Jake

The xbox has much higher specs than the gamecube. Yet, the gamecube games still are able to match their quality. Why?
The original xbox was slightly modified commodity PC parts. The gamecube was designed from the ground up, custom cpu, custom gpu etc. This allowed Nintendo to work out bottlenecks as much as possible.
Nintendo published real world benchmarks. Microsoft published theoretical ones. The fact is the xbox is a lot less powerfull than it is in theory, because of its design. Even the PS2 theoretical benchmarks blow the GCN away, but I don't think anyone can argue that the PS2 has better graphics than the GCN.

One reason why the GCN suffered in ports was the fact that they choose to only have ~24MB of 1T-SRAM. The PS2 had 32mb and the xbox 64mb. Nintendo only used 24 because 1T-SRAM is more expensive. It was a trade off for quality (1T-SRAM is much faster) and quantity. The problem is your run of the mill 3rd party developer just wants to port the game, not take full advantage of each system (with the gcn's faster disk reading and faster ram, it couldve loaded things like textures more often and stored less in memory)

Anyway, the GCN was not as "powerful" in theory as the xbox, but in practice it was, and in some cases it was more powerful. The Wii will not be "on par" with the xbox, because the gcn was "on par" with it. The developers have said 2-3 times the GCN, and that's great.

A lot of the launch titles look pretty shitty though (red steel is nice in spots though, TP is a GCN game..) I will wait for Retro to show MP3 in its final form, they pushed the GCN pretty far and will probably do the same with wii (remember that MP3 so far has been the build that was done on gcn hardware with wii controllers)

P.S., Mark, I'd suggest you reread what I said and try and figure out what I was really saying.

Back to bowling, it looks sweet, I bowl in a league and am very interested about being able to hook the ball.

No. The gamecube was for all purposes slightly more powerful than the xbox 1 (albeit not in all respects, such as shaders, but that was Nintendos decision, their hardware COULD have supported them)

The magic number for the wii has been 2-3 times the GCN. The Wii is more powerful than the xbox 1 (360 it is not, however)

Mario is just a model they use in games. Is mario a soccer player? No. He's a plumber. Nintendo decides they want to make a kick ass soccer game, so they might as well use the mario art because it will be familiar. The game is 100% different from the real mario games, which there are drastically fewer of. BMW3P, you're that the sony fanboy thats always posting right? Want to talk about a series as old as mario that hasn't changed? Metal Gear. I remember playing that on the NES. Same shit in 2D. Hell, he first came out on the MSX in 1987, only two years after mario came out. (Donkey kong doesn't count because its more of a back reference, he was "jump man")I'm not saying metal gear sucks, but your logic is flawed. Just because there have been many games starring a character or he is an old character doesn't make it bad, of course it can but it obviously hasn't with mario or they'd stop.

"The dude's got obvious programming talent but decided to COPY someone else's creativity. Makes no sense. It's parasitic and lame.

He doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. Darn right he pulled it down."

Sal, you're an idiot. First of all, geometry wars is a combonation of two old arcade games, not original (even if they added a lot to it.) Secondly, programming talent != creativity, and copying a game and giving it away for free != no creativity. Some things are fun to program. As a single coder, he wouldn't want to worry about graphics and assets in a game, so geometry wars is the perfect game to do, since all it's graphics are done in code, and look cool. Everybody does a tetris or pong clone, but that's not because they're uncreative, it's because sometimes its fun to just program and not have to think something up. From what he says, his project started off as a robotron code, just like geometry wars, but when it wasn't coming out for PC he switched gears and made a clone so that he (and others) could play it. Props to him.

The price of HDTV's is not the point. The fact is the developers were lazy. PC developers have always had to deal with a moving platform (different gpu's, different soundcards, multiple input devices etc) and PC games are still playable on lower resolutions. Console games have up until now been built with one resolution in mind, SD, but now with HD, are we supposed to believe that Capcom forgot that SD existed? Not checking to see if the games text when rendered at a lower resolution - but the same size - was readable is plain stupid. There is no excuse for that kind of laziness.

Side note: I own an HDTV, (i dont game on it though) I just can't believe Capcom can be so inept.

"C# is a lot of aspects is actually faster than C++, and to be frank, the language has grown into its own, and plenty of people are moving over to it. Whatever hangups you have with C# need to be put aside. Also, they are allowing low-level access as well. You're not being 'held back' at all with C#"

Well isn't that nice of Microsoft, they're giving ordinary people C# devkits before they give the real developers this language that "people are moving over to."

I'm sorry, but real developers still use C/C++. Hell, I don't know why people still use C, like Bungie did with the Halo 1 engine (I guess it takes time to learn the extras in c++..)

C# isn't "faster" than C++, it's just a language. An O(n^n) algorithm will still be O(n^n) in C#. C# *may* be faster than c++ in random things like square roots, but that's because the standard libraries for C++ actually follow standards, and, well, we all know how well MS follows standards (i.e. IE) That's the reason Java and C# and the like can get better "benchmarks" than C++ for trivial things. Ever wondered why Java fanboys always have benchmarks that PROOVE java is faster? Yet I wonder why all Java apps are so goddamn shitty.

Prefab garbage collectors in games is not a good idea. Until someone makes a garbage collector that is less crap, games developers will keep making their own custom ones. The next Unreal engine will not be coded in either C# or Java, I can tell you that.


Oh, and C# is part of .NET, which ruins it right there.

Why oh why can't they remake FF3(US)/6 :(

If the xbox sold 100 one week, and then 200 the next, we get (200 - 100)/ 100 * 100% = 100% increase, in general:

(new - old) / old.

If the xbox sold 0 previously, we get 0/0, which could be anything, not necissarily infinity. In this case, as "old" approaches 0, (new-old)/old approaches new, therefore the xbox's % is approaching 11% increase, not infinity.

Please, did anyone go through highschool?

The number of "bits" in a cpu is rather irrelavent. 32 is fine. 512 is just silly. The main reason for uping the "bits" is to up the memory ceiling, which on 32bit machines is 4Gb (?)

64bit is something in the theoretical range of 16exa-bytes or something. More than we'll need for this generation.

The main reason you get people going "ooooo 64 bits!" is because AMD used the oppurtunity to add extra registers and call the spec x86_64. x86 sorely lacks registers, so the actual speed boosts are not because of the "64 bits"

None of the consoles are 256bit footsteps because that would be silly, pointless, and well just stupid. PS3 and xbox have the G5 (power4) architecture at their core, and that's why they are 64bit. I wouldn't be surprised if the wii is 32, since the gecko was. Either way, it will not make a difference because the Wii won't have more than 4GB of ram, and "bit count" is the most pointless benchmark ever past 16bits.

Oh really? Everyone thought and hoped they would make Marathon 4, here's what they had to say about that:

"
Imagine a painting of a horse, a marvellous white stallion. This stallion happens to be lying in a crumpled heap on the ground, dead. And Bungie employees are standing around it in a semicircle, beating the horse with various blunt objects. The painting is titled "Marathon 4."
Well, okay, that's overstating things. We're very proud of the Marathon series, but it's not the only thing we can do. Rather than getting into a rut and spitting out a new Marathon game every year, we're going to try some new stuff.
"

Now, Marathon 4 didn't sell as well as Halo, but put into perspective, it was the bees knees of the Mac gaming platform at the time, and still very very popular. I love Halo, don't get me wrong, but I'm VERY interested in what else Bungie can come up with.

What's wrong with it anyways? Endings rock. The next Metroid Prime is the end of the 'Prime' trilogy. There will still undoubtbly be 500 more Metroid games from Nintendo, but supposedly that's it for Prime. Yay. (Good games, but conclusions are nice)