Don't have to tell me. I've got an A500 and an A4000. I still plan to pick up the new AmigaOne with AmigaOS 4.0. The multi-tasking capabilities alone still walk all over Mac and PC since it's a nearly a full Real Time OS. Of course, the games were insane when compared to anything else available at the time. Oh how I wish Commodore hadn't blown the marketing of Amiga.
No Amiga 1000, 500, 2000, 600, 3000, 1200, or 4000? No AmigaCD32 (I it was the first 32bit CD based game console after all)? No Amiga CDTV? Seriously, we all know the Amiga wasn't good for anything other than games (oh, and TV SFX, and video editing) so how can any "collection" be complete without at least an A500 and an AmigaCD32.
It's not whether or not M$ will decide to make a 180 and release HDDVD only versions of their games and concole but more a question of how well the PS3 and Blueray sell as well as whether or not game developers decide that they need it.
M$ certainly has no issues with cramming Windows down the worlds collective throats, what makes you think they won't force HD-DVD on people? If they conclude that in order to remain competative in the market, HD-DVD only is a must, then you better be prepared to be force fed. But for that to happen it would require that users start buying HD movies like crazy and that people say the PS3 is percieved as a better value due to it's integrated HD media. AND, if developers concluded that they needed the larger media in order to produce games that meet users expectations. However, that's a lot of "if's." Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised either way. Remember, MS not only brought us the disaster known as WinME, but your good pall Clippy too.
As for the Wii, personally I couldn't care less about it and have zero interest in buying it, but that's just me. Still, just because a console is expensive doesn't mean that people will go buy the cheaper one. If that were really true, people would refuse to pay over $3 a gallon for gas, but they don't. They just gut it up, bitch about it, and pay.
Of course, this is all moot to me. I don't own an Xbox360 nor do I intend to ever by one (of course, I said that about the Xbox too, but I caved in after it was out for 2 years). Nor will I spend a penny on the Wii. I'm not too keen about the price of the PS3, but I'll gut it up and pay, because I DO want High Def movies (and if you say you don't care, that tells me you've never seen one, and no DVD movies played in a progressive scan DVD player on an HDTV are NOT HD) and I don't want it in the form of some random add-on. Lastly, it's about time for me to get a new computer anyway. I hate PCs (long live Amiga!) so I'm hoping that a new PS3 will fill the bill. If not, there's always the Mac Pro.
For almost a year I worked as the lead game designer at a small game design studio that was just getting started. We were developing three 2d adventure games at the same time. We had 2 programmers for those three games and about 20 artists. Of those, only 4 artists were actually in our offices. 3 were in Canada and the rest in China or Taiwan. In the end, the publisher decided they didn't want the games despite the fact that we reached beta. I have since left the game design industry and I wouldn't consider going back for any reason. Why?
1. Outsourcing is only going to increase as the cost for development increases. As someone pointed out, the savings aren't as much as you'd expect because you do tend to have a lot of fixes because they'll submit work that is totally off character. You also have a language barrier and that can cause them to do things that you didn't mean. Of course, even people in the office make mistakes or do something you don't want. My first job in games was as a game tester (no I didn't get to sit around and play the game all day, that's not testing). I was hired because the outsourced (Canada) game testing group was doing a terrible job. Their bug reports made no sense and it took them a week to give any feedback on new versions. In the end I alone was a far more effective source of testing than that entire testing company. I was there in the office. A programmer could call me over to help test a bug in real time rahter than sending a build to some place where they may get to it next week if at all. Yes, outsourced labor is cheap, but you get what you pay for.
2. The pay is crap. You can all say that Americans ask for too much money. Piss off I say, all I wanted was to make enough to survive. As lead game designer in charge of 4 other designers I made a pathetic $2k a month. Worse yet is I know that I was making the same as the rest of the designers. Why so little? Because it's a small company and the boss claims that's all he could afford at the time. Is he telling the truth? No way of knowing for sure. My point is that at a small company you will get screwed over on your pay left and right. Nevermind the times where you don't get paid for weeks on end.
3. Publishers don't want to pay for the work you're doing. They will find every excuse to get out of paying you. It's reaching the point where a Publisher will get a developer started on a game, and then refuse to pay any money claiming that the developer isn't meeting the milestones properly and finally the publisher will cancel the contract and demand the the developer hand over the work. Don't believe me? Look at JoWood and the Stargate video game that was being developed. That's exactly what the publisher did.
4. It's so painful to work on a game and have the publisher come along and ask you to make totally retarded changes to the game. It will happen, many times over the course of a project. Keep that in mind the next time you're playing a game and you think to yourself, "what retard thought this would be fun?" It was probably some suit at the publisher who doesn't even play video games. In fact, go to YouTube and look up Superman and Kevin Smith. His story about writing a Superman script sounds a lot like the conversations that our development company had with publishers. Point being, just because you're a game designer, doesn't mean you'll get to design the game. More likely that you'll come up with ideas that some guy above you will butcher into something stupid and then you'll be forced to build that game instead.
5. Of course you have heard of the hours. My worst was 30 hours straight and for what? To deliver a document that no one is even going to read? Forget it. I have a family and they should take priority, but that's not how the company thinks. To them you're either working 24/7 or about to be replaced by some other eager sucker that thinks working in games would be the coolest job ever. Don't fall for it.
I think that the video game industry needs to die so that it can be reborn with realistic business practices and fair treatment of their employees (like actually admitting that they ARE employees rather than trying to claim that they're independent contractors which is total BS). I'd rather only see 12 new games a year than all the junk the industry is pumping out today.
Do I sound bitter? I should, in 2 years I went from making a decent living to being nearly homeless, all while working in the game industry. In the end most of the blame belongs on the shoulders of the Publisher.
I think the worst thing about G4 today is that it killed TechTV. Back before the merger G4 really was about games all the time. The shows repeated a lot then too but it was all about the games. TechTV had some great shows about computers and gadgets. I really miss all their shows about gadgets and technology. I miss TSS too. AOTS sucks because, again, it's mostly not about video games and I can't stand Kevin P. G4 died when Kevin Rose left. Sure Morgan Webb is hot, but I'd be happy just to see her in Playboy.
As for G4 today, why watch it? Most of the day their programs have nothing to do with video games. I don't care about drift racing. Tuned cars are cool, but shows about that stuff belong on Speed not a channel about video games. I like Star Trek but I want to see shows about games! Remember Portal? Okay, it was a strange show about MMO games, but at least it was about games.
So sad really. I must have called my cable company a billion times asking them to carry G4. Now they have it and I don't want to be paying for it anymore.
Rumble adds weight to the controller and little else, especially when compared to the value of motion sensing input. Would you really prefer to just feel the bike skid or actually tilt the controller to more acurately control the bike or plane?
As for the price... I don't get what all the whining is about. If you wanted a PC that was even slightly close to the capabilities of a PS3 you'd have to spend well over $3,000. I'd rather just buy the PS3 and use it as my movie player, game console, and home computer for a dirt cheap $600. Lets look at it another way.
$600 Mac Mini: CPU: 1.5GHz Intel Core Solo processor GPU: Intel GMA950 (Takes its memory from system RAM) Sound: ? System Bandwidth: 2MB L2 Cache 667MHz Frontside Bus Memory: 512MB memory (667MHz DDR2 SDRAM) Storage: 60GB hard drive I/O: USB2.0 Rear x 4 FireWire Rear x 1 Communication: Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2) Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR) Controller: None included AV Output DVI/VGA Headphones/Audio out / Optical Out x 1 Line In / Optical In x 1 Disc Media: Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) Games: Sometimes people port games to Mac, but with integrated graphics it can maybe run current gen games ok to poorly. You can install Windows to play more games and performance is supposed to be respectable.
$600 PS3: CPU: Cell Processor PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz 1 VMX vector unit per core 512KB L2 cache 7 x SPE @3.2GHz 7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs 7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE * 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy Total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS GPU: RSX @550MHz 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines Sound: Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-based processing) System Bandwidth: Main RAM -- 25.6GB/s VRAM -- 22.4GB/s RSX -- 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read) SB -- 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read) Memory: 256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz Storage: 60GB hard drive I/O: USB Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0) Memory Stick standard/Duo, PRO x 1 SD standard/mini x 1 CompactFlash (Type I, II) x 1 Communication: Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2) Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR) Controller: Bluetooth (up to 7) USB 2.0 (wired) Wi-Fi (PSP) Network (over IP) AV Output Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p HDMI: HDMI out x 2 Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1 Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1 Disc Media: CD, SACD, SACD Hybrid (CD layer), SACD HD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc Games: Around 15 titles at launch with amazing graphics and sound.
Compare the specs of these two $600 machines. Forget who makes them and ask yourself which one would you rather buy based PURELY on the specs above? Which machine provides the best value and performance for the money? This is a comparison that I haven't seen made before and I think it clearly shows just why Sony is claiming that even at $600 the PS3 is too cheap. If you're looking for a computer that isn't Windows based the PS3 is virtually impossible to pass up and that's the point; the PS3 isn't just a console anymore, it's an extremely powerful computer that can play amazing games and allow you to work on that book or surf the web. I've been thinking about upgrading from my old G4 MacOS X machine to a new Intel Mac, but after thinking about the above, forget it I'll just save up and get a PS3 instead.
In the past year I'd say that G4 has taken a serious turn for the worse. By no means is the channel all games all the time. There are several shows on now that have very little, if anything, to do with games. The Man Show seriously doesn't belong on G4 and neither does Star Trek :TNG (nor Street Fury, or Happy Tree Friends and Friends, etc.). There is less and less games related programming and more crud I don't care about. They seem to be following MTV's example. It's not as if you can expect to see a music video when you tune into MTV, and you're not as likely to see a show about games when you watch G4.
G4 was better before they took over TechTV. Sure, a lot of the shows repeated daily, but that just made it easier for me to watch it when I had the chance. G4 was a station that has long kept me a cable subscriber, but it's looking like that won't stay true for long.
Today in Joystiq: April 25, 2008
Apr 28th 2008 5:55PM (Joystiq)Joyswag: Most impressive gamer rig
Sep 11th 2006 8:11PM (Joystiq)Don't have to tell me. I've got an A500 and an A4000. I still plan to pick up the new AmigaOne with AmigaOS 4.0. The multi-tasking capabilities alone still walk all over Mac and PC since it's a nearly a full Real Time OS. Of course, the games were insane when compared to anything else available at the time. Oh how I wish Commodore hadn't blown the marketing of Amiga.
Joyswag: Most impressive gamer rig
Sep 11th 2006 4:23PM (Joystiq)Will Xbox 360 games require HD-DVD add-on? [update 1]
Aug 16th 2006 7:03PM (Joystiq)M$ certainly has no issues with cramming Windows down the worlds collective throats, what makes you think they won't force HD-DVD on people? If they conclude that in order to remain competative in the market, HD-DVD only is a must, then you better be prepared to be force fed. But for that to happen it would require that users start buying HD movies like crazy and that people say the PS3 is percieved as a better value due to it's integrated HD media. AND, if developers concluded that they needed the larger media in order to produce games that meet users expectations. However, that's a lot of "if's." Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised either way. Remember, MS not only brought us the disaster known as WinME, but your good pall Clippy too.
As for the Wii, personally I couldn't care less about it and have zero interest in buying it, but that's just me. Still, just because a console is expensive doesn't mean that people will go buy the cheaper one. If that were really true, people would refuse to pay over $3 a gallon for gas, but they don't. They just gut it up, bitch about it, and pay.
Of course, this is all moot to me. I don't own an Xbox360 nor do I intend to ever by one (of course, I said that about the Xbox too, but I caved in after it was out for 2 years). Nor will I spend a penny on the Wii. I'm not too keen about the price of the PS3, but I'll gut it up and pay, because I DO want High Def movies (and if you say you don't care, that tells me you've never seen one, and no DVD movies played in a progressive scan DVD player on an HDTV are NOT HD) and I don't want it in the form of some random add-on. Lastly, it's about time for me to get a new computer anyway. I hate PCs (long live Amiga!) so I'm hoping that a new PS3 will fill the bill. If not, there's always the Mac Pro.
Game development offshoring to increase
Jul 28th 2006 8:22PM (Joystiq)1. Outsourcing is only going to increase as the cost for development increases. As someone pointed out, the savings aren't as much as you'd expect because you do tend to have a lot of fixes because they'll submit work that is totally off character. You also have a language barrier and that can cause them to do things that you didn't mean. Of course, even people in the office make mistakes or do something you don't want. My first job in games was as a game tester (no I didn't get to sit around and play the game all day, that's not testing). I was hired because the outsourced (Canada) game testing group was doing a terrible job. Their bug reports made no sense and it took them a week to give any feedback on new versions. In the end I alone was a far more effective source of testing than that entire testing company. I was there in the office. A programmer could call me over to help test a bug in real time rahter than sending a build to some place where they may get to it next week if at all. Yes, outsourced labor is cheap, but you get what you pay for.
2. The pay is crap. You can all say that Americans ask for too much money. Piss off I say, all I wanted was to make enough to survive. As lead game designer in charge of 4 other designers I made a pathetic $2k a month. Worse yet is I know that I was making the same as the rest of the designers. Why so little? Because it's a small company and the boss claims that's all he could afford at the time. Is he telling the truth? No way of knowing for sure. My point is that at a small company you will get screwed over on your pay left and right. Nevermind the times where you don't get paid for weeks on end.
3. Publishers don't want to pay for the work you're doing. They will find every excuse to get out of paying you. It's reaching the point where a Publisher will get a developer started on a game, and then refuse to pay any money claiming that the developer isn't meeting the milestones properly and finally the publisher will cancel the contract and demand the the developer hand over the work. Don't believe me? Look at JoWood and the Stargate video game that was being developed. That's exactly what the publisher did.
4. It's so painful to work on a game and have the publisher come along and ask you to make totally retarded changes to the game. It will happen, many times over the course of a project. Keep that in mind the next time you're playing a game and you think to yourself, "what retard thought this would be fun?" It was probably some suit at the publisher who doesn't even play video games. In fact, go to YouTube and look up Superman and Kevin Smith. His story about writing a Superman script sounds a lot like the conversations that our development company had with publishers. Point being, just because you're a game designer, doesn't mean you'll get to design the game. More likely that you'll come up with ideas that some guy above you will butcher into something stupid and then you'll be forced to build that game instead.
5. Of course you have heard of the hours. My worst was 30 hours straight and for what? To deliver a document that no one is even going to read? Forget it. I have a family and they should take priority, but that's not how the company thinks. To them you're either working 24/7 or about to be replaced by some other eager sucker that thinks working in games would be the coolest job ever. Don't fall for it.
I think that the video game industry needs to die so that it can be reborn with realistic business practices and fair treatment of their employees (like actually admitting that they ARE employees rather than trying to claim that they're independent contractors which is total BS). I'd rather only see 12 new games a year than all the junk the industry is pumping out today.
Do I sound bitter? I should, in 2 years I went from making a decent living to being nearly homeless, all while working in the game industry. In the end most of the blame belongs on the shoulders of the Publisher.
G4TV's blog strikes back at the Game Rag [update 1]
Jul 26th 2006 5:19PM (Joystiq)As for G4 today, why watch it? Most of the day their programs have nothing to do with video games. I don't care about drift racing. Tuned cars are cool, but shows about that stuff belong on Speed not a channel about video games. I like Star Trek but I want to see shows about games! Remember Portal? Okay, it was a strange show about MMO games, but at least it was about games.
So sad really. I must have called my cable company a billion times asking them to carry G4. Now they have it and I don't want to be paying for it anymore.
Immersion ready to rumble with PS3 controller
May 19th 2006 6:59PM (Engadget)As for the price... I don't get what all the whining is about. If you wanted a PC that was even slightly close to the capabilities of a PS3 you'd have to spend well over $3,000. I'd rather just buy the PS3 and use it as my movie player, game console, and home computer for a dirt cheap $600. Lets look at it another way.
$600 Mac Mini:
CPU:
1.5GHz Intel Core Solo processor
GPU:
Intel GMA950 (Takes its memory from system RAM)
Sound:
?
System Bandwidth:
2MB L2 Cache
667MHz Frontside Bus
Memory:
512MB memory (667MHz DDR2 SDRAM)
Storage:
60GB hard drive
I/O:
USB2.0 Rear x 4
FireWire Rear x 1
Communication:
Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2)
Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)
Controller:
None included
AV Output
DVI/VGA
Headphones/Audio out / Optical Out x 1
Line In / Optical In x 1
Disc Media:
Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
Games:
Sometimes people port games to Mac, but with integrated graphics it can maybe run current gen games ok to poorly. You can install Windows to play more games and performance is supposed to be respectable.
$600 PS3:
CPU: Cell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
Total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS
GPU: RSX @550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines
Sound:
Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-based processing)
System Bandwidth:
Main RAM -- 25.6GB/s
VRAM -- 22.4GB/s
RSX -- 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
SB -- 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)
Memory:
256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz
256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz
Storage:
60GB hard drive
I/O:
USB Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
Memory Stick standard/Duo, PRO x 1
SD standard/mini x 1
CompactFlash (Type I, II) x 1
Communication:
Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2)
Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)
Controller:
Bluetooth (up to 7)
USB 2.0 (wired)
Wi-Fi (PSP)
Network (over IP)
AV Output
Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI: HDMI out x 2
Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1
Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1
Disc Media:
CD, SACD, SACD Hybrid (CD layer), SACD HD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc
Games:
Around 15 titles at launch with amazing graphics and sound.
Compare the specs of these two $600 machines. Forget who makes them and ask yourself which one would you rather buy based PURELY on the specs above? Which machine provides the best value and performance for the money? This is a comparison that I haven't seen made before and I think it clearly shows just why Sony is claiming that even at $600 the PS3 is too cheap. If you're looking for a computer that isn't Windows based the PS3 is virtually impossible to pass up and that's the point; the PS3 isn't just a console anymore, it's an extremely powerful computer that can play amazing games and allow you to work on that book or surf the web. I've been thinking about upgrading from my old G4 MacOS X machine to a new Intel Mac, but after thinking about the above, forget it I'll just save up and get a PS3 instead.
G4TV vs MTV for gamers
Dec 28th 2005 6:12PM (Joystiq)G4 was better before they took over TechTV. Sure, a lot of the shows repeated daily, but that just made it easier for me to watch it when I had the chance. G4 was a station that has long kept me a cable subscriber, but it's looking like that won't stay true for long.