Smoke and Mirrors from Sony and Microsoft 581
An anonymous reader writes "History tells us: Don't believe what you're hearing about the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.There was a lot of hype last week about the next generation of game machines. Microsoft said the Xbox 360 will ultimately reach 1 billion consumers worldwide, while Sony gave a laundry list of features for the PlayStation 3, showing some jaw dropping footage along the way. (Nintendo promised a Revolution, but didn't go much further than that.)
I hate to be a wet blanket, but it's time to come back to reality."
Here's my reality... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since so many people these days are into spouting off basically unsubstantiated rumor and making it appear legit through our "new media outlets" I'll go ahead and state what *I* believe the console makers should do!
Enjoy.
You know what I want from gaming consoles? Something *new*. When I say *new* I don't mean hi-def resolutions, better sound, faster game play, or even high density storage mediums. When I say *new* I mean I want to see something I have never in my life seen before...
Problem is that we are stuck in a loop of the same rehashed cafeteria lunches with gaming. "Green beans" slopped on my tray is the same as "Emerald Pods". HL2 and Doom3 are the same as Wolf3D and various others.
It really disappoints me when I am thrilled with simple games like Ms. Pacman, Tetris, and Bejeweled variants yet I am extremely bored with "amazing and real life AI", "hi-def graphics", etc.
Gran Turismo 1 was the end all of racing games apparently as GT2, GT3, and now GT4 (and various other similar racing variants) have all been abysmal remakes of the original. I remember saying how revolutionary Quake1 was. Everything after has been bleh. I think I have made my point...
Sony and MSFT: You want to make me excited about a console? Give me some really incredible titles that are something new and exciting rather than just renamed and rehashed green beans. I guarantee that if you can impress me with some titles you can impress all the people and even those that believe that people like me are just ignoring the "important subtle differences between similar genres". You don't even have to have fancy pre-fab rendering, lifelike graphics, or tons of CPU horsepower. All you need is a new and revolutionary idea that makes me want to play it again and again and again. You won't even have to spend millions on hardware and software research.
Hopefully this will give you a few ideas of what to do. I'll be waiting...
Smoke and mirrors? Bring it on! (Score:3, Interesting)
Hype, Hype, and More Hype (Score:4, Interesting)
But it's JUST a new console.
I saw the MTV Xbox 360 launch tv show and was amazed at how they hyped this thing up to be, gosh darn it, the next best thing since loosing my virginity. I mean, the one shot where they first reveal it to a crowd of screaming geeks, and it's up on a platform above the crowd, lit from above... that shot was nearly identical to the scene of the Jews worshiping the Golden Calf from Moses. I intoned to my husband, "We worship our new god! We worship our new god!" as the crowd screamed... he laughed, I didn't. It just pushed my awareness of hype from beyond "silly yet trying to get publicity" to "serously wierding me out".
I mean, it's just a game console. It will be a good game console. But in five years time, there will be a new game console to replace it. And so on in another five years. Technology marches on and we will continously be updating our consoles. This one is JUST a game console, heck, it won't even give me a hand job. Now if it came with a vibrator attachment... maybe I'd call it a revolution....
But seriously, game companies, lay off the insane hype. It's just a game console.
Hype is fun. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm waiting for the games that are coming out, not just the console itself. I wasn't jazzed about the PS2 particularly,until I saw games I liked for it.
the MGS4 trailer has me hot in the pants.
a billion people can afford a console? (Score:5, Interesting)
Game Industry Identity Crisis... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, we have the PS3 which isn't a game machine but just happens to play games.
The X-Box 360, which is touted as a media center that plays games.
-and-
The Revolution, the console that Nintendo company big wigs say is designed to play games, games, and more games. In fact, 5 generations of games all under one roof, most of which will be instantly accessible over the internet at little or, in some cases, no cost.
I don't know, I've got media center and powerful computer covered. I have a 7 disc DVD changer, so no console is going to replace that. I have a ReplayTV. I also have a stereo that I stream audio from my computer and the internet to, so I can't see myself using any of the music functions on any of these consoles. What I want, to complement all of this, is a game console. Do Sony and MS actually expect me to toss out my entire entertainment system to replace it with their all in one box? Heck no...I don't want to pay extra cash for things I already have.
Looks like I'm going to be buying the Revolution this time around, the only console without an inflated price and an identity crisis.
Re:Can get better later (Score:5, Interesting)
In this 90%, they can be fairly wasteful with their choice of language and how tightly they bound their algorithms. (There are even game companies that write the bulk of this logic in LISP.) In the last 10% of code, performance is critical. This is the code that takes up 90% of the CPU and GPU to execute. This is the code that must be (and still is) carefully hand optimized, tuned, and tuned again.
However, this is all sort of moot because on current generation consoles, memory is at a huge premium. Most console developers will simply not touch STL (for example) with a 30 foot pole. The performance characteristics of the STL are not well known (in the specific sense), and neither are the memory requirements.
Don't kid yourself, it's still not the compiler writers that are making games more optimal during the life of a console. A simple example is GTA3 to GTA3: SA. It's not like the PS3 suddenly grew 3X the memory... And yet GTA3:SA is dramatically more rich in terms of both total content as well as content running at any given time. And although I'm too lazy to look up other examples to dispute your claim that games don't get better over the lifecycle of a console, rest assured there are a very large number.
Re:Here's my reality... (Score:2, Interesting)
my 2 cents.
Re:Couldn't agree more... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's my reality... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Suitable for all ages" does not equal "aimed at kids."
One might as well say that the real problem for Sony/Microsoft/etc. is that all their games FAIL to aim at kids. Why unecessarily limit your market like that?
If Nintendo can stay afloat financially until 2020, when all the GBA-toting kids of today are in THEIR twenties and have piles of disposable income (and I think they will survive until then), they're going to dominate the industry. Again. MicroSony are making a mistake in focusing on today's markets to the exclusion of tomorrow's.
Re:Here's my reality... (Score:3, Interesting)
* Pikman
* Animal Crossing
* Super Monkey Ball (was first a gamecube game)
* Mario Tennis
* Mario Golf
* Mario Cart
* Metroid Prime
* Zelda: Windwaker
* Resident Evil 4
* Viewtiful Joe (Originally a Gamecube Exclusive)
True most of these are new takes on old ideas, but that's really the point of this thread, we're sick of the same take over and over and over again. It's not that we don't like FPS, it's just that they're in a rut, or that we don't like racing games, it's just the last few have been the first one ruined and repackaged.
Nintendo does something that few others do with their sequals, they change the game. Think about Zelda 1, now Zelda 2, then Zelda 3, on and on. Each one changed the formula. Some a little, others alot. Often they even pissed off their fanbase.
Now think about Resident Evil 1-3, kind of the same game. It took them until 4 to say "Hey lets mix it up a bit".
Nintendo doesn't seem milk franchises the way other companies do (Capcom being one of the worst). Sure they whore out mario and friends to every game on the planet but every game is very very different, and most importantly, very fun.
What nintendo is doing that's so great is laying their heads on the chopping block with new concepts (Animal Crossing? Pikman?) instead of beating you to death with the louder flashier corpse of a once successful game design.
Re:Here's my reality... (Score:1, Interesting)
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/spore/616537p1.html [gamespy.com]
Re:Indeed. And don't forget... (Score:1, Interesting)
Also, Microsoft didn't use x86 in the original XBox because it was convenient for them. Their original plan was to use a RISC CPU of some sort. What Microsoft did first was send out surveys to all of the major games development shops and ask them what features they desired in the console platform. Of the most common requests was for a profiler to aid in finding and correcting bottlenecks. At the time, it was a no brainer, VTune from Intel was the, hands down, best profiler on the market. So MS decided on using x86 to gain the benefits of this level of support.
I was not shocked to hear that XBox Next/360 was going to use Power5 CPUs. It just makes sense; with their altivec processors they churn floating point numbers very quickly. This isn't the same as the Mac G5, however. The CPUs are modified. The programmer has been given a lot more control over such things as the L2 cache, including the ability to convert blocks into highspeed data queues. They almost function as the cache of a hybrid Cell processor.
I completely agree with the article, however. Every single time a new system is announced we are promised and shown things which are way beyond the capabilities of that console, considering everything else that it needs to do. Games aren't tech demos, and physics engines aren't lite on the resources.
Not exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
Broadband acceptance (Score:2, Interesting)
Only thing is, broadband acceptance in the US is not exactly ubiquitous. Back when xbox1 and ps2 launched, how many people actually had broadband? Also, how big are those latest and greatest PC game demos? Almost as big as the full game itself!
Back then there wasn't much of a market. Now, the demos are frickin' HUGE! Maybe downloading games and demos is doable, but it's still going to take mucho bandwidth to distro a demo for Halo3 or God of War 2. They should have builtin Bittorrent support into their console. Now that would be ironic justice!
Nobody uses Intel any more (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is one reason why I find the suggestion that Apple will be switching to Intel CPU's laughable.
On the other hand, this could be a prelude to Microsoft switching to PowerPC. Imagine a PowerPC based PC, running PowerPC native Windows, PowerPC native MS Office, and all old Windows applications using the Virtual PC Intel emulator (which Microsoft happens to own).
Both dead until modded to XBox-1 level (Score:2, Interesting)
When some friends come by, we play a game of Winter Games on X-Box. When I get a new DVD, I watch it on the X-Box - no matter what region the friggin disk is. When I dload something off the net in whatever format that has been used in the last 10 years, it's more often than not viewable on the X-Box.
X-Box games are a bonus - I bought X-Box to be the home entertainment center - and in that role, it rewlzors.
Unless X-Box 360 can be modded and used in this way it has absolutely no value to me. Unless PS3 can be modded and used in this way it's useless too.
PS. the script detection crap sucks.
Just to nitpick (Score:3, Interesting)
While that is technically true, I often see it become false anyway. Why? Because you can be _incredibly_ wasteful with that 90% of the code if you start with the frame of mind that it doesn't matter anyway. What _should_ have only been 10% of the CPU time can easily balloon into taking more time than that critical part.
E.g., my canonical example is a crap framework we had to use at work. Think: exercise in having every "enterprise" buzzword in the same framework. Everything went through XML, SOAP, XSLT, EJB, etc, even though it was essentially internal calls inside the same program.
But it shouldn't matter, because it's that unimportant part of the program that only takes 10% of the CPU, right? Doesn't matter if we use a few more CPU cycles for those buzzwords, right? Can be as wasteful as we want there, right?
I've actually benchmarked it: it took over a second to call an _empty_ function through that framework. On a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4. It wasn't a couple of extra CPU cycles, it was almost 2.5 _billion_ CPU cycles of pure overhead.
So basically I'd say that there's a (not so) fine line between "you don't need to spend time optimizing that (but you still write clean, efficient code)", which is probably what you had in mind, and "you can be wasteful". Once you're in the frame of mind that you can be wasteful, abhominations like the above happen.
Re:Just to nitpick (Score:3, Interesting)
This might be true in enterprise programming, but my point was specifically directed towards game programming, game programmers and game companies.
In game programming, you can be wasteful. Within the realms of viable solutions to the particular problem that you are solving at the time. Keep in mind that a game programmer would not consider using (for example) EJB to solve his scripting language problem.
Because unlike enterprise applications, time to execute is always something that has to be thought about. It's just not something that has to always be thought hard about.
My point is that in 90% of the code, getting your execution within the same order of magnitude is sufficient. In the last 10% of the code, the constants and factors become a very big deal. Things like cache misses, cache warming, function call overhead, etc, all become things that are important to the speed of the application.