I think the article summary/article itself is a little misleading - my understanding is that these machines aren't necessarily creating a distributed network of nodes in one server as we would think of it. Instead it's just a bunch of PS3s running their own dedicated Warhawk servers individually. They're put in racks and spread around the globe to provide low latency connections to many different dedicated servers so that no matter where you are, you have access to at least a few dedicated servers that are constantly running with players on them. They're basically eliminating the need for you to run your own game and allow people to connect to you. You can still do this if you'd like, but it's not required if you're looking to get into a game quickly.
Note they also hype the fact that you have a list of eligible servers when you go looking to connect to a game - most of the PS3 games available today (The Darkness, Rainbow Six, Resistance) just randomly connect you to a game based on some search criteria you put in. It's actually rather annoying and I'm glad they're doing this for Warhawk.
I think a few journalistic ethics people might have issue with this:
1. Pay off some bloggers to generate grass roots hype, 2. Pay a few key "journalists" to write a OMFG this game is going to MF rock \m/ > \m/
then again, we are talking about games journalists. And didn't I read somewhere that there was an investigation into whether there was some form of bribery going on in games journalism? It wasn't payola, but it was along the lines of, "Write us a good preview or you won't get good access," type stuff.
But isn't Microsoft the developer of Direct3D, which is now a premiere graphics API for anything Windows? Yes, OpenGL still is extremely important, but I just don't see why it's a surprise that Microsoft has so many researchers contributing to the field of computer graphics when they develop one of the two biggest graphics platforms in the world.
I think I did mention in my original post that I have a 46" tv. And yes, you can notice the difference between 480p and 1080p. 720p and 1080p are a bit more subtle, but I'm happy as long as it looks good. Rainbox 6, by the way, is the worst game to have at 1080p (I think it upscales horribly). It's annoying to switch it to 720, though, so I just cope.
Well, if I was going to upgrade then I definitely was going to go the SLI route. I might not have been able to get both video cards at once, but I could set up the system to start with and then buy the card later on. Of course, by the time I could afford the second card then your system is out of date so...it's a whole mess at this point. I think the consoles have finally gotten to the point where they can compete head on with PC's for less cost. At this point I have my PS3 for gaming and my PC setup with Linux for surfing the web and that kind of thing. In the long run, it's cheaper and I have immediate access to next-gen gaming and no more dependency on Windows, which always annoyed me.
Re:At least it won't piss off their existing owner
on
80 Gig PS3 Arrives in US
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I actually attempted to avoid all of the other hype stuff - no mention of Home, FF XIII, or Killzone (I'm still skeptical on that one). You have MGS 4 and MGS online, whatever/whenever that will be.
But why buy early? Because I was mostly a PC gamer with $600 but not $1500 to replace my mobo, processor, video card, and upgrade my RAM to get next-gen graphics on a 20" monitor. I'll admit it - I'm in for the eyecandy as well as the gameplay. So I don't see it as a $400 vs. $600 debate, I see it as a $600 versus $1500 debate. I mean, did I know in January that the PS3 would be good in a year - not necessarily. But $50 a year for XBL turned me off, I heard bad things about the hardware, and I had a PSP already. So why not just stick with what I had? And, I wasn't sure I was going to have that $600 cash available in six months, so I wanted to commit it when I had it in my hands.
Another reason glossed over by these replies is the ability to cache data for faster fetching - see Oblivion on the PS3. They improved draw distance and texture quality by unpacking the data to 4GB on the hard drive for faster load times as well. Rumor was that GTA IV was going to use this as well.
Re:At least it won't piss off their existing owner
on
80 Gig PS3 Arrives in US
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Luckily nobody who bought a PS3 knows what "value for money" is.
You're right - I am such an idiot for spending $600 on a next gen gaming console, hi-def movie player, UPnP media client. Add in the waste of $170 I spent on my PSP to play mobile games and access this $600 piece of junk from any WAP in the world and I feel like a total moron. Why do I even listen to myself when I should just call you instead? I mean, taking into account all the great mini-games available (Calling All Cars, Flow, Stardust HD) and coming soon (Echochrome, LBP, Pain) for the console, the ability to play games and movies in 1080p on my 46" TV and the ability to play FOR FREE the great online games both available (Resistance, Rainbow Six, The Darkness) and exclusives coming soon (UT3, Warhawk) shows what a big mistake this was.
It's up to the programmers to keep the cylinders fed at the right times and synchronize all of them properly and in ways such that the power can be applied efficiently to the transmission
Which highlights my point - Sony has released tools to make this easier. So the argument that the SPEs are so hard to deal with is moot.
But I think it's fair to blame this on the PS3, because their stupid architecture is the one that deviated from the standard.
Who said there was a "standard" gaming architecture? What part of the PS3 is not standard? It has a processor, a motherboard, a hard drive (hell, the 360 doesn't even adhere to that standard), RAM, a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray disc drive. I know, it's the wireless card that's throwing Rockstar off!
Want to dive in deeper? You have to deal with threading in the cell, core duo (2), and of course the PowerPC. The only difference is the division of the work to the cells, and Sony has released software to help deal with that. The 360 has that newfangled Unified Shader pipeline versus the PS3's traditional pixel/vertex pipeline.
So what's exactly not standard? The fact that you have those mysterious cells that no one knows what to do with? It's all API'd out at this point. Sony released help for developers at the GDC six months ago. So I don't think it's really a good argument to say that it's such a craaaazy hard platform to program for anymore. There's help there if they want this.
Even Pachter said, this was a failure of management to figure out that it was taking so long. They should have known this weeks ago. I personally was surprised to find out that they were going to be able to develop this game so quickly - look at MGS and FFXIII, they're taking much longer.
Obviously no details have been released yet, but we can at least speculate (I reorganized your questions):
Is it an additional add-on? (I'd assume it is, with a remote.) If so, how much does it cost?
Seeing as this would be a huge marketing thing if it was built in, I think we can assume that this would have to be an add-on. The PS3 has USB ports, so I'm thinking that's an obvious connection method.
Does it support CableCard?
I don't think we can answer that definitively, but seeing as they already make a digital entertainment product with a CableCard slot, it's possible that this could happen. At least we know they have the infrastructure in place to produce devices with CableCard slots, and are aware that this might be a good thing to include.
Does it support HD? (I'd assume it does.)
Obviously we don't know, but we could go either way here - to support digital and HD cable subscriptions you'd think they'd definitely have to include it. But I have to speculate what their content protection would be on any recorded content. Of course, seeing as the PS3 supports HDMI 1.3, I think it's safe to say this device, if it comes to fruition, definitely would support HD content.
How does it compare to other DVRs? Specifically, does it require a subscription? Offer TV listings? Offer suggestions?
I can't answer that, but my link above to the Sony Vaio XL3 gets a pretty decent, but not perfect, review from CNET. I imagine it won't be a Tivo, but for people like me who don't want to own a Tivo, I'm hoping that this will be an adequate solution. Particularly if you can access the device from within the PS3's linux distro...
Can it record while a game is playing? While a movie (DVD/Blu-Ray) is playing?
If we follow through with the assumption that the device is external, I don't expect it to draw too much power from the PS3 itself. Given that you currently can download content from the web while watching a movie or playing a game, I think that this feature is a must-have, but maybe not available initially. As with the PSP and PS3, I see them following the trend of releasing good hardware with limited features and patching with firmware releases as time goes on.
Does it use the same hard drive that games use? Will they be competing for available space?
Seeing as the ability to connect external devices is built into the current Sony firmware, I don't see how they can not allow you to use an external hard drive or memory card. Of course, the content will be encrypted, so mobility will be an interesting issue...but the ability to take recorded content on the road with your PSP is very intriguing.
I agree with most of what you said. It seems as though Dvorak is mistaking the dot com bubble with the market trends that occurred around the same time. Take CDRoms and the WWW explosion - both resulted in rushes to put anything you could on that medium. Cookbooks, encyclopedias, maps - they all ended up rushing towards whatever medium was the hot topic of the moment. I seem to remember the movie Disclosure having some premise regarding a CDROM virtual world or whatever - it didn't make sense.
The dotcom bust was more about the money being invested - usually poorly. All this money was coming in and nothing was getting produced. Anyone with an idea was given cash. It was tightly linked to the WWW rush, but it wasn't exactly the same. We still have that WWW rush as we see more and more services move to the web and the first adopters start to mature - see Wikipedia and Google Maps as second generation web services versus movie rentals like Netflicks, which are a relatively new experiment. The money, on the other hand, is there but everyone is considerably more controlled about their investments. Pets.com wouldn't get investors today without a solid business model or more likely a working implementation first. This is why Google succeeded as an IPO - they were already dominating search and web advertising. Ditto MySpace being bought out and Facebook talking about going either way.
I don't see a bubble per se - I just see smarter investing and wiser hiring practices. That was the second symptom of the bubble in 2000-2002 - people with little or no experience were hired for jobs that required some level of training. There's no way you can land a job at a company now without the proper education. Even outsourcing has cooled down, outside of the politically advantaged hype that the press tend to give it. Does anyone really care that you can't have a career in a call center anymore?
The game wouldn't draw nearly as much attention if it was being developed for any other console.
I'm pretty sure that the Nintendo fanboys would go apeshit for this game, considering that they're already feeling as though Nintendo is abandoning them. Seeing as Nintendo made the platformer what it is, this game definitely would be getting a ton of hype - and all the characters would be Mario like. As for Xbox, Microsoft fanboys would use this as the game that is the death knell to the PS3. Combined with Katamari, Guitar Hero, and GTA, the inovative titles that made the PS2 what it was last generation would now be on the 360 this generation.
But it's not on either of those platforms. It's on the Playstation 3. The story here isn't just another platformer - it's the whole package that Sony is producing - Home, LBP both are going to be driven by user content, and that hasn't happened yet on a console, and it probably will help the PS3 stand apart.
Unfortunately, it's limited due to their methodology. You have to dig into the press release, but you'll see this.
Nielsen GamePlay Metrics uses console data collected from the Nielsen's People Meter TV sample combined with Nielsen GamePlay Metrics' proprietary audio signature library that matches the unique audio signature of every game tracked on the six most widely available video game consoles, including PlayStation 2, PLAYSTATION 3, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii and GameCube.
So they basically have to be plugged into the TV so the meter can see that they're playing. I guess they then use the console's audio output to differentiate between them. No TV for portables. Well, PSP will have it soon.
How many card games do you need? Sony has High Stakes Poker coming, as well as short action games like Calling all Cars. But it also has weird radical games like Echochrome and Flow, and don't discount the pull that LittleBigPlanet will have on casual gaming. If content for that game is as easy to produce as a movie for YouTube, then LBP will definitely be a huge casual gaming pull.
Add in BluRay for HiDef support and it's multimedia support that blunts the 360's abilities, and the PS3 is pretty attractive.
I was referring more to a GPL violation, or whatever license the code is distributed under. If you can't see the code, how do you know what system it is?
Even more disturbing...how will we know if they're implementing an open source system? If a voting machine is a black box, it wouldn't exactly be easy to determine whether or not the source code originates from an open source system.
Folklore (TBA, probably not this year), Heavenly Sword, Echochrome... I'm sure there are others coming.
You forgot timed exclusives UT3 and Haze, both of which look good to those who consider the Xbox a "FPS" machine and the PS a "RPG" machine. Add in HL2 and older games like RS:Vegas and Resistance and you have some pretty nice FPS games to compete with the 360's Halo (I'm not a fan myself). I think this generation you're going to see the lines blur more and more.
Also, the fact that Microsoft has publicly acknowledged the problems it's having with Rings of Red probably isn't boosting consumer confidence, and I'm not sure a robust games library will save them. Sony is catching up. If the price drop doesn't help this summer, if it's still in effect this holiday season then the 360 is going to have some issues - you can't get 2 year old games at your average retailer anymore unless they are used. It's one year and that's it. Most people aren't jumping into the next generation to save money. So basically, the 2 year games library isn't going to be enough of an advantage to help them.
I bet no one out there regrets their Wii360 purchase instead of just a PS3.
I bet this guy is regretting his decision just a little. And Microsoft views Rings of Red as a good thing for sales...so I guess if you do create a device that fails every 3-6 months then your shareholders will be happy because you generate repeat customers with little effort on your part. Way to go Microsoft!
They might be a bit more in-depth, but I loved Freelancer (beat it in 24 hours...without stopping) and X2 The Threat, which just happens to be available for Linux as well. However, X3 was not as good, IMO. Way too complicated. The X universe is more of a space trading/combat game though, so you might not like it nearly as much as Tie Fighter, which was pure fighting. Freelancer might be what you like, but there's still some trading involved as well. Much better combat in Freelancer.
There was Jumpgate, the excellent MMO which is now pretty much dead (30 people online at a time isn't really an MMO) and Vendetta, another MMO with good developer support but the same fate as Jumpgate - about 30-50 people online at peak hours.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the article summary/article itself is a little misleading - my understanding is that these machines aren't necessarily creating a distributed network of nodes in one server as we would think of it. Instead it's just a bunch of PS3s running their own dedicated Warhawk servers individually. They're put in racks and spread around the globe to provide low latency connections to many different dedicated servers so that no matter where you are, you have access to at least a few dedicated servers that are constantly running with players on them. They're basically eliminating the need for you to run your own game and allow people to connect to you. You can still do this if you'd like, but it's not required if you're looking to get into a game quickly.
Note they also hype the fact that you have a list of eligible servers when you go looking to connect to a game - most of the PS3 games available today (The Darkness, Rainbow Six, Resistance) just randomly connect you to a game based on some search criteria you put in. It's actually rather annoying and I'm glad they're doing this for Warhawk.
I think a few journalistic ethics people might have issue with this:
1. Pay off some bloggers to generate grass roots hype,
2. Pay a few key "journalists" to write a OMFG this game is going to MF rock \m/ > \m/
then again, we are talking about games journalists. And didn't I read somewhere that there was an investigation into whether there was some form of bribery going on in games journalism? It wasn't payola, but it was along the lines of, "Write us a good preview or you won't get good access," type stuff.
the higher cost of entry may be helping the PlayStation 3 in this respect.
Since when does higher cost mean higher quality, regardless of what it can do?
Seeing as I haven't had one ring of death or scratched disc on my PS3, I'd say it's a pretty high quality machine.
But isn't Microsoft the developer of Direct3D, which is now a premiere graphics API for anything Windows? Yes, OpenGL still is extremely important, but I just don't see why it's a surprise that Microsoft has so many researchers contributing to the field of computer graphics when they develop one of the two biggest graphics platforms in the world.
I think I did mention in my original post that I have a 46" tv. And yes, you can notice the difference between 480p and 1080p. 720p and 1080p are a bit more subtle, but I'm happy as long as it looks good. Rainbox 6, by the way, is the worst game to have at 1080p (I think it upscales horribly). It's annoying to switch it to 720, though, so I just cope.
Well, if I was going to upgrade then I definitely was going to go the SLI route. I might not have been able to get both video cards at once, but I could set up the system to start with and then buy the card later on. Of course, by the time I could afford the second card then your system is out of date so...it's a whole mess at this point. I think the consoles have finally gotten to the point where they can compete head on with PC's for less cost. At this point I have my PS3 for gaming and my PC setup with Linux for surfing the web and that kind of thing. In the long run, it's cheaper and I have immediate access to next-gen gaming and no more dependency on Windows, which always annoyed me.
I actually attempted to avoid all of the other hype stuff - no mention of Home, FF XIII, or Killzone (I'm still skeptical on that one). You have MGS 4 and MGS online, whatever/whenever that will be.
But why buy early? Because I was mostly a PC gamer with $600 but not $1500 to replace my mobo, processor, video card, and upgrade my RAM to get next-gen graphics on a 20" monitor. I'll admit it - I'm in for the eyecandy as well as the gameplay. So I don't see it as a $400 vs. $600 debate, I see it as a $600 versus $1500 debate. I mean, did I know in January that the PS3 would be good in a year - not necessarily. But $50 a year for XBL turned me off, I heard bad things about the hardware, and I had a PSP already. So why not just stick with what I had? And, I wasn't sure I was going to have that $600 cash available in six months, so I wanted to commit it when I had it in my hands.
Another reason glossed over by these replies is the ability to cache data for faster fetching - see Oblivion on the PS3. They improved draw distance and texture quality by unpacking the data to 4GB on the hard drive for faster load times as well. Rumor was that GTA IV was going to use this as well.
Luckily nobody who bought a PS3 knows what "value for money" is.
You're right - I am such an idiot for spending $600 on a next gen gaming console, hi-def movie player, UPnP media client. Add in the waste of $170 I spent on my PSP to play mobile games and access this $600 piece of junk from any WAP in the world and I feel like a total moron. Why do I even listen to myself when I should just call you instead? I mean, taking into account all the great mini-games available (Calling All Cars, Flow, Stardust HD) and coming soon (Echochrome, LBP, Pain) for the console, the ability to play games and movies in 1080p on my 46" TV and the ability to play FOR FREE the great online games both available (Resistance, Rainbow Six, The Darkness) and exclusives coming soon (UT3, Warhawk) shows what a big mistake this was.
How's your Wii Fit?
You forgot the Wolfenstein series -
Historically Innacurate/Horror Shooter 1,Historically Innacurate/Horror Shooter 2, Historically Innacurate/Horror Multiplayer Shooter 1
How was she going to fit in at a hacker conference?
It's up to the programmers to keep the cylinders fed at the right times and synchronize all of them properly and in ways such that the power can be applied efficiently to the transmission
Which highlights my point - Sony has released tools to make this easier. So the argument that the SPEs are so hard to deal with is moot.
But I think it's fair to blame this on the PS3, because their stupid architecture is the one that deviated from the standard.
Who said there was a "standard" gaming architecture? What part of the PS3 is not standard? It has a processor, a motherboard, a hard drive (hell, the 360 doesn't even adhere to that standard), RAM, a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray disc drive. I know, it's the wireless card that's throwing Rockstar off!
Want to dive in deeper? You have to deal with threading in the cell, core duo (2), and of course the PowerPC. The only difference is the division of the work to the cells, and Sony has released software to help deal with that. The 360 has that newfangled Unified Shader pipeline versus the PS3's traditional pixel/vertex pipeline.
So what's exactly not standard? The fact that you have those mysterious cells that no one knows what to do with? It's all API'd out at this point. Sony released help for developers at the GDC six months ago. So I don't think it's really a good argument to say that it's such a craaaazy hard platform to program for anymore. There's help there if they want this.
Even Pachter said, this was a failure of management to figure out that it was taking so long. They should have known this weeks ago. I personally was surprised to find out that they were going to be able to develop this game so quickly - look at MGS and FFXIII, they're taking much longer.
Obviously no details have been released yet, but we can at least speculate (I reorganized your questions):
Is it an additional add-on? (I'd assume it is, with a remote.) If so, how much does it cost?
Seeing as this would be a huge marketing thing if it was built in, I think we can assume that this would have to be an add-on. The PS3 has USB ports, so I'm thinking that's an obvious connection method.
Does it support CableCard?
I don't think we can answer that definitively, but seeing as they already make a digital entertainment product with a CableCard slot, it's possible that this could happen. At least we know they have the infrastructure in place to produce devices with CableCard slots, and are aware that this might be a good thing to include.
Does it support HD? (I'd assume it does.)
Obviously we don't know, but we could go either way here - to support digital and HD cable subscriptions you'd think they'd definitely have to include it. But I have to speculate what their content protection would be on any recorded content. Of course, seeing as the PS3 supports HDMI 1.3, I think it's safe to say this device, if it comes to fruition, definitely would support HD content.
How does it compare to other DVRs? Specifically, does it require a subscription? Offer TV listings? Offer suggestions?
I can't answer that, but my link above to the Sony Vaio XL3 gets a pretty decent, but not perfect, review from CNET. I imagine it won't be a Tivo, but for people like me who don't want to own a Tivo, I'm hoping that this will be an adequate solution. Particularly if you can access the device from within the PS3's linux distro...
Can it record while a game is playing? While a movie (DVD/Blu-Ray) is playing?
If we follow through with the assumption that the device is external, I don't expect it to draw too much power from the PS3 itself. Given that you currently can download content from the web while watching a movie or playing a game, I think that this feature is a must-have, but maybe not available initially. As with the PSP and PS3, I see them following the trend of releasing good hardware with limited features and patching with firmware releases as time goes on.
Does it use the same hard drive that games use? Will they be competing for available space?
Seeing as the ability to connect external devices is built into the current Sony firmware, I don't see how they can not allow you to use an external hard drive or memory card. Of course, the content will be encrypted, so mobility will be an interesting issue...but the ability to take recorded content on the road with your PSP is very intriguing.
I agree with most of what you said. It seems as though Dvorak is mistaking the dot com bubble with the market trends that occurred around the same time. Take CDRoms and the WWW explosion - both resulted in rushes to put anything you could on that medium. Cookbooks, encyclopedias, maps - they all ended up rushing towards whatever medium was the hot topic of the moment. I seem to remember the movie Disclosure having some premise regarding a CDROM virtual world or whatever - it didn't make sense.
The dotcom bust was more about the money being invested - usually poorly. All this money was coming in and nothing was getting produced. Anyone with an idea was given cash. It was tightly linked to the WWW rush, but it wasn't exactly the same. We still have that WWW rush as we see more and more services move to the web and the first adopters start to mature - see Wikipedia and Google Maps as second generation web services versus movie rentals like Netflicks, which are a relatively new experiment. The money, on the other hand, is there but everyone is considerably more controlled about their investments. Pets.com wouldn't get investors today without a solid business model or more likely a working implementation first. This is why Google succeeded as an IPO - they were already dominating search and web advertising. Ditto MySpace being bought out and Facebook talking about going either way.
I don't see a bubble per se - I just see smarter investing and wiser hiring practices. That was the second symptom of the bubble in 2000-2002 - people with little or no experience were hired for jobs that required some level of training. There's no way you can land a job at a company now without the proper education. Even outsourcing has cooled down, outside of the politically advantaged hype that the press tend to give it. Does anyone really care that you can't have a career in a call center anymore?
Just my $0.02
People like you are the reason we need a "Doesn't get the joke" mod.
For the first time in a while I was floored by a single game this generation
So Guitar Hero 2 is the game that floored you? I wasn't sure by what I read in your comment.
The game wouldn't draw nearly as much attention if it was being developed for any other console.
I'm pretty sure that the Nintendo fanboys would go apeshit for this game, considering that they're already feeling as though Nintendo is abandoning them. Seeing as Nintendo made the platformer what it is, this game definitely would be getting a ton of hype - and all the characters would be Mario like. As for Xbox, Microsoft fanboys would use this as the game that is the death knell to the PS3. Combined with Katamari, Guitar Hero, and GTA, the inovative titles that made the PS2 what it was last generation would now be on the 360 this generation.
But it's not on either of those platforms. It's on the Playstation 3. The story here isn't just another platformer - it's the whole package that Sony is producing - Home, LBP both are going to be driven by user content, and that hasn't happened yet on a console, and it probably will help the PS3 stand apart.
Unfortunately, it's limited due to their methodology. You have to dig into the press release, but you'll see this.
Nielsen GamePlay Metrics uses console data collected from the Nielsen's People Meter TV sample combined with Nielsen GamePlay Metrics' proprietary audio signature library that matches the unique audio signature of every game tracked on the six most widely available video game consoles, including PlayStation 2, PLAYSTATION 3, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii and GameCube.
So they basically have to be plugged into the TV so the meter can see that they're playing. I guess they then use the console's audio output to differentiate between them. No TV for portables. Well, PSP will have it soon.
Bomberman, Uno, Zuma, Catan, Poker
How many card games do you need? Sony has High Stakes Poker coming, as well as short action games like Calling all Cars. But it also has weird radical games like Echochrome and Flow, and don't discount the pull that LittleBigPlanet will have on casual gaming. If content for that game is as easy to produce as a movie for YouTube, then LBP will definitely be a huge casual gaming pull.
Add in BluRay for HiDef support and it's multimedia support that blunts the 360's abilities, and the PS3 is pretty attractive.
I was referring more to a GPL violation, or whatever license the code is distributed under. If you can't see the code, how do you know what system it is?
Even more disturbing...how will we know if they're implementing an open source system? If a voting machine is a black box, it wouldn't exactly be easy to determine whether or not the source code originates from an open source system.
Folklore (TBA, probably not this year), Heavenly Sword, Echochrome... I'm sure there are others coming.
You forgot timed exclusives UT3 and Haze, both of which look good to those who consider the Xbox a "FPS" machine and the PS a "RPG" machine. Add in HL2 and older games like RS:Vegas and Resistance and you have some pretty nice FPS games to compete with the 360's Halo (I'm not a fan myself). I think this generation you're going to see the lines blur more and more.
Also, the fact that Microsoft has publicly acknowledged the problems it's having with Rings of Red probably isn't boosting consumer confidence, and I'm not sure a robust games library will save them. Sony is catching up. If the price drop doesn't help this summer, if it's still in effect this holiday season then the 360 is going to have some issues - you can't get 2 year old games at your average retailer anymore unless they are used. It's one year and that's it. Most people aren't jumping into the next generation to save money. So basically, the 2 year games library isn't going to be enough of an advantage to help them.
I bet no one out there regrets their Wii360 purchase instead of just a PS3.
I bet this guy is regretting his decision just a little. And Microsoft views Rings of Red as a good thing for sales...so I guess if you do create a device that fails every 3-6 months then your shareholders will be happy because you generate repeat customers with little effort on your part. Way to go Microsoft!
They might be a bit more in-depth, but I loved Freelancer (beat it in 24 hours...without stopping) and X2 The Threat, which just happens to be available for Linux as well. However, X3 was not as good, IMO. Way too complicated. The X universe is more of a space trading/combat game though, so you might not like it nearly as much as Tie Fighter, which was pure fighting. Freelancer might be what you like, but there's still some trading involved as well. Much better combat in Freelancer.
There was Jumpgate, the excellent MMO which is now pretty much dead (30 people online at a time isn't really an MMO) and Vendetta, another MMO with good developer support but the same fate as Jumpgate - about 30-50 people online at peak hours.