f13.net

I picked up a PS3, surprise.

Go ahead, grill me. I'll have something up in about a week - like I did for the 360 and PSP.

Things I can say right off hand:

1. Haven't opened Ridge Racer 7 yet.

2. Weird stuff going on with Gundam. Think I got a bad press since the PS3 itself has been flawless with everything else. I might return it, which would sabotage some plans I had. Seriously, I don't mind owning games of any quality, but I mind when that game doesn't work right.

3. Genji and Resistance opinions will be saved for the review.

4. Blu-Ray is weird. I have a _good_ tv that maxes out at 1080i. I run everything on it in 720p though since the PS3 doesn't output 1080i. Well, the option is there, but the drivers must be fucked up or something. I'm sure it will be fixed.

5. The controller is pretty rad. I like it being light, I never gave two shits about rumble. But more on this later. The games that launched with the PS3 show how much the loss of rumble changes games - and how much I still don't care.

6. The download service. Heh. "Download service." What a cute thing to call it.

7. XMB (the PS3 GUI) is fucking awesome. I like it more than the other 2 (wii and 360). What failed on the PSP works amazingly well on the PS3. But uhhhhhhh, I guess that means I really have to explain #6 above.

8. My username on it is "schild."

9. PS3 homebrew. I'm sure at least one person is wondering about this after reading stories about removable harddrives and the "Install Other OS" button under settings (dead serious).

10. Worth $600? I honestly can't answer that until I finish a game and watch the 4 movies I picked up (including Talladega Nights, the packin). The other 3 being Fifth Element, Silent Hill, and A Knight's Tale.

I'll make one comment now on A Knight's Tale - Goddamn. The color depth on blu-ray is just fucking amazing. Also, you don't notice it until there's a blurry object in the foreground and the camera is focused on something further away - but hi-def movies are the fucking future. Given the stable of companies supporting blu-ray, I'm damn near tempted to trade in about 200-300 action dvds. Anyway, more later.

So, go ahead, if you want a quick opinion, I'll give it. If there's something you'd like me to check, I'll do that.

Only two rule: Don't ask me about 5.1 sound. You've seen the reports - optical does not play nice with HDMI. I'm using HDMI. The other rule - don't ask me to compare the available games to the games on the 360. The 360 has been out for a year. I'm not buying Call of Duty 3 or Sonic for both systems.

Is that universal across all games or just Sony stuff?

Also, you should have taken "TVCasualty" while you had the chance.

It's universal. You can make as many accounts as you want. I may take a handful of good names.

I keep thinking "wow, it's like a huge PSP!"
I've noticed a few fun features about the XMB UI:
- It lets you rip CDs to a couple different formats (mp3, aac, etc)
- You can copy ripped CD audio to USB mass storage devices
- You can copy savegames to/from USB mass storage devices
- It only recognizes FAT formatted USB devices (Does not like NTFS)


I went with "Quinton" for some reason.

The usernames seem to be universal across all regions, but the language you have chosen when you create the account determines what version of the online store you see.  My "Zaphod" username was created on the jp ps3 before the us online service was ready -- it sees slightly different demo/trailer downloads, etc.


Some homebrew babbling here:  http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=8668.0

I have FC5 installed on my PS3, though I haven't spent much time mucking around with it.  I'm a little bummed about the lack of RSX support (beyond framebuffer mode) at the moment.  I do plan on trying to get VLC running and seeing how this thing works for home theatre stuff (maybe replace the mac mini for video playback).


We used HDMI with a projector and optical 5.1 at the office last night.  The optical was a little cranky -- once after checking out some bluray stuff and then launching Resistance, we had no audio until we power cycled the PS3. 

Resistance is pretty damn fun with 4 players in split-screen mode.  4 way split screen on a nice 1080p projector is pretty awesome.  I'm not much of a FPS player, but enjoyed running around blasting my co-workers.

I've played a little of the single player Resistance and am reminded that 1. I am pretty awful at FPS and 2. I am even more awful at FPS using a ps3 controller.  I do love the controller though.

-Q

Here's a question -- any luck with scaling on PS2 titles?

I was really hoping that PS3 would improve the way older titles look on the HDTV.  Component 480i/p into my 720p samsung DLP gives me stuff that just doesn't look so hot.  Sadly the PS3 does no internal upscaling so I remain that the mercy of the TV's scaler and 480p PS2 content on PS3 via HDMI actually seems to look a little *worse* than on component from the PS2.

I remain bummed that in some ways PS2 content looked better on my old 27" trinitron than on the (in all other ways) nicer DLP.

-Q

As I've said, I'm running HDMI. Right now the PS3 doesn't do shit to PS2 titles. It's really a goddamn shame you can't go in and manually set the PS2 settings. Right now everything backwards runs at 480i. Oh, and it looks like it's run through a composite cable. My opinion on this sort of shit - if you can't do it right, don't do it at all (360 backwards compatibility, I'm looking at you). On the other hand, the memory card system is fucking brilliant. I made memory cards for each of the big companies on my HDD (capcom, konami, etc).

I'm sure they'll fix the 480i thing soon. Also, PS2 component cables work with the PS3.

The memory card system is great.  Being able to back it up easily to usb drive is a win.  I was worried we might end up with some kind of awful roach motel for savegames.   I can see the HDD filling up pretty quickly with a lot of games grabbing 150-250MB for cache or whatnot.  Having the HDD standard so games can rely on this is total win though.

Current list of minor gripes / feature requests:
- don't make me have to muck with the controller every time I start a game (I seem to have to hit that PS button an awful lot)
- do something about ps2 content scaling: sony's insane library of older titles is a big selling point for them and this is a chance to give people another reason to upgrade
- let me mount nfs/samba/whatever shares from the NAS and play music and movies / copy savegames to them

Did you get a 60GB unit?  I've heard that the PSP remote access stuff only works with the units with built-in 802.11, but it's not clear if that's even available yet.

-Q

Can you truely justify the kind of prices they are charging for BD movies? They're like $50, right? Seems like a lot when you can get the 'normal" version for less than half the price.

Nevermind, Schild is crazy about this sort of thing; Pointless question.

schild, have you hit this issue (http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/15/720p-ps3-games-downscale-on-older-hd-sets/)?

What can I say about F13?  It's really my favorite website in the entire universe!  I love the irreverent banter and sly wit these keyboard jockeys produce.  And I especially love the staff, they're AWESOME.

So, in essence, you are saying:

"The console UI is awesome, I got 1 good movie to watch, 1/4th of my games dont work, the sound doesnt work, the HD doesnt work to the fullest, and I spent $800"

Let me rush out and get one quick.

You're sounding more and more like a sectarian than a gamer, Morpheind.  :wink:

Nah, I just have a problem with PS3. Costs way to much, and offers way to little. Also, I dont think you should be the one to talk. You dont even like gaming. :-D

Lol, say what?

So all those times we've played games together, and with Righ, too, Stray... you were what?  punking us?   :x

I am terribly picky, I admit. Usually with just mmo's though.

But of course....That's not gaming anyways.

I have a real question.  I am a little confused about what I read.  I do not have HDMI on my TV, just component.  With the PS2 cable and optical sound, what sort of look and sound will I get?  Something less than 100% would be bothersome.  I mean for both PS2 and PS3 games.

They're $14-29 dollars. It's not a pointless question when you have the facts ENTIRELY wrong. They're cheaper than DVDs when DVDs first came out (on average).


No, my set does 720p just fine. But, it fucks up the PS2 thing. You've heard reports about PS2 stuff looking better on the PS2. That's because the PS3 isn't outputting through HDMI or Component when the PS2 shit is enabled at 480p. It's not anti-aliasing either. In other words. Man, PS2 games suck balls on it.


I'm just gonna rip this apart. The HD does work to the fullest because my tv supports 720p. Considering the PS2 never output "HD," I can't claim otherwise. I like all 4 movies I got. What's wrong with popcorn flicks? I'd say they're the best thing for hi-def. You think I give a shit about watching Glengarry Glen Ross or Seven Samurai remastared in hi-def? Get real. As for 1/4 of my games not working - did you notice what the game was? Gundam. Put out by Bandai. I should've known better from the beginning. Bandai does dicky jobs with everything. The sound on everything else is flawless. And the sound on Blu-Ray shit is light years beyond DVDs. It's sooooo crisp.


I used component cables with my 360. Looks incredible. Sure, I upgraded to VGA, but if I didn't have that option I would've been fine with component. I'd say the same goes for the PS3. Assuming your TV supports 720p that is.

Here's my final comment on the hi-def wankering surrounding the system right now. And I'll reiterate this in the article.

1080i is listed as supported. 1080i looks exactly like 480p though. It seems as though someone at Sony just fucked up when they were writing the code for that shit. It seems like a super easy fix and I'm sure it'll come down the pipe soon. Anything (and I mean ANYTHING) that can output 480i-1080p can support 1080i. But more often than not, those things output at 1080i, instead of 480p which is what the PS3 is doing. I'd go as far to say "by mistake."


Having played Genji 2, ripped some MP3s, tooled around with the UI, read a bit more about homebrew and watched a few more movies - I have this to say: I disagree with what you said.

Is it better than the 360? I'll save that for the article.

Somehow I get the idea that you value your money differently from the rest of us.

You're only just catching on to that?

Ed: Not to mention Schild's huge blind spot for all things Sony.

Uh, or I like gaming more than the rest of you.

Blue-Ray Movies != gaming.

No, you have completely different valuations of things when it comes to games, and to more specifically Sony.  PSP, PS3,  same hype different system.  It just takes knowing how to convert our value stick to yours.  :-D

One thing to watch out for - the PS3 is a Blu-ray device that supports HDCP. HDCP only 'functions' over newer DVI and HDMI connectors. If you're not going to be using the PS3's HDMI output and you're using an HDTV and you're planning on using the PS3 as your main Blu-ray player, you may want to think twice.

While there's an informal agreement to not use it in the 'immediate future', HDCP-enabled players will downsample all content flagged with the Image Constraint Token (probably will be movies, mostly - I doubt games care about it) if not transmitted over DVI or HDMI to a HDCP-enabled television. (The downsampling is to about 960x540, progressive-mode.)

We're all seeing different things. Recently, I thought Schild was being staunchly supportive of the 360 (not that there's anything wrong with that). Now he's a Sony fanboi, simply because he likes the PS3. Go figure.

I'm a gaming fanboi. If a system gives me even the slightest reason to own it, I'll get it. Sooner rather than later. I already have a problem having too many games to play them all. If I waited to play them when prices dropped, I'd never get through half of what I get through now.

Or maybe you just saw some different prices? The couple stupid movies we have at GameStop, such as Ice Age, were $40+.

Yes, Gamestop is getting a handful of movies in and gouging customers on them. Not that it matters since they don't have any PS3s to sell. Target had a number of movies for $14.99 this week, as did Fry's. The average price I've seen though is $19.99-$24.99.

I don't think he's a fanboi or anything.  I just get the idea that money generally isn't an issue for him so anything he buys that doesn't outright suck is worth the purchase.  Those of us with less disposable income generally have to be more picky, regardless of how much any of us loves gaming.  This isn't a criticism of Schild or anything mind you.  It's just when I read that playing Genji 2 and watching A Knight's Tale in HD justify the purchase of a PS3, I have to remind myself where he's coming from.

Maybe I wasn't clear on how much I fucking love Genji. It's probably one of my favorite Sony exclusive licenses.

Ok, that's more realistic. I stand corrected. I don't normally shop at Target, and Fry's does not exist here (Not that I ever go shopping for movies anyway).

Sounds to me like you just agreed with me.

Basically this whole thread boils down to, if your a raging fanboy who will spend money on anything gaming related, get PS3, for the rest of us, its not worth it.

As to schild being a raging Sony fanboy, I think its more of a raging console fanboy. And it always comes out with a new console. Remember the major Xbox 360 fanboyishness last November? I dont disagree that the Xbox360 is a great console, but at the release date it also wasnt worth owning. It took at least 6 months for there to be enough games to make it a worthwhile purchase for most people. I think Ps3 will also be a good system, but defenetly not a rush out and buy on release day system.

What I would like is for some one who is not blinded by "ohhh shiney" to give a review on it.

*Edit* Isnt Genji the game thats getting ripped apart by the reviewers right now?

It sucks rich boys balls.  You can take my word that I'm not blinded by the shiny at all.  I don't even have one, that's how fair my five word reveiw is!!

One of several.  Of the exclusives, the only PS3 games that didn't get ripped apart are Ridge Racer and Resistance, with Gundam getting the worst reviews out of the whole lineup.

How is the new Tony Hawk on PS3?

I just don't get all the PS3-love that I'm seeing around the 'net.  There simply isn't a "must-have" game available for it right now to justify not only the expensive price, but all of the bullshit one has to go through in order to get one.  It seems like the early adopters are just so happy to have actually acquired one, that they only need the hardware specs, fun-to-fiddle-with GUI, and Blu-Ray support to be so over-enthused with their purchase.

And about Blu-Ray... I wish I could give a damn about it, but I don't.  I'd be lying if I said that I was just throughly disappointed with the quality of films on DVDs.  It's not like we're jumping from VHS here.

*shrugs*

Yeah, it's neat but the launch titles are typical launch titles: rather uninteresting to me.  The only reason I didn't wait until next year to pick one up was to muck around with the linux side of the world and maybe  "enjoy the shiny" a little.  If they had done a decent job of upscaling/postprocessing for ps1/ps2 video out over HDMI, I would have wanted one just so my ps1/ps2 titles looked nicer on the hdtv, while I waited for some native titles that grabbed me.

Fun to play with, but I wouldn't stand in a line overnight in the rain or pay $2500 on ebay for one or whathaveyou.  Of course I feel that way about just about anything.

- Q

Don't understand the PS3 love? I don't understand the Wii love. I'm actually picking one up, I just traded in a ton of movies and got 30% more (for action movies that are already out or coming out on Blu-Ray). So I'm basically getting it for shit I paid for a few years ago.

Here's Nintendo's release list through March:
Wii
January 15th - WarioWare: Smooth Moves (Japan will have this one already at the launch of the Wii)
January 15th - Wii Play
March 5th - Mario Party 8 (developed by Hudson Soft)


WTG. Despite buying one on Launch day for well, Zelda and Trauma Center and Elebits (which got delayed til Dec 20th), this is pretty weak. This means Super Mario Galaxy isn't out til god knows when and MP3 Corruption isn't even on the radar.

Just saying, there's more PS3 hate than there is Ninty hate and there's less PS3 love than there is Ninty love around the net right now.

As for console fanboi? What? I've already admitted I'm a gaming fanboi, and if you saw my PC Setup (when it's clean), you'd understand that it doesn't matter what the gaming format is. I owned a Lynx and Jaguar for fucks sake. And I made my mom buy a WAY overpriced 1st gen CDRom so I could play Journeyman Project. If you're gonna bash, at least bash for the right things.

PS3 has a $600 pricetag, Wii is only $250.

So? You really can't compare the two systems.

Which does help make it easier to justify buying the Wii for one or two games.  I picked up a gamecube for Zelda and Pikmin and later grabbed a copy of Ikaruga.  I have a whole pile of games for the PS2.  I fully expect the same situation to exist with the Wii and PS3.

Also, everyone seems to live throwing around the $600 price, but for $500 you lack only 802.11, some extra drive space, and a builtin memory card reader -- none of which I needed.  That's not to say it doesn't cost twice what a Wii does, obviously, but it's not like the xbox360 (where I'm told the Core system without the HDD would be a huge mistake to buy).

I guess I'm just banking on PS3 to have the most titles I'm interested in in this generation, similar to the situation with PS2 in the last generation.  I'll quite likely grab a Wii to see what all the fuss is about and play yet another retelling of the zelda story and am unlikely to buy an xbox.

- Q

As far as specs go, no, you cannot. The pricetag is still a factor.

If you aren't a Sony fanboi, and don't have a 360, I hear Amazon is going to sell the 360 core unit for $100 in a couple of weeks.

For a lot of people, definitely.  I think Nintendo is going to move an ungodly number of Wiis this holiday season -- cheaper, more available, funky new controller thing, yet another Zelda game.  Backward compatibility with GC is a nice bonus too.  This is a first for Nintendo, no?

- Q

That'd be pretty nutty.  Maybe somebody at Microsoft decided that they need to try to lose as much money on 360 as Sony is losing on ps3.  I can't imagine BOM being anywhere near $100 on even the Core xbox360.  Doing another crazy subsidized pricecut when you're already cheaper and more available than the competition would smell an awful lot like fear, I'd think.

EDIT: Or, wait... maybe it's the Wii they're scared of.  But that makes even less sense.  I'd think the likelyhood of somebody who wants a Wii buying an xbox360 instead is about the same as them buying a ps3 instead: almost none.  Sure a $100 xbox360 core would be cheaper than a Wii, but I just can't believe that'd successfully steal any significant part of Nintendo's market.  Just as xbox lacks the kind of ps content I want, it lacks the kind of nintendo content that somebody buying a wii wants...

- Q

The pic that was posted by Sky in the other thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=8639.msg241146#msg241146) also indicated that there would only be 1,000 units available at that price.


As far as game systems bought by anyone other than geeks and folks without kids, yep.   I've heard nothing but derision about the PS3 price, but know several families planning on picking-up the Wii because of the managable price and the parent's nostalgia, since they heard they can play the old 16bit games on it.

It's actually just a Thanksgiving day promotion amazon.com will have going, and they'll only be selling 1000 at that price.

The thing you need to ask yourself is... Why would any of those people have a PS3 right now anyway? Or any of the current generation consoles at launch, for that matter.

Maybe they got it as a gift?

I will not review the PS3 in "ooooh shiny" mode. In fact, anyone who has met me or watched me play games can attest that OOOH SHINY lasts about 5 hours with me these days and then it wears off.

Seriously. Even when the shiny wears off though, Genji 2 still looks amazing and the PS3 is still a powerhouse.

Sony now has a form you can use to search for ps1 and ps2 titles to see if they have known issues running on the ps3.  Not quite as useful as just a big 'ol list, but if you want to know if your favorite older games are working or not, perhaps it's handy:

http://www.us.playstation.com/Support/CompatibleStatus

-Q

If you only see one or two issues at a time, or keep seeing 'no compatability issues' when you search you start to think 'no big deal.'  If you post a big list it just provides fodder for people to point out and say, "oh good job there."

But then again, if you search "Final Fantasy" you will probably find yourself thinking, "what the fuck?"


Most of the PS1 FF games seem to have graphics issues as well, and Final Fantasy Anthology has a bug that makes it unplayable.  :cry:

Well, it said the First save point...right? What if you skip the first save point?

They had issues on the PS2 as well, although I didn't find any of them unplayable.

Harr....I knew GS was going to have MadCatz Wii comp. cables, but I didn't know they'd do any price gouging like that. Sorry, that sucks.

Slight derail - avoiding any bullshit BR vs. HDDVD discussions (I will be getting a PS3 next year for the exclusives and BR) I gotta agree here 100%. I just picked up my HD-DVD 360 add-on yesterday and watched Pitch Black, Chronicles of Riddick and Serenity and I'm now in the process of planning the replacement of about 120 films on DVD with the equivalent Blu-Ray and HD-DVD equivalents. It's just sooo fucking superior it's amazing. Ya it's shitty there's 2 standards and ya both M$ and $ony are being bitches but you know what - for $800 (HD-DVD addon and PS3) by next year I will never have to watch low-def movies again. Fuck yeah. Double fuck yeah.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and that $800 includes the Sony PS3 gaming shit. It's a good time to be a gamer/media enthusiast. Between my HTPC, 360 and my planned PS3 I need a clone to go to work so I can do all the gaming and movie shit I need done!

Seriously, do you watch all of your movies enough to warrant replacing them all with a prettier version of the same movie? 120 is like...a lot.

Honestly? Probably not. But I do watch a lot of them fairly frequently. The big seller for me will be things like Godfather and Scarface.

By the same token - I have a 720p TV that is 3 years old. It's a Samsung 56" DLP. I love this shit. So combine that with a fairly disposable income and yeah, i'll spend the coin. Hell me and the girl are currently considering retiring the Sammy to the loft and putting a 1080p set in the main room. $1500 - $2500 on films isn't much for me, and that's not a conceit, just reality.

So, Tower Records was going out of business. Lots of good comics available there (Ex Machina, Fables, etc). Also, each store has a selection of Blu-Ray discs. A single trip to Tower just made my having a PS3 of utmost importance. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for $16? Yes plz.

I hear the MPAA is planning on holding a "We Love Squirrel" appreciation day in the near future :-D

Lol. 120 films is the conservative non-DivX count. I doubt either the MPAA will be honoring me anytime soon :)  The crusade I'm participating in on avsforums and elsewhere is focussed on M$ofts determination to not support non VC1 (WMV9-11) codecs.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang =  :heart: I stay at the Phoenician in Scottsdale once in a while, next time I'm down that way you and I are hooking up.

EDIT: I just did a count, I have close to 1,000 (840 some odd) films. Most are on the PC.

This fucking sucks btw. Most of the home theater systems on sale today do not have hdmi switches. Manufacturers like Pioneer, Yamaha or Denon just put those in their high end equipment. So most people looking for 5.1 sound only have optical or coaxial digital input, which will not work on the ps3. Big letdown by sony.

Thank god that my LCD-TV has optical out capability so that I still can use my nice shiny 5.1 system even though the ps3 doesn't allow optical output. But many potential buyers of a ps3 are thoroughly fucked by sony's decision

I thought virtually all TVs with HDMI input have an optical/digital audio output?

I've seen (heard?) optical and HDMI coexist on PS3.  On Friday evening, at the office, we hooked one up to a projector via HDMI and a cheap 5.1 stereo via optical and got audio both with bluray movie playback and with games.  The glitch we saw was once after playing a bluray disc and then exiting and starting Resistance there was no audio.  Power cycling the PS3 fixed that.  Obviously something got confused, but overall it was working.  You do need to go into the audio settings menu and change from HDMI to optical output.

- Q

Oh it can be done. But the jimmywiggling to get it working also involves me unplugging my 360 which is optical also. I'll be getting an amp in about 2 weeks (this blu-ray purchase tonight stopped me getting a cheap to use for a year or so). I may pick up an all in one kit from Costco though that I can return when better shit comes out.

I'll explain it to you real simply. The Wii is not last gen's console with shinier graphics (although it would be without the controller). It's an entirely new way to control and play games. That's it. It's pushing gaming out of the box it's been strapped down in since the PS1. It's the newest thing since the analog stick, and it's better than the analog stick.

Oh and it's not SIX HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS.

Better than the analog stick? What? No, it's still not as good as the mouse. And it's not really useful for moving around, but rather only looking and uhm, swinging your arm around. I never said it wasn't fun. Trauma Center is just fine. It's a good game. Better with a stylus, imo, but one of the better (best?) third party games for a Ninty console since the SNES. Also, the Wii is last gens console with just a new controller. I'll judge shinier graphics when I get component cables, though I've seen it and nothing looks as good as RE4 did.

Get over the money issue, that's Strazos' angle.

No, the money is about 90% of the buying public's issue, and it's my issue as well. Gaming is too fucking expensive when "next-gen" games are $60 a pop, HDTV's are twice the price of normal TV's and all the movies I bought on DVD "have" to be replaced with hi-def versions.

The controller is much much more important than the graphics by a factor of about 10 billion. Mediocre graphics don't mean a mediocre game (KOTOR for example). Mediocre controls means a mediocre fucking game.

And yes, it IS better than the analog stick, and I'd put it on a par with the mouse based on the difference in your viewing device. What does it matter if the Wiimote isn't useful for moving around, neither is a mouse. That's what the chuk/keyboard is for.

I wouldn't buy a PS3 right now if there was a glut of them and they were only $200. The pricetag is just the most Obvious issue.

That and the stupid BD that sony is trying to shove down peoples' throats. I seriously hope BD turns out the same way Beta did for Sony.

Won't.

You say that now, but this :is: Sony ;) They'll screw it up somehow.

hrm, schild needs to be reviewed by 1up.

BluRay is hot. If it wasn't time to build a new pc, I'd have all three consoles (and I dislike consoles in general). They all have cool features. Stop hatin', yo. Look, you guys made Dawkin all ghetto on yo asses.

All this HD crap can go blow.  I've stood in the store staring at the image on the display set, waiting to be impressed.  It didn't happen.  Wake me up when HD is equal to or cheaper than normal.

You're still playing UO.

He's still right about HD.

You're so completely an utterly wrong. Check out a good underwater documentary in HD vs SD. It's completely amazing. There are some concerts where I can follow not just chord shapes, but individual notes because of the clarity of my (middling resolution) 720p set. And I'm talking about the guitarist in the background, not when they zoom in on a soloist.

And if you can't see the difference between 480i and 720p/1080p in gaming, you are functionally retarded. Or the difference between a 20" monitor and a 61" monitor. But I'll assume you're not talking about gaming.

It's ok if you don't want to pony up the cash for HD. I admit it's still pretty expensive, especially if you're just looking at it as a tv set (not home theater, not gaming). But to say it's not better than SD? Please.

I don't use my TV speakers, nice as they might be, instead using my Denon receiver.  I don't have speakers littered about an apartment, my surround speakers are built into the frame of my house for the win.  It handles component and optical just fine (PS2 and Xbox use both, crappy Cube just uses RCA plugs for sound), but I'm not dropping the change on a new receiver just to get HDMI switching ability, especially if I have just dropped $600 on a PS3.  Neither am I buying a new TV which might have four component inputs and one or more HDMI for a PS3, only to end up using the TV speakers like a damned dirty ape.  I am using a stinking Pelican switch right now because I don't want to pay out for a new receiver with more ports, even though it wounds my soul to get off the couch when I want to change inputs.

Cutting-edge is great, but if you are trying to sell me a piece of equipment it had better fucking play nice with my existing A/V stuff.

Neither he nor I said HD wasn't better than SD. You are correct that that would be a retarded statement. He said he wasn't impressed. I'm not impressed enough to think it's worth paying premium prices for. Were the prices exactly the same, only a blind man would buy an SD over an HD. But they aren't the same, and they are still far enough away from SD prices that it isn't worth it to a lot of people.

Thus, HD can go blow.

I think they might be removing the PvP from HD soon.  Might give it a go then.

Can't you hook the HDMI up to your TV, then have the optical out go to your Denon? I thought that was the whole point of having an optical out on a TV?

I don't use mine, so I don't know for sure, but that's the way I thought it worked.

My TV has no optical either.  It does 1080i, 720p, 480p via component and sound via RCA plugs.  Right now I send all the consoles to the Pelican switch, then to the receiver, then TV and speakers.  I am sure I could rig up something using HDMI and optical, but I'd like as little ass when switching as possible.  I am sure the problems with the PS3 itself will be less of an issue later on.

The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/arts/20game.html?em&ex=1164258000&en=f57e8bbc4474c53f&ei=5087%0A) doesn't seem to like the PS3.  I think most of his complaints will be fixed with patches to the system though.  Hopefully when I buy one in about six months it will be better.

What does the PS3 Dashboard (or whatever they are calling it) look like?

It looks like the PSP dashboard, but cleaner.

I literally missed a PS3 in Walmart today by less than 30 seconds. Sadly I was mostly meh about it though I did have daydreams of Ebaying it and funding a Wii purchase plus Christmas presents for my relatives.

Speaking of PSP, the 3.0 PSP firmware enables PS3 connectivity.  Tried it yet?

Neg. I'm on the fence about upgrading my PSP until they release the PS1 games for downroad in America. The list of PS1 games available on day 1 is phenomenal. It kinda makes the (wii) virtual console look sorta...weak.

Resident Evil Director's Cut
Konami Antics MSX Collection Vol. 1
Konami Antics MSX Collection Vol. 2
Bishi Bashi Special
Arc The Lad
Jumping Flash!
Everybody's Golf 2
Silent Bomber
Tekken 2

Each title should cost about $5. If Sony can pull this off, well. Yea. A 4GB Memory stick can be gotten for less than $60. I'd say they've made the PS1 the killer app for the PSP.

Uh, not really.  These games are still too recent to really play on gamers' sense of nostalgia, not to mention a lot of people who played them the first time around still have them (and thus can play them on their PS2/3).  People who missed these games the first time around weren't likely losing sleep at night wondering how they could get their hands on a copy of Jumping Flash or Silent Bomber.  Resident Evil Director's Cut is a particularly baffling choice as you can find it used for under $5 or pick up the Remake for GC or Deadly Silence for the DS.

Sony may have shot themselves in the foot a little bit by making the PS2 and PS3 backwards compatible.  Aside from some sought-after rare games, most people have long since tracked down any PS1 era games they really wanted to play.  Now they'll have to rely largely on compulsive buyers who just feel like buying a random game for $5, and people who want to play the games on their PSP.

The Wii VC lineup does look weak so far though from what I've read.  I did hear the Bonk's Adventure and Bomberman '93 were just added for $6 each.  I've always had an irrational amount of love for the TG-16 though.

Not to mention the GC remakes were phenomenal. The RE Remake is one of my very favoritist console games.

Sony Retracts Statement of PS3 HD Scaling Fix (http://loot-ninja.com/2006/11/25/sony-retracts-statement-of-ps3-hd-scaling-fix/)

Son of a dick. They need to make PS2 games look as good as they do on the PS2 at least. Cuz right now they look like dog shit.

Holy shit, it won't scale Blu-Ray movies either? Isn't that supposed to be one of the selling points, a cheap Blu-Ray player (that only supports 2 resolutions)? Has anyone been able to confirm there is no hardware scaler built onto the machine? I'm amazed that something that expensive does that.

Are you sure that's not your TV that's making them look like ass? E.g. have you tried hooking up your PS3 using SVideo or component and comparing that output with your PS2's? I.e. maybe it's your TV's scaler that's making it look like crap. Even if it is the PS3's fault, "post processing" a video stream can cause delays in what you see on the screen and what the program thinks you are seeing (a problem already experience by many people trying to play console games on their HDTVs) so it's not trival to try to fix this after release.

No it supports multiple resolutions -- it just won't upscale from one to another if the TV reports back that it doesn't support the resolution of the source material.

My biggest problem is the PS2 stuff. My Blu-Ray stuff looks great at 1080i and 720p. Now, the PS2 stuff isn't aliased at all and doesn't have the filter the PS2 had. Basically, there's no post processing. My TVs scaler is not fucking stuff up.

I think you meant "anti-aliased" and that sort of thing is typically handled by the GPU, not as some sort of CPU post-processing effect, so if that's really the case then the PS2 chip they stuck inside is gimped (i.e. it doesn't fully replicate the functionality of the PS2's GPU) and basically you are screwed.

I didn't know the PS2 even did anti-aliasing, there are severe jaggies all over the place in the games I play.  I guess it would be way too difficult to somehow get a PS3 screen shot of what you are talking about, maybe even with another shot of what the game looks like on a PS2.

Premium prices?  Around $1000 can buy you a pretty decent 1080i HDTV that's around 52" big.  That, to me, is not "premium", especially when you consider that I was willing to pay around half that for the XBox 360.  When I'll pay 1/5 of that price for a video card whose lifespan can be estimated at around 2 years, the price of an HDTV that I'll get years upon years of use out of and enjoy tremendously sounds very, very reasonable.

Now if things are tight and you don't have $1000 to just toss around on entertainment, that's fine.  But don't act like these are "premium" consumer electronics; they're not.  They're very comfortably in the reach of the lower middle class.

The PS2 can do various forms of anti-aliasing however the built-in edge anti-aliasing routines are apparently very processor intensive. Anti-aliasing on the PS2 is more used to try and cut down on the "shimmering" effect you get where very thin lines pop in and out of existence because of resolution limitations (exacerbated by the nature of interlaced video).

After rereading schild's comments he may be complaining about the aliasing effects that stem from poor deinterlacing filters (or the lack of any filters) assuming he's trying to run at 480p. That could potentially be fixed through software/firmware since deinterlacing is a much simpler (and quicker) process than doing FSAA and the like. However if there's an issue with the PS2 GPU inside the PS3 where is isn't doing FSAA and other anti-aliasing routines as well or the same way that the original PS2 GPU did then that's a much bigger problem and probably not fixable barring a hardware update or a switch to software emulation.

My original theory was that my TV was making more of a mess of the HDMI 480i (or 480p -- the TV's info overlay doesn't indicate interlacing or not so far as I can see)  than it does of component out from the PS2.  Then, I tried component out for the same PS2 game on both PS2 and PS3 and the PS3 looked significantly worse.

Of course I'd prefer that the PS3 actually do a bit of post-processing and upscaling so that PS2 content looks better on the HDTV with PS3 than on a PS2, but at a minimum I really wish it didn't look *worse*, which it currently does.

-Q

No, they are not, not when the same size TV without HD is half the fucking cost. It isn't that I do or do not have the spare change to buy it (I don't for the record), it's that for the same size TV, I'm paying double. While yes, prices have gone down recently, they still aren't comparable. As for the lifespan of 2 years for the video card, the funny thing is how different TV's are handling the HD standard. I've heard at least 4 different resolutions tossed about that aren't all working with different things like the 360 or the PS3. So yes, that HD may well be obsolete or at least not completely compatible with what I want to use it for. That's a premium price to be on the bleeding edge of tech, a price I won't work an extra hour to pay for.

And I think the same thing about both the 360 and the PS3, because I think they are both priced at a premium, an undeserved premium at that. I'm sure by the end of 2007, they may be in the still pricey but no longer a premium price point, but right now, it IS a premium and isn't worth saving up for.

I'm really sick and tired of the premium argument. It's being tossed around everywhere. Well guess what, You just paid $250 for a gamecube with a new fucking controller (when a used Gamecube is $50). Talk about a fucking premium. Also, have you seen the upcoming release list for the Wii?

BARREN.

FUCKING BARREN.

Why am I angry? Cuz I spent $250 ($400 if you count games and such) also.

I'm confused by what meaning of premium we're talking about here...


Seems most likely, but I don't actually expect to pay hundreds of dollars less than BOM for hardware unless I'm giving up something in return (like a 1-2 year contract with some foul cellular carrier).  I guess if you expect that consoles are $200-300 items based on previous console prices it makes sense.

-Q

Well, considering Sony is losing money on the PS3 and Microsoft has just recently started making money, there's no premium on those systems. Unless you're one of those "WHAT? I HAVE TO PAY FOR BLU-RAY? BUT I DON'T WANT BLU-RAY!" types, there's only one premium in gaming right now. And that's the Wii. Nintendo has been making money since day 1 and they passed the buck straight onto the consumer.

So you're angry because you felt the need to drop $400 when you knew going into the transaction that you weren't satisfied with what you were getting?

Actually, I thought I'd be satisfied when GS thought they'd be getting component cables the week of release. That still burns me more than anything. The PS3 may not be perfect, but at least I can play it the best possible way intended. I don't even have that option with the Wii at this point. They could've packed one of every type of cable into the Wii and still made a profit. The Wii may be fun and innovative, but it's also a ripoff. A Wiipoff. Whatever.

I wouldn't say it's a ripoff.  Realistically I think it was pretty much the only way Nintendo could go if they wanted to stay in the console business.  I don't think they can really afford to take the kind of hit that MS and Sony take on the hardware (hell, Sony can't really even afford it).  Beyond that I think that we may even be a bit spoiled these days for expecting companies to take a loss on consoles, and while it might be good for us as consumers in the short term, it could really limit the number of companies that could compete in the console industry in the future (not that it wasn't a tough market to break into already).  How many companies out there could develop a console and sell it at a $300 loss.

So you're saying that it's bad for the consumers that there's nobody who can compete with Sony and M$ in selling of their hardware at a loss? Mkey  :roll:

The PS3 can't do 1080i?  Wow, that is balls.  A great big sack of suck.  Going to 1080p seems to shoot the price of the television up to around four grand.  I might've been able to swing a 720p/1080i around forty inches, but there's just no way in hell I can afford 1080p, and if you don't have 1080p the PS3 downgrades to first-gen HD resolution, because spending $600 for a console that displays 720p is the wave of the future.

Man, people who say that consoles have a price advantage over PC gaming are tools.  At least PC gamers don't have to worry about their equipment having to jump through a series of hoops to upsample and downsample and rescale to work with a television that may or may not even be fully compatible with the resolution.  All the shit I keep seeing about blu-ray downgrading to 480i if you don't use digital cables, televisions that say they can display a certain resolution but actually only accept a lower resolution and upscale it so it looks like ass, it just makes me want to find the people behind the home theater electronics industry and beat them with a DIVx player until they get their heads out of their asses and make a set of standards they can actually abide by.

The PS3 can do 1080i. It just can't upscale to 1080i. So games that are 720p will only show in 720p or lower. A 1080i game will show in 1080i, 720p, 480p, and 480i.

Oh, that's better.  But are there any 1080i games?  I heard that Resistance, the closest thing they have to a launch title, isn't 1080i compatible.

I'm sure it will be a magical era for people who like to masturbate over tech specs.  When people start calling a $250 system (that tries to do something different from the other systems on the market) overpriced because the company making it actually has the nerve to try and make a profit off it, then yes, I see the beginnings of a problem.

A Wii costs $250, but a GameCube costs around $100.  You paid over double for an overclocked GameCube with a new control scheme.    In world shattering news, technology progression costs money.


What?  480i and 480p aren't HD standards, so we can ignore those.  Older HD's (in other words, the kind no stores sell anymore) only displayed 780p, but now pretty much all HD's display at 780p and 1080i.  The newest ones also display at 1080p, which is really fairly superfluous.  It's not the kind of monumental upgrade that going from SD to HD entails.  As far as Sony fucking up which resolutions they scale to, I'd say that's Sony's fault and not the HD standard.

Just for reference, the price for a Wii isn't that bad if you do not already own a GC.

It's the other way around. Many older HDTVs support 1080i but not 720p.

Price is sort of irrelevant in any case unless people really think there's going to be a sudden resurgence in games launching for the gamecube. Of course by the same logic a PS2 probably continues to represent better value than the PS3. Installed base is just such a massive advantage.

I traded in my GC for sixty bucks' worth of credit a couple weeks before the Wii's release.  That was a promotional thing though, not sure if it's still got that much value.

If Nintendo would've been alone on the market we would still be playing with cartridges and having problems distinguishing spheres from boxes. I fall under the category that masturbate over tech specs every now and then, good visuals, better sound etc do make gaming more enjoyable. It's a smart move on Nintendos part, everybody likes cheering for the underdog, especially when it's an old childhoods friend. However, that doesn't change the fact that in comparsion, it's overpriced. And as we know, the main profit isn't from consoles in themselves but from licensing fees further down the road, and because of that I don't think it's unreasonable to expect losses on the console sales.

Hm, losses on console sales are going to be leached back somewhere... licensing fees on each game produced for the platform I assume? Personally I'd rather not have another dis-incentive for experimentation in games.

I'm not concerned about future releases for the GC. Rather, what I mean is that since I don't own a GC, paying $250 to get was is sort of 2 platforms isn't that bad. I can play all the new Wii releases, and hunt through used stuff and pick up select GC games. I'm not even counting what the Virtual Console service could eventually be (note: it sucks ass right now).

For me, I don't care about tech specs.  I wouldn't care if Nintendo sill used cartridges for the same reason.  Nor would I care if it cost Nintendo $10 to manufacture the thing.  What I care about is (a) is it fun, (b) is it affordable, (c) is the fun/cost worth it.  Yes on all three.  I've seen (and played) the 360, and seen the PS3.  I did not get the sense that they were 2x as much fun even with HDTV, let alone without it (seeing as I don't have an HDTV).  I know others rate the values for all these things differently, and for someone else none of it is overpriced.  That's  not a "fact", but a perspective. 

Then I don't see the point in geting a next gen console at all, unless you've already played all the good games on the previous consoles, since that would grant you a much better value.

For some people, there may not be a point.  For myself, I'd basically written off getting any console until at *least* next Christmas because there's still plenty of good (Gampesot 8.0+ games, or whatever ranking system you'd like to pick from) I haven't played yet on either the GC or PS2.  The main reason I did wind up geting a Wii is because my wife got it for me as an early Christmas present.  She wanted to do something big-ish, and knew I'd enjoy it.  Beyond that, she was interested in it too for her sake, and she hasn't cared much for either the GC or PS2.  That it's something we play together is fun++.  Beyond even that, it's entirely painless for me to hand out my GC as a hand-me-down to my sister who is on hard times and can't afford much at all in the way of entertainment. 

Overall though, even if I think the 7th gen consoles are better than the 6th, I don't think any of them are so much better that you couldn't enjoy 6th gen stuff.  Hell, I still fire up a copy of Master of Magic about once a year.

Let's get it straight. Both Sony and Microsoft are FUCKING RETARDED for selling consoles at a loss. Especially Sony. Smart business people who want to make a profit do not take almost $200 losses on a product that they absolutely need to have people buy, especially one they cannot produce in sufficient quantity to satisfy the demand. They especially do not need to sell at a loss when the console hardware they were currently selling is still profitable, and when the new hardware they are pimping really doesn't provide that different an experience from what they were previously making money on.

Other than extra pixels, there is nothing the 360 or the PS3 can do that the previous consoles could not do other than play movies for formats that aren't even standard. The games are the same. The controller is the same. Yes, yes, the PS3 has motion-sensing, which is being used for fuckall, so doesn't really count especially since they had to lose the rumble feature to do it. It's the same games with more shiney. I consider both that and HDTV a premium because the experience is not significantly different than SD. It's the same games, same movies and same TV shows only with a crisper picture. Having an HDTV will not change my life or my TV viewing dramatically, and so charging me more for it is charging me a premium. It's value does not equal or exceed the cost paid.

However, the Wii and the Tivo? Now THOSE are devices worth paying premiums for. Getting a Tivo completely changed my TV viewing life, to the point where I'd rather lose DVD playback than get rid of it. The Wii's motion-sensing gameplay is dramatically different than GameCube games. I'm more engrossed in Red Steel than I've been in a shooter, especially one on a console, than I've been since Half Life 1, all because of the controller and all despite the flaws I see in the game.

Nintendo is the smart one here. They make a profit off of their consoles. I don't have a problem with that, because despite being a Gamecube++ inside, the game play is different enough to warrant a new console. Selling a console for a loss is a symptom of the problem I have with modern capitalism. The business isn't about making a profit on good products, it's about keeping stock prices going higher until the CEO can retire on his golden parachute. To me, Sony and Microsoft are both practicing BAD BUSINESS, because when the stock price dips, regular working folks get shitcanned.

Eh.  I don't think it's stupid of either Sony or Microsoft to take losses upfront.  It's a risk sure, but stock prices are only going to float if there is a somewhat legitimate expectation of return.  It's not that different from, say, Google throwing up a free search engine, free Google Maps, and a shitton of other free things that they have to start sucking cost for on day 1 both for development, production (servers/network infastructure), marketing, and ongoing operational costs.  All of that, and it may be a year or more before there is even the hope of profit, even more before the profit takes them into the black.  Both Sony and Microsoft are taking a look at the long term.  Selling the consoles at a losss isn't just about recouping costs on game licenses, although that certainly figures into a central role.  It's also about the role of these consoles, and the 8th gen consoles, moving forward.  If Blu-Ray does become dominant, then Sony sits poised to dominate licensing not only on PS3 games, but on Blue Ray licensing/sales as well.  Neither company looks at their product as just a gaming console.  I wonder if either or both might even consider that role secondary to their long term (10y) strategy.

Nintendo decided to skip out on that.  Although they are thinking long term, their focus is almost entirely on the game console itself.  Microsoft and Sony only see "fun games" as an entrypoint into games plus a bunch of other things.  Nintendo sees the Wii as an entry point for... fun games.  The weather and news feeds on the Wii, when they come, are a joke.  They're an afterthought, but they are intended to be an afterthought. 

Dude. More than double the resolution, sticking with the 1080i example given. Hdtv isn't cheap, but it's not silly expensive, either, if your hobbies include movies and gaming. Actually it makes a heck of a lot of sense.
The PS2 disagrees with you. Also, Microsoft was quite successful at their venture of buying mindshare in the console realm. Thirdly, I'm pretty certain you understand that they are making profits from the games, it's not just about giving consoles away. It's also business as usual, for example: HP selling cheap printers and expensive inks.

Then you start in on how trivial a 'crisper' picture is. Really? Do you game at 640x480 on your Voodoo 2? Or have you dumped money into new pc systems just to get a trivially better picture?

I do.  20 years of smoking has taken away my ability to properly blow on the damm things.  I need disks.

Im gona have to agree with Sky. Like TiVo, I cannot ever imagine going back to SD TV after having a great HD TV. It really does change the whole experience.

But errr Sky, Hemmy IS still gaming on a voodoo2.

My home PC is using a Radeon 9600 because I refuse to (and can't afford to) pay $500 for a new fucking video card to get the latest shiney. Do you really think I give a fuck if I'm playing at 640x480? If the game is fun, the graphics are a bonus, not the be all end all. I can still see soccer just fine on my 27" SDTV, though I could use some new glasses.

The graphics do not fundamentally change the game from the GC/PS2/X-Box to the 360/PS3/Wii. Zelda looks gorgeous on the Wii. Some parts of Red Steel are spectacular looking even in SD with RGB cables. I'm not crying for lack of HD.

I'm sure when I get it, it'll seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread. But it still won't make as much difference as the movement from gamepads to Wiimote, or from keyboard only to keyboard and mouse. Since the standardization of K&M and PS1 gamepads, gaming has been static as fuck in regards to gameplay mechanics, with everyone concentrating on more pixels, more lighting, more shaders, higher res textures. It's nice to worry about the important bits, THE GAME.

Haemish...you know I love ya man, but come on... (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102606)

RGB cables? You have your Wii hooked up to a monitor? You mean composite.

And it doesn't look good, I'm sorry, it looks like dick. And graphics ARE important to games. Play Splinter Cell on the Wii and then on the 360, tell me graphics don't matter. Bullshit. Hell, go play it on the Xbox.

Graphics matter.  Graphical power doesn't necessarily equate to good graphics, however.  Games with good art direction on low-power systems (Wind Waker) can look far better than games with shitty art direction on top-notch systems (any generic WW2 shooter or sport game on Xbox).  I saw some football game at a circuit city hooked up to a 360 through HD, on what I assume was a player roster screen because the camera was zoomed in on the players' faces.  The resolution was magnificent, absolutely crystal-clear.  But it looked like shit.  Someone on the art team had apparently decided that they had to make use of that resolution by covering the faces of the players with little details, pores and such.  As a result, all of the faces were messy wrecks that looked inhuman.

Now, using the best possible cables from your console to get a non-blurry picture on the television, that's just good sense.  Just because one can get a good-looking game without a high-power console doesn't mean that one should try to feed the signal through a coat hanger to a black and white twelve-inch television from 1980.  Not blowing five grand on top-notch HD equipment I can understand completely, but a few extra bucks here and there for a decent CRT TV that can take component inputs (~$200-250) and component cables for your Wii or PS2 (~$20-30), and maybe a decent receiver/5.1 speaker combo (~$200-300) will get a lot of reward for not a lot of cash.  You can get good clean video and surround sound from all of the current consoles, which really improve the playing experience (and DVD-watching experience) and it doesn't cost a ton to get it.

There was an update to the PS3 firmware tonight. Version 1.11. Additions?

+Added Account Management.


Woop woop.

Last I looked, they were twice that price. That was also the last time I gave a shit about upgrading my PC because the Movies was the last thing I gave a shit about playing on my PC. I've tried Oblivion, haven't been impressed, and there aren't any good MMOG's coming out until next year.

And that's not even the latest great flavor of video card. So I'd still be a generation behind.

Yes, Red Steel and Zelda both look gorgeous, even on my COMPOSITE (or whatever the hell that connection is called... there's only about 50 billion different cables now apparently). Maybe they don't look as pretty as on a 360. I'm not doubting that HD and HD gaming looks good, I'm saying it isn't as important as the gameplay and isn't worth as much to me. I'm perfectly happy playing "teh old" graphics, because they still look good to me.

When I hear someone tell me I have to play games on the new shiney, all I hear is the sucking sound of some bitch trying to take money out of my wallet.

EDIT: I begin to feel like a fucking Luddite when I discuss HD issues with HD zealots who have more money to spend on useless shit than I do on food. My TV is using S-Video for the Tivo connection, and those Yellow/Red/White cables for the game systems and DVD player. Apparently that's called composite. Component is the cable everyone's bitching that Nintendo didn't include in the box. My TV doesn't have component.

I'll second Haemish on this.  I like HD - games/movies look nice on a new LCD/plasma even if they don't use HD, and stunning if they do.  But it's not terribly important, as stuff still looks good on SD and is no less fun.  IMO, Fun Games > Pretty Games and I'm not to keen on doubling (yes, HD TVs are about 2x an equivalent SD) pricetags to get more pretty when what I have is still nice.


Don't be so elitest.  Of course better graphics are ... well, better.  But Wii on SD doesn't look like dick.  I've played 360 on HD.  It's nice.  Wii on SD is still fine.  I get that your gaming is almost your part time job, and if you want to chase the graphical love that's great.  Honestly, glad you've found something to enjoy.  Do more front pages about the games on your HD+360 and let us all know about it.  I'll likely have both at some point when it's cheaper, and enjoy all of it then at less than half of what you paid for it and put the other half towards other things I care about.

Of course what we are saying is that pretty games are more important than quality games.  :roll:

But quality games + higher resolution + big widescreen (+ 5.1 surround) = better. I try to avoid crappy games, even if they look great. I only buy a half dozen games a year on average, I spend way more on the hardware, partly because I enjoy a quality experience, partly because I enjoy building computers (of course, both my pc and hdtv are over three years old, so it's not like I'm blowing a lot of money on my hobby every year).

I've already said that if the price is keeping you away, that's not a big deal. I understand. I was in a band for years, we used to shower under the neighbor's garden hose and warm our house with construction debris in the fireplace (I still had a Sega Genesis!). But simply leave it at 'it's expensive' and don't bother with the tripe about higher resolutions (or screen size) not making gaming better.

 :roll:

Everytime someone tries to leave it with "it's expensive", someone else(s) say it isn't.  Then someone else(s) pops up and says that anything less than the top end stuff looks like shit.  Or dick.  Whatever. 

I'm also saying that not only is it expensive, the games AREN'T quality. Or more precisely, they aren't a noticeable step up in quality outside of the graphics. Gears of War is the first 360 game in the entire year that has made me want that system, and only because it looked to be utilizing cover and the gamepad control scheme in a way that was different from previous iterations. Call of Duty 2 on the 360? Other than sharper graphics, it didn't play fundamentally different to me than any other shooter on the original X-Box. If all I'm getting out of the next-gen is shinier graphics on the same games, why am I being asked to pay $400-$600 (plus the added $10 each game) for the privilege?

Saint's Row and Gears of War are the only 2 360-exclusive games I'd consider the system for. The PS3 has even less than that, because Assassin's Creed is going to be on the 360 as well. I'm not seeing the quality in the games, but I AM seeing the repetition of tired/tried gameplay. The same goes for HDTV. I can still see soccer and football and baseball and Heroes on my SDTV (for the next few years), I just see them better with HD. I can live with that until the price becomes reasonable.

I think it's what you're used to as well. I find it hard to play games that aren't in 5.1 now because I'm so used to positional sounds in games. Before I got the HDTV, SD 360 was fine for me... now that I'm gaming in widescreen 720p, I find it hard to jump back to the old TV upstairs and play the Gamecube on that.

Personally, I'm glad I got my HDTV before Gears of War came out and I'll have it to play Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed and Bioshock.

Haem, I don't have a 360, nor Wii, nor PS3. I'm talking pc games :) This 720p stuff people are raving about with the new consoles is what I've been gaming with for years now. My 3-yr old pc pushes out 720p just fine on most titles. Only Oblivion, EQ2 and CoV have given it a tough time (though again, I don't play every new shiny game to come out).

Don't confuse the situation by bringing the quality of console titles into it (I know this is technically a PS3 thread, but I'm only addressing the hdtv issue).

I likely would not be playing PC games on my future theoretical big HDTV because the interface of mouse/keyboard really doesn't work well for me on anything but a desk.

(Waits for Sky to bring up PC gaming from a couch. Again.)

Haemmy brought it up. Apparently some folks can't find a comfortable solution. I've been fine for years. *shrug*

And I'm perfectly comfortable at my desk. /shrug

As far as I can tell the "selling PS3's for $200 less than cost" is all just rumor and probably incorrect at that.

http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/141/is-sony-losing-their-shirt-on-each-ps3/

...and then he proceeds to prove it by quoting prices and saying "LOL! No way can it cost that, it just doesn't sound right".

This guy needs to go back to what the blogosphere is best at...rating the taste of various brands of cat food.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=14483

...right, that's just a summary of the exact same iSuppli article that the blogger was objecting to.  It offers nothing new, and both sites reference back to the same data.  Which is what was in dispute.

I was just supplying the numbers I saw. I really don't give a shit what some blogger makes of them.

Phil has produced a number of games (he did Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3 and Tropico, for example) and his comments seem reasonable if not infallible.

I was just pointing out that someone was claiming a $200 difference as FACT when actually it is just one particular groups OPINION and one that other people have disagreed with (Phil's not the only one, just the one I remembered reading most recently).  You can claim $200 as fact when Sony publishes that number.

I'm still not sold that the PS3 can outperform the 360 by as wide a margin as these techie types seem to be masturbating to.

Supposedly, the biggest difference is that the PS3, no matter what "version", has a HD. From what little I've read of it.

Ignoring the output issues and lack of blue laser storage for games, the 360 has the better architecture, on paper. Three identical cores rather than the 1 main core, 7 "coprocessor" design, unified memory rather than separate system and graphics memory, and the unified pipelines in the ATI GPU rather than separate vertex and pixel pipelines in the NVIDIA one. The wildcard is whether or not programmers will be able to figure out how to 1) effectively use the 7 SPEs as intended and 2) use them in interesting and novel ways.

This is similar to the Merrill Lynch estimate that came out in February -- i.e. another wild ass guess at the cost of manufacturing a PS3. Now of course iSuppli presumably knows more about this stuff than ML does but on the other hand they have stupid stuff like $148.00 for "Other Components and Manfacturing" without explaining WTF that's all about and they almost certainly have the GPU and CPU costs swapped -- it's extremely unlikely Sony is coughing up that much money to NVIDIA though we'll hopefully find out more when NVIDIA releases their 4th quarter earnings in February.

Father of the Playstation switches jobs, new guy is in as president of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE). (http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/30/technology/sony.reut/?postversion=2006113008)

The article also says Sony has forcast a 1.7 billion dollar charge in March, if they believe they will hit their target of shipping six million PS3s by then that would make the loss per unit almost $300 unless some of the loss is accounted for elsewhere, and since you have to assume they are still making money from the PS2 they might be losing even more.

The thing is, as Phil points out, a lot of the costs are top-heavy.  That is, you do R&D, you build fabs, etc., when you start.  And that costs a lot.  And then the true cost is really amortized against the 5 year life of the product (although on the books it shows up as an immediate expenditure).

Basically I'm content to not give a shit about how much they are under- or over-charging because I don't think that anyone really knows or is likely to know anytime soon and it doesn't really seem to make that much difference.  Of more immediate concern to me is whether the product is worth the price tag that's attached to it.  Personally, I don't think it is right now, no matter how much the parts cost Sony.

Said differently:

$1.7 billion / 6 million units shipped by March = $283/unit
$1.7 billion / 100 million units shipped by 2012 = $17/unit

The actual loss per unit depends on how much of the overall loss that was actually part of the per-unit manufacture of the device and how much of it was infrastructure (including stuff like developing the Sony Online client and servers, marketing, creating/updating the dev kits, doing last minute BC testing and development, etc., etc., etc.).  $283 is the maximum loss per unit but the actual number is probably much less.

The second bit is only true if the cost charged per unit is identical to cost for each unit, for every unit built after unit number 6,000,000. 

I can spare $20.  Where's the nearest PS3 manufacturing plant?  Hard working people don't need to eat as badly as I need to game.  :wink:

Merry Xmas. (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5171)

It's funny because Gran Turismo is a killer App for me. You can be damn sure I'll be downloading that.

From what I've read, they put their first five games up for download today ($5.99 each).  The list apparently differs from the one you posted though:

CoolBoarders
Crash Bandicoot
Hot Shots Golf 2
Syphon Filter
Tekken 2

Well, that's a goddamn terrible list. Why the hell aren't there any Square, N1, or Atlus titles. THE GENRES MOST LACKING ON THE PSP.

Fucking Sony.

I don't see Square or Atlus letting any of their good titles go for $5.99 any time soon when they know that if they wanted to they could slap them on UMD's and sell them for $20 each.  Besides I would think that you'd have to do some tweaking for FF games or any other games that were more than one disc, plus I don't think Sony wants to start things off with large downloads (Tekken 2 is the largest right now at 535MB) so that would cut down possibilities a bit.

The PSP supports H.264 video playback which means you could squeeze down the FF prerendered videos to a much smaller size than they were on the original CDs, plus the resolution of the PSP is less than a standard defintion TV making the files even smaller.

I tried to read through this thread again for the answer to my question.  I really did.  I don't have it in me to get past page one.

The PS3 isn't connecting to my wireless net properly.  There don't seem to be any first-page-of-a-google-search guides on this.  Anyone else have their PS3 set up on a wireless?  I seem to have a b network.

Is that the version where you have to buy the cars and tracks? If so, free download my ass.

They canceled it. This is a concept version. 'Tis why it's free.

I doubt they'll introduce microtransactions for what basically amounts to a demo. They'll just save that idea for GT5.

I've got a bit of a question about the downloadable PS1 games.  Now according to a Gamespot article: (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6162670.html)


So my question is, if you delete a game off your memory card (which you're likely to do at some point unless you've got tons of 1GB sticks lying around) and then put the game back on your card later when you feel like playing it again, does that count as one of the 5 times it can be copied?  Or does it check to see if a license file for the game (which I read about in a different article somewhere) is already present on the memory card before it counts as one of the 5 copies you get?

Counts against the license file, or so first reports...report.

I actually expended some effort after giving up on the wireless connection and now have the PS3 using Ye Olde PS2 Componente Cables and optical sound.  I'll try a copper ethernet cable, but if that doesn't work, I'll just play some more Resistance.  Or Vagrant Story.

Copper worked and updating from 1.10 to 1.11 fixed the wireless problems.

FFXII looks like ass on the PS3.

Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland boots right up, unlike in my aged PS2, and I can't really say it looks like ass since it was pretty much drawn that way in the first place.  So I might get some play on the blue PS2 discs.

SMT: DDS also looks like ass.

I am almost ready to complain about the controller behavior with PS2 titles.  Just a little more annoyance should do it.

I broke down and watched Taladega Nights last night.  Picture quality is amazing.  Still mad about that PS2-game problem.  Sent an email to Sony support.  I look forward to giving myself a "keke".

http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/ps3/clip-ps3-bc-issues-popping-up-221492.php

I WANT TO FIGHT HIM.

NOW. FUCKING BARE KNUCKLE.

LET'S THROW DOWN YOU SON OF A BITCH.

CAN'T SEE A DIFFERENCE? WHAT? DIE.

Edit: Btw, the video in the post does a great job of showing the difference between composite and component. Everything out of any output on the PS3 looks like composite if it's PS2 or PS1. The PS2 stuff on the right is most DEFINATELY component. Oh, and if that guy had actually shown gameplay. Whooooo wee. Fucking night and day.

Edit: Nevermind. I just figured out the only possible LEGITIMATE reason Crecente can't see a difference. He's fucking blind.

Okay that looks like the PS2's Full Screen Anti Aliasing (FSAA) routines simply don't do anything on the PS3 (or more accurately they don't do any supersampling) -- it's not a question of output filtering or deinterlacing or anything of that nature. If you watch Tidus's hair at the end you can see the strands "jumping" around which is a clear indication that the FSAA stuff isn't working. Testing with a driving game would give more obvious examples since you should see poles and other slender objects popping in and out of existence. It don't know enough about how the emulation stuff is setup to know if this is something that can be fixed in software/firmware but I'm guessing it is a very difficult problem to solve, otherwise Sony would've had such a basic feature working from the start.

Edit: typos, clarification

I didn't think it was possible to make PS2 games look shittier. Nice job, Sony.

Yeah, they do a good job of uglying the fuck out of PS2 games.

I have to laugh, because all along Sony kept saying that the PS3 would be PS2-compatible because there was a mini-PS2 chip on the board. I guess they forget the part with AA on it.

Why couldn't they do for PS2 games what Bleem was in the process of doing?  I could actually see sharp, drawn faces on the 3D characters in Chrono Chross that were far too blurry to make out when the PS2 rendered it.    Now I'm hearing that the PS3 does an even worse job?  Bah!

Looks like the PS3 just lost another exclusive.  Virtua Fighter 5 is coming to the 360 next year (http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/752/752074p1.html)

Since my PS2 broke down I'm using ePSXe to play my PSX games on the computer, it's almost flawless, only very minor issues. The added benefit is that there's a lot of filters and other stuff to enhance the image quality. Sure, they can't remedy the low poly count, but runing at 1600 x 1200 with full AA and various other things makes it look heaps better than on the original machine.

I can't get any Hi-Def F13 action. Damn.

The browser looks like shit in 1080i. Lol.

Looks like shit in 720p too.

Excuse me if someone touched on this (somewhat) pointless issue already. It's my only complaint so far.  :wink:

Browser looks fine on my TV (LCD).

Strange. What size is it? Mine's 32" (LCD).

Anecdotal evidence ftl- I still don't see a Wii in any store I'm in, but Walmart/Gamestop/etc. has multiple PS3s lying around.  I guess neither system has an incredible launch lineup, so all other things being equal the price seems to be controlling. 

37".

People are buying the Wii when it comes in because it's cheap. That and Sony resolved the shortage issue weeks ago.

It's not so bad in 720p, I guess. Depending on the site.

1080i is really tiny though. Maybe browsing at that setting just isn't a good idea for a TV this size.

Everything else is great though.

Hell, Bestbuy.com has some PS3's in stock right now (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=pcmcat104100050000&type=category).  Some of them aren't even being sold as bundles.  Not a Wii to be found though.

This out of the gates shit doesn't matter. At all. The Cube was the little system that could also. It's all about game support and I guarantee with Square and Sony's First Party offerings, the PS3 will blow the Wii away within a couple years unless there's some sort of mass uprising WITHIN Sony (not likely). Hell, SCEA/J's offerings have been as good if not better than Nintendo's in the last generation (God of War and Shadow of the Colossus and ICO vs.... Mario Sunshine, Smash Bros. and Windwaker?). Please. I expect amateur sites to use that sort of anecdotal bullshit to construct a market leader. Nintendo didn't even have the money to R&D a full system this go round, hence the new controller. The Wii is nothing but a red herring that managed to dupe a whole lot of people. We're looking at 3-4 games a year from Nintendo that may be worth purchasing. If that. Probably more like 2-3. The 360 has twice the attach rate of that already for every system.

Yes, the Wii has planted itself firmly enough to be the second or third system everyone owns. But it's nothing but a generation filler for Nintendo while they figure out how to really compete. In two years it'll be collecting as much dust as the Gamecube did for people halfway through the past generation.

That said, the DS is wrecking the PSP - though because of the advancements in the hacking community - the PSP is, imo, the best handheld out there. Due partly to Sony making such a fucking kickass emulator for PS1 games. The DS however gets DQ9. Which means the PS3 and the Wii won't. DQ9 would have put a Wii in every home in Japan. Final Fantasy XIII will put a PS3 in every home in Japan. With 4 games attached to it. This generation will be fought and won by the 360 (specifically Europe and America with XBL/Halo 3&4 and Gears 1&2), the PS3 in Japan, and the DS in every major country around the world besides maybe Spain (where the PSP is a MONSTER). The PS3 and 360 due to being so close on the technology side will become the new Sega & Nintendo of the late 80s/early 90s. Same as it ever was.

I admit, right now the 360 is the most compelling system. The Wii is still - despite my growing hate - more compelling than the PS3 as a gaming system. But who am I fucking kidding. Some N1 titles will drop on the PS3, it'll have awesome games for download, it plays Blu-Ray, and Square - despite what they say - is still backing them STRONG. The PS3 will blow past the Wii WHILE people are still hating on the PS3. It's just the way of the world. The Wii was awesome at winning the heart of the people though. And people will remember it for that. It was the system that rich people and poor people both had to find and both could afford. At a launch! Yeeee haaaaa! That's some exciting fucking press. Now get the fuck over it and realize you'll just be playing the exact same shit you played on the Cube with new levels and a new barrier to entry - the Wiimote.

Edit: Something, from some third party, however - like RE4 - will come along and make the Wii worth every penny. I've got my money on Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, because it's an easy favorite. But my heart wants to say Sadness may be that app. Nintendo sure as shit won't be making That Game though.

My only comment to Schild's post above is that I still wouldn't put the Blu-Ray as an advantage for the PS3. Noone I know has adopted a next-gen DvD format yet and I don't think the PS3 is going to have as much an impact on it as people thought/hoped. Even if I bought a PS3, I'd still hesitate to buy any Blu-Ray DvDs because my gut tells me they're going to lose the format war.

The PS3 may wind up "winning" the console war, whether win be by net profit or units sold.  However, at the moment it is not, and there isn't much reason to think it will.  The main issue is one of cross-platform games; publishers like it because it makes a wider userbase to market to.  This will also be one of the main pitfalls for Nintendo.  Because of their relatively weak hardware, it remains to be seen how many titles can be ported to that platform without significant loss.  Graphics downgrade to 480 isn't much of a loss (Wii buyers know it lacks HD going in), but the potential for loss of draw distance, level size, number of objects, etc are potential reasons why a port may not occur.  Worse, publishers may decide it's unimportant and that two platforms are enough.

However, it is much more difficult to target the PS3 only.  Not only does it have a small marketshare at the moment and short term future, making full use of it requires HD content.  This, in turn, requires higher content costs, but they are costs that can only be recouped on this one console.  You can't port this content to even the 360, because it lacks an HD-DVD for gaming.  I assume that content can be downgraded in quality relatively cheaply, but that doesn't skirt the point that you're not really regaining your investment in the higher quality content.

What the 360 has going for it is an incredibly strong online model.  Live offers a lot for gamers who are into multiplay, and everything 360 is minimally attached to it.  The PS3 has that too, but it's an afterthought and not nearly as mature.  What this caters to is the "serious" gamer.  Good graphics, VERY mature games, online multiplay.  This is the gamer's box.  The weakness here is that the hardcore/male tween market is fickle and niche.  There is serious money to be made, but it's very tough to do well, and they didn't last go round. 

What the Wii has going for it is ease of use, cost, and family/party oriented games.  Despite what schild says, the Wiimote is not a barrier to entry; it is the key to entry.  Every party (family or friend) I've been to since I've gotten my Wii has included me bringing it in tow.  Everyone who's tried it, even those who don't care for games, has enjoyed it and found the control intuitive and fun.  The clincher is whether Nintendo can get more mature games for their platform which go beyond just the party set.  They already have Zelda and a few ports, but they need more.  Stuff is in the works, including both first and third party games, but they aren't to be delivered for a bit.

What the PS2 had (or has - it's still selling well) was a HUGE game portfolio.  Everything but exclusives had a PS2 port, and even that exception was sometimes broken (RE4).  The PS2 rocketed up because the PS1 had a good library, and everyone knew it was going to carry forward.  Nintendo screwed the pooch with the N64, and nothing about the GC made people think it would fare much better.  And Sega? Heh.  Sony won by default.  What they failed to do was innovate; both Microsoft and Nintendo have worked at being innovative.  Sony decided to rest on their laurels and play it safe.  They are paying dearly for that mistake.

What the PS3 has going for it is graphics.  And... well, no, that's it.  It has a bigger gpeen than anyone else.  Blu-Ray storage just augments that point.  There are Blu-Ray DVDs, but that won't do very much for Sony unless that format wins the format war.  They are hoping that the PS3 will help them win, and it may, but to be much help they have to move consoles - which they're not doing.  Worse, what happens out of the gate is important because it sets reputation, which is something we've seen with MMOGs.  It's very hard to overcome a bad reputation, and the rep that the PS3 has is that it's overpriced bloat that has features few people want.

Last thing. This isn't about PS3 "hate".  I really don't get people who talk about hate for any of the systems, whether it's growing or pre-existant.  Before the Wii I owned a PS2 and GC, of which I played the PS2 more.  I refused to buy an Xbox because I disliked the notion of paying for Live.  I'm still buying PS2 games, and even bought a PS2 for someone for Christmas.  This generation, I have a Wii (on release day, first console I've done that ever) and wouldn't mind getting a 360.  That might happen Christmas '07, but I don't see ever getting a PS3.  I may not get a 360, but if I do it'll have 90% of what I'd want from a PS3 and so couldn't justify the cost of it.  Some people do.  Good for them.  They're just in a minority.

What innovation are you referring to in Microsofts case?

A dedicated, consolidated online platform.

We should put some bets on this, too.

As Roac said, the Wiimote is not a barrier to entry, it's a key. It makes video games palatable to people who might not otherwise play (or buy) a video game. To hardcore gamers, it's an insult or something, because it's not their way and they don't want to get used to it. To anyone else who hates fucking controllers with all their buttons and triggers and shoulders and stuff. Controllers like that really are intimidating to those people with little to no lifelong experience with games. The Wiimote is not, especially in games like Wii Sports with such intuitive controls.

The trick will be converting those people from players at someone else's house to buyers. Oh, and getting out more games. Lots and lots of games. With development costs of a Wii game being about 1/4 to 1/2 of a PS3 game, and with an install base of abotu 2x or 3x that of the PS3, I'm thinking a lot of 3rd party developers would be retarded not to go after those numbers.

But it isn't like game developers have lacked retardation over the years, so I could be totally wrong.

I want them to release the WiiMote programming module for the pc so we can map stuff to it.  I don't see why they're not.

Someone's already found a way to use the Wiimote as a PC mouse substitute.

Where have you heard development costs 1/4 to 1/2 for that of a PS3 game? Also, I hope that comparsion is between equally AAA titles of the same type, with just the technical limitations seperated.


Didn't that already happen the last generation with xbox though?

THQ. (http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/avatarthelastairbender/news.html?sid=6149154)

Edit:  Epic thinks so too (http://www.playfeed.com/index.php/playfeed/article/epics-sweeney-talks-ps3-development-user-content-09221145/)

Edit: Squeenix seems to think so too (http://apple.dcemu.co.uk/dragonquest9-will-this-be-a-lead-for-others-to-follow--46042.html).

Yep. Depending what you're doing and how efficient you are, PS3 can be EXPENSIVO. But then, some of the smallest companies in Japan are building stuff on the PS3 and 360. So take that shit with a grain of salt. THQ sucks anyway.

Aside from who thinks what, the content of making hidef stuff for the PS3 as well as working in that architecture (reference a couple dozen devs talking about how they have yet to untap its power - ie, it's complicated) is costly.  The consensus is that the Wii is very close to the GC, and tools from one can mostly be ported.  Also, no hidef because you can't use it.  Basically the same for the 360 on that point only because of lack of HD-DVD. 

So here's the catch.  If you're going to sink an extra $10m into development of a title for the PS3, you have to be relatively certain that you're going to make enough sales to cover that.  If a dev shop gets 50% of the sticker price (heh), that translates to just over 300k units needing to sell just to break even on a $10m difference, which is roughly what's been quoted for Red Steel.  There is some doubt as to how many third party devs are going to do anything but ports to the PS3.  Given that the 360 has a nice development toolset, a large installed base, and weaker hardware, any "high end" games may very well target a 360/PS3 mix, with 360 being their standard.

The figure I've heard is that a AAA PS3 title would have to sell 500k copies to break even.

You are confusing storage formats with output formats. MS mandates 360 games output 720p -- that's HD.

No I'm not, but I may not have been clear.  The "can't use it" is because Wii doesn't support hidef.  The 360 does, but running hidef often implies high quality content, which is the premise behind the need for Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD.  If you lack dozens of gigs of space to store crap on, then you're rendering low[er] quality content in hidef.  Yey team. 

I'm not saying any of those facts are wrong, because I've never deved for either of the consoles. But I can't see how it's such a large diffrence, I mean one article states it can be as much as 5 to 1. Afaik hi def only means higher resolution, I can't belive that if you have 4x as many pixels it will take 4x as much time, it should only be telling the console "hey, lets use this resoultion instead". I can clearly understand that there's a huge step to take in order to create the additional abstraction layer required for the exotic architecture. If numbers haven't changed though, then actually rolling the entire engine is only a small part of the budget compared to content generation and gameplay coding, which shouldn't be changing at all. The demand for "more shit" in the games should be the same for all consoles.

Yeah, something like that could set them back later.

On the sidenote, the same goes for having a base model without a hard drive. Developers have to develop for that primarily, and not their 20 gig version.

RAM, or the lack thereof, puts a limit on the amount of super high resolution textures you can use at any given time so not having blue laser storage is not a significant disadvantage yet. It is a problem if you want to include lots of HD prerendered video in the game. As for the cost part, making HD content is not more expensive than non-HD content. These days virtually all the main artwork for a AAA title starts at super high resolution/super high polygon counts and gets downsampled/reduced to fit the appropriate storage and format constraints. In other words they are already starting with much higher quality source material than "HD" quality even if they are developing for something like a PS2.

For example, go here:

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml

and scroll down to the bottom to the part on normal map generation. Modellers/character designers/level designers create their game models at whatever upper limit their modeling programs allow and then they get converted into low(er) polygon versions and possibly tweaked as needed. The same applies to textures. They are scanned in from photographs, painted/drawn, or generated programmatically at high resolutions/high detail and then downsampled to fit whatever size and tiling constraints as needed.

In the good old days people did actually paint each individual pixel in the artwork with a bitmap editor and model each individual polygon. That generally doesn't happen anymore on these big budget console titles.

The PS3 and the 360 need more art assets than a Wii game, because their models are higher-res, more polygons, etc. Art is the most expensive part of developing a AAA title, not because it's harder than programming, but because throwing more artists at a problem isn't going to help nearly as much as throwing more programmers or QA guys at a problem in their arena. Hi-def art assets are just more time-consuming to make and to render, and thus are more expensive. The PS3 has the additional problem of having an entirely new type of architecture (multi-core) to program for, which means devs have to learn how to use it and training on the job is expensive. Those two combined make the PS3 such a drastically more expensive proposition.

With Wii games, the only thing to learn is how to program for the Wiimote and other peripherals. The CPU and GPU are mostly GameCube upgrades, and devs who have developed for the Cube have already got the dev tools investment and knowledge investment paid for.

EDIT: Also don't forget that with the PS3 and 360, instead of having to develop for one resolution like the Wii (480i or p won't matter much), you have to developr for what... 4? 5? 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1080i, and 720i? So all your art assets have to scale down to that and be stored on a disc.

Blu-Ray isn't going to be a huge advantage over the 360 in games, because in most cases, you can just have a game span multiple discs. It's a pain in the ass, but not a game killer for most.

There's another program here at my school for graphics, and as Trippy said, they do an extremely high poly model once and then just let program generate normal maps and scale them down. If you let the UI just be a textured quad that's in front of the camera at all times, and then simply blit windows etc to it. if you then use some filtering on that texture you should be able to get a resolution independent UI. The 3D world doesn't really get affected by the resolution at all. If the filter is good you shouldn't get any font issues and missing pixels. Computer games have been hi def for a very long time and they usually have to deal with a heck of a lot more resolutions.

These aren't computer games. Console manufacturers who haven't done PC games likely have not dealt with these issues before the Hi-Def era.

You should probably be aware then that the PS3 has less available memory to manage these "HIDEF" textures in and has a weaker GPU (by a significant margin) than the 360. The PS3 cell architecture will be good at things like AI and physics - although it's really difficult to use Cell with out of order instruction, part of the thing that developers are having to relearn with the PS3. Graphically it is the inferior system to the 360 UBAH 1080P output notwithstanding. (Irrelevant to games, important to bluray.) So all that extra storage is pretty much useless from a gaming p.o.v. Makes for good marketing copywriting though. Yay consumer education.

This AVS thread (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=758390&highlight=ps3+processor) and the linked articles have some excellent information. On the graphics front the fact that the PS3 has 256MB dedicated to the GPU and 256MB dedicated to the PPE is actually inferior in many ways to the 512MB unified memory of the 360. Further the 360's GPU is ATI's next gen r600 piece which is by all measures superior in almost every way to the PS3's Nvidia part - essentially a 7800GTX.

But yeah. Those extra gigs will make all the difference.  :roll:

It is true that developers of console games that aren't 3D or have stylized-3D graphics (e.g. cell shaded textures) haven't had to worry about a lot of this sort of stuff, though even in the 2D world they already are starting from higher resolution source material like for things like painted background -- i.e. the artists certainly aren't trying to paint the backgrounds at 640 x 480 resolution.

However any console 3D game that has gone with a more realistic look, especially if it has any sort of non in-game engine prerendered video, has been adopting the techniques I described, and some like Square have been doing it a really long time (since at least FF VII). That is how they were able to put together the PS3 tech demo that showed it rendering the FF VII "cinematic" sets in (more or less) real time -- they had already built those highly-detailed sets back then to render the cinematic videos from.

Edit: fixed double quote

I'm mostly ignorant about a lot of this stuff, but I was under the impression that one couldn't directly compare the PS3 and 360 GPU's, since the CPU plays a significant part in the PS3's capabilities as well. Nor is the RSX a 7800 really. Faster clock speed than what's in the PC market, completely different bus (which in turn involves the Cell and main memory to play a different role), and who knows what else.

Also, the OP in that AVS thread seems to want to ignore architecture differences, and judge everything from a component by component basis. Which is just wrong when comparing game consoles.

He admits to not even playing, let alone developing games. To some, that might seem like he's unbiased, but all it tells me is that he has completely different priorities on how to assess the hardware in these machines. I've seen other articles that sound just as impressive as his, and say completely opposite things. Everyone can play the disinfo game.

The OP in the AVS thread is one of the least interesting posters in that thread. It's a long thread, but some very knowledgeable people post in it and there are links to some very detailed technical analysis of the two systems.

Particularly interesting is some benchmarks of the two video subsystems.

All of which is beside the point I was trying to make - the PS3 will have some kick-ass games for sure. It has a powerful architecture for sure. Some developers will do amazing things with it for sure. And none of these positives will be influenced by the high volume BluRay disc at all really because:

a). More storage is only good really for cutscenes and textures. The PS3 does not really have any more (and in fact has less) headroom for high rez textures than the 360 does.

b). Most of the developers will be doing cross platform games and won't bother with any additional material to fill the bluray's capacity.

The PS3 is not particularly more powerful than the 360 for Graphics. Theoretically it should be very good at AI, physics, encoding/decoding and that sort of thing.

No the Xbox 360 does not have an R600 in it cause that would be like unpossible since the R600 (still) isn't out yet. The Xbox 360 GPU does have the unified shader architecture which the R600 will have that the PS3's GPU does not have.

Fair enough. Maybe BD storage doesn't mean much for this generation of gaming, but if it does, then at least a developer can count on it being on all PS3 systems. There aren't constraints and worries about which users have or don't have what, like in the case of the 360 (or say, the PS2 and the Final Fantasy hard drive). Even the Wii, though underpowered, presents a clearer situation than the XBox.

I like the PS3 because it doesn't shortchange future possibilities in any significant way. Both models have BD, both have hard drives, both have motion sensing, both have Bluetooth, both have gigabit ethernet, etc.. Any extensions to the hardware can be done through minor peripherals and input devices. There's a lot to work with right out of the box.

I'm lazy and I just don't care that much so i'll take the lazy way out and simply throw one quote out from here (http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=8). You can choose to believe that the Xenos chip has just the shaders in common with the R600. Most people who've read up on it would disagree, but you're welcome to your opinion. It's not a complete R600 certainly but it is essentially the same core chipset, not just the unified shader capability.

"This GPU here inside the Xbox 360 is literally an early ATI R600, which when released by ATI for the pc will be a Directx 10 GPU. Xenos in a lot of areas manages to meet many of the requirements that would qualify it as a Directx 10 GPU, but falls short of the requirements in others."

Um yes. A console released 8 weeks ago is more future proof than a console released 12 months ago. Surprise? I don't know. In 2009 when the next Xbox comes out it will be way ahead of the PS3 and Wii in capabilities/features. Not sure what the point here is.

That the PS3 will be in the cheaper, yet still impressive, territory that the Wii and XBox enjoy now.

With, more than likely, an equally impressive gaming catalog.

[EDIT]

And better backwards compatibility to boot. Whatever Microsoft releases next, it'll surely fuck up in this department even more than before.

Or maybe it won't be a fuckup at all. It'll probably be intentional.

I don't own a PS3 but I'm suprised to hear it's BC being referenced in any sort of positive light. I've read a lot of negative stuff about it's backward compatibility so far. But yes, the cycle of console life will continue. I'll get a PS3 later as a BR player. That's the kind of thing the cell will excel at. Oh and there might be a good game or two. But it's not going to be a PS2/Xbox situation, no matter how hard Sony prays.

By the way (to get back to BD games):

Resistance looks every bit as good as Gears of War, but lasts longer simply because of Blu-Ray storage (22 gigs, I think). That's a good thing.

It's not necessarily a better game than GoW (from what I can tell), but it's a good example of the advantages that Blu-Ray offers. If the 360 had the same advantage for GoW, nobody would downplay it. Nobody would talk shit. Length and content is probably the one thing everyone wants more of out of a game like GoW.

..

This also makes me wonder about exclusive content in future titles like GTA IV - a game which definitely could use as much storage as possible. Microsoft is touting "exclusive XBL content" for the upcoming GTA IV (on a system with precious hard drive space to begin with), while the PS3 versions will have the advantages of larger media capacity, as well as hdd capabilties. I'll bet right now that the PS3 version will be better because of this.

You're the first person I've heard say this. I've played Resistance and I disagree completely. It's a good looking game. It's not as visually impressive as GoW. I'm not going to bother linking to the PS3 owner threads elsewhere that support this, suffice to say I think you're wrong on that point.

I agree that in some cases more content will be available to PS3 games, but then that wasn't Roac's original assertion at all was it? The original point was that BR was going to allow uber hidef content that the 360 couldn't have due to storage. That's simply not the case.

BTW in the next 360 spec thread there's a picture:

(http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/01/xbox_zephyr.jpg)

Rumours are a 360 refresh is coming with a smaller chipset, HDMI, 1080p output & 120Gig drive. I'd bet that the dvd drive is replaced with an HDDVD drive too. This still leaves a 2 tier situation (360 1st gen & 2nd Gen) for developers but  if it ships soon I think the margin of capabilities you reference will become pretty slim pretty fast.

I think the art has something to do with it, but there are real costs associated with learning to program a new dev kit, especially one with a CPU like Cell where your programmers need to learn all of the tricks that are a given in the single-CPU world.  The time spent learning how to program the PS3 is time not spent actually making a game for it.

No, it won't. The PS3 is $600 while the Wii is $250. It will not reach Wii levels of pricing EVER. The Wii will likely be sub-$200 by 2009, possibly Xmas 2008. It will never compete with the Wii on price, ever ever ever. The 360 will likely drop sub-$300 for the premium system around the same time. I don't see the PS3 dropping to sub-$400 until it's a dead machine unless Blu-Ray wins so handily the huge sales of Blu-Ray players make manufacture cheaper.


Not necessarily. Not only has the 360 had a year's worth of extra time to build a catalog, it doesn't have developers scared to produce games for the system 1 month after release. The PS3 has that. With the PS3 games needing 500k sales to break even for the first year the games are likely to be slow in coming, meaning the 360 will have almost 2 years of headstart to build up a library. Sony has given away the advantage it had with the PS2 (library) in favor of some kind of elite cache and unpossible promised lifecycle. It's going to have to compete on things it never had to before, innovation, price and a DVD format war.

Geez, don't take me me too literally. No, it won't be as cheap as the Wii. I'm just saying it'll eventually be priced to the point where miserly consumers won't bitch about it.


This comes down to taste, I guess, but I don't see the 360 doing that much better than the original XBox. Their exclusives are still tapping into the same console market I don't care a lot about. I see them as doing more damage to the PC than the Playstation really.


If past consoles are any indicator, then no one is going to program for a second tier system. Except first parties -- but even then, barely. It's never worked before, why should it now? The best benefit will be more hard drive space for XBL, but that's it. They'd be better off just issuing out a new hard drive kit.


I'm willing to concede that. I can't really say. I haven't even played GoW on my TV.

My bad. I thought that was a big part of his point -- Not necessarily uber high def content, but more high def content.

As far as I know, so far only NBA 2K7 is 1080p native. I think Resistance, Sony's flagship launch title if anything, is 720p.

Resistance will only do up to 720p.

I'm getting slaughtered in multiplayer btw. I haven't played an online thumbshooter in a while.

Cool maps though. They did a good job.

[EDIT]

Another thing...

I was messing around with Account Management and noticed an "Activate System" menu. So I activated the PS3 (there's another option for the PSP as well). It said it unlocked additional content (for the future, of course). What's that all about anyways? Something to do with DRM and future movie downloads maybe? The store already allows access to purchasable games, and it didn't need an activation.

I think that's actually for activating another PS3 if you have more than one around.

Actually, it says:

Please select a device you want to activate or deactivate

Playstation 3 (This system)

PSP (Playstation Portable) (USB Connected)

You select one and then get this confirmation message:

By activating this system, you can download and play additional content

Activate (or "Deactivate" if you've already activated)

I have played two or three 8-way online matches and consistently came in last place.  My aim is to blame, of course; the leader almost invariably had the highest hit-percentage.

Some old Midway titles (arcade versions) coming to the online service soon:

Mortal Kombat II
Gauntlet II
Joust
Rampage World Tour
Rampart
Championship Sprint

The Wii is geting Gradius. I'd probably trade all of those for that.

Newest Silent Hill villain (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137194)

[EDIT]

Actually that's the 360. Wrong thread. Heh.

Umm....Supposedly Gamestop is offering a deal when you a trade in a PS2/Card/Controller/and cords you'll get $100 off a PS3. Anyone want to confirm that? [EDIT] Here's an ad (http://www.ebgames.com/gs/weeklyad/current/olfsi_011207-1.asp).


Also, here's a horrible PS3 Euro commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-LpZk5oTNo).  :|

Looks legit. Honestly, we don't really know about the internet offers until someone brings in a printout. I've seen someone use an internet offer all of once.

Resistance

Damn, this game could have easily been a must have if the first half of the game was like the second. Video (http://www.gametrailers.com/umwatcher.php?id=32683) (Viper's Nest level). The drab WWII-ish graphics are traded in for a more colorful sci-fi experience (wish I could take a screenshot of that level. It's a thing of beauty). Boss fights don't really come into play until halfway either. Vehicles aren't utilized that much either. Overall, I'd give it an 8.8 or something.

So it was recently brought to my attention that the U.S. version of MotorStorm doesn't support split-screen gameplay (http://kotaku.com/gaming/motorstorm/evolution-motorstorm-could-get-splitscreen-228745.php).  See, apparently:


In other words: "We were in a rush to get this game out and we chose graphics over gameplay, but maybe if you guys ask enough we'll put it in at somepoint *cough*notfuckinglikely*cough".

Seriously, this kind of thing is the epitome of the bullshit we'll be dealing with for this current gen of consoles and probably beyond.  We have one of the most fucking basic gameplay options for racing games left out because these fucks were in a hurry and didn't want to sacrifice the next-gen shiny graphics which will draw the sheep in.  Then we get the increasingly familiar "well these days we don't actually have to finish our games before release because we can just make you guys download shit later if we ever actually get around to developing it" bullshit that reminds one of how the console market is taking on some of the worst traits from the PC market.

I guess we're lucky we don't get the Japanese version of the game which didn't even have Online gameplay (and thus 0 multiplayer options).  They would have been better off leaving out Online play in the US version though and putting in splitscreen.  Driving games are just one of those genres that's a lot more fun to play in the same room as other people than it is to play online.

I agree. I'm still going to buy this though (since it's pretty rockin' as is), but I'll do my best to raise my voice at Sony too.  8-)

I've never played a single splitscreen game that I've really enjoyed. Ever. When they don't offer it, it just means I can get more friends to buy the game. Real Estate is king, and I'm not giving up 50% of it.

Resistance was actually pretty fun four-player on a nice 1080P projector.   Crazy HDTV resolutions make split screen not so bad.  Playing something split 2x or 4x on NTSC is pretty painful.

-Q

Perhaps you might understand though that those of us who actually like playing games with our friends/family in the same room and don't have multiple TV's and consoles set up, might actually appreciate split-screen in our games.

Ok then, I'll be more specific. Splitscreen in Motorstorm would suck balls.

I'll be more specific then.  Racing games suck to play online, and unless it's a deeper simulation style game like Gran Turismo, they suck to play single-player also.  I don't mind if it hurts the graphics a little bit to play split-screen, because driving games are just one of those genres I find more fun to play against other people in the same room.  If the game itself is such a piece of shit that the shiny hi-res graphics are it's only draw, so much so that they couldn't risk making them look worse in split-screen, then I'd say anyone buying this game should be prepared for a 3rd rate rush job that doesn't have much more replay value than the demo they've probably already played to death.

While I wouldn't mind split screen, solo doesn't suck for me. As far as I can tell, the tracks are, coupled with the general chaos, pretty hard to master and fun.

Though I don't dislike racing solo in general. I like mastering tracks, getting turns just right with different setups and vehicles, etc, etc.. The Racing Genre as the Party Genre is not the be all end all for me. I can enjoy it on many levels.

Also, why do you think it's a piece of shit? Have you played the demo or the Jap version? Can you not get an idea from those at least? It's far more than just shiny. It's like ATV Off Road mixed with Burnout, and it's hard to even make it to the freakin' finish line. You care so much about other players, but it's the tracks that'll kick your ass the most.

Besides that, the reason some multiplayer features were rushed in Japan is that they generally do not care as much about that sort of thing. It's a big single player market. They could take that kind of chance.

I think it's a piece of shit because they made an unnecessary sacrifice in gameplay all in the name of preserving their graphics.  I have played the demo (the downloadable one, not the one from the kiosks).  It's fun for a little bit, but without being able to play it offline its got 0 replay value for me.  I love games like SF Rush and more recently Burnout because any time my brother is in town, we can go over to my dad's place and all three of us can sit down and play those games for hours (that's also the only reason I ever play FPS games on consoles also).  Taking out the option of doing that because it might not end up looking as pretty is a shit excuse.  If this game came out a year from now one the PS3 has more titles, I'm sure nobody would give the game a second look.  As it is this game is just attracting attention because PS3 owners haven't had a anything to look forward to since Resistance.

MotorStorm footage was one of the things that got me stoked about the PS3 back before launch. It's hardly filler material for me.

It might be filler material for you, but take a look at console forums and you'll find people have been expectant of this game for at least 6 months.

Resistance is filler material for me.

Yes, they've been expectant of it because it's one of the handful of exclusives for the PS3 that's coming out in the near future and its got shiny graphics.  They're expectant of Heavenly Sword despite the fact that the dev team has only done one mediocre XBox game before this, and the lack of any sort of new demo for the game since E3.  They're expectant of Lair, which at least probably has the best chance of being a good game since I've got a fondness for Factor 5's Rogue Squadron stuff.  They're expectant of Warhawk which has lately been rumored to have a lot of development problems.  They're expectant of all these games because if these 4 in particular end up being less than great, their next shot at a killer exclusive for the PS3 is at the very end of the year with MGS4, or whenever DMC4 is released.

Umm....OK? That's how game purchasing has always worked. Especially launches.

Really?  Your game purchasing always revolves around getting excited about games that normally wouldn't interest you, just so you can justify your $600 purchase?  Seriously, I can understand getting excited about sequels to franchises you like, or new stuff coming from developers who have done games you liked in the past.  Something like Motorstorm especially though, I think nobody would be talking about had it released last year on the PS2 or even the 360.

Dude, I just said I've been wanting to play it for awhile now. As far as not being thrilled by it, speak for yourself.

I can understand if it doesn't appeal to you. I wouldn't, and am not trying to convince you to like it. As far as I can tell though, I want this game. Me. Want. Been wanting. I like the shiny. I like the physics. I like the track design: I like the multiple tracks within a track thing, and I like that I can barely even see the track to begin with. I like the idea of smacking other racers like Road Rash. I like the fact that it's hard as shit to reach finish lines without crashing once. I'd play it for the simple purpose of trying to win 1st place on every course, and manipulating every vehicle and mechanic it has to offer. Like I do in all racing games.

Not sure why I have to justify my liking for this game, but there it is.

Also, I'm an off road fanatic. It's the only kind of racing I watch with any kind of devotion (you can find old threads around here where I talk about it), and the only one I like participating in. And I like off road video games, whether they be goofy like this one or not.

You also brought up people talking on console forums.  This wasn't directed at you in particular.  The majority of the people I've seen getting excited about Motorstom on all the console forums I've frequented in the past few months have been the same people that get excited about every single PS3 exclusive that's been announced.  Either the popularity of off-road racing games blew up overnight, or there are a lot of people out there forcing themselves to get hyped up months in advance over a game they wouldn't even consider renting if it hadn't come out during a drought.

You don't seem very enthusiastic about racing games to begin with, and I think you're projecting *just a bit*. Sure's there's people who get excited about these new titles for little reason, but off road video games aren't that unpopular. Hell, those ATV games have gone through several iterations on just the PS2 alone, starting with a launch title. Supercross, Motocross, and Baja games are a dime a dozen. Some *are* good. People genuinely do like them. And if the number of distinct titles are any indication, then they are more popular than crotch rocket games (which is a large, fanatical crowd as well).

Like I said I'm a big fan of racing games I can play split-screen on.  My brother, father, and I have literally played Burnout 3 for 3-4 hours at a time on several occassions (pretty much every time my brother is out here on leave we manage to get a few Burnout sessions in).  We played Rush a lot back on the N64 also.  I think games like Gran Turismo work well as single-player games due to the depth of the game and the amount of unlockables.  I enjoy racing games, but give me multi-player arcade action, or a primarily single-player simulation-style game.  Don't give me an arcade-stlye game though that I have to play online for multi-player.

I quote you out of context to say "nyah ha!"

No actually I understand what you're saying - mindless arcadey racing games are almost Wii like in their need for a physical community to cheer and jeer while you're playing them. As a HUGE fan of racing in general I own a tonne of PC and Xbox racing titles and there seems to be 3 kinds of driving/racing games:

Arcade: Burnout, Motorstorm, Ridge Racer, ATV. I'm not a big fan of these in general personally but have enjoyed them on occasion and somewhat agree they are best when split screen or competitive in a room.

RPG/Tuner: Need for Speed, Midnight Club - these are totally fun games for me that I play solo. I like to build a super sized version of the car i have in RL (RX8) as well drive all the tuner imports I can't afford to play with.

Semi-Sim/Sim: PGR3, Colin McRae Rally, Forza, Gran Turismo, GT Legends, F1 Challenge - games I love and generally suck at that take dedication solo play to be able to even think about online play.

What's the point? Well for me the first group is like Wii tennis or bowling - it really only is fun after a few beers with friends that you can crash into. I've played MotorStorm for probably <4 hours but I couldn't see the appeal. Yes it's pretty. But it's the same game. Over and over. With no trappings or RPG development or anything. Dunno - I just don't see the appeal.

Which isn't to say it's a bad game at all, racing games are notoriously hard to get right for everybody.

EDIT: Re-reading this I have no idea what I'm trying to say. Go go Boddington's followed by red wine...

Just to clarify, I totally wouldn't mind split screen for Motorstorm. It is a game with many of the party type trappings. Probably would be hilarious with friends.

That being said, I can still enjoy it solo or online.

Since it was mentioned, I'm not crazy on the look of Lair. It's like they went overboard on the bump mapping or something. It like, looks Overly-sharp to me, and extremely unnatural (as far as games go).

I'd be sold on Lair if it came on the Wii.

That being said, yeah, the dragons look kind of rough. On the plus side, there's a lot of stuff going on the screen to offset that (the weather and water looks great, it's able to display hundreds of soldiers at a time, buildings look cool and are destructible, particle effects are cool, etc).

But then again, I haven't seen any recent footage of it.

So...

Ridge Racer is worth buying. Should have done that earlier.

NBA 2K7, crippled Project 8...What was I thinking?

Looks like Motorstorm has been pushed back slightly from a Feb 27th release to "sometime in March", Heavenly Sword was listed for a time as being a March 6th release but is now back to a vague Q2/Q3 release date, and KOEI has pushed back both the PS3 and 360 releases of Fatal Inertia and Bladestorm to sometime in the Summer.

Heh. I was gonna post about Fatal Intertia and Bladestorm. The latter being delayed really pisses me off.

It pisses me off a little bit, but then I remind myself to be happy any time that KOEI bothers to bring their games to the States.  As it is I'll always be left wondering what their Uncharted Waters MMO is like.

I wonder what that's costing them in time and money. I know they're a big company and all, but I rather see groups like that make 20 DS or 5 big console titles rather than one mmo.

KOEI isn't thinning themselves out by making Uncharted Waters online. Different team and staff. No, they thinned themselves out by deciding halfway through development to port it from the PS3 to the 360. I'm quite sure porting FROM the latter is a lot easier.

If they started on the PS3 with SPE specific code, then they'd have to get rid of all the fine tuned Cell specific scheduling and unravel everything across the 360's 3 CPU's. If they started on the 360, then they'd have to fine tune general code to to work in specific ways and specific areas. The job isn't any worse. In both scenarios, programmers have to undo a lot of their previous work when porting between the two.

The only games that would be easy to port are the ones that are mainly utilizing one CPU.....And aren't that much better than Wii titles.

Uh, then again Fatal Inertia is UE3. If GoW is any indication, then it shouldn't be a problem at all on the 360. Maybe it's a PS3 delay.

On another note, David Jaffe is one of the few good things Sony has going for it right now and one of the main reasons I'd even consider buying a PS3.  I only mention this because I just watched the interview he did for 1up recently (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3156560).  I don't agree with everything the guy says but he's always so blunt and doesn't spend a lot of time bullshitting in his interviews that I find him failrly entertaining in addition to being a great game designer.

By one of the main reasons, you mean him and Fumito Ueda, rite?

That would be a second and unrelated reason, but yeah.

Edit:  I've never seen an interview with him, but I don't imagine that he's as entertaining as Jaffe is. That drunken interview from that party at Playboy was some funny shit. (http://www.gamespot.com/users/JLuke360/video_player?id=JHRnxDb55bgLuj7f)

I like listening to Jaffe, but I don't consider him that integral. Hell, lately he's been all enthused over the possibilities of the PS Store and downloadable casual games (like the upcoming Calling All Cars). That's cool and all, but not exactly why I bought a Playstation.

He still seems to be interested in doing God of War 3 though as soon as Sony gives it the green-light.

God of War is already being worked on for the PS3.

It's being worked on in that Jaffe says he's just barely started writing down ideas, but that Sony hasn't actually told them to go ahead and make the game yet (of course we all know they will).

According to Brian Crecente's Quivering Asshole, the PS3 will get an update on January 24th in Japan that will do something a rather to backwards compatibility. They didn't elaborate. Instead they jerked off to some e-reader bullshit that only Japan would be interesting. I fucking hate those guys.

I have no doubt this stuff will get fixed. Who the hell could fuck up hardware emu that badly?

I just hate Sony for keeping a lid on everything. They should be more open.

Now I know you're on crack.  Sony's biggest problem is that they just couldn't shut the fuck up for the past year about how they were building a "supercomputer", about how you should get a second job to afford one, and how NORAD was buying truckloads of them to create a beowulf cluster which could track the movements of everything sparrow sized or larger in North America.

More open?  No, they need a goddamned gag.

Eh, what the fuck? Seriously. WTF. Stop it. How could you possibly make the leap to that bullshit? And how could you even construe that I'm saying anything good about Sony here? I'm criticizing them.

The marketing gibberish is not "open". Every company on the face of the earth does it. And all it does is beg more questions.

I'm talking about them about shedding more light on upcoming SCE games, community contact ala Maj. Nelson, progress and plans for updates. Things like that.

[EDIT]

Basically, I'm pointing some good things from Microsoft, and saying Sony should learn (look at how in depth their Halo documentaries are, for example. Or how they keep people up to date about Live features. Or the aforementioned Major Nelson). How that got you riled up, I don't know.

I think they'd just fuck that up, too.  No, the only solution for Sony is a strict mafia-like code of silence for everybody, from the lowliest intern to the batshit crazy guy who used to be in charge of their Playstation division.  They should break into Best Buys and stock shelves with any new games they have out, you know, the "thief in the night" approach to content delivery.

Because if you don't hype something it can't come back to bite you in the ass.

I'm more inclined to go with the idea that they don't want to admit that their machine is incomplete.  Kinda like most any other large corporation.


Are you telling me that I'm the only one around here that thinks it's neat to have Donkey Kong encoded in dots on a card?  Uh... don't answer that.

It's not fair to tease with a BC fix like that.  I mean Backward Compatibility, not Brian Crescente.  SMT: Devil Summoner looks terrible on the PS3.

I suppose this could be another thing to chalk up to the "East meets West" thread. I dunno.

In fact, if I'm not mistaken, I think that's exactly why Kutaragi got demoted: For "speaking out" too much. Not following the party line, etc..


In the end though, I think they can deliver things. They usually do. But the silence doesn't help.

I want to believe that they will fix it.  It makes sense.  I just don't like getting my hopes up for anything anymore.  Yes, I blame EQ.

So apparently, the PS3 actually does have a hardware scaler (the Toshiba SCC, or a variant, I think?).

http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/ps3scaler/ (http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/ps3scaler/)

The problem was the SDK, which has since been updated this month for developers to take full advantage of scaling.

On the negative side of things, fixing the 1080i problems for old school HD-TV owners is a developer-side issue. Not something fixed by default.

Did they reset the GTHD servers? I just got a 13 overall ranking on that dinky little Mazda (time was 1.25), and 55 on the Lotus. The best I could do before this was the top 200 or 300.

I got around to downloading that Genji demo. Never played the first one, but this game doesn't seem that bad. It's no Onimusha, but it's probably in the same realm as Otogi (and just as beautiful). I.E. Not the most inspired Oriental hack and slasher, but gameplay seems decent enough (besides the camera...but very few of these do that well anyways). Great music as well.

Wonder why it's getting slammed so hard. Schild? You bought it. Played it through yet?

I wouldn't say it got slammed all that hard when you actually read the reviews.  Most just said the game was average, and a bit dull.  The Gundam game on the other hand, got slammed.

True....But it's the end rating that obscures that, I guess.

It's funny, but I basically agree (from what I can tell) with the things they say: Beautiful visuals, nice score, average gameplay, awful camera.

But even though I agree, the difference is that I wouldn't give an otherwise nice looking and decent game like this a "2 out of 5" or a sub 50% rating just because of the camera.

I think what you're seeing is a shift game reviewers seem to be making towards more of a "5 out of 10 is average" way of scoring (which is a logical way to review things, but the key obviously is to do it consistently, which I don't think they're doing).

Reading through this thread I ran into that quote. Is there a way to find Gamespot X-rating+ games beyond just surfing through games and seeing what they scored?

Go to "All <Platform> Games" when you are looking at a particular platform. Then "Browse All Results". Finally click on the Score column.

For some inexplicable reason they took out the Search config page where you could specify a score range, which genres you were interested, and so on.

They need a way to turn off all the basketball/skateboarding/football/snowboarding/baseball/soccor/wrestling/etc games. I mean... damn.

That's what Trippy was talking about.  They had it.  Their search engine was damn nice and made it very easy to find exactly what I wanted.  Now, not so much.

I'm sure if you used the search function, you wouldn't have your eyes raped by so many EA Street Sports ads. They couldn't have that.

No, they still had full screen clickthrough ads.  If anything I saw more of the damned things then, because back then I actually visited their site.  They hid the content I wanted to see (easy searching for games I might like), so I don't visit that much anymore.

I talked with the lead programmer at Massive the other day, he's been lead since they started 10 years ago so he has quite a wealth of experience. Anyway, he was mostly intrested in PS3 in this generation it seemed. He thinks that the PS3 will be the truly innovative machine when it comes to technology. He thinks that just as the PS2 was a bitch to program for, it had entirely diffrent possibilities than the competition. Compare first generation PS2 games to the best looking bunch now at the end of the cycle and there's a much larger difference than for xbox and gc. He pointed out that in for example Warhawk they have ray traced clouds, just because they can. People talk about how it will be impossible to unlock all the potential of the CPU cores, but I bet you that there's smart people out there which will do it.

Oh, I'm sure they can unlock the power of the PS3 architecture. And there's a huge number of technical people who would adore the challenge it provides. However the people with the money may be a lot less interested in another increase in the cost of development, and making it much harder to do versions for other platforms.

A lot of it is going to end up depending on the size of the PS3 installed base.

The PS3 will get enough exclusives, and the console will drop in price eventually (although probably only sometime late in 2008) so that the install base shouldn't be a problem.  The thing is, though, that although it's more powerful than the 360, it's only marginally so.  Also, they'll never come close to duplicating what MS has going on with Live, and I think that if Sony comes breathing down their neck they'll drop the subscription for that as well.

The PS3 has some advantages, but man, it's competitors have leaped out ahead of it in a huge way.

Seems like this might be a big era for middleware (not that it already isn't). Less people even trying to take advantage of the hardware themselves as much, putting the main burden on specialists and first parties to push the hardware.

More hardware is not innovation.  The hardware arms race has been going on since... well, since computing began.  As for how excited programmers are to work with the PS3, I really doubt it because it offers nothing really new.  What Microsoft is doing with Live is new.  What Nintendo is doing both with the DS and Wii is new.  The PS3 and PSP are not new. 

Thing is, people have been really worried for a long time now about the notion that more graphics does not make better games, yet more and more of the cost of a game percent wise is being dumped into graphics content.  The actual game part of a game isn't changing much.


There isn't much that is fundamentally different between the XBox, PS2, and GC.  If any of the three had "entirely different possibilities", it would be the XBox because of the Live content and beat the PS2 for online stuff hands down.  Oh, and it had a hard drive too.  Right, and it was the more powerful hardware of the three.  It still lost despite being an arguably better product, because the PS2 dominated mindshare at the outset and was able to lockup a HUGE library of games.  Nobody gives a shit about consoles, people care about games, so pepople bought PS2s.  It had games, which was well reflected in its 4:1 sales lead over the Xbox (and GC).  That library is why the PS2 is still selling well, because even for people who are excited about 7th gen stuff, if you like playing games the PS2 is still where it's at.

Technology allows more innovation in the gameplay areas. Good luck doing the gravity gun in HL2 with the hardware available when HL1 launched. There's a bit more to it than "more powerful" when it comes to hardware, PS3 is worse than the 360 in some areas but better in others. In the end it's all about the game, just as you stated, at this point however we can only speculate about how good the up coming games are for the PS3 and Wii so it's hard to base a purchase on that.

Oh brother. Not the less investment in graphics means better gameplay argument again.

[EDIT]

Besides, the hardware doesn't just push higher graphics capabilities. There's better AI, better physics, better capacity...All of which can help gameplay.

Since this is the Q&A thread, I have a couple of questions.   Some of these have already been speculated on, but I'd be interested in some solid answers if anyone has them:

Is the PS3 region free for PS2 games?

Can the BD player also run ordinary DVDs?  Is this also region free?

These are actually pretty important questions for me...I'm moving to the US in about 2 weeks, and I know I'll need a region free DVD player.  I'd also like to know if I should dump all my PAL PS2 games, or take them with me.  If the answer to all the above is YES (which I doubt), then the PS3 will be a no-brainer purchase for me.

Agreed, actually after doing a fair bit of reading on the PS3 architecture I'd say that if you're expecting graphics way above what the 360 does you're going to be disappointed. However, given developer commitment, the Cell should be awesome for AI and physics specifically, and those have a huge impact on gameplay.

Not region free for anything besides PS3 games.

It can play DVDs. Not other regions besides though.

Bummer.  But thanks.

So I got invited to the G.A.P. Is that a good thing? And is that a random invite or something? They're already calling me elite (lol), but I can't think of anything I did that was special (did have some kickass laptimes in gthd awhile back, I guess..).

They pretty much invite everyone.  It's not bad to sign up for.  I think they send out demo discs and stuff once in a while, and I also seem to recall that it's how I got into the FFXI PS2 beta (which also netted me a free PS2 HDD that never saw any use afterwards since I only ever played FFXI on the PC).

So, it's kinda like being a member of Nintendo Power?

I guess.  I haven't so much as looked at an issue of Nintendo Power since the end of the 8-bit days.

Aww man. I thought it was free parties and swag or some shit.  :-P

And especially thought it was saying that I was a unique snowflake.  :oops:

Neg. It's nothing.

Fifth Element in Blu-Ray is pretty.  Too bad it's not really an improvement over the Superbit DVD.

Anybody happen to know how to increase XMB text size while in 720 or 1080?  That shit is tiny.

Don't think so. It should scale well enough already...?

The only text you can increase manually is in the browser, I think.

[EDIT]

Fifth Element isn't the greatest of transfers.

Actually, there aren't any big, recent visual sci-fi/fantasy flicks that are yet. Unless you want to include X3 and Superman Returns. Those look great, but they're also shitty movies.

Well....I haven't seen Hitchhiker's on BD. Maybe that's good.

...

House of Flying Daggers isn't as good as it could be either.

Like Schild recommended awhile back though, if you want great picture quality, the best you might get is Silent Hill.

Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux aren't too shabby either.

Edit: Stray, is your avatar Dan Smith from Killer 7?

Yep, that's Dan :)


The Prestige comes out Tuesday. That's supposed to look good.

Doesn't scale at all as far as I can tell.  The icons seem to maintain their size.  I got used to it, though, and I know where everything is in XMB now.

Yeah, my eyes adjusted pretty quickly to the size.

Is it just me, or are the melee ranges in Resistance multiplayer awfully dodgy?

Hitting things with the butt of my gun is far less satisfying than it should be, if you ask me.

I think I melee'd like once in this game (besides screwing and breaking glass for the fun of it). I'm just weary of melee in any FPS really...


I loves me some grenades though. This game makes pretty good use of them. I'd like to play an FPS with nothing but demolition and grenades.  :-D

The grenades, grenade launcher, and rocket launcher in Crackdown are about as Fun as demolition gets. Sorry to drop 360 on the PS3 party. Mercenaries 2 should be good.

Since we are dogging on it, I find combat in R&C: Deadlocked to be more fun than Resistance, but there's that FPS burnout problem I have.

Oh, I would have preferred an R&C launch title rather than Resistance. No doubt. But it's not a bad game either.

Besides blowing shit up, my favorite weapon in this game was the Hailstorm. Never enough damn bullets for that thing though. Clip (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3506085976634782757&q=hailstorm+resistance&hl=en)

But EA is publishing Mercs 2.  Doesn't that make it evil or something?  I can never keep track of how these things work.

I didn't say I was going to buy it.

Also it apparently just got confirmed for the 360, PC, and PS2 today.

360 was already a guarantee. I don't understand why IGN is talking about this being an exclusive. Game Informer all but said YA on it a few weeks ago in the new issue.

Split the VF5 talk into it's own thread. More than deserves it.

[EDIT]

Reposting in the other thread.

You poor sods that live in Europe get screwed again. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070223/tc_nm/sony_playstation_europe_dc_1)

Hmm, that sucks. It doesn't say what exactly they're removing though. The EE chip itself?

At least the Euro's are lucky enough to have a launch with a large game selection though. Maybe they'll happy enough to ignore this (not spin....just trying to find a positive here).

Aussies get screwed. You'll be paying $1000 Aussie dollars for the PS3 (about $778 US). Ouch.

Ouch that's brutal. It's also probably a sign of things to come for future PS3s. If PS2 compatibility is important to you and you are in the US or Japan you better get one sooner rather than later.

This is why I'm definitely getting a US PS3 just as soon as I get paid for the current job.


Oh and Stray, we actually tend to get a few bonus features and fixes for having to wait half a year, so there's usually some mollification. Not enough though. :P

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v231/lonestar627/Games/gundam_musou.jpg)


I like Gundam. I like Musou. And I might as well take advantage of region free play. So I think I'll be getting this.

Anyone else?

Is that not the same terrible Gundam game that launched with the system?

No, not even close. This is done like Dynasty Warriors. So far, it's not being released in the States.

Seems like a worthy import though. Cool premise, and it's in a genre that doesn't require too much reading. [EDIT] Though I would rather wait if they just announced a US version.

I'm ordering it also actually.  This is the kind of release that region free was made for. Reading is entirely unnecessary. All numbers, and enemy actions describe the actual orders you've been give (blinky red thing! lots of my guys or lots of their guys?).

OK, so it might actually get localized. Hmm.


Maybe I'll wait then. I mean, I wouldn't mind reading/listening to some kind of storyline. For my giant robot fix in the meantime, we'll have AC4. For the DW fix, maybe Bladestorm will get released before this...

I don't know though. It looks cool. Normally I wouldn't be tempted to import. But this is the PS3. Them's the breaks for now.  :-D

Samurai Warriors 2 Empires gets released next week for the 360.

*shuts ears*

La La La La La

 :-P


Seriously though, I probably won't get around to the 360 until at least June. I was considering it for March, but I don't have the cash for that and some other things.

I don't think I've ever heard of a console re-releasing and removing major features.

It is funny that the press release spins it as a positive. Now we don't have to worry about backwards compatibility so we can concentrate more on new games - cause you know the machines that glue the EE into the PS3 on the assembly line are the same machines that design and code PS3 software...

I suppose this is one way to get the PS3s that are sitting on shelves moving - threaten the consumers with a new, worse version while making the old one unavailable.

Sony removed hard drive support when they released the "mini" PS2. Nintendo took out component output in the later GCs.

It sucks immensely short term wise, can't argue with that. However software emulation has some clear advantages over the model they obviously seems to have used with the hardware version. For example, texture filtering, post processing, resolution enhancement is all easily achieved when you emulate. How about 1080p for every PS2 game released? It should be a trivial matter now.

I did remember the lack of hard drive support in the PS2 but the Hard Drive was barely supported anyway.

Software emulation is fine, if they can get it to work. That's a pretty big if. MS was never able to get XBox software emulation working 100%.

New firmware is out. Not as big as I thought it'd be.

Features off the top of my head:

Browser Zoom
Background downloading and queueing
Bluetooth KB&M support
Also a better on screen keyboard
Folding@Home
WMA playback (I don't think there's WMV though)
Remote Play through Wi-Fi

Bored me to tears.  Tried to like it.  Played a few scenarios, just couldn't get into it.  Didn't have that same feel to me that these games used to have.

Background downloading is a big deal.

I guess. I was just hoping they'd include 720p Blu-Ray support for this patch. That'd be a bigger deal to me. I don't expect to download a whole lot off the PS Store for awhile.

There you go getting your hopes up again.  I keep my expectations low and am always pleasantly surprised.  If I were to get my hopes up, it would be for a game capable of 1080i.

Maybe I'm missing the joke, but games are fine at 1080i. Not really ideal, but fine nonetheless.

Resistance only does up to 720p.  Now that I think on it, I don't know about VF5, I didn't check.  A quibble, certainly, especially since I mostly play PS2 games.

Are you sure? 1080i isn't anything -- it's worse than 720p, in fact.


Or do you mean 1080p? Because I know it can't do that.

Virtua Fighter is 720p as well, but I'm pretty sure it can do 1080i. I don't see why not.

Other games I have (MUA, RR7, NBA2K7) can all do 1080p. I don't remember what Project 8 is (but it's a bad port anyhow).

My setup can't do 720, so I'm just looking to get what I can get.

Question about folding@home: are we able to run it in the background while playing a game or watching a movie?  I ask because the PS3 gets awfully warm when left on for extended periods, and I can't see myself just leaving my ps3 on at all hours.

Don't think you can. Background running (or screensaver mode) would be a nice feature to add though.

In other news, the PS3 is a beast (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats).

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v231/lonestar627/Misc/fahstats.jpg)

And the client isn't even publically available yet.

Oh? Not available for who? I'm confused.

The PS3 client(s). If you go to the Folding@Home Web site they say it'll be available at the end of the month and it's not listed on their download page.

Hmm?  PS3 people have been downloading it and returning packets.  What're you talking about?

My bad, the client was made available on March 22 through the PS3 1.6 firmware update. I assumed it was going to be something you could download off the main Folding@Home Web site.

Yeah, it's downloadable through the XMB, starting with the patch from last week. I've had it since then. That pic above is the number of normal PS3 users who were running Folding@Home when I made that post. Just a modest number of clients, and they're already nearing a petaflop on their own. Pretty neat.

It's probably not listed as downloadable from a website because the distribution is wacky for that format or something. But it is downloadable through the PS3 itself.

Huh. So, all those jokes about the PS3 not having games but being able to cure cancer (or someshit) might turn out to be right. Between SETI@Home, Folding@Home and that other one, has Anything good come out of these distributed projects?

Folding@Home, relatively speaking, hasn't been out that long.

As for anything good coming out of them, I don't know... Probably not. But I think it's Seti@Home that gives distributing projects an air of futility. Folding@Home might be reaching for the impossible as well, but the goal is more down to earth than searching for ET through radiowaves.

[EDIT] Ok, here are some results they've had with it:

http://folding.stanford.edu/results.html (http://folding.stanford.edu/results.html)

It's greek to me, but at least they learn things incrementally. Whether they're "curing" cancer or not, it aids in research. SETI, on the other hand, is not for research. I imagine that there isn't much to learn at all. You only have two possible answers: Yes, aliens exist. Or, no, they don't exist.

I submit that SETI actually gives you "Yes, aliens exist" or "Not sure".

In regard to PS3 and heat, I leave mine on for days at a time.  If I'm not near a save point in FFXII, I just pause it and leave... in fact it is paused right now.  I did enlarge the hole in the back of my cabinet to make sure the fans could expel the hot air; with just a hand test, it seems to have decent airflow.  The PS3 makes much less heat than some of the Power4 machines at work, but it is some magnitude smaller.

Of course there has! Just read this (http://folding.stanford.edu/papers/sorin_helix-nanotube_2006jacs.pdf) and you'll see it clearly!

This is the better page for what F@H has contributed so far:

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-diseases.html

Folding@Home is doing very useful stuff (see above link). Some of the other distributed projects like distributed.net are helping test the strength of cryptographic systems that a lot things depend on now. And then there are the just for fun projects (well fun to math geeks) like the search for Mersenne primes.

Thought this (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/776/776492p1.html) sounded a bit interesting:

Casual games that were 3-4 years in the making?

Casual development.

BluRay goes oldskool (not PS3, but hey):

http://www.dailytech.com/Dragons+Lair+Bringing+Bluray+Java+Gaming+to+Bluray+Players/article6789.htm

Fuck Dragon's Lair.

Does anyone remember this one Dragon's Lair type game that was more anime based, and contained a story with helicopters in it?

I stumbled across it once when I was a kid, but never knew the name. I've been trying to figure out that one for a long ass time.


In other news, some new Heavenly Sword pics (http://www.gamepro.com/screen_gallery.cfm?globalid=110429) (GamePro are bitches for making them so small though). Looks like they got rid of the bloom.


(http://www.gamepro.com/screens/110429/108390-6-2.jpg)

(http://www.gamepro.com/screens/110429/108390-1-2.jpg)

(http://www.gamepro.com/screens/110429/108390-9-2.jpg) (love the asscheek)

Nice ass.

I guess they are axing the basic model. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070412/tc_nm/sony_ps3_dc_1)

That can only be good, if you ask me.

I'm not sure how you figure that.

I will pretend I am a math professor and ask you to demonstrate how it will be bad.

It's probably good, they won't have to waste their expensive and difficult to produce components on the crappy version no one wants.

I think it was called Cliff Hanger.

They had one at the Showbiz Pizza Place by my childhood home.  Happy birthday boy or girl.

 Brief review and some tiny tiny pictures. (http://www.atarihq.com/coinops/laser/clifhang.html)

IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0161443/)

For those not interested in Wi-Fi, the 20GB was the better deal as you can get a new HDD (one bigger than 60GB if you want) for less than the $100 extra you'd pay for the 60GB model.  As long as they kept a $100 between the two models when they did price drops, the 20B is the model I would have gone for.

Too much HDD. Does anyone really need that kind of storage in a console?

DVR use among other things.

Sound reasoning.  In my case, I have found that my future self never worries about that Franklin I once had more than the wi-fi I don't have.  My shining example is how I passed on seeing Bowie at Chastain Ampitheatre because I felt bad for wasting the money on frivolous things.  Which one do you think I would miss more today, that lousy $100 or seeing the Reality tour in a non-stadium venue?  Sometimes logic bites you in the nutsack.

Also, Sky, are you being serious?

:cry:

And yeah, I was genuinely curious. I never used my xbox hd for anything except a few save games.

Also, I've never regretted spending money to see an artist I admire. I get to see Buddy Guy twice this year!

I absolutely need more than 20 gigs (err 15) on my 360.  I'm already finding myself deleting things that I would rather save to make space for new things.

I'm presuming you will be able to put the Elite's 120 gig'er onto the regular 360.

Yeah, but I think the 120GB is going to cost around $180 iif you buy it separately.  I'm hoping that once MS gets the 360 to recognize a HDD bigger than 20GB, someone will figure out how to get other HDD's to work in there.

I don't personally have a 360 to look at right this moment, but what kind of port does the HDD connect through to the 360? I somehow remember it looking similar to a SATA port.

I just got my Play-Asia order with Gundam Musou in it. Suck on that, internet.

When did you order it?

Just wondering how long it took. I haven't even tried yet.

Oh I ordered it during their 20% off sale, everything was delayed because they had so many orders.

It took 2 days from the day they shipped it though. EMS is love.

This is by FAR the best Gundam game I've ever played. It makes the whole series fresh. The new engine (seemingly new) is just spectacular. The movement is awesome. And since Senko no Ronde isn't out for the 360 yet (GO GO MAY!) this is the best robot fighting game since Tech Romancer (lols).

Yep. Official. This game meets 3 requirements:

1. Best Gundam game. (Only good Gundam Game? HARHARHAHRHARHR)
2. Best Musou Game.
3. Best Robot game.

This needs to hit America fast. Bandai US and KOEI need to come to a fast agreement. The PS3 needs this. And yes, it's as good as Zone of the Enders (though obviously not as fast as Zone of the Enders 2, which is ridiculous at some parts).

Huh. I was interested in it, of course, but I could have never seen all of that from the videos. If it's as fun as ZoE, then I'd really like to play it.

Best Gundam isn't hard to accomplish though... But best musou?

Seems to be selling well, so it probably will make it here soon (started off at 170k, and keeps climbing. Almost 300k now, topping other PS3 and 360 games significantly -- [EDIT] In this thread, we will not compare it with Wii numbers...).

Well, it could just be the shocking change of pace from china/japan that makes it the best Musou game. It sure is incredibly pretty though.

Also, hard.

So I got my first piece of GAP swag today. A t-shirt that can't be found in stores.

I truly am elite.


What the hell does it say anyway?

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v231/lonestar627/Misc/Sony_GAP_Shirt.jpg)

[EDIT] Oops. Didn't see that 20GB news earlier.

A shame really. If only because it's cooler looking than the 60 gigger.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v231/lonestar627/Games/ps3_60gb.jpg)] (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v231/lonestar627/Games/ps3_20gb.jpg)




That's it. Thanks! :)

That shirt is awesome.

It is kind of cool actually.

Just realized it said Playstation in Kanji (should have guessed that..  :roll:).

[EDIT]

Heh, I wish I had won this awhile back. The jacket may be cooler than the game.

(http://img.qj.net/uploads/articles_module2/78972/rfom_jacket_contest_qjpreviewth.jpg)

I'd wear it.

It's gotta be better than Samurai Warriors II Empires.  That game just didn't feel fun.  The demo to 99 nights was more fun to me even though it's almost identical game play.

I think they should use the kill hordes of everything mechanic in MMO's, party up, use some strategy and wipe out thousands at a time.  Massive Carnage!

I seem to have a small PS3 problem.

My PS3 has huge bursts of static when there's too many audio things going on at once. Motorstorm is a particular violator. A lot of things start making sounds and it seems like it overloads and I get a crackle-burst of static. Flow has also done it, if you are using the charge-fish that can eat a whole ton at the same time, and you do, it can also happen. It seems to be like it runs out of audio channels or makes things on top of each other so loud that it goes off the top-end.

As for my setup, I've got the optical out hooked to my stereo reciever; I thought I'd ask to see if anyone has heard of this issue, because I did some searching but I haven't seen anything. It's really annoying, and I want to make sure I don't have a defective PS3.

Weird. No problems here. Not sure how to help you.

Have you tried different settings in the Audio menu? If you're using stereo, make sure you're just using a standard PCM/Stereo setting. Maybe since you went optical, it's assuming you have 5.1 or something, and is trying to crank that through your stereo reciever (just a wild guess).

Unrelated, but still pretty cool:

I've never been so happy with a piece of shareware before this. VisualHub (http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/).

Pretty fast video converter for OS X, and the next best thing to having DVD movies. I can just batch up multiple DivX or XviD movies (and just about anything else), and convert to a friendly PS3 format.

For example, converting one DivX encoded Heroes episode to MP4 takes 5 minutes (typical 22 min anime episode takes about 3 mins). After that, I can just burn on to a DVD, and they'll play like a charm in the PS3's video player.

[edit] Err, the reason I'm happy is because that encoding speed is pretty fast. Before I knew about it, I was almost ready to install Linux and try to get VLC working. Screw that.

Why do you need Linux to have VLC work? Or do you mean Linux on the PS3?

Yeah. VLC on PS3 Linux (and I'm not even sure if that works well anyways).

I was just looking for a way to get XVids and DivX's to play well (and conveniently) on my TV. Best way to go about it is converting files to MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 (which the PS3 can natively handle). Problem is, converting videos usually takes a fuckload of time. So....I was considering installing Linux instead.

Now I don't have to.

I'll assume you cannot route the files through the PS3 through your home network?

I'm not sure what you're asking. The problem isn't getting files on to a PS3. The problem is that the large majority of the (ahem) pirating world encodes in DivX, XviD, OGM, or Matroska. I could easily copy these files on to a PS3 if I wanted to -- What I can't do is decode them. The PS3 only decodes MPEG and Flash formats, as far as video goes. Therefore you either need

1) a universal video player like VLC (which Sony hasn't ported to the XMB....Hence, why Linux is the only option)

or 2) to reencode them to MPEG yourself (which wasn't a practical option until I found that fast ass app up above)


[EDIT] I could watch videos on my computer, of course. I just didn't see the point if I have a bigger screen to watch them on.

I have friends who'd like to see these shows too. It's easier to just lug a PS3 to their house rather than burning a small amount of episodes for their DVD players (and burning even that small amount in that format would take a long ass time anyways).

Yeah, not much of a better solution if you want to transport the videos to another person's house.

But what I meant above is, in order to view the files on your big TV, can you play the files off your PC, through your PS3 using your home network? I believe the 360 does something like that.

Nope, unfortunately not.

Even if it could network, you still couldn't stream these files by virtue of the format they're in.

Also, even though the Xbox360 can network, it still can't play these files either (it just does WMV). Someone would still have to resort to the process I'm going through to play DivX and XviD's if they had an XBox -- except they would have to encode to WMV instead of MP4.

Once again.

Original Xbox + XMBC. Anything else is _just_stupid_.

XMBC is cool and all, but my Xbox is gone. I don't care to get another one. And it's nice to have the media playing capabilities I need in the machine I'm going to be using the most.


Also, I convert vids in general anyways. That little app kicks ass. Never seen anything encode this fast and with little input from the user.

I'm getting a divide by zedro error on "I don't care to get another one."

Shutting down.

Sleeptime.

Yeah really. I don't care. I don't care to spend $50. I don't care to mod it. I don't care make room in the cramped theater space that I have. I don't care to do something on XMBC that I can basically do on the Playstation now. It's good enough for me.

Ah wait. Here's something XMBC can't do.

I can fire up a PSP and play the videos stored on the PS3 remotely.

As long as you have the wireless/60gb model, of course.

Not much use for it personally, but what the hell. It's cool. :)

here's a ps3 question:

NSFW: Why does sony think this commercial will sell in Europe? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_CIsfIVMU0)

Edit by Trippy: remember over here, violence is okay but sex is bad

Jesus Christ there is at least one really NSFW part of that which caused me to quickly close the browser.  Fuck.

Sorry about that.  :oops:

I constantly forget that people don't live in the third world around here.

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH A FUCKING CONSOLE?

Holy shit. It's not like I mind sex and violence on TV and in commercials. But fuck, 5 goddamn minutes and there wasn't one gameplay screen, not one controller, not even one hint of the product in the commercial. You didn't even get to see the fucking console. WHAT THE FUCK?

That reminds me a lot of the dreamcast commercials at launch, but minus the narrative.  Really, Haemish has it: What the fuck does that have to do with a fucking console?

There are absolute shittons of commercials that don't feature products or have anything to do with products. I mean, yea, it's funny whenever a company does that. But really, nothing new to see here.

@bhodi, I have optical going to a receiver with my PS3 and I don't have that problem, but I don't have Motorstorm either.  Maybe poke at your audio settings?  Do you have this in other games or media?

So far, nothing else has done it; There aren't any audio settings for the PS3. You select what audio out you want (HDMI, Optical, HPDIF) and what kind of formats you can output (DD, DTS, etc.). I need to fool around some more; see if I can get it to happen through the hdmi port and maybe get my friend to bring his ps3 over and hook it up the same way.

Firmware 1.7 allows you to actually play the PS games you downloaded on your PS3... on your PS3.  Now, fix up that store selection.

Eh? Time to go download Jumping Flash.

You can also use the rumble features for PS2 accessories/controls in PS2 games now.

More software BC fixes for Euroland as well.

I did not mention that since I'm not really sure how to go about connecting a PS2 item to the PS3.  Also, I'm just not enamored of vibrating controllers.

In theory it does.  In practice you have to wait until sometime in May (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/781/781934p1.html).

All's fair. Posted the Nintendo list for 2007. Here's the Sony list for 200...wait, my bad, 2nd quarter.


I didn't post the DS list, WAY TOO MUCH JAPANESE SHIT on the DS list for it to even be useful. If you really want a DS list in the other thread, I think I could list all the titles 3 weeks from now, that's how long it would take to compile LERN ENGLISH, NOOB and BRAIN TRAINING FOR UR DOG games into something cohesive.

Well... at least they've got Odin Sphere I guess.   And if I had a PS3 I'd probably get Calling All Cars.

I didn't really care about it at first, but the Darkness is looking to be pretty cool.

Spider-Man 3 looks pretty crappy (visual wise), but.... I liked the others enough, so I'll get this (this isn't from Treyarch, but the ones in charge are decent enough to go with Treyarch's vision). Also, PS3 Exclusive: SixAxis Hobgoblin. Hmm....

Sigma. Basically the 3rd time buying this game, and yet, it's still a must have.

Puzzle Fighter HD yay

Calling All Cars... Y'know, I don't really care.... I'll wait a little to see what's up.

Online Rampage, Sprint, and Rampart all sound like good fun.

Odin Sphere

/guilty pleasure PS2 games: Naruto UN 2, FF/Silver Surfer

By the way, this is only April through June. July through September is huger.

Where the hell is Disgaea for the PSP?

Voiceover limbo.

NISA gets a little slow when they're working on... well, 4 fully voiced games at once.

But they already have the voiceovers from the PS2 version. Or did they substantially change the dialog in the game?

They added storyline. An entire Etna storyline where she's the main character.

Well damn they better hurry the fuck up before Sony discontinues the PSP.

Just get a PSP emulator for your Zune.

Damn I need a PS2!!

Ha ha.

The "they added a new storyline" bit kills me.  Etna Mode is in the JP release. 
I keep seeing "industry news" sites touting it as some fancy new feature for
the NA release.

I doubt we'll see PSP discontinued any time soon.  Last I heard they were moving
about half a million of 'em a month.

- Q

NA release? No, just the PSP release in general I thought. And NISA was trying to get the same voice actors? amiwrong? I'd rather be wrong.

I was pretty sure I saw some various online gaming news sites claiming the Etna Mode was specially added for the NA port.  Assumed they were just confused.  No clue about voice talent.  For my money the best they could possibly do is leave the original japanese tracks available like they did for the PS2 D and D2 ports.

- Q

AFAIK, the japanese tracks are still included.

That's bull shit.  Now I have to buy a PSP.  Etna is my hero.

I think MLB is scheduled to be releaed next month.  I've been excited about baseball this year and the batting in 2k7 sucks.  Hopefully they didn't botch the port as the PS2 version is quite fun from what I've played.

Is R6 Vegas still headed to PS3?  I have not heard much about it since earlier this  year.  Gameinformer hinted at the fact Ubi was holding a few releases back until the install base is bigger and I have a hunch this is one of the titles they were refering to.

Yes, Vegas is still planned for the PS3.

I figured out the noise problem; It turned out that my old roommate had fucked around with some of the dolby digital settings on my receiver and turned up dialog to +6 which was causing it. I put the setting back to normal and it's fixed!

Now, where the fuck is my lumnies! I heard a rumor they'd be adding it to the PS store :(

Didn't know it was going to the PSN store, but the PS2 disc is only $20. Pick it up. Especially since you have that slick stereo setup.  8-)

Lumines was never planned to be a PSN download. Ever.

Unfortunately for them, though, their whole "convergence" strategy for the PSP -- i.e. "let's make our customers buy the same movie over and over and over again in different formats" -- has fallen apart with the decline of UMD movies. And the number of PSPs sold in 2006 has drastically fallen off compared to 2005. Software sales are still doing reasonable well though. I don't know if the PSP is losing money for them (and the recent price cut can't be helping things) but it can't be easy supporting two relatively new hardware intensive gaming platforms at the same time and that's reflected in the steep drop in their operating margin in the Games division.

I don't really expect them to discontinue the PSP anytime soon either as long as publishers are still willing to making games for the platform.

I'd forgotten to watch this, but thanks for the link. It's hilarious to watch a company become so arty they're almost completely incoherent. It is almost as if they've forgotten exactly why the hell they made the console in the first place. Maybe the house full of drug addled washed up losers is a complex metaphor for sony management? The guy with the suit case is marketing, the washed up TV star parading to a closet full of dummies is Kutaragi and the scary veteran is the PS2?

By comparison the wii advert (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5cPVP_llfo) is a superb example of targetting. Whereas the xbox adds seem very focused on the console and the games, which works too.

I think the whole point of those PS3 commercials was simply to get people to talk about them.

Same goes for the Baby thing.

Have UMD movies resulted in much in the way of PSP sales?  I thought that UMD has done pretty terribly from day one -- it's a pretty awful format, basically inferior to DVD, incompatible with existing hardware, and about the same price.

- Q

I can't speak for other retailers, or any other store for that matter, but my GS has shit for UMD stock. And we hardly ever sell the things.

The games still sell well enough though.

UMDs... they have not done well.

Apparently, Sony has a new and interesting tactic for dealing with the latest sales figures: outright lying. (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=13615) At least we know where Comical Ali got hired now.


Also, ninja'd from elsewhere - (http://xs314.xs.to/xs314/07171/PhoenixWrightPS3Sales.gif) (http://xs.to)

Haha. Wow, gamasutra too. Damn.

"Industry observers". Why do they try to make it sound all official and shit, and not just give credit where credit is due (i.e. a bunch outrage from anonymous posters at GAF)? Are they too ashamed to do that or what?



Anyhow, Sony PR sucks. Bad. This is not news.

[EDIT] Also, I'm pretty sure that gif you ninja'ed was ninja'ed by the place you ninja'ed it from. ;)

LOL, that's classic.

Aww yeah

Sigma demo on PSN.

Yea, waiting for 1.70 to finish downloading. keke.

Crap, that Rachael mission is hard. I'm rusty.  :-P

[EDIT]

Yeah, really rusty. 675 on the rankiings. Hehe.

[EDIT]

This is an awesome demo though. Wasn't expecting this.  :-D

Pretty good image quality for a port of an old game, and still fun as ever.