PS3 : hope you weren't getting one

[Rowne]

Would anyone mind if I replied to some of the more fun topics raised here?

With indie development, the reason I'm not too fond of the Microsoft system is because it's too organized.  I'm probably going to get slapped upside the head for saying this but indie and organization goes together like salted fries and a sugary chocolate milkshake.  And it gives one about the same level of indigestion, too.

The reason I considered the Street Fighter II remake to be subpar is because it simply isn't as good as the old console or arcade ROMs which do, indeed, use Kaillera or other forms of netplay.  I figured that the best approach is the Nintendo approach, retain the original games and encourage innovation from the indie developers.  Give them an even standing ground for development.

With the Microsoft Live and points system, it's a case of X sells for Y and so on.  It would be kind of like telling indie developers that it would be favourable if they developed X certain type of game and that their games would slotted in at a Y price margin bracket.  This is just how it seems to me, so forgive me if I'm talking out of my arse here but I'm only going on information that I've read in publications.

What I'm hoping the Wii system will be like is as je.saist explained, a Steam-like system wherein the developers can create their own games, to whatever level of professionalism they want and then charge appropriately for it.  The reason I'd want to see this is because companies would then rise and fall by the same rules and tenets as the PC aesthetic.  The PC indie scene has worked without any level or organization for a long time now and some real gems have been developed.

Man!festo Games and Game Tunnel go a long way towards illustrating this.

I've always felt iffy about Microsoft Live Arcade because it always smelled like Microsoft desired something from it, they were willing it to be something.  They wanted it to take up a particular market niche, to mould it into something that they thought would aid their console.  Which is why they encouraged items like the Street Fighter II remake (again, as I've read in Games™).

As far as I'm concerned, indie developers simply haven't had a launch platform like the PC for consoles yet.  Live doesn't seem to be that.  The Wii system looks like it just might and just like with the PC, that lack of force is going to be a breeding ground for innovation.  I'd be very happy to see titles like Eets, Kudos and Aveyond popping up on the Wii.  I enjoy them as much as I do commercial titles.

I'm not entirely sure whether what I've just said will make sense to everyone but I'm hoping that some wisdom can be gleaned from it as to why I personally prefer the Wii approach.

Finally, I agree with you, Tapewolf.  I'd also love to see people developing more entertainment software with a cross-platform archetecture in both mind and practice.  To be honest, I'm not exactly looking forward to Vista so I'm even more staunch about that stance than I ever was (and I've always been very supportive of it).

[Jack McSlay]

I can't cease to agree with rowne..

the tendency of a team making creative games is inversely proportionate to its size.

see, one must fall, one of the most fun fighting games around, probably the best fighting game for PC, it was done by 4 people.

the old Doom series had a team of about 15 people I think, and is much better than the stuff id makes nowadays

when rockstar started and showed up GTA they weren't big at all.

like Reggie mentioned, big companies tend to do a lot of similar games in order to get more guaranteed profits, they're afraid of spending millions on a game they're not sure it's gonna sell. indie devs, on the other hand, don't rely on the games for a living, so what really matters is having fun by making a fun game.

seriously, I'm sick of all clichés of these days. the ridiculous amount of WWII games each claiming to have it's own touch of originality is really disgusting.

I think nintendo may cause a big turn of the table on the realm of game development with this. if the indie games gain space, it's a possibility many of the players will turn their heads to the more creative games done by smaller developers instead. of course, PC indie development has been on the scene for long, but never had a good way to showcase their works, let a lone sell them. if nintendo does it right, the VC marketplace may become the CafePress of games.

and I agree that many people will buy a Wii primarily for VC games and indie games.

as for X360 independent development, it's like living tuna. everyone knows it exists, but very few people has ever seen it.

[Rowne]

It's true!

In fact, I can't think how it wouldn't be.  After all, thinking about some of the things I'm looking forward to currently, a lot of them are indie titles.  Some of which most people wouldn't have heard of.  I'll name a couple of big names though, such as Portal and Team Fortress 2.  According to what I've read in both cases, they're both being worked on by small teams.

In fact, the Portal team is fresh out of college, having recently completed something called Narbacular Drop or other, VALVe saw that and snapped them up and set them to work on their mindbending project.  They're not a team of a hundred or so, it's just seven or eight guys.

And I'm more excited about Portal than I am about a lot of the stuff that's on the horizon.  In fact, the only things I seem to get excited about anymore that do have anything to do with big production are MMOs or certain kinds of multiplayer games (such as NWN2 or Hellgate: London) simply because I'll get to socialize with people in weird locales but for little more than that.

Other than that, I'm not exactly excited by anything lately.  It's all become so grey and paste-like, there's barely any palette to corporate development anymore.

[Cvstos]

I don't know, Rowne.  There are a number of big-name titles I'm looking forward to.

Command & Conquer 3
Battlefield 2142
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
F.E.A.R. Extraction Point
Neverwinter Nights 2
Star Trek: Legacy
BioShock
Assassin's Creed

Not to say there aren't any indie titles I want (there are), but there are still a fair host of games from larger companies that are on my list.

[Rowne]

I admit that I was more eager to play commercial games until late.  It's just that I've been bludgeoned over the head lately so often with how bad commercial games are, I can barely even bring myself to be excited.

For example, between the demos and the full games I've played lately, I've had it continually beaten into my head that the game is either going to become boring after ten minutes play (F.E.A.R), it's not going to live up to any expectations (Dark Messiah of Might and Magic) or it's just not going to expand at all past its own demo (Prey).  I just feel that these recent examples of 'top industry gaming' (so sayeth the review publications and sites) are just examples of the tepid and decidedly half-arsed efforts we're going to see from now on.

I was excited about some of those games but I just look at the hype and I can't bring myself to do it anymore.  Perhaps if they industry surprises me, just once or twice with something genuinely inventive, that stays good for more than a few minutes (or the length of a demo even) and introduces a few innovative ideas without ripping everything off then I can get that excitement back.

Perhaps the reason indie works is because it has no hype, there is no marketing guff really, not much about indie games is revealed so one forgets about them mostly until they pop up on the radar, they're cheap and one has a good amount of fun with them, a lot more fun than the commercial efforts these days.  It's like when I discovered Aveyond, I played that for a lot longer and I was drawn into it much more than other commercial games of late.

It just seems most of the games that I want to play are either those I randomly come across or indie titles mentioned at relatively unknown sites such as AdventureGamers.  I found The Secret Files: Tunguska to do much more for my enjoyment and excitement than a great many large, corporate games.  That's the problem, really.  Back in the day of say, Ultima VII, there were big games being released all the time that really were meaty and had lots of innovation and content.  I miss that.  Compare something like Ultima Underworld or the Pandora Directive with most of the tripe that's out today and you'll see basically where I'm coming from.

I might get excited about commercial efforts again but I'm just waiting for them to surprise me first.  So far, the corporate games industry hasn't managed to do that.  Every time I have become excited I find that the truth of how bad it's becoming is just beaten into me a little more.  If I see one really, really good game from a large company then maybe it'll do something to rekindle a little of that trust but so far, it just hasn't happened.

Sure, a lot of these games sound fantastic in theory but in practice, I'm not sure they'll be any good at all.  Most of them will probably be technical demos with samey levels slapped together as an excuse for content, like FEAR and Prey.  Impressive ideas will be shown but those ideas will be the only ideas in the game, they'll be used over and over throughout the game until the idea is so dead that one just wouldn't want to see it again.

That's the problem today, games companies ride a game on one idea and games can't just be ridden like that.  They need a number of clever ideas, good content, a great story and fantastic level design.  This is why I'm excited about Portal though, it seems that even though it perscribes to the 'one idea' thing, it actually has more to it than that.  It's a first-person puzzle game, it's also got action elements to it and there's even something of a story with a mad AI there, it has the chance to be really memorable.

I admit, of that list, Bioshock is the only one I'm really holding up quiet hopes for but ... I'm prepared to be let down.

----

I admit, part of my problem might be that I'm expecting clever/intricate level design and a half-decent plot, it seems that genrés these days have less of that now than they did six-to-ten years or more ago (and that feels really odd to say).  Just a comparison between the Longest Journey and its successor Dreamfall is proof enough of that though, as weird as it is.

Strangely, I find more entertainment in indie for two reasons.  When they do story, they do it better than commercial teams (at least when they're not trying to be philosophical or theological, Force Majeure was bad in this respect, so very bad), just a look at the latest adventure title (big companies dropped that genré long ago), Aveyond or anything similar proves this.  The other reason is that they develop games which don't actually need a strong story, titles such as Gibbage which exist just to be fun.  That's a lot of the problem lately, to be honest.  Developers create titles which seem to yearn for the grandiose story they'll never have.  Instead they should build games without story and not even pretend that they have one, it'll allow them to be more creative instead of them trying to hold themselves to some imaginary plotline.

So perhaps that'll offer some insight into my disappointment.  Or maybe not, I don't know.

[thegayhare]

An interesting new selling point for the PS3

I got this off CNN while looking for data on intels new super fast cheep chips

PlayStation's serious side: Fighting disease
POSTED: 12:01 p.m. EDT, September 18, 2006
By David E. Williams
CNN

(CNN) -- Kids aiming to persuade their parents to buy the PlayStation 3 have some new ammunition -- donating their PS3's down time to researchers could help cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or mad cow disease.

This November, Sony's PS3, with a price tag from $499 to $599, will challenge Microsoft's XBox 360 and Nintendo's Wii in a battle royale for holiday dollars when it hits stores in the United States and Japan.

The PS3 uses a powerful new processor called the Cell Broadband Engine to run highly realistic games like "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07," "Metal Gear Solid 4" and "Full Auto 2." It also has a 20GB or 60GB hard drive (depending on the model) and can connect to the Internet either wirelessly, or with an Ethernet hookup so gamers can download new programs and take each other on.

The PS3's chip is the same one IBM is using in a supercomputer it's building for the Department of Energy. That computer is expected to reach speeds of one petaflop, or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. (Full story)

"It has so much horsepower and, of course, when you're playing a game all that horsepower will be used for the game. But there are a lot of times during the day when somebody's not playing the game," said Sony's Richard Marks. "It seemed like a good idea to be able to use that horsepower for something else that is, in this case, good for mankind."

Sony worked with Stanford University's Folding@home project to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.

Improperly formed proteins are linked to a number of diseases, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gherig's disease, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad-cow disease.

"What you can imagine is that if a machine was assembled incorrectly, it can do damaging things," said Vijay Pande, who runs the Stanford project. "You can imagine a car that's screwed up and someone tries to drive it, then maybe it crashes into things and causing problems."

Proteins start out in the body as long strings of amino acids and have to assemble themselves into complex shapes -- a process scientists call folding -- before they can do anything. The challenge for scientists is that folding is difficult to observe because proteins are so small and the process is so fast -- about 10 one-millionths of a second.

Scientists are using computer simulations instead, but that has its own limitations. It takes about a day for a computer to simulate a nanosecond (one-billionth of a second) so it would take about 30 years for that computer to complete one simulation.

Folding@home uses a network of about 200,000 personal computers to simulate how proteins assemble themselves. Dividing the complicated calculations into smaller packets enables the computers to do jobs that would strain the most powerful supercomputers.

"These calculations that we have to do are very challenging. Even if we were given all of the supercomputer resources in the country we still would not be able to do the types of things that we can do with folding@home," said Vijay Pande, who runs the Stanford project.

A network of PS3s would run even faster. Pande said that a network of 10,000 PlayStations would increase speeds by a factor of five, and 100,000 would be 50 times faster than what they can do today.

"It turns two years into one month, and that's a huge thing for us," he said. "It's more than us just being impatient, there are calculations that we don't run right now because any calculation that would take more than two or three years, we don't even start it."

To participate, users will just download a program into the PS3's hard drive. Then they just need to leave the machine on when they're not playing. The Folding@home team will divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines. The program and data will take up 10 to 20 megabytes - or about the size of a handful of MP3 files, Pande said.

When the PS3 is done processing its chunk it will send the data back.

Makers say the program won't run when someone is using the PS3, because it might bog down the game.

Sony says it plans to sell about 2 million PS3s in the United States and Japan before the end of the year, and 6 million worldwide by next March.

Since all of those units are pretty much the same, developers did not have to make compromises that would slow the Folding@home program down.

"You don't really know what you're getting on any given PC, so you have to write the program in a general way so that it will run on weaker machines and stronger systems, Marks said. "They have to write programs sort of to the lowest common denominator, whereas on our system it can be finely tuned to completely leverage what we have."

The PS3 also has a graphic chip that lets users watch the protein as it folds and from different angles, said Klaus Hofrichter, another Sony developer.

"These interfaces are very nice looking, very scientific in a certain way. ... You can use the controller and navigate around," Hofrichter said.

That might make people more likely to download and run the program, Pande said.

All PS3s connect to the Internet, and Sony plans to make it easy for gamers to get the program when they go online, Marks said.

"What we want is for people just to have to make the decision to contribute electricity and benefit mankind," Marks said.

[Manawolf]

The question is: Will we still have to pay the electric bill for those guys leeching off the consoles?  Just playing last gens systems took a lot of power, how much juice will it take (and cost) to leave your PS3 on all the time.  Oh, nevermind, no one's going to be getting one anyway, cause now they're asking us to spend even MORE money for this glorified calculator.

[Rowne]

Don't underestimate the consumer's ability to throw their life-savings away on something with very little to no return in value.

Despite the obvious fact that there are people who're too intelligent to throw away that much money on a console (and the smart folks that do want one will wait a year or so and get one for a tenth of the official price in a second hand or pawn shop somewhere), I strongly suspect that with the right marketing campaign, Sony will sell their entire stock.

Though the electricity thing won't be a worry in the UK for that much longer.  The Gubbermint over here has actually done something right, they're creating a law in which electronics can no longer be produced with standby functions.  It's on ... and off and that's it.  That's Kyoto for you.

[Manawolf]

Sell their entire stock?  Yeah, maybe after 5 years and not producing a single PS3 after the initial supplies.  I'm sorry, they've messed up far to much to have that kind of faith in them.

[Jack McSlay]

Despite the obvious fact that there are people who're too intelligent to throw away that much money on a console (and the smart folks that do want one will wait a year or so and get one for a tenth of the official price in a second hand or pawn shop somewhere), I strongly suspect that with the right marketing campaign, Sony will sell their entire stock.

yeah, but with a stock consisting of merely 500k units, selling the whole stock  isn't all that amazing

[Vidar]

If I'm going to buy a PS3, it has to drop in price a lot, and there will have to be a boat-load of games on it that I really want to play, and that don't appear on any other system.
Until then, Nintendo Wii FTW.

[RJ]

PS3 isn't coming until March in Australia so it seems... I'm... well, I'm not surprised I suppose. It's just another slap to the face for us. I think we're getting used to it. Though I'm wondering about all those people who have already pre-ordered one in "time for Christmas", which quite a few stores were promising.

Wii covets the Nintendo, yes Wii do.

[Rowne]

Don't worry RJ, the same is true for the stalwart gamers of old Blighty, too.  It's just Sony's way and it's infectious as far as companies that develop and publish for them are concerned.  This, for me, is a good reason to love Nintendo over Sony.

o The Nintendo attitude.

Let's try and get our games to as many people as possible, our console too!  In fact, let's try and synchronise our release dates around the World, too.  Let's do our best to be egalitarian.  Gamers around the globe are important to us and we respect you all.

o The Sony attitude.

What's a Britain?  Do they even have televisions?  Australia you say?  Isn't that place still peopled by aboriginal tribes or something?  They have electricity?!  Holy crap!  I suppose we should try and market there or something ... let's concentrate on getting a few consoles out there eventually, nowhere near as much as America of course because America rules the World.  Yeah, just a few and leave it for a few months ... or longer, does it really matter?

Oh hey, I've got another great idea!  Let's encourage that third-party publishers also follow this way of thinking too, only to release games months, even years after they've been released in America.

----

And now we begin to see one of the reasons why I have such a deep-rooted hatred of Sony.  <.<

(Cleaned up the post a bit.)

[Vidar]

Sony is a japanese company, so sony's attitude should be more like "let's see how much money we can squeeze from those crazy yanks with our overpriced box of utter uselessness".

Nintendo's Wii release date isn't completely at the exact same date. I won't get a Wii until 8 december, while some other parts of this space-rock will get it somewhere in november. Still, they don't make me wait an extra 6 months or so.

[Rowne]

Exactly.  The delays are pretty much in shipping the consoles and getting the stock to where it needs to be rather than any intentional and premeditated delays, I just don't see real preferential treatment with Nintendo.

Though I do agree that they're all out for money and what they can squeeze out of a person.  First law of capitalism, really.  Of course, the World would likely be better off if people were motivated by things other than money but I don't see that happening for a long time.

[RJ]

Well, it's not like Sony was going to make much money in Australia anyway... not that we just don't have such a big demographic of gamers, but we're just not going to buy it anyway with the price. AU$700 for the basic package? When the Wii is going to be around AU$400?

Duh.

[Vidar]

Until nintendo showed them otherwise, Sony (and MS) thought that shiny graphics == everything, doesn't matter how expensive. Nintendo knows that fun == everything, and that graphics can help, but are not everything. Besides, do we really need graphics that are better then, say, Metroid Prime? (Is that even possible?)

[Rowne]

I agree Vidar, wholeheartedly.

In fact, I have the same view of Beyond Good & Evil, to be honest.  As far as I'm concerned, there are two types of graphics and they rely on two different types of method.

Style and technology.

It's true that one can brute force tech to get a game to look good, Oblivion proves this because it's rather pretty but how often do the graphics in games really impress you or make you smile?  I ask the reader this individually.  I find that graphics that have been created via the brute-force method are pretty, yes but they're also rather soulless.

Whereas Metroid Prime was impressive because it was moulded, it had style, they made sure that every nook and cranny had something to stare at and poke.  The World felt weirdly alive.  Beyond Good & Evil had the same thing going for it, you could crawl into a cave and the walls would be alive, there would be all these creatures you could take photographs of.  One could literally swing the camera around in awe at how delicately put together everything was.

Now in my opinion, that's impressive, it's inspiring.

Graphics via technology will always get better but it doesn't really inspire me, it'll be technically impressive on a very clinnical level but there's no heart to it.  To be honest, I think graphics reached their pinnacle at stuff like Metroid Prime and Beyond Good & Evil.  All the bloom and high-poly action in the World can't do better than that.

At least, not that I've seen.

[Jack McSlay]

as for the graphics question, the development of them is getting redundant. We haven't had any significant improvement on grahics since Halo shown up. Fighting games haven't shown up barely any graphical improvement at all since the Dreamcast.  It all looks the same, except with higher polycounts, which are barely noticed until you take a close look.

Well, it's not like Sony was going to make much money in Australia anyway... not that we just don't have such a big demographic of gamers, but we're just not going to buy it anyway with the price. AU$700 for the basic package? When the Wii is going to be around AU$400?

Duh.

dunno how many the australian currency worths compared to dollars, but if you take the U$ price and multiply it by at least 3, you get about the equivalent to the brazilian price 

[Rowne]

The irony of that Jack is that it's true.

After the release of Oblivion, what did modders spend months doing?  Creating better models that use less polygons, lower polygon rocks, lower poly faces, lower poly areas, lower poly grass, lower poly stuff in general.  Did it affect how pretty the game looked?  Not even.  In fact it made the game infinitely better for a lot of people who were running on older machines and those older machines could look the same as the top-of-the-range stuff running vanilla Oblivion.

[Aridas]

http://psp.ign.com/articles/734/734850p1.html

POSTY.

[Rowne]

The best part of that entire page was:

IGN: "And other people have passed by here for two days now without questioning this?"
Booth Babe: "Hai!"

Why is that I'm not surprised by this?  Hey, everyone ... remember when I told you that most consumers are idiots?  Well I hate to be smug but ...

Seriously though, one has to wonder just how mentally unbalanced Sony, as a company, is.