I was wondering what that lineup at Virgin Megastore was all about. Thought it was nickle night at the whorehouse.
How about this for retail larceny: there was a sign on the door announcing the PS2 was available only as part of a package including 2 games now, coupon for another game later, a mouldy pizza someone found under the staff room sofa-all for the low low price of $750CDN. Now, how does one say “kiss my spacious white ass” in Japanese?
From what I read (and I monitor a gaming forum, too, so I try to keep up with this stuff) Sony can’t get hold of enough chips for the system. Sony doesn’t MAKE those particular chips.
Fortunately, I hadn’t had my heart set on having a PSX2 for Xmas this year. I’m going to wait til the second or third wave of them come out, and the price lowers a bit. Sony is the ONLY one carrying the SquareSoft games I know and love. Oh, sure, the Final Fantasies come out on PC, eventually…but how about CronoCross? What about Legend of Mana? Threads of Fate? Nope, I GOTTA have a PSX2…I just don’t gotta have it right now.
Wait a whole year and get the PSX2 for $150 and the top games for $25. And you’ll know what the top games are, rather than having to buy blind.
Or, if you’ve got a pc already, sink the $299 into an awesome video card and some memory and you’re rocking.
I’m still buying games for my Super Nintendo… yes, Super Nintendo for $8.99… and loving it!
Lynn: You can check this link for details on the shortage. Evidently Sony was trying to go from a .25 micron process to a .18, and screwed up.
Annie: So when is nickel night at the whorehouse?
Diet: A video card and some memory? But what kind of memory? PC-150, the overclocker’s dream? Or PC-100 for maximum value? Or should I just wait for DDR-SDRAM, and buy a Duron and overclock the hell out of it - which will take a year? Argh, I hate PC product cycles! 
Ummmmmm, I’ll know what the BEST SELLING games were. Not necessarily the best play values. I don’t like buying used games (too many kids don’t take care of their games) and most places don’t carry “older” games. Particularly if they’re “niche” games. I am not very fond of shootemups, I don’t like sport sims at all.
I laugh at all consol-freaks :D. Our PC’s been running PS2-level graphics for the past year. Sony’s had plenty of screwups with regards to the PS2 (the current shortage not being one of them… companies usually want to INCREASE sales), one of them being that the PS2 is hard to program games for… so you’re going to see a decided lack of titles this time around. On the other hand, that may work to seperate the wheat from the chaff, and result in more top-notch games. One can only hope… who remembers such PSX wonders like Spider?
Spoofe - Ah, but if graphics make a game good, then Trespasser should be the greatest game ever. (But it ain’t. :p)
My point exactly. I still consider games like Final Fantasy 3 to be superior to most anything that came out for PSX/N64. But a lot of the hooplah over PS2 focuses on the snazzy new graphics, which, in my case, ain’t that big a deal. In fact, the only reason I’d consider buying a PS2 would be because the games are put on DVD, meaning that there’d be more content, more “game”. However, I know that most of this DVD space will be given over to cinematics and music or sound files, as opposed to a more immersive game environment.
I did preorder. In May. A lot of good it did me–I “might” get it “next week” in the “next shipment” (Sony says they are shipping 100,000 a week until Christmas). And yes, the GameCube will be more powerful. So will the X-Box. Have fun waiting for them. In the gaming industry, there is ALWAYS something more powerful down the line.
My kids know they’re not getting it for Christmas. It would’ve been nice though if I could of bought it as my “splurge” gift for all three of them.
Feynn
I do not go in to debt for Christmas. I do however try to get at least one gift that’s a little more pricey for the kids.One year we got them a T.V. for the basement. It was the best investment I ever made.I only spend a lot of money on a gift if it is something all the kids can use.
Is it just me or does anyone else think this is weird: I go into a few different electronic stores and there are no advertisements for the PS2. I know there was a limited release, and only the lucky and early birds got one, but I just find it really strange that after all the hype now nothing. Almost like the stores want you to think that it never really happened and the PS2 does’nt really exist. Well, I guess it does not exist for most people, only the lucky 500,000.
I want one
WillyK… I only yesterday saw a commercial for PS2. It was pretty damn good, too. But you’d think that if Sony was trying to drive up demand for the Christmas season (by halving the supply), wouldn’t they be wanting to push the product down our throats with ads and commercials everywhere?
Here’s a quick question… how many of you who wished you had preordered a year ago would be willing to pay an extra hundred bucks if it guaran-damn-teed you’d get your PS2 system within the next month?
Addendum: And came with the stipulation that you could not sell it to someone else.
Have any of you actually seen a PS2? Played games on it? I doubt you’d be so impressed if you had.
I’m a game programmer, and the company where I work is owned by Sony. For much of my time there, I have been coding for the PS2. Yes folks, I’ve had a PS2 development system sitting on my desk for over a year. And do you know what? It’s really not that special.
Most games’ screenshots look very impressive, until you realize that they’re rendered at a resolution of 1024x768 (or even higher). That’s fine for a computer monitor, but when you buy a PS2 and bring it home, you’re stuck plugging it into your TV. A television is more like 320x200; the screenshots have at least ten times as many pixels as anything you’ll see on your screen.
I could start getting into more technical details, but this is long enough already. My point is that a system can have all the hype in the world and still not be all that good. Unless you have actually sat down in front of the system and played some games on it, don’t just sprint out and buy it because Daily Radar tells you to.
I’ll stop before this becomes a real rant. Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here, having fun with my Dreamcast…
Yes, the cutback from a Million to 500K was not Sonys “fault”. But they knew even a Million would create “gotta-have-it-at-any-cost” shortages- hell, they planned it. They wanted to be the “cabbage patch kid/ tickle me elmo/furby” for 2000.
Spoofe& willy: why do they need to advertise when the media is giving them all the free hype they can use? There have been 4 articles (that I have seen) in the SJMN about the PS2 and its shortages, and the demand thereof.
That’s bullshit. Do you know how much of an insane risk that is? “Yeah, let’s drum up sales by NOT selling anything!” That’s the biggest hunk of shit I’ve ever heard, since if the price DOES go up high, it’ll be the retailers that rake in the dough, as Sony would already have sold them to the 3rd-parties.
What do you suggest? That they not ship ANY until they know for sure that they can meet demand? That’s ridiculous. If they wait too long to ship, consumer confidence and interest dissipates.
Finally, what do you know about the inner workings of a PS2? Somewhere between “Nothing” and “Jack Shit”, I reckon. It’s a very complicated hunk o’ machinery, my friend… that’s like saying “Why don’t they make enough Ferrari’s so that everyone can have one?”
You call negative attention to be “free hype”? Contrary to popular myth, there IS such a thing as “bad publicity”. I’d imagine that if they were trying to turn the PS2 into the “Furby/Tickle-Me-Whatever” toy of the Xmas season, they’d be trying to GET PEOPLE TO BUY THE SYSTEM. Seeing as how they’re NOT, it leads one to think that the explanations for the system shortages are genuine.
Yep. Import PS2, import Tekken Tag. Looks better on my TV than it does at the arcade, and, unlike my local arcade, the controls work. Also played a bunch of other games at E3, and though even UT looked great, I prefer it on my PC, thank you very much. Overall, though, yes I am still “so impressed.”
I can believe someone paying $15,000 for one. If some guy is a millionaire and has promised his kid he can have whatever he wants for Christmas, and he wanted a PS2, he will probably do whatever is necessary. It’s just money.
The truly ironic thing is, for fifteen grand, you can go out and buy a half-dozen computers with graphics capabilities significantly better than PS2. Heck, pop a 64-meg GeForce II card (which costs a hundred bucks more than the whole PS2 system) into your computer, and suddenly you’re running Quake 3 at 1600X1400 resolution at 75 FPS.
Uhhh, yeah. Dissapointed kids at Christmas. Real “victems [sic]” there. :rolleyes: