The microphone has been around since N64 so it's not really "revolutionary". A projector would almost certainly not fit it into their target price range, and not really be the "simple Nintendo experience". Though, for one or two hundred bucks I'd buy the thing just for the hardware. Not very likely though. A 3d headset would be even more prohibitively expensive (would almost certainly make the thing cost more than PS3), although it would work well with the controllers. Didn't we used to have better theories, though? Like just plain 3d glasses? I mean, that right there is such a crazy idea it just might work...
I expected the Playstation 3 to dominate once more, with Nintendo coming on the side as the cheaper "add-on" gaming console that everyone buys to play Zelda and Mario Kart on the side.
You know, after months of listening to Revolution-devotees and now this article, a thought just occured to me. Would it be that surprising if Sony granted Nintendo's initial greatest fear and copied some of their functionality? They certainly have the time for it now, and Nintendo will have to put all their cards down pretty soon, since they were counting on an earlier launch of the PS3. Not necessarily ripping off the controller, but they might crank out more "counter-revolution" technology in the form of (better) eyetoy applications and/or other new peripherals, giving it more of an edge on the competition. Like you said, Nintendo's strategy is "cheap", not very expensive to pull off. And like Nintendo said, it would be easy to copy. As far as the Japanese market goes, I bet the DS is scaring Sony a hell of a lot more than the 360.
You want to copy a Shakespeare play back then? Hopefully you're literate, which wasn't exactly the norm
Wouldn't bootlegging a Shakespeare manuscript just involve looking at the twirly lines and copying them? If you don't need to speak English to translate a movie, you certainly don't need to be able to read to duplicate writing. Hence the poor quality of Shakespeare bootlegs. I might be wrong, but I believe this was after paper overtook parchment as the material you write on, so call it "post cd-r".
Let's look on the bright side. If Sony was practically ready for a spring or summer launch, minus blu-ray, then doesn't this mean that a delayed launch will have double helpings of what the 360's more hurried launch was lacking? I'm sure Sony realizes what waiting this long means, but they know how they creamed the last two generations, and so I expect them to have a very, very strong lineup at launch time (which, from what I've heard so far, seems likely. At least as far as games I want to play go, I can't speak for everyone). Another possible bonus in delay is the fact that first-gen models of Playstations are notoriously glitchy. Maybe if the design people get an unexpected couple of extra months to troubleshoot, this won't be an issue.
Also, as much as I don't like this in-your-face copy protection, can someone please tell me which of the last generation of consoles (excluding Dreamcast) played burned games out of the box? It's something I've more or less grown accustomed to, and I find it very likely that despite their best efforts the thing will be cracked.
I think you give our education system too much credit. When I was in third grade that's more or less what we learned. Also that Columbus was the first one to think the world was round, and the Native Americans and pilgrims loved each other (and it's really amazing when the teachers themselves actually believe these things). By the time you're learning actual fact, you're probably more than mature enough to handle it.
My parents aren't trekkies and I am. I find it highly unlikely that "trekkies breeding" will result in a generation of inherent trekkies. In fact, if both your parents are trekkies you're probably more likely to rebel and like something different during adolescence, I'd think.
I predict that the Saturn and Dreamcast will flop, Nintendo will dominate the handhold market, Microsoft will eventually enter the console business, and Duke Nukem Forever won't make it out in 2002!
(Silly me, I always thought that predictions had to be made before the fact, this changes everything!)
Um, you may have missed it, but Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are pretty big here, and even bigger in Japan. If you started your own magazine called "I'm Not Biased Weekly" and polled hundreds of Japanese gamers, your poll would look a lot like the Famitsuu one. Does that make you a suckup bad journalist? I don't think so, you're just reporting poll data. In fact, the difference in reader ratings ("OMG FF and DQ!1!") and editor ratings ("In our opinion only six games ever have lived up to the hype") should show you that they aren't too biased. Pretty much all the games they gave perfect scores to actually were innovative in one way or another (Soul Calibur was the most revolutionary game in the series even now, Nintendogs is obvious, and FFXII is certainly different...).
Actually, of the two families I've had (host family in Japan and real one in America), both seem to be happy with older stuff. The Japanese one has all sorts of fun on their Super-Famicom, and the suburbanite one loves the NES. Of course, since the "average person" loves high-def fps games (not puzzle or platformer, of course), 360 should be selling like hotcakes.
Large, clumsy phones designed for Europeans simply don't jive with the small, sleek, feature-packed phones that typify the phones of other Japanese operators.
But their Japanese phones were great though. They didn't beat Docomo in popularity, but unlike most of the other companies (AU, and other companies whose names escape me due to the very point I'm making) their phones weren't "uncool" to have. I believe they were the only company offering TV phones, which were dang neat, and pretty much epitimize "feature-packed". There's nothing about their phones that really give them away as "foreign".
Actually, ignoring the fact that the law doesn't actually apply to consoles like the Famicom (NES), I'm pretty sure that if it did it would piss off Nintendo. Why? Because the patent on the Famicom recently expired, and "innovative third-party models" less than five years old would be more legal than the original. They wouldn't be losing money on it, but it's hard to imagine them being thrilled.
I agree. "Cero 18" was a lot less cryptic than "Z". How the heck is this more intuitive? Not that many parents know too much about games, so they're more likely to respond to a big "18" (which as far as I know has been working beautifully) on the box than a Z...
But esoteric fighting games are about learning how to play and getting really good at it. They're not designed as "authentic fighting simulators", they're just games, in much the same sense chess is just a game and not an "authentic war simulator". Minimalist fighting games can be fun too, but they aren't "better at being fighting games" (nor the other way around) or anything... Likewise, I don't think that the Revolution's controller is some "holy grail" for fighting games. It will lead to a bunch of fun ones, I'm sure, but they won't be something all previous fighting games were "trying to be".
You can't accept the science that says the earth is billions of years old and reject the science that says people don't rise from the dead after 3 days.
Uh, what science? Last time I checked there was a non-zero probability of that happening... God might roll dice, but that doesn't keep Him from occasionally 'fixing' them... If you ask me, believing that God set up the universe to look older than it is brings up a whole lot more theological conflicts than assuming an error in bookkeeping somewhere...
Presumably the RIAA actually offers "overwhelming evidence" against the people it brings to court, which probably amounts to a fast-talking lawyer. I wish she would have waited until the last possible minute to disclose this piece of information before court, once the RIAA had its (marked) cards on the table she might have caught them lying through their teeth. Actually, I'm not quite sure how the process works, it's probable the RIAA needs to submit that evidence in order to accuse her. In which case, I hope the judge looks over the RIAA's papers very carefully...
I retract the Microsoft statement. It wasn't the main point of my comment, and it was really more a bad joke than a sustainable claim. On another note, anyone ever played a Squaresoft game here? They have not used CGI cutscenes since Final Fantasy 9, the cutscenes in Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X and X-2 were all done in the Playstation.
Incorrect. While they may have been rendered off of the PS2 to prove something to someone (though I'm pretty sure a better computer did it), they were probably rendered by a cluster of them and definitely not in real time. Many in-game scenes are rendered in real time, but X, X-2, and Kingdom Hearts all use beautiful, pre-rendered FMVs at some point or another which are clearly superior to the in-game graphics. I know that for at least FFX and X-2 the prerendered FMV files take up many many gigs of discspace (I've never dissected Kingdom Heats though, it might just be the opening for that, I haven't played very far either). The fact that these game have great graphics anyway just emphasizes the point that Square-Enix can't ween themselves off the FMVs, no matter how good console technology gets. And HD-happy FMVs are going to be much bigger...
People thought that when the PS2 came out too. CGI technology isn't standing still though. Look at the cutscenes in say, FF8 or something. They look WORSE than standard PS2 graphics. But by the time of the PS2 though, CGI started looking much better. Likewise, I expect there to be advances during the 360's lifetime. Otherwise there won't be any reason for a third Xbox. (Imagine: a Microsoft product with a lifetime of more than four years)
we aren't doing it too. Remember the 2001 spy plane incident? If we have spy planes flying around, you bet we have hackers on their networks. The NSA, CIA, and military fund hacking think tanks and advanced CS research, and classify math. The military is probably downplaying China's attacks because China downplays theirs. Also, because releasing just about any information about what was cracked, what was actually a honey pot, etc., would compromise operations.
I love how the same damned DQ8 ad was played for six friggin' months straight while I was there (in every freaking store. hearing the orchestral theme sends me into a berserk frenzy), and yet Microsoft's Important Launch didn't even get half that amount of publicity...
In Japan, O is synonymous with "correct", and X is synonymous with "wrong" (they flipped the PS controls in America, in Japanese games "O" is almost always accept, and "X" is cancel). Instead of just meaning "beyond" or whatever it means here, X has the added connotation of failure. So "Xbox" can be translated as "failure box". One poster on/.J pointed out that if you "translate" "Xbox360", you get "failure box", with a hastily appended circle to make it succeed.
A conclusion that says 100% of anyone does anything (aside from eat, sleep, and taxes) seems pretty low-resolution, even if it's restricted to a single country... I suppose "play games" is a low hurdle to clear, "play games once every few months at my cousin's" probably qualifies. If that's true, it seems like a bad idea to market based on this data...
To stop alienating gamers in Japan they'll start alienating American ones!
Japanese people are used to paying $60 for games, so the tables are finally even, winning Microsoft some favor on the other side of... the other pond.
Actually, (I'm my own insightful reply) Japanese 360 games are $10 more too (ignore the discount thing), which probably provides twice the alienation doing nothing would have... I wonder how Microsoft possibly could hope to do well in Japan with games that cost more than a used Xbox 1, and no Kasumi-shaped pillow.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm not aware of any of the services listed being particularly undependable. Internet matchmaking is cheap. There might be ads though.
The microphone has been around since N64 so it's not really "revolutionary". A projector would almost certainly not fit it into their target price range, and not really be the "simple Nintendo experience". Though, for one or two hundred bucks I'd buy the thing just for the hardware. Not very likely though. A 3d headset would be even more prohibitively expensive (would almost certainly make the thing cost more than PS3), although it would work well with the controllers. Didn't we used to have better theories, though? Like just plain 3d glasses? I mean, that right there is such a crazy idea it just might work...
I expected the Playstation 3 to dominate once more, with Nintendo coming on the side as the cheaper "add-on" gaming console that everyone buys to play Zelda and Mario Kart on the side.
You know, after months of listening to Revolution-devotees and now this article, a thought just occured to me. Would it be that surprising if Sony granted Nintendo's initial greatest fear and copied some of their functionality? They certainly have the time for it now, and Nintendo will have to put all their cards down pretty soon, since they were counting on an earlier launch of the PS3. Not necessarily ripping off the controller, but they might crank out more "counter-revolution" technology in the form of (better) eyetoy applications and/or other new peripherals, giving it more of an edge on the competition. Like you said, Nintendo's strategy is "cheap", not very expensive to pull off. And like Nintendo said, it would be easy to copy. As far as the Japanese market goes, I bet the DS is scaring Sony a hell of a lot more than the 360.
You want to copy a Shakespeare play back then? Hopefully you're literate, which wasn't exactly the norm
Wouldn't bootlegging a Shakespeare manuscript just involve looking at the twirly lines and copying them? If you don't need to speak English to translate a movie, you certainly don't need to be able to read to duplicate writing. Hence the poor quality of Shakespeare bootlegs. I might be wrong, but I believe this was after paper overtook parchment as the material you write on, so call it "post cd-r".
Let's look on the bright side. If Sony was practically ready for a spring or summer launch, minus blu-ray, then doesn't this mean that a delayed launch will have double helpings of what the 360's more hurried launch was lacking? I'm sure Sony realizes what waiting this long means, but they know how they creamed the last two generations, and so I expect them to have a very, very strong lineup at launch time (which, from what I've heard so far, seems likely. At least as far as games I want to play go, I can't speak for everyone). Another possible bonus in delay is the fact that first-gen models of Playstations are notoriously glitchy. Maybe if the design people get an unexpected couple of extra months to troubleshoot, this won't be an issue.
Also, as much as I don't like this in-your-face copy protection, can someone please tell me which of the last generation of consoles (excluding Dreamcast) played burned games out of the box? It's something I've more or less grown accustomed to, and I find it very likely that despite their best efforts the thing will be cracked.
I think you give our education system too much credit. When I was in third grade that's more or less what we learned. Also that Columbus was the first one to think the world was round, and the Native Americans and pilgrims loved each other (and it's really amazing when the teachers themselves actually believe these things). By the time you're learning actual fact, you're probably more than mature enough to handle it.
My parents aren't trekkies and I am. I find it highly unlikely that "trekkies breeding" will result in a generation of inherent trekkies. In fact, if both your parents are trekkies you're probably more likely to rebel and like something different during adolescence, I'd think.
...here I come!
I predict that the Saturn and Dreamcast will flop, Nintendo will dominate the handhold market, Microsoft will eventually enter the console business, and Duke Nukem Forever won't make it out in 2002!
(Silly me, I always thought that predictions had to be made before the fact, this changes everything!)
Um, you may have missed it, but Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are pretty big here, and even bigger in Japan. If you started your own magazine called "I'm Not Biased Weekly" and polled hundreds of Japanese gamers, your poll would look a lot like the Famitsuu one. Does that make you a suckup bad journalist? I don't think so, you're just reporting poll data. In fact, the difference in reader ratings ("OMG FF and DQ!1!") and editor ratings ("In our opinion only six games ever have lived up to the hype") should show you that they aren't too biased. Pretty much all the games they gave perfect scores to actually were innovative in one way or another (Soul Calibur was the most revolutionary game in the series even now, Nintendogs is obvious, and FFXII is certainly different...).
The Dreamcast still has new games coming out for it. You tellin' me it's not dead?
Actually, of the two families I've had (host family in Japan and real one in America), both seem to be happy with older stuff. The Japanese one has all sorts of fun on their Super-Famicom, and the suburbanite one loves the NES. Of course, since the "average person" loves high-def fps games (not puzzle or platformer, of course), 360 should be selling like hotcakes.
Large, clumsy phones designed for Europeans simply don't jive with the small, sleek, feature-packed phones that typify the phones of other Japanese operators.
But their Japanese phones were great though. They didn't beat Docomo in popularity, but unlike most of the other companies (AU, and other companies whose names escape me due to the very point I'm making) their phones weren't "uncool" to have. I believe they were the only company offering TV phones, which were dang neat, and pretty much epitimize "feature-packed". There's nothing about their phones that really give them away as "foreign".
Actually, ignoring the fact that the law doesn't actually apply to consoles like the Famicom (NES), I'm pretty sure that if it did it would piss off Nintendo. Why? Because the patent on the Famicom recently expired, and "innovative third-party models" less than five years old would be more legal than the original. They wouldn't be losing money on it, but it's hard to imagine them being thrilled.
I agree. "Cero 18" was a lot less cryptic than "Z". How the heck is this more intuitive? Not that many parents know too much about games, so they're more likely to respond to a big "18" (which as far as I know has been working beautifully) on the box than a Z...
But esoteric fighting games are about learning how to play and getting really good at it. They're not designed as "authentic fighting simulators", they're just games, in much the same sense chess is just a game and not an "authentic war simulator". Minimalist fighting games can be fun too, but they aren't "better at being fighting games" (nor the other way around) or anything... Likewise, I don't think that the Revolution's controller is some "holy grail" for fighting games. It will lead to a bunch of fun ones, I'm sure, but they won't be something all previous fighting games were "trying to be".
You can't accept the science that says the earth is billions of years old and reject the science that says people don't rise from the dead after 3 days.
Uh, what science? Last time I checked there was a non-zero probability of that happening... God might roll dice, but that doesn't keep Him from occasionally 'fixing' them... If you ask me, believing that God set up the universe to look older than it is brings up a whole lot more theological conflicts than assuming an error in bookkeeping somewhere...
Presumably the RIAA actually offers "overwhelming evidence" against the people it brings to court, which probably amounts to a fast-talking lawyer. I wish she would have waited until the last possible minute to disclose this piece of information before court, once the RIAA had its (marked) cards on the table she might have caught them lying through their teeth. Actually, I'm not quite sure how the process works, it's probable the RIAA needs to submit that evidence in order to accuse her. In which case, I hope the judge looks over the RIAA's papers very carefully...
I retract the Microsoft statement. It wasn't the main point of my comment, and it was really more a bad joke than a sustainable claim.
On another note, anyone ever played a Squaresoft game here? They have not used CGI cutscenes since Final Fantasy 9, the cutscenes in Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X and X-2 were all done in the Playstation.
Incorrect. While they may have been rendered off of the PS2 to prove something to someone (though I'm pretty sure a better computer did it), they were probably rendered by a cluster of them and definitely not in real time. Many in-game scenes are rendered in real time, but X, X-2, and Kingdom Hearts all use beautiful, pre-rendered FMVs at some point or another which are clearly superior to the in-game graphics. I know that for at least FFX and X-2 the prerendered FMV files take up many many gigs of discspace (I've never dissected Kingdom Heats though, it might just be the opening for that, I haven't played very far either). The fact that these game have great graphics anyway just emphasizes the point that Square-Enix can't ween themselves off the FMVs, no matter how good console technology gets. And HD-happy FMVs are going to be much bigger...
People thought that when the PS2 came out too. CGI technology isn't standing still though. Look at the cutscenes in say, FF8 or something. They look WORSE than standard PS2 graphics. But by the time of the PS2 though, CGI started looking much better. Likewise, I expect there to be advances during the 360's lifetime. Otherwise there won't be any reason for a third Xbox. (Imagine: a Microsoft product with a lifetime of more than four years)
we aren't doing it too. Remember the 2001 spy plane incident? If we have spy planes flying around, you bet we have hackers on their networks. The NSA, CIA, and military fund hacking think tanks and advanced CS research, and classify math. The military is probably downplaying China's attacks because China downplays theirs. Also, because releasing just about any information about what was cracked, what was actually a honey pot, etc., would compromise operations.
Chimps don't go around publishing dumbass conclusions based on Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacies.
I love how the same damned DQ8 ad was played for six friggin' months straight while I was there (in every freaking store. hearing the orchestral theme sends me into a berserk frenzy), and yet Microsoft's Important Launch didn't even get half that amount of publicity...
In Japan, O is synonymous with "correct", and X is synonymous with "wrong" (they flipped the PS controls in America, in Japanese games "O" is almost always accept, and "X" is cancel). Instead of just meaning "beyond" or whatever it means here, X has the added connotation of failure. So "Xbox" can be translated as "failure box". One poster on /.J pointed out that if you "translate" "Xbox360", you get "failure box", with a hastily appended circle to make it succeed.
A conclusion that says 100% of anyone does anything (aside from eat, sleep, and taxes) seems pretty low-resolution, even if it's restricted to a single country... I suppose "play games" is a low hurdle to clear, "play games once every few months at my cousin's" probably qualifies. If that's true, it seems like a bad idea to market based on this data...
To stop alienating gamers in Japan they'll start alienating American ones! Japanese people are used to paying $60 for games, so the tables are finally even, winning Microsoft some favor on the other side of... the other pond. Actually, (I'm my own insightful reply) Japanese 360 games are $10 more too (ignore the discount thing), which probably provides twice the alienation doing nothing would have... I wonder how Microsoft possibly could hope to do well in Japan with games that cost more than a used Xbox 1, and no Kasumi-shaped pillow.