@MikeB

Quote:

The HD DVD player's DVD playback is more acceptable, but is still well worse than the PS3 and most better upscaling DVD players.

I may be wrong on this, but my understanding is that the HD DVD player in Xbox 360 actually does not affect DVD playback - just that the Xbox 360 DVD player got an update at the same time as HD DVD. I believe it was a misunderstanding at the time that the HD DVD player would differ in DVD playback...

I would assume the New Xbox Experience includes whatever is latest on the Xbox regarding DVD? Any reviews?

But agreed, PS3 is a great DVD player (if yours is quiet, mine isn't) and Xbox 360 is at least not as good. PS3 of course is also a great Blu-ray player and HD DVD died, these are IMHO undisputed PS3s media credentials - Xbox 360 seems to lead the fray in online media at least in U.S. though.

@wegster

I think this quote from wegster really sums it up.

Quote:

The question remains as to whether or not the PS3 will be 'mastered' well enough to make an actual, consistent difference....before the 720 comes out.

There doesn't seem to be much disagreement whether or not PS3 holds the most theoretical muscle (I don't remember there having been two years ago either?), just that due to its architecture and certain shortcomings (GPU springs to mind as one) it just isn't a black and white issue.

I would have expected that in two years things would have been markedly different, but the only difference today seems to be that PS3 versions are no longer consistently clearly worse than Xbox 360 versions - now they are trading more even punches.

And not even 1080p has really made it on PS3, although it is better supported than on Xbox 360. I guess Microsoft was onto something when they said 720p offers the best balance for this generation.

@MikeB

Quote:

MikeB does know what he's talking about.

I really wonder what that engineer would think of your track record on AW.net for many a thing... ;)

(Oh, and what a kick I do get for having been right on Amiga Inc.)

But I do think in general there are interesting technical issues we have discussed, where you have been right - like others and where you have been wrong - like others too. The technology discussions have advanced understanding and that is great, there has been a lot of information on these threads as well.

But I do think you have underestimated the Xbox 360 on several occasions simply because you want to believe PS3 is so clever. You clearly dislike what Microsoft marketing says, but have disregarded multiple frogs leaping out of Sonys mouth (PS3 driving two 1080p displays anyone?)...

The PS3 is a clever piece of hardware. If it had come out first, like PS2 did, and if it were cheaper, I don't think a current Xbox 360 would have had a chance in heck. PS2 was inferior compared to Xbox 1, PS3 would have been really on the same page or even better and Sony could have built on their past success better.

Now they just tried a few too big things that cost time, money, market share and they remain pricey - and reliability aside, not even all that much a wanted machine from gamers perspective, Xbox 360 continues still to deliver even punches. Maybe Microsoft did something right?

The thing is, Sony wanted Blu-ray and they wanted Cell in PS3. Cool things in themselves, but those cost too much time and money compared to what they have been delivering so far. Perhaps they had to compromise on memory and GPU because of that, and now all that money and all that delay can't even deliver Xbox 360 blowing experience two years after release.

The thing is, I'd really want PS3 to be the best, because I want more from my games - always do, but don't really want the PC hassle. I think a PS3.5 with more power (Cell and Blu-ray with better surrounding components, better GPU, more memory etc.) would really be welcome for me. Of course console market "rules" dictate that won't happen, but one can always dream, right?

PS3 is not what it could have been, should have been given its late entry to the market. Cell and Blu-ray just didn't give Sony the flexibility Microsoft had with another approach and then they (Sony) just ended up being too late and too much.

Will they catch up? Maybe. But I wonder where they could be now had PS3 been planned and executed better and with less arrogance regarding to what the market is willing to wait and pay for. (Same goes for Microsoft BTW, had reliability been better I'm guessing marketshare would be even better and would have allowed earlier price cuts.)

@minator

Quote:

minator wrote: @BrianK Quote: Thanks for the specs. Here is the ArsTechnia Link I think the last point of the article was interesting. I think that article got quite a bit of criticism at the time. He completely ignored the PowerXCell 8i. Quote: Summary -- Where is the ubiquitous Cell computing Sony talked about? Short answer: Cell=PS3 Erm: IBM blades, Mercury blades, Mercury Cell PCIe card, Toshiba Spurs engine and PCIe cards, the Qosmio laptop (includes the spurs engine), Toshiba's forthcoming TVs, Sony's new blade and of course this beastie. PC news outlet tend to report on PC news so you hear very little of anything else. At best you hear the odd story of some researcher building a PS3 cluster. You get very little of what's happening with Cell. You'll probably find it's building up in the background quite nicely in the high end embedded space. The G4 once did well in that area but no one talked about that either.

Toshiba Spurs engine doesn't have a PPE core. It uses the host's CPU i.e. Intel Core 2.

Toshiba Spurs engine is pretty useless since ATI CAL (part of Catalyst 8.12 driver package) and NV CUDA (via Badaboom 1.1; now supports both main profile and baseline profile) supports H264 transcoding.

RoadRunner is pretty useless in personal computing market . One can use NVIDIA GT260/GT280 in lanparty and run Linpack to beat that score.

But since you started HPC discussions, refer to http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1226945999108.html
With only 170 Tesla S1070(aka Geforce GT280) enables Tokyo Institute of Technology to enter Top 500 Supercomputers.

Unlike PS3's CELL and RoadRunner's CELL i.e. they are not the same , Tesla S1070's GPU is the same core as Geforce GT2x0.

Last edited by Hammer on 29-Dec-2008 at 08:53 PM.

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@BrianK

Quote:

My understanding was that the licensing for the 360 is all owned by Microsoft. Or at least friendlier to Microsoft's goals than the Xbox licensing with Nvidia was. From what I recall the Xbox3 will not have to pay the big licensing penality to ATI for the 360 that Nvidia saw from the Xbox.

ATI/AMD licenced Xenos IP to STMicro i.e. AMD owns the Xenos IP.

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@jtsiren

Quote:

I may be wrong on this, but my understanding is that the HD DVD player in Xbox 360 actually does not affect DVD playback

I don't know for sure, but a reliable source told me DVD playback is more acceptable with the HD DVD drive, but maybe he was referring to noise generation.

He also said artifacts issues improved, but scaling sharpness, colors and such are still well off from what you would expect from a quality DVD player.

If it's your only DVD player, it's of course still a useful feature.

@MikeB

Quote:

MikeB wrote: @Tomas Quote: 30fps might be acceptable with quite a few games, but not with a fast paced FPS game like UT. Many reviewers thought it is acceptable for this game. Some even preferred the PS3 version over the PC original.

Most of them are subjective.

Refer to http://au.gamespot.com/features/6202552/index.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=picks&tag=picks;title;2

XBOX 360 vs PS3 vs PC. A screen by screen comparisons. The PC version blown away both consoles i.e. higher resolution (i.e. proper 1080p HD), less burry textures.

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@jtsiren

Quote:

The thing is, Sony wanted Blu-ray and they wanted Cell in PS3. Cool things in themselves, but those cost too much time and money compared to what they have been delivering so far.

3rd parties haven't devoted enough into the new tech yet. But I see clear results with regard to exclusives.

Without the Cell and Blu-Ray it's unlikely I would have had a PS3 today and wouldn't be very enthusiastic about the long term potentials. Of course it would have sold better, but short term sales by themselves don't mean much to me or else I would have bought a PS2 and Wii.

The PS3 sold well enough to matter a great deal to 3rd parties and to push 1st and 2nd parties towards exploring the device towards its potential. 20 million users worldwide is not nothing for less than 2 years on the market for most of the world.

In March 2009 my PS3 turns 2, I will be buying Killzone 2 for certain. Originally I anticipated to buy no more than 6 to 10 games a year. I have already bought over 20 playstation exclusives so far in addition to some multi-platformers, I can't keep up with all the stuff that's coming out and is available. My next PS3 purchase is likely to be Planet Earth on Blu-Ray though.

@Hammer

That's not Unreal Tournament though. Yes, the Fallout series like the Unreal series are PC orientated games. But looking at the screen shots it looks like the PC version does not include considerably better assets. Probably the amount of graphics and audio data is similar across all versions.

I haven't played Fallout 3, but that game doesn't seem fast paced. 30 FPS without needing motion blur (movies are 24 FPS with motion blur) is probably good enough in terms of fluid animation for that game, provided the framerate is solid.

@MikeB

Quote:

That's not Unreal Tournament though. Yes, the Fallout series like the Unreal series are PC orientated games. But looking at the screen shots it looks like the PC version does not include considerably better assets. Probably the amount of graphics and audio data is similar across all versions.

Like GRID or UT3, Fallout 3 runs fine on Geforce 8600M GT GDDR3 @ 720p.

Last edited by Hammer on 29-Dec-2008 at 10:34 PM.

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@MikeB

Quote:

MikeB wrote: @wegster Quote: So, using the PS3 as a 'media center' will of course, cost *extra* if you don't want to be raped on per movie costs from Sony. I'm sure this can be used to offset the 'preaching' over paying $40/year for XBox Live, no? Quote: It's interesting I often hear claims the PS3 movie playback capabilities provide no real value for most games, because the 360 has some of the worst quality DVD playback available and the PS3 is amongst the best quality DVD as well as Blu-Ray movie playback devices available.

I'm sorry, this reads funny/not sure of your point here? The PS3 BD is of limited use, IOW not 'universal' depending on the purchaser. Now, with cheaper BD players, it doesn't make sense to buy a PS3 solely for it's BD capabilities, but for me, I was ok with spending another $50 'extra' at the time for a second PS3, although it's primary use (for the second unit) is for BD.

The first/other PS3 I also use to play DVDs and BD, but really, it wasn't a deciding factor at purchase time, for me.

It's sort of like negotiating at a new job - if they make an offer of significantly less yearly than you want, but stock options, it's irrelevant for the most part, but if the offer is everything you expect, *plus" options, it becomes a bonus, but doesn't factor in much in real decisions for many.

Quote:

IMO online multi-player should be free for a console like the 360 (best sellers are heavily online focussed games like COD4, Halo 3 and Gears of War). IMO no optional online movie service changes this. I find it funny, I often hear about so many double standards.

It's pricing, and it also goes against Sony pushing/promoting of a media center, for the 'masses,' IOW those of us not willing to be raped on prices, while the 360 now has NetFlix yet Sony does not.
Your comment changes nothing about that statement, yet financially, it's *cheaper* to go with a 360 + Netflix + Live than a PS3 and any small number of movie rentals under Sony's current pricing.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@MikeB

Quote:

Sorry Brian the 360 is a horrible DVD player for today's standards, one of the worst, even the PS2 is better in many cases. You browse videophile forums yourself.

I think we've identified your problem here. You trust the fanboys who side with you. Why not go out and get a 360 and actually use it and do your own comparison.

Having a 360 since launch I can say the DVD quality is much improved from day 1. If you find most quality reviews I've yet to find a comprehensive one after the May 2007 update which improved -- visual quality, scaling, smootheness, out of sync issues, jitter and allowed 720p upscaling.

Horrible? If you actually tried it you'd find out that assessement is wrong.

HD DVD worse than Blu-Ray on the consoles? Double blind test finds no discernable difference. Having both there really isn't that much difference. Even early testings put the difference more in the hands of the mastering than the console.

@wegster

Wall Street Journal Backs most of your points. With cheap Blu-Ray players ( and cheaper next year) Blu-Ray is no longer seen as a value add for the PS3.

Same article this Christmas US sales are in. Compared to 2007 the Wii doubled it's sales. Compared to 2007 the 360 sold 8% more. Compared to 2007 the PS3 dropped in sales by 20%. What they didn't cover is the PS2 dropped too. This was clearly not a Sony Christmas in the USA. The article goes on to say the PS3 couldn't drop price more or their gaming division would lose money. Of course the trade off here was less owners. Too bad the owners of the 360 are the most devoted, own the most titles per console out of any generation. So Sony isn't making it up on volume either.

Last edited by BrianK on 30-Dec-2008 at 04:11 AM.

@BrianK

How to Save the PlayStation 3
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2008/id20081229_857029.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Interesting thoughts there, much in line BTW with some of the comments in this thread.

Quote:

...Microsoft was the first to launch a movie download service and most recently inked a deal with Netflix. Sony's online movie catalogue is still in its infancy, with even fewer movies available in HD, and the price is high for a digital-only copy of popular movies ($15 for Batman, really?). Sony should be the leader in this realm. It should work to reduce the cost of Blu-ray movies, especially considering the credit crunch. It should also implement its once touted IPTV here in the States and work fast to expand the PlayStation Store lineup....

Quote:

Home was supposed to be Sony's answer to Xbox Live. Arriving late and still in beta, this is not exactly what we hoped for. Voice chat is up, and then it's down. Avatars are slow to load. The amount of items to purchase is incredibly limited. We can't watch movies yet with our buddies. The only game we can launch from Home is Warhawk. In fact, despite Far Cry 2 having one of the few dedicated gamer spaces, its multiplayer is not synced with the Home software. Instead of a grand evolution of online connectivity, all we have is a glorified chat room...

Quote:

When you think about all you're getting with an Xbox Live Gold account, the price of admission really doesn't sound that high. The PlayStation network is free, but you never score the perks Xbox 360 owners receive. The PS3's community platform, despite Home's rookie efforts, needs a lot of work. There needs to be a unified online interface, one that doesn't require that you spend five minutes logging into Home to access. Offer more tournaments and get developers in there to play with fans. Just because online play is free doesn't mean that it should be sub par...

Good read, much of it I concur with.

@jtsiren

Thansk for the read. I think their analysis of why the PS3 isn't selling as well as the other consoles is pretty much on. I think Sony can fix this and get a better selling console.

Just for fun, amongst all the self-congratulating here (goes for all of us really), I went back and searched for some gems from the still-active thread writers here.

Welcome back to December 2006 / January 2007:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=21541&forum=17

How some of us were actually not too far apart in the beginning:

MikeB
Quote:

It's far too early to tell which console will have the edge on gaming. Most PS3 launch titles currently look like quick and dirty ports, similar to early Amiga games which were ported from the Atari ST, which often ran slower on the Amiga due to technical differences. However IMO the available data does seem to suggest that the PS3 will have by far more impressive games available. However like always creating real blockbusters takes more time and effort.

jtsiren
Quote:

I found myself having pretty much the same opinion as MikeB some time ago. Last year I wanted to go high-def in gaming, so I did get an Xbox 360 and was quite impressed with it, but at the same time clearly planning to replace it with a PS3 over a year later upon the European release. At that time the PS3 was still a long way off and later delayed even more, so I needed something temporary. The things that impressed me about the PS3, based on preliminary info, were obviously the Cell, what I believed to be superior graphics (the whole 1080p issue) and Blu-Ray. I thought that Microsoft was probably going to have better network gaming, but other than that I thought Xbox would be a real underdog much like PS2 was for the original Xbox. ... There may come a time or a game that knocks my socks off and justifies the PS3. That time doesn't seem to be now nor come March. And I have this nagging feeling that save for some few exclusives that are always hard to compare, we won't see the Xbox maxing out and the PS3 making a clear victory technically... the Xbox wil likely remain an equal for a long time to come, it might even remain the victor for all we know. Huge from a console that came out a year earlier! Maybe I expected too much from PS3, or maybe I didn't give that little white box enough credit, but for the moment I'm considering the Xbox 360 the best choice techincally and games wise, and sticking to that until something changes.

MikeB to jtsiren
Quote:

Reasons to upgrade may come later on, with the release of Motorstorm, Heavenly Sword, Lair and maybe Warhawk around the European launch date. Later there will be other PS3 exclusive blockbusters including Gran Turismo 5, Killzone, WarDevil, Final Fantasy, etc. The total list of games being worked on is IMO very impressive, the new Eyetoy and TV Tuner may prove to become selling features as well. ... IMO then is the time to make an educated judgement. I don't think Atari went through all this trouble when the first Atari orignals were ported to the Amiga. But an indepth comparison next christmas will IMO be a lot more interesting from a technical standpoint. ... If there was a mod system I would rate your's as insightful. Personally I have more than enough patience, I started this thread mainly because so many people in PS3 threads or US media seem to claim XBox 360's "victory" prematurely. I think Christmas 2007 will be more than enough time, sure the Amiga took a bit longer to prove itself as the more powerful gaming platform and course the PS3 will be pushed even further beyond christmas.

How many of us doubted Wiis longetivity:

MikeB
Quote:

I don't think the Wii will fail, I think it will do better than the Nintendo GameCube did. However during christmas 2007 I think people will expect better graphics than the Wii can offer.

jtsiren
Quote:

Oh, definitely. The Nintendo Wii has so far been a huge surprise. For all I know, it might win this round (i.e. console generation). It would be great too if it did - gameplay truly winning over technical advances. Nintendo is known for their innovation and I think it benefits us all in the long run. I love Nintendo Wii. I don't know how much longetivity it might hold for myself personally, but playing especially Wiisports Golf was a huge blast. I'm still worried because many Wii titles with the notable exception of Zelda have been receiving poor reviews and the Wiisports/Play games offer only limited appeal in the long run.

How some predictions really did not hit home:

MikeB
Quote:

Considering this is a predictions thread I would like to predict that both Nintendo Wii and Microsoft XBox 360 will sell less than 40 Million units during their life cycle. I expect the PS3 to at least do as well as Playstation and Playstation 2 models did, selling more than 100 Million units. I don't care too much about the bad press the PS3 is currently receiving, there will be plenty of nice things to report in the future.

How some rumors are still not dead or fully settled:

Trezzer and MikeB
Quote:

>It seems Metal Gear Solid is going multi-platform. Official reaction to the rumour: "Konami has no plans to bring Metal Gear Solid 4 to the Xbox 360 at this time."

How PS3 vs. Xbox 360 performance was an endless debate and still is:

MikeB
Quote:

Sorry, but that wasn't intended as an insult. I just wanted to point out that for some people the PS3 hardware capabilities are already proven to a large extend. Of course even newer games won't show the capabilities 100%, but people have seen things way beyond even PC games offer today. ... But yes, I think next christmas the PS3 will show some muscle which cannot be reproduced on the XBox 360 without reasonable doubts.

BrianK (hits surprisingly home with Halo)
Quote:

Halo3 is unlikely to be the most impressive game. It'll be nice but they'll not likely need all the power available on the console to pull it off. PS3 will have some better games next Christmas w/ better graphics but again so will the 360.

BrianK to MikeB:
Quote:

>Opinions disagree on that, PS3 rating may be lower also due to Epic claiming Gears of War is as good as it gets for the XBox 360 and Resistance being based on a heavily improved PS2-engine. It's been explained to you twice by myself and a few times by Trezzer while your statement is incorrect. Read the rest of the Epic statements see why they said they can do better the next time. GoW is not the ultimate in 360 games. Stop the FUD.

And the big 720p vs. 1080p debate:

jtsiren
Quote:

When in fact I was expecting the PS3 to knock Xbox 360 down with sheer graphics power, we are now learning that Xbox 360 has the more powerful graphics chip. When I thought PS3 would kill Xbox 360's 720p with its 1080p glamour, we know have learned that all/most PS3 lauch-titles are in fact 720p too, can't even be scaled to 1080p, while at the same time Xbox 360 now can do 1080p native, already has 1080p title(s) out there, and has a hardware scaler which the PS3 does not giving it additional flexibility as well as quality improvement when up-scaling is needed. ... Even the Cell is a mixed bag. I do put faith in Cell to give the PS3 longetivity as it is utilized more and more in the future, but I never expected it to have to compensate for shortcomings in the graphics department. It is also proving to be far tougher to code for, and the Xbox 360 still has three easy to code cores too. The PS3's CPU has potential, but it is not like it is crushing the Xbox 360 like a bug either - it will even be slower in some cases if the specialized units are not spesifically used or used well. PS2 was also told to have a lot of potential down under that wasn't utilized to the max, but this potential took a long time to emerge if ever. (I do believe Cell will be better in that regard, though. I hope it is.)

BrianK
Quote:

So yes I stand by my comment the average person in the average home is not going to notice the difference between 720p and 1080p due to the average seating distance being 8-10 feet and average screensize which is under the 60" sized.

MikeB
Quote:

Normally 1080p games will look better than upscaled lower res games not designed with such a resolution in mind. 720P games will look just fine. Sadly seemingly many people who claimed they can't see any differences between genuine native 1080p, 720p or even 1080i output, now all of the sudden think a scaler is some kind of magic component.

jtsiren
Quote:

Sony has their fair share of misleading and simply false announcements, do you really want to go there? As for that 10 million, it isn't like they failed by a huge margin considering how much they did ship. I also don't think 1080p/60 has mostly been claimed impossible by Microsoft (clearly doing something at 1080p/60 is easily possible by either console), I remember them mostly saying that the cost of 1080p is huge compared to rewards. Again this uninspiring talk of the sweet spot, but still. I would imagine more 1080p Xbox 360 content coming out because of competition though. Whether or not this will make for better or visually more pleasing games, it is hard to tell - at 720p these either of these consoles can certainly pump out more complex graphics than they can at 1080p (somewhat ironically the overhead of producing a higher resolution image inherently means it is always possible to get "more details" at a "less detailed" resolution...). If PS3 in the future does consistently beat Xbox 360 in 1080p quality and content, well, then that does tell us something. We are certainly all, well most of us, anxiously waiting for that to happen since it did not really happen at launch. I do hope 1080p gets good games on either console, more resolution would be nice. I just hope it won't be at too a high cost concerning the content of the graphics, just upping the resolution and compromising complexity wouldn'nt be nice. ... The real question in my mind about the plausibility of 1080p on the current console generation doesn't come from whether or not the game renders in which HD resolution, but where it can deliver the best combination of resolution and detail, as in complexity, in graphics. 1080p will be worth it when it can be combined with a great level of graphical complexity as well. This is interesting to see.

Anonymous
Quote:

One idiot said 1080p wasn't possible - the rest of the company has said the same thing the whole time: The sweet spot is 720p. Just like on PS3.

How some things had just changed:

MikeB
Quote:

2) The PS3 currently has issues with playing about 1.5% of legacy games. Suddenly all news media exaggerate regarding this minor issue. PS3 not being backwards compatible and such.

jtsiren
Quote:

Other thing where Xbox 360 had merely an after-thought compared to PS3 is obviously backwards compatibility, as discussed early in the thread. Xbox 360's is pretty laughable compared to Sony who even maintains cable compatibility. But then, I usually get rid of all my last generation games when a new generation arrives so this is not a consideration for me. I do know it is a consideration for some and gladly award PS3 the point on this one.

MikeB
Quote:

Regarding backward compatibility the PS3 wins hands down.

How some wishes were granted:

wegster
Quote:

I still wish Sony would pony up and add force feedback back into the system.

And some were not:

MikeB
Quote:

Sony also plans to incorporate Tivo-like features into the machine sometime in the late summer/early fall of next year." Have my cries been heard?

And, finally, my question which remains unanswered by the dueling HD consoles to this date:

jtsiren to MikeB, January 14th 2007
Quote:

I think the real questions concerning the PS3 vs. Xbox 360 processor debate are: how highly is Xbox 360's CPU utilized and, at the end of the day, how much of PS3's Cell potential can be realized in gaming? We all know games of today and yesterday haven't really been all that multi-threading, games all around are just now getting the hang of it (general purpose or special purpose cores, either way). Home computers have just recently been getting multiple cores. Xbox 360 has three cores, PS3 has one plus the seven specialized ones (of which 1-2 are reserved). Xbox 360 has also specialized vector capabilities and multi-threading built into these processor cores thus enabling them to perfor many tasks at once. Clearly PS3 also has a very interesting multi-processing ability. Your assumption seems to be that the hype is correct: when PS3's SPUs are mostly/fully utilized (and they will be, I guess, you assume) the end-result will be far more than what a fully utilized Xbox 360 is capable of. (Although Sony's graphics chip doesn't seem to be quite as powerful than that of Xbox 360's, so that may level the playing field a bit too.) You seem to even think that Gears of War has already set the level Xbox 360 is capable of (which I doubt)? I guess the questions boil down to this: is your assumption correct or is it not - when and where do the Xbox 360 and PS3 eventually "max out"? I say we don't know. I'd be much more comforted in the idea of purchasing a PS3 if I didn't have to go by alleged future potential alone. Sony promised quite a bit for PS2 too that never did materialize. I actually hope PS3 does live up to the promise one day. That would benefit me as a gamer. At the moment (still do in 2008) I'm just trying to find out and paint as realistic a picture of the situation as possible.

So, it has been two years and not much really is different. The three are in a holding patterns doing what they mostly did three years ago, all more mature and certainly improved, PS3 and Xbox 360 somewhat more even in numbers and realized game performance, but all still in pretty much the same places relative to each other - and 720p still the sweet spot. Maybe in another two years time finally more differences show and predictions come true, but so far... I really can't say I feel a whole lot differently than what I did two years ago. Only thing that is resolved is the HD disc fight.

One thing is certain, it really wasn't Christmas 2007 (or 2008 for that matter) that began to show how this generation will unfold.

(Or was it?)

@jtsiren

Quote:

Just for fun, amongst all the self-congratulating here (goes for all of us really), I went back and searched for some gems from the still-active thread writers here. Welcome back to December 2006 / January 2007:

Very interesting post.

Clearly Wii has won. Short of a miracle I can't see anyone catching up with it.
That said the win is due to Nintendo opening up the market to people previously uninterested in gaming - even my parents are considering getting one!

XBox is still in 2nd place and this christmas will have only reinforced this. As I see it though the success of the XBox this Christmas is down to price and the carpet bombing of TV ads.

I think 2nd place is still to play for but Sony have to act soon otherwise they'll be stuck in 3rd.

I've said before I think they'll do a smaller, cheaper "PSthree" sometime next year. I expect this could be very "Wii" if so, things could get very interesting. XBox will try the same, they've done some games but nothing looks convincing so far.

So, I'm pretty certain Wii wins, 2nd and 3rd is rather less clear.

In terms of money made it could be completely different though. And that ultimately decides the real winner.

_________________
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@jtsiren
Nice quotes always good to see what we said and what has since happened.

@minator
Quote:

Clearly Wii has won. Short of a miracle I can't see anyone catching up with it. That said the win is due to Nintendo opening up the market to people previously uninterested in gaming - even my parents are considering getting one! XBox is still in 2nd place and this christmas will have only reinforced this. As I see it though the success of the XBox this Christmas is down to price and the carpet bombing of TV ads.

I think the PS3 might stay around to beat the Wii. The reason why is Nintendo rarely has 2 consoles on the market. I can see Sony trying to milk the PS3 as the low cost console against the Wii2, Xbox3 and possibly PS4. Sony will declare themselves the winner when they bow out of the market and well after the other 2 companies have moved along in technology.

The Xbox360 appears to be taking a new approach to marketing? That of the tupperware, tastefully simple, and sex toy market. In home Mom parties

@jtsiren

Quote:

One thing is certain, it really wasn't Christmas 2007 (or 2008 for that matter) that began to show how this generation will unfold. (Or was it?)

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune launched in time for Christmas 2007, by many considered to be the best looking console game (amongst others like Metal Gear Solid 4, but MGS4 mostly for other reasons).

I think we are going to see more 1080p PS3 games in the future when 1080p HDTVs considerably outsell 720p sets and of course due to ever maturing game engines.

Last edited by MikeB on 31-Dec-2008 at 08:20 AM.

According to Gametrailers the PS3 had the best software line-up for 2008 (not bad coming from a 360 centric website like this):

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/43916.html

"And the winner is.... "Playstation 3"!

The tides have truly turned in 2008. Developers finally up to speed with the Playstation hardware, so multi-platform games are on equal footing.

Then you have to look at the exclusives for each platform. When stacking up the PS3 holding releases against those of the 360, there's really no contest in quality and quantity"

Last edited by MikeB on 31-Dec-2008 at 11:17 AM.
Last edited by MikeB on 31-Dec-2008 at 09:39 AM.