Quite a lot of bull you wrote there, Alex, the last paragraph at least. Sony's products are among the most reliable and the Playstation seems to have the best games, and the Dreamcast sucked at a console, it was outdated on its release. Sega makes fun games, nice enjoyability factor but ulitmatly with no depth. Nintendo make games for kids. I'll stick with the Playstation and its sucessors.
Anyway back on topic, I'm not a fan of handheld consoles, especially when they're twice the price of a proper console. I don't feel the need to play games on the move, I play them in comfort at home on a TV that's big enough not to make my eyes hurt.
DS isnt brilliant, its no way better than the GBA right now. Sure Mario 64 DS is a hell of a lot more than a port but its amazing, as goes for Warioware Touched which has been in my hands just 4 days but not 10 minutes goes by where i have 'just another play'
my only negative point about the DS is the battery life, 10 hours and 22 minutes is the lowest ive gotten Warioware to run for. which is bad.
the thing i find about the PSP though is it negates itself instantly. on paper it is just a portable PS2 with a 4" screen and 2 diddy speakers. i dont own a PS2 but if the choice was to either play console games on a tiny screen with low battery life or play on a 64" widescreen or hell a 6' projector with 5.1... i think i know what i'd choose thank you. ooh and i would LOVE to know how they intend FPS games to work barring the crappy slow Goldeneye *shoulder button to look* method.
anyone seen Lost in Blue for the DS? lordy it looks good
oh and Circy; Warioware Touched is good you'll love it.
Alex; "They tried to set up standards like Betamax, Minidisc and ATRAC in the past, all failed and now they are trying to do it again, when will they learn.". true. Minidisc Atrac lost out to MP3. sony's HD MP3 player lost out because you couldnt play MP3s on it. so they changed it. they learned then. and yea i agree with pretty much everything else you said. the Dreamcast was god, mines still hooked up after all these years.
I didnt buy a dreamcast because i was waiting for the ps2 to be realeased.
same with these handhelds (sort of) im not buying one or the other on launch day, i will see how things work out for a year or so. Then there will be a few games to choose from and a pricedrop.
I'm planning on holding out a bit for the price to go down (and for there to be DS flash carts) before I get mine. I don't really care who 'wins' the handheld market because that's a matter of public behaviour and we all know how retarded the public can be. I've never considered the most successful console to be the 'best' one, and I'm not about to start with handhelds.
In my personal opinion, while the PSP might be technically superior the launch lineup is abysmal, and for the most part will probably all be PS2 ports anyway (I can't think of *any* good PS2 games that aren't multiplatform). That's because it's probably going to be just as horrendously difficult to develop for as the PS2, so it'll be generally much more attractive to developers to simply re-release games.
On the other hand, prior to the DS, the GBA was the last bastion of 2D gaming. The DS has the same potential, in addition to 3D capability, and is far, far easier to develop for. Yes, it's only 64-grade 3D, but I've been playing Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day for the last couple of days and I can honestly say I don't give a fuck.
Arf: Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Mortal Kombat 4 were all changed for the N64 because the N64 couldn't hold all of the data. The N64 version of MKT had less characters, and the N64 version of MK4 had different endings. Also, Squaresoft dropped their contract with Nintendo because they were sticking to cartridges.
The N64 MK4 had to have in-engine endings because they couldn't fit the proper FMV ones on the cartridge. If I remember rightly, the N64's endings were crap.
I remember reading once that one of the reasons the final fantasy series jumped from Nintendo to Sony with VII was that the CD format allowed for cinematics and better music. There's also that little fact of Nintendo royalling fucking over Square w/ MarioRPG, so it's hard to tell exactly. Regardless of why they chose to do it tho, there's no way FMV sequences will ever fit on a cart. So far Nintendo has stated DS carts can hold up to a gigabit (equal to 128MB), as opposed to UMD's on the PSP which hold up to 1.8 gigaBYTES (as in 1800MB). Pretty significant difference if you ask me.
I've tried playing my sister's DS using the emulated analogue sticks, and I could never get the hang of it. The problem is that there isn't any resistance, so you never truly get a feel for where your thumb is positioned.
I will concede that the PSP's batterly life sucks. There's also the issue of price (it's launching at $250 here in America, which is B.S. since the Japanese got it for $180). Still tho, I think Nintendo is flooding the market with systems (they're trying to keep the GBA alive alongside the DS, and already analysts are projecting they will announce a new Gameboy this year). Add in Sony's marketing engine, and superior 3rd party support, and Nintendo really has a lot to worry about.
As for the Cart vs. UMD production cost argument... I completely pulled that out of my ass from the PSX vs. N64 debates. I'm sure the gap is much narrower now, altho the size restrictions are still very much a fact.
Now, when it comes to software, I would argue that neither system has a killer app yet. However, of what is out there, the PSP has the edge, not only in quantity, but also in quality. I firmly believe Nintendo rushed the DS out in order to get a Christmas ahead of the PSP in the US. Why else would they launch a system with only 5 games? Granted it can play the entire GBA backlog, but how many people buy a brand-new system just so they can play games for an older cheaper one?
Now then, I'm going to completely switch gears here and address the PS2 and Dreamcast argument. I used to hold the same beliefs about Sony... that they were responsible for the death of Sega. The simple fact is tho that Sega loaded a revolver in around 1994, and proceeded to shoot themselves in the foot every year afterwords until they ran out of bullets. To save myself the trouble of actually re-writing my "This is Why Sega Failed" argument for the 40th time, I'm just going to copy what I wrote on my friends Xanga in response to a post he made about the failure of the Dreamcast. Keep in mind that I am probably the planet's biggest Sega fanboy (seriously, I bid up to $140 on eBay for a Sonic the Hedgehod promotional letter jacket. granted i ended up losing, but still...). Anyway, the rant is as follows.
Dreamcast's failure can be balmed on several things... namely:
1. Sega's Previous mistakes. This is a killer. They completely dessimated their user-base with the 32X. The SegaCD add-on came early enough to be a viable platform, but releasing the 32-bit add-on just months before the US launch of the Saturn was a very poor decision on Sega's part. Then of course, there is the Saturn itself. An underpowered system (at least in the realm of 3D -- it's 2d owned all at the time) that was equally difficult to develop for (most developers only used one of the two processors since multi-processor programming was so difficult given the limited and hard to use Saturn SDK. Had the system been easier to work with, the 3rd party support might have been greater, and no doubt the games would have looked better. Sega's first party stuff looked amazing (Nights, Panzer Dragoon Azel, and prototype Shenmue spring to mind), and it's almost painful to think how much more it could have competed with the Playstation had it been easier to code for.
2. Sega being $260 million in the hole after the Saturn. When you're that broke, it's hard to dedicate much money to advertising (altho Sega did spend $100 million on the Dreamcast going into holiday 1999). They weren't making any money at all off of the console sales (which were $198 to produce and sold for $199). Rampant software piracy didn't help the situation any. By the end of the system's life, NPD numbers were rediculously low compared to the user-base.
3. Lack of major 3rd party support. As much as I hate them (due partly to this), EA support of the Dreamcast would have benefitted Sega greatly. I don't know what the numbers were at the time, but I read recently that EA accounts for nearly 40% of the north-american game software market. With just a couple of big-name franchises, more Dreamcast consoles might have flown off the shelves. Plus, having EA support (and that of other 3rd parties that took a rain-check) would have shown gamers that the Dreamcast was a platform worth investing in.
4. Not being online at launch. I know this is asking a lot of Sega, but having online games on September 9, 1999, instead of September 7, 2000 would have done wonders towards selling the console. By the time the Dreamcast went online, the PS2 was on the horizon with a promised online strategy (which Sony has never fully delivered on), and the XBox was rumored to have online as well. Charging a nominal fee for P2P online games (as Microsoft has done), could have earned Sega some easy revenue. Even at $2-3 a month they could have pulled in enouugh pure profit to stay afloat.
5. Not offering a DVD drive out of the box. Sure, this would have driven the cost of the console up by around $50, but coupled with an online service, it would have skyrocketed sales of the console. There are people in Japan who only bought the PS2 for it's DVD capabilities. $249 for a cutting-edge game system and a dvd player would have been considered a steal in late 1999.
6. The Japanese launch of the console. This one is a little far fetched, but Sega should have waited until September of 1999 in Japan rather than in November of 1998 and launched the console world-wide then (or at least in all NTSC regions). The technology gap between the Dreamcast and PS2 would have been narrower by that point (only 6 months as opposed to 16). By the time the Dreamcast launched in the U.S., Sega had already upgraded the modem from 33kbps to 56kbps. Looking at processor technology, the Dreamcast's SH-4, clocked at 200MHz, was capable of 267MHz by the time of the U.S. launch. Memory had fallen drastically in price (making a 32mb/16mb version feasible as opposed to the existing 16mb/8mb version). Finally, videocard technology would have advanced steadily (allowing Sega to either use a faster PowerVR2 card or a slightly more powerful custom-designed chip). Shoot, the existing Dreamcast already has twice the texture memory, and outputs graphics at twice the resolution, with FSAA.
7. The Sony hype-machine. Sony knows how to spin numbers like nobody's business. I remember reading early specs of the PS2 that talked about Toy-Story level graphics, facial animation that captured true emotions, CG-quality in-game graphics, and numbers like 66 million polygons per second. Have they even come close to delivering on any of it? No! But the rumors were out there, and the PsOne was the lead system going into the next-gen race, so naturally people believed them.
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Bah... I'm done ranting for the moment, but I'll probably be on later to post more and response to any further arguments. Thanks for debating with me everyone. I could talk about this stuff all day.
XBL Gamertag: Rampant Mjolnir
Dustin Gunn Gnarly Tubular Way Cool Awesome Groovy Mondo
Registered 15/12/2004
Points 2659
9th March, 2005 at 23:24:29 -
Haha, everyone here's talking out of their asses.
Sony makes the LEAST dependable hardware, I'd say, ever, and have the highest fuck-up rate of any video game manufacturer. A large faction of PSPs have already been recalled because the O button stuck into the screen.
And as for full motion videos, obviously someone hasn't played Resident Evil 2 for the N64, which it has to be said, fit on less than 56 megabytes, which is less than half a DS card, and didn't cut a single FMV sequence. The playstation version was split into 2 disks even.
Sony's Hardware dependable....... LOL, ive got a video of someone playing a PSP and it just randomly ejects the disc, also as Dustin stated many recalls have been from the O button because it was too close to the screen aswell as many have had "Dead pixels". and the UMD movie thing is just a joke, im probably going to get neither, but if i get one itll be the NDS.
Hello. The Nintendo DS is going online, and the first title is Animal Crossing DS. The sequel to the gamecube version. It will own your soul.
...
Thankyou for your time.
Gah!
Assault Andy Administrator
I make other people create vaporware
Registered 29/07/2002
Points 5686
11th March, 2005 at 02:19:22 -
I got a DS from one of my relatives (which I wanted) in Malaysia in about January. It's just come out in Australia. I have Mario DS and it is very fun. The DS has heaps of potential and having the touch screen is exactly like an analog stick. Palm is also making an 'operating system' for the DS so that you will be able to use the DS as a PDA. I played pictochat and mario DS with my friend the other day over the wireless and it's fab. As for the PSP, the graphics are good I'm not denying it. The price is also quite large and the battery life is very short. It is harder to control with the arrows instead of having some sort of analog stick thingy. I've played both, and I'd have to say they are both great machines. I think hardcore gamers will need to buy both.
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you'll love it.
Edited by the Author.
