what's most hilarious about this particular situation is who isn't talking about xbox 360. the answer? large gaming publications who know everything and are afraid to speak until the cat's officially out of the bag. the news really is too big for the gaming industry... so big that its not even allowed to talk about it!

Posted by: ryan on May 11, 2005 10:19 AM

Am I the only one who doesn't give a fuck about any of this? The high school girl metaphor rings true to me -- in that all the buzz is incredibly purile and inane. (I mean. Yes, it always is; but this strikes me as particularly exceptional.)

Who seriously debates something like system specs anymore? Especially given that the more powerful systems become, the less able the majority of developers are to take advantage of them? Most late generation PS2/Xbox/GC games still look about as good as Dreamcast games at the end of the day. And I'm not one of those assholes who thinks the Dreamcast was like, way ahead of its time.

This is a tangent, but it makes me wonder how much good the next generation of consoles is really going to do for the games themselves? If all we are going to get is higher-resolution versions of the same crap we're playing today -- NOW WITH ONLINE PLAY -- are people going to still want to pay money for it? When will the amount of money the industry is dumping into console production reach a point of diminishing returns?

Again, I am predicting an industry crash. It's mostly wishful thinking, but I have a feeling that next year's E3 will be held at a Holiday Inn in Denver.

Posted by: Mister Toups on May 11, 2005 04:50 PM

Ha... it's funny - when others post rumours about MS products they are giddy. When the same thing happened with Apple, they tried to shut them down. I dont have a link from where i read about it... and it was probably just used at a marketing tool for publicity, but still. That crazy, fire-beathing steve jobs.

Posted by: Girl_from_Mars on May 12, 2005 10:24 AM

I agree with Mister Toups... This reminds me of an interesting article on Gamasutra I read a few months ago about how hardware manufacturers are forcing the industry in the direction of "technoholism".

I mean, I seriously doubt that many game developers these days are saying, "man, if only we had better hardware, we could make such a better game." My guess would instead be that they're saying, "dammit, here comes yet another hardware platform we've got to learn from ground zero in order to stay afloat." Keep changing the tools artists use and they never get enough time to master them, and they won't have much time to focus on the game itself because they'll be too busy focusing on the technology behind it.

And from the consumer's perspective, it does seem like the next-gen consoles are going to need higher resolution TV's for their great new graphics to look much different from their older-generation counterparts; that means that aside from spending hundreds of dollars on a new XBox 360, I'd also have to spend a few hundred on a decent 720p HDTV, at which point I'm wondering why I didn't just buy a computer instead.

Posted by: Foopy on May 12, 2005 11:04 AM

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when was the last time any console's "big splash" lasted longer than the next one?

The only one's really talking about the 360 to death, and it's marketing campaign (which I flat-out refused to take part it for some, I'd like to think, obvious reasons), are gaming geeks such as ourselves. The rest of the world doesn't care, and neither will we in about a week when we ohh and ahh Sony and Nintendo's new wares.

If anything, both those two are just sitting back and enjoying themselves as they watch the little guy with the big head make some rather stupid and arrogant mistakes right out of the gate.

Posted by: matt@fort90.com on May 12, 2005 01:39 PM