How's the forum cynicism levels with respect to the forthcoming influx of new console hardware (before chrimble for Xbox360 apparently)?

So excited that froth is forming in your underpants? Frustrated that you're going to have to fork out another several hundred pounds/dollars/baht to play the latest games? Bored mindless by the idiotic dribblings of corporate execs pointing out that their competitor's machine can't display as many flop-py high-defininition cartoon wangs as theirs can?

For me, it's only a matter of time before we invest in one or more of them, but I'm content to step off the bleeding edge of the tech-wave, and wait for the prices to come down - 3 consoles under the telly ought to keep me busy for the near future.

I'm not interested. I can't justify the spending, for one thing - not just on the consoles themselves, but also on the absolutely ludicrous prices games come out for these days. Also, I still have a PS2 and an Xbox, and there's plenty of good games for them that I haven't played yet. Certainly enough to keep me happy for a couple of years.

I prefer to game on the PC anyway - I'll be keeping up with the new games there.

Not a single one of them. I'm still exploring my PS2 and catching up on titles I've missed for the PS1 and N64 growing up in the boonies. I'll probably get one eventually, though. Just not for a long time.

PS3? I don't even have a PS2 yet. I'm still working my way through the Xbox games, and, frankly, I'll always end up going back to PC games. Console games get a bit repetitive after a while.

The only concievable reason for me buying any of the Next-Gen Consoles would be this:

Metal Gear Solid 4

So, PS3 it is for me then. Unless MGS4 comes out on PC too.

And here comes the console whore.

Yeah, they cost too much, but I voted that I was interested in PS3 and the Revolution. Even the XBox360 has some semblance of potential. I probably won't get any for a while (read: at least one price drop) but I imagine I'll wind up with a PS3 and possibly a Revolution.

The only console I have ever owned is a PS1, that I bought off a friend for £30 about a year ago. I've played on it about 10 times in total and own 3 games for it. I don't see the point of consoles really, I do game, but on the computer. I just prefer it.

Thinking about it, I might be tempted to get a Revolution too. The prospect of being able to download the entire Nintendo back catalogue for free might be too much to resist. Plus, one word: Zelda

I will probably get the ps3 (although I dont like the pad), however I am very intrested in the revolution but their isnt much information

I can't wait until they re-release the same old tired and boring (but safe, profitwise) games with slightly updated graphics on more expensive hardware.

I personally think that if graphics hardware was frozen at the point at which it was viable to make playable 3D games (since it adds a lot more options for making innovative games) then we'd have a lot more exciting games rather than EA style re-releases with minor updates and the year on the end of the title incremented by one. As it is graphics hardware improves so the games look better but actual games don't improve. Naturally this also means games run slowly on old hardware (or not at all in the console world) and forces people into upgrading if they want to be able to play anything new.

You could say the same about nearly all console hardware updates (excepting the transition between 16-bit and PS1/DC/Saturn, which enabled the leap into 3D). Nothing much changed between NES and SNES - you still had side-scrolling 2D platformers swamping the 8 and 16 bit eras.

Likewise, little changed between PS1 and PS2 generations (although I take issue with that - Xbox Live is proof of concept for the viability of an online box under your telly).

PC gamers have been playing the same game since Doom. Or Wolfenstein 3D now I think about it.

I think the problem is little to do with technology and hardware, and way more to do with the maturing of the industry. Few small independant companies sticking one finger up at the world, and doing things the way they want, and many corporate entities, with shareholders to satisfy, being forced down the path of minimum risk in order to maximise profit. Shareholders don't like risk, therefore we're seeing little innovation.

They upgrade consoles to get more money out of you, not to make better games. It's similar to Microsoft Windows, if Microsoft released a perfect OS, they wouldn't need to make another one, and once everybody had it, Microsoft would stop making so much money, so they release buggy software, then come out with another OS a few years later, which promises a lot, but doesn't deliver, and the cycle repeats.

I agree - I was attempting to say that if hardware was frozen at a certain point then developers would be forced to do more with what they have and maybe make games that sell on gameplay instead of graphics. Definitiely not the way things should be and not possible, just a kind of idealism I guess. Anyways, I felt like clarifying incase the original post I made wasn't clear.



I can honestly say I've never purchased a Microsoft product, never needed to and never intend to. Why use buggy and generally awful software when the alternatives are better and generally free. The alternatives also don't contain an annoying cartoon paperclip that pops up at the most inopportune times and makes bedroom eyes at me.
I guess the problem here is that 99% of the popluation can't be bothered to learn to use something that's slightly different and therefore go with whatever is rammed down their throats by marketing and retailers. Microsoft's market position is of course stabilised by the nice feedback loop this creates.

Actually the 32X was both the first 32-bit console and the first console to feature polygonal 3D graphics, and the Mega Drive was using "faux" 3D since Sonic 2 in... 91? 92? I forget now.

I loved consoles for their games waaaaay back when I was playing sonic games in my youth and I still like to play those games now, but generally I can play them a lot cheaper on my PC than on a console. Fr'instance, the Sonic Mega Collection on the PS2 costs £40 at most places, but since I have owned almost every sonic game in my life then I'm allowed to keep ROM's of the ones I have for an emulator on the PC legally, and at least test ones I didn't own. though I'm not always that well behaved and just Had to play sonic CD somehow... .

Nowadays I still buy console games, though. I have a PS2 at home and almost 40 games for it, almost all of which I have payed for myself, and then a further 10 or 15 that my little brother owns, some of which I have bought too, and the price hasn't really bothered me that much. I do look for deals, mind you, and I only really ever buy a game at full price if its something that I've really looked forward to - the last one I can think of was Final Fantasy X-2, and even then I got it at £35 from tescos. I usu get games in sales or special deals (I bought MGS3 on its day of release for £0.99 from game by trading in some old games) to make it more affordable but if its a good game and I can justify it then I buy it outright. San Andreas was another one, and I think I payed the full 40 for that.

That said, my collection is full of second and third rate games that I wont play very often, or ever again. I got the Ghost in the Shell game cheap in Game the other week and had it finished two days later, thoughroughly unimpressed by anything other than the non-stop plot (the ending of which I totally missed due to being too busy fighting the end boss whilst it was being explained). But to counter this, it also has Final Fantasy X and X-2, MGS3, San Andreas (indeed all three PS2 releases of the GTA series), Transformers, the Getaway, Star Ocean, Everything or Nothing, Unlimited Saga and Kingdom Hearts, almost all of which are PS2 only, and all but Deus Ex are currently (to my knowledge) console only. I put it to the multi-platform gamers who play PC games and say that they are invariably better than console games that Square do frighteningly enjoyable RPG's that take years to come out on PC, that Konami do several good titles, especially the MGS series; and I saw MGS2 on PC and it looked horrible. The system requirements were ridiculous and the graphics were terrible and low-rez. So consoles don't do the best FPS games, but who cares? Like Jon said, they've been the same basic game since Wolfenstein 3D!

So to answer this poll, I have indeed been looking forward to the next-gen consoles. As to which ones interest me in particular, the 360 is the only one that I don't like the look of. I was never an X-Box fan - the only game I enjoyed playing on it was Halo and Halo 2. Nothing else got my attention, and the actual thing itself was unsightly and large and made by Microsoft, so I distrusted it naturally. The 360 I have had a small look at and it seems like all they've done is miniturise a PC with a good graphics card, stick a concole OS on it and package it. At E3 the one they had "running" was a shell with a Macintosh Power PC hidden in the stand running the actual demos. Sad, to be sure. The revolution interests me for two reasons: Nintendo games kick butt, for one. Zelda is, whilst lacking in originality, variety and challenge recently, still a very good series. Mario is a bit overused, yes, but who can deny the gleeful pleasure that is Smash Bros? The second reason is the hardware itself, being built to be the size of a CD rom drive. Consoles were originally meant to be about portability and this is it at its finest - a high spec machine that can easily be carried about from place to place and not suffer in performance for being less than half the size of its competitors? Genious! And if the big N don't come out with more great hardware stuff for this then I'll be seriously surprised - they've innovated at every turn on hardware before, they probably wont stop now.

The PS3, however ugly it is, has me slightly salivating. The Cell processor has been the topoc of much discussion amongst my classmates - as round about the time its spec was released we were studying hardware architecture and this blew everything we knew out of the water! The design of it is a fundamental change in how processors work - Intel have been stuck for years because they've almost reached the functional limits of silicone for speed and capacity; they just can't fit anything else on to the chip. The Cell takes these limited things and joins them together in a way that means instead of a progressive increase in performance, you get a mathematical combination of the two (or more!) parts' capabilities. Considering the Emotion engine for the PS2 is still the most advanced engine to run AI on in the world, so far after its release, the updated Cell will leave most other competitors in the dust. Now if they get ATI to do the graphics processing as well, the thing is gonna be unstoppable. Especially when people realise that networking the things makes them at least twice as powerful to start with.
It's just a real shame that they look like a great big old VCR player. They scream eighties to me, and I don't think I'm alone. However, this is sorta balanced by the fact that you can get one of these and ditch your entire home entertainment system - because its all in here. If you can afford it, at least. Which is the only problem I have with playstation stuff. Hardware prices are bloody ridiculous. They say the PS3 starts at £300, with a full version available at roughly £500 that includes the complete home entertainment system and the fancy schmancy stuff that pure "gamers" wont need. The basic package is gonna be gaming only, aparrently. Which is funny, since the PS2 has a CD player and a DVD built in...

So yes, I'll probably get me a PS3 and I'll at least see about borrowing a Rev at some point, and who knows maybe one night I'll crash at someone's house and play through Halo 3 and some multiplayer, but I doubt I'll buy more than one, and certainly not til they go down in price (about two months after release, if by past standards).

Just as a side point, has anyone bought a DS recently and been as annoyed as me about the complete lack of games? Bomberman is just out but I don't have money to buy it yet, but that and Mario have been the only games so far that I really wanted. Goldeneye (coughnotcough) looks alright, especially since one cartridge can do up to eight players, but I'm still waiting for Metroid Hunters, Mariocart and then some more games to actually make the day-of-release £100 purchase I made worth it, other than having pictochat during lectures...

I think I got your point - I was just disagreeing with you I think it wouldn't have made a difference if hardware was frozen. You'd still see increasingly risk-averse publishers packing release schedules full or derivatives and sequals. The only difference is that the gaming public wouldn't put up with it, and the industry would crash.



I think that we, as nerdy IT folk, vastly over-emphasise the crap-ness of MS products. For the majority of users, who are using MS stuff at work, or at home to email, get online, type letters and add things up in spreadsheets (and that covers a substantial amount of the 9+ hours I spend using a PC every day), there's little that's bad. The software is functional, fairly intuitive (once you've got a basic grasp), and for the most part, idiot-proof to use. Sure, it's not as stable as it could be, but that's as much about how the user uses it (close un-needed apps, save regularly etc).
It's only when you start doing things that are pushing the performance limits of your machine that MS really starts showing the cracks.

Sure, it's not all bad but there are some things that make me want to strangle things.

It's not pushing the performance limits of the machine that causes the cracks to show, that's coincidental, the real problem is that running too much at once simply shows the flakeyness of their multitasking code. Inadequate protection of one apps memory space from another app means programs can and will corrupt themselves, causing crashes and other fun.

MS Word for instance, the way it tries to predict the fonts and styles you'll want to use is horrible, especially when it tried to do automatic numbered bullet points - when it gets it wrong it takes lots of effort, some insight into how to prevent it from predicting stuff again and (usually) messing up the formatting of the rest of the document to fix.
Likewise in MS Word, type -- and hit enter. What the hell? I wanted two dashes, not a horizontal rule across the page that's nigh on impossible to get rid of.

Microsoft Office file formats suck too, they're just memory dump of the running program so not only are they inefficient but if something gets corrupted or starts behaving erratically (as tends to happen a lot) and you save the document, that'll persist next time you load it up (depending on where the corruption happened, not all of the programs memory gets saved after all). This will of course be fixed in the next version since I believe they're switching to a nice XML based format but Open Source alternatives to word have been doing this for years.

Windows as well, it's great for a month after you install it (excluding the ugly horrible user interface) then it slowly builds up crap until eventually your shiney fast PC is running at a snails pace (I've seen right click menus take 20 seconds to pop up on a 2Ghz PC) and you're pretty much forced to reformat.

Who said the alternatives can't be intuitive and idiot proof also, why pay hundreds of quid for Office when AbiWord, GNUmeric and similar apps exist? Both are free, nicely unbloated and have Windows versions and can import Microsofts file formats.

As for the paper clip, what do I need to say? It's pure evil.

It should be noted I prefer not to use a word processor at all. I tend to edit files in VIM (text mode text editor - my hands never leave the keyboard) then copy and paste into the word processor at the end and format it. What is with interfaces that require to constantly move between mouse and keyboard? Is that somehow supposed to be fast? Sure it's easy to use but also really restrictive and annoying (yes, there are keyboard shortcuts for some things but generally they're pretty useless).
</off topic>

err, have you been videotaping me at home again - I thought I'd asked you to stop.


Granted

Which is all well and good if you can touch type at 40+ words per minute, and have an encyclopaedic knowledge of emacs commands. Which, of course, 95% of PC users neither have, nor want. What they want is something that they can bumble their way through, typing with one and half fingers, and send to anyone without having to worry about compatability.

And if you want a personal Word horror story - try pasting a table of 1500 database records into Word. Then having to reformat the table. On a very low spec machine.

Urgh. I gave up after a day (yes, an entire day trying to reformat a table), took it home to my higher spec machine, which struggled less, but still struggled...

I think part of my problem with PCs is that I don't have a good one and can never bring myself to upgrade. However, I shall be purchasing a new computer soon and that might just inspire me to take a look at more computer games.

Anywho... it seems that most of the forumites here value innovation and gameplay over raw power (as do I.) To this I say: why not check out the Revolution? Nintendo is rapidly establishing themselves as the odd man out... all they do now is try new things, and for the most part it works out well.

Just a thought, though.

Pft!

vi < emacs

And there's always the :help command of course.

I agree that not everyone wants to learn use that sort of software. Pasting database records sounds like fun </sarcasm>. So much nicer if Word had a nice open XML based file format and you could make a script to do it for you - let's not get onto UNIX vs Windows philosophy though. >:)

Fargh! Cand left it logged in as her again.

Microsoft did release the perfect OS, they named it 2k, then had to tempt users away from it with the shiney telletubby land of xp (for only a 50% drop in speed folks!)

Now Vista, another completely unrequired 'update' serves to futher lag out processors, hell it needs a 3D acceleration card just to display the desktop.

--

Right back to the consoles... I'll prolly be getting a PS3 a short while after it comes out. From a hardware front it seems supirior to the 360.

Plus the 360's hardware is going to cause some headaches... DVD9 Drive instead of the HD Drive, at first. So the people who pay the most for the console will have a fairly shite console after a few months when they switch to HD, forcing the user to upgrade ifthey want to play the new games, (or of course forcing the game developers to limit themselves at 9GB, making the HD drive pointless).

The PS3 however comes with blu-ray as standard, with mosterous amounts of space. The different options of te PS3 all seem to circulate around the HDD.

At the moment, I think it's a bit too early to express any sort of real interest in the consoles. I'd like to wait for all the consoles to come out, and to see what games are available. Ultimately, that's what really matters to me. I don't care too much about the extra features, and the media capabilities of each console. I only want to play games, and it's what games that'll come out that will convince me to buy one.

Saying that, I've still got plenty of games that I want to check out on the current group of consoles. If I had the money, I'd buy them all . Alas, life isn't that kind at the moment.

I'm not really into the whole console thing, for me it tends to be 'If Metal Gear Solid is on it in some form, then I'll buy it' (hence why I bought a PS2 - which I just sold on eBay a few minutes ago for £80 - EDIT: Turns out the buyer was a timewaster so I'm relisting. ). I bought a Game Boy Color at a car boot sale a long time ago, which I don't think I've ever played, although now I'm trying to buy Metal Gear Solid : Ghost Babel for it. Anyway, enough talk of MGS.

I really only play games on PC, and only buy a console if it's a console which I think it really, really good (which is the reason I have a Dreamcast. And it's not a Dreamcast I've had for a while which I haven't been bothered to sell, I actually bought it a few months ago. Infact I have two Dreamcasts, but that's another story).


Same here. I'm not too fond of the idea of buying a console just to play a game I really want to play, so I'll just hope it'll be PC-ified.


I still have Wolfy 3D...

Anyway, I voted for none, because I don't intend to buy one unless PS3 is the only platform MGS4 comes out on. So this post is just a waste of space on the server. Ach weel.