Well, I got the Limited Edition, which has no artwork on it, so I can't say for myself. But the limited edition strategy guide is WORTH EVERY PENNY simply for its artwork. It even includes a full, 100+ page book with illustrations and renderings of all the airships, espers, primary and secondary characters, landscapes, and archetecture. It is simply breathtaking. I have seen the cover of the regular edition box, which just has Vaan doing an afeminate little pose (which, btw, doesn't fit his in-game persona at all... even his outfit is pretty unassuming once you get used to it). I haven't checked the back of it, but the copies I saw looked very professionally rendered.
I'll probably stay away from Vagrant Story then, because as much as I absolutely love FF12, it's musical score is probably the weakest link. I'm a big prog head, and Uematsu's scores actually started me playing video games in the first place... I just miss the classical/rock fusion that Uematsu brought to the genre. Hamouzu did a great job doing similarly fuzed work, but with his own style, during FFX, and I was really hoping he'd take the reigns for FF12. FF12s score, while "pretty" just seems a bit "safe" to me... not the same amount of energy and drama that separated the FF series' scores from the rest of the pack. There was a bit too much emphasis (musically) on "trying" to be sophisticated, where-as I thought the previous scores just "were" sophisticated, in their own right (FFX a little less so).
That said, I applaud the rest of the game for greatly upping the sophistication factor, and proving that great dialog, wonderful character portrayals, and tasteful plotlines can be just as entertaining as sophomoric ones.
lol, both my friend and I (in our respective games), were dumbasses and attacked the green dinosaur in the Eastersands. I should have gotten a clue when I saw the FMV with it running along with the wolves fleeing in a panic... but I didn't.
No, that wouldn't be correct... I've never supported the Iraq war, either. Hell, I didn't support the war in Afgahnastan, and even though it worked out well for a while, over the past few months things have been getting a lot worse, due to our neglect.
This is usually my sentiment as well... but if we're going to go and ruin someone's shit, we've just made ourselves part of the mess, like it or not, and it's our reponsibility to at least try and clean it up. That said... we're hopeless in Iraq; either that or Iraq is hopeless with us in it... and the most practical move, for all parties involved, is for us to just suck up our honor, and leave. We've been dishonorable as hell as it is, at least this move might save lives.
We're like a knife in a wound, with no doctor for hundreds of miles. At some point, you've gotta pull the knife out before it becomes gangrien.
Interesting comment. And that is one of the things I have been thinking... maybe it's too much to ask to have our soldiers be peace brokers, maybe we need a totally separate branch of the military whose soul purpose is diplomatic relations... hell, I'd inlist.
Nation Building should be our NUMBER ONE priority, using military or not. Maybe we need to start training our boys as diplomats instead of as just gun wielding meat heads. No offense, but that's what the US military wants... meat heads, and it pisses me off. This is what you get when you take a bunch of guys who are trained to hate everyone but themselves, and put them in a position of peace keeping. Either we need a separate "Peace keeping force" more akin to streamlined UN forces, or we need to start respecting our boys and not shitting on them in attempts to get them to hate everyone else... soldiers and officers alike.
But "Nation Building" should no longer be a bad term. If we're going to go in and ruin someone's shit, we've gotta be willing to help rebuild it. It's blatantly refusing to take responsibility for our actions, and I'm tired of hearing it used as a bad word.
Not sure what I'm gonna do, I'm up here in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I'm gunning for a Wii at launch. The only thing is, it's probably going to be at least -10F by the time the 19th rolls around, so I don't know how much "camping" is going to go on. I'm thinking about parking the car close to the store a few hours before openning, and waiting to see when people start to show up. I'll have to ask around about previous launches. Wal-Mart already sold out their pre-orders, as did GameStop, so I'm going after a state-wide chain department store instead, they're usually pretty on top of things.
Anyone else been faced with cold weather system launches? What was your experience?
You mentioned about widescreen being better. Well, there are psycho-optical arguements both for and against widescreen, and I'm not completely sure I can say one or the other is better. First of all, widescreen was invented because at one point, cinematographers realized that the human eyes, being stereooptic, have a much broader horizontal field of view than vertical, so they split the frame in half, and ran the film vertically, creating 16:9. There's one problem with this, though. If you're basing this assumption on the ratio of the human eye between vertical and horizontal... this ratio is actually much closer to 4:3 than 16:9. Secondly, 4:3 (12:9) is slightly closer to a golden section (13.5:9) than 16:9, and thus is more visually pleasing.
The only viable arguement for 16:9 format over 4:3 is that we live a fairly horizontal existance, panning back and forth much more than tilting our heads, so even if our vision is closer to a 4:3 ratio, our mental imagry of our surroundings is a lot more horizontal. Ideally, I would expect that a 3:2 format would be the best, but there are definitely cases to be made for both.
Be careful, though. Remember that pilar boxing 16:9 is much less attractive than letterboxing 4:3, so once you've moved to 16:9, it's hard to go back. Finally, for gaming, especially, 4:3 gives the designers a way of having widescreen video, while putting things like dialog, text, meters, and other CGs above and below the action. As a TV producer, myself, I do letterbox many of my spots, but many times I make use of the blank vertical space to put text and other CGs in, out of the way of the picture. Once we go totally wide-screen, I won't have that option anymore, and video is going to get much more covered over.
Good point. In fact, that's one thing I think the PS3 is going to have trouble with. Sony's always scoffed at multiplayer format. Their idea of a multiplayer game is two guys on screen in an arena beating eachother up. Nintendo was able to push past that in the mid 90s, and the XBox, while behind, still has had some good multiplayer support. Even that the PS3 has support for, what, 7 similtaneous players (which I think is overkill), it'll probably take a while for the "party game" mentality to catch on.
Where-as I agree that Wind Waker probably wouldn't benefit all that much (or even at all) from a higher resolution, I fail to see how higher resolution would "hurt" it. Higher resolution can be used to produce finer detail OR it can be made to smooth out less detailed material to have cleaner lines (which is what they would do with WW). I have no love for HD, I think it's a relatively benign advancement, but if the price is right, it's hard to argue that higher resolution doesn't allow for better graphics, or cleaner versions of old graphics. When the time is right, and when TV manufacturers and game console designers stop raping the public for every last scanline, then I will have no trouble saying goodbye to NTSC. But for now, you're right, it's rediculous. I mean, the difference between a GameCube and a PS2s graphics are still world's apart.
I was playing Shadow of the Collosus the other day, which was PAINFUL because the art designers did a great job creating scenes that the system couldn't even really render correctly at 480i. It doesn't matter if you're at 480i or 1080p, if you don't have any smoothing algorythms going, it's going to look bad. I'm playing FF12 right now, and loving it... but I'll choose most GameCube games, any day, over it in terms of graphical "glitchy-ness".
For one, 1080p isn't going anywhere, in fact, in 2-3 years, the common populace MIGHT just be ready for it by then. I fully expect that in 3 years, the Wii will be priced at around $100, and still be making a large profit. An HD compatable system will probably be priced at $150, not even at launch prices. The best the PS3 is going to pull, because of attempting to make up for lost profits, will probably not be lower than $250. Even if Nintendo has to require that game developers bundle DVDs and high defintion media together so as not to piss off their fanbase, this would NOT be a big deal.
The choice is this, create cheaper hardware that people don't feel bad about replacing every couple years, and thus keeping relatively "up" with the power curve, or creating a really expensive, high-end machine that people will only be able to justify buying every 6-7 years. Usually, if you price things out, you're much better off going with the cheaper systems, because you actually spend MORE time in the higher power curve. This is why, as an Mac user, I see the Mini as being a much better investment than a tower.
The only question now is: which is going to be larger, Nintendo's next console, or Sony's next handheld?
Well, ask yourself this: do you think 640x480 is still an acceptable PC gaming resolution or do you see benefit in higher resolutions?
No, however, PC games are played by sitting right in front of your computer screen, so every pixel counts. Unless you're playing 3 feet away from your large-screen TV, NOONE plays console games with as big a field of view as with PC games, so NTSC/ED resolutions are fairly comperable to standard PC resolutions when you take into acount how large each pixel looks from the players viewpoint.
Another thing you should consider is that the Wii is going to stick around for what, five years or so?
There's nothing that says that Nintendo won't release a console update mid-generation. In fact, I pretty much expect that within 2-3 years, we'll see a "Super Wii" or whatever they decide to call it, with support for HD graphics. The Wii is a very ecconomical system, and will make a profit almost immediately off the assembly line, which means that Nintendo is perfectly capable of turning around and releasing a mid-generation system. If they do, it'll be FAR more powerful than the PS3, far cheaper to make, the HD-DVD wars will have been decided by that point, and HD TVs will have come down in price enough so that normal people can buy them. This business model worked like a charm for the DS, and I expect that they learned from their success with that, and will do it again with the Wii. I see this as by far the best strategy, at this point in time.
If you move your finger or hand in a line, you have to eventually pick up and start back up at the top to continue moving. A circle has a looped path, which means that you can continue to move in one direction or another forever. Another advantage is that the hand remains fairly stationary, while the finger just spins around in place. Unlike a pressure sensitive button system, which would be one choice of of being able to change the speed while jogging, a wheel is a tactile interface, the faster you move your finger, the faster and farther the marker moves. The wheel is an almost perfect choice for a two-dimensional control interface.
because computers/entertainment gadgets are becoming more and more mobil each day. Also, having access to your files, even when you're not on YOUR machine is going to become more and more commonplace (yeah Google Office!). Sure, you might have SOME local stuff, but it will probably be more like a cache than anything else.
Dude, we're already doing that, not with bombs though. Currently, there are MANY american citizens that have lost all their rights, simply because someone outted them as being a terrorist. We've created a situation in which the definition of "terrorist" and "american" cannot overlap, therefor, anyone who's a "terrorist" isn't a citizen of this country, and is subject to whatever we want to do to them. A lot of people are buying into it too. Terrorism is the new communism, except this time around the witch hunters were smart enough to attach some racial stigma to it as well.
Aren't you refering to the Kent State shootings during the 60's anti-war movement? Case Western had it's share of protests, but noone was killed. Kent State's a bit south of Case.
If you're comparing the average mp3/acc (which tends to be 192kbps these days) to cassette tapes, then you need to go back and relisten to your cassette tapes, because you are FAR off base. Even as an audio engineer, many times I have to really listen to hear the inconsistancies of mp3s. I'm not saying they're perfect, but there are many other much more important things to worry about: namely the quality of the player, DAC, amplifier, and speakers. Cassette tapes leave loud tape hiss and have a highly degradated frequency/response curve, FAR worse than the slight flanging you hear with standard quality mp3s.
That said, even as bad as tapes were, people didn't switch from tapes to CDs because of their quality. Well, that was maybe part of it, but it was more the supposed durability, random access, and general convenience of CDs that really sold them. People will almost ALWAYS choose convenience over quality. MP3s are far more convenient, now days, than CDs. I carry a 60GB harddrive on my belt, called an iPod (you may have heard of it), that includes my entire CD collection of 400+ albums, plus my entire resume of both my musical compositions and my video works. I have all that in about 30lbs of boxes. More convenient? I think so.
It's only a matter of time before everyone's main stereo system takes some sort of non-physical media, and everyone has a wireless hub in their home. Then the CD will truly die. When iPod drives become 400GB, standard, for video and everyone can stream non-lossy audio files off the internet, I think we'll start to see the disappearence of lossy audio, so the mp3 is most probably a stop-gap at worst.
Eventually, we won't even have our music files on our own computers. They will be streamed to us, wirelessly, on demand, and we won't have to ever worry about physical media breaking down, hard drives going out, or anything else... accept fucked up DRM
You forgot to mention the very thing I was refering to:
Nintendo:
Total GameBoy Advance units sold: 76.79 Million
Also, the current PS2 figure is: 106.23 Million units SHIPPED, not sold. There is no figure on units sold that I can find.
Nintendo's total console unit sales are 127 Million, and Sony's are 128 Million. So, yes, I was a bit off sugggesting Nintendo's total sales were higher, but if they are behind, it's not by much.
But I do agree, that getting into a discussion about how many PS2 units failed and were re-bought is pointless and of little consiquence, as long as the mindshare doesn't suffer significantly. I had my PS2 go out on me after about 2 years, but then again, I had a friend who's GameCube went out on him after about 2 years. The original XBox's fairiour rate probably should be taken into consideration, but most of the other recent systems have been fairly solid or at least status quo. Oh, and the PS2 deserved every last sale, it was an amazing system... but I see too much confusion in Sony's current strategy to trust that the PS3 will be able to carry on the legacy it has so far. I have no doubt that the gaming division is trying its damnedest to make a killer system... but they're being poisoned by their media division, which doesn't have a great track record. Let's face it, the only real variable that the PS3 has going against it is price, which IS a significant problem, and I'm hating Sony for it. But let's not lose perspective, all other arguements are fairly minor and knit-picky. That said, I think the price alone is more than enough to kill their future.
Both of these are comparable in scope to Halo... FF13 probably even a bit larger. Interesting thing is that Microsoft was probably better off having Halo and little else, because it got so attention because it was the ONLY THING that anyone was noticing. After all, a mountain is going to stand out more in the midwest than it will the Alps.
And they would be dead wrong, GBA SP was the best selling console for at least 4 years in a row, only to be overthrown by the DS. If we're talking units sold, Nintendo kicks the shit out of Sony. If we're talking profits, Nintendo kicks the shit out of Sony. Only thing that Sony can claim is that they sell more TV-Top units... and in the business world, compared to overall profits and mindshare, that means SHIT.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I got the Limited Edition, which has no artwork on it, so I can't say for myself. But the limited edition strategy guide is WORTH EVERY PENNY simply for its artwork. It even includes a full, 100+ page book with illustrations and renderings of all the airships, espers, primary and secondary characters, landscapes, and archetecture. It is simply breathtaking. I have seen the cover of the regular edition box, which just has Vaan doing an afeminate little pose (which, btw, doesn't fit his in-game persona at all... even his outfit is pretty unassuming once you get used to it). I haven't checked the back of it, but the copies I saw looked very professionally rendered.
I'll probably stay away from Vagrant Story then, because as much as I absolutely love FF12, it's musical score is probably the weakest link. I'm a big prog head, and Uematsu's scores actually started me playing video games in the first place... I just miss the classical/rock fusion that Uematsu brought to the genre. Hamouzu did a great job doing similarly fuzed work, but with his own style, during FFX, and I was really hoping he'd take the reigns for FF12. FF12s score, while "pretty" just seems a bit "safe" to me... not the same amount of energy and drama that separated the FF series' scores from the rest of the pack. There was a bit too much emphasis (musically) on "trying" to be sophisticated, where-as I thought the previous scores just "were" sophisticated, in their own right (FFX a little less so).
That said, I applaud the rest of the game for greatly upping the sophistication factor, and proving that great dialog, wonderful character portrayals, and tasteful plotlines can be just as entertaining as sophomoric ones.
lol, both my friend and I (in our respective games), were dumbasses and attacked the green dinosaur in the Eastersands. I should have gotten a clue when I saw the FMV with it running along with the wolves fleeing in a panic... but I didn't.
No, that wouldn't be correct... I've never supported the Iraq war, either. Hell, I didn't support the war in Afgahnastan, and even though it worked out well for a while, over the past few months things have been getting a lot worse, due to our neglect.
This is usually my sentiment as well... but if we're going to go and ruin someone's shit, we've just made ourselves part of the mess, like it or not, and it's our reponsibility to at least try and clean it up. That said... we're hopeless in Iraq; either that or Iraq is hopeless with us in it... and the most practical move, for all parties involved, is for us to just suck up our honor, and leave. We've been dishonorable as hell as it is, at least this move might save lives.
We're like a knife in a wound, with no doctor for hundreds of miles. At some point, you've gotta pull the knife out before it becomes gangrien.
Interesting comment. And that is one of the things I have been thinking... maybe it's too much to ask to have our soldiers be peace brokers, maybe we need a totally separate branch of the military whose soul purpose is diplomatic relations... hell, I'd inlist.
Your aggressive attitude just goes to prove my point.
Welcome to 2006... things need to change.
Nation Building should be our NUMBER ONE priority, using military or not. Maybe we need to start training our boys as diplomats instead of as just gun wielding meat heads. No offense, but that's what the US military wants... meat heads, and it pisses me off. This is what you get when you take a bunch of guys who are trained to hate everyone but themselves, and put them in a position of peace keeping. Either we need a separate "Peace keeping force" more akin to streamlined UN forces, or we need to start respecting our boys and not shitting on them in attempts to get them to hate everyone else... soldiers and officers alike.
But "Nation Building" should no longer be a bad term. If we're going to go in and ruin someone's shit, we've gotta be willing to help rebuild it. It's blatantly refusing to take responsibility for our actions, and I'm tired of hearing it used as a bad word.
Not sure what I'm gonna do, I'm up here in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I'm gunning for a Wii at launch. The only thing is, it's probably going to be at least -10F by the time the 19th rolls around, so I don't know how much "camping" is going to go on. I'm thinking about parking the car close to the store a few hours before openning, and waiting to see when people start to show up. I'll have to ask around about previous launches. Wal-Mart already sold out their pre-orders, as did GameStop, so I'm going after a state-wide chain department store instead, they're usually pretty on top of things.
Anyone else been faced with cold weather system launches? What was your experience?
You mentioned about widescreen being better. Well, there are psycho-optical arguements both for and against widescreen, and I'm not completely sure I can say one or the other is better. First of all, widescreen was invented because at one point, cinematographers realized that the human eyes, being stereooptic, have a much broader horizontal field of view than vertical, so they split the frame in half, and ran the film vertically, creating 16:9. There's one problem with this, though. If you're basing this assumption on the ratio of the human eye between vertical and horizontal... this ratio is actually much closer to 4:3 than 16:9. Secondly, 4:3 (12:9) is slightly closer to a golden section (13.5:9) than 16:9, and thus is more visually pleasing.
The only viable arguement for 16:9 format over 4:3 is that we live a fairly horizontal existance, panning back and forth much more than tilting our heads, so even if our vision is closer to a 4:3 ratio, our mental imagry of our surroundings is a lot more horizontal. Ideally, I would expect that a 3:2 format would be the best, but there are definitely cases to be made for both.
Be careful, though. Remember that pilar boxing 16:9 is much less attractive than letterboxing 4:3, so once you've moved to 16:9, it's hard to go back. Finally, for gaming, especially, 4:3 gives the designers a way of having widescreen video, while putting things like dialog, text, meters, and other CGs above and below the action. As a TV producer, myself, I do letterbox many of my spots, but many times I make use of the blank vertical space to put text and other CGs in, out of the way of the picture. Once we go totally wide-screen, I won't have that option anymore, and video is going to get much more covered over.Good point. In fact, that's one thing I think the PS3 is going to have trouble with. Sony's always scoffed at multiplayer format. Their idea of a multiplayer game is two guys on screen in an arena beating eachother up. Nintendo was able to push past that in the mid 90s, and the XBox, while behind, still has had some good multiplayer support. Even that the PS3 has support for, what, 7 similtaneous players (which I think is overkill), it'll probably take a while for the "party game" mentality to catch on.
Where-as I agree that Wind Waker probably wouldn't benefit all that much (or even at all) from a higher resolution, I fail to see how higher resolution would "hurt" it. Higher resolution can be used to produce finer detail OR it can be made to smooth out less detailed material to have cleaner lines (which is what they would do with WW). I have no love for HD, I think it's a relatively benign advancement, but if the price is right, it's hard to argue that higher resolution doesn't allow for better graphics, or cleaner versions of old graphics. When the time is right, and when TV manufacturers and game console designers stop raping the public for every last scanline, then I will have no trouble saying goodbye to NTSC. But for now, you're right, it's rediculous. I mean, the difference between a GameCube and a PS2s graphics are still world's apart.
I was playing Shadow of the Collosus the other day, which was PAINFUL because the art designers did a great job creating scenes that the system couldn't even really render correctly at 480i. It doesn't matter if you're at 480i or 1080p, if you don't have any smoothing algorythms going, it's going to look bad. I'm playing FF12 right now, and loving it... but I'll choose most GameCube games, any day, over it in terms of graphical "glitchy-ness".
For one, 1080p isn't going anywhere, in fact, in 2-3 years, the common populace MIGHT just be ready for it by then. I fully expect that in 3 years, the Wii will be priced at around $100, and still be making a large profit. An HD compatable system will probably be priced at $150, not even at launch prices. The best the PS3 is going to pull, because of attempting to make up for lost profits, will probably not be lower than $250. Even if Nintendo has to require that game developers bundle DVDs and high defintion media together so as not to piss off their fanbase, this would NOT be a big deal.
The choice is this, create cheaper hardware that people don't feel bad about replacing every couple years, and thus keeping relatively "up" with the power curve, or creating a really expensive, high-end machine that people will only be able to justify buying every 6-7 years. Usually, if you price things out, you're much better off going with the cheaper systems, because you actually spend MORE time in the higher power curve. This is why, as an Mac user, I see the Mini as being a much better investment than a tower.
The only question now is: which is going to be larger, Nintendo's next console, or Sony's next handheld?
No, however, PC games are played by sitting right in front of your computer screen, so every pixel counts. Unless you're playing 3 feet away from your large-screen TV, NOONE plays console games with as big a field of view as with PC games, so NTSC/ED resolutions are fairly comperable to standard PC resolutions when you take into acount how large each pixel looks from the players viewpoint.
There's nothing that says that Nintendo won't release a console update mid-generation. In fact, I pretty much expect that within 2-3 years, we'll see a "Super Wii" or whatever they decide to call it, with support for HD graphics. The Wii is a very ecconomical system, and will make a profit almost immediately off the assembly line, which means that Nintendo is perfectly capable of turning around and releasing a mid-generation system. If they do, it'll be FAR more powerful than the PS3, far cheaper to make, the HD-DVD wars will have been decided by that point, and HD TVs will have come down in price enough so that normal people can buy them. This business model worked like a charm for the DS, and I expect that they learned from their success with that, and will do it again with the Wii. I see this as by far the best strategy, at this point in time.
Obviously you've never done any video editing.
If you move your finger or hand in a line, you have to eventually pick up and start back up at the top to continue moving. A circle has a looped path, which means that you can continue to move in one direction or another forever. Another advantage is that the hand remains fairly stationary, while the finger just spins around in place. Unlike a pressure sensitive button system, which would be one choice of of being able to change the speed while jogging, a wheel is a tactile interface, the faster you move your finger, the faster and farther the marker moves. The wheel is an almost perfect choice for a two-dimensional control interface.
because computers/entertainment gadgets are becoming more and more mobil each day. Also, having access to your files, even when you're not on YOUR machine is going to become more and more commonplace (yeah Google Office!). Sure, you might have SOME local stuff, but it will probably be more like a cache than anything else.
Dude, we're already doing that, not with bombs though. Currently, there are MANY american citizens that have lost all their rights, simply because someone outted them as being a terrorist. We've created a situation in which the definition of "terrorist" and "american" cannot overlap, therefor, anyone who's a "terrorist" isn't a citizen of this country, and is subject to whatever we want to do to them. A lot of people are buying into it too. Terrorism is the new communism, except this time around the witch hunters were smart enough to attach some racial stigma to it as well.
Aren't you refering to the Kent State shootings during the 60's anti-war movement? Case Western had it's share of protests, but noone was killed. Kent State's a bit south of Case.
after all, more people vote in it.
If you're comparing the average mp3/acc (which tends to be 192kbps these days) to cassette tapes, then you need to go back and relisten to your cassette tapes, because you are FAR off base. Even as an audio engineer, many times I have to really listen to hear the inconsistancies of mp3s. I'm not saying they're perfect, but there are many other much more important things to worry about: namely the quality of the player, DAC, amplifier, and speakers. Cassette tapes leave loud tape hiss and have a highly degradated frequency/response curve, FAR worse than the slight flanging you hear with standard quality mp3s.
That said, even as bad as tapes were, people didn't switch from tapes to CDs because of their quality. Well, that was maybe part of it, but it was more the supposed durability, random access, and general convenience of CDs that really sold them. People will almost ALWAYS choose convenience over quality. MP3s are far more convenient, now days, than CDs. I carry a 60GB harddrive on my belt, called an iPod (you may have heard of it), that includes my entire CD collection of 400+ albums, plus my entire resume of both my musical compositions and my video works. I have all that in about 30lbs of boxes. More convenient? I think so.
It's only a matter of time before everyone's main stereo system takes some sort of non-physical media, and everyone has a wireless hub in their home. Then the CD will truly die. When iPod drives become 400GB, standard, for video and everyone can stream non-lossy audio files off the internet, I think we'll start to see the disappearence of lossy audio, so the mp3 is most probably a stop-gap at worst.
Eventually, we won't even have our music files on our own computers. They will be streamed to us, wirelessly, on demand, and we won't have to ever worry about physical media breaking down, hard drives going out, or anything else... accept fucked up DRM
You forgot to mention the very thing I was refering to:
Nintendo:
Total GameBoy Advance units sold: 76.79 Million
Also, the current PS2 figure is: 106.23 Million units SHIPPED, not sold. There is no figure on units sold that I can find.
Nintendo's total console unit sales are 127 Million, and Sony's are 128 Million. So, yes, I was a bit off sugggesting Nintendo's total sales were higher, but if they are behind, it's not by much.
But I do agree, that getting into a discussion about how many PS2 units failed and were re-bought is pointless and of little consiquence, as long as the mindshare doesn't suffer significantly. I had my PS2 go out on me after about 2 years, but then again, I had a friend who's GameCube went out on him after about 2 years. The original XBox's fairiour rate probably should be taken into consideration, but most of the other recent systems have been fairly solid or at least status quo. Oh, and the PS2 deserved every last sale, it was an amazing system... but I see too much confusion in Sony's current strategy to trust that the PS3 will be able to carry on the legacy it has so far. I have no doubt that the gaming division is trying its damnedest to make a killer system... but they're being poisoned by their media division, which doesn't have a great track record. Let's face it, the only real variable that the PS3 has going against it is price, which IS a significant problem, and I'm hating Sony for it. But let's not lose perspective, all other arguements are fairly minor and knit-picky. That said, I think the price alone is more than enough to kill their future.
Both of these are comparable in scope to Halo... FF13 probably even a bit larger. Interesting thing is that Microsoft was probably better off having Halo and little else, because it got so attention because it was the ONLY THING that anyone was noticing. After all, a mountain is going to stand out more in the midwest than it will the Alps.
And they would be dead wrong, GBA SP was the best selling console for at least 4 years in a row, only to be overthrown by the DS. If we're talking units sold, Nintendo kicks the shit out of Sony. If we're talking profits, Nintendo kicks the shit out of Sony. Only thing that Sony can claim is that they sell more TV-Top units... and in the business world, compared to overall profits and mindshare, that means SHIT.
So, what you're REALLY saying is that the real enemy is Coorporate... now you're speaking my language!
—disgruntled Clear Channel employeeActually, a purist could theoretically call Firefox 2, "Netscape 7", since Mozilla was theoretically Netscape 5, and Firefox was basically Mozilla 2.