26th May 2005, 9:21 PM
Quote:But, you see, EVERY company that makes a DVD player, by international copyright law, is forced to pay royalties to the DVD... erm... High Council or whatever it is they call themselves these days. If Nintendo had the machine play DVDs normally without alterations, they would have to pay out that fee for every single system sold, meaning they would need to get that money from somewhere, and that somewhere would be us.
So, instead of making those pay who only wanted a game system, they did what Microsoft did. They put that cost into a seperate dongle that unlocks the feature. Those who want DVD playback can pay Nintendo's royalties, and those who don't, don't have to.
Sony, I am pretty sure, is a member of that group, so they don't mind paying themselves royalties. :)
Quote:Am I off with my numbers or what? I think it's pretty liberal, but it paints a realistic picture. I cant afford a full Revolution package, but I already have a DS, so that cuts the 170+ off the final cost. But it's still holy shit expensive. The PS3 and XBox360 projected costs are way out of my pocket book. I'm not going to get a loan or pay as much as my big screen HDTV for a fucking video game system.
This generation proves that lower prices don't win the race. If that were true, Nintendo would be in first right now. So this doesn't really matter... and yeah, Life is a quite reasonable $50/year, not something ridiculous like that... :)
Quote:1. I have trouble reconciling the fact that the controller may feature some new out of this world control scheme, without traditional D-Pad and A/B Buttons with the concept of downloading classic Nintendo games. When I get Rev, that is one feature I will be partaking of on a constant basis, and I will want to use a control that is familiar to me when I do.
Either you'll be using a Gamecube controller or it won't be quite as odd as some people think it might be, I expect... but if the stuff Lazy posted is accurate they say that we'll be using the Rev pad for the old games, so obviously it'll have at least most of a standard layout...
Quote:2. I'm very happy that Nintendo decided to use SD cards as storage media, because now all of the major players have decided to go with common flash media. This is good in many ways. One, we can spend less money overall because our memory card media is useful for applications besides gaming. Two, this can open the door for all sorts of special gameplay features, since you can store any kind of file on them with a billion different devices. Three, this practice will likely prove to be a new breed of killer app for memory card devices, especially SD, since they are already so widespread, and will help further drive down prices for the cards, even for people who will never use them for gaming.
With X-Box, though, you can just use the harddrive... PS3 also has a HDD, but I'm not sure if it'll also be used as a standard game-save space (though if you have one, I sure hope it lets you use it for that!). But GC is still going to rely on memcards... yes, quite large memcards, but memcards. Poor in comparison. As for 'standard format', that'd matter more if you could use them in multiple systems, but I highly doubt that you could use your GC SD card in a PS3... formatting and all that...
Quote:2. Agreed. I'd just like to expand that using standard multiuse memory cards is great for the reasons you named, which all falls under the concept of standardization. However, I would like to see that taken further. The many memory card formats there are now are akin to having many different formats of DVDs. Wait... Yes, we have many DVD formats, but in the end it was all standardized so that new ones don't emerge and all DVD players support all those formats. Memory cards didn't even bother using the same standardized shapes and pin numbers, so making a device use all the formats now requires making a LOT of different slots for memory cards, which is stupid. Either the market needs to eliminate formats until one is left (and considering they are functionally the same, I really don't care which one, well I'd prefer one that's small and cheap to produce) or the major memory card makers all need to get together and design a standard. At the very least, the market has prevented this from going the way of printer cartridges. There is a store here that SPECIALIZES in the hundreds of obscure printer cartridges out there, "Cartridge World". Basically all that's needed is a standardized slot shape and pin set, to allow backwards compatibility, and a very high potential for upgrading both maximum capacity and transfer speeds.
... does it need N64 controller ports too then? :D