God, I love console war threads. One of the few places I can always count on being told that I’m not a “real gamer” anyway, so what do I know?
slight hijack. can someone explain the wii 1:1 control how is it different from now. thanks
Hah. You think that’s bad? I’m still playing on a PS2. :o
Hey, the PS2 still has better games than either the 360 or the PS3. Of course, it’s had a stupid long amount of time to get there too. What’s scary is that the PS2 is frequently still OUTSELLING the PS3.
I think you might have a classic case of the “tail wagging the dog” here. I think the primary reason why Sony is showing dedication to the older console is because the old consoles are still selling. If microsoft had enjoyed the same popularity for the xbox1 as Sony had for the PS2, I can guarantee they’d still be releasing “slimline” versions of the xbox1, and developers would still be jumping over themselves putting out games for the console.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the site, but:
Just try googling “PS3 YLOD” (that’s Yellow Light of Death)
Again, my guess is that if you bought a launch-day PS3, it’s much more likely to last 10years than a launch-day 360. But it’s definitely not guaranteed
I’ve been thinking about getting a PS3 from Gamestop as well. I already have a PS2 so I probably won’t need anything backwards compatible, although the Gamestop website has refurbished 60 gigs for just a bit more than the new 80 gigs.
The odds of a 60gb being in stock are about zero.
[Usually Ships In 24 Hours
Limit 2 per household
This item cannot be shipped to a PO Box
Ships to U.S. addresses only](http://www.gamestop.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?product_id=64006)
In a nutshell, the Wii remote’s motion sensing is a bit crude, and the new add-on adds input from a gyroscope so that the position and rotation of the remote can be tracked much more accurately. It’s “1:1” in the sense that real-world motion translates pretty much exactly into in-game motion.
This will be a pretty huge improvement on the interface. I downloaded a game (The Incredible Maze) from the WiiWare Channel that takes rotational information from the Wii remote and simulates (and elaborates on) the old “ball and maze” toy game. An okay concept as a casual time-waster, but a bit frustrating because real-world movements are not mapped accurately enough for very fine actions.
1:1 motion sensing would make a lame-o $5 game liek The Amazing Game more playable, but the real excitement comes from the improvements to game play where accurate motion (rather than general gestures) drive gameplay. Swordplay, golfing, etc.
sorry, I meant uncompressed audio, not audio AND video. This is what happens when you type up a post between classes while also planning the lesson for said classes 
I get what you’re saying about the user base. No one thought the Wii would be anywhere NEAR as popular as it has become.
As for the money issue, I still disagree. Sony got IN to the deal with Nintendo to make money, they wanted to make the SNES DD so they could make money. When Nintendo turned around and screwed 'em on it, they had to spend more time and more money to develop the SNES DD into the PSOne, and it was a huge gamble. They figured it’d be better to take that gamble and try to make money than it would have been to take the hit and lose money. History has shown that they were more than correct.
As for starting line-ups, well pretty much all consoles have shit launch line-ups these days. I think the last good launch line-up might have been PSOne. That’s just a simple fact of the industry these days.
This thread is so full of misinformation that I don’t know where to start.
So I won’t; I’ll just opine.
It doesn’t matter how much we argue about “real gamers” or how the Wii must be doing something right if it sells so well. There are and always have been two types of gamers: people who play Mario and Doom, and people who play Bejeweled and Solitaire. This is not a bad thing. There are different products for different people. No one has to demonize anyone else about their zombie splatter games or their casual bullshit.
If you’re a hardcore gamer (and by this I do not mean ‘owned an original Pong cabinet you whippersnapper,’ the definition has changed) the fact that the Wii doesn’t have HD, dual-stick shooting, or online matchmaking is huge detriment.
If you’re a pick-up-and-play type of gamer (and I use this term because, bizarrely, ‘casual’ is taken as an insult these days), the fact that the Wii doesn’t support or encourage overly complex controls, has plenty of minigame compilations, and has overall cheaper games is a huge plus.
And vice-versa.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what conclusions we come to in this thread or how many dopers we convince to go one way or the other; the game console market is flexible enough that it will correct itself. I’ve seen way too many gamers sell their systems off and switch sides in the casual/hardcore camps to believe otherwise. To be totally honest, it’s usually hardcore gamers switching over because they snagged their Wii after finally seeing it in a store one day. They’re easier to find, now, and the base 360 unit with similar online functionality is $199, so I don’t think that’ll happen much, anymore.
There is a booming market for both types of consoles, but it’s important not to pretend they all basically do the same things. We wouldn’t even have to put ‘A or B’ in a thread title if that were true.
while this is true in some sense, it’s more venn-diagram-ish than that (did I just verb venn-diagram?) . There are definitely those of us who enjoy taking time out from decapitating zombies or saving princess (which can, in fact, be accomplished at the same time) to play a couple rounds of bejeweled or a tower defense game 
This has always interested me, when it comes to porting over a game, has anyone played resident Evil 4 on the PC? when you goto controls it shows you the playstation controller with the buttons as square, triangle etc with no indication at all of the keyboard keys?.. did they run run that game in a emulator, or what? i cant believe when they ported it over they forgot the control screen:confused:
Very true! I never like to speak in absolutes, so I hope that doesn’t come across too strongly in my post. There are basically two types of gamers, just like there are basically two types of political leanings or sexualities. For a lot of involved gamers, it’s a matter of finding with which of the two sides to identify more.
Huh - there’s one at a location near me. I was at a store about 30 minutes before you posted your original post, and I had actually asked about their availability, and the cashier said, “We’ll never get those in stock again.” Good to know.
This happens some times. EA used to be the biggest culprit. They would either hire incompetent studios to handle the port or saddle the dev team with very short development times, or both.
Naturally, piss poor ports would not sell very well because PC gamers aren’t brainless morons, and then EA would stop production of the IP on the PC platform and claim it was because PC gaming was in decline. Never mind that this is only true when speaking about retail space, and then only in the US. Europe and asia still have a large PC retail space and, like the US, an ever growing digital download market.
Bad ports could have issues ranging from instability, terrible console centric controls, poor optimization, etc.
Luckily, good ports have come and are coming out from various studios and publishers. Even EA is doing a lot better these days. Mass effect for example, is simply a superior game on the PC, as are most ports/multi platform releases now a days. The exceptions still exist out there however, there are plenty of examples.
On the original quote By Really Not All That Bright: Porting from a console, well, at least a GOOD port from a console (or a good multi platform release) usually involves significant development time. It’s not just fiddling with control inputs. The keyboard and mouse have a different design aesthetic; you can’t just map out the controller inputs to a mouse and keyboard, you have to design the GUI to take advantage of the keyboard and mouse in an intuitive way. You also need to test the game on various hardware configurations and scale the graphics engine so that high end hardware has access to more polygons, higher resolution textures and more graphical effects, while low end hardware can run the game with some settings turned off. It’s not just plopping down the xbox code on a compiler and away you go.
I looked into that too, but I wanted the warranty that comes with the new system. After the highly publicized 360 RRoD (now in two flavors!), and the less frequent, less publicized PS3 yellow light of death, I wanted the coverage. My PS2 is still chugging along nicely after 7 years, so I can pass up the backwards compatibility.
I’m curious about your opinion of the Wii’s control options. Can you clarify?
I have been a PC gamer since the end of the eighties - apart from that, the last console I spent any amount of time on was the Colecovision.
By the time that the popular consoles’ hardware began to offer something that was remotely comparable to PC gaming, I still resisted because the controls were so limited. I play mainly FPS, RTS, and combat simulators, and a gamepad has never cut it for me.
The novelty of the Wii controllers finally broke down my console resistence – it’s nowhere near as good as a keyboard & mouse combo (I guess I like overly-complex controls) but it seems to me that they are better suited to complex controls than a gamepad. (ie; there is a comparable number of buttons, mini-joystick, etc plus positional and gestural input.)
In my experience, the Wii controllers give developers a little freerer reign when it comes to assigning controls, and there seems to be more room for complexity.
(I am going to break down and buy a PS3 or Xbox 360 this year, maybe it’ll all become clear after enough hours of struggling with an alien scheme…)
And the free game, right? 