What console will win this generation?

[Carnivol]

Love, love love Metroid Prime 3... but, it was too blue. Regardless, some of those planets were absolutely stunning to behold. Plus, those controls.

People always like to talk about Phendrana Drifts, but, man, setting foot on Bryyo in Metroid Prime 3? Sooooo good.

Wii is more popular because of 2 reasons:

1. Its cheap (I got a used one off Craigslist for only $40, worked perfect.)
2. Its got a good rep because its been deemed a console that can supposedly keep you fit, which is why parents buy it for their kids/teens.

1. Used sales don't count towards official sales numbers.
2. Out of Mario franchise, Just Dance, Zelda, LEGO franchise, and Wii Sports, only two are what the average consumer sees as "active" games.

[Dracarys]

Hopefully PS4 because another gen of games being held back because of inferior hardware will suck.

[yurieu]

Hopefully PS4 because another gen of games being held back because of inferior hardware will suck.

who is holding games due to hardware?

[[STARS]TyranT]

Argh stop it. The 'Must play Metroid Prime Trilogy' has returned.

On that note, I realised I own Metroid Prime Trilogy, and never tried 1 and 2 with the Wii controls.

[Dracarys]

who is holding games due to hardware?

MS.

[Guest]

Which ever one gets hacked first, probably.

[Carnivol]

Which ever one gets hacked first, probably.

I bet Sony would be happy if they didn't sell PSP units at a loss.

Hopefully PS4 because another gen of games being held back because of inferior hardware will suck.

Despite Carmack's initial comments about the PS4's architecture being quite good, I find it interesting that he took a much more passive "Pros and cons" stance when people asked him to pick the best one. While it doesn't take a genius to see that most of the hardware's "less capable" in many ways on the One (although there's a lot of stuff that's left to be revealed in terms of internal wirings and potential bottle necks on both the One and PS4), I must say that the concept of cloud computing for tasks inn video games is pretty interesting if they can pull it off - and it's a much more important step in terms of providing "richer" (and more extensive/comprehensive) gameplay experiences than just boosting your RAM speed to the current state-of-the-art ever could. Technically, the only two bottle necks you're facing on "the cloud" is your bandwidth and the local hardware's rendering capability. And while not a permanent truth or a constant, the way things currently are in terms of image rendering on most display devices, you can under ideal circumstances with even current day technology transfer a data package containing a single frame from one side of the world to the other in less time than it takes your system to transfer an image to the average digital display device and have that device draw it on screen. Personally not a fan of "cloud gaming" in terms of video transferring and input transfers, but it's still a curios bit of noteworthy trivia. Of course, that doesn't mean the cloud is some god send and that MS will use it for that, but the potential for a lot of interesting things are there. It's just a matter of how developers take advantage of it.

The prime sample of "how" to take advantage of the Cloud, according to many, is assigning AI tasks to the Cloud. That doesn't neccessarily translate to everything you're playing with or against in the game will lag like in an FPS or anything like that, if that's what a person believes; it just shows how narrow their scope and mind is on the subject (and also why they're likely not paid to think), lag could be done away with by ensuring that it's the client side (and not server) that ultimately decides things in a single player experience. But even better, you could completely eliminate the latency responds issues too. Say that you take an entire world, populate it entirely with unique entitites that're all operating on their own complex AI system in the cloud, rather than some dumbed down mass AI on the local system, and the moment where latency might become a concern, the cloud could hand over AI command of anything that's within rendering distance to the home console instead. Suddenly you have a world that can be "entirely alive", without it really being much of a concern to your hardware specs. This could make next gen sandbox experiences much more "alive" than what pretty much anything else without an access to a server farm could pull off.

A game that comes to mind is F-Zero X and F-Zero GX, two racing games that donned 30 racers on track, 29 being AI controlled. While they weren't exactly "advanced" AIs, they were still individual entities racing on their own and responding to each other's presence and eachother's vehicle stats. In a similar fashion, cloud computing could technically allow you to give much more complex AI behavior to each vehicle. I guess we'll know soon if Forza does this.

Games like FIFA will probably allow for "background calculation" of matches for those playing seasons and such. So you don't have to sit around and wait for your system to fully simulate all matches locally before you can go further in your season. That's actually a pretty awesome thing, but since it's trendy to hate on sports games 'cause of "LOL! SAME EVERY YEAR!", I don't expect people to understand how great that'd actually be for those who play those games.

Depending on how their cloud will work up against cloud storage too, you might see something like Minecraft get proper server support with "infinite" world sizes too. (Just to use something as another sample of where). If they want to get really fancy on it, you could technically receive data from 3 sources at the same time too. Disc drive, HDD and network. Split the packages according to transfer rate of the available channels and you could see trimmed loading times. Theoretical bullshit, of course, but, yeah,

And unlike Microsoft, Sony doesn't exactly currently have the resources to pull off "the cloud" at the same scale this moment. Either way, E3 will be interesting. All about the games, MS said. All about the games... better not disappoint me again

[Dracarys]

I don't see cloud taking off as that takes a once a 24 hour connection and makes it a constant one while you play. I cannot see that going down well for single player games. In addition to this a lot of the worlds internet just cannot support such a requirement, still plenty people in slow areas, bad connection areas, data caps etc. Seems a lot of work for an option not everyone will make use of, especially for multiplats.

[Carnivol]

I don't see cloud taking off as that takes a once a 24 hour connection and makes it a constant one while you play. I cannot see that going down well for single player games. In addition to this a lot of the worlds internet just cannot support such a requirement, still plenty people in slow areas, bad connection areas, data caps etc. Seems a lot of work for an option not everyone will make use of, especially for multiplats.

Connection wise, we're always moving closer to having a world where everything's connected 24/7. (Heck, my cellphone's data transfer rate is faster than my internet connection was five years ago ... and also cheaper .. and I live in the middle of nowhere ... and I've had this for two years now ... I can now have 4G where I live ... technology's changing, and it's changing fast). But, of course, there'll always be places that're "disconnected" from the cloud, for one reason or another ... but, still, it doesn't remove the fact that the cloud concept can still help enrichen the gameplay experience for those that DO have access to it. The samples I used are traditional gameplay concepts, that can be expanded upon with the contribution of external factors, and bandwidth isn't really much of a concern for concepts something as basic as AI calculations and idle tasks; if you're in a situation where that's not doable, you can basically axe online gaming all together from your list of activities (past-present-future), as the bandwidth requirement for that would in most cases likely be larger.

[Guest]

Even though I won't be buying a new-gen console, PS4 will be the winner, because it's popular. And probably, unlike Xbox One, you won't need to pay additional fees for almost everything.

[veronesis]

The DRM thing is bad enough but with Kinect watching you play games? Yeah, Eff em'

[BBboy20]

M$ isn't going to have a roundtable post-show press release so yeah, I can safely say that Zero is out of the race, just have to wait to see what Sony has to say now for E3.

[Enigmatism415]

R.I.P. XBOX ONE, you just struck out.

I knew it would pay off to remain a proud and loyal Sony fanboy! They just "get it".

[Enigmatism415]

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/691088-xbox-one/66417274?page=3