I'm not sure I know this "everyone" you're talking about. You act as if the whole world hates iTunes, there is a very small minority of computer-savvy users who have a beef with iTunes for one reason or another, but it doesn't have much relivience when compared to the other 80% of digital music player users, who use and love both the iPod and iTunes (I've seriously heard more complaints against the iPod than of iTunes).
And no, iTunes began as a music player, the iTunes store came much later. And since Apple practically breaks even on the store, it isn't really important to them to hook you on it. Both the store and the player are gateways to the iPod, they don't really care if you're using the store or just the program, so your reasoning makes little sense.
Now, I haven't really searched around and used different programs very much, but the ones I have used, that supposedly matched iTunes in capabilities were appaulingly bad in interface design, which is a very important thing to both Apple and most users. Both iTunes and the iPod are quickly increasing their arsenal of supported formats, although it makes sense that they wouldn't want to give iTunes any audio formats that the iPod can't support or they would suddenly get a lot of angry emails. And it would be incredibly irrisponsible for Apple to use Ogg as their primary format. 1) Ogg doesn't support any kind of DRM... trust me, Apple doesn't like DRM any more than you do, but they would lose 95% of the music industry's support overnight if they removed it, which would be currently bad for Apple, bad for me, and bad for you, since most of the music I listen to is put out by major lables. 2) Ogg saps processing power, and currently, the biggest problem there is with the iPod is its battery life. I haven't done any statistical study, but I can guarentee you that about 90% of music listeners out their don't even realize that aacs (let alone m3ps) have lower quality than CDs, let alone oggs, and that when asked what's more important, practically having your listening time or getting slightly better audio quality, there would be very few people out there that would chose the former.
If you don't like DRM, consider this, for most other music players, the primary way of getting music onto your player is by ripping CDs. You can do this with the iPod... hell, about 99% of the music on my iPod comes from ripped CDs. The iTunes store, complete with DRM, is a nice little addition when compared to the iRiver or any other music device... all of which also have their own DRM formats and are trying to start their own "DRM Laden" music stores that currently have fallen flat on their face. If you don't like DRM, buy CDs. You're not going to convince the music industry that it's safe for them to not include DRM in their downloadable music distrobution. Apple had to come to terms with this. Live with it... move on.
Well, the iBud issue is irrelivent, iBuds are NOT attatched to the iPod, and many people (not all, but a good percentage) buy/have/use headphones that are better. I can understand Apple's reasoning for including headphones, they've always been about "usability right out of the box", but it makes sense that they would included the cheapest headphones you could think of (and they aren't the worst, actually, for earbuds, they're pretty good, but earbuds suck). If people want good headphones, they're going to want to choose from a selection of headphones that fits their individual wants and needs, so including "good" headphones would be a bad idea on Apple's part.
That said, it's true that most people don't give a shit about lossless vs. lossy music encryption. Hell, I'm a musician and an audio engineer, and I can't tell the difference between an AAC and a CD unless I'm doing a blindfold test in a quite room with professional quality headphones or speakers... and I don't listen to most of my music blindfolded:)
The fact is, Ogg takes more processing power, which saps battery life, which for the purposes of a portable music player, is a MUCH bigger deal than the last degree of audio quality (and the quality difference between AAC and OGG has yet to be really proven to me). Both are open source formats, one is based on a family of encription that is of much more mainstream use (MPEG 4) than the other... so I think it would be irresponsible for Apple to chose OGG over AAC as their primary audio format. And while it would be "nice" if they included OGG in their growing assortment of supported audio formats, I can understand that they might want to avoid the angry letters from Average Joe when he ripped his CD collection to OGG, only to find that his iPod's battery charge life was only 2/3rds of what it would be, had he been using AACs. I have yet to hear an OGG supporter who tackled the processing power issue, most seem to ignore it, which is extremely ignorant.
I'm sorry, but intuitive design is a very REAL part of designing interfaces for both displaying media content (slashdot) and software. If you think that over-complicated design is better just because it "weeds out the newbs"; this is just a completely immature way of looking at the world. The bottom line is, as much as I love slashdot's content, this website's design is emberassingly bad. Placing links in text, as a rule, is one of the most basic "nono's" in webdesign. It is both aesthetically displeasing and confusing. Aesthetics and transfering information is a good 100% of what webdesign is based on, and Slashdot, I'm sorry to say, fails misserably at both these catagories. So before you go around bashing people who are critical of this site's design... you should know that this website goes against a lot of basic webdesign principals, and that the parent poster is completely justified in his critique. The difference between his critique and your post was that you made a personal attack, whereas he was making a perfectly understanble point. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I'll call bullshit here. I work as a video editor and producer for a TV station, and unfortunately, we're all forced to use PCs. The production staff has been screeming at the engineering staff (who build the computers to the specs THEY want, even though we're doing the work) to get us Macs for a while now, but they're a couple of Apple-aphobes / Microsoft-phyles, who won't even let us run Firefox. We're running Adobe Premiere Pro, one of the only (if not THE only) usable video editting programs on Windows. Now, I'm a big Adobe fan, I like their interface design, almost as much as Apple's, but I have to say, Premiere is NO FinalCut. The basic fact that it works in AVIs causes a huge amount of headache. The most agreduious problem is that AVIs do not support Line 21 ("Closed Captioning" for you lay-people). It is now ILLEGAL to run programing without closed captioning. So while Premiere might work fine for making commercials (which are not required to have CC), for piecing together a news broadcast, it's unusable. Actually, we DO use it for that, but it requires that someone sit there at the teleprompter and scroll in the CC manually, while the tape is running... how idiotic is that! The MPEGs that Final Cut uses, however, retain their line-21 data, and I've also heard (but not had the oportunity to try it) that Final Cut can actually edit closed captioning. If you consider that we piece together two of our four news broadcasts that run each day, on the computer, and considering that the person who scrolls the prompter is probably payed something like $25-$30/h, an hour out of his day is spent doing bullshit. That's $25-$30 a day! In three months, we'd make back the entire price of a new high-end Mac.
That's only one of the many problems with using Windows for video editing. My newly-built PC crashes at least 2-5 times a week while I'm doing video editing, which wastes quite a bit of my time. My Mac laptop has maybe crashed that many times in its 3 year lifetime, and I've actually done much more processor intensive stuff with it (and yes, I've also run Final Cut on it). Final Cut is just a much more robust video editing program for professionals than either Adobe, or the "quickly becoming obsolete" Avid options.
So sure, for amature video editing... ya know, putting together Anime Music Videos or whatever you like to do, Windows works just fine, hell, Windows Movie Maker will be enough for most hobbiests (although I'd chose iMovie over WMM any day... hell there's some things iMovie can do better than Premiere!) but for real work, give me a Mac and spare me the grief:(
The one thing I will agree with you on, though, is screen realestate. All the video production bays have two monitors, and I can't really imagine doing my work without them. But seriously, you were talking about laptops, which is irrelivent, because no professional video editor, in their right mind, would use a laptop for his video work, so your point is not very valid.
I have no doubt that at least in Japan the Revolution will wipe the floor with the blood of the PS3 and the XBox 360. The only thing that knocked Nintendo off of their #1 spot was their refusal to go to disc media, not allowing for cut scenes, which practically MADE contemporary Japanese gaming. They lost Square because of it: Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, the two biggest game series in Japan. And they lost 90% of the RPG and adventure game market. Now they're back, with a media fully capable of doing hours of pretty anime cutscenes. Most PS3 games will probably still be DVD anyway (much cheaper), so Nintendo is going to have the same sized media as the competition. Now Sony took a big stumble with their pricing and delays. As I said in a post below, it will take MS generations to recover from their inhibility to market to Japan, even if they get on the right track now, so the XBox is NOT going to take up the pace where Sony stumbled, Nintendo is in the perfect position to do so.
Nintendo's plan on cheap dev kits will allow a lot of small upstarts to innovate for their new hardware, suddenly the playingfield is MUCH more even for small new companies, closer to the way it was back when the NES came out. We may finally be able to see some small new upstarts jump on board, the next Square or Konami. Nintendo has the ability of winning back old friends (and from the enthusiasm I've heard from developers, it seems that they're already doing so) but breeding a new generation of videogame developers. If I were smart, I would look into investing some stock into Nintendo.
Not only are the Japanese rather racist in aspects of what they buy (among other things), they also don't want the games MS is selling.
Japanese aren't exactly racist about what they buy (not to say they aren't racist in general, there are a lot of problems in that department), but many US products have managed to do EXTREMELY well over in Japan, becoming so immersed in their culture that most Americans can't really comprehend it. McDonald's, Coka Cola, the iPod, if you think they're big here, they're almost like a religion over in Japan. But the difference is that these companese were smart enough to specialize their marketting strategy to fit the Japanese cultural paradigm. The same marketting stratagies that work really well in the US will fail MISSERABLY in Japan. McDonald's positioned itself first as an exotic foreign experience (then sold sushi) and then as a centerpiece of the fast-paced, modernized Japanese business world. The idea of "fast food" was both unheard of, and because of the pacing of the business world, greatly appreciated. Then there's Apple... maybe having a highly-philosophical Buddhist genious (Steve Jobs) as their CEO helped a bit. The bottom line is, Jobs is a fairly worldy individual who is willing to listen and learn about the cultures he's marketing toward. If anything, he's more out of touch with the US than with most of the world. Even his American iPod campaign had a Zen-like quality to it. Japan isn't Buddhist, but their culture has grown around a lot of similar basic values (neo-confusionism)... add to that that Japan has always been obsessed with simplicity and function in their aesthetics, and the iPod is almost a perfect product. Owning one has huge cultural significance like no-other we see in the states. Consumerism is practically Japan's national religion: the products you buy, and their presentation have a deep significiance in how you are percieved as an individual. And no, we're not simply talking, "I'm a Ford kinda guy" like we have over here.
MS has no Japanese marketting campaign. And their American campaign is so ungodly removed from the values of Japanese culture that they're going to have a hard time changing that around. The XBox is an SUV... plain and simple: it's big, it's powerful, and it's sold as a way to flex your muscles. Now, Chevy could possibly run a Japanese marketting campaign on their biggest SUV attempt to highlight it's functionality, aesthetic simplicity, and it's overall addition to cultural statis... but you still have to take into account that Chevy's SUVs aren't very functional (terrible reliability, a burdon to drive around Tokyos streets, low gas millage, etc.), they're a slap in the face to classical aesthetic values, aiming for a brainless, "muscley" look, which is laughable to most Japanese, and thus, is going to be impossible to convince Japanese culture, as a whole, that the image of having one is a positive one. MS is dealing with the same problem, XBoxs are big (especially the first), have terrible reliability, and their games commonly go against common Japanese aesthetic principals and basic values (modern Japan is EXTREMELY pacifistic).
So yes, some Gundam and Naruto tie-ins would help, but it's more than that, the XBox's basic image is riding on the "xXx-TREME!" fad—hell, even it's name is "XBox"—which is dieing out in the US and never happened over in Japan. "Game Cube", "Play Station" "Game Boy", "Entertainment System", all names that reflect the product's ability to entertain. "N64" is probably the most xXxtreme name that came out of Nintendo, and look how well that worked for them. "Revolution" is a different naming tactic altogether, neither xXxtreme nor playful but more along the lines of Apple's current marketting strategy, one that may translate very well over in Europe and Japan, and probably fairly well in the US.
Believe it, mister. Nintendo, as far as I know, has NEVER taken a loss on a console. They made a profit on every single GameCube ever made. This was common practice, across the board, until Sony came into the picture. I'm fairly sure that Sega made a profit on all their consoles, at least up through the Genesis. Nintendo, furthermore, as a much smaller company than Sony or Microsoft (by a few magnitudes), does quite well with its current business model.
The funny thing is, if Nintendo decided to adopt the newer "sell at a loss" business model that Sony and Microsoft have been using, they'd probably be able to pull it off much better, seeing as that a majority of their game sales are from in-house games, and thus a much higher profit margin than simple licensing. In a way, I almost would have expected Nintendo to be the first ones to sell consoles at a loss. Oh, and I think they make more of a profit on the gamecube than the GBA, if I remember correctly.
Can any modern late 80's or higher VHS VCR run circles around beta? Damn straight!
Wrong. Beta did evolve BetaCam (which IS this "high quality beta" that you are imagining), and frankly, even the best quality VHS can't hold a candle to the quality of BetaCam. I use BetaCam every day at work, and even though I'd rather use DVCam or DVDs, BetaCam is pretty damn good. The other week my co-worker and I had to work off of a VHS (because our client sent us a VHS tape) and it was unbelievably painful to use after working with Beta. Hell, I work with 3/4" tapes (older standard, pre-VHS) some of the time, and aside from the fact that the audio is mono and the tape decks are old and falling apart, the video quality on them is higher than that of VHS.
And no, VHS didn't really change much. In fact, the only improvement it made is that it adopted a faster speed, 1 hour playback mode which slightly improved quality. However, most of the "innovations" were toward the other end, ie: how to cram 6 hours of video onto a 2 hour VHS tape. Beta evolved much more than VHS ever did. I'd take a late 80s BetaMAX over a "modern" VHS any day.
Inside the box will be a standard DS cart with the browser, and a memory cart to go in the GBA slot to cache pages.
That is pure rumor. This was talked about previously on/. and is the result of some fairly asinine wishful thinking. There has been no evidence to support this, and furthermore, it would be utterly unneccessary, as the DS cart has a good few magnitudes more memory storage capability than the GBA cart to begin with. Please, next time check your facts and name your sources if you're going to add "old news" that has no bearing on reality. Thank you for your time.
Remember that 30 years ago, we had vinyl and cassette tapes. Vinyl was easily rippable, although "ripping" one meant something a little different back then. Cassette tapes sounded like total crap. If you think about it, even *with* DRM, we've come a long way in quality and ease of copying. And don't worry about compression for the moment, this is just a passing phase while non-lossy algorythms become more streamlined and connection speeds get faster. DRM is a neccessary evil, unfortunately, because no record company, in their right mind, would agree to selling media without it. Thankfully, there are many quick, and fairly painless ways of getting past Apple's DRM if you're really worried about it (I'm amazed that record companies agreed to FairPlay, it's so easy to bypass).
I totally agree, although I don't particularly like your tone.
BUT, Beta is totally superior for professional-level recording. I work for a local TV company. We're in a rural enough era, and small enough that we still use Beta as our standard (sadly). Now, it kills me that we haven't gone to a digital format already, but if I had to use VHS, I would shoot myself. Now, we're using BetaCam, and I'm not sure the exact differences (I think the tapes are essentially the same, though the players/recording format is higher quality), but the quality level between Beta and VHS is no laughing matter, especially in my field. It isn't a small difference of quality, it's a fairly huge one, actually. Especially for audio, Beta runs VHS totally up the ass. In fact, before Alesis came out with the ADAT digital standard, Betas were the highest quality magnetic tape audio format. Not only that, but Sony created converters to use the visual track as another two audio tracks, allowing for four-channel recording... again, the ADAT replaced that, but only much later. On the video end of things, Betas are much more robust, they don't degrade nearly as quickly with use, their control tracks hold up surprisingly well, and the video quality is greatly superior. The other day, I had to record a VHS tape for a client, and my coworker and I were in awe of just how shitty it looked compared to Beta.
Now, that said, Beta was totally the wrong choice for consumers, for just the reasons you stated. Probably the biggest one was the time issue, since most feature films are between 90mins and 120mins, Beta was incredibly inconvenient. I can't believe Sony's stupidity on that one. If you're going to release a new form of media, at least make it sufficiently large enough to hold the standard amount of data. If CDs had been released that only played 30mins of audio, noone would have switched from LPs.
No, you're just being as elitest and oblivious as the next guy, and well, it looks like I'm the next guy, so I'm definitely not excluded from this catagory.
You do realize that one of the defining characteristics of sheep is that they think that everyone else is a sheep except them. The international coorperate machine has made millions off of making people feel like they're being individuals.
Me? I'm a total sheep, I realize that there's really no way of escaping it, and get on with my life. The more you try to fight back, the worse it gets, really. You just end up playing into the hands of a different coorperately manufactured demographic. I love my iPod because it makes me feel like I'm supporting a movement of aesthetics and innovation, I drive a Toyota because it makes me happy to give a big "fuck you" to the redneck american auto industry. I'm sophisticated and elitest, and I'm playing right into the hands of a lot of major companies. And ya know what? The best I can do, most of the time, is acknowledge that I'm doing it, and move on. And yes, I'm feeling quite "holier than thow" right now for having said this, but whatever.
So don't go around spouting about shills like you aren't one yourself. It's fairly obvious, from your list of examples, that you're trying to use your arguement to put down those things you don't like (namely console gamers), which is petty and shortsighted. Both sides are equally at fault for deluding themselves into following whatever the latest trend is. Unbelievable.
This is exactly why I said this was not an option for me.
I don't know what I want to listen to until about 30 seconds before I play it.
30 seconds: the song right before it. By that I meant that my "playlist" for the day is adaptive, on the spot. It doesn't matter if I setup a playlist of songs 10 seconds before I start it playing, then the second song on the list will be wrong. I mean, this is an exaduration, but I'm trying to make a point. I don't wake up thinking, "What kind of music do I want to listen today?" I usually want to listen to a variety of things, very particular things, many times that I don't listen to on a regular basis. Thankfully, the average length of a track I listen to is about 10 minutes, so I don't have to do a lot of switching, and many times I listen to whole albums anyway. And the iPod is very easy to access by artist/album/track, which works pretty well. But see, you're system just doesn't work for me.
I think the amount of enjoyment one can get from a certain medium is directly proportional to the amount of "work" it takes to come to terms with it. For example, I love long, complex, epic things: movies, music, video games, etc., because it will take a long time for me to unravel and digest what I've seen/heard. This way, it takes litterally days, and multipul viewings/listenings before I can see the work as a whole. In this way, it's not 4 minutes (for a song) or 2 hours (for a movie) of enjoyement, but an ongoing, rewarding process that gives hours and days of enjoyment, even when I'm not actually watching/listening to the work in question, I'm turning it over in my head and enjoying just chewing on it for a while.
After I saw Capote, I was unable to speak for a good hour because I was in sort of a daze from having to think about so many intense things. And for days afterwards, I found myself seeing scenes of the movie in my head, playing with alternate dialog, putting myself in the shoes of characters in the situations, and trying to understand the characters' motivations. Fast Food movies just don't give me that long term enjoyment that I can get from a more sophisticated work. I think that people who blow of sophistication as just an attempt for a group of people to establish themselves as an elite have really missed the point. Obviously, there is some of that, but there is truly something to be said for more involved work that may take time to digest.
"Good Night & Good Luck" anyone? Not just because it's black & white, but the movie really feels like a classic that could have been made 50 years ago... simple, elegant, with a lot of depth. Would have been picture of the year in 1959... don't know why it wasn't in 2006, but at least it got its dues.
Same could be said of "Capote".
But neither of these films ARE old films, they're not rehashing old techniques simply to making them feel classic, but use them in order to break new ground in ways that most modern films are not. I think the entertainment industry, as a whole, is beginning to feel the effects of over-complication in aesthetics. There seems to be a revolution afoot in the mainstream of exploring new territory with older, less technical, but more meaningful methods.
This really is an exciting time, and possibly the beginning of the film genre's first neo-classical era, in the history of its existance. Every art/entertainment medium has a neo-classical era (or two, or three) somewhere in its lifetime after it has reached a certain point of maturity. A "back to basics" movement that explores more regimented, and traditional approaches to production. For visual arts, the 17th century looked back to greek and roman procedures for a more mathmatically "precise" approach. Music saw its neo-classical rennaisance in the first few decades of the 20th century, with a return to the more formula-based approaches of the 18th century. Both these genres have seen many similar, smaller movements, though these are two very noticable eras. Film is now at its hundreth birthday, but we may very well be seeing it's "first" neo-classical era.
Well, the only thing I can think of is that on the 5G iPods, if a song is already playing, the framerate for the song browser decreases significantly, which is kinda annoying. This wasn't the case on the 3G iPod that I used to have. I'm probably one of the few people who doesn't work by playlists, since I don't know what I want to listen to until about 30 seconds before I play it. And I have an over 400 CD collection, which makes it worse. Still, I have to admit, it's pretty incredible how fast I can get to what I want to hear, considering those things.
But I am with you on the fact that there HAS to be improvement. Unfortunately, I think Apple's route will be more along the lines of the iPod deciding what you want to listen to for you, which I don't want. Only *I* know what I want to hear, and I'm very picky about playing exactly what I want to hear, which is why I don't use playlists.
Let's not forget, though, the touch wheel is based off of jog wheels from video editting bays, of which I use all the time at work. I think this was a VERY slick decision, since this is a method that has been already used for years in choosing specific frames of video quickly. It requires no "pick-up and move" repositioning of the thumb or any fingers (like with a scroll wheel), and requires no constant pressure, so it is very ergonomic and just "feels" good to use.
I also have to agree, I think the PS2 had a fairly piss-poor game lineup in general. That said, though, I am enjoying the hell out of Dragon Quest VIII, so maybe not all is lost.
Hey, I'm a GUY and I don't like seeing women objectified in video games. Not just because of how I think it might effect our culture, but because it really feels like a threat to my intelligence, and it reenforces male stereotypes just as much as it does female stereotypes. Game companies putting in big-titted, thongly dressed women over and over again just says to me, "we think that men only ever think about is sex, and from a purely physical standpoint." You see this stereotype reenforced everywhere in our culture, but this is usually completely exadurated. Sure, it makes sense to cast characters that are reasonably attractive, especially if we are supposed to connect and empathize with them, being "easy to look at" is a positive feature. But making them completely abnormally sexual, either in appearence or in personality, just destroys all empathetic connection with that character. If I wanted to just look at sexual women all the time, I'd probably just hang out at METArt all the time or subscribe to Penthouse.
Strangely enough, in narrative games, such as RPGs or adventure games, I think that there is a lot more diversity in female characterization than male charactization. For the guys, 95% of characters either fall into: "tough talking hero", "silent, hard-boiled badass", "innocent young boy", "wise, though cool, old geezer", and "silent seifer protagonist". For the women, you have you're typical "starry-eyed romantic lead", "boobulicious, overbearing young woman", and the "annoying, but cute little girl". Yet, I would only say that about 50%-60% of female characters in games fit into those distinct catagories, and even the ones that do tend to have much richer personalities than the guys.
Think: video games as a mark of conservative society!
Nah, only when video games become as old and decripped as AM radio.
Re:Yet another example of east-west differences
on
Japan's Top 100 Games
·
· Score: 1
The majority of the people that play Final Fantasy will also vote for various Blizzard games as the best games of all time alongside it.
I don't think this could be farther from the truth. Tthere is a huge reviene of a gap between the console RPG community and the RTS/TBS communities, as there is with the MMORPG community and the PC RPG community. You're dealing with some huge devides, and a lot of intense in-fighting between these crowds. You've just compared two game series: one is a PC series, one is a console series in the most traditional sense; that right there is a huge demographic devide. Then, on top of that, you have the fact that one is Japanese made, and the other is American made, again, very large demographic differences. There are a lot of American gamers who are just repulsed by Japanese made games, and there are others that find that the majority of American made games have a style that really doesn't fit right with them either. There are some fence sitters, but not all that many.
To make a fairly strange analogy, you've just said the equivalent of: Catholics will agree with Babtists most of the time about religion. No, they will kill each other over it. I'm not sure you realize just how much tension there is between the PC gaming and console gaming communities. How similar they may be (which is up for debate), they tend to consider themselves polar opposites.
I'm a huge console gamer, myself, and a big FF fan. And yes, I've played StarCraft, and yes, I did enjoy it. Would I put it up there with the greatest games I've ever played? Hell no. And I think I can safetly say, also, that I'm in a minority of console rpg players who have even given a Blizzard game (besides WoW) the TIME OF DAY. All my console RPG playing friends, and almost all the gamers I've talked to online, tend to consider themselves strongly in one camp or the other. No matter how ludicrus it is, you can't deny that it exists.
I've noticed it largely to be a control issue. Americans, as a rule, are obsessed with freedom and control, even if it becomes a disadvantage. Conversely, in Japanese culture there is an ingrained emphasis on structure. These two different cultural tendancies become quite evident in the construction of video games. American RPGs will many times choose to sacrifice narrative emphasis in exchange for more open-ended gameplay, as with Fable. Conversely, Japanese made RPGs tend to emphasise elegent narrative structure (even if the narrative itself is worthless, which is commonly the case) over freedom of gameplay, as in the linear plotlines of the Final Fantasy series. I, mayself, have yet to find a game that combined large amounts of freedom and elegent narrative construction... the two are ALMOST if not completely mutually exclusive. Personally, however, I don't mind sacrificing freedom for structure, I actually find it somewhat comforting that I'm not completely out on my own. Too little structure can lead to a game environment where only simple, repetative tasks can exist, without any overarching goals. I realize that others may find structure to be more stifling than I do.
Sure, but the point is that you'd have to make them pay ATTENTION to the screen resolution just for them to notice the difference. This is precicely what games aren't supposed to do. Any kind of graphical boost is only as good as it adds to the "feel" of the game. If people are having to actually be concious of the technology to get additional enjoyment from it, then the game and system has failed to deliver. Now, there is no question that higher resolution can be utilized to the advantage of the game's enjoyment, it can be used to make a much more ellaborate, more emerssive environment. But that said, there are much larger concerns. A game company may be better off putting that extra time they would use to increase polygon count towards making more interesting environmental layout. IE: Zelda:TTP looks like it will have an INCREDIBLY emmersive environment due to the attention to detail in the overall design, probably much more emmersive than most of the HD PS3 titles will be. Bigger, faster, more powerful can be nice, but it can also distract game developers from concentrating on the most important aspects of gaming.
Same with the PS2 controller, just add two more shoulder buttons to that count. But what's the point? Only, like, 3 games utilize this feature, and it's combersomb. GC shoulder buttons are, to this day, the ONLY pressure sensitive buttons worth a damn.
Yes, but you're still missing the point of the parent poster. What's important is what's done with it, not what it CAN do. If its games play pretty much the same as any other game made today, then what's the point? I'll take my 4-cylinder Camry over an Formula-1 any day of the week, because I can actually drive around town in my Camry (and it has a kickass stereo system). Just because something has a more powerful engine doesn't mean it's better.
You can also play all the older console games on your PC through an emulator and a $10 USB controller... what's you're point? There is something to be said for actually playing a game a way it's intended to be played. $5 says Nintendo releases a host of older styled controllers (NES, SNES, N64) to play older games with, they've pretty much said as much with their announcement that the stick will dock with other controllers. And the Rev has 4 GC controller ports (I sorta wish it didn't, it would be nicer for them to release Rev. specific Wavebirds that didn't require plugging in recievers). Nintendo Revolution ($200?), Rev. SNES controller ($20?), SNES games (at $2 a piece, or something), looks a lot more appealing to me than a $100 XBox (which is bullshit, because even normal used XBoxen are like $130) that someone has tampered with.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I know this "everyone" you're talking about. You act as if the whole world hates iTunes, there is a very small minority of computer-savvy users who have a beef with iTunes for one reason or another, but it doesn't have much relivience when compared to the other 80% of digital music player users, who use and love both the iPod and iTunes (I've seriously heard more complaints against the iPod than of iTunes).
And no, iTunes began as a music player, the iTunes store came much later. And since Apple practically breaks even on the store, it isn't really important to them to hook you on it. Both the store and the player are gateways to the iPod, they don't really care if you're using the store or just the program, so your reasoning makes little sense.
Now, I haven't really searched around and used different programs very much, but the ones I have used, that supposedly matched iTunes in capabilities were appaulingly bad in interface design, which is a very important thing to both Apple and most users. Both iTunes and the iPod are quickly increasing their arsenal of supported formats, although it makes sense that they wouldn't want to give iTunes any audio formats that the iPod can't support or they would suddenly get a lot of angry emails. And it would be incredibly irrisponsible for Apple to use Ogg as their primary format. 1) Ogg doesn't support any kind of DRM... trust me, Apple doesn't like DRM any more than you do, but they would lose 95% of the music industry's support overnight if they removed it, which would be currently bad for Apple, bad for me, and bad for you, since most of the music I listen to is put out by major lables. 2) Ogg saps processing power, and currently, the biggest problem there is with the iPod is its battery life. I haven't done any statistical study, but I can guarentee you that about 90% of music listeners out their don't even realize that aacs (let alone m3ps) have lower quality than CDs, let alone oggs, and that when asked what's more important, practically having your listening time or getting slightly better audio quality, there would be very few people out there that would chose the former.
If you don't like DRM, consider this, for most other music players, the primary way of getting music onto your player is by ripping CDs. You can do this with the iPod... hell, about 99% of the music on my iPod comes from ripped CDs. The iTunes store, complete with DRM, is a nice little addition when compared to the iRiver or any other music device... all of which also have their own DRM formats and are trying to start their own "DRM Laden" music stores that currently have fallen flat on their face. If you don't like DRM, buy CDs. You're not going to convince the music industry that it's safe for them to not include DRM in their downloadable music distrobution. Apple had to come to terms with this. Live with it... move on.
Well, the iBud issue is irrelivent, iBuds are NOT attatched to the iPod, and many people (not all, but a good percentage) buy/have/use headphones that are better. I can understand Apple's reasoning for including headphones, they've always been about "usability right out of the box", but it makes sense that they would included the cheapest headphones you could think of (and they aren't the worst, actually, for earbuds, they're pretty good, but earbuds suck). If people want good headphones, they're going to want to choose from a selection of headphones that fits their individual wants and needs, so including "good" headphones would be a bad idea on Apple's part.
That said, it's true that most people don't give a shit about lossless vs. lossy music encryption. Hell, I'm a musician and an audio engineer, and I can't tell the difference between an AAC and a CD unless I'm doing a blindfold test in a quite room with professional quality headphones or speakers... and I don't listen to most of my music blindfolded :)
The fact is, Ogg takes more processing power, which saps battery life, which for the purposes of a portable music player, is a MUCH bigger deal than the last degree of audio quality (and the quality difference between AAC and OGG has yet to be really proven to me). Both are open source formats, one is based on a family of encription that is of much more mainstream use (MPEG 4) than the other... so I think it would be irresponsible for Apple to chose OGG over AAC as their primary audio format. And while it would be "nice" if they included OGG in their growing assortment of supported audio formats, I can understand that they might want to avoid the angry letters from Average Joe when he ripped his CD collection to OGG, only to find that his iPod's battery charge life was only 2/3rds of what it would be, had he been using AACs. I have yet to hear an OGG supporter who tackled the processing power issue, most seem to ignore it, which is extremely ignorant.
I'm sorry, but intuitive design is a very REAL part of designing interfaces for both displaying media content (slashdot) and software. If you think that over-complicated design is better just because it "weeds out the newbs"; this is just a completely immature way of looking at the world. The bottom line is, as much as I love slashdot's content, this website's design is emberassingly bad. Placing links in text, as a rule, is one of the most basic "nono's" in webdesign. It is both aesthetically displeasing and confusing. Aesthetics and transfering information is a good 100% of what webdesign is based on, and Slashdot, I'm sorry to say, fails misserably at both these catagories. So before you go around bashing people who are critical of this site's design... you should know that this website goes against a lot of basic webdesign principals, and that the parent poster is completely justified in his critique. The difference between his critique and your post was that you made a personal attack, whereas he was making a perfectly understanble point. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I'll call bullshit here. I work as a video editor and producer for a TV station, and unfortunately, we're all forced to use PCs. The production staff has been screeming at the engineering staff (who build the computers to the specs THEY want, even though we're doing the work) to get us Macs for a while now, but they're a couple of Apple-aphobes / Microsoft-phyles, who won't even let us run Firefox. We're running Adobe Premiere Pro, one of the only (if not THE only) usable video editting programs on Windows. Now, I'm a big Adobe fan, I like their interface design, almost as much as Apple's, but I have to say, Premiere is NO FinalCut. The basic fact that it works in AVIs causes a huge amount of headache. The most agreduious problem is that AVIs do not support Line 21 ("Closed Captioning" for you lay-people). It is now ILLEGAL to run programing without closed captioning. So while Premiere might work fine for making commercials (which are not required to have CC), for piecing together a news broadcast, it's unusable. Actually, we DO use it for that, but it requires that someone sit there at the teleprompter and scroll in the CC manually, while the tape is running... how idiotic is that! The MPEGs that Final Cut uses, however, retain their line-21 data, and I've also heard (but not had the oportunity to try it) that Final Cut can actually edit closed captioning. If you consider that we piece together two of our four news broadcasts that run each day, on the computer, and considering that the person who scrolls the prompter is probably payed something like $25-$30/h, an hour out of his day is spent doing bullshit. That's $25-$30 a day! In three months, we'd make back the entire price of a new high-end Mac.
That's only one of the many problems with using Windows for video editing. My newly-built PC crashes at least 2-5 times a week while I'm doing video editing, which wastes quite a bit of my time. My Mac laptop has maybe crashed that many times in its 3 year lifetime, and I've actually done much more processor intensive stuff with it (and yes, I've also run Final Cut on it). Final Cut is just a much more robust video editing program for professionals than either Adobe, or the "quickly becoming obsolete" Avid options.
So sure, for amature video editing... ya know, putting together Anime Music Videos or whatever you like to do, Windows works just fine, hell, Windows Movie Maker will be enough for most hobbiests (although I'd chose iMovie over WMM any day... hell there's some things iMovie can do better than Premiere!) but for real work, give me a Mac and spare me the grief :(
The one thing I will agree with you on, though, is screen realestate. All the video production bays have two monitors, and I can't really imagine doing my work without them. But seriously, you were talking about laptops, which is irrelivent, because no professional video editor, in their right mind, would use a laptop for his video work, so your point is not very valid.
"Yeah, but we've got it now, so fuck off. Ooooh, who's got the power now, bitch!" :)
I have no doubt that at least in Japan the Revolution will wipe the floor with the blood of the PS3 and the XBox 360. The only thing that knocked Nintendo off of their #1 spot was their refusal to go to disc media, not allowing for cut scenes, which practically MADE contemporary Japanese gaming. They lost Square because of it: Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, the two biggest game series in Japan. And they lost 90% of the RPG and adventure game market. Now they're back, with a media fully capable of doing hours of pretty anime cutscenes. Most PS3 games will probably still be DVD anyway (much cheaper), so Nintendo is going to have the same sized media as the competition. Now Sony took a big stumble with their pricing and delays. As I said in a post below, it will take MS generations to recover from their inhibility to market to Japan, even if they get on the right track now, so the XBox is NOT going to take up the pace where Sony stumbled, Nintendo is in the perfect position to do so.
Nintendo's plan on cheap dev kits will allow a lot of small upstarts to innovate for their new hardware, suddenly the playingfield is MUCH more even for small new companies, closer to the way it was back when the NES came out. We may finally be able to see some small new upstarts jump on board, the next Square or Konami. Nintendo has the ability of winning back old friends (and from the enthusiasm I've heard from developers, it seems that they're already doing so) but breeding a new generation of videogame developers. If I were smart, I would look into investing some stock into Nintendo.
Japanese aren't exactly racist about what they buy (not to say they aren't racist in general, there are a lot of problems in that department), but many US products have managed to do EXTREMELY well over in Japan, becoming so immersed in their culture that most Americans can't really comprehend it. McDonald's, Coka Cola, the iPod, if you think they're big here, they're almost like a religion over in Japan. But the difference is that these companese were smart enough to specialize their marketting strategy to fit the Japanese cultural paradigm. The same marketting stratagies that work really well in the US will fail MISSERABLY in Japan. McDonald's positioned itself first as an exotic foreign experience (then sold sushi) and then as a centerpiece of the fast-paced, modernized Japanese business world. The idea of "fast food" was both unheard of, and because of the pacing of the business world, greatly appreciated. Then there's Apple... maybe having a highly-philosophical Buddhist genious (Steve Jobs) as their CEO helped a bit. The bottom line is, Jobs is a fairly worldy individual who is willing to listen and learn about the cultures he's marketing toward. If anything, he's more out of touch with the US than with most of the world. Even his American iPod campaign had a Zen-like quality to it. Japan isn't Buddhist, but their culture has grown around a lot of similar basic values (neo-confusionism)... add to that that Japan has always been obsessed with simplicity and function in their aesthetics, and the iPod is almost a perfect product. Owning one has huge cultural significance like no-other we see in the states. Consumerism is practically Japan's national religion: the products you buy, and their presentation have a deep significiance in how you are percieved as an individual. And no, we're not simply talking, "I'm a Ford kinda guy" like we have over here.
MS has no Japanese marketting campaign. And their American campaign is so ungodly removed from the values of Japanese culture that they're going to have a hard time changing that around. The XBox is an SUV... plain and simple: it's big, it's powerful, and it's sold as a way to flex your muscles. Now, Chevy could possibly run a Japanese marketting campaign on their biggest SUV attempt to highlight it's functionality, aesthetic simplicity, and it's overall addition to cultural statis... but you still have to take into account that Chevy's SUVs aren't very functional (terrible reliability, a burdon to drive around Tokyos streets, low gas millage, etc.), they're a slap in the face to classical aesthetic values, aiming for a brainless, "muscley" look, which is laughable to most Japanese, and thus, is going to be impossible to convince Japanese culture, as a whole, that the image of having one is a positive one. MS is dealing with the same problem, XBoxs are big (especially the first), have terrible reliability, and their games commonly go against common Japanese aesthetic principals and basic values (modern Japan is EXTREMELY pacifistic).
So yes, some Gundam and Naruto tie-ins would help, but it's more than that, the XBox's basic image is riding on the "xXx-TREME!" fad—hell, even it's name is "XBox"—which is dieing out in the US and never happened over in Japan. "Game Cube", "Play Station" "Game Boy", "Entertainment System", all names that reflect the product's ability to entertain. "N64" is probably the most xXxtreme name that came out of Nintendo, and look how well that worked for them. "Revolution" is a different naming tactic altogether, neither xXxtreme nor playful but more along the lines of Apple's current marketting strategy, one that may translate very well over in Europe and Japan, and probably fairly well in the US.
Believe it, mister. Nintendo, as far as I know, has NEVER taken a loss on a console. They made a profit on every single GameCube ever made. This was common practice, across the board, until Sony came into the picture. I'm fairly sure that Sega made a profit on all their consoles, at least up through the Genesis. Nintendo, furthermore, as a much smaller company than Sony or Microsoft (by a few magnitudes), does quite well with its current business model.
The funny thing is, if Nintendo decided to adopt the newer "sell at a loss" business model that Sony and Microsoft have been using, they'd probably be able to pull it off much better, seeing as that a majority of their game sales are from in-house games, and thus a much higher profit margin than simple licensing. In a way, I almost would have expected Nintendo to be the first ones to sell consoles at a loss. Oh, and I think they make more of a profit on the gamecube than the GBA, if I remember correctly.
Wrong. Beta did evolve BetaCam (which IS this "high quality beta" that you are imagining), and frankly, even the best quality VHS can't hold a candle to the quality of BetaCam. I use BetaCam every day at work, and even though I'd rather use DVCam or DVDs, BetaCam is pretty damn good. The other week my co-worker and I had to work off of a VHS (because our client sent us a VHS tape) and it was unbelievably painful to use after working with Beta. Hell, I work with 3/4" tapes (older standard, pre-VHS) some of the time, and aside from the fact that the audio is mono and the tape decks are old and falling apart, the video quality on them is higher than that of VHS.
And no, VHS didn't really change much. In fact, the only improvement it made is that it adopted a faster speed, 1 hour playback mode which slightly improved quality. However, most of the "innovations" were toward the other end, ie: how to cram 6 hours of video onto a 2 hour VHS tape. Beta evolved much more than VHS ever did. I'd take a late 80s BetaMAX over a "modern" VHS any day.
That is pure rumor. This was talked about previously on /. and is the result of some fairly asinine wishful thinking. There has been no evidence to support this, and furthermore, it would be utterly unneccessary, as the DS cart has a good few magnitudes more memory storage capability than the GBA cart to begin with. Please, next time check your facts and name your sources if you're going to add "old news" that has no bearing on reality. Thank you for your time.
Remember that 30 years ago, we had vinyl and cassette tapes. Vinyl was easily rippable, although "ripping" one meant something a little different back then. Cassette tapes sounded like total crap. If you think about it, even *with* DRM, we've come a long way in quality and ease of copying. And don't worry about compression for the moment, this is just a passing phase while non-lossy algorythms become more streamlined and connection speeds get faster. DRM is a neccessary evil, unfortunately, because no record company, in their right mind, would agree to selling media without it. Thankfully, there are many quick, and fairly painless ways of getting past Apple's DRM if you're really worried about it (I'm amazed that record companies agreed to FairPlay, it's so easy to bypass).
I totally agree, although I don't particularly like your tone.
BUT, Beta is totally superior for professional-level recording. I work for a local TV company. We're in a rural enough era, and small enough that we still use Beta as our standard (sadly). Now, it kills me that we haven't gone to a digital format already, but if I had to use VHS, I would shoot myself. Now, we're using BetaCam, and I'm not sure the exact differences (I think the tapes are essentially the same, though the players/recording format is higher quality), but the quality level between Beta and VHS is no laughing matter, especially in my field. It isn't a small difference of quality, it's a fairly huge one, actually. Especially for audio, Beta runs VHS totally up the ass. In fact, before Alesis came out with the ADAT digital standard, Betas were the highest quality magnetic tape audio format. Not only that, but Sony created converters to use the visual track as another two audio tracks, allowing for four-channel recording... again, the ADAT replaced that, but only much later. On the video end of things, Betas are much more robust, they don't degrade nearly as quickly with use, their control tracks hold up surprisingly well, and the video quality is greatly superior. The other day, I had to record a VHS tape for a client, and my coworker and I were in awe of just how shitty it looked compared to Beta.Now, that said, Beta was totally the wrong choice for consumers, for just the reasons you stated. Probably the biggest one was the time issue, since most feature films are between 90mins and 120mins, Beta was incredibly inconvenient. I can't believe Sony's stupidity on that one. If you're going to release a new form of media, at least make it sufficiently large enough to hold the standard amount of data. If CDs had been released that only played 30mins of audio, noone would have switched from LPs.
No, you're just being as elitest and oblivious as the next guy, and well, it looks like I'm the next guy, so I'm definitely not excluded from this catagory.
You do realize that one of the defining characteristics of sheep is that they think that everyone else is a sheep except them. The international coorperate machine has made millions off of making people feel like they're being individuals.
Me? I'm a total sheep, I realize that there's really no way of escaping it, and get on with my life. The more you try to fight back, the worse it gets, really. You just end up playing into the hands of a different coorperately manufactured demographic. I love my iPod because it makes me feel like I'm supporting a movement of aesthetics and innovation, I drive a Toyota because it makes me happy to give a big "fuck you" to the redneck american auto industry. I'm sophisticated and elitest, and I'm playing right into the hands of a lot of major companies. And ya know what? The best I can do, most of the time, is acknowledge that I'm doing it, and move on. And yes, I'm feeling quite "holier than thow" right now for having said this, but whatever.
So don't go around spouting about shills like you aren't one yourself. It's fairly obvious, from your list of examples, that you're trying to use your arguement to put down those things you don't like (namely console gamers), which is petty and shortsighted. Both sides are equally at fault for deluding themselves into following whatever the latest trend is. Unbelievable.
This is exactly why I said this was not an option for me.
30 seconds: the song right before it. By that I meant that my "playlist" for the day is adaptive, on the spot. It doesn't matter if I setup a playlist of songs 10 seconds before I start it playing, then the second song on the list will be wrong. I mean, this is an exaduration, but I'm trying to make a point. I don't wake up thinking, "What kind of music do I want to listen today?" I usually want to listen to a variety of things, very particular things, many times that I don't listen to on a regular basis. Thankfully, the average length of a track I listen to is about 10 minutes, so I don't have to do a lot of switching, and many times I listen to whole albums anyway. And the iPod is very easy to access by artist/album/track, which works pretty well. But see, you're system just doesn't work for me.
Exactly, you hit the nail right on the head.
I think the amount of enjoyment one can get from a certain medium is directly proportional to the amount of "work" it takes to come to terms with it. For example, I love long, complex, epic things: movies, music, video games, etc., because it will take a long time for me to unravel and digest what I've seen/heard. This way, it takes litterally days, and multipul viewings/listenings before I can see the work as a whole. In this way, it's not 4 minutes (for a song) or 2 hours (for a movie) of enjoyement, but an ongoing, rewarding process that gives hours and days of enjoyment, even when I'm not actually watching/listening to the work in question, I'm turning it over in my head and enjoying just chewing on it for a while.
After I saw Capote, I was unable to speak for a good hour because I was in sort of a daze from having to think about so many intense things. And for days afterwards, I found myself seeing scenes of the movie in my head, playing with alternate dialog, putting myself in the shoes of characters in the situations, and trying to understand the characters' motivations. Fast Food movies just don't give me that long term enjoyment that I can get from a more sophisticated work. I think that people who blow of sophistication as just an attempt for a group of people to establish themselves as an elite have really missed the point. Obviously, there is some of that, but there is truly something to be said for more involved work that may take time to digest.
Back to basics...
"Good Night & Good Luck" anyone? Not just because it's black & white, but the movie really feels like a classic that could have been made 50 years ago... simple, elegant, with a lot of depth. Would have been picture of the year in 1959... don't know why it wasn't in 2006, but at least it got its dues.
Same could be said of "Capote".
But neither of these films ARE old films, they're not rehashing old techniques simply to making them feel classic, but use them in order to break new ground in ways that most modern films are not. I think the entertainment industry, as a whole, is beginning to feel the effects of over-complication in aesthetics. There seems to be a revolution afoot in the mainstream of exploring new territory with older, less technical, but more meaningful methods.
This really is an exciting time, and possibly the beginning of the film genre's first neo-classical era, in the history of its existance. Every art/entertainment medium has a neo-classical era (or two, or three) somewhere in its lifetime after it has reached a certain point of maturity. A "back to basics" movement that explores more regimented, and traditional approaches to production. For visual arts, the 17th century looked back to greek and roman procedures for a more mathmatically "precise" approach. Music saw its neo-classical rennaisance in the first few decades of the 20th century, with a return to the more formula-based approaches of the 18th century. Both these genres have seen many similar, smaller movements, though these are two very noticable eras. Film is now at its hundreth birthday, but we may very well be seeing it's "first" neo-classical era.
Well, the only thing I can think of is that on the 5G iPods, if a song is already playing, the framerate for the song browser decreases significantly, which is kinda annoying. This wasn't the case on the 3G iPod that I used to have. I'm probably one of the few people who doesn't work by playlists, since I don't know what I want to listen to until about 30 seconds before I play it. And I have an over 400 CD collection, which makes it worse. Still, I have to admit, it's pretty incredible how fast I can get to what I want to hear, considering those things.
But I am with you on the fact that there HAS to be improvement. Unfortunately, I think Apple's route will be more along the lines of the iPod deciding what you want to listen to for you, which I don't want. Only *I* know what I want to hear, and I'm very picky about playing exactly what I want to hear, which is why I don't use playlists.
Let's not forget, though, the touch wheel is based off of jog wheels from video editting bays, of which I use all the time at work. I think this was a VERY slick decision, since this is a method that has been already used for years in choosing specific frames of video quickly. It requires no "pick-up and move" repositioning of the thumb or any fingers (like with a scroll wheel), and requires no constant pressure, so it is very ergonomic and just "feels" good to use.
I also have to agree, I think the PS2 had a fairly piss-poor game lineup in general. That said, though, I am enjoying the hell out of Dragon Quest VIII, so maybe not all is lost.
Hey, I'm a GUY and I don't like seeing women objectified in video games. Not just because of how I think it might effect our culture, but because it really feels like a threat to my intelligence, and it reenforces male stereotypes just as much as it does female stereotypes. Game companies putting in big-titted, thongly dressed women over and over again just says to me, "we think that men only ever think about is sex, and from a purely physical standpoint." You see this stereotype reenforced everywhere in our culture, but this is usually completely exadurated. Sure, it makes sense to cast characters that are reasonably attractive, especially if we are supposed to connect and empathize with them, being "easy to look at" is a positive feature. But making them completely abnormally sexual, either in appearence or in personality, just destroys all empathetic connection with that character. If I wanted to just look at sexual women all the time, I'd probably just hang out at METArt all the time or subscribe to Penthouse.
Strangely enough, in narrative games, such as RPGs or adventure games, I think that there is a lot more diversity in female characterization than male charactization. For the guys, 95% of characters either fall into: "tough talking hero", "silent, hard-boiled badass", "innocent young boy", "wise, though cool, old geezer", and "silent seifer protagonist". For the women, you have you're typical "starry-eyed romantic lead", "boobulicious, overbearing young woman", and the "annoying, but cute little girl". Yet, I would only say that about 50%-60% of female characters in games fit into those distinct catagories, and even the ones that do tend to have much richer personalities than the guys.
I don't think this could be farther from the truth. Tthere is a huge reviene of a gap between the console RPG community and the RTS/TBS communities, as there is with the MMORPG community and the PC RPG community. You're dealing with some huge devides, and a lot of intense in-fighting between these crowds. You've just compared two game series: one is a PC series, one is a console series in the most traditional sense; that right there is a huge demographic devide. Then, on top of that, you have the fact that one is Japanese made, and the other is American made, again, very large demographic differences. There are a lot of American gamers who are just repulsed by Japanese made games, and there are others that find that the majority of American made games have a style that really doesn't fit right with them either. There are some fence sitters, but not all that many.
To make a fairly strange analogy, you've just said the equivalent of: Catholics will agree with Babtists most of the time about religion. No, they will kill each other over it. I'm not sure you realize just how much tension there is between the PC gaming and console gaming communities. How similar they may be (which is up for debate), they tend to consider themselves polar opposites.
I'm a huge console gamer, myself, and a big FF fan. And yes, I've played StarCraft, and yes, I did enjoy it. Would I put it up there with the greatest games I've ever played? Hell no. And I think I can safetly say, also, that I'm in a minority of console rpg players who have even given a Blizzard game (besides WoW) the TIME OF DAY. All my console RPG playing friends, and almost all the gamers I've talked to online, tend to consider themselves strongly in one camp or the other. No matter how ludicrus it is, you can't deny that it exists.
I've noticed it largely to be a control issue. Americans, as a rule, are obsessed with freedom and control, even if it becomes a disadvantage. Conversely, in Japanese culture there is an ingrained emphasis on structure. These two different cultural tendancies become quite evident in the construction of video games. American RPGs will many times choose to sacrifice narrative emphasis in exchange for more open-ended gameplay, as with Fable. Conversely, Japanese made RPGs tend to emphasise elegent narrative structure (even if the narrative itself is worthless, which is commonly the case) over freedom of gameplay, as in the linear plotlines of the Final Fantasy series. I, mayself, have yet to find a game that combined large amounts of freedom and elegent narrative construction... the two are ALMOST if not completely mutually exclusive. Personally, however, I don't mind sacrificing freedom for structure, I actually find it somewhat comforting that I'm not completely out on my own. Too little structure can lead to a game environment where only simple, repetative tasks can exist, without any overarching goals. I realize that others may find structure to be more stifling than I do.
Sure, but the point is that you'd have to make them pay ATTENTION to the screen resolution just for them to notice the difference. This is precicely what games aren't supposed to do. Any kind of graphical boost is only as good as it adds to the "feel" of the game. If people are having to actually be concious of the technology to get additional enjoyment from it, then the game and system has failed to deliver. Now, there is no question that higher resolution can be utilized to the advantage of the game's enjoyment, it can be used to make a much more ellaborate, more emerssive environment. But that said, there are much larger concerns. A game company may be better off putting that extra time they would use to increase polygon count towards making more interesting environmental layout. IE: Zelda:TTP looks like it will have an INCREDIBLY emmersive environment due to the attention to detail in the overall design, probably much more emmersive than most of the HD PS3 titles will be. Bigger, faster, more powerful can be nice, but it can also distract game developers from concentrating on the most important aspects of gaming.
Same with the PS2 controller, just add two more shoulder buttons to that count. But what's the point? Only, like, 3 games utilize this feature, and it's combersomb. GC shoulder buttons are, to this day, the ONLY pressure sensitive buttons worth a damn.
Yes, but you're still missing the point of the parent poster. What's important is what's done with it, not what it CAN do. If its games play pretty much the same as any other game made today, then what's the point? I'll take my 4-cylinder Camry over an Formula-1 any day of the week, because I can actually drive around town in my Camry (and it has a kickass stereo system). Just because something has a more powerful engine doesn't mean it's better.
You can also play all the older console games on your PC through an emulator and a $10 USB controller... what's you're point? There is something to be said for actually playing a game a way it's intended to be played. $5 says Nintendo releases a host of older styled controllers (NES, SNES, N64) to play older games with, they've pretty much said as much with their announcement that the stick will dock with other controllers. And the Rev has 4 GC controller ports (I sorta wish it didn't, it would be nicer for them to release Rev. specific Wavebirds that didn't require plugging in recievers). Nintendo Revolution ($200?), Rev. SNES controller ($20?), SNES games (at $2 a piece, or something), looks a lot more appealing to me than a $100 XBox (which is bullshit, because even normal used XBoxen are like $130) that someone has tampered with.