Ξ January 7th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
Yup, instead of freelance I was offered a job and took it 
I start full time in Feb 
If anyone knows a good place near Ascot, lmk.
NBS will be back next week, sometime. We were going to do one over new year but that got shot to shit with me not being able to talk. Brett is at CES this week, lucky bastard, so hopefully we’ll have all the low down and dirty from the show floor. Obviously, omitting the censorship: if it was shit, we aren’t afraid to tell you.
Gears of War on a 42″ 1080p LCD is the kingshit of visual goodness. I have to put in more time and I’m hoping it’s still in the office when I get back there in a few days. I’m not a huge fan of the “a button for everything” feature, it’s frustrating as hell, and RE4 had a better aiming system but it’s still an entertaining game. Still not better than Dead Rising though. I tried the wireless wheel out for the 360 and it’s really hard to get a hang of; you basically have to reinvent your driving style from scratch. I need to try some other racing games (Forza 360 should be soon!!) to see how they handle it instead.
Bioshock is coming out within days and I’m like a fucking kid at Christmas. It’s been years since I first played System Shock 2 (it WAS a better FPS than Half-Life) and I can’t wait. Sadly, I know I’m going to be disappointed because I’m too hyped about it.
Oh, and DFI’s RD600 board is fantastic. As a general rule of thumb I seem to fall in love with all LanParty boards, but this is just an overclockers dream, despite the needed PhD in BIOS option deciphering.
Ξ January 7th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
Ok, so the spy shots of Zephyr have been released and the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that Microsoft are going to release a “Premium+” model later in the year, over and above the Premium model, to directly compete with Sony’s 60GB PS3.
For starters, including HDMI puts it in a better position than Sony’s PS3 because it allows 1080p over analogue (VGA and component) and digital (HDMI), whereas the PS3 is exclusively digital. This covers more bases and provides an extra upgrade option. Do Microsoft want people to go out and REBUY a 360? Hell no! They lose money on every console, that deficit has to be remade through licensing and peripheral sales, so why would a company deliberately cause itself more grief. It wants more consoles in every house so as it can charge more for licences or get more developers on board if it can argue there are more potential customers (than the competition).
Microsoft is both committed to HD-DVD and it’s XBL marketplace, so why choose an integrated HD-DVD over a 120GB harddisk as an inclusion? HD-DVD drives will come down in price as the year progresses and seeing as an external unit (which requires the design, packaging, shipping, few million lines of code: so paying dev’s) is £$200, you can slash a chunk off that and bung one in the console.
We’ve seen in the past, on virtually every-single-console games that required updates or multiple disks, and off the top of my head: PS1 (FFVII was 4 disk), GC (RE0 and 4 were 2 disk), PS2 (wasn’t it FFX-something that required a harddisk?), some N64 games (Pokémon Stadium) needed an extra 4meg memory pack. So including a HDDVD and shipping games on both a single HDDVD and multiple DVD isn’t the big deal people are making it out to be.
Even if they don’t ship games on HDDVD, then having an internal unit with HDMI puts it directly opposite the PS3, and with a 120GB harddisk they have the marketing edge.
With three console stock units they can update the IBM chip in all of them to save money across the board and lower the price of the core, making it suitable for very casual gamers who fancy playing the odd title now and again, then the Premium stays the same for intermediate gamers or those who want wireless, XBL arcade and some harddisk for their game saves; basically what it is now. People who like to play but don’t really have enough money to go all out on the Premium+ model which is stacked to the gills for people who want the whole 360 experience and much have that simple digital interface. Putting this at a price near/at the upper PS3 means they can charge more but it still looks as good as or better than the competition, plus, you don’t piss a load of early adopters off by releasing HDMI across the board. These people will think they are entitled to it, despite the fact their console will be 18 months old when this gets released. Microsoft doesn’t want to give Sony any edge or possibility of spin like “we waited and got it right from the beginning”.
But then, Microsoft (along with Nintendo) can also decrease PS3 sales by continuing with the idea that the PS3 is over-priced and expensive. By NOT releasing a stacked model near the price of the higher end PS3 they deliberately don’t make the PS3 have a direct competitor and give people that sort of choice, because at the end of the day they will side with their PS2s. Plus, they can charge an arm and a leg for an extra 120GB drive to replace the 20GBs people have, which make them more money through peripherals. Then they can offer the egde of “well, buy what you need” giving the perceived idea of value but essentially nickel and diming you to death, because if they’d have included them both you would have got them for a fraction of the price.
As for a “quieter unit” I can’t see it happening as the main noise is coming from the DVD, unless you like to leave your 360 in a lead case with no ventilation or under a load of pillows, so the fans kick in to try to compensate. The DVD will also spin as fast as possible in order to get levels loaded faster, and data is never usually read in sync so it just makes it louder with the laser shooting back and forth. Microsoft could engineer the firmware to lower the speed on DVD playback, to keep it quiet, and we can but hope that happens eventually.
My ideal would be to plug in an external disk and be able to copy the game, entirely, to run from that. Sure, it would be limited by USB speed but it’ll be a hell of a lot quieter and more convenient than it is now. They could require the drive (of choice: MS could have “360 cert” on the 3rd party products for a price) is formatted after being plugged in, then encrypted with an AES code unique to the core of the console. Chance of cracking: extremely low. Piracy from the game disks themselves will continue as it always has done. Now you can access the drive with merely a list of games like you could through the original (hacked) Xbox. You couldn’t use that drive with any other console because the encryption would be locked to yours. Sure, this would mean if your console dies you’re up shit creek but you own all those games anyway ;), so it’s just a job of loading them all up again.
It’ll never happen, but I can dream. The slim probability of it ever bearing fruit is if the PS3 games that are partially loaded onto the harddisk are such a performance and noise benefit (Blu-Ray read rate, through greater data density is already in excess of DVD) then Microsoft will want to offer something there to compete as well.
