In Japan, PlayStation 2 Ends a 12-Year Run 146
The PlayStation 3 may have overshadowed it technically, but the PlayStation 2 has seniority. Now, the PS2 is being retired in Japan after nearly 13 years. That doesn't mean the games have stopped: "To this day, developers have continued to release games on the platform due to its enduring popularity, with the last title in Japan, Final Fantasy XI: Seekers of Adoulin, due out in March this year."
Titan of its generation (and replaced too early?) (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah... the PS2. I don't think I can ever remember a console that's dominated its generation in quite the same way. I'm not just talking about unit sales (though its figures there and its lead over the Xbox and Gamecube were impressive enough), but rather about the sheer scale of the influence it exercised over gaming in general.
Back in the PS2's generation, if you were developing a console game, then unless you were being given bags and bags of money by MS or Nintendo, you had no choice but to make the PS2 your primary target. It didn't matter that it had underpowered hardware that was known for pain a pain in the arse to develop for. The Xbox and the Cube were optional. The PC (which was on a back-foot for most of that console cycle) was even more optional. The PS2 was where you had to be to get the sales. It had games from every genre represented; and often the best titles in their respective genres were for the PS2.
In many ways, it wasn't a particularly brilliant console. Its UI was butt-ugly. Cross-platform ports tended to look like a dog next to their Xbox and Cube versions (though the latter were admittedly quite uncommon). The memory cards for savegames were tiny, expensive and prone to data corruption. But it had the games, so if you were at all passionate about console gaming, you had to own one.
The funny thing is that, despite its hardware being completely obsolete, I've often felt Sony sent it to the back burner (via the PS3 launch) too soon. Both the console and its games were still selling well when the PS3 launched, with the 360 having failed to take much wind out of its sales. I do wonder what would have happened if Sony had held back the PS3 for 6-9 months, to work out some of the oddities in the hardware, let the launch price fall, get a stronger launch-lineup and maybe get proper back-compatibility into the hardware as a standard across the world. As it is, when the PS3 launched, it was too expensive for most and still suffering fierce competition from its own predecessor (some of the PS2's best games launched after the PS3, such as Personas 3 and 4). Certainly, for the first 18 months I owned my imported US 60 gig model, it spent far more time running PS2 titles than PS3 ones.
Nothing in the 360/PS3/Wii console generation has come close to replicating the PS2's dominance. The Wii got a big installed sales base early (which later stagnated, with the result that its lead, while still there, is much eroded), but never even came close to converting that into PS2-style dominance of games development. The 360 and the PS3 have more or less run neck and neck; if I remember, the 360 has a small worldwide installed base lead despite its Japan deficit, but the gap between the two isn't much more than a rounding error. And if you're developing a game these days, then unless you are being given large amounts of cash by a console manufacturer, you need to target the 360, PS3 and PC (the latter is very much back in the game), while giving consideration to the idea of a Wii-U port or a scaled down Wii version.
I wonder whether, to an extent, the PS2's dominance wasn't linked to Sony's ability to lock down what were, at the time, some of the biggest and most important franchises in the world to its console; Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid. Those were really the names that started shifting consoles (after what was actually a slightly lacklustre launch). These days, of course, all of the really big name franchises are cross-platform (and almost all Western, rather than Japanese). A couple of exceptions; the Nintendo first party games (not everybody's cup of tea), Forza (the 360's superior reflection of Gran Turismo) and the Halo/Gears vs Resistance/Killzone shooter pairings (where the games are essentially interchangable). But increasingly, it's cross-platform that dominates the charts (particularly when it features angry men with thick necks shouting "OSCAR MIKE" every 5 seconds).
PS. Another Final Fantasy XI expansion? My word. I stopped playing that years ago and didn't realise it was still going. It feels a bit like a relic from another world now; easy to forget it was probably the world's most successful MMO until World of Warcraft launched.
Re:Titan of its generation (and replaced too early (Score:4, Informative)
And nor has much since...
WoW increasingly looks like an anomaly. Very few MMOs have managed to go over 1 million subscribers and stay there. Old Republic almost hit 2 million at launch, but fell off very, very rapidly.
Having done a bit of reading since my original post, it seems FFXI managed to stay in the 500k-750k range for years and years. It's below that point now, but then, it's extremely old now. While it may only have managed not much more than 1/20th of WoW's peak subscriber base, it seems to have done better than almost all of the other competition.
Also massively better than its own successor, FF14, which remains one of the greatest MMO cock-ups of all time.
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Having done a bit of reading since my original post, it seems FFXI managed to stay in the 500k-750k range for years and years. It's below that point now, but then, it's extremely old now. While it may only have managed not much more than 1/20th of WoW's peak subscriber base, it seems to have done better than almost all of the other competition..
And ironically enough, FFXIV contributed to that drop, by drawing away players and dev resources. FFXI developed that sort of "end of game" atmosphere, as everyone expected it to be completely obsoleted by SE's new creation. At the time of FFXIV's release, quite a few friends in my linkshells (FFXI social or guild-type organizations) left to go play it. After a burst of initial enthusiasm, most found the new game disappointing and eventually quit -- but a portion of them never returned to FFXI afterwards
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Another Final Fantasy XI expansion? [..] It feels a bit like a relic from another world now; easy to forget it was probably the world's most successful MMO until World of Warcraft launched.
That's probably because it never even came close to that accomplishment.
I never played any of them, so I'm not really speaking from a position of authority. However, the MMORPG even *I* remember people going on about was Everquest. Looking back, I always got the impression that Everquest was the 800lb gorilla that dominated until the King Kong-sized WoW overshadowed even that.
Maybe as a non-game player I didn't notice FFXI because I assumed it was just a regular RPG like its predecessors, but I don't recall people going on about it anywhere near as much as "Evercrack".
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Everquest was "the game to beat" for a long time. Final Fantasy XI was the first game to beat it (in terms of subscriber numbers). In fairness, Everquest was already very old when FFXI launched.
Then WoW came along and succeeded on a different order of magnitude to anything that had come before (and, in terms of subscription MMOs, anything that's come since as well).
Getting over 500k subscribers and staying there for years seems to be incredibly difficult. Everquest managed it for a while, FFXI managed it, E
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Dark Age of Camelot was the Everquest killer and the dominate mmo before WoW.
Dark Age of Camelot still to this day has the best pvp system out of any mmorpg
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The Xbox 360 has clearly been dominating this generation, just like the PS2 did.
Re:Titan of its generation (and replaced too early (Score:4, Insightful)
There's more to dominating the market than installed base - as I said in my original post, the Wii managed PS2-style sales in its early years, but never really dominated the scene.
I think the thing with the 360 and PS3 has been that, from the user's point of view, they're probably more interchangable than any other two consoles in history. Their internal architectures might be completely different, but in terms of overall performance, they come out in about the same place. In a technical sense, if a game can run on the 360, it can be made to run on the PS3 and vice-versa. Just as importantly, they've got controllers which, while different in appearance, basically have the same number and configuration of buttons. So the same game can be released for both platforms in a near-identical state.
There aren't as many exclusives as in previous generations and nor are those exclusives as likely to be "best in genre" as they have been in the past. Even developers who started out this generation tied to one manufacturer's hardware have branched out since into cross-platform (eg. Insomniac).
So whether you buy a 360 or a PS3 (or if you own both, which one you spend most time with) is likely to be influenced by some distinctly secondary factors. Do you believe in "patriotic" buying? I suspect a lot of people do, as evidenced by the PS3's advantage in Japan and the 360's in the US (while Europe remains a dead heat). Which controller do you prefer the ergonomic fit of? Which console do most of your friends own? These are much narrower factors than the essentials that set apart the Xbox and the Gamecube, the SNES and the Genesis/Megadrive and the Playstation and the N64.
I don't think this console generation has had a winner. The Wii took an early lead but squandered it (check Nintendo's financials for the last couple of years, as opposed to the specifically gaming divisions of Sony and MS). The 360 and PS3 have remained neck and neck. And the Wii-U (which feels as much a current-gen console as a next-gen one based on the time I've had with mine)... who knows?
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I would argue that the 360 has more mind-share in the US--but at the same time, it's the least relevant console. Most games these days are multiplatform, and now that developers have had more time with the PS3, the PS3 ports are almost always superior. The 360 does have a few good exclusives, but those often wind up on the PC as well, which ends up getting the superior ports (Halo is a notable exception). Sony, meanwhile, has been amazingly open to a diverse range of niche titles that don't wind up anywh
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Do you believe in "patriotic" buying? I suspect a lot of people do, as evidenced by the PS3's advantage in Japan and the 360's in the US (while Europe remains a dead heat).
While I have no doubt that it matters to a significant percentage of Japanese gamers that the PS3 is made by a Japanese company...I don't believe for a second that any significant percentage of Americans give a damn that MS is an American company and got their Xbox because of that. Most likely IMO? Someone wanted to play some flavor of Halo because their buddies all played it...then, that was the console that they had, and there was no reason to get another one.
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The Wii squandered nothing. It got lucky being a fad toy using a new gimmick. The fad could not be sustained because the gimmick was simple and got old quickly (especially because it didn't work all that well). The hardware was half a generation behind the competition so it couldn't "graduate" from fad toy to standard console. Anyone who was a "core" gamer or potentially could transition to that category was forced to buy a PS3 or 360. Their lead was not "squandered" because that implies they ever had a cha
Re:Take The Fanboy Goggle Off (Score:5, Informative)
Far Cry 3 [eurogamer.net]
Need for Speed: Most Wanted [eurogamer.net]
Mass Effect 3 [eurogamer.net]
Darksiders 2 [eurogamer.net]
There are lots more if you want to look.
tl;dr version - in most cases, the graphical and performance differences between PS3 and 360 "top end" games are so miniscule that you need detailed frame-by-frame comparisons to spot them. Broadly speaking, what differences do exist show the 360 having an advantage on Unreal-tech games (which is a lot of the big shooters). There are a few games which do swing heavily in favour of one platform or another (eg. Skyrim towards the 360, Final Fantasy XIII towards the PS3), but these are the exception rather than the norm and tend to reflect a developer which is much more comfortable with one set of hardware than the other.
Neither console crushes the other in performance terms in the real world. End of.
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We're not having a debate. There is six years of real world graphics engines running on fixed hardware. The fact that whatever brain damage you have that makes you so vehemently deny what is something that isn't just easily seem with people's own eyes but with the actual resolution, poly counts, lighting models, etc on the PS3 and the significantly weaker Xbox 360.
There are usually two groups of people who still cling to the delusion that the Xbox 360 graphics hardware is in the same league as the PS3:
1. Ou
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So in other words, I could believe several years' archives of face-offs on multiple sites, not least Eurogamer, and the evidence of my own eyes over the last 5 years, all of which suggests that the two machines come out in broadly the same place.
Or I could believe you (and some of those anonymous coward sockpuppet posts you've also made in this thread). Given you seem to be contending for the title of "biggest asshole on slashdot" (which believe me, has some competition), I'm leaning away from that option.
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"So in other words, I could believe several years' archives of face-offs on multiple sites, not least Eurogamer"
All almost paid-for review sites.
Owning both a 360 and PS3 - PS3 owns the 360. See, the 360 LIES about its actual video output and my very smart TV catches on and goes "This isn't the proclaimed 1080i the 360 is saying, this is 720i" and auto-adjusts resolution. It even tells me in the upper-right corner what resolution it switched to.
The 360 has a maximum theoretical full-system performance of 1T
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No, you shut the fuck up, since you started with the insults.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-ninjagaiden2-faceoff-article [eurogamer.net]
Same game by two teams who wanted to exploit their hardware to the maximum. :
The results reflect the hardware differences
X360 displays more enemies on screen and effects.
PS3 does better lighting.
Choose your favourite, but stop the fanboy rant. We're talking about games, not visual demos.
Re:Take The Fanboy Goggle Off (Score:4, Informative)
PS3 got SPUs, and that's about it. It has less RAM, less performant GPU, and only a single hyper-threaded CPU core. Without taking SPUs into account, PS3 is essentially a castrated Xbox with 2 of its 3 cores removed and RAM halved to 256 MB (you better not touch video RAM with CPU).
Now, what SPUs give you: 6 fast, but pretty dumb cores that see the world through 256KB window and have to DMA data in and out. Their job is mostly helping weak RSX GPU with graphics tasks (post-processing, sometimes geometry optimizations like early culling, deferred renderer - if used, etc). Using them for generic game logic is possible, but most cross-platform engines were not designed for that and SPU utilization remains a problem even now, 6 years after the launch.
Compare the framerates of the cross-platform games, BTW.
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And the little kid pretending to be 'console developer' blows it by parroting a silly rumor.
Here's a hint kid. Don't try to bullshit about things people have sitting in the offices right now.
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Haha, wow, did you seriously create multiple accounts on slashdot just so you could push your point further without looking like the same raving lunatic?
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"PS3 got SPUs, and that's about it. It has less RAM, less performant GPU,"
The 256 MB of RAM running core clock speed way outperformed the 360's 512MB, and the only reason the 360 as a whole got labeled superior was the inclusion of the eDRAM for video, which had huge amounts of bandwidth, but CPU to CPU, the RDRAM killed the DDR3 in the 360 which ran at 700 MHz. The modified GeForce 7800GT in the PS3 slammed the shit out of the ATi -revamped X1800, with the ATi GPU only having the advantage of the eDRAM whi
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"You don't back your claims, in reality it's PS3 games that run in "640p"
I can pause my games on my PS3, monitor displaying "1080p" in the upper-right hand corner, and one-by-one with a magnifying lens count the pixels and go "This is a true 1080p image without anti-aliasing" - example being Mortal Kombat, or Valkyria Chronicles, or Uncharted.
BTW, you can't evenly scale 640p up to 1080p. So your claim off the bat is bullshit.
You won't mention the franchise because you've never done console development and y
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"Go visit a paid reviewer."
Nope. I'll stick with 15+ years of direct hardware experience versus a group of sub-30s neckbeards.
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Wow, you created an account just for posting fanboy wars from.... what, 5 years ago? I would think this was a troll, if it wasn't for the fact that I've read drivel like yours for the past 15 years. 20 if you start with magazines.
The cold, hard reality is that for all of the PS3s technical excellence, no one gives a fuck because no one can tell the difference. And with no one, I mean anyone who has better things to do than to hitch their personal self-worth to some bag of plastic, silicon and metal that is
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"no one gives a fuck because no one can tell the difference"
Only ignorant people like yourself. Those of us with the time, inclination, and true geek attitude have already taken your bullshit apart and found out that it's just that, bullshit.
See, on a nice big screen like mine, I can pick out flaws very quickly. Frame dropping to play catch-up is rampant even on 360 exclusive titles, and the suddenly large gaps in movement show that. I can see the heavy anti-aliasing done and actually figure out that the 36
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I think you logged in with the wrong account. This isn't one of the many 2.8M+ UID accounts that you posted under.
It must really eat you up from the inside that you not only picked the least popular platform to tie your self-worth to, but that on top of that, no one really cares you did. You, sad, sad, lonely loser.
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You think I have other accounts. *laughs*
Yep, you're totally moronic.
"It must really eat you up from the inside that you not only picked the least popular platform to tie your self-worth to, but that on top of that, no one really cares you did"
I own every platform, fool, including an Action Maxx. I don't thi9nk you have half a fucking clue what you're talking about.
It must be life on hard mode for you - stupid, ignorant, assumptive, and inept. Life would only be harder if you were fat, black, female, and bl
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You're absolutely right.
I bought a 360 all the way back in 2006, so have had one for quite some time, but a few months ago I finally bought a PS3 to act as a Bluray player in the living room partially, but because I finally felt like playing some of the PS3 exclusives that looked quite nice.
I made my own share of posts 5 years ago in the "console wars" against the PS3, but really if I'm honest, much of it then was just to wind the fanboys up because it was tiresome seeing the kind of drivel you're suffering
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The irony. It is.... overwhelming.
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LOL...that's it?
A pathetic attempt at pretending to be the 'mature and disinterested observer'.
Really?
Wouldn't have wasted my time on you if I knew you just some dumb guy.
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Quick google of NeutronCowboy Xbox
What a surprise! The lame attempt at pretending to be a 'grown up' above silly things like 'graphics' is just another angry and bitter Xbox fanboy...
Like here [slashdot.org], where he is criticizing the potential of sponsored Achievements? Oh wait, he was not supporting MS there...but feel free to keep on ranting.
I like the PS3 - it's my console of choice - although I do have a 360 Slim, Wii, PS Vita, 3DS & PSP as well. However, I have to say - RogueyWon was being kind when he implied that the PS3 and 360 versions are running neck-to-neck in some cross-platform game; in some of those games, the 360 version is actually better. By far.
On the flip side, I do think th
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"P.S., 360 still has a larger install base than the PS3. Not by a significant margin, mind you, but it's still ahead."
LOL. Let me guess...you just checked vgchartz.com to 'make sure'...
vgchartz.com - the site run by a 20 something year old Xbox fanboy who use to post fake sales numbers on the neogaf forums in a desperate attempt to make the Xbox 360 sales look larger than they really were. Who got banned for doing so and ran off and created his pathetic little fake sales website where he could make up infla
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Again, [citation needed]. Put up or shut up, rather than just claiming that everything written anywhere by anyone was written by an "MS fanboy". Even Wiki, which you probably think is run by Balmer himself, shows that the 360 and the PS3 are effectively in a statistical heat globally. Show some real numbers, apples to apples comparisons.
When you accuse everyone else of bias it demonstrates only your bias. And perhaps research civil discourse, you come off like a 12 year old boy who still thinks that rap
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Latest external sources I can find show that as of September 2012, the 360 had shipped 70 million and the PS3 had shipped 70.2 million. It's a statistical dead-heat (though I don't know what sales will have been like over the Christmas just gone, the PS3 has been getting some seriously heavy advertising here in the UK).
The 360 has done that on the basis of almost no Japanese sales, so on balance, it seems to have "won" outside of Japan (and lost big in Japan). Even if there are indeed inaccuracies of "a cou
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In what world does cost not matter?
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You can always spend more. Point is, cost is just as important as performance when designing a mass-market game console. You can't have enough market share to attract developers without making the platform cost competitive.
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So if you agree with me, what was your point?
Xbox 360 Is In Last Place (Score:1, Insightful)
You were joking...right?
The Xbox 360 is in last place in worldwide sales this gen.
An absolutely mind boggling failure for Microsoft. The Xbox 360 was suppose to be the console where Microsoft recovered from the first Xbox multi-billion dollar fiasco and finally got it right.
Instead Microsoft:
* Killed off the first Xbox leaving pissing off developers who wasted resources developing engines for the console
* Rushed the worst console hardware ever created out the door that lead to the RRoD fiasco and many other
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You must be living in a different world, like Japan.
Games are designed first and foremost for the Xbox 360, and PC and PS3 versions, when they happen, are outsourced sub-par ports.
Games released on multiple platforms usually have a better experience on the Xbox 360, especially graphics.
There are also many games which get DLC on Xbox 360 first. There are even some multi-platform games that only get DLC on the Xbox 360 version.
While the PS3 remains the best console for japanese games, the Xbox 360 is a much b
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Actually, I think the Xbox360 outsold the Wii sometime this year in total units (the Xbox360 has been outselling the Wii for the past 18 months, so it's been only a matter of time before it overtook the Wii). The PS3 has consistently been third.
And the primary reason people are developing for Xbox36
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Graphics quality have little to do with the power of the hardware. It's how much time the devs spent optimizing for a particular console that defines how good the game looks.
Unlike you I don't really like a particular console. I just care about having a device to play games and have a good time.
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"Graphics quality have little to do with the power of the hardware. It's how much time the devs spent optimizing for a particular console that defines how good the game looks."
I don't know how anyone could possibly write something so inane.
Why would you post something so obviously untrue?
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Because it is true..
Most computers or game consoles are so complicated to program that to tap the full power of the processor needs a lot of development time.
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That's not the fault of the hardware, that's the fault of the software that lets devs interface with the hardware.
I hate working in the semiconductor field. People like you piss us off all the time with you "It's the hardware."
No, it fucking isn't. It's your failure to understand logic and develop your own tools instead of relying upon ours. If you can do it better, fucking do it. Otherwise, shut the fuck up!
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I actually work in the business of writing software tools to make it easy to make the most out of the hardware.
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Debatable. It might be the most popular of the 3 consoles (although I don't think it is- the Wii outsold it), or the most profitable, but Xbox 360 hasn't dominated in the way that the PS2 did in it's day, or the SNES in it's. It doesn't have vast numbers of exclusive games, and the other consoles haven't tried to emulate it. If anything, both MS and Sony have expended much effort to try to emulate the Wii, making Nintendo this generation's "trend setter"- although it'd be extremely generous to say the Wii "
Re:Titan of its generation (and replaced too early (Score:5, Insightful)
I do wonder what would have happened if Sony had held back the PS3 for 6-9 months, to work out some of the oddities in the hardware, let the launch price fall, get a stronger launch-lineup and maybe get proper back-compatibility into the hardware as a standard across the world.
Possibly, something entirely unrelated to the console market - HD-DVD may have become the de facto standard for high-def media. Upgrading their console platform was only one reason Sony launched the PS3 - the other was to get a player for their proprietary high-def format in the lounge room of as many consumers as possible. Remember, at launch, the PS3 was the most cost-effective BluRay player on the market, due to console subsidies.
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Hah, so very true. I remember how close I came to buying the HD-DVD addon for the 360, before remembering the old-adage that console peripherals never really take off. On that basis, it was clear that even if the 360 sold the PS3, the PS3's inclusion of blu-ray as standard was going to carry that format over the line.
And yes, my parents bought a PS3 to go with their new HD-TV, not because they wanted to play games on it, but because it was indeed the cheapest blu-ray player around.
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It mattered a whole hell of a lot. It threw developers back to the days of the (S)NES, where you had to develop your own development tools to actually create something that is usable. The video RAM limitation alone was a massive drawback to development, so much so, I can name two studios that eventually folded because development time targeting the PS2 was insurmountable with a small shop.
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Best writer on games on Slashdot: RogueyWon
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TL;DR (just another thread about console cretinitis disease apparently destroying pc gaming lol)
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I don't mention consoles destroying PC gaming anywhere in my post. In so far as I do mention PC gaming, it is to say that it was on the back foot during the PS2/Xbox/GC era (which it was) and that it is resurgent towards the end of the PS3/360/Wii era (which it is).
Judging by your post history, you seem to have trouble reading posts over 3 lines in length. There is specialist adult education out there that might help you with this. I'd urge you to consider it.
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...
The funny thing is that, despite its hardware being completely obsolete, I've often felt Sony sent it to the back burner (via the PS3 launch) too soon. Both the console and its games were still selling well when the PS3 launched, with the 360 having failed to take much wind out of its sales.../p>
That is funny thing to say. Because Sony was the only one selling games for the previous generation system when the new systems came out. Did MS still support the original Xbox? Fuck no. Yet Sony still had new games coming out for the PS2 long after the PS3 was released. In fact, for being a "back burner" they just finally stopped making PS2, did MS still make Xboxes 5 years ago? No? So why is the back burner so bad when they have a new product? At least they were keeping it warm, not forge
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I pretty much agree with most of your post, despite being more of an Xbox 1 over PS2 gamer (my first consoles and coming from PC, I liked the more PC-centric stuff on the Xbox)
That being said, I now love my PS3, so many good games for it and more importantly so many good exclusive games for it, often unique ones to boot.
I'm curious if you'd agree (and suspect so) that the PS3 and 360 are about to also be retired too early. The replacements for both systems are heavily rumoured to come out next year before X
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No, I think this time, they may even have moved too late.
The shadow in the backdrop of the console cycle is PC gaming. People talk about console gaming killing PC gaming. It could, in theory, happen, but it hasn't to date. The reverse could also happen. And while it hasn't happened yet, we've been close at a couple of points in the past and are quite close now.
The PC had its first gaming surge at the end of the NES/Mastersystem era. That's when we got the likes of the original Wing Commander and Ultima 7, w
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I was always lucky on the PS2 hardware front, for the most part. Had a "fat" UK model for several years which got very heavy use, which was later joined by a "slim" US model. Neither had any internal hardware failures. What did get irritating, however, was memory card corruption. I remember losing a Final Fantasy X save with about 70 hours of play-time on it to that. Not amusing.
I actually had worse luck with the Gamecube, where I had two of them fail on me, despite the fact they got much more limited use.
Due? March this year? (Score:1)
It was either released in march this year, or it is due to be released march next year, as we are currently in december
not game (Score:4, Informative)
to be fair FFXI: seekers of adoulin is an expansion to the FFXI game released close to 7 years ago now. it is not a full game and can not be played seperately without buying the original title from 7 years ago.
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to be fair FFXI: seekers of adoulin is an expansion to the FFXI game released close to 7 years ago now. it is not a full game and can not be played seperately without buying the original title from 7 years ago.
So then it requires a HDD? Do most FF fans in Japan have HDDs in their PS2s?
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yes requires the HDD. i moved here after the ps3 generation started so dont know how popular ps2 hdds are. wii u seemed to sell pretty decently. donno how US sales went.
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wii u seemed to sell pretty decently. donno how US sales went.
I don't know either, but the only mention of it I've even heard since the launch is a woman who works in my bank who didn't know if it would even play Wii games. (I stayed out of it, I don't want to get too friendly with the bank employees, as some of them are excessively nosy as it is. The dark side of the local credit union.)
March of this ... (Score:3)
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It was due March 2012, but had to be postponed because of the time requirements of putting in sufficiently huge boobies.
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It was due March 2012, but had to be postponed because of the time requirements of putting in sufficiently huge boobies.
They are following the advice of Ted Stryker, "We can't live in the past any more, or the present. This is the future."
I love the PS2... (Score:2)
Now sony only needs to kill the PSP too, as it is cannibalizing all the sales the vita could have and as well as dividing developers (some are scratching their game's vita versions in favor of the PSP and others are developing for both).
Sony should learn that no risk no return. Apple kills successful products al
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I agree. However, planned obsolescence is rarely what's best for the consumer. If we want games to be treated as an artistic medium, as I believe they can be, then we have to stop with the bullshit "end of life" -- If a developer wants to make a game for the PS1, NES, C64, x86 DOS or any other platform then they should be able to. Should people be able to port, say, Cavestory to run on an SNES? I think so. The difference between the consoles and PC platforms is that you can still publish software for t
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I totally agree with you. Consoles may have some advantages(usability, optimization, hardware uniformness, etc...), but the disadvantages(licences, censorship, pricing, forced gimmicks, obsolesce) far outnumber them. Imagine if the film industry or the music industry worked liked the game industry. Imagine a world where in order to play disney movies you'd have to buy a disney movie console. To the hell with that world. As a gamer one of the things that really pisses me off is that I grew up with nintendo (
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A Console Developer Looks Back (Score:5, Informative)
I remember the excitement in the company when the first PS2 devkit arrived and were placed in a locked room. Only a few top engineers in the company had access to the room. People would come and stare through the glass at the devkit demos running on the screens and standing around chatting with the guys working on the PS2 hardware. And I remember the engineers holding mini seminars in one of the conference rooms diagramming out the amazing PS2 hardware architecture and how engines will be written for the hardware.
Sony did an absolutely amazing job with the PS2 hardware design. It was a system that much resembles some finely tuned race car that has had every single bit of wasted weight trimmed from it and setup so the driver can do one single thing, drive fast. Looking back at the PS2 code for our games it is wonderful to look at just how small and straightforward the PS2 engine code is. Pack as much data into DMA packets down to the point where not a single bit is wasted. None of the wasteful lines and lines of setup code one has to go through when writing engines for a desktop PC(or a desktop PC in console case like the Xbox).
It is no surprise Sony was able to keep the PS2 hardware viable for almost 13 years. Unmatched console hardware design and manufacturing prowess mixed with the best developer support and tools.
And Sony treats developers better than anyone else. They've always had the mindset of tell us what you need and well make it happen. Nintendo has always been too focused on their own first party titles and have always had an underlying attitude of 'we don't really need anyone but ourselves'. And Microsoft...I don't know where to being with how bad they are with supporting developers. The fact that they managed to piss off their sole important first party developer Bungie so much that they forced Microsoft to let them leave the company is a good an indication as any of just how bad Microsoft is with supporting developers.
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Sony did an absolutely amazing job with the PS2 hardware design
It's absolutely amazing that Sony decided to use the cell, but it's even more amazing that there's still people like you who think it was a good decision. Multiplatform games always look better on Xbox than on PS2, because the PS2 is such a bitch and keeping the hardware fully utilized is virtually impossible, and it's an achievement only ever reached by a small handful of titles.
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He's talking about PS2, you're talking about the PS3
Whoops! Wrong rant, and what's hilarious is that I didn't C&P, I just have deep structures for these rants now. The PS2 was equally retarded. They took two 64-bit MIPS cores with 128-bit data types and a 32-bit MIPS core with 64-bit data types and glued them together in such a way that it was a total nightmare to keep both vector units (VU0 and VU1, weren't they?) busy, especially because in their infinite wisdom they made them asymmetrical.
This always brings me to what's hilarious about the PS3 in ligh
Re:A Console Developer Looks Back (Score:4, Informative)
I don't even know what the hell that rambling wall of text is supposed be.
Our company being one of the largest developers/publishers working on the original Playstation our engineers worked directly with Sony on the design of the PS2(and the PS3). The PS2 was our dream console.
It is such an elegant machine. It was able to put out graphics that were just as good for all but a few areas like multipass rendering and AA as the Xbox while easily surpassing it in areas like frame buffer effects(one of the major reasons the Xbox couldn't handle the Metal Gear port from the PS2 without bogging down) and physics calculations for animation thanks to the insane floating point power in the PS2. And all this while the manufacturing cost of the PS2 was roughly half that of the Xbox 360.
It really is bizarre to read someone who has never worked on a real console game spew a bunch of techno babble.
The PS2 and PS3 are almost identical hardware designs that are almost perfectly designed to maximize graphical power with the absolute minimum hardware costs. The only exception being the Blu-Ray drive which was very new tech compared to the PS2 more mature and cheaper drive tech.
It really is strange to hear desktop PC game programmers cry about how the PS2/PS3 isn't exactly like their desktop PC and how they can't just dump their code designed for a completely(and massively inefficient) architecture like the standard x86 desktop PC is.
The main engine starts off on the EE/PPU. Does basic setup. Loads tasks into the VUs/SPUs. The heavy lifting tasks on the VUs/SPUs start firing away asynchronously while the main engine continues along with the less computationally heavy game code. As data in the VUs/SPUs become ready for rendering, that data is DMAed over to the GS/RSX.
Over time you continue to maximize the parallelism going on and get to the point where all three parts of the PS2/PS3 are cranking away at their respective tasks. Thanks to the bus architecture of the PS2/PS3 this happens with a minimal amount of bus contention slowing the system down. It is always funny to hear some PC programmer or someone on the Net parroting them crying about the split bus architecture and how they can't just dump everything into one big block of memory.
That amazing design by Sony is the PS2 was able to put out graphics that were so close to a machine that came out a year later and had components that cost roughly twice as much.
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The PS3 hardware was clearly a mistake. Or rather it was miscalculation. They originally planned not to need a GPU because Cell was supposed to have enough FP power to do the 3D graphics all by itself but that turned out not to be the case. So they had to rush to NVIDIA and slap a GPU in there. With its own dedicated memory. The result was a very expensive console. Cell itself had a massive die size and probably only got cheap enough to build after two shrinks. Programming the Cell was a nightmare for a lo
Re:A Console Developer Looks Back (Score:5, Insightful)
"They originally planned not to need a GPU because Cell was supposed to have enough FP power to do the 3D graphics all by itself but that turned out not to be the case."
Please stop parroting crap from the Beyond3D forums.
Our company is large enough to have had access to the PS3 hardware designs at a very early stage and were in a dialog with Sony engineers about the design. At no time did the PS3 have any other design than what is in the shipping hardware today. The only things that were to be determined were clockspeeds, number of SPUs, etc.
Not only is that stupid lie started on the Beyond3D forums false, it doesn't even make sense. The PS2 and PS3 have almost identical hardware designs. That is the feedback we console developers gave to Sony - we want a PS2 taken to the next level. Which is exactly what the PS3 was and is.
Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have no idea what company you worked for, but the PS3 hardware design went through a radical change between its early stage incarnation and what shipped. You must have worked for a late-access company.
Originally, the PS3 was going to do most of it's graphics in a souped-up 12-bit fixed point PS2-like graphics pipeline (called the RS) and do all the geometry on the Cell processors. After they found out their fixed point design was untenable for modern fragment shading, they had a crash program to retro-f
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Over time you continue to maximize the parallelism going on and get to the point where all three parts of the PS2/PS3 are cranking away at their respective tasks
Well, thank you for agreeing with me, and admitting that it takes a long iterative process to milk performance out of the PS2, meanwhile your competitor has spit out three titles on the Xbox which, due to the fact that it just has more to work with even if it does less with it, and the fact that it's easier to do it with. This is what every game console programmer but you has said ever.
That amazing design by Sony is the PS2 was able to put out graphics that were so close to a machine that came out a year later and had components that cost roughly twice as much.
What's amazing is that Sony failed to recognize that by waiting a year they could get the same results with COTS parts, and
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Yes, desktop PC are massively inefficient compared to a modern graphics architecture like the one in the PS3.
You have gimped processor with pathetic floating point performance thanks the horrendous Intel x86 chips that should have been done away with years and years ago. The performance is so bad relative to more modern computing hardware that the hottest programming area in PC development is going through the tedious and wasteful effort of trying to shoehorn heavy computational task across the main bus to
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You have gimped processor with pathetic floating point performance thanks the horrendous Intel x86 chips that should have been done away with years and years ago.
My PC has fantastic floating point performance thanks to the fantastic AMD amd64 chip, an architecture which has now been around for some time.
The performance is so bad relative to more modern computing hardware that the hottest programming area in PC development is going through the tedious and wasteful effort of trying to shoehorn heavy computational task across the main bus to the GPU.
It's the "hottest" programming area today because there is so vastly much power concentrated in the GPU. This does not differentiate it in any way from game consoles. The only difference is the speed of the bus, which we would do on PCs too if it wouldn't make them outrageously expensive.
GPU is sitting across a relatively slow bus that is managed by a software driver that the programmer has no control of.
Low-level control of the driver is great for the programmer, but it comes at the
Could Sony then please let us install (Score:1)
Thanks Sony for the PS2, I hacked mine. (Score:2)
Granted the Dreamcast (I am not one of those fan boys who says it's more powerful then the PS2) was the first machine I learned about "hacking" on, which was basicly learning to make boot disks so I could boot up copies of games/homebrew. The PS2 was the first gaming console that gave me a harddrive to do it with.
Granted I didn't get my first PS2 till about 6 months before the PS3 came out. I was mostly a PC gamer at that point, but of course, had all the various consoles up till the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube c
PS2 Software Library (Score:2)
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Exceptions:
The PC is no
When I went to Japan... (Score:1)
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When and where in Japan were you? I just moved back to the states from Japan, and while certainly many kids play video games, so do many adults. People in suits heading to work playing Monster Hunter on their PSPs. Arcades full of adults with only a couple kids playing Namco's Taiko game in the corner.
Sure, not every adult is into games, but not every adult is into games here either. Of course we also have adults here that think video games are just children's toys and will buy GTA for their kid while co
Discount Air jordan shoes,sunglasses sale (Score:1)
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The PS3 is also using memory from Rambus. (XDR)