You know, with some of the recent medical advances I keep idly wondering how long it's going to be before the statement "same-sex couples can't have biological children" is no longer true. After all, there's no particular reason the stem cells used to create the artificial sperm in this procedure would have to come from a male, is there?
What you don't mention is Tycho's motivation in writing this rant against Wikipedia, as revealed by the part of the article you didn't quote: He was pissed off because they deleted some of his articles. Articles about a book series called "Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga". A book series that doesn't exist.
In other words, this very set of arguments as to why wikipedia's system "doesn't work" was prompted by an incident of wikipedia's system working. Tycho tried to post false information, and Wikipedia rejected this. And Tycho got pissy and went and complained about Wikipedia on his blog.
Now given, Tycho's false information was awesome; the ELOTH:TES stuff that Wikipedia rejected is truly hilarious, and now that it's been moved to its own wiki (where it probably should have been in the first place), it's turned into a collaborative project in its own right, as if Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" conspiracy had had as their goal to parody fantasy novels.
But it didn't belong on Wikipedia. And the incident in which it was removed from Wikipedia itself neatly refutes the complaints that the incident inspired Tycho to level against Wikipedia.
The first complaint is that "Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions... all sources of information are not of equal value... I believe there is such a thing as expertise." I don't think it's very hard to read between the lines here; we already know Tycho is pissed off because some "persistent idiot" obliterated his contributions. It's not very hard to imagine that the real issue here is that Tycho (who certainly is a person with expertise) thinks he as a source of information is of value, and the Wikipedia hivemind does not. But Tycho himself shows that the things wikipedia values are more valuable than "expertise"-- Wikipedia values facts, neutrality and whenever possible rigor, and ignores authority. If we accepted "expertise" or appeals to authority, then we'd be obligated to accept Tycho as a source of information just cuz he's a real smart person with a real popular blog. And then Wikipedia would have a series of articles about a fantasy novel franchise and ill-fated 1980s children's TV show which never existed.
Second off, Tycho issues the complaint that Wikipedia's "errors get fixed eventually" principle isn't very useful if you don't know whether the errors have been fixed yet. Simply looking at a wikipedia page, you have no way to know whether you're looking at a cleanly vetted, accurate bunch of information, or if your pageload just happened by random coincidence to fall in that 30-second gap of space between a vandal entering a statement that Ken Lay committed suicide and a watchlister rving it. This is a much more serious and substantial complaint, and one which is a serious problem for the idea of Wikipedia as an information source. The lesson to be learned here is of course that you shouldn't treat wikipedia as a primary source but rather a starting point for further information, and if the information you're taking from wikipedia is important you need to check the references like a hawk. But in the end, it still isn't a real problem-- as Tycho has shown us. After all, as Tycho found when he tried to introduce false information, that little gap of time where the Wikipedia Wave Function hasn't yet collapsed and pageloads return false information is strikingly small. This is generally not a matter of errors taking months to get fixed. It is sometimes measured in minutes or seconds. The probability of hitting at a bad moment is small enough we can effectively ignore it, unless we have some kind of ulterior motives and are just trying to make Wikipedia look bad.
You just don't know how to use their website. The page consists of several sections, which can be expanded and collapsed by clicking the "show" and "hide" links in the section title bars. Click "show" on the second section title bar (labelled "some examples") to see the list of services which are and are not permitted.
Predatory pricing is only illegal when it is done to acquire or sustain a monopoly. Toshiba is in no way a legal monopoly, whereas Microsoft is a monopoly and has been legally declared such in court.
It's kind of like how owning a gun is only illegal when a convicted felon does it. Do you complain about the injustice there?
Like a gun, it's not predatory pricing itself that's illegal. It's what you do with the predatory pricing that's illegal. Toshiba is in this case not doing anything anything in their action of selling HD-DVD players below cost which qualifies as illegal.
Problems that stick out with this map, off the top of my head:
It does not include any indication of the convoluted Sony/Nintendo/DirectX/XBox 360/Bluray/HD-DVD/Windows Media Center conflict; the DirectX vs OpenGL battle is listed as a "front" but OpenGL is depicted as coming from SGI, an irrelivant company who is literally currently in the process of filing for bankruptcy
In general lacks any sign of WMA/WMP, or the European legal issues currently related to them
In no way indicates Sun's bizarre pseudostalinesque trying-to-simultaneously-ally-with-and-fight-both- sides, -and-failing strategy as regards the GPL and Open Source
"Trusted Computing" references fail to note that Apple, who is listed as Microsoft's enemy on this chart, is now using Trusted Platform Module chips
What is interesting to me about this is that they do not seem to be charging significantly differently for an NES game than for an N64 game. I was originally expecting an N64 game on Virtual Console would cost several times as much as an NES game. Apparently that's not how it works.
I'm pretty happy with these prices, $5-$9 is about how much you would normally expect to be paying anyway for almost any SNES or Genesis game, or almost any NES game worth playing, at this point if you were to buy the cartridges used. For some of the titles that have gotten harder to find, like Kid Icarus or the original Final Fantasy, $5-$9 is an absolute steal...
Now let's just hope they offer an appropriately large selection of titles.
"Listen! We can keep them from taking away our freedoms if we just give them up willingly!"
Like "voluntary" film and comics codes of the past, the ESRB isn't a defense against game censorship. It's an instrument of game censorship. As the article says, it isn't nearly as bad an instrument of censorship as the film and comics codes of old. It remains an instrument of censorship nonetheless. Twice now perfectly normal and worthwhile games have gotten effectively banned from sale in the U.S. not because the games were particularly obscene-- they weren't, both paled before something like BMX XXX or God of War-- but because the games manaaged to inspire pressure groups to complain, and the ESRB caved like a house of cards and rerated them as AO after they had already been available some time. In theory the difference between M and AO is the difference between "sell to 17 year olds" and "sell to 18 year olds", but in practice the difference is the difference between "For sale" and "Not for sale".
And unlike attempts by legislators to ban video games they disapprove of-- attempts which all have so far eventually gotten overturned in the courts, because this nation has constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression-- when the ESRB gets something banned by rating it AO, it stays banned, because industry associations are allowed to censor expression as much as they want. As a legal, adult paying customer it is far, far more difficult to get around the ESRB's "voluntary" censorship than it is to get around the legal censorship of runaway legislators.
The defense against game censorship should be through the democratic process. This country is ours just as much as anyone elses; the democratic process belongs to gamers as much as it belongs to parents who think Wal-Mart should be responsible for parenting instead of them. One of the functions of a healthy democracy is to protect the minority from a tyranny of the majority. We need to start ensuring our democracy functions in a healthy manner.
In the meantime, if the ESRB is going to be any kind of defense against game censorship, it needs to start acting like it. So far it is serving as an instrument of the pressure groups working for game censorship far more than it is serving as a deterrent from governmental censorship. In fact, not only is the ESRB failing to serve as a check on runaway legislators-- by now it is actually providing a stepping-stone for those same legislators. Hillary Clinton's latest attempt at a video games law actually uses the ESRB ratings, in mandating ESRB enforcement by law. I can't help but wonder how all those people will feel who touted the ESRB as an "alternative" to censorship law, once [if] the ESRB becomes the censorship law?
Responding to an inquiry by Gamasutra regarding the validity of these claims, a SCEA U.S. representative responded: "At this time, that news from IGN is just speculation, and Sony has no official comment at this time. However, we will be sending out more concrete information regarding the hardware in the near future."
So... when you say "Sony addresses PS2 in PS3 rumour",
What you really mean is "Sony doesn't address PS2 in PS3 rumour", right?
If DVDs mean $50 games and blurays mean $60 games, then Microsoft must be really ripping us off, because every XBox 360 game is on a DVD and every XBox 360 game is $60.
You are judging Nintendo's launch plans against a number you picked absolutely out of thin air. Let's look at some more realistic numbers.
The Sony PS3 will launch at roughly the same time as the Wii, and 6 million units is the exact same number of units Sony says they want to ship by next March.
The XBox 360 shipped about a year before the Wii will. By the beginning of this May, it had shipped about 3.3 million units.
The Nintendo DS, the effective successor to Nintendo's enormously successful Game Boy, took about 14 months to sell 6 million units.
So: Nintendo is planning, by March, to ship about twice as many units in this console generation as the Gamecube's closest competitor has in the same period; and about the same number of units as their most successful competitor, the one who sold five times as many units as the Gamecube, will in the same period. And they're expecting these units to sell roughly 3 times as fast as Nintendo's last video game system did.
Let's ignore, for a moment, the very real question of whether it's even possible for Nintendo to manufacture more than 6 million units by March. Let's furthermore ignore the opposite and equally real question-- whether Nintendo has the option, if it becomes clear they have not been sufficiently optimistic about the Wii, of increasing that number to more than 6 million units by March. (Nintendo did in fact do exactly this with the DS-- a month or two before launch it became clear they'd understimated demand, so they rushed to increase the number of production lines and met demand just barely.)
If you compare Nintendo's launch numbers to the actual video game market, instead of comparing them to "the population of Japan", 6 million in the first few months is an extremely optimistic number-- and if Nintendo manages to meet this number in sales, it will be a major coup.
I can't get to the article. Could someone please let me know: How are they providing their internet service? 802.11? 802.16/Wimax? Something entirely other?
I mostly ask because I heavily doubt that a serious wide-coverage wireless ISP is feasible with 802.11.
Under normal circumstances, I would agree here. One of my favorite things about the Wavebird on the gamecube was that it didn't have rumble, which meant I never had to hunt for the configuration menu to turn the rumble off.
However: these are not normal circumstances.
Have you ever played a game called Wario Ware Twisted?
Wario Ware Twisted was a Game Boy game that came out last year. It is very possibly the best GBA game of all time. It also, interestingly, is probably the best glimpse we have into what the PS3 tilt controller will work like.
Wario Ware Twisted had some kind of gyroscope built into it which could both tell which way you were tilting the GBA, as well as provide rumble feedback. The point of the game was that it would provide you a bunch of tiny tasks in rapidfire succession ("cut this carrot!" "stomp on this turtle!" "dodge this rock!" etc.), give you 5 seconds to complete the task, and then immediately move on to the next one, as if someone had put an NES in a blender. The trick is, all of these microgames were played using nothing but the tilt sensor and the A button.
Because, unlike the Nintendo Wii and its remote control / 3d mouse, WWT is played on something that "feels like" a traditional controller (i.e. a GBA or DS), Wario Ware Twisted is probably actually closer to how the PS3 controller ought to work than the Wii demos that Nintendo has shown so far.
One of the surprising things about Wario Ware Twisted is that, although under normal conditions I personally consider rumble to normally be a stupid gimmick, once you slapped in the tilt sensor the rumble became absolutely necessary, and after playing Wario Ware Twisted it is very hard to imagine tilt sensing working without rumble.
This is why: part of good interface design is providing feedback. An example we see on a computer might be a button; when you click on the button, it provides feedback by visually highlighting, signalling to the user, hey, you pressed a button. That would be an example in a graphical user interface. However when you are designing a tactile interface, like a video game controller, you need to provide tactile feedback. When you press a button on a controller or a key on a keyboard, you feel the key depressing under your hand. When you move a mouse on a desk you feel the mouse dragging across the mousing surface. The point in all cases is, the user needs guidance to know, hey, that thing you did, it did something. The user can figure out what's happening even withut this guidance, but it just won't feel natural.
And part of what makes Wario Ware Twisted feel natural is the guidance of tactile feedback. Whenever the tilt sensor is active, it emits little rumble jolts every time it registers a reading. This means that when you turn the controller, it "resists" in your hand, or provides the illusion of doing so, to give the impression you are actually "turning" something. Furthermore the game is set up so that the "heavier" the thing you're controlling is, the greater the feedback. The rumble "resistance" is greater in a microgame where the controller is moving the earth than in a microgame where you are moving a fly. Meanwhile when you turn the GBA quickly the resistance comes quicker than when you turn it slowly, giving immediate feedback that you are having a greater effect.
The GBA is no harder to turn when the resistance is present, but just the feel of the thing gives you a clear idea, straight to your reflexes without any need to think about it, when I tilt the controller, is it having any effect? And how much effect is it having? The extent to which this adds to the natural feeling of the game is quite startling.
This is why, hilariously-- although there are claims that Sony took out the rumble to prevent it from interfering with the tilt control-- the Dual Shake needs rumble exactly because it has tilt control. Sony's tilt control is going to be effectively one step behind a Game Boy game released last year.
I guess I am missing something but why would HDMI not be upgradable. The standard XBOX 360 came with plain A/V cables that can be upgradable to component cables. I would assume that sony just like every other console has a special connection on the back where you have to buy a special approved cable that can have A/V, component or HDMI output.
Apples and oranges.
Component, RCA or VGA are all analog video connections.
DVI or HDMI are digital video connections.
You can convert from analog to analog pretty easy. You can convert from digital to digital pretty easy. You can get a cheap cable that converts from VGA to Component. You can get a cheap cable that converts from DVI to HDMI.
However, converting from analog to digital is an entirely different and very difficult matter. Go looking for a converter box that converts from component to DVI or from component to HDMI and you're going to be paying near a hundred dollars, and you may have to sacrifice picture quality.
The PS3, according to the SCEJ spec sheet published during E3, has a special "A/V Multi Out" connector on the back. You apparently plug a component video dongle into there. If Sony had wired the "A/V Multi Out" to provide digital data in addition to analog, you could plug in a dongle that converts to HDMI really cheap and be on your way. But they apparently didn't do this, and apparently they only provide analog. So you can get a cheap converter to component or RCA or VGA or whatever... but if you want a converter to HDMI or DVI, you are screwed forever, you have to go and spend another $600 on the HDMI output version of the PS3.
Similarly, it's going to be really cheap to upgrade that XBox 360 to component, because that's analog to analog. But the XBox 360 doesn't offer digital out, so you're not going to be able to upgrade it to DVI or HDMI without buying an entire new XBox 360 (assuming an XBox 360 with DVI or HDMI output even exists, which it doesn't.)
The really bizarre and crazy thing here is that Sony can't possibly be saving all that much money by doing this. It isn't that putting HDMI output on the cheap PS3, or putting digital information into the A/V multi out output that's already there, would be all that difficult. The only reason why all those analog-to-digital converters are so expensive is because they actually have to convert analog to digital, which is not a trivial act. When Sony is designing the PS3, though, they don't have to convert anything to anything. They've already got digital inside the box, and they actually have to convert it to analog before they can pump it out to the component video. Considering how easy it would have been to provide some mechanism that would allow a $500 PS3 to be upgraded to digital video output later (thus turning the $500 PS3 from the "broken version" into just the version that's missing a couple of bells and whistles) it's mind-boggling they are choosing to screw over their customers this way.
Shadow Hearts: Covenant already comes on two DVDs, and that's a PS2 game. Game developers are already running out of space in this generation, and in the next generation they will face an explosion in space needs as every texture, model, and video needs to be upped in resolution so it will look good on the new HDTVs.
It is my opinion that from a business standpoint, Sony's inclusion of the Blu-Ray in the PS3 is a cynical product "tying" ploy designed to use their established position in one market to benefit their tenuous position in another market.
But even if Sony's motivations are wrong, the decision was the right one. I don't expect the blu-ray movie functionality of the PS3 to be successful at market (though Sony clearly thinks it will), but I am quite sure that blu-ray is going to be a massive benefit to the PS3 as a game machine. In the HD era DVDs just aren't enough. The only really viable strategies is to take the Sony route and go for something larger-storage (even if it's worthless and betamaxy for movies) or to take Nintendo's route and say screw it, nobody owns HDTVs anyway.
In no particular order, off the top of my head, candidates are
Metal Gear Solid 4
Heavenly Sword
Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII-2
Devil May Cry 4
Virtual Fighter 5
Resistance: Fall of Man
That weird karaoke game
Now, call me crazy, but I think it's rather probable that one of these games will turn out to live up to its potential and qualify as a "must own". Just possibly. It's also possible, since the games I list above are generally in distinct genres, more than one of them may be "must have" titles which appeal to different groups. And it's even possible that someone may choose to buy a PS3 to play a game that isn't technically exclusive (such as Madden or GTA4) if they consider GTA4 a must-have and something like MGS4 a kinda-want, but don't already have anything that can play GTA4.
Now, given, the items in this list generally aren't launch titles, but the reality of modern game design is that bestseller games take a couple years to make and a next-gen system cannot possibly have a truly system-showcase game at launch. The only people who are going to be able in this new generation to have really system-showcase, system-selling, blockbuster titles right out of the gate at launch time is Nintendo, due to shrewd tactics in creating a game system that can effectively reuse the Gamecube resources they already have. Besides the Nintendo, the other systems are probably not worth buying for the first year or so after launch anyway.
It appears in my excitement I did not read the article as closely as I should have, and missed this vital section:
After a couple of hits, he's bested and a star appears. Collecting that star ends the level and the demo.
Consarn and blast, it's a star hunt. Again. Still, it may be too early to be disappointed. The level design philosophy still sounds really different. Maybe, as the hands-on suggests, it will turn out that the star is just an endpoint, the flag you lower at the end of the level. You know, as opposed to a mechanism to force you to re-enter a level you've already played three times, where a fat blue alien tells you you have to find his lost jar of mustard somewhere in the level in 48 seconds for a star.
The graphics are creative and mindbendingly absurdist, the gameplay sounds intuitive and natural, and even better-- if I understand the Gamespot hands on correctly, Mario Galaxy isn't a stupid star/shine hunt like the last two games were. The point is to just get from point A to point B, like in the 2D mario games-- meaning that the environments can be huge and expansive and there can be a wide variety of them, as opposed to Mario Sunshine where the levels were basically just entering the same 10 boxes over and over to do different little errands in them. I am so happy about this, I cannot wait to play this game. I hope it is a launch title.
Microsoft already has lots of decent games while Sony has almost none in their lineup.
Uh... Microsoft's got, like, a handful of PC ports and one exclusive fighting game. On the horizon the best they have to offer is more PC ports and some sequels to XBox games. They are really not in a good position. Sony doesn't have anything now-- because they haven't released a console yet. Meanwhile in the pipeline Sony has two Final Fantasy games, Virtua Fighter, the same GTA game the XBox 360 is getting, Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavenly Sword... do I really need to go on? Because that's just off the top of my head, and that spans five genres and every one of those except Heavenly Sword is a proven franchise.
I don't see much of anything to be excited about about the PS3 games that we'll be seeing this fall, but I can't imagine anyone with any sense buying a Sony console at launch anyway (especially not at these prices). Meanwhile this fall the PS2 is getting God of War 2 and Final Fantasy 12, while the XBox 360 is getting... I don't know, I think it's an Unreal 3 spinoff or something? The PS2 is absolutely going to be a hotter console this Christmas than either the PS3 or the XBox 360. I don't know if that's good for Sony or not. But it definitely doesn't make this a good year for Microsoft.
Microsoft basically has two things going for them right now:
They got out the gate first, and that allows them to present the appearance of being ahead
People on the internet want Sony to fail, and assume that the enemy of their enemy is their friend.
Advantage #1 will evaporate with simple time, and take with it everything along the lines of "The XBox has games, Sony doesn't".
Advantage #2 will not effect the wider market; it will help Nintendo more than it helps Microsoft (because Nintendo, you see, has games in genres in addition to first person shooters); and even that may (or may not) go away once people start trying to rationalize their desire for Final Fantasy 13.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, with some of the recent medical advances I keep idly wondering how long it's going to be before the statement "same-sex couples can't have biological children" is no longer true. After all, there's no particular reason the stem cells used to create the artificial sperm in this procedure would have to come from a male, is there?
What you don't mention is Tycho's motivation in writing this rant against Wikipedia, as revealed by the part of the article you didn't quote: He was pissed off because they deleted some of his articles. Articles about a book series called "Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga". A book series that doesn't exist.
In other words, this very set of arguments as to why wikipedia's system "doesn't work" was prompted by an incident of wikipedia's system working. Tycho tried to post false information, and Wikipedia rejected this. And Tycho got pissy and went and complained about Wikipedia on his blog.
Now given, Tycho's false information was awesome; the ELOTH:TES stuff that Wikipedia rejected is truly hilarious, and now that it's been moved to its own wiki (where it probably should have been in the first place), it's turned into a collaborative project in its own right, as if Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" conspiracy had had as their goal to parody fantasy novels.
But it didn't belong on Wikipedia. And the incident in which it was removed from Wikipedia itself neatly refutes the complaints that the incident inspired Tycho to level against Wikipedia.
The first complaint is that "Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions... all sources of information are not of equal value... I believe there is such a thing as expertise." I don't think it's very hard to read between the lines here; we already know Tycho is pissed off because some "persistent idiot" obliterated his contributions. It's not very hard to imagine that the real issue here is that Tycho (who certainly is a person with expertise) thinks he as a source of information is of value, and the Wikipedia hivemind does not. But Tycho himself shows that the things wikipedia values are more valuable than "expertise"-- Wikipedia values facts, neutrality and whenever possible rigor, and ignores authority. If we accepted "expertise" or appeals to authority, then we'd be obligated to accept Tycho as a source of information just cuz he's a real smart person with a real popular blog. And then Wikipedia would have a series of articles about a fantasy novel franchise and ill-fated 1980s children's TV show which never existed.
Second off, Tycho issues the complaint that Wikipedia's "errors get fixed eventually" principle isn't very useful if you don't know whether the errors have been fixed yet. Simply looking at a wikipedia page, you have no way to know whether you're looking at a cleanly vetted, accurate bunch of information, or if your pageload just happened by random coincidence to fall in that 30-second gap of space between a vandal entering a statement that Ken Lay committed suicide and a watchlister rving it. This is a much more serious and substantial complaint, and one which is a serious problem for the idea of Wikipedia as an information source. The lesson to be learned here is of course that you shouldn't treat wikipedia as a primary source but rather a starting point for further information, and if the information you're taking from wikipedia is important you need to check the references like a hawk. But in the end, it still isn't a real problem-- as Tycho has shown us. After all, as Tycho found when he tried to introduce false information, that little gap of time where the Wikipedia Wave Function hasn't yet collapsed and pageloads return false information is strikingly small. This is generally not a matter of errors taking months to get fixed. It is sometimes measured in minutes or seconds. The probability of hitting at a bad moment is small enough we can effectively ignore it, unless we have some kind of ulterior motives and are just trying to make Wikipedia look bad.
The latest confirmed by third party retail sales trackers puts the 360 at:
130k in Japan, 1.6 million in the US, 700k in Europe
Hi,
What is your source on these numbers?
You just don't know how to use their website. The page consists of several sections, which can be expanded and collapsed by clicking the "show" and "hide" links in the section title bars. Click "show" on the second section title bar (labelled "some examples") to see the list of services which are and are not permitted.
Predatory pricing is only illegal when it is done to acquire or sustain a monopoly. Toshiba is in no way a legal monopoly, whereas Microsoft is a monopoly and has been legally declared such in court.
It's kind of like how owning a gun is only illegal when a convicted felon does it. Do you complain about the injustice there?
Like a gun, it's not predatory pricing itself that's illegal. It's what you do with the predatory pricing that's illegal. Toshiba is in this case not doing anything anything in their action of selling HD-DVD players below cost which qualifies as illegal.
Can this drive burn video blu-ray discs capable of being played back on a blu-ray video drive?
I love that this is presented as a serious piece of news!
No... actually it was posted on Slashdot
What is interesting to me about this is that they do not seem to be charging significantly differently for an NES game than for an N64 game. I was originally expecting an N64 game on Virtual Console would cost several times as much as an NES game. Apparently that's not how it works.
I'm pretty happy with these prices, $5-$9 is about how much you would normally expect to be paying anyway for almost any SNES or Genesis game, or almost any NES game worth playing, at this point if you were to buy the cartridges used. For some of the titles that have gotten harder to find, like Kid Icarus or the original Final Fantasy, $5-$9 is an absolute steal...
Now let's just hope they offer an appropriately large selection of titles.
"Listen! We can keep them from taking away our freedoms if we just give them up willingly!"
Like "voluntary" film and comics codes of the past, the ESRB isn't a defense against game censorship. It's an instrument of game censorship. As the article says, it isn't nearly as bad an instrument of censorship as the film and comics codes of old. It remains an instrument of censorship nonetheless. Twice now perfectly normal and worthwhile games have gotten effectively banned from sale in the U.S. not because the games were particularly obscene-- they weren't, both paled before something like BMX XXX or God of War-- but because the games manaaged to inspire pressure groups to complain, and the ESRB caved like a house of cards and rerated them as AO after they had already been available some time. In theory the difference between M and AO is the difference between "sell to 17 year olds" and "sell to 18 year olds", but in practice the difference is the difference between "For sale" and "Not for sale".
And unlike attempts by legislators to ban video games they disapprove of-- attempts which all have so far eventually gotten overturned in the courts, because this nation has constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression-- when the ESRB gets something banned by rating it AO, it stays banned, because industry associations are allowed to censor expression as much as they want. As a legal, adult paying customer it is far, far more difficult to get around the ESRB's "voluntary" censorship than it is to get around the legal censorship of runaway legislators.
The defense against game censorship should be through the democratic process. This country is ours just as much as anyone elses; the democratic process belongs to gamers as much as it belongs to parents who think Wal-Mart should be responsible for parenting instead of them. One of the functions of a healthy democracy is to protect the minority from a tyranny of the majority. We need to start ensuring our democracy functions in a healthy manner.
In the meantime, if the ESRB is going to be any kind of defense against game censorship, it needs to start acting like it. So far it is serving as an instrument of the pressure groups working for game censorship far more than it is serving as a deterrent from governmental censorship. In fact, not only is the ESRB failing to serve as a check on runaway legislators-- by now it is actually providing a stepping-stone for those same legislators. Hillary Clinton's latest attempt at a video games law actually uses the ESRB ratings, in mandating ESRB enforcement by law. I can't help but wonder how all those people will feel who touted the ESRB as an "alternative" to censorship law, once [if] the ESRB becomes the censorship law?
Sony has repeatedly confirmed that the PS3 backward compatibility includes PS2 and PS1 games.
Unfortunately, they haven't confirmed this means all PS1 and PS2 games.
They also, keep in mind, haven't confirmed or even commented on the rumors in this article...
What you really mean is "Sony doesn't address PS2 in PS3 rumour", right?
DVDs are the correct thing to compare to, as they are the format the other video game systems are using.
HD-DVD is not interesting or important at all in this context, because it is just a movie format. No one is using HD-DVDs to play console games on.
$60 vs. $50 dollars, DVD is the obvious choice at retail.
What on earth are you talking about?
If DVDs mean $50 games and blurays mean $60 games, then Microsoft must be really ripping us off, because every XBox 360 game is on a DVD and every XBox 360 game is $60.
You are judging Nintendo's launch plans against a number you picked absolutely out of thin air. Let's look at some more realistic numbers.
The Sony PS3 will launch at roughly the same time as the Wii, and 6 million units is the exact same number of units Sony says they want to ship by next March.
The XBox 360 shipped about a year before the Wii will. By the beginning of this May, it had shipped about 3.3 million units.
The Nintendo DS, the effective successor to Nintendo's enormously successful Game Boy, took about 14 months to sell 6 million units.
So: Nintendo is planning, by March, to ship about twice as many units in this console generation as the Gamecube's closest competitor has in the same period; and about the same number of units as their most successful competitor, the one who sold five times as many units as the Gamecube, will in the same period. And they're expecting these units to sell roughly 3 times as fast as Nintendo's last video game system did.
Let's ignore, for a moment, the very real question of whether it's even possible for Nintendo to manufacture more than 6 million units by March. Let's furthermore ignore the opposite and equally real question-- whether Nintendo has the option, if it becomes clear they have not been sufficiently optimistic about the Wii, of increasing that number to more than 6 million units by March. (Nintendo did in fact do exactly this with the DS-- a month or two before launch it became clear they'd understimated demand, so they rushed to increase the number of production lines and met demand just barely.)
If you compare Nintendo's launch numbers to the actual video game market, instead of comparing them to "the population of Japan", 6 million in the first few months is an extremely optimistic number-- and if Nintendo manages to meet this number in sales, it will be a major coup.
I can't get to the article. Could someone please let me know: How are they providing their internet service? 802.11? 802.16/Wimax? Something entirely other?
I mostly ask because I heavily doubt that a serious wide-coverage wireless ISP is feasible with 802.11.
That is very interesting, I did not know that.
Under normal circumstances, I would agree here. One of my favorite things about the Wavebird on the gamecube was that it didn't have rumble, which meant I never had to hunt for the configuration menu to turn the rumble off.
However: these are not normal circumstances.
Have you ever played a game called Wario Ware Twisted?
Wario Ware Twisted was a Game Boy game that came out last year. It is very possibly the best GBA game of all time. It also, interestingly, is probably the best glimpse we have into what the PS3 tilt controller will work like.
Wario Ware Twisted had some kind of gyroscope built into it which could both tell which way you were tilting the GBA, as well as provide rumble feedback. The point of the game was that it would provide you a bunch of tiny tasks in rapidfire succession ("cut this carrot!" "stomp on this turtle!" "dodge this rock!" etc.), give you 5 seconds to complete the task, and then immediately move on to the next one, as if someone had put an NES in a blender. The trick is, all of these microgames were played using nothing but the tilt sensor and the A button.
Because, unlike the Nintendo Wii and its remote control / 3d mouse, WWT is played on something that "feels like" a traditional controller (i.e. a GBA or DS), Wario Ware Twisted is probably actually closer to how the PS3 controller ought to work than the Wii demos that Nintendo has shown so far.
One of the surprising things about Wario Ware Twisted is that, although under normal conditions I personally consider rumble to normally be a stupid gimmick, once you slapped in the tilt sensor the rumble became absolutely necessary, and after playing Wario Ware Twisted it is very hard to imagine tilt sensing working without rumble.
This is why: part of good interface design is providing feedback. An example we see on a computer might be a button; when you click on the button, it provides feedback by visually highlighting, signalling to the user, hey, you pressed a button. That would be an example in a graphical user interface. However when you are designing a tactile interface, like a video game controller, you need to provide tactile feedback. When you press a button on a controller or a key on a keyboard, you feel the key depressing under your hand. When you move a mouse on a desk you feel the mouse dragging across the mousing surface. The point in all cases is, the user needs guidance to know, hey, that thing you did, it did something. The user can figure out what's happening even withut this guidance, but it just won't feel natural.
And part of what makes Wario Ware Twisted feel natural is the guidance of tactile feedback. Whenever the tilt sensor is active, it emits little rumble jolts every time it registers a reading. This means that when you turn the controller, it "resists" in your hand, or provides the illusion of doing so, to give the impression you are actually "turning" something. Furthermore the game is set up so that the "heavier" the thing you're controlling is, the greater the feedback. The rumble "resistance" is greater in a microgame where the controller is moving the earth than in a microgame where you are moving a fly. Meanwhile when you turn the GBA quickly the resistance comes quicker than when you turn it slowly, giving immediate feedback that you are having a greater effect.
The GBA is no harder to turn when the resistance is present, but just the feel of the thing gives you a clear idea, straight to your reflexes without any need to think about it, when I tilt the controller, is it having any effect? And how much effect is it having? The extent to which this adds to the natural feeling of the game is quite startling.
This is why, hilariously-- although there are claims that Sony took out the rumble to prevent it from interfering with the tilt control-- the Dual Shake needs rumble exactly because it has tilt control. Sony's tilt control is going to be effectively one step behind a Game Boy game released last year.
I guess I am missing something but why would HDMI not be upgradable. The standard XBOX 360 came with plain A/V cables that can be upgradable to component cables. I would assume that sony just like every other console has a special connection on the back where you have to buy a special approved cable that can have A/V, component or HDMI output.
Apples and oranges.
Component, RCA or VGA are all analog video connections.
DVI or HDMI are digital video connections.
You can convert from analog to analog pretty easy. You can convert from digital to digital pretty easy. You can get a cheap cable that converts from VGA to Component. You can get a cheap cable that converts from DVI to HDMI.
However, converting from analog to digital is an entirely different and very difficult matter. Go looking for a converter box that converts from component to DVI or from component to HDMI and you're going to be paying near a hundred dollars, and you may have to sacrifice picture quality.
The PS3, according to the SCEJ spec sheet published during E3, has a special "A/V Multi Out" connector on the back. You apparently plug a component video dongle into there. If Sony had wired the "A/V Multi Out" to provide digital data in addition to analog, you could plug in a dongle that converts to HDMI really cheap and be on your way. But they apparently didn't do this, and apparently they only provide analog. So you can get a cheap converter to component or RCA or VGA or whatever... but if you want a converter to HDMI or DVI, you are screwed forever, you have to go and spend another $600 on the HDMI output version of the PS3.
Similarly, it's going to be really cheap to upgrade that XBox 360 to component, because that's analog to analog. But the XBox 360 doesn't offer digital out, so you're not going to be able to upgrade it to DVI or HDMI without buying an entire new XBox 360 (assuming an XBox 360 with DVI or HDMI output even exists, which it doesn't.)
The really bizarre and crazy thing here is that Sony can't possibly be saving all that much money by doing this. It isn't that putting HDMI output on the cheap PS3, or putting digital information into the A/V multi out output that's already there, would be all that difficult. The only reason why all those analog-to-digital converters are so expensive is because they actually have to convert analog to digital, which is not a trivial act. When Sony is designing the PS3, though, they don't have to convert anything to anything. They've already got digital inside the box, and they actually have to convert it to analog before they can pump it out to the component video. Considering how easy it would have been to provide some mechanism that would allow a $500 PS3 to be upgraded to digital video output later (thus turning the $500 PS3 from the "broken version" into just the version that's missing a couple of bells and whistles) it's mind-boggling they are choosing to screw over their customers this way.
Shadow Hearts: Covenant already comes on two DVDs, and that's a PS2 game. Game developers are already running out of space in this generation, and in the next generation they will face an explosion in space needs as every texture, model, and video needs to be upped in resolution so it will look good on the new HDTVs.
It is my opinion that from a business standpoint, Sony's inclusion of the Blu-Ray in the PS3 is a cynical product "tying" ploy designed to use their established position in one market to benefit their tenuous position in another market.
But even if Sony's motivations are wrong, the decision was the right one. I don't expect the blu-ray movie functionality of the PS3 to be successful at market (though Sony clearly thinks it will), but I am quite sure that blu-ray is going to be a massive benefit to the PS3 as a game machine. In the HD era DVDs just aren't enough. The only really viable strategies is to take the Sony route and go for something larger-storage (even if it's worthless and betamaxy for movies) or to take Nintendo's route and say screw it, nobody owns HDTVs anyway.
Now, call me crazy, but I think it's rather probable that one of these games will turn out to live up to its potential and qualify as a "must own". Just possibly. It's also possible, since the games I list above are generally in distinct genres, more than one of them may be "must have" titles which appeal to different groups. And it's even possible that someone may choose to buy a PS3 to play a game that isn't technically exclusive (such as Madden or GTA4) if they consider GTA4 a must-have and something like MGS4 a kinda-want, but don't already have anything that can play GTA4.
Now, given, the items in this list generally aren't launch titles, but the reality of modern game design is that bestseller games take a couple years to make and a next-gen system cannot possibly have a truly system-showcase game at launch. The only people who are going to be able in this new generation to have really system-showcase, system-selling, blockbuster titles right out of the gate at launch time is Nintendo, due to shrewd tactics in creating a game system that can effectively reuse the Gamecube resources they already have. Besides the Nintendo, the other systems are probably not worth buying for the first year or so after launch anyway.
Leaking classified information is a crime.
Unless the White House does it, you mean?
Not linked from this story are hands on reports on Mario Galaxy from the E3 floor! And here are some photos from the E3 demo stations. This is probably the most exciting thing to come out of this entire E3, this game looks amazing.
The graphics are creative and mindbendingly absurdist, the gameplay sounds intuitive and natural, and even better-- if I understand the Gamespot hands on correctly, Mario Galaxy isn't a stupid star/shine hunt like the last two games were. The point is to just get from point A to point B, like in the 2D mario games-- meaning that the environments can be huge and expansive and there can be a wide variety of them, as opposed to Mario Sunshine where the levels were basically just entering the same 10 boxes over and over to do different little errands in them. I am so happy about this, I cannot wait to play this game. I hope it is a launch title.
Uh... Microsoft's got, like, a handful of PC ports and one exclusive fighting game. On the horizon the best they have to offer is more PC ports and some sequels to XBox games. They are really not in a good position. Sony doesn't have anything now-- because they haven't released a console yet. Meanwhile in the pipeline Sony has two Final Fantasy games, Virtua Fighter, the same GTA game the XBox 360 is getting, Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavenly Sword... do I really need to go on? Because that's just off the top of my head, and that spans five genres and every one of those except Heavenly Sword is a proven franchise.
I don't see much of anything to be excited about about the PS3 games that we'll be seeing this fall, but I can't imagine anyone with any sense buying a Sony console at launch anyway (especially not at these prices). Meanwhile this fall the PS2 is getting God of War 2 and Final Fantasy 12, while the XBox 360 is getting... I don't know, I think it's an Unreal 3 spinoff or something? The PS2 is absolutely going to be a hotter console this Christmas than either the PS3 or the XBox 360. I don't know if that's good for Sony or not. But it definitely doesn't make this a good year for Microsoft.
Microsoft basically has two things going for them right now:
Advantage #1 will evaporate with simple time, and take with it everything along the lines of "The XBox has games, Sony doesn't".
Advantage #2 will not effect the wider market; it will help Nintendo more than it helps Microsoft (because Nintendo, you see, has games in genres in addition to first person shooters); and even that may (or may not) go away once people start trying to rationalize their desire for Final Fantasy 13.