Actually the emails are going out on Monday, according to Major Nelson:
"Xbox Preview Program Update: The first set of notification emails will start to go out on Monday, July 27th." (via twitter)
GWAVE: Probably because the camera is ONE accessory, yet it could be used to replace mice, steering wheels, golf clubs, other motion sticks, etc.
You're being incredibly negative towards the idea, but when used well, Natal could be very very good. Halo is quite possibly the worst example of a game that could ever make use of it, but there are plenty of games out there that could easily benefit from the likes of Natal, including genres that don't even exist yet.
Saying things like "ridiculous graphics @ 480p 25fps 0x AA " isn't really helping your case, either.
What makes everyone so sure that it's Microsoft?
Could easily be a 3rd party game, hell it could even be an XNA thing as it has Avatar support.
I don't think this video is anything significant, I think it was meant to show off the 360 rather than anything special about Avatars.
It's not Natal, if it was Natal then it wouldn't need that little power bar at the bottom of the screen, your power would just be your swing.
To get an idea of what to expect from the next generation, it's always worth looking at what the PC market is doing, because lets face it the technology put inside PCs will likely find its way into Consoles in the future anyway (or at least a derivative of it).
The very very latest, fastest processors today, Intel's high-end server models, even when bunched up so you get 8 super fast cores, are only barely able to do real time ray tracing and even then, it's either low resolution...
People say the same thing about FPSs and other strategy games, this will do fine.
It depends what they mean by they "can only do their games". I mean, what specifically are they referring to? Is it the graphics? The Texture resolution? The number of polygons? Or is it a bit more than that, does it fall down to physics, AI, particles and such?
GG is a good example, their graphics engine actually works completely differently to most others out there and that's designed to take advantage of the CELL, essentially rather than pushing polygons in the regular way,...
Something that far too many people don't understand is just what the CELL actually is and, more importantly, what it's meant to be used for.
It's a bit like the Megahertz myth that AMD and Intel used to fight about, you can show lots of benchmarks and statistics showing just how fast the CELL can be, but the reality is that it's still a general-purpose CPU. The GPUs inside both the 360 and the PS3 can push polygons way faster than the 7 CELL processors in the PS3 ever could, but that's ...
I think what the guy is trying to get at (flaimbait title aside) is that ALL of those games you listed use an engine custom built for the PS3, whereas the 360's exclusives are nearly always built with the Unreal Engine (Which is designed to run on multiple platforms and thus wont take full "advantage" of the 360). I suppose the logic isn't too bad, when you look at how the Unreal Engine runs on the PS3 (i.e. about as well as it does on the 360 and occasionally a bit more stuttery), ...
Picking stuff up is the only "difficult" part. Selecting plants is easy ,just use a radial dial. You never have more than 10 to pick from anyway and there's nothing stopping them using TWO radial dials at 5 a piece (press LB for one, RB for another). The placing of the plants is super easy, the game uses a grid system that isn't that large, it's about 15x5 or something like that, which can easily be zipped around by just tapping the analogue stick.
To pick up sun, why not just...
It'll work just fine, it's not the most fast-paced TD out there, really.
Microsoft doesn't care about loosing face, they care about making money. They're not going to make ANY money on any blu-ray disks sold, so why should they care?
On the other hand, they've been doing a lot of deals with movie studios for downloadable films, which they'll make money from every purchase of. That's the real reason MS wont release a Blu-ray player for the 360.
And note that I'm not saying which is better.
Its certainly nice looking and I wouldn't say no to swapping my current PSP for it, but the price is just far too high for me. As nice as the console is, I just wouldn't feel like I'd be getting much for my money, not when a regular PSP costs half the price.
I'm using Daemon tools right now on windows 7. I don't know where you heard that, but its completely and utterly absurd.
"Good" for gamers? I wouldn't say that, but that's not to say it'll be "bad" for gamers, either. The second 7 is on shelves, there wont be a PC game out there in development that wont work on the OS. As for previous games, it's as Compatible as Vista, which despite some reports to the contrary is pretty good when it comes to compatibility with games.
7 will be good for everyone in general, its like Vista's best bits but almost none of Vista's bad bits, plus a few new...
Erm Windows has had Multi-core support since before XP...
The hardcore will be fine, in fact we'll be better off for it. It's a lot easier to justify a large development cost when the target systems have more owners. The hardcore will always be there, we'll always be buying the best games and several million units sold is nothing to be sniffed at. Even if the big publishers, EA, Activision and Ubisoft all went completely casual, SOMEONE would cash in on the hardcore out there.
I believe the point is to punish the survivors who stick together too much. So you've got a choice: stick together and get spiked, or spread out and get smoked/pounced.