Summary of the past few weeks

Console war is my first blog, and everything is all new experience to me (though I've known blog for quite a while already, ironic). I find that, without actually operating a blog of my own, I wouldn't really understand how blog works. Blog represents not only my identity, but also my interest and some of my personality. Blog is much better than the personal websites that was famous a few years ago because the personal website back then (web 1.0) only allows people to read info's about the host. And Blog allows not only checking out host's information, but it allows guests to comment on the host's diaries, and also it has the tag function that could direct visitors to other blogs who has same interests. The tagging gives more possibilities, more directions and paths for people to travel through internet, but not having to type in website address all the time or find them on our bookmarks. Back to my blog, Console war discuss about the next-generation market fight between the three consoles, Xbox360, PS3 and Wii. The War actually began long time ago since 2004 E3 when the representative of each company announce of coming of new console. Since then, players and 3rd party developers has been gathering information (positive and negatives) of all three console to see which console we should put money on (developing a game is quite expensive, the profit usually result in red if the game copies sold doesn't reach certain amount) As a core player, I am also interested of how the next-gen console share the market. I am glad that there are quite amount of people joined the discussion since beginning of my blog, I guess it is the topic that attracts people in. Other than building up my own website, I also visit classmates blogs and comment on their postings. Here I must mention that it makes people give up on giving comments if we have to register another account rather than using anonymous or type in any names replying people's post. For instance, I was planning to reply on Andrew's animation blog but then I have to register something... pretty annoying to me and so I just tend to reply on other blogs. Other than that, many interesting blogs going on in the class and each blog shows some of their personal identity to all of us. For example, Todd is writing about mashups (though I don't know how to comment on it but I think its cool from the links he provide on his blog), Akash gives his perspective of thought on designing and copy right issues, Raymond discusses about use of hybrid cars and Peter talks about comics, which is also my favourite thing to do in my leisure time. Communication through internet, gain knowledge from other's posts, read how people approach to their goal meanwhile build up my own blog (and be sure to maintain my theme and style of the blog) is what I experience during this exercise.

Games

Comparing services of MS and Sony

The services comparing here is to Taiwan only because I get these information from Taiwan game discussion forums. Wii is not into this discussion because it is not released yet in Taiwan.

Due to the cause of overheating problems that some PS3 consoles having right now. Many players consult to the customer service department to request for exchanging new console. However the department replied to these players that they can only fix for them, and the exchange is not available. So then player reported to media, then post on news.

Some players who are more on MS side, saying that Sony never think about players in Taiwan because the market is so small, so not worth for them to pay attention to us; unlike MS, you are able to exchange as many consoles as you want as long as it realy has problem (the highest heard was 7 consoles). And one of them listed one action that MS did when xbox360 first out, having the problem of overheating...Acutally its not overheating, it is BURNING, x360's cable wires totaly on fire, so MS had to recall all the cables and give out to players for free.

xbox360 cable on fire (mandarine news)


Well, I mean, the cable is on fire man... its their responsiblilty to recall all the cables in same shippment. And in fact, this shouldn't even be happening, for this person giving MS credit on this, its ridiculous to me.

Anyhow, I think people should consider that PS3 is new released console, it contains new invented technology chips and blu-ray which is hard to produce. Additionaly, the first shippment almost all sold out on launch days and they don't have extra consoles to exchange with you even they wanted to! So the voice of complains soon reduced after the 2nd shippment arrive.

Second problem to these players are that Sony never like to have have games in mandarin edition. Unlike most games made by MS, they always consider about markets on mandarin speaker group. Well, for this part, I'd agree with MS people, cuz even if I can read english good, it is a 2nd language to me, so if I can read faster and understand better with mandarin games, why not?



Overall, MS does has better services than Sony, I think Sony should realy make improvement on it. And they do have space for improvement yes.



Reference sites:

www.gamer.com.tw
www.levelup.cn

Console auctions on Ebay

Because of the Ps3 is so limited in first shippment (probably don't meet 400,000 consoles for the whole north america), price of each system on ebay auctions has been going sky rocket; keeping on break record or highest price console in history... the highest I've seen in news was 15100 USD, bought by a Britian. I don't know if its true or not, but it is pretty crazy. Even the "constant normal" price of auctions on the pre-orders has been kept around 2000-4000 USD each.

This lead to the happening of 588 pages of ps3 auctions on ebay after first retail launch day. 588 pages... omg! Though I've predicted this to happen, but I didn't thought it would be that many pages. If I've screen shotted the the screen. (I was trying to buy online on the launch day as well, but I didn't get it successfully. Now I think it was my luck not to get one because I wouldn't think I'll get a good price competing with other 10,000 PS3 auctions) And, as I thought, now that there are more supplies than needs, and not everyone is rich boi, price drop down fast to 700-1000.

And this happened...
tragety

This is screen shot of it :



Its pretty bad mannor to laugh as this guy... but I can't help it.. hahahahhaah

By the way, the calculated amount of Wii console and PS3 console sold on Ebay so far is; Wii for 14400 systems, and PS3 for 11000 systems.

This is pretty reasonable for me since the wii only cost you 400-500 USD and PS3 averagly cost 800-1000+ excluding the time when the price not drop down yet. Perhaps not everyone is rich boi.

Sited:
www.gamer.com.tw
www.levelup.cn

Problem with the new consoles

The new released or the first shippment of the product always has many problems, and this is why I never buy game consoles when it first came out. The PS3 right now is having same problem as X360 when it was out, the problem with overheating. Although it is only a few days after it is released, there are already quite a few cases being reported to the shop that froze due to the overheating problem.

I was quite supriced when I read this news because the heatsink that implemented in PS3 is quite large, so I wasn't worried about it having heating problem. And we have to note that Sony had delayed the releasing of PS3 once due to redesigning the heatsinker/Fans and the hot air flow design...and now it seems the problem is unavoidable.

Xbox360 had the same problem as PS3, just a little bit worse than it. The X360 not only froze by overheating, the cable even burned on fire...probably caused by the voltage differnciations... I am not sure.

Now Wii have problems too. Not exactly the problem from the console, but the problem with users. We all know that Wii is to play by motion sensing (the Wii remote and nunchuk) and Wii is fun to play. So when these 2 elements combine together, problem comes. There are already a few cases that people being too enjoyed in the game not noticing the space they are in, so people playing tennis, making jump smashes broke their lamps on roof, and people playing bolins crushed their LCD TV (the reported case was a 60inch LCD TV...ouch). The Wii remote slipped off and the strap broke.

Sony playstation 3 part 2

The PS3 console is by far the most expensive and most powerful next gen system for video games.

It contains new technologies, the Cell chips for its main processor and the revolutionary blu-ray cd driver. The blu-ray has about the same resolution pixels as the HDs, which is to boost the resolution to 1080P, but it contains 10G more in size for a single layered CD. A single blu-ray cd can go up to double layers, which is 50GB in size. This slightly explains Why it is so expensive.

Ps3 has hard drives installed in the machine, players could install the whole game into system to boost up loading speed. The memory files are also saved in the harddrives as well, so I don't think there is memory chips for ps3. But it does have slots to insert the ps2 memory chips.

So what PS3 is good at? Well, basically both PS3 and Xbox 360 aims to same target: super graphic, super neat game detail, super smooth loading, Super fun. What PS3 has is just better than xbox360, thats all~

However, the first few released games are not that great. This is because of that Sony is really having problem producing PS3, and giving the 3rd party game developing companys the development kit late, and they don't have enough time to produce AAAAA games. But I am sure the games coming next spring will be much much better than what they have now.

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I cant believe someone would do this... feels so bad

smash ps3

If they wanna smash the ps3, why don't they video it at home... But busted it infront of all the people who been waiting for 3,4 days for that console...
man, this must pissed them off

Sony PlayStation 3

The next gen console that Sony promotes is Playstation 3.
But the start of Playstation 3 is not easy and successful. Since the announce of the console in 2005 E3, the date of publishing Playstation 3 delayed again and again and again, pissed off many sony fans. (Sony said they going to have PS3 in store available in end of 2005, then revised to spring of 2006, then summer, till now, end of 2006... delayed for 1 year!)

From the forum (one of the largest forum in taiwan, millions of people access into it everyday) that I often visit, people are tired of Sony saying bullshit about how soon and how many playstation 3 they going to produce per month.
Players: We want Playstation 3 NOW!

It is quite ridiculous that the first set of PS3 consoles publishing in whole world is only .5 million. This is so not enough for hardcore player. distributing 100,000 consoles in whole asia region, and 400,000 in north america... For Europe, ha, they have to wait till next year march. Many problems occured due to less amount of consoles, ppl are selling pre-ordered consoles in auction sites like, EBay, Yahoo, and the price of Console has been doubled (the retail price is 599 USD, on ebay it is 1500 USD) because PS3 is so limited. And next shippment is like , 1 or 2 months later, you never know! Because Sony still having hard time reaching high percentage of successful producing rate...So if player want to play early, want to show off to their friends, you have to buy it in extreme high price. But if you don't want to be idiot and pay high price for PS3, you could go line up for it too. Just that you need super patience (line up for 2,3 days, sleep at the store) and LUCK.

Here is a chaos occured in Japan for the first publishing day:



Some people ruined the auction in Yahoo.Japan:





Well, despite of the mess Sony has made, PS3 is still a very good console. But i'll talk about this some other time :)

Funny commercial

check it out here

Xbox 360

Xbox360 commercial in usa, Jump in!

Xbox360, next gen console published by Microsoft, 2nd generation of Xbox. Its said to be that xbox360 the version of xbox1.5 when Sony announced their next gen console ps3 and ps3's hardware setups. But i mean, com'on, Xbox is not cheap, if its just 1.5, why publish it so soon? They planning to earn money from us again when they publish the actual xbox2 in the next 2,3 yrs? pfft!

Anyways, lets take a look on what Microsoft say on E3 press conference

One big advantage/feature that xbox has always have is their network system, the xbox-live. The idea is simple and neat, all xbox user can connect to each other through xbox live, and all xbox game (that has online system) has a server on it. Players could play with each other, add friend, chatroom and even team chat using earphones. Also MS are willing to do games in many different languages. This beat Sony and Wii alot cuz they only do games in english and japanese version, thats so stupid!

Overall I think MS (microsoft) says that it is a xbox 1.5, but I think the graphic is already pretty neat. The conference seem to be focusing on presenting FPS games, and since I am not a big fan of FPS games, it is not going to be that much temptation than Wii or PS3 give to me.

The Wii console Nintendo promotes aims at the word "interactivity", also the meaning of wii is W = with, I and I, person + person become people, signifying that this console is for everybody to enjoy and play same time.

While Sony and Microsoft define next-gen console to be the High Definition graphics, Nintendo thought to proceed on developing the "game plays" rather than improving their graphics. Well, Nintendo would be dead meat if they decided to go for graphic in next gen console ha. One reason is that graphic is never an advantage of nintendo style game, and also the graphic that Microsoft and Sony presented is like, beyond what Nintendo could do. Also I don't think Nintendo has that much money to throw in water haha.

That is the advertisment Nintendo showed in the E3 conference. It shows of how people play Wii. Nintendo jumped out of traditional way 1 hand controller, and seperated into 2 hand held controllers. Not only this, the controllers are motion sensitive. Referring to the video, you notice how ppl play golf game? it no more has power gauge that player needs to choose for the strength of the swings, but you just simply swing your wii controller, and the strength of the swing is depended on player's speed of his swing. Its pretty cool to play game this way. Suits its title of revolution no doubt.

See, twist around ur wrist to play. Below is the analog you held in left hand, for controlling character movement, check. And one on right is front and side view for Wii remote, its can work as traditional game if you hold it side by side and the click at behind is for fps games

But! if you playing rpg game like dragon quest : sword and magic, and you are trying to lv up your character... do you have to swing for 3-5 hrs? that would suck very bad!

Well, wutever! Its only 280 Canadian! so cheap! go buy one!

more detail in wii official website