[QUOTE="DaBrainz"]Guild Wars will always have this game beat.MadExponent

I'm just glad that there is one nation that **** like call of duty,half life and other hollywood a like titles arent the most popular. -Flagg-

For those not already in the know, the Xbox 360's "Jasper" hardware revision may spell doom for the infamous Red Ring of Death. This hardware revision's CPU and GPU are both 65 nm and the system draws less power. Less heat and lower power consumption are conditions which will hopefully obliterate the RRoD issue and make buying Xbox 360s much safer, as the failure rate will hopefully be lower.

They haven't been around long enough to tell if they can have the RRoD problem, but you can find the details here.

Angry_Beaver

[QUOTE="SecretPolice"][QUOTE="c02z"] you have no idea what you talking about. first of allthere are no ISP residential service that offer 7mb/s ( assume 7mbps)even with ATT Uverse. and what is the percentage of people using high speed internet nowadays? Jhcho2 is right, even if it does reach mainstream casuals wont buy the idea. c02z

1. Of course MS won't go BluRay this gen...they're already 3 years in and have a large install base. If anything, they would only do something like their HD-DVD add-on i.e. for movies only, not games. But what would be the point when standalone BR players are only getting cheaper?

2. For sure MS will emphasize DD next gen, but we'll probably only see a co-existing ecosytem like the PC right now where games are available on Steam/D2D and also on discs at your local BestBuy. I know I prefer DD since its more convenient for me, but I'm not diluted in thinking it is for everyone.

3. Notice how the consoles are becoming more PC-like? Notice how all PC games are installed? Even if BR increases its read speeds, the writing is on the wall: installs are inevitable, and just plain better from a performace standpoint. The only thing we can hope for is that they come up with a clever way of "installing while idle/playing" after a small initial install, or some way that you're not forced to sit through a long explicit install process. Avoiding an explicit 15-20 minute install is necessary for consoles IMO, if anything just as a convenience factor vs. a straight-up PC.

I'm curious how people in this forum can still have loyalty to a particular gaming hardware brand, after all the things that have happened this gen?

Nintendo seemed to have an interesting idea with the motion-sensing controller when they first announced the Wii. There were dreams of new FPS experiences, better ways to interact with games, and overal ingenuity that Ninty is known for. But what did we get? A console that simply ignores the hardcore audience. I can't bash Ninty for making tons of games catered to a more casual audience since, hey, everybody needs to pay the bills. But how they are completely ignoring the non-casuals is shocking. Would you have still bought a Wii at launch, knowing that the good titles would be few and far between, and that Nintendo may no longer care to make anything other than mini-games?

Sony, on the other hand, has suffered from different problems with the PS3 and PSP. For what was initially a $600 platform, the games underwhelmed. Would you have still bought a PS3 at launch knowing that it would take almost 2 years for the really good titles to start rolling in, and that it would drop in price so rapidly? This year Sony finally put out some high-quality titles, but multplats still lag behind the competition. For all the bragging they've done about the Cell a competing platform at half the price seems to be chugging just as well. Their consistent PR BS only seemed to have made people jaded about them. To add insult to injury, they've all but left the PSP to die. There were still some great titles this year, but it seems all the devs have already jumped ship. Their recent Playstation Store initiative is great, but is something I've been wondering about for 2 years already, and strikes me a too little, too late, possibly because they didn't accept that UMDs sucked.

Microsoft did a lot of good things to build a fanbase this time around, but all that inevitable will get forgotten for their next console due to the RRoD issue. Would you still have bought a 360 at launch knowing that your chances of hardware failure were so high? I suppose the problem has more or less gone away, but as a shrewd consumer, I find it odd that MS still hasn't come out with an press release explicitly stating what exactly was wrong, and exactly how they've fixed it. I'm also curious to see how much longer the Xbox Live subscription will last...if PSN gets its act together and offers the exact same experience, and Steam keeps on growing and getting better, will they still be able to justify a fee?

PC harwareis a slightly different beast, at least from my experience. When upgrading to the latest and greatest, I've never cared if it was an Intel vs AMD, or Nvidia or ATI...whichever one was the fastest, or offered the best price-to-performance, got my cash. Looking back, it almost seems as though I've flip-floped between the competitors each time I've upgraded. But I can imagine it sucked for someone that bought an expensive Nvidia Geforce4-series card after their successful 2-3 series, only for the cheaper ATI Radeon8500-series to beat it out in performance.

Personally, I can't see myself jumping into bed right off the bat with any of these companies next generation based on brand alone. What about you?