Archive for September, 2007

Retro Content

While PS3 users are happy to get the occasional PS1 title repackaged in downloadable format, the 360 doesn’t merely get direct ports, but genuinely enhanced versions of classic fan favorites: Doom, Marathon, Prince of Persia, Street Fighter, and now even Rez! And all of these game have upgraded textures and graphics, improved frame rates, a variety of multiplayer options, etc.

PS3 users do get the occasional retro title with enhancements (Super Puzzle Fighter, Lemmings, or MK2), but the 360 seems to get more retro titles, a better selection of them, and much more substantial enhancements.

I’m definitely envious of this. I would love to see more of this type of quality, enhanced remakes.

Hobbyist Development

Microsoft provides attractive hobbyist oriented XNA dev kits with options for 360 distribution. I must mention two counter points to this:

1. User created content, which is coming to both systems, will be much more relevant in the console world than from-the-ground-up game development support.
2. There is already a dream hobbyist system, and it’s not a console and probably won’t ever be. I’m talking about the general purpose home PC. Independent and hobbyist developed games are flourishing on the PC and enjoying great success. The success and variety in these efforts is amazing. Check out here, here, and here.

However, despite these two counter points, I’m still genuinely envious of the power and accessibility of Microsoft’s XNA tools and I wish the PS3 had something similar.

(BTW, PS3 Linux is great, but it’s just a limited PC rather than a new tool for hobbyist developers)

Third Party Relations

The 360 seems to get many third party titles much earlier than the PS3. This includes traditionally PlayStation franchises such as Ace Combat and Katamari, which are rumored to come out for the PS3 after a 360 exclusivity period. Even titles such as GRAW 2, which the devs claim was designed from the very beginning to provide full PS3 support, still come out a solid five months earlier on the 360.

And for GTA fanatics such as myself, those upcoming exclusive episodes sound very tempting.

UPDATE: This was supposed to be a genuine and good spirited acknowledgment of the strong points of the competition that would ease tensions and restore a constructive enjoyable discussion forum. This isn’t supposed to kick off a second wave of console war arguments. There are a ton of PS3 advantages that I will not mention those for now.

Bungie community rep, Luke Smith, tries to do some damage control on the discovered Halo 3 resolution deficiency debacle:

“In fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152×640 image and the scaled 1280×720, it’s practically impossible to discern the difference.”

Very true! Upscaling doesn’t improve quality at all! That’s why people are upset! ROFL! For once, I actually agree with something Microsoft says about upscaling

Upscaling doesn’t add any more texture or model detail or sharpness, it just blows up the pixels.

Then, the Microsoft rep proceeds to go off the deep end:

“In fact the reason we haven’t mentioned this before in weekly updates, is the simple fact that it would have distracted conversation away from more important aspects of the game, and given tinfoil hats some new gristle to chew on as they catalogued their toenail clippings.”

640p vs 720p? Sure, most people wouldn’t notice by themselves if they didn’t read about it. But the exact same thing can be said about the 30/60 Madden FPS issue that Microsoft trumpeted to the moon last month.

UPDATE: OK, even though this is a PS3 fan site, we try not to be obnoxious and blatantly bash the 360. In rather short hindsight, this post was a little bit too much, so to balance this out a little bit, read this newer post.

We touched on this topic in this thread, but I think this topic really deserves it’s own thread:

Why do you think that the GPU access is restricted under Linux? Please vote for one in the comments or suggest your alternate reasoning.

• Piracy
• Competition with Linux game development
• Just Not ImportantDeveloping and supporting proper Linux drivers takes time, money, and valuable resources. Maybe Sony simply has more important priorities.
• Other?

I vote for Linux game dev. Think about it: if devs could access the full hardware under Linux, they could make the exact same games for Linux that they make for PS3 and sell to the exact same install base with one difference: They can cut Sony out of the picture and not pay them anything. The PlayStation revenue stream could really dry up.

That’s more than quadrillion floating point operations per second! And that’s only from 41,145 PS3s. Great job PS3 folders! Keep it up.

Our Folding@Home team is doing great too. We are currently at 419 with only 116 members. Very impressive. We are always accepting new members to the folding team. You can even join on your PC.

Join our Folding@Home Team: 55054

Remember you can run Folding@Home on your PSP via remote play, but you need to start remote play first and then start Folding@Home. Might as well have your PS3 doing something beneficial while it’s on remote play and not in use

Also we can’t let Joystiq pass us up, they seem to be about 10 or so places behind use and they have more members than we do.

Keep those PS3s Folding

Folding@Home update: PS3 breaks Petaflop barrier on its own