Nintendo's E3 showing--and beyond

[Orius]

I haven't payed any real attention to E3, but I've heard that Nintendo totally blew sony out of the water with a superior presentation. Good for them. I've never really cared for Sony's consoles myself, and if it weren't for the Final Fantasy games, I probably never would have bothered with one. It's good to see the Big N pick itself up after taking beatings in the market with its last 2 consoles and make a comback like this. Go Nintendo!

The biggest announcement from Sony's side seems to be that they're also planning on motion sensor controllers which seems like copying Nintendo's Wii controllers a bit, although the Wii controllers are far more innovative where Sony just seems to have stuck motion sensors on their standard controller. That and the fact that Sony indeed was arrogant enough to price their console at $600, which IMO is ridiculous.

 

[Agamon]

The Wii looks great. I just watched the 9 hours of G4's E3 coverage (well, the parts that interested me) and I'm definitely getting one of those when it comes out. Not all that interested in PS3. The 360's new games look good, but I just got a new PC, so the XBox isn't worth it for me.

 

[trancejeremy]

Don't forget the Wii is fully wireless, automatically connects with other systems through WiFi, and... when I heard its controllers were backwards compatible, it wasn't just with GC controllers.

But, don't use the word "just." Free games is a big deal. The new controller is a big deal. The controller is, arguably, the biggest console innovation in the past 10 years.

What's the PS3? A souped up PS2. What's the XBox 360? A souped up XBox. They have hardware upgrades, just like every past console has had. No console company has ever rethought how console games play as much as Nintendo.

Free games? AFAIK, you will have to buy the old games. Much like the ones from Microsoft Arcade. (In fact, that is basically exactly what is is, only with Nintendo and other companies back catalogs. And Sony has also copied this, offering downloads of PS1 games)

And the Wii is basically the same hardware as the GC , only the PowerPC CPU is running at 750 megahertz instead of 450 or so. 80 megabytes of memory instead of 40. Which was my point - the hardware was very similar, just with a slight improvement (thus, souped up).

As opposed to the 360 from Xbox jump, which went from a 733 Mhz Celeron with a GeForce 3 to a what, 3.3 Ghz PowerPC and a top of the line ATI, with 512 megs of ram total. It's an even bigger jump from the PS2 to PS3, though both use weird hardware. With that you go from something running about 300 MHz with 32 megs of ram, to something running around 3 GhZ, again, with 512 megs of ram total, and in this case, a nearly top of the line Nvidia card.

And innovation - everyone had been copying Sony's controller* -the GC controller looked much more like a dual shock than the monstrousity that was the N64 controller. Now that Sony is copying Nintendo, people cry foul? Sheesh. (Even then you have to ignore the Eye toy stuff providing similar controls to what the Wii controller provides)

* The 360 pad is actually derived from Sega's analog pad for the Saturn. But that was inspired by the original PSX analog controller. Sega did add the triggers (something Sony should copy), but MS added the buttons above the analog triggers to the 360 controller directly copy the dual shock

 

[drothgery]

As opposed to the 360, which went from a 733 Mhz Celeron with a GeForce 3 to a what, 3.3 Ghz PowerPC and a top of the line ATI, with 512 megs of ram total.

The Xenon (Xbox 360 CPU) is a triple-core 3.2 GHz PowerPC chip, but it's less than it seems. People are used to thinking of PPC chips as faster clock per clock than x86 chips, because we were used looking at early PPCs vs Pentium IIs, and G5s against Pentium IVs (G4s and Pentium IIIs were pretty similar clock per clock). But any one Xenon core is actually a lot slower than any modern AMD or Intel x86 core clock for clock in most tasks, enough that running at 3.2 GHz isn't going to make up for it. The best guess is that a single Xenon core is about twice as powerful as the original Xbox's 733 MHz Celeron.

Now, there are three cores in a Xenon, and Sony's Cell has seven even less capable cores in addition to a main core that's almost identical to any of the Xenon cores (IBM designed both of them, and is actually using something similar in their forthcoming Power6 server CPUs), but the real trick has been to get something out of multiple cores. Lots of gaming consoles have tried to get something out of mulitple CPUs in the past (and multiple cores in one CPU are the same thing, packaged differently), and they've usually failed, because someone's usually been in the market with a single, high-performance core-based design. That won't be happening this time.

 

[Bront]

That and the fact that Sony indeed was arrogant enough to price their console at $600, which IMO is ridiculous.

Part of that is because it's also a Blue-Ray DVD player, which should retail for about $400 by themselves.

Not that I'd pay that much, and I don't care for the copy locking on the Blue-Ray (no more personal backups, at least for the average user)

 

[BrooklynKnight]

I've been stuck somewhere with shotty net access so i havnt been able to view everything but I'm a nintendo fanboy. I'll be buying it within a month or two of release...

I cant wait for Mario, Metroid, Zelda, and everything else... Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee! err, i mean Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

 

[LightPhoenix]

But, don't use the word "just." Free games is a big deal. The new controller is a big deal. The controller is, arguably, the biggest console innovation in the past 10 years.

I don't think it's "free", so much as it is the idea of reverse compatibility, which is something Nintendo should have embraced earlier in the game. It is a big thing though, that's how Sony did so well with the PS2.

 

[John Crichton]

Part of that is because it's also a Blue-Ray DVD player, which should retail for about $400 by themselves.

Actually, the early reports are that the standalone BR players will start off at around $1000.

Best Buy price

NexTag search

engadget article

 

[Vocenoctum]

Part of that is because it's also a Blue-Ray DVD player, which should retail for about $400 by themselves.

Not that I'd pay that much, and I don't care for the copy locking on the Blue-Ray (no more personal backups, at least for the average user)

I wonder what the actual inherent value of the Blu Ray is, production wise, vs what they're charging for standalones.

I assume the PS3 will be in some way "less" of a BluRay then the independent readers, but how will it be?

 

[drothgery]

I wonder what the actual inherent value of the Blu Ray is, production wise, vs what they're charging for standalones.

I assume the PS3 will be in some way "less" of a BluRay then the independent readers, but how will it be?

The Blu-Ray in a PS3 (like the forthcoming HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360) is really more like a PC drive than a standalone player. Rather than having specialized dedicated hardware to decode HD movies, they use software that runs on the console hardware. I expect the components cost maybe $200-$250 for Sony (this is a wild guess based on a rumored price of $120 for soon-to-be released internal HD-DVD drives for PCs, and knowing that the disc-reading components for BluRay are somewhat more expensive).