Anubis

Moptimus,

Actually, there are two differences between the PC and console ports; while the PC port lacks multiplayer, it's also $30 cheaper. Furthermore, it's not an incredibly resource intensive game; if you have an HD 4850 or Gefore 9800 GTX+ (or equivalent), there's no reason you couldn't run the game up to 2500x1600 without dipping below a minimum of 30 FPS. The HD 4770 runs it fine at 1920x1200, but the narrow memory bus prevents it from being a 4 mega pixel rendering option. The game does not support AA or AF, but that's an unfortunate product of using deferred rendering; hardware AA and texture filtering simply doesn't work the way it's intended to.

Jakka,

Actually, a slim model would make perfect sense from a manufacturing stand point. If Sony's able to introduce a model that requires fewer components (there was a 50% reduction in maindboard components between the 60 GB and first 80 GB SKU alone), a smaller case (for what's in them, there's no real justification in keeping the "old" design for the current SKUs as there's too much wasted space), and they're able to move both CELL and the RSX to a smaller manufacturing process (the 45 nm node is, at this point in time, mature enough to warrant the move from 65 nm), why shouldn't they introduce a slim model? They'll be breaking even at worst and, from a manufacturing stand point once more, that's still an improvement over what they have in the current SKUs (which still cost slightly more to make than what they retail for).

The only major hardware differences I could see between the current PS3 SKUs and the future slim editions would be externalizing the PSU as a brick ala PS2 slim and a slightly smaller or lower profile case fan (as the PSU will no longer be bleeding a fair amount of heat in the case). From the production stills we've seen, they still seem to have the same number of USB ports, the same connectivity options, and (most likely) are still using non-proprietary 2.5" HDDs.

iRobot,

Are you functionally retarded? There are currently no other engines in the wild that can compete with the Unreal 3 engine in terms of delivering fantastic visuals on lesser hardware; a $179.99 Radeon HD 3850 can run the game with all of the settings maxed out at 1920x1220 while never hitting less than 50 FPS (it stutters at 2500x1600). Source has served the gaming community well, but it's 4 years old and is definitely showing its age. ID's Tech 5 engine is essentially the Tech 4/Doom 3 engine on steroids (enhanced megatexture technology and the addition of new lighting/shadowing technologies); people still have pointy heads and look like they're made from plastic. Square Enix's White Engine is going to stay inhouse, and Capcom can't get MtFramework to work well on multiple platforms. Ubisoft's new Scimitar engine is buggy on consoles and has obscenely high "low" requirements on the PC (it's essentially Crysis's "recommended" specs with another gig of memory). The Diesel engines behind the GRAW games are super tweaked forms of Unreal 2 technology. CryEngine2 looks fantastic, but was only meant to run comfortably on tomorrow's hardware.

What you're demanding is simply unfeasible. It takes a lot of time and money to develop an engine in-house, something few developers have. Your average Xbox 360 or PS3 game costs $10,000,000 to develop using licensed technology; the costs balloon when done in-house. Gears of War cost $10,000,000 to develop using Epic's own engine and Killzone 2's budget (the last I saw) is fast approaching $22,000,000; if Sony hadn't bought out Guerrilla Games, there would be no sequel. Metal Gear Solid 4 is rumored to exceed $30,000,000 in development costs. This is all before advertising. But hey...if you're approach is to force everyone to develop their own technology in-house, I hope you really love Duke Nukem Forever.

Negativecool,

I think you're reading too deep into it, to be honest. The XBOX and Gamecube both outsold the PS2 at some point during the last generation; the PS2 still went on to claim 100,000,000 consoles sold while MS and Nintendo couldn't even sell a quarter of that number. Looking at the NPD chart, all the consoles are basically neck in neck with each other. Outselling a competitor by 100,000-150,000 units is substantial; outselling a competitor by 40,000 units isn't.

Going off of CXM's theory, the increase of PS3 sales might be related to the fact that Blu-Ray has essentially won the hi-def format war (HD-DVD, though kicking and screaming, is dying) and people want the best Blu-ray player they can possibly buy; the PS3, after all, is the only Blu-ray player on the market that will support the upcoming BD-Java spec when it comes in October. This generation, I think, will be quite strange compared to others. The PS3 might pull ahead of the 360 in overall sales due to Blu-ray, but the 360 might have more gamers (the attach rate of each system is actually a really good indicator of this). If this does indeed happen, you have no losers (no third place, only second).

I might be the only person here to suggest it, but I think the vast majority of people who are buying PS3s are doing so because they want the best Blu-ray player on the market, with gaming relegated to an afterthought; it's a fair bit cheaper than most standalone players, offers great quality (from what I've read), and the PS3 is the only current Blu-ray player that will receive the firmware update necessary to use BD-Java until the new standalone players come around in October. To support my theory, if one takes a look at the average attach rate of games per console this generation, the Xbox 360 has roughly 8-10 per unit, the PS3 is averaging 2-5, and the Wii is just shy of that. If Sony was able to sell more consoles than Microsoft last year (only taking gaming into consideration), wouldn't the attach rate be higher? Like I said, it's just a theory.

Nigeria,

MS dropped the original XBOX early because they were losing $150 per system sold; MS didn't own the intellectual properties of the CPU and GPU so they couldn't get the critical dieshrinks needed to make them cheap to manufacture. Settings aside different DVD-ROMs and PSU revisions, there was really no difference between an XBOX manufactured in early 2005 and one that sold at launch. The Xbox 360 is different from its predecessor simply because MS owns nearly everything that pertains to the system. The Xbox 360's CPU went from 90 nm to 65 nm this fall (the GPU will be following); the XBOX's mutant Pentium III Coppermine processor, comparatively, stayed the exact same size throughout its life (over 130 nm in size). I'm not saying I agree with what Microsoft did, but from a financial point of view it made sense. The XBOX was never, ever going to make money while its successor already has (it would've last year had there not been a warranty extension).

Jack,

It's not hard to find some well researched studies; most are published online from very reputable sources and are freely available to anyone who spends a few minutes reading them. I'm sure I'm not the only person to notice that violent crime amongst youth has steadily declined the last 10-15 years even though the population is still growing in leaps and bounds (the US is the third most populous nation in the world); if teenagers and kids were nearly as distanced from reality as Cooper says they are, the gamer generation would be one of the most violent ones in our nation's history. Obviously, it isn't.

There's also a few other reports showing that aggression in teenagers differs depending on the media. Videogames require active participation and the kids that play them are statistically less likely to be aggressive than those that don't or those that favor passive participation. Why? I'm sure you've had a crappy day at work or school, came home, and blew off your steam by blowing people away on GTA. Barring drug induced psychosis or an undiagnosed mental disease, I'm pretty sure you didn't smack your mom around like a crack whore or car jack anyone. If self proclaimed expert Cooper Lawrence had done 5 minutes worth of research or applied common sense, she'd know this. Instead, she cherry picks one obscure study and the runs with it like it's scientific law.

As for FOX's errors, I believe them to be quite intentional. What we call news isn't news, but sensationalist BS that sells on hot-topic issues. FOX's news network (just like every other news network) makes money based on the amount of viewers it has. If there's a slow day without a major headline, what better way to make news than by creating a controversy out of something incredibly insignificant? It doesn't matter to the company that you hate them or are morally opposed to them; if you tuned in just to watch that one segment, they basically made money off of you.

Jack,

Ya know, this is fundamentally no different than what our grandparents had to go through with comic books and what our parents had to go through with the emergence of rock Both, in their respective eras, were viewed as the corrupters of youth. Sex, drugs, homosexuality, violence, and even communism were blamed on those two forms of media. It wasn't long after they were both nearly wiped from the face of the earth by self-righteous "experts" (all of which were just like Cooper) that normal people actually began to think and realized the "experts" were asshats so full of shit it was almost astonishing that the sclera of their eyes weren't brown.

Ya know, about the only movie I watched as kid that creeped me out (and still does to this day) is John Carpenter's The Thing; the kennel scene, with the exception of the puppet huskies, was so well shot it actually looked real.

If anyone watches FOX news (or ANY news station/program) to better his/her parenting skills, he/she isn't just supremely ignorant but also in desperate need of mental help.

Major typo correction: I meant to say gender instead of age at beginning of the second paragraph. Man, listening to that arrogant unlicensed head shrinker really damaged my brain more than previously thought.