solidunit

DUDE.

You asked Mark Rein all the technical engine questions and Tim Sweeney all the business/marketing/game questions. WTF.

How is making development more complicated an innovation? What incredible advantages do the additional SPE's afford the PS3 that justify the additional man hours wasted on optimization and sub-par ports we're getting now?

Also, you don't just design hardware with no regard or thought on how developers will code for it. Sony made a conscious decision to elevate parallelism and machine level coding of DSP's as the norm for getting the most out of the hardware.

The 360 (currently) has better dev. documentation, better support from Microsoft (from a dev point of view), and better debugging tools. Sony, not being a software manufacturer themselves, should have made development manageability a priority from the design stage of the hardware.

They miscalculated, and now they are trying to make up for it by developing their own freely available game engine (among other initiatives, ie: Insomniac's Nocturnal).

You know, if Sony had designed a console that was easier to code for in the first place, they wouldn't have to resort to this, nor would people have to settle for inferior ports of next-gen games.

Ummm, I'm pretty sure the EX series had 2D gameplay as well. The occasional knockdown would rotate the screen, but it was 2D gameplay all the way

Pirates do not equal cheaters. The game images you download have to be 1:1 perfect copies of the original game so that it works correctly on a modded xbox

Looking forward to installing Doom and a NES emulator!!

and by the way folks, you're only getting real 1080p picture on the 360 if you're playing an HD-DVD or a 1080p native game like Virtua Tennis 3. Setting your dash to 1080p without either of the 2 aforementioned possible sources will yield an IDENTICAL looking picture to 720p. All the 360 does is effectively resize (i.e. "upscale") the 720p output to 1080p, not too different from telling Windows to "Stretch" your wallpaper to fit your monitor's resolution. So don't say "there's no difference" without taking a look at a real 1080p source.

And if you prefer 1080i over 1080p you either have an AWESOME deinterlacer on your TV or you fundamentally don't understand how the technology works, or you sit too far away from your TV to know any better

DEPENDING ON YOUR TELEVISION, HDMI may look better.

In my experience with the PS3, small sharp text at 1080p looks fuzzy over component but crystal clear over HDMI. Of course, this totally depends on your brand of TV and how it handles A/D signal conversion. I was doing this on a cheapo Westinghouse 37" 1080p set.

Why play an upscaled 1080p game like Gears of War? Virtua Tennis 3 and NBA Street Homecourt are both 1080p native.

Its not a stupid idea. The only modern example I can think of is the PS2-to-PSP / PSP-to-PS2 connectivity of Madden (I forget which year); the idea was that you can play the same season in franchise mode on either device by syncing back and forth. That's pretty cool!

I hope more developers take advantage of this concept in the future. On a different scale, I can imagine a PS3 Final Fantasy game with a downloadable PSP Triple Triad-esque card game that allows you to unlock rare items and whatnot.