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[Carlo210]

So lets all build a system revolving around you!  

Japan loves it, and I don't mind it too because its all about fun.

 

[gamerguy999]

QUOTE(Xeriak @ Jun 1 2005, 03:46 PM)

Not that I'm a fanboy or dislike Nintendo...

[joekun]

So far I'm pretty unexcited about the next generation of systems.  At one time or another I've owned all of the current gen systems starting with PS2 (bought at the Japanese launch).  I had that for about a month or so before dumping it because it had no games and was in desperate need of full screen hardware deinterlacing.  

Got the XBox on the first day because of the hefty specs and pretty graphics, beat DOA 3 within 5 minutes and then played Halo for a few weeks.  After that I haven't really liked many games (Halo 2 was a huge disappointment for me, maybe because I don't play Live).  I was about ready to sell my xbox 2 years ago when instead I modded it.  It now gets more use as a media player than a game system.

Lastly I got a gamecube about a year and a half ago when it came with the 4 Zelda games for $99.  I've finished more games on it than any other system, Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2, Zelda Ocarina of Time (emulated), Pikmin, Pikmin 2, and the new Zelda later this year will almost certainly be one that I finish.

I'm no Nintendo fan boy, and I am probably one of the most casual gamers out there since I get bored with games so easily, but I got the most bang for my buck (as a game system) out of the cube.  Revolution doesn't have me exited though because I know squat about it and I can play almost any old NES, and Super NES games on my xbox.  N64 emulation is cool, but the system has to have great new generation games to go with that.  If it ends up being cool I will get one.

Game wise no next gen game has impressed me yet.  I could see myself getting a PS3 simply for Blu-Ray, but that depends on the overall price and what happens with the whole HD-DVD and blu-ray format war.

And this interview with Steve Balmer has me thinking it would be a mistake to jump on the 360 right away as they apparently have plans for a bigger storage medium:

QUOTE

There are going to be some more surprises on the hardware end?

Could be! Look, for us to say we’re going to go through a whole generation without an HD capacity drive—I think that would be naive to assume that we’ll be sitting here at the end of the Xbox 360 generation and no such device will have shipped. On the other hand, we haven’t announced anything, Sony’s announced something, and who knows? You know, they could have announced support for Beta instead of VHS. We’re trying to watch and really be agile on our feet, relative to the issues between HD DVD and Blu-ray. As a platform provider we’re trying to make sure our software standards are well-supported in both places. As the provider of the Xbox, we’re sitting there saying, “Look, we’re shipping NOW.” This was not an option. Neither one of these things were an option for our first shipment, so it’s kind of a moot point. Sony’s saying, “Who knows what the standards are, but we’re going to commit to what we’re going to commit to.” I think we can be nimble and agile and that’ll be important.

So there’s a possibility of an Xbox 360 Mark II coming along?

I won’t hypothesize on how we get there. I just think it’s just wrong-minded to think that somehow we’d go a whole generation without this. We’re not going to be sitting here five years saying, “Oh jeez, we don’t have HD DVD-type storage.” But we’re going to out perform Sony in a lot of things. We’re faster on integer than they are, they’re faster on floating point than we are. To sit there and just take a look and say “Well, they’re just faster…” Well, we’ve got three cores, they’ve got one core. Actually, we were pleasantly surprised by what they announced. They’re later, and yet we think we’re going to outperform them on a bunch of stuff. We think we’ve got better balanced system performance than they do. Now, when you’re the second guy of course you’re going to be faster. We sit there and say “There are some things [on the PS3] that are faster… [whispers] but there are some things we’re faster on, too.”

Oh, and finally if the rumors are true about $60 games I will definitely not be buying many.  I already have a hard time finding games that are worth $50, so something like Gamefly would be my main source of games at that point.