Monday, May 08, 2006
e3 madness!!!!
Brings back memories. Nothing I love more than wasting a whole day sifting through the vast amount of new info that comes out of E3. Especially when new consoles are being released. Back in the N64 days I'd stay up late on AOL downloading tiny movies of game trailers. On 56k dialup, no less. Currently I have the leisure of working from home so I'll be very unproductive for the next few days.
The big influx of info brings millions of posts from all the fanboys. The debates are as entertaining as the info itself. Arguments range from the Sony's apparent miscues with the PS3, to whether the "Wii" name (Nintendo's next console) will be relegated to being the butt of jokes for years to come. Here's an example - the Sony Conference thread, where pages 1-55 represents a huge circle jerk amongst Sony fanyboys. They squeal with delight at the unveiling of trailers for FFXIII and MGS4 - certain blockbuster hits for Sony. They cackle with glee when Kuratagi unveals the gyroscopic functions of the DS3 controller, an unabashed "inspiration" gleaned from Nintendo's controller. Then the megaton hits (the announcement of the PS3 pricing), to which we see a mass exodus of Sony fans jumping off the bandwagon to the Microsoft and Nintendo camps. The prevailing sentiment in the thread going forward is "fuck you Sony!".
My thoughts: ugh, the dualshock is back. I guess I'm one of the few that was happy with that batarang controller since it at least represented an effort to innovate. Now they bring back the DS2 controller and while it's a good controller.... dammit change it a bit already!!! Bringing back the controller virtually unaltered doesn't give me a sense of newness. It's not the perfect design either, - the xbox360 controller trumps it IMO. If you are going to copy Nintendo's motion sensing, copy some features from the 360 controller. The radical shift back to the Dualshock design, coupled with the addition of "Nintendo controller features" screams of desperation.
On that note, someone's already summed up the Sony press conference. Wikipedia is pretty accurate I'm told, so it must be valid.
I was floored by the pricing of the PS3. They copied Microsoft's 2 SKU strategy, but the net is the same. If you want the non-crippled (no HDMI, no wifi, no memory card ports) PS3, it is going to cost you $600. I mean, $600 was the price I was going to hawk these on ebay for! I'm not sure how they are going to swing this, marketing wise. They've got their ducks in a row with MGS4, VF4, FFXIII exclusives, but 600 could be a killing point. ¶ 11:28 PM
The big influx of info brings millions of posts from all the fanboys. The debates are as entertaining as the info itself. Arguments range from the Sony's apparent miscues with the PS3, to whether the "Wii" name (Nintendo's next console) will be relegated to being the butt of jokes for years to come. Here's an example - the Sony Conference thread, where pages 1-55 represents a huge circle jerk amongst Sony fanyboys. They squeal with delight at the unveiling of trailers for FFXIII and MGS4 - certain blockbuster hits for Sony. They cackle with glee when Kuratagi unveals the gyroscopic functions of the DS3 controller, an unabashed "inspiration" gleaned from Nintendo's controller. Then the megaton hits (the announcement of the PS3 pricing), to which we see a mass exodus of Sony fans jumping off the bandwagon to the Microsoft and Nintendo camps. The prevailing sentiment in the thread going forward is "fuck you Sony!".
My thoughts: ugh, the dualshock is back. I guess I'm one of the few that was happy with that batarang controller since it at least represented an effort to innovate. Now they bring back the DS2 controller and while it's a good controller.... dammit change it a bit already!!! Bringing back the controller virtually unaltered doesn't give me a sense of newness. It's not the perfect design either, - the xbox360 controller trumps it IMO. If you are going to copy Nintendo's motion sensing, copy some features from the 360 controller. The radical shift back to the Dualshock design, coupled with the addition of "Nintendo controller features" screams of desperation.
On that note, someone's already summed up the Sony press conference. Wikipedia is pretty accurate I'm told, so it must be valid.
I was floored by the pricing of the PS3. They copied Microsoft's 2 SKU strategy, but the net is the same. If you want the non-crippled (no HDMI, no wifi, no memory card ports) PS3, it is going to cost you $600. I mean, $600 was the price I was going to hawk these on ebay for! I'm not sure how they are going to swing this, marketing wise. They've got their ducks in a row with MGS4, VF4, FFXIII exclusives, but 600 could be a killing point. ¶ 11:28 PM
