Late Night Consoling

Very good news from Sony on the price drop, they may consider it for the USA surely?

As for Microsoft also good showing on the replacing these things under warranty.

I think both companies are realising we're in control here - there seems to be a lot more negativity towards the new consoles this time round, some about lack of power or gimick controller or delayed this or overheat that or un-necessary tech etc - if they want us to buy these new consoles, no matter who you're loyal to then danit we need incentives and this is a good start.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but do those MGS4 shots look different than the E3 trailer? I can pretty much see the polygons on him, it seemed so much more detailed in the original videos. Is someone lying here or was it a case of bad quality videos making it look better than it was?

Maybe its just me....gotta stop drinking this stuff. ;)

Okami is even better than I thought it would. It's been a while since a game has managed to hold my attention for six hours at a time. A crime that it's not the hot topic around here.

The refund sounds like a good idea, IMO. Get a refund, then go out and buy a new XBox360. You get a new warranty, and you don't have to wonder if their repairs are going to hold up.

This is the first time that I've actually been non-negatively intrigued by the PS3. You're starting to get my attention, sony, now stop saying stupid things before I lose you again.

direct feed TGS 2006 trailers for Heavenly Sword and Resistance: Fall of Man. both videos are 1280 x 720 pixels.
link: http://blog.hinjang.com/media/files/tgs06_heavenlysword_trailer.wmv
link: http://blog.hinjang.com/media/files/tgs06_resistance_trailer.wmv
site: http://blog.hinjang.com/

Blue Dragon ships on multiple discs. In the loading screen you could see "Disc 1"

It should probably be mentioned that RedOctane bought those Topway guitars to resell them. Up until the release of Guitar Hero, the Topway guitars were still available on the RO website for order.

Also interesting is this snippet from John Tam's blog at 1Up:

For the fret buttons we decided on five. Harmonix's request was to have 5 so that three power chords could be held in succession. (1&3, 2&4, 3&5) Play Smoke on the Water on a higher difficulty and you'll understand perfectly what effect we wanted to get. So much forethought/and discussion went into the shape of the button, the yellow buttons brail line, the weight of the switch and even the type of switch in the fret buttons.

Apparently, "so much forethought/and discussion" consists of "let's take the Topway guitar, flip the fret buttons upside down, and change one of the colors". I'm sure they made improvements to the switches and such, but to make it sound like they slaved over a design that is obviously copied is more than a bit disingenuous.

At one point, Tam posted an image of a modified Topway guitar (one that had a whammy bar mounted on it) saying that it was a GH controller prototype, but I have been unable to find that image again.

OK Now that we have the Genesis out of the way, give me Saturn games!

I want Dragon Force! Even better forget the emulation, give me a sequel for the new systems.

Anyone know if Ninja Gaiden Sigma is coming to the 360 as well?

Suddenly I am much more interested in a PS3 in a year or so. I have to get me some Final Fantasy, especially if the rumored FFVII remake happens.

Do we really want games that use 50gb of content? "HD content" means jack shit when you're rendering in real-time. Do we really need gigabytes of pre-rendered cinematics that could be done in megabytes of extra data in the engine?

Oblivion had no shortage of content plus actual recorded VO for every line of dialogue. And on a single DVD. Gears of War is going to fit on a DVD. Safe to say Mass Effect will as well, or pretty much any upcoming 360 game for that matter. UE3 games, pushing crazy art resolution and detail, all in 9 gigs or less. Next-gen games with streaming systems are fitting on DVD - given how streaming generally works it's safe to say they've got content doubled, tripled, or even worse... yet still on a single disc.

Ubisoft maintains 150+ man teams to take a year to make at most 9gb of shipping content on massive budgets. Do we really want to see the budget and manpower required to fill 50 gigs with current workflows? Is that 50gb, tripled team size, quadrupled budget, and increased sale price going to give me the same 6-8 hours those 9 gigs on DVD are giving me?

Sure, maybe this is why UT2K7 is announced for the PS3 but not 360 - could be that the wild variety in settings and themes the UT series has gone with actually is just too much for a measly 9gb. Maybe some epic masterpiece will arrive on the PS3 and make me regret ever doubting our new 50gb overlords. Yeah, we'll definitely hit that threshhold eventually. Visuals will jump, audio quality will jump, animation will become more lifelike, detail will increase, hardware will jump, tools will improve... we'll fill 50gb with time. But do we really need that much space right now? Are our lives really going to improve that drastically from more expansive games with all that extra space, or are we just looking at needless content bloat?

god damn it, i started to get excited when it sounded like the 360 would upres dvd content. ofcourse that would end up not being the case. freakin lame copy protection laws. please someone tell mehow that law helps to serve jack shit. ooooh my player is upresing a source, that means ill somehow copy it because its not digitally encryped and sell it for massive profit!! bleh

no PS3 US price drop, according to 1up: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3153875&did=1

Sony's Karraker: "360 sux lol."

"to truly take gaming into the next generation requires a larger data format for both games and movies"

Actually, to truly take gaming into the next generation requires 1 TB. Sorry Sony.

anyone else excited about Motorstorm other than me. Game looks freakin awesome.

MGS fans,

new mgs4 trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zQuqVdt698&eurl=

gregson-williams back doing the music and awesome ending to trailer.

Gundam PS3: The latest casualty of bullshots.

Those afrika screenshots intrigue me. I want to control herds of beasts.

F1 looks great. Hope it plays well.

I am just totally shocked that a Sony employee would not approve of Microsofts HD-DVD drive for the 360. sarcasm ftw

this GMS may some day allow developers to share ideas of works in progress

That would be awesome. Too bad no company will do it.

Crazy stuff on the PS3. And it sounds like they'll have some kind of virtual console too?

I hope the price drop applys to us as well. if i can pick up a ps3 with a 20gb HDD, hdmi, etc. then thats a fucking deal!!!!!!!!

It's unfortunate that Microsoft's Sony's hardware...oh nm. List too long.

Oh Thank God MS is coming clean and fixing these borked Xboxs. Mine destroyed a disk and has been locking up randomly for months. I don't have the money to pay what it was going to cost to repair it, so I'm quite happy.

"...we recently noticed a higher than usual number of units coming in for repair." They couldn't have just noticed this. I have a feeling the 2005 run of Xbox's had an extremely high failure rate, and they're just now having their backs put against the wall to deal with the situation.

Heh... I'm making a website for Viva Pinata starting next week. Some kind of video mixer.

Red Octane got owned!

Some cool stuff today. The MS refund thingy is cool. HDMI support is cool.

However the price drop not extending to the U.S. is not cool. Also if Microsoft needs more storage for their HD content, then I for one am okay with them using a second disc. I'm used to it. It's okay, really.

I don't think there are any TV's that can take a 1080p component signal ->in. now, the fact that all PS3's will have HDMI is interesting indeed. This is definitely a distinguishing difference as they'll be able to upscale regular DVDs over HDMI whereas the 360 is limited to over VGA.