Late Night Consoling

I'm still pissed about no Sonic CD. One of the, if not the best Sonic game.

Fucking Sega.

Integrated broadband? Like...like....the Xbox?

Did Square also make a Wonderswan Color port of the Japanese Final Fantasy III?

Any chance you guys will fix LNC so that it'll work with WAP? :)

I get the feeling Console companies (specificly sony and ms) are shifting the console into a reigion most people arn't particularly interested in going. I know quite a few people with more than one console, but i don't know a single individual who bought a system to play online.

Casual gamers just want to sit and play sonic or MGS. They dont want to compete in a hardcore dedicated fashion. Atleast the vast majority dont from my understanding.

The whole console online thing seems like a boring move to me :/ why bother :/

SO! I am thinking of picking up a gamecube in the next couple days. I've heard good things about Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil: 0, any other games worth picking up?

I loved the old Sonic games for the Genesis, is the Sonic GC title any good? When is Mario due? Metroid? What does the future of gamecube gaming look like?

Or should I just get a PS2 for the huge library of games?

To give you an idea of my console experience, the last console I played for any amount of time was the Super Nintendo. The only other console I've owned was a Turbo Grafx 16. So I am somewhat of a console neophyte, and I am very wary of buying a console that will never have a library of good games.

-gren

More on that Gamecube Godzilla game, looks like it's gonna kick ass.

http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/gamespotting/062802/p8_01.html

I'm really really doubtfull that "internet multiplayer gamming" will ever be a big thing on consoles. Consoles are the perfect entertainment machine for the Casual gamer.

Switch on, play for 1-1000 minutes, pause when you need to, come back play a little more, let your friend try and beat the high score, cook dinner for the gf, play in between. Getting this to work online would require that games are designed to allow the gamer to just jump in and jump out without spoiling the game for the others.

And right now we already have the Perfect platform for multiplayer games (PC) i don't really see what the consoles can offer that the PC doesn't have.

I think that future Console games will add the online as an added value, not something that is required to play the game. Grand Turismo 4 "NET" should be a good indication of this, play it alone or online, it's your choice.

I hope graphics get to a point where they become secondary in focus (I know that sounds bad, it should be already). I mean, you can only add so many details before people get bored with X, Y and Z features. After this, I really think developers will start really pushing unique gameplay to capture the player's eye. I mean, if everyone is doing AMAZING looking games, what else would you be able to do to stand out? It's like what pre-rendered movies are at right now- basically, you can do anything you want and make them look realistic as real-life, now people are really starting to scrutinize the actual content or story of a CGI. Look at Final Fantasy the movie- it looks flawless, but after awhile watching it, you start to think "ho hum, this story is kinda boring/not well written".

That's kinda what I'm thinking.

Get Kingdom Hearts early ;-)

http://cgi.ebay.disney.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1756132755

Am i the only one totally not interested in Zelda?? I love the series but wtf why did they have to make him look like a 4 year old

Jason,
I enjoyed your random thoughts. I think that's something alot of people and other sites fail to imagine.. That next level of gaming.. Where it's come from, and where it's going. I found an IRC log from 1994/95 that back in the day of modem to modem, BBS, or IFRAG play online (required like a t1). Can you imagine just popping a box on your coffee table, plugging it into your hub/switch/cable modem network and "poof" instant online 1,000 people world where you have to interact with other players on a constant basis. We've seen this type of thing for the pc, but on a console where games are more static this would be a big advantage. I'm not downing pc games, but I think many of us just got bored of them (same old, same old). XBOX LIVE seems to a step in the right direction. Voice chat/Instant games.. All from your living room with 3 buddies over playing along side you. For those of us who still enjoy playing games, but don't have hours apon hours to dedicate to them, this is a great thing. Got an extra 45min before the gf comes over? Fire up some Halo2/XBOXLIVE and get in a couple of games.. I think one of the advantages the console has over PC's is the static hardware/software. It's controlled by one source, you don't get all of this "well I use a kb/mouse+my left toe on a stearing wheel+two button pads under my knees to play that game..". You might argue that it takes away the option of choice, but I see it as a level playing field for anyone who enjoys games, and the social aspect they have.

More random rants later. :)

I worry about any future architecture (PS3 or anyone else's) where the developers don't do a *WHOLE LOT* of work on both the hardware and software side to make life easy for developers.

As games approach the quality of prerendered movies, they're going to take a lot more time, money, and manpower to make. And that's not all just art: things like physics and collision detection get far more difficult with lots of complex objects, and improved art creates an elevated expectation in the public for the way game objects are supposed to react.

It's absolutely crucial that the console manufacturers, and for that matter Microsoft and the video card guys on the PC, develop incredibly robust tools to make game development easier. It's the only way game budgets are going to stay manageable, and more importantly, it's going to be the only thing that lets developers use all that power to make better PLAYING games, not just better LOOKING/SOUNDING games.

This means making plugins for established content creation software, sample game code that's good enough for cut 'n paste use in real game engines, robust shader libraries, comprehensive sound properites libraries, and an easy to work with architecture (or tools that abstract the complicated stuff without much performance loss).

At any given budget and development schedule, the next-gen console that provides those things the best will have the best looking, sounding, and PLAYING games, regardless of their hardware specs.

Something happening at Rare? (part 37)

Donkey Kong Racing and Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers have been removed from the list of upcoming games - are they delayed? are they dropped? is it just an oversight?

http://www.rareware.com/master_frames/frameset50.html

Japanese hardware sales (last week in brackets)

PS2: 69,100 (75,000)
Cube: 13,700 (17,500)
Xbox: 3,500 (5,400)

Japanese software sales (29th Jul to Aug 4th - play guess the game from the title!)
1 PS2 BANDAI Movement fighter cancer dam record of war 196,900 (196,900)
2 GBA van presto Super robot great war R 195,200 (195,200)
3 GC Nintendo Super MARIOSAN Shine 54,300 (490,400)
4 PS2 KONAMI on-the-spot powerful professional baseball 9 33,400 (264,000)
5 PS2 S C E me -- adventure editing of the gloss finishing 2 seas 27,500 (252,200)
6 PS2 CHUN software ‚í of a night 2? prison island which leaving cares about S. 24,000 (275,300)
7 GBA Nintendo Caster MUROBO GX 23,800 (58,900)
8 PS2 S C E SARUGETCHU 2 19,800 (140,300)
9 PS2 YAMASA entertainment Yamasa Digi world 3 18,500 (70,800)
10 PS2 KONAMI Fantasy V 17,200 (300,800 )

XBOX has DOA Extreme Volleyball coming out, and NHL2K3...

Prospects are looking good ^_^

www.newtechnix.com posted new screenshots:

Tomb Raider [PS2]

http://www.cannedtunes.net/fusker/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newtechnix.com%2FWebmasters%2Fmickurt%2FImages%2FTombRaider_AngelOfDarkness_ps2_%5B1-8%5D.jpg&displaytype=images

The Getaway [PS2]
http://www.cannedtunes.net/fusker/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newtechnix.com%2FWebmasters%2Fmickurt%2FImages%2FTheGetaway_ps2_%5B10-16%5D.jpg&displaytype=images

So yeah, been playing "The Mark of Kri" today and i can't let go of the controller till now.
I got my ass beat down. I decided to just go in guns blazing, guard sounds a horn, and poof at least 10 guys surround me. i coldnt attack for crap. Every time i'd hit someone 3 people on the other side would be hitting me. So i love that it's not easy.
yeah so back to the game
= )

Hrm, it's been awhile so I guess I'll just make this one big post instead of replying to a bunch separately.

As for buying a gamecube or a ps2, it really depends on if you can live without nintendo exclusives or not. And in 12 -18 months, they have a pretty large list of things coming out. New Mario, Zelda, StarFox(two if you count Namco's), Fzero, etc... and that doesn't even count the quirkier games like Animal Forest. If you're not particularly interested in their own in house games, then you're probably better off with a ps2 just because with the huge library you're bound to find _something_ that you'll want to play. Best course of action would of course be to get both, which is a lot more feasible with the lowered prices. Mario comes out on Aug. 27th, Metroid is sometime in November/December I believe. Probably just in time for the christmas shopping spree.

As for the ps3, I think most of the distributed processing is being read into this the wrong way. Broadband will likely just be its default connection, just like the xbox is now. The ps3 doesn't even need to worry about the distributed processing aspects of Cell either if each single chip is powerful enough. And of course, it can be, since we don't really know how many processors are going to be squashed into each Cell chip yet.

My best guess about distributed processing though is that it has nothing to do with broadband data sharing. Latency, loss of data, etc would make this pretty iffy all by itself. Connections just aren't fast enough to do, say, realtime game graphics between multiple ps3s connected over the net.

The more likely scenario would be that anything in your house that also has Cell chips in it could be used by the ps3 to increase it's abilities. Essentially meaning that after you have your ps3, you figure maybe its finally time to get a new hdtv to go with it. So you buy a new Sony model, which also has a Cell chip in it. This in turn gives your ps3 more cpu cycles to burn up.

Where this would work well is if every game on the ps3 was coded up like Shiny's messiah engine. Everytime you grabbed another appliance with a Cell chip in it, the game engine would just use that extra power to keep pushing itself along up to the highest end character models, world details, etc.

How advanced is the ps2 technology for its time?

What was the big deal with the emotion engine, and the delay for the US release? I thought this system was fairly advanced already -just hard to program for?

Fuck PS3. Fuck Sony in general. The only good PS2 game, GTA3, came out better looking for the only platform it should have been made for in the first place - PC. And yes, I think consoles in general are not worth the money(except maybe GC). Speculating on future console power is something people never seem to tire of? I like how when specs are released for different nex gen systems, people go crazy debating which one is more powerful. Rofl.

*sorry if said before*

Jason, and you failed to question how far pirating software will go by then as well....

=oX SUPPORT THE ONES WHO DESERVE IT! -=Ut2003=- ahem...

....hopefully =oX

Will games contain an auto-update feature that continually adds new content? Will there be several PS3 games that have no disc media of any kind? And what about multiplayer? Not in the deathmatch sense, but beyond that...imagine playing something as seemingly solitary as Mario 64 when all of a sudden you run into another player, who you have to team up with to get past a particular area. Just random thoughts, but there are some exciting possibilities on the horizon.

None of that sounds at all exciting or new. Also, all this broadband stuff will make things complicated. I mean with a net connection you need to worry about the ISP and stuff like that. Why not just use the computer?

There's plenty to do with the power. Resident Evil on the Gamecube needed 2D environments to get the level of detail they were going for. Another great example are the Spiderman games. If you watch the movie you see him jumping around in moving traffic. When you play the game you realize this was too much information to process, and you are therefore not allowed to swing too low below a certain level in the cityscapes. I've heard Nintendo say the technology has reached a point where more power isn't necessary, but they are just trying to downplay the difference in power between them and the XBox (which I agree is very small).

By the way, the 1,000x speed claim is asinine. Which marketing moron spun the math to get THAT result? Pure lies.

What are inappropriate expressions?

the only reason i read the lnc is because the bold doomiii caught my eye. err, not that i dont normally read it... :)

Cat ears? I don't get it.

Woo, I can't wait. Consoles that have an internet connections! Now even the console developers can release games that are buggy and incomplete and just worry about patching later!!!

does DDR for the home systems have that workout mode like the pc version?

I don't think games will be that different from the way they are now in 2 years because frankly there aren't that many original developers out there. The graphics will obviously look much better, but they will probably far suprass anything even Doom 3 can offer. It will probably be around that time that developers hit the point of being able to do cinema quality CG real time graphics stuff, and it will just take different routes/styles on how they present it.

Well Jason I think its really a fascinating question and good conversation to be had. To be honest, I don't think that information processing increasing at such exponential rates will really make visual quality improve at the same rates.

Not to say Doom3 isn't fantastic looking, but at the same time you can still rattle on for hours about what other visual eye candy the tech is lacking. I guess what I am saying is that I think the muscle is going to be flexed more in the area of things like AI and more dynamic game development (not DEVELOPMENT, but actually in the intelligence of how the game develops as you play it... never getting the same gaming experience twice and such).

When it comes to graphics, triangles are only going to get smaller, textures more detailed and high res, lighting more realistic, kinematics working on even the most subtle of ways (purely dynamic hair movement and such) and of course, much more deformable elements. That stuff can go on forever and we need just as effiecient ways to develop for that as we do to process it all through hardware.

The next gen PS processor might be pushing a shitload of data around but when it comes to things like visuals, you need all that memory bandwidth, pixel shading, ram and other graphics card goodness. So while the visuals will keep on their steady climb to the "pixar in real time" level we all dream of, the actual information in a game is going to get just amazingly complex.

Imagine a game that isn't even really "multiplayer" but the game processing is still distributed, so other tricks and paths that other players took in the game will effect the AI of the characters when you encounter them yourself. Sort of like you are talking about with Mario, just in a different fashion. I am just hoping it doesn't become like a "well we can do it so lets do it" sort of thing because that doesn't always mean its appropriate. Like any sort of power, it has to be used the right way or things can suck that much more in the same way that they can be that much better.

Portable Excitebike? Looks like Nintendo is gonna sell at least 1 more e-card reader.

Unless they're actually willing to change the controller (which I doubt, seriously), we'll be seeing pretty much the same kinds of games we've been seeing for the past 4-5 years. There's only so many types of games two little analogue sticks and 10 buttons can handle.

Another big problem is that the bar is so high on the presentation end of things (graphics, sound, AI, scripting) it takes 3-4 years to integrate it all with an already established style of game. With that kind of investment, almost nobody's willing to take the risk of making a new game type, and those that do won't get the backing of major publishers. Yeah, the games business is becoming just as fucked as any other media industry.

On the plus side, all the console makers seem to finally be making an effort to attract new talent to the development scene, so maybe we'll see some serious growth in the independent games scene in a few years (and then we can have a whole sub culture of Emo gaming geeks to go with it!)