29 Oct
2001
29 Oct
'01
2:48 a.m.
On Topic and Off Topic :-)
At 11:44 PM 10/28/01 -0800, it was written:
PS2 is last year, by Xmas all his friends will be
talking about Xbox and
GameCube. We have N64, and I resisted forever getting one, and relented
only as the price dropped to about $150 with a game (he just HAD to have
Zelda). Keep in mind this is a razor blade industry, regardless of the high
price of the console, the real money and costs will be in games etc.
Off topic part:
I was originally quite excited by the Xbox, I still think the _hardware_ is
cool, but the fact that Microsoft will be in charge of the software makes
me cringe. The first dedicated console that crashes not because of the
games :-( If I had to buy one this year I'd go with the PSTwo. Best of the
current lot, if I could get full docs and write my own software, I'd get
the Xbox.
My recommendation is to forget the console, and put
together a gaming PC.
Better intelligence to the games, and immensely greater selection and
usefullness.
On topic part:
This will basically cost 10x as much in real terms and be harder to
maintain. Unless you use it only for games and even then games from
different years won't work on it.
So how many people collect gaming environments? It seems that classic
computers go back to the early days of the C-64 vs Atari console wars.
Remember the advertisements where the young guy is sitting in a job
interview and the interviewer says, "So you can score 200,000 in space
donuts and get to the 15th level in maze wars, but what else can you do?"
and then they offer that if your kid said, "I can hack a C64" they would
hire him. (they don't really say that, they imply programming ability :-)
But I've been a gamer as long as I've been a programmer (which is waaay too
long ;-) and witnessing the folks who got the original 4.2BSD image of the
game Haunt running under NetBSD/VAX was an example of the extremes folks
would like to get to, to recreate gaming experiences.
All the gaming magazines (especially the ones that are left) wax rhapsodic
about the "good old days" when polygon count and particle physics weren't
as important as game play. There are some classic computer games out there
(SpaceWar being perhaps the most famous) that need preserving.
--Chuck