Well no doubt, but one can also argue that it sold well because it wasn't a half assed port, and took full advantage of the GameCube's hardware. It looked slightly better than the PS2 version, and didn't feature the god-awful load times found in most multiplatform games.
Just on an almost completely unrelated note, Soul Calibur is one of my ~40 GameCube games because it's just a bloody good game.
1) You just know that I'm right. =P The reason this is an issue is that it's the primary bottleneck on the Xbox. Faster GPU means nothing if it's sitting there waiting for its data half the time. GameCube has huge bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, and the memory chosen for GameCube specializes in quick seek time. Meaning that developers may optimize to the hardware to a great degree.
2) Whatever. I honestly don't care if my sound is in 4.1 Dolby Prologic 2 or 5.1 Dolby Digital. They sound nearly identical to me. (I did check on this though, and you are correct, in that it's not 2.1... it's 5.1, but only 4 or 5 out of the 6 5.1 channels are actually used, bringing it down to the level of Prologic II). My last word on this subject, as I think that the sound on both consoles is perfectly adequate, and has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.
3) Your friends have no problems with crashing. Mine do. Your word against mine, I honestly don't care. But otherpeople do
havetheseproblems. I'm most certainly not going to buy an Xbox to win a stupid argument online.
4) Ever play Metroid Prime? Or Metal Gear Solid? Or Eternal Darkness? Show me an Xbox game with better load times.
5) Rogue Squadron III pushes about 14 to 15 million polys per second. Halo 2 pushes something like 7 or 8 million per second. The thing is that Bungie REDUCED the poly count from Halo 1 to Halo 2 in favor of more effects. Factor 5 upped both the poly counts and the effects. Asserting that my assertion that Rogue Squadron III has a higher poly count is wrong is just plain WRONG. Deal with it. =P (honestly, I don't know why I'm still debating this with you after that comment).
GameCube is firmly in second place in worldwide sales. The reason being that Xbox's lineup is VERY American, while GameCube has a nice mix of Japanese/American games, as well as a whole whack of games not available elsewhere (Baten Kaitos, Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Starfox, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, Crystal Chronicles, Tales of Symphonia (in the US), etc.) (While Xbox really just has Halo to call its own, relying on empty promises of better graphics to sell systems).
Being that this will probably be my last post on the subject, I will just say that my original post was referring to the fact that the Xbox's hardware does not seem to be gaming oriented in the slightest. I think if you take a careful look at the hardware, it's in plain sight that the design choices made were out of laziness rather than any desire to squeeze more power out of the system. It's designed to be a general purpose computing machine. GameCube was designed purely to play games. I think I've shown that as well as I can without digging through hundreds of google queries to find the links I need to absolutely prove my claims. You can say "You're just plain wrong" all that you want, but I don't think your views on this are any more valid than mine as it stands. I could get more links to prove my claims, but this is again in the territory of "not caring enough to bother". I honestly don't care if you think that I'm an idiot and the Xbox is clearly the superior console.
1) Good. I take it that you know why it's such a bottleneck then?
2) Most Xbox games have Dolby Digital 2.1, but they don't advertise that fact. They just write Dolby Digital on the box.
3) My GameCube has crashed a couple of times due to known bugs in Rogue Squadron 2 (Battle of Hoth). That's it. Perhaps you live in an air conditioned region, but I have had experience with Xboxes up here overheating during the summer months. (I'm a Canadian. We don't do air conditioning)
4) Well, I've seen head to head reviews that say the contrary. So perhaps you read head to head reviews for different games than I do.
5) Halo 2 is out in video form, pirate form, screenshot form, and spec form. Honestly, what more do you want?
If you base hardware decisions primarily on specs, I can see where you would be happy with an XBox. =P My problem with it isn't really the hardware, it's the absolutely horrid game lineup. It lacks the size of the PS2's selection, and the quality of the GameCube's selection. I am not happy with PC Games in general, but I find that there's slightly more pickings on a PC than on an Xbox. (Which really says something about Xbox... about the single game I have the slightest desire for on the system is Panzer Dragoon Orta.)
Now I don't have sales figures handy, but I am right positive that Xbox and GameCube have each sold more than 10 million units. And Sony I thought had sold something like 40 million units. (But I have often wondered just how much of that is replacement units? I know a guy who works at EBGames who says he's been through 4 PS2s so far, and I'm sure that you know at least one person who's been through 2 PS2s themselves. Hell, there was a lawsuit with Sony a while back over their shoddy hardware).
But I think you have to remember that a GOOD game on GameCube can sell just as well as its counterparts. Take Soul Calibur II for example. It sold more copies on GameCube than either PS2 or Xbox, despite most people's issues with the GameCube's controller for fighting games.
I don't have sales figures handy again, but I'm pretty sure that Viewtiful Joe sold more copies on GameCube than PS2. (If someone has a link to a site with sales figures for consoles/games, it would be appreciated if you could pass that on to me)
Re:exclusivity is only temporary these days
on
Resident Evil 4 for PS2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, I've always thought that the GameCube was doing pretty good with survival horror. We have ALL of the Resident Evil games (including Zero, which the PS2 does not have), as well as Eternal Darkness. Silent Hill is notably missing, but I think that Eternal Darkness makes up for it. (btw, Resident Evil: Remake sold better on GameCube than Silent Hill 2 on PS2)
I thought that Resident Evil 4 would really be the clincher.
After years of promising Nintendo and its fans that Resident Evil 4 would ONLY be for GameCube, Capcom shows its true colors.
I am mostly angry because ports always go TO the PS2, and not vice versa. Viewtiful Joe did well on GameCube, and it was a great game. So it got ported to PS2 (and sold horribly). Resident Evil 4 is about the most hyped game on GameCube right now, so Capcom decides that they will avoid the whole "not selling well on PS2", and announce the port before the GameCube version even comes out.
Meanwhile... Onimusha and Devil May Cry are doing well on PS2, but nobody thinks to bring them to GameCube.
No, I would say that Xbox is marginally more powerful at best.
Yes, it clearly has the more powerful GPU, but you also have to remember that the memory in an XBox is unified, meaning that all data must be pushed down a 133MHz bus. (and btw, GameCube has shader capability in flipper as well, according to Factor 5 and Silicon Knights)
Few Xbox games have 5.1 Dolby Digital. Most GameCube games have Dolby Prologic II, which honestly sounds slightly less good. The reason I would suspect for Xbox games lacking the full 5.1 Dolby Digital is bandwidth issues between the main memory and the SPU.
Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike is currently the game that pushes the most polys across ANY system, and does it with just about every effect in the book turned on, including shaders and bump mapping. About the best that Xbox has to offer in return is Halo 2, which pushes about half as many polys, and has similar effects.
I personally do not own an Xbox, but I know a few Xbox owners who frequently experience crashes or freezes. They also say that the load times on a GameCube are far better than what they are used to on an XBox. (This is actually contrary to the theoretical specs, as the Xbox's hard drive should be able to decrease load times, but I guess that this is not so.)
I am just saying that the Xbox's architecture is a lot different than the GameCube's... this is somewhat good for general purpose applications, but I think that the GameCube being built from the ground up to play games has a much better effect on being able to actually PLAY said games.
Xbox isn't a gaming machine either.;-)
I mean, think about it for a moment before modding me as a troll. Xbox is a hamstrung Celeron (128k of L2 cache), with UNIFIED MEMORY, and a CISC CPU running Windows. Honestly, how good of a gaming machine do you think it's going to be? As it would turn out it's about on the level of a GameCube in terms of hardware power, but without the advantage of a console game library. Xboxes tend to get more PC ports than anything.
But calling the Xbox a gaming machine is a bit much for me. It's honestly just a stripped down PC running Windows...
(ok, now you can mod me as a troll. I'm done.)
As a Canadian, I have to say that in many many ways, I never want to leave my country. The only reasons I could possibly have for going to the US are for work related reasons, or to visit a special someone. I don't really have any desire to leave Canada, as our country is actually a fair bit saner in my experience.
So no, I wouldn't say that the grass is always greener.:)
I must be blind, I completely didn't notice the gallery. I am running hte October 18th nightly of Firefox on Windows XP SP2, and it crashed on mozilla die 1 and 2.
But the thing is that although there are a couple examples there of garbage that crashes mozilla, there are also plenty out there for IE too. I was working as a web developer for a corporate intranet for the last year, and I found many interesting ways of crashing IE6 with Javascript (I can't recall crashing Mozilla with Javascript at any point), but there are also HTML only ways to crash IE.
I just spent 5 minutes here refreshing the garbage generator, and other than the odd security exception thrown when it tries to access my hard drive, I find absolutely nothing wrong with Mozilla. Memory usage has been nearly constant, and it's not crashed once. Perhaps the testing computer was using an ancient version of Mozilla, or Windows was running too long without a reboot?
Honestly, I'm not seeing the issue here, other than a Microsoft guy throwing around some FUD.
I also loved Origin before they met EA's axe, and I also have some respect for EA Canada. And yes, Blizzard is one that I forgot to mention. (And I can't wait for Pirates 2). Peter Molyneux thoroughly unimpresses me though, and Bioware doesn't make games that appeal to me. (But I appreciate the production value)
Namco, Konami, Nintendo, Sega, Capcom and Enix I think are the big Japanese names. But I think what I was really getting at in my post is that the value of the average Japanese game is much much more than the average western game. I mean, most of the western games I see on the store shelves are some poorly made piece of garbage, or some generic type of game like an FPS or an RTS (not so common these days though... RTS seems to be being replaced with western style RPGs or MMORPGs).
If my hardware was FULLY supported in Mac OS X, and the OS was stable, I would most likely want to dual (or possibly triple) boot from Mac OS X and some flavor of Linux. (and possibly Windows).
The thing that bothers me about Linux is that it often takes me a week to get a distro set up properly for my hardware (which is often strange), and then at the end of that, I am just plain tired, and switch back to Windows for some gaming.
The thing that bothers me about Windows is that it is Windows. The core OS kinda bothers me, and I prefer the power offered by a *NIX OS.
The appeal of Mac OS X is that it has quite a bit of mainstream software released for it, and has the capability to natively run some of the best Linux software. (I can't live without XMMS).
I think it's about time to bring out one of the more famous John Carmack quotes. "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
I have great respect for John Carmack as a programmer, but I absolutely despise his games. Honestly, I think that the western developers could really learn something from the Japanese. About the only western developers that I know of that make games that I personally feel the need to play are Ubisoft (Prince of Persia), and Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness, Blood Omen, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes).
My problem is that the Xbox has PC hardware running it, has a PC operating system, and now has the standard PC input device. The way I see it, if you are willing to put out about $500, you can have a working PC made out of your Xbox. Whoop de doo.
Honestly, I think if you are playing console games with a mouse and keyboard, it's probably time to buy a PC.
For the people too lazy to read the article, the link is here.. But the site's design is just the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and the email capacity seems to be only 10GB.
I would still love to see these idiots slashdotted. Go get em boys.
I'm a nerd. I honestly don't care about this news, as I never cared about the game in the slightest, as I anticipated it to be a poorly made piece of garbage. Proving me right isn't really "news" to me.
It was released in Japan. It had games for it such as Doshin the Giant and F-Zero X Expansion. However, it didn't last long, and never made it to North America. Other games planned for it included Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest, and Animal Crossing. (Animal Crossing may actually have been released on 64DD... My memory is hazy. I know that it was released on N64 though)
I'm at work right now, and my internet access is logged, so I can't provide any links.
The Famicom had a modem that could check stocks, and download some games I believe... it was only released in Japan though I think, and I my memory of it is sort of hazy. It did have some connectivity stuff though, take my word for that.
The American SNES had full online play via a modem, where you could compete with other people. The Japanese Super Famicom had a system where you could download games from a central server.
The N64 had an add-on device called the 64DD. It is for this that the patent in question is being disputed here. It had a modem built into it that could be used for online stuff. I believe that only one 64DD game actually used it though.
GameCube has an expansion slot that can be fitted with either a broadband adaptor or 56k modem.
Yes. They do have prior art to the GameCube. But the N64, Super Famicom, and Famicom all have prior art against them. ALL of Nintendo's consoles have been online in some form.
The difference here is that SCO did not invent Linux. Every single one of Nintendo's consoles (even the Famicom) has been online in some form or another.
Nintendo is just doing what it has always done. Cheap low price crappy hardware but fun
NES - cart reading mechanisms tended to wear out over time, but the console itself and the carts have lasted 20 years now. The hardware itself allowed for large scrolling games. This was in an era where most games were on a single screen.
SNES - exceptionally durable console. I don't know of many broken ones, even this many years later. The quality is also quite exceptional, with a DSP that was state of the art at its release, and capability to display many more colors than the competition of the era.
N64 - as always, exceptionally durable. The quality of the console was unquestionable. The CPU was just a monster, with a fairly good clock rate, and the games easily blew away the other consoles of the generation. Held back mainly by a small amount of working memory and storage medium constraints. Not a nice system to develop for, but well made.
GCN - Durable as hell. There are a few people having problems reading discs already, but nowhere even close to the number of people having problems with the PS2. Hardware is designed with efficiency and ease of development in mind, essentially the anti-N64. Console is definitely a match for the current generation, trumping Xbox's graphics in many cases but at a fraction of the cost. (Xbox has higher clock frequencies, but GameCube beats it out in efficiency and coordination of hardware. Case in point, most polygons in a console game record still belongs to GameCube (Rebel Strike))
GameBoy - Essentially a portable monochrome NES. The durability is also unquestionable, but what really made this console great is that it didn't eat through batteries at too high of a rate, and was playable for extended periods of time.
GameBoy Color - GameBoy with a smaller form factor and a color screen... what more is to be said?
GameBoy Advance - This is probably the Nintendo console I am most familiar with. The hardware works together unbelievably well (ala GameCube), and functions quite well as a portable SNES, and does it without eating up batteries or compromising ease of development. Regardless of what you might think, this is truly a console for the ages.
Nintendo DS - Nintendo has packed in wireless connectivity, 2 lit screens, a touchpad, a microphone, a speaker, and 2 fairly high performance CPUs while claiming battery life comparable to GBA SP. I am prepared to take their word on it, as it's unlike them to lie about that. Especially compared to the battery life of the PSP, that is completely undeniably awesome.
Metroid Prime: Hunters was shown at E3 this year (usually only games slated for US release are shown at E3), and Metroid is QUITE well loved in the US. More so than any other region. I don't think you should be disturbed in the slightest. Especially considering that the list presented is a list of 3rd party titles coming out for Nintendo DS.
Slashdot Mirror
Well no doubt, but one can also argue that it sold well because it wasn't a half assed port, and took full advantage of the GameCube's hardware. It looked slightly better than the PS2 version, and didn't feature the god-awful load times found in most multiplatform games.
Just on an almost completely unrelated note, Soul Calibur is one of my ~40 GameCube games because it's just a bloody good game.
You really like your Xbox huh?
1) You just know that I'm right. =P The reason this is an issue is that it's the primary bottleneck on the Xbox. Faster GPU means nothing if it's sitting there waiting for its data half the time. GameCube has huge bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, and the memory chosen for GameCube specializes in quick seek time. Meaning that developers may optimize to the hardware to a great degree.
2) Whatever. I honestly don't care if my sound is in 4.1 Dolby Prologic 2 or 5.1 Dolby Digital. They sound nearly identical to me. (I did check on this though, and you are correct, in that it's not 2.1... it's 5.1, but only 4 or 5 out of the 6 5.1 channels are actually used, bringing it down to the level of Prologic II). My last word on this subject, as I think that the sound on both consoles is perfectly adequate, and has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.
3) Your friends have no problems with crashing. Mine do. Your word against mine, I honestly don't care. But other people do have these problems. I'm most certainly not going to buy an Xbox to win a stupid argument online.
4) Ever play Metroid Prime? Or Metal Gear Solid? Or Eternal Darkness? Show me an Xbox game with better load times.
5) Rogue Squadron III pushes about 14 to 15 million polys per second. Halo 2 pushes something like 7 or 8 million per second. The thing is that Bungie REDUCED the poly count from Halo 1 to Halo 2 in favor of more effects. Factor 5 upped both the poly counts and the effects. Asserting that my assertion that Rogue Squadron III has a higher poly count is wrong is just plain WRONG. Deal with it. =P (honestly, I don't know why I'm still debating this with you after that comment).
GameCube is firmly in second place in worldwide sales. The reason being that Xbox's lineup is VERY American, while GameCube has a nice mix of Japanese/American games, as well as a whole whack of games not available elsewhere (Baten Kaitos, Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Starfox, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, Crystal Chronicles, Tales of Symphonia (in the US), etc.) (While Xbox really just has Halo to call its own, relying on empty promises of better graphics to sell systems).
Being that this will probably be my last post on the subject, I will just say that my original post was referring to the fact that the Xbox's hardware does not seem to be gaming oriented in the slightest. I think if you take a careful look at the hardware, it's in plain sight that the design choices made were out of laziness rather than any desire to squeeze more power out of the system. It's designed to be a general purpose computing machine. GameCube was designed purely to play games. I think I've shown that as well as I can without digging through hundreds of google queries to find the links I need to absolutely prove my claims. You can say "You're just plain wrong" all that you want, but I don't think your views on this are any more valid than mine as it stands. I could get more links to prove my claims, but this is again in the territory of "not caring enough to bother". I honestly don't care if you think that I'm an idiot and the Xbox is clearly the superior console.
1) Good. I take it that you know why it's such a bottleneck then?
2) Most Xbox games have Dolby Digital 2.1, but they don't advertise that fact. They just write Dolby Digital on the box.
3) My GameCube has crashed a couple of times due to known bugs in Rogue Squadron 2 (Battle of Hoth). That's it. Perhaps you live in an air conditioned region, but I have had experience with Xboxes up here overheating during the summer months. (I'm a Canadian. We don't do air conditioning)
4) Well, I've seen head to head reviews that say the contrary. So perhaps you read head to head reviews for different games than I do.
5) Halo 2 is out in video form, pirate form, screenshot form, and spec form. Honestly, what more do you want?
If you base hardware decisions primarily on specs, I can see where you would be happy with an XBox. =P My problem with it isn't really the hardware, it's the absolutely horrid game lineup. It lacks the size of the PS2's selection, and the quality of the GameCube's selection. I am not happy with PC Games in general, but I find that there's slightly more pickings on a PC than on an Xbox. (Which really says something about Xbox... about the single game I have the slightest desire for on the system is Panzer Dragoon Orta.)
Now I don't have sales figures handy, but I am right positive that Xbox and GameCube have each sold more than 10 million units. And Sony I thought had sold something like 40 million units. (But I have often wondered just how much of that is replacement units? I know a guy who works at EBGames who says he's been through 4 PS2s so far, and I'm sure that you know at least one person who's been through 2 PS2s themselves. Hell, there was a lawsuit with Sony a while back over their shoddy hardware).
But I think you have to remember that a GOOD game on GameCube can sell just as well as its counterparts. Take Soul Calibur II for example. It sold more copies on GameCube than either PS2 or Xbox, despite most people's issues with the GameCube's controller for fighting games.
I don't have sales figures handy again, but I'm pretty sure that Viewtiful Joe sold more copies on GameCube than PS2. (If someone has a link to a site with sales figures for consoles/games, it would be appreciated if you could pass that on to me)
Actually, I've always thought that the GameCube was doing pretty good with survival horror. We have ALL of the Resident Evil games (including Zero, which the PS2 does not have), as well as Eternal Darkness. Silent Hill is notably missing, but I think that Eternal Darkness makes up for it. (btw, Resident Evil: Remake sold better on GameCube than Silent Hill 2 on PS2)
I thought that Resident Evil 4 would really be the clincher.
The only thing I can tell you now is Resident Evil 4 will definitely release only on GameCube, not on another console, if it happens, I will cut my head off.
After years of promising Nintendo and its fans that Resident Evil 4 would ONLY be for GameCube, Capcom shows its true colors.
I am mostly angry because ports always go TO the PS2, and not vice versa. Viewtiful Joe did well on GameCube, and it was a great game. So it got ported to PS2 (and sold horribly). Resident Evil 4 is about the most hyped game on GameCube right now, so Capcom decides that they will avoid the whole "not selling well on PS2", and announce the port before the GameCube version even comes out.
Meanwhile... Onimusha and Devil May Cry are doing well on PS2, but nobody thinks to bring them to GameCube.
It's just irritating to a great degree.
No, I would say that Xbox is marginally more powerful at best.
Yes, it clearly has the more powerful GPU, but you also have to remember that the memory in an XBox is unified, meaning that all data must be pushed down a 133MHz bus. (and btw, GameCube has shader capability in flipper as well, according to Factor 5 and Silicon Knights)
Few Xbox games have 5.1 Dolby Digital. Most GameCube games have Dolby Prologic II, which honestly sounds slightly less good. The reason I would suspect for Xbox games lacking the full 5.1 Dolby Digital is bandwidth issues between the main memory and the SPU.
Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike is currently the game that pushes the most polys across ANY system, and does it with just about every effect in the book turned on, including shaders and bump mapping. About the best that Xbox has to offer in return is Halo 2, which pushes about half as many polys, and has similar effects.
I personally do not own an Xbox, but I know a few Xbox owners who frequently experience crashes or freezes. They also say that the load times on a GameCube are far better than what they are used to on an XBox. (This is actually contrary to the theoretical specs, as the Xbox's hard drive should be able to decrease load times, but I guess that this is not so.) I am just saying that the Xbox's architecture is a lot different than the GameCube's... this is somewhat good for general purpose applications, but I think that the GameCube being built from the ground up to play games has a much better effect on being able to actually PLAY said games.
Xbox isn't a gaming machine either. ;-)
I mean, think about it for a moment before modding me as a troll. Xbox is a hamstrung Celeron (128k of L2 cache), with UNIFIED MEMORY, and a CISC CPU running Windows. Honestly, how good of a gaming machine do you think it's going to be? As it would turn out it's about on the level of a GameCube in terms of hardware power, but without the advantage of a console game library. Xboxes tend to get more PC ports than anything.
But calling the Xbox a gaming machine is a bit much for me. It's honestly just a stripped down PC running Windows...
(ok, now you can mod me as a troll. I'm done.)
As a Canadian, I have to say that in many many ways, I never want to leave my country. The only reasons I could possibly have for going to the US are for work related reasons, or to visit a special someone. I don't really have any desire to leave Canada, as our country is actually a fair bit saner in my experience.
:)
So no, I wouldn't say that the grass is always greener.
Just what exactly is a Slashdotter doing using Internet Explorer?
I must be blind, I completely didn't notice the gallery. I am running hte October 18th nightly of Firefox on Windows XP SP2, and it crashed on mozilla die 1 and 2.
But the thing is that although there are a couple examples there of garbage that crashes mozilla, there are also plenty out there for IE too. I was working as a web developer for a corporate intranet for the last year, and I found many interesting ways of crashing IE6 with Javascript (I can't recall crashing Mozilla with Javascript at any point), but there are also HTML only ways to crash IE.
Don't forget this one either. (Mind you, this one has been fixed in XP SP2)
I just spent 5 minutes here refreshing the garbage generator, and other than the odd security exception thrown when it tries to access my hard drive, I find absolutely nothing wrong with Mozilla. Memory usage has been nearly constant, and it's not crashed once. Perhaps the testing computer was using an ancient version of Mozilla, or Windows was running too long without a reboot?
Honestly, I'm not seeing the issue here, other than a Microsoft guy throwing around some FUD.
I also loved Origin before they met EA's axe, and I also have some respect for EA Canada. And yes, Blizzard is one that I forgot to mention. (And I can't wait for Pirates 2). Peter Molyneux thoroughly unimpresses me though, and Bioware doesn't make games that appeal to me. (But I appreciate the production value)
Namco, Konami, Nintendo, Sega, Capcom and Enix I think are the big Japanese names. But I think what I was really getting at in my post is that the value of the average Japanese game is much much more than the average western game. I mean, most of the western games I see on the store shelves are some poorly made piece of garbage, or some generic type of game like an FPS or an RTS (not so common these days though... RTS seems to be being replaced with western style RPGs or MMORPGs).
If my hardware was FULLY supported in Mac OS X, and the OS was stable, I would most likely want to dual (or possibly triple) boot from Mac OS X and some flavor of Linux. (and possibly Windows).
The thing that bothers me about Linux is that it often takes me a week to get a distro set up properly for my hardware (which is often strange), and then at the end of that, I am just plain tired, and switch back to Windows for some gaming.
The thing that bothers me about Windows is that it is Windows. The core OS kinda bothers me, and I prefer the power offered by a *NIX OS.
The appeal of Mac OS X is that it has quite a bit of mainstream software released for it, and has the capability to natively run some of the best Linux software. (I can't live without XMMS).
I think it's about time to bring out one of the more famous John Carmack quotes. "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
I have great respect for John Carmack as a programmer, but I absolutely despise his games. Honestly, I think that the western developers could really learn something from the Japanese. About the only western developers that I know of that make games that I personally feel the need to play are Ubisoft (Prince of Persia), and Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness, Blood Omen, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes).
But this is one of the stupidest.
My problem is that the Xbox has PC hardware running it, has a PC operating system, and now has the standard PC input device. The way I see it, if you are willing to put out about $500, you can have a working PC made out of your Xbox. Whoop de doo.
Honestly, I think if you are playing console games with a mouse and keyboard, it's probably time to buy a PC.
For the people too lazy to read the article, the link is here.. But the site's design is just the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and the email capacity seems to be only 10GB.
I would still love to see these idiots slashdotted. Go get em boys.
I'm a nerd. I honestly don't care about this news, as I never cared about the game in the slightest, as I anticipated it to be a poorly made piece of garbage. Proving me right isn't really "news" to me.
It was released in Japan. It had games for it such as Doshin the Giant and F-Zero X Expansion. However, it didn't last long, and never made it to North America. Other games planned for it included Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest, and Animal Crossing. (Animal Crossing may actually have been released on 64DD... My memory is hazy. I know that it was released on N64 though)
I'm at work right now, and my internet access is logged, so I can't provide any links.
The Famicom had a modem that could check stocks, and download some games I believe... it was only released in Japan though I think, and I my memory of it is sort of hazy. It did have some connectivity stuff though, take my word for that.
The American SNES had full online play via a modem, where you could compete with other people. The Japanese Super Famicom had a system where you could download games from a central server.
The N64 had an add-on device called the 64DD. It is for this that the patent in question is being disputed here. It had a modem built into it that could be used for online stuff. I believe that only one 64DD game actually used it though.
GameCube has an expansion slot that can be fitted with either a broadband adaptor or 56k modem.
Yes. They do have prior art to the GameCube. But the N64, Super Famicom, and Famicom all have prior art against them. ALL of Nintendo's consoles have been online in some form.
The difference here is that SCO did not invent Linux. Every single one of Nintendo's consoles (even the Famicom) has been online in some form or another.
Nintendo is just doing what it has always done. Cheap low price crappy hardware but fun
NES - cart reading mechanisms tended to wear out over time, but the console itself and the carts have lasted 20 years now. The hardware itself allowed for large scrolling games. This was in an era where most games were on a single screen.
SNES - exceptionally durable console. I don't know of many broken ones, even this many years later. The quality is also quite exceptional, with a DSP that was state of the art at its release, and capability to display many more colors than the competition of the era.
N64 - as always, exceptionally durable. The quality of the console was unquestionable. The CPU was just a monster, with a fairly good clock rate, and the games easily blew away the other consoles of the generation. Held back mainly by a small amount of working memory and storage medium constraints. Not a nice system to develop for, but well made.
GCN - Durable as hell. There are a few people having problems reading discs already, but nowhere even close to the number of people having problems with the PS2. Hardware is designed with efficiency and ease of development in mind, essentially the anti-N64. Console is definitely a match for the current generation, trumping Xbox's graphics in many cases but at a fraction of the cost. (Xbox has higher clock frequencies, but GameCube beats it out in efficiency and coordination of hardware. Case in point, most polygons in a console game record still belongs to GameCube (Rebel Strike))
GameBoy - Essentially a portable monochrome NES. The durability is also unquestionable, but what really made this console great is that it didn't eat through batteries at too high of a rate, and was playable for extended periods of time.
GameBoy Color - GameBoy with a smaller form factor and a color screen... what more is to be said?
GameBoy Advance - This is probably the Nintendo console I am most familiar with. The hardware works together unbelievably well (ala GameCube), and functions quite well as a portable SNES, and does it without eating up batteries or compromising ease of development. Regardless of what you might think, this is truly a console for the ages.
Nintendo DS - Nintendo has packed in wireless connectivity, 2 lit screens, a touchpad, a microphone, a speaker, and 2 fairly high performance CPUs while claiming battery life comparable to GBA SP. I am prepared to take their word on it, as it's unlike them to lie about that. Especially compared to the battery life of the PSP, that is completely undeniably awesome.
Metroid Prime: Hunters was shown at E3 this year (usually only games slated for US release are shown at E3), and Metroid is QUITE well loved in the US. More so than any other region. I don't think you should be disturbed in the slightest. Especially considering that the list presented is a list of 3rd party titles coming out for Nintendo DS.