killer_roach

Nobody's really winning anybody over... Sony's not getting serious about competing, Apple and NIntendo aren't serious about having quality product on their platforms.

Being an iPod Touch owner as well as a PSP owner, I use them for completely different gaming purposes. Sony lacks a good deal of indie art titles and puzzlers on their handheld, Apple lacks the deeper, more traditional gameplay experience. Can't play Bejeweled 2 or Tap Tap Revenge on the PSP, and can't play Disgaea or Phantasy Star Portable on the Touch.

That being said, the Touch does consume more of my gaming time than I'd like to admit...

Personally, as somebody who does play Dance Dance Revolution, I can testify that it is an excellent form of exercise if played extensively (I personally have lost about sixty pounds playing it), but that most people also lack skill at DDR, just like they may be lacking at dodgeball or track. And, with the lower difficulty levels in the game, the level of physical exercise given from playing is hardly any different than walking. However, it can engage people enough so that they are better able to sticking with a regime of physical activity, so who knows?

People keep asking "when's Sony going to discontinue the 60GB PS3?", thinking they're being snarky.

Wrong question.

The proper question is "when's Microsoft going to discontinue their counter-productive 360 Core?". For goodness' sakes... after all, as capable of a machine as the 360 is, the Core just completely gums up the works. I'd rather have a smaller hard drive (in the case of the "lesser" PS3, a hard drive as large as in the premium 360, with less being reserved by the OS) than no hard drive at all (and also keeping game developers from utilizing the hard drive as much, as they can't guarantee that their core audience has one).

That being said... the 20GB PS3 is hardly cripple-ware, and is actually, for a lot of people, a relatively intriguing machine. Sad to see it go, really.

Frank: "Yes! I want to pay $600 for a video game system so that some government sponsored agency can use up my bandwidth and cpu."

Other than the fact that Stanford is a private university. Right.

To be honest, the data parallelism that Cell and RSX provide is quite impressive for running a program like Folding... although I would love to see what would happen if they got that running on a GeForce 8800GTX or something similar. Since I know the Folding project has gotten it running on AMD/ATI video cards, the performance advantage of the PS3, while absolutely incredible, may be quickly one-upped by R600. Until then, though, if you have a PS3, this is a very worthy cause to devote your high-end gaming hardware to when not playing Resistance, fl0w, or MotorStorm.

Wipeout is one of the greatest gaming series ever... a PS3 version would definitely make me very, very excited. I still play Wipeout 3 regularly, although on my PC through an emulator... nothing beats high-def texture-sharpened anti-gravity racing goodness :)

I don't care if the sales number is 1.7 million or 3 million... the operative point here is you'd have to be smoking crack to think that the 360 will sell 10 million units before the PS3's release with the current rate that they're on. Keep in mind, even with the 3 million number, that includes the rush of the launch. In the remaining five months, they might be slouching to just over an installed base of 4 million, 5 million at the high end... kudos to Microsoft's spin machine for making those numbers seem like an unqualified success. Smacks more of the Dreamcast, if you ask me.

The French have been known to protest McDonald's for years; this is nothing new. For one thing, it's a huge American company, something grating to them. Secondly, for cost reasons, McDonald's doesn't purchase any food items from French farmers, which also doesn't generate any good will (on the same hand, food in France is quite expensive compared to America). And, to some, it represents a corporate entity that is preying on the less fortunate in society (a specious argument at best, but one that resonates with its core audience of anarchists and Marxists). Not sure if the protests will have long-term effects on the event, positive or negative, but I think they did give themselves a black eye in protesting at a relatively inappropriate venue.

The thing is, the current 360 install base is still very small, and far smaller than MS wants it to be at the moment. By the PS3's launch, the number of 360s out in the wild will be somewhere in the 7 million range, most likely (could be as low as 4.5 or as high as 10, but 7 is a good guess). Yes, Microsoft does have a good bit of momentum, but there is also the undeniable fact that the current PS1/PS2 user base is enormous, and that should carry over to quite a few sales from brand loyalty alone. By Spring '07, it could be quite likely that the PS3's brand advantage and the 360's temporal advantage will have cancelled each other out, and then we'll see what both platforms are truly about.