"Why in the hell do people like you give so much weight to these numbers?"
A lot of people treat game console purchases as investments. The rationale is similar to "I'll buy a $4,000 PC now because it'll 'last' longer." The theory runs like this: "the greater the specs, the more impressive the games will be towards the end of the system's life cycle. Towards the end of the cycle, the machine with the better specs is the one that's going to get the more ambitious titles." There is some data to support this. (Note: I'm not saying it's strong rationale, but I can see how some would see it this way.) Compare the SNES to the Genesis. Towards the end of both system's life cycles, the SNES had Donkey Kong Country and the Genesis had Vector man. Both were beautiful games, but DKC outshined VM. Saturn vs. Playstation? I think most of us know which clobbered the other. It would also be totally reasonable to say that the DC wouldn't have aged as gracefully as the PS2, GC, and the XBOX. (Amusingly, I don't think the N64 rocked the boat like it could have in this case...)
Frankly, all three systems are a gamble. Nobody is buying any of these systems knowing what will be coming down the line in the next 5 years. The best that can be done is to look at the system's potential. There is this fear that they'll buy the system, and it'll turn out to be a dud purchase. Ask anybody who's purchased a Jaguar. So what do you do? Well, specs, when assessed properly, are about the only tangibles we have. I have faith that Nintendo will create some excellent titles for the Revolution. But do I actually know that? Really, I don't. I do know, however, the type of processor the XBOX 360 has. I know how much RAM it has. I can look at that and make a mental estimation of what it'll be capable of. These are numbers I can work with. That sort of make sense?
In any event, I don't think specs alone are going to make or break these systems. All three are designed around 3D gaming. (as opposed to the Saturn vs. the Playstation, the Saturn was leaned too far towards 2D.) The artists are going to make a much bigger difference than the hardware. Take Resident Evil 4. Very impressive game. Despite the technical differences between the PS2 and the GameCube, it came out pretty much the same. I realize I'm taking the scenic route here, but I'm basically saying that I agree with you. Fuck polycounts, they don't matter anymore. I just hope that Nintendo's not stupid enough to develop the Rev with a big enough bottleneck to make the games feel watered down in comparison.
"Former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi may be retired (and frozen in a cryogenic coffin), but he would be proud of new company head Satoru Iwata for his May, 2004 assertion that, 'Customers do not want online games.' "
Oh brother. I love how these out-of-context quotes keep coming up again and again despite how laughable they are. I mean, seriously, he said this in 2004 AFTER Wifi was announced for the DS.
Anyway, here's the rest of that quote:
"most customers do not wish to pay the extra money for connection to the Internet, and for some customers, connection procedures to the Internet are still not easy."
He wasn't talking about people playing on-line, he was talking about the subscription model that Sony and Microsoft were using. He also backed that up with numbers that showed a small percentage of PS2 and/or XBOX owners were actually playing their consoles on line.
Shame on IGN and Slashdot for perpetuating this quote.
"If they are putting up billboards in the gameworld, I have a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM with it. "
Why?
Seriously, I don't understand this. I recently played San Andreas. There are soda machines all over that game using some made-up brand. Why couldn't Sprite pay Rockstar to get their logo placed in that texture? Why would this be a pitchfork waving offense?
"And yet Nintendo has escaped lawsuit? I remember way back when getting the bulky rumble pak for the N64. Prior Art? "
Nintendo escaped because the Rumble Pak wasn't actually built into the controller. (Same goes for the Dreamcast.) Now you know why that functionality wasn't simply built in.
"And, more importantly, why isn't Immersion suing pager manufacturers, and the manufacturers of vibrating cell phone batteries???? "
For the simple reason that a cell phone or a pager uses the vibration feature as a form of display, not interaction. The patent covers force feedback, not simple vibration. This is why vibrators and pagers aren't covered in the patent. Neither of which vibrate because you're controlling an entity within a video game.
You see, patents are typically pretty darn specific. Wanna know why the Rumble Pak didn't get Nintendo in trouble? Wait for it... wait for it... The Rumble Pak was an accessory to the controller and not built into it. Amazing, eh?
"Then by your arguement all xbox games should be able to play playstations and gamecubes and vice versa, not to mention Windows and Macs should be compatiable too."
This might be worthy of debate if there were simply artifical restrictions keeping games from being played on other consoles. However, that's not even close to the case, so this argument holds no water.
" It's not at all unreasonable to think that apple will not grant competers the right to compete with their portiable music players because that's what they make their money on."
Apple is using their market power to keep the competition down. I know we all love Apple and think their way is always the right way, but the fact is that it's better for everybody if they're opened up. Just as it's always touted in the Microsoft stories, competition is good.
"My question is, is there going to be any sort of trade-in deal? That might be kind of tricky, of course, given each DS seems to have an ID on it which WFC games and friend codes are bound to (the specific game and the specific console are treated as a single "unit", the instructions say). But I know I'm not dropping another however-many dollars on another iteration of a console I JUST got done buying a bit ago. "
Places like GameStop will let you trade in your DS for store credit. You could then put it towards a DS-lite.
Honestly, though, I'm not sure there's any real big reason to upgrade. I mean, I personally want to because I want the better screens, but I'm not sure I want to dump $50+ on it. The original DS is still a fine piece of hardware.
You could do what I did, though: When the GBA SP came out, I had the original GBA and I wasn't keen on having both in the house. So what I did was I bought the SP, then gave the GBA to my mom with a couple of games I knew she'd like. I know it sounds like a silly rationalization, but it sure made my mom's day.
P.S. for Slashdot coders: It's really annoying when I reply to a post and I get an error saying that the subject line is too long even though I didn't modify it.
"It came out, it was fixed. There are going to be problems in any project this large, but it shows how much the Ubuntu team cares to respond to a problem this quickly and on a Sunday of all days. Ubuntu really has become a nice distro. It's completely free and polished around the edges. I hope they continue to do well."
I know this rationale gives everybody the warm fuzzies, but this is still a really bone-headed mistake. You guys really shouldn't be this forgiving about it.
"I used to run my school computer lab on co-ax. What a pain. The connectors were always breaking. They didn't have to completely break either, they just had to go slightly bad and they'd take down the whole network. Anyway I suppose they will come up with a solution that has 'more conventional' connectors because most NICs don't have co-ax connectors."
Hmmm... sounds like the token fell out. Why don't check to see if it rolled under your desk?
"It would be funny if the anti-piracy ads actually increased awareness of piracy in the negative way, and people who would otherwise have gone to the theatres and paid to see movies realize they can pay for a broadband connection and get all the movies they want."
I know this is modded as funny, but I've actually witnessed this. On three seperate occasions, I've gone to the theater, sat through the anti-piracy propoganda, and heard somebody in the audience say "What? You can download movies from the internet? How?!"
I don't know why they thought it would be a good idea to show these messages immediately after the audience plunks down $20-$30 for admission and over-priced snacks and sits down with a bunch of people babbling during the previews.
"Should be interesting to play with but I think that Microsoft and Sony are going to put Nintendo out of biz with the next gen consules. "
Considering how expensive the XBOX 360 is, I suppose in a weird Harry Potter'esque way I could see people running out of money before they could buy any Nintendo products.
"if people had more common sense, they would save the money they are wasting on buying these shows, and purchase cheap tv card for there pc that has dvr functions. (im sure you could even make it automaticly convert the files to the ipod format)"
Well, they could spend $100 or so on a TV card and turn their computer into a DVR. The resources this takes up could be questionable, though. You can get a card that'll encode to MPEG2 and use up 2 gigs an hour or you can encode to a more efficient file size and eat up more CPU. Once that's done, then you've got to go through the conversion process to make this video playable on your iPod. Then you've got to sync it. The result? Well, you can get one show at a time assuming what you wanted to see has aired, and it comes complete with commercials. Alternatively, you could buy a season of your favorite show and have it sent directly to your iPod sans commercials. Frankly, I can see a quite a few people enjoying the benefits of both a DVR and an iPod subscription.
"I wonder why internet advertising does not take a page from the radio advertising playbook. Daily, on the radio, I hear ads that say "Mention this ad and save an additional 12%!" This system allows the advertising folks to learn quickly whether their ad is reaching its audience. The customers come in and tell you so."
I'm not sure about Google specifically, but there have been plenty of ads like this. Really, it's about different flavors of advertising. Some adverts simply want to get the name of the product out there for branding. Some want the actual click-through. Some pay the advertiser based on whether or not the sale was made directly from the click. Which kind of advertising you choose is dependent on what type of service you want and how much you're willing to spend.
"There is a new crop every few years such that no actor is indespensible. Pay them a normal fee and cut huge costs and development time from films."
Considering that big name actors often bring in big name profits, this is not really the case. The decision to pay some actors millions of dollars per movie wasn't made because Hollywood studios are so happy and generous with the check writing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why in the hell do people like you give so much weight to these numbers?"
A lot of people treat game console purchases as investments. The rationale is similar to "I'll buy a $4,000 PC now because it'll 'last' longer." The theory runs like this: "the greater the specs, the more impressive the games will be towards the end of the system's life cycle. Towards the end of the cycle, the machine with the better specs is the one that's going to get the more ambitious titles." There is some data to support this. (Note: I'm not saying it's strong rationale, but I can see how some would see it this way.) Compare the SNES to the Genesis. Towards the end of both system's life cycles, the SNES had Donkey Kong Country and the Genesis had Vector man. Both were beautiful games, but DKC outshined VM. Saturn vs. Playstation? I think most of us know which clobbered the other. It would also be totally reasonable to say that the DC wouldn't have aged as gracefully as the PS2, GC, and the XBOX. (Amusingly, I don't think the N64 rocked the boat like it could have in this case...)
Frankly, all three systems are a gamble. Nobody is buying any of these systems knowing what will be coming down the line in the next 5 years. The best that can be done is to look at the system's potential. There is this fear that they'll buy the system, and it'll turn out to be a dud purchase. Ask anybody who's purchased a Jaguar. So what do you do? Well, specs, when assessed properly, are about the only tangibles we have. I have faith that Nintendo will create some excellent titles for the Revolution. But do I actually know that? Really, I don't. I do know, however, the type of processor the XBOX 360 has. I know how much RAM it has. I can look at that and make a mental estimation of what it'll be capable of. These are numbers I can work with. That sort of make sense?
In any event, I don't think specs alone are going to make or break these systems. All three are designed around 3D gaming. (as opposed to the Saturn vs. the Playstation, the Saturn was leaned too far towards 2D.) The artists are going to make a much bigger difference than the hardware. Take Resident Evil 4. Very impressive game. Despite the technical differences between the PS2 and the GameCube, it came out pretty much the same. I realize I'm taking the scenic route here, but I'm basically saying that I agree with you. Fuck polycounts, they don't matter anymore. I just hope that Nintendo's not stupid enough to develop the Rev with a big enough bottleneck to make the games feel watered down in comparison.
"Former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi may be retired (and frozen in a cryogenic coffin), but he would be proud of new company head Satoru Iwata for his May, 2004 assertion that, 'Customers do not want online games.' "
Oh brother. I love how these out-of-context quotes keep coming up again and again despite how laughable they are. I mean, seriously, he said this in 2004 AFTER Wifi was announced for the DS.
Anyway, here's the rest of that quote:
"most customers do not wish to pay the extra money for connection to the Internet, and for some customers, connection procedures to the Internet are still not easy."
He wasn't talking about people playing on-line, he was talking about the subscription model that Sony and Microsoft were using. He also backed that up with numbers that showed a small percentage of PS2 and/or XBOX owners were actually playing their consoles on line.
Shame on IGN and Slashdot for perpetuating this quote.
"If they are putting up billboards in the gameworld, I have a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM with it. "
Why?
Seriously, I don't understand this. I recently played San Andreas. There are soda machines all over that game using some made-up brand. Why couldn't Sprite pay Rockstar to get their logo placed in that texture? Why would this be a pitchfork waving offense?
"And for the Trekkies, that's 1.48168301 × 10^-13 Parsecs,"
I'm a Star Wars fan. Could you convert that into a unit of time for me, please?
"I think most Zelda fans are already quite proficient at wielding their wands, thank you very much."
Yeah but they're usually uncomfortable in a two-player environment.
"And yet Nintendo has escaped lawsuit? I remember way back when getting the bulky rumble pak for the N64. Prior Art? "
Nintendo escaped because the Rumble Pak wasn't actually built into the controller. (Same goes for the Dreamcast.) Now you know why that functionality wasn't simply built in.
"And, more importantly, why isn't Immersion suing pager manufacturers, and the manufacturers of vibrating cell phone batteries???? "
For the simple reason that a cell phone or a pager uses the vibration feature as a form of display, not interaction. The patent covers force feedback, not simple vibration. This is why vibrators and pagers aren't covered in the patent. Neither of which vibrate because you're controlling an entity within a video game.
You see, patents are typically pretty darn specific. Wanna know why the Rumble Pak didn't get Nintendo in trouble? Wait for it... wait for it... The Rumble Pak was an accessory to the controller and not built into it. Amazing, eh?
"Prior art. After all, women have used vibrations to heighten a sensation since at least the early 1900's "
There's a root-kit joke to be made here, but I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet.
"Why wasn't Fight Club banned when adults could legally go see it in theatres?"
For some strange reason, Fight Club is something nobody wants to talk about.
"Innovative" and "franchise" are incompatible terms. "
Wrong. See Super Mario Brothers.
"Then by your arguement all xbox games should be able to play playstations and gamecubes and vice versa, not to mention Windows and Macs should be compatiable too."
This might be worthy of debate if there were simply artifical restrictions keeping games from being played on other consoles. However, that's not even close to the case, so this argument holds no water.
" It's not at all unreasonable to think that apple will not grant competers the right to compete with their portiable music players because that's what they make their money on."
Apple is using their market power to keep the competition down. I know we all love Apple and think their way is always the right way, but the fact is that it's better for everybody if they're opened up. Just as it's always touted in the Microsoft stories, competition is good.
"My question is, is there going to be any sort of trade-in deal? That might be kind of tricky, of course, given each DS seems to have an ID on it which WFC games and friend codes are bound to (the specific game and the specific console are treated as a single "unit", the instructions say). But I know I'm not dropping another however-many dollars on another iteration of a console I JUST got done buying a bit ago. "
Places like GameStop will let you trade in your DS for store credit. You could then put it towards a DS-lite.
Honestly, though, I'm not sure there's any real big reason to upgrade. I mean, I personally want to because I want the better screens, but I'm not sure I want to dump $50+ on it. The original DS is still a fine piece of hardware.
You could do what I did, though: When the GBA SP came out, I had the original GBA and I wasn't keen on having both in the house. So what I did was I bought the SP, then gave the GBA to my mom with a couple of games I knew she'd like. I know it sounds like a silly rationalization, but it sure made my mom's day.
P.S. for Slashdot coders: It's really annoying when I reply to a post and I get an error saying that the subject line is too long even though I didn't modify it.
"Remember DR DOS, Netscape? I expect that photshop will stop working with Windows pretty soon."
Yeah, this is real +2 Interesting considering most of you are using FireFox and OpenOffice on your Windows machines.
"To be honest, you get what you pay for."
That's convenient.
"It came out, it was fixed. There are going to be problems in any project this large, but it shows how much the Ubuntu team cares to respond to a problem this quickly and on a Sunday of all days. Ubuntu really has become a nice distro. It's completely free and polished around the edges. I hope they continue to do well."
I know this rationale gives everybody the warm fuzzies, but this is still a really bone-headed mistake. You guys really shouldn't be this forgiving about it.
"I used to run my school computer lab on co-ax. What a pain. The connectors were always breaking. They didn't have to completely break either, they just had to go slightly bad and they'd take down the whole network. Anyway I suppose they will come up with a solution that has 'more conventional' connectors because most NICs don't have co-ax connectors."
Hmmm... sounds like the token fell out. Why don't check to see if it rolled under your desk?
"It would be funny if the anti-piracy ads actually increased awareness of piracy in the negative way, and people who would otherwise have gone to the theatres and paid to see movies realize they can pay for a broadband connection and get all the movies they want."
I know this is modded as funny, but I've actually witnessed this. On three seperate occasions, I've gone to the theater, sat through the anti-piracy propoganda, and heard somebody in the audience say "What? You can download movies from the internet? How?!"
I don't know why they thought it would be a good idea to show these messages immediately after the audience plunks down $20-$30 for admission and over-priced snacks and sits down with a bunch of people babbling during the previews.
"Should be interesting to play with but I think that Microsoft and Sony are going to put Nintendo out of biz with the next gen consules. "
Considering how expensive the XBOX 360 is, I suppose in a weird Harry Potter'esque way I could see people running out of money before they could buy any Nintendo products.
"if people had more common sense, they would save the money they are wasting on buying these shows, and purchase cheap tv card for there pc that has dvr functions. (im sure you could even make it automaticly convert the files to the ipod format)"
Well, they could spend $100 or so on a TV card and turn their computer into a DVR. The resources this takes up could be questionable, though. You can get a card that'll encode to MPEG2 and use up 2 gigs an hour or you can encode to a more efficient file size and eat up more CPU. Once that's done, then you've got to go through the conversion process to make this video playable on your iPod. Then you've got to sync it. The result? Well, you can get one show at a time assuming what you wanted to see has aired, and it comes complete with commercials. Alternatively, you could buy a season of your favorite show and have it sent directly to your iPod sans commercials. Frankly, I can see a quite a few people enjoying the benefits of both a DVR and an iPod subscription.
It's not for everybody, bfd.
"I wonder why internet advertising does not take a page from the radio advertising playbook. Daily, on the radio, I hear ads that say "Mention this ad and save an additional 12%!" This system allows the advertising folks to learn quickly whether their ad is reaching its audience. The customers come in and tell you so."
I'm not sure about Google specifically, but there have been plenty of ads like this. Really, it's about different flavors of advertising. Some adverts simply want to get the name of the product out there for branding. Some want the actual click-through. Some pay the advertiser based on whether or not the sale was made directly from the click. Which kind of advertising you choose is dependent on what type of service you want and how much you're willing to spend.
"How did they measure it ?"
They used Recording Industry math.
"...is to grow a new 19' LCD monitor. can we do that? No? Oh screw Bush and his policies"
What the hell are you going to do with a 19 foot LCD? Sit in front of it and say "Make it so"?
"That's the power of childhood nostalgia, I suppose."
It's the power of playing-a-bunch-of-RECENT-games nostalgia.
"The idea was that people would see the absurdity of there being fewer than 4 female Star Trek fans in the entire world, causing laughter."
Enough of the Star Trek crap, it's too early in the mornin.
"There is a new crop every few years such that no actor is indespensible. Pay them a normal fee and cut huge costs and development time from films."
Considering that big name actors often bring in big name profits, this is not really the case. The decision to pay some actors millions of dollars per movie wasn't made because Hollywood studios are so happy and generous with the check writing.