Does this mean that Nintendo is allowing "clones" of their hardware so that any 3rd party that wants to include GameCube functionality can pay them some royalties and BAM, now your TV has a built in GameCube (or something similar)??

I'm ignorant as to the Nintendo-Panasonic relationship and I don't know anything about their hardware licensing but if they are planning on letting 3rd parties have access to it, they might be onto a really good idea. I know it's a completely different situation, but remember how Macintosh used to keep everything Mac, no 3rd party, but PC's were all about the 3rd party? Well we see how that turned out...

Besides the obvious "I want one" factor, think if the following were incorporated into this:

1) Cable/SatTV decoding
2) mp3/mpeg/avi/etc. player
3) tivo capabilities

what you basically have is an inexpensive all in wonder unit. now i dont know the true specs of a gamecube, but if you could drop a hackable os onto it, you already have a media reader and storage capabilities (options) built in.

people with a little expertise should start taking advantage of the big opportunities game companies are dumping into their laps.

I was going through the internal debate of which game system to buy in December. I was reluctant to buy the Sony because it was out for a year, and they hadn't dropped the price to compete with the Xbox and NGC.

I was favoring the NGC, due to its 4-player capability out of the box(yes I know they others do with silly-ass dongles). However, when I heard that it wouldn't play full-sized DVDs, I was in a quandry - should I wait for the Panasonic player, or should I go with one of the other boxen?

I don't like the Xbox because of who makes it (and it is an acceptable gaming system), and Sony could have stomped the competition by dropping the price of the PS2, sy, by $50, or adding some extras and keeping the price the same, but why they didn't is beyond me.

Many of my officemates have PS2s, and one friend has an Xbox, and another has a PS2.

In the end, I chose to do nothing but wait.

I don't need another PC - I already have a homebuilt kickass system that does everything I need a computer to do. I don't care if you can get it to run Linux (see above).

I want a system to have fun with when I have a bunch of friends over who don't want to stare at their own screens. We already do multiplayer gaming, but with boards, dice, tokens and cards. Occasionally we want something else, and a 4-player gaming system fits the bill quite nicely.

Maybe someone here'll enlighten me on which one to get?

If it is reasonable/cheap/easy to integrate PS1 consoles into mainstream DVD players, then will we be seeing PS1 consoles integrated into our DVD-ROMs? I'm not sure what the implications would be or whether it would be reasonable to do, but being able to use your PC to also natively play console games is sort of an interesting idea.

Gran Turismo anyone?

Mmmm.... High Resolution Monitor... (Insert Homer Simpson drooling sound)

Sigh. I thought it would be obvious that by product differentiation, I meant positive differentiation. Nuon was a marginal, more expensive format, that wasn't relevant to what consumers wanted:

• nothing significantly new, different, or already in demand was offered - "interactive" titles had already been tried with CD-I and other formats, to say nothing of the fact that the games were not overwhelming - how many people can name a single Nuon game? Did any of them even get covered in gaming magazines?
• DVDs had not yet achieved significant penetration in the market, to the extent that there were still few players on the market, and features like DTS and progressive-scan were still the hot selling points.

Personally, I feel Nuon was an excuse to re-key the coding scheme of DVD, and get rid of the plain-text keys that people are exploiting in the current specification, but was otherwise an engineering feat looking for a problem to address. Shoving a Gamecube (which people want) into a DVD player satisfies the desires of people who want both, or who want one but are interested in the other. I know I'm trying to hold off on buying a Gamecube until this hybrid hits the US - most of what I use my Playstation 2 for is playing movies, and my justification for buying the hybrid is that it's a secondary DVD player for another room, that also plays a different format of game than what I already have.