All 3 major game systems are going to release their newest editions by the end of 2006. The following is cut and pasted from a USA today article by a certain rather lazy blogger that should remain nameless.
The players are in place for the next video game battle of the big guns.
Nintendo reveals details Tuesday of its new system, code-named Revolution, after Sony's announcement of the PlayStation 3 console Monday and Microsoft's unveiling of Xbox 360 on an MTV special last Thursday.
All the action is taking place before the annual E3 Expo, which begins Wednesday. The three gaming giants will unveil the systems there.
Microsoft is expected to have the Xbox 360 in stores first, in time for the holidays. Nintendo and Sony will follow in 2006. No prices have been set, and release dates have not been locked in.
Nintendo, whose GameCube sales have lagged, hopes to gain ground, particularly among the fast-growing older-gaming market. Revolution is about the size of a stack of three DVD cases and has no visible knobs, buttons or ports for joysticks. The system will use only wireless controllers, and it sits flat or stands vertically.
With its front-loading slot for discs, it will play games on full-size DVDs as well as older GameCube games on mini-DVDs. Like Xbox and PlayStation 2, it will play DVD movies.
Nintendo, which mostly ignored the Net with GameCube, also is catching up with the online wave. Revolution will offer broadband access to a free Internet-based player matching service, similar to Xbox Live, that also will have downloadable versions of nearly every Nintendo game - from arcade classic Donkey Kong through current titles such as Mario Sunshine. (Nintendo hasn't decided whether downloading will be free.)
Xbox spokesmen have pointed out that 360's specifications are 10 to 13 times more powerful than those of the original Xbox; Sony said Monday that the processor in Play-Station 3, which will come in several colors and be out next spring, will be 35 times more powerful than the PS2 processor.
Nintendo makes more modest claims that Revolution is two or three times more powerful than GameCube. "It's not all about having 'turbo power,' " Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan says. "It's about what you do with it."
Analyst Richard Doherty of The Envisioneering Group says one of Revolution's chief advantages is that designers will find it far easier to create games for Revolution than for competing systems. "They do not need to make major changes from the games they were designing," he says. "They have better performance without having to do a lot of extra work."
Says Kaplan: "We've built Revolution around the concept of 'all-access gaming,' " a term Nintendo uses to mean the system is easily adapted to by both gamers and designers. "We're about sticking to the soul of gaming."
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4 comments:
I was there when Pong first caught fire. Then Pac-Man. I say with pride that my Intellivision system still works. I laughed in 1986 when the first NES came out. The video game industry had just collapsed under the weight of Atari's 5200 and 7800. Why, I thought, would Nintendo think it could do any better? Boy, was I wrong!
I haven't bought a home game console since the Intellivision system. The best I can do is a Game Boy Advance SP on which I play only Tetris. These new systems, however, are making me think seriously about getting one next year.
First, there's the Xbox 360. It's specs are ridiculous. Most interesting to me as a long-time Mac user is that the chips Microsoft is using as the core of the system are close variants of the PowerPC chips that run today's Macs. Still, I refuse to support Microsoft, so I will not buy an Xbox under any circumstances.
As for Nintendo, well, they surprised me before with their approach to gaming, so maybe the comparatively anemic Revolution will eventuall catch on. I dunno. They seem almost apologetic when talking about it. "We're sorry we can't compete with our hardware, so instead we hope you'll like our games." It's an interesting approach.
What's missing from the article is the Game Boy Micro. It plays all GBA games and is all of 4" wide by 2" tall. Sweet!
The one system that gave me a chubby is the Playstation 3. It's specs are friggin' sick. Whole computers should be this powerful! What it lacks in aesthetics it more than makes up for in raw performance. The 360 may be a Ferrari but the PS3 is a Lambourghini with a jet engine!
So next year I'll sit here and ponder whether or not to get a PS3. Pro: It's fast, its graphic engine is insane, it'll drive my HDTV, and it'll play DVDs. Con: It'll be expensive at first, I'll end up wasting gobs of time playing the damn thing, and my kids will want to use it, too.
But it may just be worth it. [TL]
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