Posts by Iain 357 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Zettai Zetsumei Toshi was a really interesting game. Although, I admit that it pushed the PS2 so hard that framerates occasionally went single-digit, so hopefully they can do a bit better this time. The second game in the series had similar problems trying to do floods, so I'm cautious about that, however.
Do you mean these "undisclosed" download limits?
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
With the current 20Mb/s service, after 3Gb of peak use you're throttled back to 5Mb/s. Which is hardly "dialup speed", given that it's a shedload faster than most "up to 8Mb/s" ADSL services are to start with.
Do be more careful with your lying in future.
This could be a very good thing, just as long as they get the price right. Having replaced a 360 HD-DVD drive with a standalone player already, because the cost came down to a level where it was affordable to do so, I'm used the way running films over Microsoft's console isn't ideal. But standalone Blu-ray players are coming down all the time. If they're going to do this, they need to do it both quickly and cheaply, before I just get a proper player instead. Or Sony drop the price of a PS3, for that matter.
Until Reg ACs demonstrate more than one opinion (i.e. that everything Sony ever created is like amber from the Gods, but Bill Gates shat in their bed) there really doesn't seem to be any point in granting more than one person's worth in value.
Which is a whole person's worth more than /. ACs deserve. Most of them are bots.
Steve Rowsell: "Yet another $ony fanboy displays his fear"
Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm just assuming that all ACs are Mark in disguise. It would make sense.
Allan Rutland: "And the thought of almost buying three consoles to one of another brand, kind of massively skews the situation in favour of the 360."
For some, the Arcade doesn't make much sense; online use is a lot easier with the hard drive and headset. But, using the Sainsbury's offer, it's possible to buy both a Wii AND a Premium 360 for around the price of a PS3. Which really doesn't make it look very good value. Or, if you buy from Amazon, you could spend that Wii money on a standalone Blu-ray player and have all those HD movies that supposedly make the PS3 such a bargain.
Have you played any Wii games? They work better. You can't point with a SixAxis, because it's just the wrong shape. Personally, I don't like using them on the Wii that much either, but there you go.
The PS3 would seriously benefit from a price cut, but I doubt Sony can afford to very much at the moment, without further damaging Blu-ray players. Their current solution of returning features to the machine while keeping the price constant seems to be the only option.
"the PSP managed to survive this so long as it was so notoriously difficult and user unfriendly to run game copies."
Ha. Hahahahahahaha. No, really. This has got to be sarcastic. I've never met a PSP that wasn't softmodded. Not because I'm a dirty pirate, but because it was the only way to play PS1 games on them at first.
The DMCA has already been upheld against ROT13 in the case of ebooks, hasn't it? So something as complex (though broken) as CSS has got to count.
Otherwise, it becomes a non-law. Broken protection is 'ineffective', and 'effective' protection means you don't have a hack to distribute in the first place.
"Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use,"
And yet the Judge appears to agree that breaking open the DRM on DVDs (which, no matter what they do afterwards will have to happen) constitutes circumventing copy protection measures. Because it quite clearly is.
Real have a legitimate product here, even if they're historically scumbags for the nightmare that was RealPlayer. But US law explicitly states that this class of product is illegal, just in case there might be profit for Hollywood without it.
Well, obviously I disagree on which console offers the best value, or I wouldn't have already bought the other two at full price. But I do think HMV's current offer off £299.99 for the 80Gb model plus a free copy of GTA4 is rather better than your suggestion of £250 for the 40Gb, because even without the game I'd need to pay for both the hard drive and the DualShock3 on top. Oh well, I'll probably grab a US one next year then, as planned.
Tony - My recently revived 360 originally had 1st generation parts in it, so the only question for the PS3 fans is why it lasted the 2 years it did, to be honest. I was merely mentioning it with relation to the question about them being so noisy.
Anonymous Coward - I've been posting under my own name since roughly when El Reg allowed comments, and have had plenty of nice things to say about the best Blu-ray player around and the home of LBP (which is utterly charming) and wipEout HD (still the best futuristic racer ever). You're AC. Motes in eyes, and all that.
Curiously, my aged 360 came back from a RRODing on Monday, with a fresh motherboard and DVD drive, to be FAR quieter than it used to be. Seriously, it's now decidedly less noisy than my PS2, and only a little more than my mate's PS3. Whether this means it'll go another 2 and a bit years without dying again is another question.
According to other sources, the next step after Jasper's die shrink of the GPU is that in early 2010 we'll get the CPU and GPU combined into a single-chip solution. At which point the rest of the board can shrink, and that's when you'll get your smaller Xbox Box.
That, or this is just the replacement for the Arcade. The fact that they're talking about faceplates suggests it might not be a different size to the current models after all.
Yes, there are things you can't do on an Arcade. Some of them are even worth doing (playing Burnout Paradise online), though others mystify me as to why you should care (Football Manager and FFXI, the only two games that flat-out need a hard drive, are both better on the PC). But since one of the big points to this announcement is that the PREMIUM, 60Gb model is now less than a Wii, it's rather by-the-by.
"PlayStation 3 fans are likely to be pretty peeved at news of the Xbox 360 price cut, because Sony said earlier this year that there’ll be no UK PS3 price cut this year."
Surely PlayStation 3 fans already own a machine, and so what the price of one is later in the year changes to is fairly irrelevant to them?
Of the first 10 people I know who bought PS3s, every single one was at least primarily to use as a Blu-ray player. Two of those have yet to have a game disc even put in them to this day, because they have no interest in videogames.
I can buy a standalone for £160 from Amazon now, but until 6 months ago the PS3 remained the best player at any price, and remains the best without spending more money on a high-end Panasonic.
Umm, your list of 20 games consists of no less than 14 that are on other, cheaper platforms. 15, if you don't count NG:Sigma, which is just an enhanced version of the XBox game. So that's why people who already own 360s complain there isn't much to entice them over.
My Dad managed to catch this on his PC (had the bad luck to receive a scam "you've received an e-card" mail on his birthday, natch). I only spotted it as a problem because the thing foolishly used Vista-themed fake windows on an XP box. Dear Lord, it's a nightmare to get rid of, as all of those slight variants out there appear to have differently-named executables with different hashes in different obfuscated directory names and registry keys; nothing automated I could find would do the trick.
It also hides all your desktop icons and replaces them with an ActiveX page to reinstall the damn thing again, before locking out the relevant page of the Display Properties tab. Which was an eye-opener.
The minimal advantage the PS3 has over the 360 sales at the moment matches the proportion of people buying them purely as Blu-ray players. As a measure of the more successful GAMES machine it's too small to care about. They're both doing about the same, which is pretty terrible in comparison to the Wii.
If Asda have the Elite (the 120GB version) for the same price as a Premium, then yes - the only reason to get a Premium is that you really, really want a white one. But that's a special offer price, rather than a new RRP.
Re: HDMI ports, though, all the 360s on shelves now should have them, irrespective of whether it's an Arcade, Premium or Elite. The only difference is that the Elite comes with a cable in the box instead of you having to spend a tenner on one.
I wouldn't bother with the HD-DVD drive. It's a perfectly fine format; I've got three shelves of the things myself, along with two players (the XBox one and the standalone I subsequently bought because the 360's fan noise is annoying). But that boat has sailed; the last of the bargains are starting to dry up now and many of the best titles are becoming difficult to find.
On the other hand, I was watching Batman Begins last night. Shot on 35mm with no digital intermediate, so just like 'old films' that some people claim not to see the point of HD for, but it both looked and sounded absolutely stunning. The HD formats look a lot more like film than DVD did; I've grown so tired of the look of the latter format, with its mosquito noise and macroblocking artifacts that I find myself preferring even Laserdisc some of the time.
The PS3 will only remain among the cheapest Blu-ray players while Sony continue to subsidise all those billions in development costs with software sales. As you yourself suggested, Sony can't sell it at a loss for long.
But it's plainly obvious that the PS3 is not what you'd design as the most efficient method of playing Blu-ray films. As the format matures, system-on-chip designs will start to undercut that dramatically - a PS2 is over 4 times what you can pick up a standalone DVD player for. Samsung, Panasonic and indeed Sony themselves have players that can be had for less already. That they're last year's spec isn't going to be an issue now the Blu-ray consortium finally have a standard they're hapy with.
"The Wii is rapidly losing face, as more and more people discover it's nothing short of a fad." says the AC.
Meanwhile, in this week's All Formats chart, MGS4 sits at number 10, the highest-placed of the 10 titles in the whole top 40 that is for a non-Nintendo format. On hardware, Nintendo continue to devastate the opposition as well. The 'fad' isn't showing signs of dropping off just yet.
"Those PS2 customers will be PS3 customers in 5 or so years" says an AC.
Not something you should take for granted. Every 360 owner I know had a PS2. Not every one plans to buy a PS3 as well. Since most of them are old enough to have owned a Megadrive but then went for a PS1 instead of a Saturn, the methodology looks particularly suspect.
As patiently explained to the Sony fanboys last week, the 360 has had a "pay per title with no subscription, no not even Gold Live" movie service for over a year. Netflix support is a minor addition to it, whereby 360 users can use the existing free supplement to the main Netflix service for streaming movies via their telly instead of on a PC.
That doesn't quite match what they said in the Microsoft keynote. There, it was that America and Europe get the 360 release "day one", i.e. the same time they get the PS3 release.
Development is on the "Crystal Tools" engine, whose initial platform was actually the PC, and that's where they're doing the development. It's a fully agnostic multi-platform engine, so now they've ported Crystal to the 360 hardware claims that they've been working for 3 years on the PS3 version are somewhat disingenuous.
Re: this new PSN system, it's a very different thing to the Netflix option, and a lot closer to the current 360 Video Marketplace. That also works with the free Live account and requires you pay per film instead of a flat subscription fee. That they've got more studios than the Microsoft service is good news, although I won't be using it as I still prefer to purchase my films on shiny discs.
My sources at Microsoft say the 360 is outselling the PS3, and that Ballmer is pretty well off, too.
Being sensible for a moment, I fail to see why Sony would announce any price cut in advance anyway. Nobody ever does. The price will come down when it comes down. I'll buy one when I can justify the expenditure.
The point is that 20Gb 2.5" SATA drives aren't competitively priced in comparison to the 60Gb ones any more, so Microsoft are switching. Having the same size drive as the PS3 is probably a useful tech-spec bonus for people who make their console investment based on such things, and it also may be tied into the Netflix announcement, which generates something to put on all that space.
Oddly enough, there are good things to watch as well. No, you don't particularly want to try watching Big Brother (a show in SD) on a screen that large while sitting really close to it. Or at all; it's rubbish.
The Blu-ray of 2001: A Space Odyssey looks absolutely fantastic on it, for example. Tartan's (God rest their soul) release of The Seventh Seal is jaw-dropping; noticeably better than on a £1500 Sony LCD, yes.
You're allowed to have different priorities, but a review that just says "This TV costs lots of money, and what's the point in that?" wouldn't be terribly informative.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
