While it may not be independant of income level, a $600 price tag is prohibitive for a large number of incomes and mindsets. There will be parents who have to buy everything for their kids, but on the flip side there will be as many or more parents who can't afford or are unwilling to pay that much.
Personally I don't care about load times unless they exceed more than 20 seconds. It's the time it takes me to actually understand/find anything that bothers me.
My college's student portal was like that. Sure it would load quickly, but it was a pain in the rear to navigate. The splash page was plastered with options, tickers, sidebars and crap that you could care less about. The categories to navigate through were even worse, and completely unintuitive.
That's why sites such as Google or Thottbot appeal to me. You load them and there aren't any bells and whistles flying everywhere distracting you from what you're actually trying to do. I'd easily take a page that loads in 20 seconds over one that loads in 4 if it simply cut the crap.
Having only recently gotten to the age where I have both the money and the time to afford for a late night launch I am rather ignorant of how this all works. The article was helpful, but some questions remain.
1. Where do preorders fit into all of this? I was #7 in line for the Wii preorders, assuming there are 7 Wiis left over after the store employees get theirs am I guaranteed one?
2. When they say the system launches on Sunday, do I camp out Saturday or Sunday night? (This has confused me in the past with game releases)
3. What do I do if I've recently moved and have no friends in the area?
75% movie company support is meaningless when there is 0% consumer report. I'm not saying that's the case, but it's important to remember.
The whole HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war may be irrelevant for years to come. I think the last number I heard for what portion of the US had an HDTV was 1 in 6 households, though I have no citation. Even if one wins decisively over the other, it won't be a big deal until we're at least at a 50/50 market split for HDTV vs SDTV.
In the end, Sony may have sacrificed their Playstation brand to claim victory with Blu-ray. It may be well worth it, but it's something to consider.
Not true, I have a 360 and an uber HDTV as well as the monetary resources required for a PS3. I'll diss them all openly, and my experience has been good.
Quite simply, the 360 and HD are fun, but the Wii looks like it will be better while being cheaper.
Except only rarely are those updated editions more powerful. Usually they're just niftier, lighter, sleeker and brighter (screens). Releasing a Wii that was more powerful would be unprecedented.
I think there's a point to be made that with 13 times the cpu power, you only end up with twice as much power per pixel.
Of course, none of this is considering the finer points of console design. You can take a 1337 graphics card, a sweet CPU, some nice memory and make a computer that absolutely sucks at playing games. For all three systems, they should each be more than the sum of their parts (not that we've even really tried to do that here).
For all we know, the ATI GPU in the Wii draws its power from Cthulu in order to clock in at 3THz, which is directly channeled through the old one's nervous centers for sweet processing times.
Yes I did just suggest that Nintendo is in league with Cthulu or otherwise speeding us towards a terror we can not comprehend.
While Nintendo is known for releasing new iterations of old consoles (The redone NES, GBA SP, DS lite etc.) one thing they rarely do is "soup up" the system. The DS lite has no more processing power, ram or anything else than the DS. It's sleeker, lighter, maybe brighter and certainly nifty but it isn't an improvement hardware-wise.
The reason for this is simple, consoles are not PCs. Consoles thrive on being the same no matter who bought one and where. Developers and accessory makers alike can count on one DS being functionally the same as any other.
Releasing a souped up Wii down the road only serves to A) undermine Nintendo's position on entertainment before eye candy B) split the player-base C) make development more difficult and D) annoy the crap out of everyone by doing what everyone else did and have two functionally different console models.
In short, it's a bad idea. The most you're ever going to get out of a Wii is 480p.
Microsoft and Bungie are going to take as long as necessary to get Halo 3 finished. Halo is their trump card and they aren't going to play it haphazardly.
If Halo 3 is anything less that pure awesome Microsoft's going to get a lot of flak. Fans were mad enough about Halo 2 which was an excellent game. If for any reason Halo 3 is not a self-evident reason to get a 360 Sony will hold a party where they burn Blu-ray diodes and smash Cell chips with a mallet.
1) They can make ONE disk that has the game on it. This disc can be pressed and made for each edition, and won't suffer any performance issues for cramming anything else on it.
2) They can wait up until the last minute to actually press the documentary disks, having pressed disk 1 the whole time up until then.
3) One of those disks is a soundtrack. I'd rather not have to go to my 360, take the Halo 3 disk out, put it in my computer/CD player and vice versa just to switch between playing the game and listening to the soundtrack.
4) Seperating the game from the extras isn't a bad thing.
Even with Blu-ray or HD-DVD, There would still have been at least two disks and likely three, if only for keeping the soundtrack seperate (on a regular CD) and also the documentary.
You may notice the regular edition remains on one disc.
Nintendo will be criticized for this, but ultimately it will matter as little as the criticism concerning online gaming.
Just look at the numbers. Many people were screaming about how Live and other online services were going to be the bread and butter of consoles last generation. All three systems launched with promises about their online support. Only one of the three consoles delivered, and it was the one which arguably was the worst when it came to online that won out.
Today we've finally reahed a point where broadband and other high speed internet connections are ubiquitous enough (and simple enough) that getting your whole house wired (including the game console) is no hassle. Because we have reached this point, online will make a larger impact.
I see the same scenario with this generation. HDTV will be too important to be ignored... next generation. HDTV is going to take off, but it will be more than a year or two or five from now before we really begin to see the end for SDTV. When Nintendo makes their MiiTuu console in 5 years to compete with the PS4 and the Xbox Extreme 1337 Pwn Media Controller Center Professinal Home Edition, they'll bother with HD. As it stands, they're content to push only 480p and that's good for them. It'll look great, not the uber eyecandy we'll get from the PS3 or the 360, but it won't be shabby at all. 1080p will not magically make Resident Evil 4 look like a bloody hobo.
...and I'll say it again. The Wii doesn't need to be much faster to look good.
The difference in required processing power to properly render the larger textures and more detailed models at 1080p versus what the Wii needs to do at 480p is huge. All that processing power that Microsoft and Sony will throw into 1920*1080=2073600 pixel is going to be much more than Nintendo has to worry about at 640*480=307200
2073600/307200 = 6.75. Sony and Microsoft need to be 6.75 times as powerful as Nintendo's console to maintain the status quo.
Now obviously this is likely to be wildly inaccurate. There are all sorts of factors I know jack about. However, the point remains that Sony and Microsoft's consoles have to go to a much greater effort to keep those framerates up.
On an HD TV, the Wii's graphics will look worse than what Sony and Microsoft offer. I have an Xbox 360 and an HDTV, I've seen the eyecandy and it's delicious. One thing I did notice was despite the fact that my Gamecube was only running at 480i via an S-Video cable, it still wasn't bad at all. The games that were beautiful before (F-Zero, Crystal Chronicles, and that beast of masochism Ikaruga) are still beautiful and I wasn't even using component (which I look forward to on the Wii). You can tell the difference between 480i 6th generation games and 1080i/p 7th generation games, but it doesn't mean the old games burn your eyes.
Even if the Wii is marginally better than the Gamecube remember how incredible games like Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime looked. Even a mere 50% to 100% increase will be more than enough to make the Wii awesome.
I didn't really care to RTFA, but am I to understand that these are "in development" and may not be ready for the PS3 launch?
It may very well be an attempt to take the wind out of Nintendo's sails, but if the titles are "in indevelopement" and won't all be there at launch, versus Nintendo who have 6 completely unique software libraries to pull titles up the wazoo from... I just don't see what Sony's getting at.
Nintendo: 2 million at launch, 4 million by year's end, 6 million before March. Sony: 480k at launch, 2 million by year's end, 6 million before March.
Looking at these production plans, I can't help but wonder what Sony is planning on doing to make up a gap of 4 million consoles in 2 months. Unless they are sitting on PS3s to create artificial scarcity (which I doubt), they'll need to go from producing 750k consoles a month [(2 million - 480k) / 2] to 2 million consoles a month [(6 million - 2 million ) / 2]. That's more than double their previous production.
I'm not saying its impossible, but the potential problems and roadblocks for such a plan are numerous and potentially crippling.
Nintendo seems far more organized in their rollout. I would hope they'd try and ramp up production to get more Wii consoles out there. However, I can see why they might stick to what numbers they have and possibly exceed them, rather than up forecasts and then fall short.
If it costs me $100 to make a single paper napkin and I charge you $10 for it, is it overpriced?
Overpriced is difficult to define. For the grandparent the PS3 is overpriced. The PS3 isn't worth $500-600 to him regardless of how much it cost to make.
The point my initial hypothetical question makes is that no one in normal circumstances would pay $10 for a paper napkin. Paper napkins aren't that expensive! To many people the PS3 is in a similar boat. Consoles aren't normally priced so high even at launch. To many, it is overpriced for what they want to do with it. They aren't looking for a media center, a PC, or a Blu-ray player. They want to play MGS4 or FF13. The PS3 is a little pricy even for people used to spending $300-$400 dollars at launch.
I enjoy game related news as much as anyone else. However, why is it that games news is outnumbering everything else combined article-wise? Some of it is very good, but a lot of it seems to be pure fluff (this for example).
Going to Sony Computer Entertainment Inc(SCEI)'s page, I could only immediately find the numbers for 2005 and 2004 in yen.
2005: 35.5 billion Yen ($302,333,504 by today's conversion rates) 2004: 57.1 billion Yen ($485,916,092 by today's conversion rates)
SCEI made more than Nintendo in 2004, but Nintendo did far, far better than SCEI in 2005.
There's a point to be made that some income and expenditure for both companies during this period would come from the GBA, DS and PSP. However, I think my original point remains that Nintendo remains competitive even with the low market share of the Gamecube. In fact, in that two year period Nintendo soundly beats SCEI.
Quite simply, Nintendo was more profitable than SCEI this past generation despite the incredible market share the PS2 had.
I'm just working based on the title of the japanese article. In either case the slogan is not "do! Game, do! Choice, do! Xbox 360". That slogan seems to be an obvious mistake of simply grabbing whatever English there was and ignoring the Japanese.
I'm not claiming to know exactly what the real slogan is, I'm just guessing, so you may very well be right.
Scariest moment for me was walking into a room and seeing 8 huge zombies lumbering towards me. It wasn't the zombies that scared me as I found myself completely unable to attack them. I could run around helplessly, but I couldn't fight back. I freaked out thinking my controller had broken and swapped in a matter of seconds. When that one didn't work I became terrified that my first player port was broken. I had iterated through my controllers twice before I finally died.
But it wasn't accurate to the game! Where were the 1ups! The flying koopas! The castles (lacking princesses)! Why was there a Bomb-omb when those didn't appear until SMB3? How can you stand by these incontinuities? Where was Lou Albano?
Slashdot Mirror
While it may not be independant of income level, a $600 price tag is prohibitive for a large number of incomes and mindsets. There will be parents who have to buy everything for their kids, but on the flip side there will be as many or more parents who can't afford or are unwilling to pay that much.
Personally I don't care about load times unless they exceed more than 20 seconds. It's the time it takes me to actually understand/find anything that bothers me.
My college's student portal was like that. Sure it would load quickly, but it was a pain in the rear to navigate. The splash page was plastered with options, tickers, sidebars and crap that you could care less about. The categories to navigate through were even worse, and completely unintuitive.
That's why sites such as Google or Thottbot appeal to me. You load them and there aren't any bells and whistles flying everywhere distracting you from what you're actually trying to do. I'd easily take a page that loads in 20 seconds over one that loads in 4 if it simply cut the crap.
This is at the very least informative and deserves a more obvious place in this discussion.
Having only recently gotten to the age where I have both the money and the time to afford for a late night launch I am rather ignorant of how this all works. The article was helpful, but some questions remain.
1. Where do preorders fit into all of this? I was #7 in line for the Wii preorders, assuming there are 7 Wiis left over after the store employees get theirs am I guaranteed one?
2. When they say the system launches on Sunday, do I camp out Saturday or Sunday night? (This has confused me in the past with game releases)
3. What do I do if I've recently moved and have no friends in the area?
Thanks.
75% movie company support is meaningless when there is 0% consumer report. I'm not saying that's the case, but it's important to remember.
The whole HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war may be irrelevant for years to come. I think the last number I heard for what portion of the US had an HDTV was 1 in 6 households, though I have no citation. Even if one wins decisively over the other, it won't be a big deal until we're at least at a 50/50 market split for HDTV vs SDTV.
In the end, Sony may have sacrificed their Playstation brand to claim victory with Blu-ray. It may be well worth it, but it's something to consider.
Not true, I have a 360 and an uber HDTV as well as the monetary resources required for a PS3. I'll diss them all openly, and my experience has been good.
Quite simply, the 360 and HD are fun, but the Wii looks like it will be better while being cheaper.
Except only rarely are those updated editions more powerful. Usually they're just niftier, lighter, sleeker and brighter (screens). Releasing a Wii that was more powerful would be unprecedented.
Fun with wild inaccuracies. :)
I think there's a point to be made that with 13 times the cpu power, you only end up with twice as much power per pixel.
Of course, none of this is considering the finer points of console design. You can take a 1337 graphics card, a sweet CPU, some nice memory and make a computer that absolutely sucks at playing games. For all three systems, they should each be more than the sum of their parts (not that we've even really tried to do that here).
For all we know, the ATI GPU in the Wii draws its power from Cthulu in order to clock in at 3THz, which is directly channeled through the old one's nervous centers for sweet processing times.
Yes I did just suggest that Nintendo is in league with Cthulu or otherwise speeding us towards a terror we can not comprehend.
There is actually.
While Nintendo is known for releasing new iterations of old consoles (The redone NES, GBA SP, DS lite etc.) one thing they rarely do is "soup up" the system. The DS lite has no more processing power, ram or anything else than the DS. It's sleeker, lighter, maybe brighter and certainly nifty but it isn't an improvement hardware-wise.
The reason for this is simple, consoles are not PCs. Consoles thrive on being the same no matter who bought one and where. Developers and accessory makers alike can count on one DS being functionally the same as any other.
Releasing a souped up Wii down the road only serves to A) undermine Nintendo's position on entertainment before eye candy B) split the player-base C) make development more difficult and D) annoy the crap out of everyone by doing what everyone else did and have two functionally different console models.
In short, it's a bad idea. The most you're ever going to get out of a Wii is 480p.
Microsoft and Bungie are going to take as long as necessary to get Halo 3 finished. Halo is their trump card and they aren't going to play it haphazardly.
If Halo 3 is anything less that pure awesome Microsoft's going to get a lot of flak. Fans were mad enough about Halo 2 which was an excellent game. If for any reason Halo 3 is not a self-evident reason to get a 360 Sony will hold a party where they burn Blu-ray diodes and smash Cell chips with a mallet.
Right here.
Four discs is simpler because:
1) They can make ONE disk that has the game on it. This disc can be pressed and made for each edition, and won't suffer any performance issues for cramming anything else on it.
2) They can wait up until the last minute to actually press the documentary disks, having pressed disk 1 the whole time up until then.
3) One of those disks is a soundtrack. I'd rather not have to go to my 360, take the Halo 3 disk out, put it in my computer/CD player and vice versa just to switch between playing the game and listening to the soundtrack.
4) Seperating the game from the extras isn't a bad thing.
Even with Blu-ray or HD-DVD, There would still have been at least two disks and likely three, if only for keeping the soundtrack seperate (on a regular CD) and also the documentary.
You may notice the regular edition remains on one disc.
Nintendo will be criticized for this, but ultimately it will matter as little as the criticism concerning online gaming.
Just look at the numbers. Many people were screaming about how Live and other online services were going to be the bread and butter of consoles last generation. All three systems launched with promises about their online support. Only one of the three consoles delivered, and it was the one which arguably was the worst when it came to online that won out.
Today we've finally reahed a point where broadband and other high speed internet connections are ubiquitous enough (and simple enough) that getting your whole house wired (including the game console) is no hassle. Because we have reached this point, online will make a larger impact.
I see the same scenario with this generation. HDTV will be too important to be ignored... next generation. HDTV is going to take off, but it will be more than a year or two or five from now before we really begin to see the end for SDTV. When Nintendo makes their MiiTuu console in 5 years to compete with the PS4 and the Xbox Extreme 1337 Pwn Media Controller Center Professinal Home Edition, they'll bother with HD. As it stands, they're content to push only 480p and that's good for them. It'll look great, not the uber eyecandy we'll get from the PS3 or the 360, but it won't be shabby at all. 1080p will not magically make Resident Evil 4 look like a bloody hobo.
...and I'll say it again. The Wii doesn't need to be much faster to look good.
The difference in required processing power to properly render the larger textures and more detailed models at 1080p versus what the Wii needs to do at 480p is huge. All that processing power that Microsoft and Sony will throw into 1920*1080=2073600 pixel is going to be much more than Nintendo has to worry about at 640*480=307200
2073600/307200 = 6.75. Sony and Microsoft need to be 6.75 times as powerful as Nintendo's console to maintain the status quo.
Now obviously this is likely to be wildly inaccurate. There are all sorts of factors I know jack about. However, the point remains that Sony and Microsoft's consoles have to go to a much greater effort to keep those framerates up.
On an HD TV, the Wii's graphics will look worse than what Sony and Microsoft offer. I have an Xbox 360 and an HDTV, I've seen the eyecandy and it's delicious. One thing I did notice was despite the fact that my Gamecube was only running at 480i via an S-Video cable, it still wasn't bad at all. The games that were beautiful before (F-Zero, Crystal Chronicles, and that beast of masochism Ikaruga) are still beautiful and I wasn't even using component (which I look forward to on the Wii). You can tell the difference between 480i 6th generation games and 1080i/p 7th generation games, but it doesn't mean the old games burn your eyes.
Even if the Wii is marginally better than the Gamecube remember how incredible games like Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime looked. Even a mere 50% to 100% increase will be more than enough to make the Wii awesome.
I didn't really care to RTFA, but am I to understand that these are "in development" and may not be ready for the PS3 launch?
It may very well be an attempt to take the wind out of Nintendo's sails, but if the titles are "in indevelopement" and won't all be there at launch, versus Nintendo who have 6 completely unique software libraries to pull titles up the wazoo from... I just don't see what Sony's getting at.
Nintendo: 2 million at launch, 4 million by year's end, 6 million before March.
Sony: 480k at launch, 2 million by year's end, 6 million before March.
Looking at these production plans, I can't help but wonder what Sony is planning on doing to make up a gap of 4 million consoles in 2 months. Unless they are sitting on PS3s to create artificial scarcity (which I doubt), they'll need to go from producing 750k consoles a month [(2 million - 480k) / 2] to 2 million consoles a month [(6 million - 2 million ) / 2]. That's more than double their previous production.
I'm not saying its impossible, but the potential problems and roadblocks for such a plan are numerous and potentially crippling.
Nintendo seems far more organized in their rollout. I would hope they'd try and ramp up production to get more Wii consoles out there. However, I can see why they might stick to what numbers they have and possibly exceed them, rather than up forecasts and then fall short.
I've been around. I'm just curious as to why we had more articles in Games today than we had on a typical day of E3.
Funny as this is... I have to question why the Games section is being flooded with what ammounts to trivialities.
If it costs me $100 to make a single paper napkin and I charge you $10 for it, is it overpriced?
Overpriced is difficult to define. For the grandparent the PS3 is overpriced. The PS3 isn't worth $500-600 to him regardless of how much it cost to make.
The point my initial hypothetical question makes is that no one in normal circumstances would pay $10 for a paper napkin. Paper napkins aren't that expensive! To many people the PS3 is in a similar boat. Consoles aren't normally priced so high even at launch. To many, it is overpriced for what they want to do with it. They aren't looking for a media center, a PC, or a Blu-ray player. They want to play MGS4 or FF13. The PS3 is a little pricy even for people used to spending $300-$400 dollars at launch.
I enjoy game related news as much as anyone else. However, why is it that games news is outnumbering everything else combined article-wise? Some of it is very good, but a lot of it seems to be pure fluff (this for example).
That's not scary, that's mind destroying torture. There's a difference:
One makes you kill yourself out of terror, the other out of sheer pain and the destruction of one's will to live.
Going to the actual Nintendo website and looking up their profits through each report from 2001 to 2005 I give you Nintendo's profits.
2005: $816,973,000
2004: $316,134,000
2003: $640,640,000
2002: $800,338,000
2001: $726,339,000
This is pure profit. Sales were often in excess of 4 billion dollars. 2004 is lower in profit due to costs incurred in the development of the DS.
None of this is assumption, this is straight numbers taken from Nintendo's fiscal reports free availible at:
http://www.nintendo.com/corp/annual_report.jsp
Going to Sony Computer Entertainment Inc(SCEI)'s page, I could only immediately find the numbers for 2005 and 2004 in yen.
2005: 35.5 billion Yen ($302,333,504 by today's conversion rates)
2004: 57.1 billion Yen ($485,916,092 by today's conversion rates)
SCEI made more than Nintendo in 2004, but Nintendo did far, far better than SCEI in 2005.
There's a point to be made that some income and expenditure for both companies during this period would come from the GBA, DS and PSP. However, I think my original point remains that Nintendo remains competitive even with the low market share of the Gamecube. In fact, in that two year period Nintendo soundly beats SCEI.
Quite simply, Nintendo was more profitable than SCEI this past generation despite the incredible market share the PS2 had.
I'm just working based on the title of the japanese article. In either case the slogan is not "do! Game, do! Choice, do! Xbox 360". That slogan seems to be an obvious mistake of simply grabbing whatever English there was and ignoring the Japanese.
I'm not claiming to know exactly what the real slogan is, I'm just guessing, so you may very well be right.
Scariest moment for me was walking into a room and seeing 8 huge zombies lumbering towards me. It wasn't the zombies that scared me as I found myself completely unable to attack them. I could run around helplessly, but I couldn't fight back. I freaked out thinking my controller had broken and swapped in a matter of seconds. When that one didn't work I became terrified that my first player port was broken. I had iterated through my controllers twice before I finally died.
Flash, "This can't be happening!"
Great, now I have to go play the game again.
But it wasn't accurate to the game! Where were the 1ups! The flying koopas! The castles (lacking princesses)! Why was there a Bomb-omb when those didn't appear until SMB3? How can you stand by these incontinuities? Where was Lou Albano?
If Nintendo can get enough retail space to have cool demos like that, they'll be in greater demand than PS3s.
Although, given my experience with Gamestop size I doubt anyone but BestBuy or Toys R Us could maange it.