The X-Box 360

[WizarDru]

Sure your example sounds alluring... it's also baseless speculating. Sure $2,50 sounds great for a great game like Majora's Mask (you do know which game to pick for your example), but what if it's $5,00 for something like Cobra Triangle, or Paperboy? Doesn't look that alluring to me.

Also the fact that something sells on the GBA, a completely different platform from the revolution isn't that good of an argument. For the moment the possibility of downloading games from the Nintendo Nes/Snes library is a good feature for the Revolution but it's hardly a killer deal.

I didn't mean to imply that it was. The question was raised "is being able to download older games a draw?", and IMHO it is one. It's not a killer feature, but it could be a tipping point, and Nintendo knows it. We're already gettting announcements by companies that their older catalogs are going to be available through Nintendo's service, so the broader the support, the more popular it will be. More importantly, it opens a whole new avenue for game and content distribution...if successful, it could have wide-reaching implications.

My point with the GBA games was that everyone commonly assumed that Nintendo was nuts for releasing $20 GBA versions of NES games...and they sold like hotcakes. When you consider that Nintendo has a very loyal fanbase, you can extrapolate outwards to the consoles. Nintendo is clearly trying to position themselves in a horizontal move away from Sony and MS. Whether that will succeed or fail remains to be seen...but Nintendo hasn't lost money on a console, yet, even if they haven't won the number one spot.

Right now, Sony and MS are locked in a tight battle for number one. If I believed Killzone was real, I'd say Sony was winning. If Microsoft hadn't just admitted that 'backwards-compatible' apparently doesn't mean the same thing to them that it does to US, I'd say they were winning. Not that it really matters much.

Me, I just want to play more games. Right now, I'd really like to go play some more "God of War"...if not for this stupid "work" thing.

 

[mojo1701]

I didn't mean to imply that it was. The question was raised "is being able to download older games a draw?", and IMHO it is one. It's not a killer feature, but it could be a tipping point, and Nintendo knows it. We're already gettting announcements by companies that their older catalogs are going to be available through Nintendo's service, so the broader the support, the more popular it will be. More importantly, it opens a whole new avenue for game and content distribution...if successful, it could have wide-reaching implications.

So true. I've been wanting to play "GoldenEye," or hoping that it comes out for Cube like Zeldas: Ocarina of Time Masterquest and Majora's Mask came out for Cube, either through pre-ordering or something (impossible, I know, since Rare developed GoldenEye, and they aren't with Nintendo...).

 

[WizarDru]

Maybe it is, and maybe it's not. I mean, it would require a new agreement, but I'd bet that many companies would be willing to revisit those old partnerships if it essentially meant new revenue with virtually no outlay of cash. Remember, Nintendo's licensing was pretty stringent...they may have the rights to do it already, though I bet it's a grey area.

Masterquest already did come out on the 'cube with the Windwaker preview CD that had Ocarina of Time. I have no doubt Majora's Mask will be available on the new service.

 

[ohGr]

You might be able to get Goldeneye and other Rare games through this service. IIRC, throughout the Snes, N64 and early-GC era, Rare was a second-party developer, with Nintendo publishing most of their games. At one point, Ninty held as much as 49% of Rare's stock. While i certainly don't know the specifics of the publishing and license deals, there's a good chance that Nintendo is the one who has say in how Rare's older games get used.

 

[trancejeremy]

So the Xbox 360 isn't backwards compatible? That sucks. I really should have bought all those retro game compilations for the PS2 instead....

 

[drothgery]

So the Xbox 360 isn't backwards compatible? That sucks. I really should have bought all those retro game compilations for the PS2 instead....

Not exactly. They've explicitly said that certain top-selling games will be backward compatible. This is yet another reason why I don't like the Xbox 360 architecture (I'd be building a 100% backward compatible, dual-core x86 box with an nVidia GPU, and I'd be launching it in 2006, because if it were the DaveBox, Halo 3, KotOR 3, and DOA4 would be launch games).

What that means is that they're achieving backward compatibility via emulation (the PS2 was backward compatible because it had a PS1 CPU onboard, which was used for audio in PS2 games). Doing things this way means different games will expose different things that need to be emulated. So they're not going to guarantee that everything will work out of the box, or that everything ever will. On the other hand, emulation that works for Halo 2 will get a lot of games to work as well.

 

[Arnwyn]

So far I'm pretty uninterested in all three, but in the end, I'll go (first) wherever the RPGs are (originally the NES/SNES, and now Sony).

I think Microsoft vastly overestimated how "teh awsum" online is, and if too many games rely on it, it will continue to hold them back. It's still too niche for games, and will be so in the forseeable future. If they're looking for massive sales - online gaming ain't it. And online gaming with additional subscription costs sure as hell ain't even close.

 

[WizarDru]

So far I'm pretty uninterested in all three, but in the end, I'll go (first) wherever the RPGs are (originally the NES/SNES, and now Sony).

I think Microsoft vastly overestimated how "teh awsum" online is, and if too many games rely on it, it will continue to hold them back. It's still too niche for games, and will be so in the forseeable future. If they're looking for massive sales - online gaming ain't it. And online gaming with additional subscription costs sure as hell ain't even close.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. The PS/2, which has a very half-hearted online presence, has good online numbers. Look at Final Fantasy XI: it currently has over 500,000 subscribers. Xbox-Live has over 1.5 million subscribers, at least. Nintendo was constantly criticized for it's lack of an online presence. When Socom II came out for the PS/2, within 48 hours there were 22,000 people playing online.

I'm sure there are plenty of folks who don't care about online options, at all. But I think many gamers like to have the option...giving Xbox-Silver out for free is good candy. More and more games of the current generation support some form of online play...I think MS and Nintendo are correctly reading the potential for the service better than Sony currently is. Sony traditionally fears or dislikes any system they can't control, and that's the very definition of the 'net.

As for Microsoft's backwards-compatability, all we know so far is this:
Two weeks ago, Microsoft wasn't sure that the X-box would be backwards compatible.
Last week, J. Allard said it sure would be, at least for some of them.
This week, at E3, the story has broken that games will most likely need to be recompiled to run on the Xbox-360. They are being very vague about it...but I'm assuming some sort of compiler will run on the 360 itself...because if they think I'm buying another copy of an existing game to play on my current Xbox...they've got another think coming.

Right now, it sounds like MS is working really, really hard to get some sort of emulator compatability working, but they don't know if they'll have it ready in time for launch, and are afraid to say so. This is the disadvantage of their rush to be first. No one doubts for a minute that the PS/3 will be backwards compatible, nor the Nintendo for that matter.

I think the Xbox-360 will support some games out of the gate (especially the biggest names) and then they'll release updates periodically to fix more games as they go, leveraging Xbox-Live as well.

 

[trancejeremy]

Not exactly. They've explicitly said that certain top-selling games will be backward compatible. This is yet another reason why I don't like the Xbox 360 architecture (I'd be building a 100% backward compatible, dual-core x86 box with an nVidia GPU, and I'd be launching it in 2006, because if it were the DaveBox, Halo 3, KotOR 3, and DOA4 would be launch games).

What that means is that they're achieving backward compatibility via emulation (the PS2 was backward compatible because it had a PS1 CPU onboard, which was used for audio in PS2 games). Doing things this way means different games will expose different things that need to be emulated. So they're not going to guarantee that everything will work out of the box, or that everything ever will. On the other hand, emulation that works for Halo 2 will get a lot of games to work as well.

Ah, see, I thought that was going to be the case, they would have to emulate the Xbox and tweak for the various games (much like Bleem for the Dreamcast, which only got as far as Gran Turismo, I think). But what caused me to write what I said was a report from a website that it's not so much an emulator, but the fact that the software will have to be re-compiled (or possibly re-written) for the 360. Which seems like a lot more work than just an emulator and thus probably won't be done for anything but the really big games like Halo & Halo 2 & Forza (and maybe not anything not from MS).

Kinda like Doom and Marathon were re-written for Windows - they used the same assets and such, but different .exe

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=8996

"Current-gen Xbox games to be "recompiled" for Xbox 360

Following earlier indications that the Xbox 360 will only be backwards compatible with some Xbox games, Microsoft has admitted that existing software will need to be recompiled before it can be run on the new console.

The problem, it says, is down to hardware incompatibility - since the current Xbox uses an Intel processor, but the 360 will use IBM's PowerPC architecture, while NVIDIA's graphics solution is being replaced with an ATI one.

As many commentators have pointed out over the last few months, this means backwards compatibility problems. The solution Microsoft has reached is apparently to recompiled current-gen Xbox games so that they can be played on the 360. First on the list, it says, are the best-selling Halo titles. "

 

[trancejeremy]

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. The PS/2, which has a very half-hearted online presence, has good online numbers. Look at Final Fantasy XI: it currently has over 500,000 subscribers. Xbox-Live has over 1.5 million subscribers, at least. Nintendo was constantly criticized for it's lack of an online presence. When Socom II came out for the PS/2, within 48 hours there were 22,000 people playing online.

I'm sure there are plenty of folks who don't care about online options, at all. But I think many gamers like to have the option...giving Xbox-Silver out for free is good candy. More and more games of the current generation support some form of online play...I think MS and Nintendo are correctly reading the potential for the service better than Sony currently is. Sony traditionally fears or dislikes any system they can't control, and that's the very definition of the 'net.

Well, I do think online play is nice, but while Xbox Live might have 1.5 million subscribers, there are something like 20 million Xboxes sold. So under 10% of the people with an Xbox are playing it online.

Similarly, 22,000 people playing Socom 2 is pretty good, but pales in comparison to the number of copies of the game sold. (Again, probably around the 10% mark)

Sony's problem with online play, at least according to a guy at Sony, is that not all that many people have broadband yet, as it's not available in all areas (I still can't get it where I live) and it's still expensive. And I agree with him - until it's cheap (say $15-20 a month) and available everywhere, online gaming isn't going to take off.