http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3209
Anandtech's article compares the 3870x2 against 8800 GT SLI (a good comparison since they cost almost exactly the same). 8800 GT SLI wins in almost every case. 3870x2 is still a damn good card for people with only one PCIe x16 slot though.
From the article: "Roscheisen said the manufacturing process the company has developed will enable it to eventually deliver solar electricity for less than a dollar per watt"
Nowhere in the article does it mention the price of the first run of panels. I'd imagine they are much more expensive than $1/watt.
XII was an anomaly. XII changed producers mid-development and had many features removed or altered. The lukewarm reception the playable demo received at E3 2004 also probably had something to do with the delay. (Remember they had no playable demo the following year at E3 2005, only a video.) So, I actually am surprised that FF XIII is still so early in development over a year after it was first revealed. There must be something else going on here besides just "not wanting to rush it out." VII - X all came out in rapid succession and they weren't half-assed.
I have nothing wrong with innovation, but Square-Enix, of all developers, should be able to recognize when the gameplay is fundamentally broken. For example:
* The license grid gives you absolutely no reason to specialize. Every character will eventually become some jack-of-all-trades battle mage.
* Offensive magic is basically useless, since MP-restoring items are hard to come by, it takes too long to cast, and you can do more damage with physical attacks in the same amount of time.
* Summons are also basically useless.
* Why the hell do they limit which gambits you have access to, and make you buy them all? It severely limits your tactical options until way later in the game for no good reason.
It's not like it takes some super genius to see how these "innovations" hurt the gameplay, and it certainly doesn't take a genius to conceive of ways to modify them so they work much more effectively.
What pissed me off was the fact that 90% of Final Fantasy XII takes place in a bunch of totally generic tombs, caves, mines, sewers, and tunnels. Seriously, every indoor environment is some stupid corridor dungeon with a whole bunch of rectangular hallways, all identically textured, strewn together with no rhyme or reason. Either the rooms are totally empty, or they have one treasure chest sitting in the corner.
I found myself yelling at the game "who the FUCK would build a fucking 80 floor tower with hundreds of rooms and then put nothing in it, except a treasure chest here and there with one potion or a knot of rust inside??" Also, you gotta love the randomized treasure chests. Not only do you get something useless 95% of the time, but you have no idea whether you're missing something good and should come back when it respawns. (After looking at the guide, I can tell you that you VERY RARELY find anything better than what you can get in shops.)
I miss the 32-bit FF games with pre-rendered dungeons. At least they made it feel like you were exploring a real place that served some purpose; that people would actually build and use. Unfortunately, from what I've seen of FF XIII, it looks like more crappy corridor dungeons. (see all the pics of those shiny futuristic hallways)
NO, Square-Enix have never suggested that Final Fantasy XIII will be multiplatform. AFAIK that rumor came from a mistranslation of this article http://www.gamefront.de/ that has been going around some message boards. They HAVE confirmed that the FF XIII series will be multiplatform, and have hinted that there will be more than the three we know about, but they've never stated that FF XIII itself will be multiplatform. Also see this interview with Hiromichi Tanaka http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 24297 where he says
"Up to PlayStation 2, all consoles had roughly the same concept of how to enjoy the gaming experience. With next-gen, each has different features and is targeted at a different audience.
So, we have to make different titles for different platforms, depending on what sort of game we want to make and what the users will be expecting; we can choose which platform we want to go for. This is completely different from the old games industry."
Also, the idea of porting a graphically demanding game like FF XIII to the Wii is total fucking nonsense.
It just looks stupid and feels awkward. You can move your characters around in real-time, run up and start humping your enemies, but each character just stands there patiently waiting for his/her turn to swing a weapon. It never really looks like they are engaged in a fight. FF X-2 managed to make its battles resemble a real fight at least somewhat, so I don't know why they failed so bad with XII.
Even Skies of Arcadia managed to solve this problem a long time ago. In SoA, your characters continuously traded blows with your enemy, but the only hits that "count" are the ones that you input. So, it was a turn-based game but it effectively created the illusion that you were in a continuous battle. I wish FF XII would've done this. It would've looked and felt much more natural.
What? It seems to me that the vast majority of gamers who hated FF XII are long-time fans of the series, not people who dislike JRPGs in general and are "not the target audience".
FF XII had one of the slowest, most bare bones stories in any FF game. It was basically Final Fantasy Tactics Lite. There are maybe 2 big plot twists in XII. In FFT, twists of the same impact and magnitude happened ALL THE TIME. Vaan and Penelo are also the worst main characters in FF history, even worse than Tidus. They have no convincing motivation for going on the quest in the first place. More importantly, why would four seasoned warriors pick up two teenage kids off the streets and take them along? It was like they finished designing the game and then thought "wait a sec, we forgot to put a fruity, effeminate teenage kid and his childhood friend in this game" and thus Vaan and Penelo were thrown in at the last minute. Actually, rumor has it that Balthier was originally intended to be the main character, but higher-ups at Square-Enix insisted they put in a character that the gamers would "relate to" better.
It also didn't help that you spend most of your time running through a bunch of sewers, mines, caves, and tombs, all of which were basically corridor dungeons with huge rectangular hallways that have the same texture pasted on all of them, with monsters pacing back and forth randomly, patiently waiting for the heroes to show up. The outdoor areas were beautiful, but the indoor dungeon areas (where you spend ~80% of the gameplay) are without a doubt the most bland, EMPTY, repetitive, and unnecessarily huge dungeons in an FF game. Hell, the last dungeon is a huge tower with floor after floor that consist of little rectangular rooms, with the same brick texture on all of them. Most of these rooms have NOTHING in them whatsoever. A few have one little treasure chest sitting in the corner. Throughout the entire game I was thinking to myself "who would build this huge fucking dungeon with gigantic rectangular rooms and hallways, and then put nothing in it?" FF XII is a huge departure from previous FF's dungeons, most of which were interesting works of art that begged to be explored.
Oh, and don't forget the randomized treasure chests that contain useless crap 99% of the time. And, thanks to it being randomized, you have no way of knowing whether you're missing something good, except to keep exiting and letting the treasure respawn (or using a guide). I played FF XII up until the shitty last dungeon, and only one time in the entire game did I find a weapon in a treasure chest that was stronger than what I could buy at the shops. So, not only are the dungeons boring as hell to explore in their own right, but they don't even give you a good reward at the end for doing so.
Look, I have been a huge FF nerd since FF1 for the NES. I chose Playstation over Saturn as soon as I saw the next FF game would be on the PSX (in fact, I still have my Cloud Strife t-shirt for pre-ordering FF7 from Electronics Boutique). I defended FF7 when people whined that it wasn't FF6, I defended FF8 when people whined that it was too different, I defended FF9 when people whined that it was too oldschool, I bought a PS2 w/FFX the day it came out, and I got FF XII at midnight launch (and even won the costume competition at my local Gamestop). There is just no way that I can defend FF XII. It's by far the most disappointing numbered FF game (excluding XI, which I refuse to play).
Transcoding video the killer app for multicore? Most people don't even know what transcoding means. I don't see many people buying into multicore processors for this purpose. I honestly don't see any "killer app" on the horizon for 4+ core processors in home PCs. The only thing I can think of is high-definition video, but GPUs will always be able to do that better anyway.
As far as Cell vs. GPGPU in future supercomputers. . . IBM has a very compelling roadmap for Cell. It includes double-precision FP calculations, insane clockspeeds, and of course lots more cores. Remember that STI want to put Cell in EVERYTHING: HDTVs, DVD players, etc. I believe it's too early to predict which direction supercomputers will take in 2007. I'm definitely excited to find out!
Akira Toriyama, Nobuo Uematsu, and Hironobu Sakaguchi are all involved in Blue Dragon's development. The last time they all collaborated AFAIK was Chrono Trigger. I'm not sure how similar the actual games are, though.
Why on earth would you need 1080p60? Film is 24 fps and video is 30 fps, so there is literally no use for a format that holds 1080p60 content. Did you just pull this out of your ass or what?
As far as I know, the only thing AMD is adding with AM2 is DDR2 800 support. The A64 isn't bandwith starved anyway. It would be awesome if AMD could bring out some secret weapon to keep Intel from grabbing the performance crown (hell, I'd buy that over a Conroe if it happened), but that is extremely unlikely. Keep in mind that, in the benchmarks, the FX-60 was overclocked to rumored FX-62 speeds, which is likely the fastest chip AMD will have at that time. There is no chance in hell they will be able to come out with a chip 20% faster than that in time for Conroe.
How is porting Office to 64-bit code going to provide any benefits whatsoever?
When AMD extended x86 to 64-bit, they also doubled the number of registers available (from 8 to 16 I believe). These registers are sitting around doing nothing when you're running in 32-bit mode. I'm not sure how big of a performance advantage this gives in real life. . . but the idea is that the CPU will spend less time swapping registers back and forth.
Now everybody and their mom is only making MMORPGs. Don't expect to ever play an excellent RPG like Fallout or Planescape: Torment again. Check out the list of upcoming PC RPGs at http://www.rpgamer.com/games/upcoming.html There are 35 listed, and maybe 4 or 5 of them are not MMORPGs. It's much easier to drop you in a world infested with stupid 14 year olds than it is to create decent AI and interesting situations to put players in.
It's so funny watching a character try to get from point A to point B in some of the in-game cutscenes. They'll sprint about 2 feet, stop abruptly, rotate, sprint another two feet, stop, rotate again, etc. It looks absolutely ridiculous.
The combat in this game also is just no fun. Your character moves so slowly when you're locked on to an enemy. On top of that, you have to be practically bumping into your enemy for your hits to connect. Before you can use your ultra fast Thousand Cuts fighting style you have to slowly inch up to your enemy. This becomes especially frustrating when you stun your enemy with a support style and then you try to hit them while they're vulnerable. By the time you get within striking range the effect has almost worn off.
Jade Empire is very much a standard RPG. You get to a town, talk to everybody, get a million stupid sidequests that have nothing to do with your main quest, finish the one required quest to move on to the next chapter. Rinse and repeat.
Slashdot Mirror
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3209 Anandtech's article compares the 3870x2 against 8800 GT SLI (a good comparison since they cost almost exactly the same). 8800 GT SLI wins in almost every case. 3870x2 is still a damn good card for people with only one PCIe x16 slot though.
You can't put two of these in Crossfire yet. ATI is working on Crossfire X drivers that will allow you to put two 3870x2s in crossfire.
From the article: "Roscheisen said the manufacturing process the company has developed will enable it to eventually deliver solar electricity for less than a dollar per watt"
Nowhere in the article does it mention the price of the first run of panels. I'd imagine they are much more expensive than $1/watt.
Arguing on the internet is like a Klingon vs. Furry bowling match. . .
VII - 1997
VIII - 1999
IX - 2000
X - 2001
XII was an anomaly. XII changed producers mid-development and had many features removed or altered. The lukewarm reception the playable demo received at E3 2004 also probably had something to do with the delay. (Remember they had no playable demo the following year at E3 2005, only a video.) So, I actually am surprised that FF XIII is still so early in development over a year after it was first revealed. There must be something else going on here besides just "not wanting to rush it out." VII - X all came out in rapid succession and they weren't half-assed.
I have nothing wrong with innovation, but Square-Enix, of all developers, should be able to recognize when the gameplay is fundamentally broken. For example:
* The license grid gives you absolutely no reason to specialize. Every character will eventually become some jack-of-all-trades battle mage.
* Offensive magic is basically useless, since MP-restoring items are hard to come by, it takes too long to cast, and you can do more damage with physical attacks in the same amount of time.
* Summons are also basically useless.
* Why the hell do they limit which gambits you have access to, and make you buy them all? It severely limits your tactical options until way later in the game for no good reason.
It's not like it takes some super genius to see how these "innovations" hurt the gameplay, and it certainly doesn't take a genius to conceive of ways to modify them so they work much more effectively.
What pissed me off was the fact that 90% of Final Fantasy XII takes place in a bunch of totally generic tombs, caves, mines, sewers, and tunnels. Seriously, every indoor environment is some stupid corridor dungeon with a whole bunch of rectangular hallways, all identically textured, strewn together with no rhyme or reason. Either the rooms are totally empty, or they have one treasure chest sitting in the corner.
I found myself yelling at the game "who the FUCK would build a fucking 80 floor tower with hundreds of rooms and then put nothing in it, except a treasure chest here and there with one potion or a knot of rust inside??" Also, you gotta love the randomized treasure chests. Not only do you get something useless 95% of the time, but you have no idea whether you're missing something good and should come back when it respawns. (After looking at the guide, I can tell you that you VERY RARELY find anything better than what you can get in shops.)
I miss the 32-bit FF games with pre-rendered dungeons. At least they made it feel like you were exploring a real place that served some purpose; that people would actually build and use. Unfortunately, from what I've seen of FF XIII, it looks like more crappy corridor dungeons. (see all the pics of those shiny futuristic hallways)
NO, Square-Enix have never suggested that Final Fantasy XIII will be multiplatform. AFAIK that rumor came from a mistranslation of this article http://www.gamefront.de/ that has been going around some message boards. They HAVE confirmed that the FF XIII series will be multiplatform, and have hinted that there will be more than the three we know about, but they've never stated that FF XIII itself will be multiplatform. Also see this interview with Hiromichi Tanaka http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 24297 where he says
"Up to PlayStation 2, all consoles had roughly the same concept of how to enjoy the gaming experience. With next-gen, each has different features and is targeted at a different audience.
So, we have to make different titles for different platforms, depending on what sort of game we want to make and what the users will be expecting; we can choose which platform we want to go for. This is completely different from the old games industry."
Also, the idea of porting a graphically demanding game like FF XIII to the Wii is total fucking nonsense.
It just looks stupid and feels awkward. You can move your characters around in real-time, run up and start humping your enemies, but each character just stands there patiently waiting for his/her turn to swing a weapon. It never really looks like they are engaged in a fight. FF X-2 managed to make its battles resemble a real fight at least somewhat, so I don't know why they failed so bad with XII.
Even Skies of Arcadia managed to solve this problem a long time ago. In SoA, your characters continuously traded blows with your enemy, but the only hits that "count" are the ones that you input. So, it was a turn-based game but it effectively created the illusion that you were in a continuous battle. I wish FF XII would've done this. It would've looked and felt much more natural.
What? It seems to me that the vast majority of gamers who hated FF XII are long-time fans of the series, not people who dislike JRPGs in general and are "not the target audience".
FF XII had one of the slowest, most bare bones stories in any FF game. It was basically Final Fantasy Tactics Lite. There are maybe 2 big plot twists in XII. In FFT, twists of the same impact and magnitude happened ALL THE TIME. Vaan and Penelo are also the worst main characters in FF history, even worse than Tidus. They have no convincing motivation for going on the quest in the first place. More importantly, why would four seasoned warriors pick up two teenage kids off the streets and take them along? It was like they finished designing the game and then thought "wait a sec, we forgot to put a fruity, effeminate teenage kid and his childhood friend in this game" and thus Vaan and Penelo were thrown in at the last minute. Actually, rumor has it that Balthier was originally intended to be the main character, but higher-ups at Square-Enix insisted they put in a character that the gamers would "relate to" better.
It also didn't help that you spend most of your time running through a bunch of sewers, mines, caves, and tombs, all of which were basically corridor dungeons with huge rectangular hallways that have the same texture pasted on all of them, with monsters pacing back and forth randomly, patiently waiting for the heroes to show up. The outdoor areas were beautiful, but the indoor dungeon areas (where you spend ~80% of the gameplay) are without a doubt the most bland, EMPTY, repetitive, and unnecessarily huge dungeons in an FF game. Hell, the last dungeon is a huge tower with floor after floor that consist of little rectangular rooms, with the same brick texture on all of them. Most of these rooms have NOTHING in them whatsoever. A few have one little treasure chest sitting in the corner. Throughout the entire game I was thinking to myself "who would build this huge fucking dungeon with gigantic rectangular rooms and hallways, and then put nothing in it?" FF XII is a huge departure from previous FF's dungeons, most of which were interesting works of art that begged to be explored.
Oh, and don't forget the randomized treasure chests that contain useless crap 99% of the time. And, thanks to it being randomized, you have no way of knowing whether you're missing something good, except to keep exiting and letting the treasure respawn (or using a guide). I played FF XII up until the shitty last dungeon, and only one time in the entire game did I find a weapon in a treasure chest that was stronger than what I could buy at the shops. So, not only are the dungeons boring as hell to explore in their own right, but they don't even give you a good reward at the end for doing so.
Look, I have been a huge FF nerd since FF1 for the NES. I chose Playstation over Saturn as soon as I saw the next FF game would be on the PSX (in fact, I still have my Cloud Strife t-shirt for pre-ordering FF7 from Electronics Boutique). I defended FF7 when people whined that it wasn't FF6, I defended FF8 when people whined that it was too different, I defended FF9 when people whined that it was too oldschool, I bought a PS2 w/FFX the day it came out, and I got FF XII at midnight launch (and even won the costume competition at my local Gamestop). There is just no way that I can defend FF XII. It's by far the most disappointing numbered FF game (excluding XI, which I refuse to play).
Transcoding video the killer app for multicore? Most people don't even know what transcoding means. I don't see many people buying into multicore processors for this purpose. I honestly don't see any "killer app" on the horizon for 4+ core processors in home PCs. The only thing I can think of is high-definition video, but GPUs will always be able to do that better anyway. As far as Cell vs. GPGPU in future supercomputers. . . IBM has a very compelling roadmap for Cell. It includes double-precision FP calculations, insane clockspeeds, and of course lots more cores. Remember that STI want to put Cell in EVERYTHING: HDTVs, DVD players, etc. I believe it's too early to predict which direction supercomputers will take in 2007. I'm definitely excited to find out!
Akira Toriyama, Nobuo Uematsu, and Hironobu Sakaguchi are all involved in Blue Dragon's development. The last time they all collaborated AFAIK was Chrono Trigger. I'm not sure how similar the actual games are, though.
Why on earth would you need 1080p60? Film is 24 fps and video is 30 fps, so there is literally no use for a format that holds 1080p60 content. Did you just pull this out of your ass or what?
As far as I know, the only thing AMD is adding with AM2 is DDR2 800 support. The A64 isn't bandwith starved anyway. It would be awesome if AMD could bring out some secret weapon to keep Intel from grabbing the performance crown (hell, I'd buy that over a Conroe if it happened), but that is extremely unlikely. Keep in mind that, in the benchmarks, the FX-60 was overclocked to rumored FX-62 speeds, which is likely the fastest chip AMD will have at that time. There is no chance in hell they will be able to come out with a chip 20% faster than that in time for Conroe.
How is porting Office to 64-bit code going to provide any benefits whatsoever?
When AMD extended x86 to 64-bit, they also doubled the number of registers available (from 8 to 16 I believe). These registers are sitting around doing nothing when you're running in 32-bit mode. I'm not sure how big of a performance advantage this gives in real life. . . but the idea is that the CPU will spend less time swapping registers back and forth.
Now everybody and their mom is only making MMORPGs. Don't expect to ever play an excellent RPG like Fallout or Planescape: Torment again. Check out the list of upcoming PC RPGs at http://www.rpgamer.com/games/upcoming.html There are 35 listed, and maybe 4 or 5 of them are not MMORPGs. It's much easier to drop you in a world infested with stupid 14 year olds than it is to create decent AI and interesting situations to put players in.
It's so funny watching a character try to get from point A to point B in some of the in-game cutscenes. They'll sprint about 2 feet, stop abruptly, rotate, sprint another two feet, stop, rotate again, etc. It looks absolutely ridiculous. The combat in this game also is just no fun. Your character moves so slowly when you're locked on to an enemy. On top of that, you have to be practically bumping into your enemy for your hits to connect. Before you can use your ultra fast Thousand Cuts fighting style you have to slowly inch up to your enemy. This becomes especially frustrating when you stun your enemy with a support style and then you try to hit them while they're vulnerable. By the time you get within striking range the effect has almost worn off. Jade Empire is very much a standard RPG. You get to a town, talk to everybody, get a million stupid sidequests that have nothing to do with your main quest, finish the one required quest to move on to the next chapter. Rinse and repeat.