They did A LOT of things right actually, just from a hardware standpoint
- Excellent Price point
- 1st party wireless controllers (as usual ahead of it's time)
- choice of colors
- durable as hell, can easily take more of a beating then the other consoles of that generation
- Widely available 480p video modes in games... 2nd only to the Xbox, and way more coverage then the PS2 had
- easily the most comfortable controllers of last generation
- from what I hear a fantastic development environment, almost Xbox 1 level graphics from apparently "inferior" hardware
Despite the fact that most of the good games are 1st party, it still remains the best "party" system on any console. with the exception of say Halo, or DOA on the Xbox 1 you wont find as many quality 4 player party games on any other console...
my thoughts exactly... anyone who thinks the GameCubes launch lineup was bad forgot that the N64 launched with only Maro64 and Pilotwings64 available. Both good games but it was quite possibly the least diverse launch ever... well with the exception of maybe the Sega Saturn which launch with only Virtua Fighter... or the Jaguar CD which IIRC launch with absolutely nothing... yeah there's some diversity for you.
I agree.. seeing some old guy with a mustache and eye-patch putting a gun in his mouth while talking to a robot trying to be cute isn't exactly my idea of a fun time...
No matter how you try to sell it: Geriatric != Bad-ass
Besides after playing Splinter cell I never want to look at another MGS game. Not to mention you can get your SC fix on whatever platform you perfer... and it looks great (or as good as possible) on all of them.
Bu the biggest selling point is I don't even need to buy a $600 next-gen system to get SC's superior gameplay.
indeed, especially considering a system like this wouldn't have any need for net-neutrality laws and the whole telco ideal of throttling bandwidth to sites or consumers that don't pay up would only hurt them further.
If they really want to sell this they'd just have to promote the angle that a government controlled network would allow the government to much more easily spy and monitor that network... then knobbiest be damned because legal power is worth more then bribes at that point.
Absolutly... part of the reason the PS2 had such a "wide selection of games" is because it was on the market over a year before it's main competitors... The 360 got first launch advantage this time. Reguardless of how spectacular a launch Sony pulls out (which it doesn't look like it will be as most of their AAA titles are 07 releases) the 360 will have a much more established next-gen catalog to choose from.
If anything the only factor that will bring people to the PS3 is BRAND LOYALTY.
The CONSOLE is region free, whether or not the games are is completely up to the Publisher/developer... basically the console knows what region it is but it's up to the game itself to determine if it should lock based on the console's region.
I don't see how that's very helpful it's the same system MS has been using for their consoles, Some games are region free, some games arn't.
that's why I like Xbox Live's pay scheme... you pay upfront for a year... it's a service but they pay plan is like that of a purchased item. and if you don't want it tied to your bank account just buy the pre-iad service card...
Most US citizens are in rural areas, and most rural areas have little to no choice of their ISP. I live in Central NH. Sure it's NH but I'm in a densely populated suburban area, and I have 1 choose for a broadband ISP, ONE! that's it, I use them or I don't have internet service at all. Despite their monopoly they're reasonably priced and they've been helpful when I have problems they're not a major provider so I think that even without net-neutrality they wouldn't be doing anything stupid... I do however fear for my brethren who live in Southern NH who's ONLY available service provider is Comcast. Some random areas also have the option of Verizon DLS... but if the proverbial sh*t hits the fan that's not much of a choice at all.
Regardless of how nice it would be to think that the consumers would drive the marketplace it just wont happen, most people put up with crappy service because they're too lazy to switch providers, ISPs would have to start murdering babies to get people to drop their internet service altogether... throttling wikipedia certainly wont do it.
Exactly... Actual in game advertising like that is good in a way. When I see a soda machine it give the game an extra sense of realism if it looks just like the Coke machine in my office break room, instead of some cleaver knock-off or some generic "POP" machine.
Then there's the other side... like EA's Fight Night Round 3, I haven't played it myself but I hear it's like watching a Burger King commercial with some Boxing thrown in for good measure.
I Wouldn't at all be surprised if we see a continued boost in current gen game sales following the announcement of the PS3's price point. Most last gen gamers who owned the PS2 where eying the PS3, and the large price of the new console could easily make some considering blowing the money they were saving on current gen titles figuring it'd be years instead of months before they'll be able to afford the PS3.
Except for the fact that inflation means NOTHING and is in-fact quite useless when considering the price of electronics.
Lets take your PC for example... In 1985 the average price of a new PC was a few grand, today the average price is only a few hundred. Considering Consoles are really just mass produced limited capability PC's a in funny box they should be governed by the same rules. If you add inflation ON TOP of that the theoretical gap is even bigger...
Fine then compare the several hundred dollar 2600 to the now $10 Atari console built into a joystick...
computer analogies still work, back in the 70s and 80s you could spend up to $10K on an IBM computer, you can buy one today that (with some finagling) can run all the same apps but only costs $400 and mops the floor with it performance wise... add in inflation and the price drop is even more dramatic...
If you take a look at the price dropping trend of computer and electronics tech in general, and factor in inflation the PS3 is head and shoulders the most expensive console to ever come along.
IIRC aren't there actually 4 physical sexes?
Male, Female, Merms, and Ferms. With the Merms being mostly male in form with some physical female characteristics, and the Ferms being mostly female with some male characteristics. Also IIRC about 1 in 25 people actually fall into the merm or ferm category and most don't even know it, some actually have their characteristics "fixed" shortly after birth and grow up never knowing it.
Anyone can be confused about their sexuality, however I imagine if you were born with parts that didn't completely fit into one of the two most common sexes you might have a harder time figuring it out.
For the record I'm a Male and very much attracted to my Female girlfriend. I'm not claiming to be an expert on any of this but I know what I learned in college... and I went to a polytech.
Regardless of what you've seen on the computer 100% of Xbox 360 discs are DVD9, the security sector is stored on the 2nd layer meaning the disc has that full capacity even if it only needs only the fraction of a CD's storage. IIRC most (if not all) Xbox 1 games are like this too.
So sure a lot of his PC games are reaching 4GB, but for DVDs to not be enough they'll have to somehow double in size over the next 4 years. Any game with that much content is probably an RPG, which can either install to the HDD (a'la FFXI) or span multiple discs (like the old PS1 FF games).
Not to mention with procedural synthesis (which AFAIK hasn't yet been used by anything on the market) games will get much smaller as they'll only be storing descriptions of items instead of full fledged models. There's something to be said for compression too. Sure most Gamecube games spanned 2 discs but because of the short space most games were heavily compressed. With lots of compression like that console games load faster because it's faster to decompress the file then transfer it raw over the DVD drive's bottleneck. I'm sure this will rear it's ugly head with the PS3 considering that they're requiring all games be pressed to BRD as part of their copy-protection measures. the discs will have so much space that most developers wont bother to compress the files (unless they're making a conscious effort to reduce loading times), add that to slow as molasses transfer speed of the 1st gen BRD drive....
I couldn't agree more, most of the popular music file formats don't even come close to the quality of CDs. I've even taken a liking to getting my music on DVD-A because of how much better that sounds over CDs... rumor has it that with BRD and HD-DVD we'll get even higher bit rate recordings.
A real innovation would be an ipod that could play music from an open and lossless format.
hmm, I see your point. Stuff like a limited amount of pipelines would definitely hinder the graphics. But as long as the software support is up to date (shader 3.0 etc) They could still employ techniques like Normal Mapping and other software based techs to bump up the perceived graphical performance. Heck the Xbox 1 has a few titles that look as good as most of the current next gen titles simply by heavily using software techniques. Chronicles of Riddick, and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory are two such titles that come to mind.
In the last gen the GC often had Xbox level graphics but specs closer to that of a PS2... I'm sure they've got something up their sleeve in terms of development tools.
The point isn't that resolution is the only important thing, the point is that if the console ONLY has to produce a low res image things like "Lighting, precision, shaders, etc " all have more resources available. Producing an image orders of magnitude higher in resolution sucks up a good majority of power differences. If producing an imagine in 1280x720 takes up 80% of the PS3s graphically power that wouldn't be used if it was only rendering in 640x480... that means that the GC only has to be 20% as powerful to compete at that resolution.
I've got an old IBM brand version of the SpaceBall... picked it up for $10 on eBay... I use Solidworks at work a lot and though it would be cool to have. once you get used to it's sensitivity it's really quite intuitive to move around the 3D object on the screen. But overall it's pretty useless, I tried seating it up to play Quake once but you hand gets tired really fast for the functions you'd normally use WASD for.
it's one of those ideas that looks good on paper but really not that great in practice. Unless they modified this thing to make it easier to nudge and hold in the linear directions... though I highly doubt it.
I think your parent was correct in saying on a 480p or less they'll look the same.
Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are HD machines. EVERY game made for the 360 and (probably) every game made for the PS3 will be programmed around a 720p (1280x720) resolution or HIGHER. that means that AA, poly count, particle effects, etc. all have to be downgraded to a point where they can pump out those graphics at that high a resolution. Similarly for the games to look THAT good they have to crank up the texture resolution as well. If you're only using all that power on a 480p set a MASSIVE portion of those console's power is just sitting dormant. The graphics don't dynamically adapt to shift their optimization to a lower resolution. In the 360s case some games are actually rendering internally at 720p and downscaling the output.
on the other hand the Wii is expected to not run any higher then 480p (640x480) which means that it does NEED all the power to crank out stuff at a high resolution and the graphics can be optimized around a low 480p output.
I forget who it was but one of the early 360 developer interviews the developer claimed that they would have 10 to 20 times the amount of graphics power to put towards the poly count, and other graphical effects if they only had to output in 480p. Considering there are a lot of games that look identical between the Xbox 1 and 360 when running in only 480p it's definitely feasible that at that resolution the Wii can compete...
Besides Nintendo is fantastic at that stuff, the GC was way underpowered compared to the Xbox 1 yet it had comparable graphics in a number of titles. Optimization is the key and from what I've heard Nintendo is the king of easy to program consoles. One PS2 game developer I spoke to claimed that his company prototypes all their games on the Gamecube and then ports to PS2, despite the fact that they don't even make GC games, it's THAT easy to program.
it varies because if you were to just play, say the bass part it'd be a pretty boring game. Not saying playing music is boring, but it is certainly repetative, especially songs on the lower end where people are just learning the game (and considering it's more of a pickup party game that's a large number of the player base). It's nice that they mix it up. Without that most song would just be...
verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge/solo, chorus
You'd be constantly repeating 2 really easy patterns with a really friggin difficult part 3/4 of the way through...
Slashdot Mirror
They did A LOT of things right actually, just from a hardware standpoint
- Excellent Price point
- 1st party wireless controllers (as usual ahead of it's time)
- choice of colors
- durable as hell, can easily take more of a beating then the other consoles of that generation
- Widely available 480p video modes in games... 2nd only to the Xbox, and way more coverage then the PS2 had
- easily the most comfortable controllers of last generation
- from what I hear a fantastic development environment, almost Xbox 1 level graphics from apparently "inferior" hardware
Despite the fact that most of the good games are 1st party, it still remains the best "party" system on any console. with the exception of say Halo, or DOA on the Xbox 1 you wont find as many quality 4 player party games on any other console...
my thoughts exactly... anyone who thinks the GameCubes launch lineup was bad forgot that the N64 launched with only Maro64 and Pilotwings64 available. Both good games but it was quite possibly the least diverse launch ever... well with the exception of maybe the Sega Saturn which launch with only Virtua Fighter... or the Jaguar CD which IIRC launch with absolutely nothing... yeah there's some diversity for you.
I agree.. seeing some old guy with a mustache and eye-patch putting a gun in his mouth while talking to a robot trying to be cute isn't exactly my idea of a fun time...
No matter how you try to sell it: Geriatric != Bad-ass
Besides after playing Splinter cell I never want to look at another MGS game. Not to mention you can get your SC fix on whatever platform you perfer... and it looks great (or as good as possible) on all of them.
Bu the biggest selling point is I don't even need to buy a $600 next-gen system to get SC's superior gameplay.
IE6 doesn't support it, if you're into that kind of reason...
er *lobbyists not knobbiest :p
indeed, especially considering a system like this wouldn't have any need for net-neutrality laws and the whole telco ideal of throttling bandwidth to sites or consumers that don't pay up would only hurt them further.
If they really want to sell this they'd just have to promote the angle that a government controlled network would allow the government to much more easily spy and monitor that network... then knobbiest be damned because legal power is worth more then bribes at that point.
Absolutly... part of the reason the PS2 had such a "wide selection of games" is because it was on the market over a year before it's main competitors... The 360 got first launch advantage this time. Reguardless of how spectacular a launch Sony pulls out (which it doesn't look like it will be as most of their AAA titles are 07 releases) the 360 will have a much more established next-gen catalog to choose from.
If anything the only factor that will bring people to the PS3 is BRAND LOYALTY.
1st party 360 games are also only $50... it doesn't stop 3rd parties from jacking up their prices though...
The CONSOLE is region free, whether or not the games are is completely up to the Publisher/developer... basically the console knows what region it is but it's up to the game itself to determine if it should lock based on the console's region.
I don't see how that's very helpful it's the same system MS has been using for their consoles, Some games are region free, some games arn't.
that's why I like Xbox Live's pay scheme... you pay upfront for a year... it's a service but they pay plan is like that of a purchased item. and if you don't want it tied to your bank account just buy the pre-iad service card...
of course they also offer the monthy route...
you're right, my use of the term "rural" was innappropriate for the area I was attempting to specify...
basically most people live in an area not big enough to have more then 1 or 2 choices.
Most US citizens are in rural areas, and most rural areas have little to no choice of their ISP. I live in Central NH. Sure it's NH but I'm in a densely populated suburban area, and I have 1 choose for a broadband ISP, ONE! that's it, I use them or I don't have internet service at all. Despite their monopoly they're reasonably priced and they've been helpful when I have problems they're not a major provider so I think that even without net-neutrality they wouldn't be doing anything stupid... I do however fear for my brethren who live in Southern NH who's ONLY available service provider is Comcast. Some random areas also have the option of Verizon DLS... but if the proverbial sh*t hits the fan that's not much of a choice at all.
Regardless of how nice it would be to think that the consumers would drive the marketplace it just wont happen, most people put up with crappy service because they're too lazy to switch providers, ISPs would have to start murdering babies to get people to drop their internet service altogether... throttling wikipedia certainly wont do it.
Exactly... Actual in game advertising like that is good in a way. When I see a soda machine it give the game an extra sense of realism if it looks just like the Coke machine in my office break room, instead of some cleaver knock-off or some generic "POP" machine.
Then there's the other side... like EA's Fight Night Round 3, I haven't played it myself but I hear it's like watching a Burger King commercial with some Boxing thrown in for good measure.
I Wouldn't at all be surprised if we see a continued boost in current gen game sales following the announcement of the PS3's price point. Most last gen gamers who owned the PS2 where eying the PS3, and the large price of the new console could easily make some considering blowing the money they were saving on current gen titles figuring it'd be years instead of months before they'll be able to afford the PS3.
Except for the fact that inflation means NOTHING and is in-fact quite useless when considering the price of electronics.
Lets take your PC for example... In 1985 the average price of a new PC was a few grand, today the average price is only a few hundred. Considering Consoles are really just mass produced limited capability PC's a in funny box they should be governed by the same rules. If you add inflation ON TOP of that the theoretical gap is even bigger...
Fine then compare the several hundred dollar 2600 to the now $10 Atari console built into a joystick...
computer analogies still work, back in the 70s and 80s you could spend up to $10K on an IBM computer, you can buy one today that (with some finagling) can run all the same apps but only costs $400 and mops the floor with it performance wise... add in inflation and the price drop is even more dramatic...
If you take a look at the price dropping trend of computer and electronics tech in general, and factor in inflation the PS3 is head and shoulders the most expensive console to ever come along.
IIRC aren't there actually 4 physical sexes? Male, Female, Merms, and Ferms. With the Merms being mostly male in form with some physical female characteristics, and the Ferms being mostly female with some male characteristics. Also IIRC about 1 in 25 people actually fall into the merm or ferm category and most don't even know it, some actually have their characteristics "fixed" shortly after birth and grow up never knowing it.
Anyone can be confused about their sexuality, however I imagine if you were born with parts that didn't completely fit into one of the two most common sexes you might have a harder time figuring it out.
For the record I'm a Male and very much attracted to my Female girlfriend. I'm not claiming to be an expert on any of this but I know what I learned in college... and I went to a polytech.
Regardless of what you've seen on the computer 100% of Xbox 360 discs are DVD9, the security sector is stored on the 2nd layer meaning the disc has that full capacity even if it only needs only the fraction of a CD's storage. IIRC most (if not all) Xbox 1 games are like this too.
So sure a lot of his PC games are reaching 4GB, but for DVDs to not be enough they'll have to somehow double in size over the next 4 years. Any game with that much content is probably an RPG, which can either install to the HDD (a'la FFXI) or span multiple discs (like the old PS1 FF games).
Not to mention with procedural synthesis (which AFAIK hasn't yet been used by anything on the market) games will get much smaller as they'll only be storing descriptions of items instead of full fledged models. There's something to be said for compression too. Sure most Gamecube games spanned 2 discs but because of the short space most games were heavily compressed. With lots of compression like that console games load faster because it's faster to decompress the file then transfer it raw over the DVD drive's bottleneck. I'm sure this will rear it's ugly head with the PS3 considering that they're requiring all games be pressed to BRD as part of their copy-protection measures. the discs will have so much space that most developers wont bother to compress the files (unless they're making a conscious effort to reduce loading times), add that to slow as molasses transfer speed of the 1st gen BRD drive....
I couldn't agree more, most of the popular music file formats don't even come close to the quality of CDs. I've even taken a liking to getting my music on DVD-A because of how much better that sounds over CDs... rumor has it that with BRD and HD-DVD we'll get even higher bit rate recordings.
A real innovation would be an ipod that could play music from an open and lossless format.
hmm, I see your point. Stuff like a limited amount of pipelines would definitely hinder the graphics. But as long as the software support is up to date (shader 3.0 etc) They could still employ techniques like Normal Mapping and other software based techs to bump up the perceived graphical performance. Heck the Xbox 1 has a few titles that look as good as most of the current next gen titles simply by heavily using software techniques. Chronicles of Riddick, and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory are two such titles that come to mind.
In the last gen the GC often had Xbox level graphics but specs closer to that of a PS2... I'm sure they've got something up their sleeve in terms of development tools.
The point isn't that resolution is the only important thing, the point is that if the console ONLY has to produce a low res image things like "Lighting, precision, shaders, etc " all have more resources available. Producing an image orders of magnitude higher in resolution sucks up a good majority of power differences. If producing an imagine in 1280x720 takes up 80% of the PS3s graphically power that wouldn't be used if it was only rendering in 640x480... that means that the GC only has to be 20% as powerful to compete at that resolution.
I've got an old IBM brand version of the SpaceBall... picked it up for $10 on eBay... I use Solidworks at work a lot and though it would be cool to have. once you get used to it's sensitivity it's really quite intuitive to move around the 3D object on the screen. But overall it's pretty useless, I tried seating it up to play Quake once but you hand gets tired really fast for the functions you'd normally use WASD for.
it's one of those ideas that looks good on paper but really not that great in practice. Unless they modified this thing to make it easier to nudge and hold in the linear directions... though I highly doubt it.
I think your parent was correct in saying on a 480p or less they'll look the same.
Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are HD machines. EVERY game made for the 360 and (probably) every game made for the PS3 will be programmed around a 720p (1280x720) resolution or HIGHER. that means that AA, poly count, particle effects, etc. all have to be downgraded to a point where they can pump out those graphics at that high a resolution. Similarly for the games to look THAT good they have to crank up the texture resolution as well. If you're only using all that power on a 480p set a MASSIVE portion of those console's power is just sitting dormant. The graphics don't dynamically adapt to shift their optimization to a lower resolution. In the 360s case some games are actually rendering internally at 720p and downscaling the output.
on the other hand the Wii is expected to not run any higher then 480p (640x480) which means that it does NEED all the power to crank out stuff at a high resolution and the graphics can be optimized around a low 480p output.
I forget who it was but one of the early 360 developer interviews the developer claimed that they would have 10 to 20 times the amount of graphics power to put towards the poly count, and other graphical effects if they only had to output in 480p. Considering there are a lot of games that look identical between the Xbox 1 and 360 when running in only 480p it's definitely feasible that at that resolution the Wii can compete...
Besides Nintendo is fantastic at that stuff, the GC was way underpowered compared to the Xbox 1 yet it had comparable graphics in a number of titles. Optimization is the key and from what I've heard Nintendo is the king of easy to program consoles. One PS2 game developer I spoke to claimed that his company prototypes all their games on the Gamecube and then ports to PS2, despite the fact that they don't even make GC games, it's THAT easy to program.
it varies because if you were to just play, say the bass part it'd be a pretty boring game. Not saying playing music is boring, but it is certainly repetative, especially songs on the lower end where people are just learning the game (and considering it's more of a pickup party game that's a large number of the player base). It's nice that they mix it up. Without that most song would just be...
verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge/solo, chorus
You'd be constantly repeating 2 really easy patterns with a really friggin difficult part 3/4 of the way through...