The lines have been drawn. HD-DVD vs Blue-Ray. PS3 uses Blue-Ray, bigger capacity; and you know what, who cares!

(1) Up to 50 gigs on a disc now, and they still refuse to put the god-damn things in mini-disc like cases to protect them from anything not made from feathers.

(2) Why the hell do we need 50 gigs for a game. Is there any chance that 7/8 of that space won't be filled with video?

(3) Who asked for a new console anyway? Console wars are bad for the game industry. Here's a new idea! Don't come out with a next-generation console until you can actually make a profit on the console itself. The way it is now, it's like they're selling microwaves at a loss and trying to make up the money marking up Hot-Pockets. What goods a microwave if I can only afford to buy a hotpocket every few months.

(4) Profit!

I HAVE scratched discs and I can tell you that the experience is not a pleasant one.

From what I can tell, the part of the disc that data is written to is near the top, so scratching the top of a CD is pretty much guaranteed to fuck it up royally in a way that no amount of polishing will fix. I lost CD 1 of Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines thanks to that. However, I was very fortunate to find a shop selling a pristine copy for £2: less than the price of a sandwhich. It's buggy, but I love it. Especially the ending.

On another point, it seems Sony are tacking things onto the PS3's specs just so they can say it's super-powerful, without really considering whether it's even necessary. I for starters, it has several processors. Has it occured to Sony that nobody actually knows how to sucessfully USE several processors at once in a beneficial way in software design yet? As far as I can tell, most of the launch titles will utilise just one processor because no-one has the first idea how to do otherwise. The Sony ideology is emphatically thus: don't play smarter, just play with the same old stuff only in larger quantities.

As for 70 gigs: you do the maths. By the time games are developed that use THAT much storage space in a manner that makes a better gaming experience, we'll be buying the NEXT-next generation consoles.

Actually, my quote on the processors came from an interview with Gabe Newell, the Half-Life bloke. He was saying that while working with multiple processors wasn't impossible, they'd have to throw out an enormous chunk of their existing coding know-how and effectively work completely from scratch to develop software to take advantage of the multi-processor setup. Effectively many developers are in something of a panic: nobody has the first idea how to smoothly translate an existing engine to use more than one CPU without chucking out the majority of it's code. Not being able to build on existing work is going to mean an initial increase in development times while coders go through the initial trial-and-error stage of determining what works and what doesn't.

On another note, Vampire Masquerade is damn funky, plus the community for it has made a patch that virtually fixes all the problems with the retail version (the only serious issue in the pre-patched version was the game crashing mid-way during an area transition). On top of that, it's dirt cheap now - so buy it!

Finally, I'm still not so sure about using all that capacity to it's fullest. No game yet has even troubled 10 gigs, let alone five times that; not even the mighty Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, which has one huge tonne of speech and texture files. To create something that turly used 50 gigs to the fullest would require a herculean effort under current development techniques.

Crikey, all languages on one disc? Won't that mean it takes longer to burn a single disc due to the increase in data to transcribe? Regardless, that doesn't seem all that good a use of space. Remember when the first CDs began rolling in for data storage? The up side: space to stick digitised speech in games. The down side: shitloads of pointless full-motion video.

I think what Gabe was getting at was that even *new* engines are built on *some* currently existing code: for instance, the Doom 3 engine started out life as a stripped down Quake 3 engine, the Half-Life engine began life as a modded Quake 1 engine. What he postulates is that even THAT won't be possible due to radically different architecture at the foundation level. Developers will have to begin development with a completely clean slate. Worse, cross-platform development between multi processor (PS3) and single processor units (ie. most PCs) is going to be a royal pain in areas.

And yes, buy Vampire. Snag the right patch and you'll be fine. Shame Troika went under: they made a masterwork.

Okay PS3 came out, anyone know anybody who actually bought or even tried to buy one? I don't.

Not only is it not out in the UK yet, but I'm planning on getting a Wii instead. I'm putting my trust in Nintendo to bring me something new and exciting, my only hope is that it's well founded.

Everybody who bought one sold it on ebay. I'm not sure who bought those, though.

And there are lots of people who know how to effectively utilize multiple processors! ...it's just that they all design high-speed numerical algorithms for use in astrophysics and fluid dynamics and shit.

Quote:Originally posted by Code

Who could possible want more than 20GB to tell a story? Square Enix, that's who.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JDs5dqGsIw
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/710/710761p1.html

I don't want to spend $650 just to play one game, but sadly, I know I will.

He said who wouldn't be using it entirely for FMV, so that doesn't count.

Well, who really cares about 50 GB games and a Cell processor? Not very many programmers know how to use it right, and the games cost so much.

And about the Hot-Pocket remark, if Hot-Pockets cost a lot and microwaves cost a lot more, then he wouldn't get the microwave because he could only buy the Hot Pockets that he would use it for a little bit.