when you look at annual average.
If you take total units sold and divide by the number of years on the market, the 360 is, and always has been, last.
It has had a few months here and there where it did well but no lasting success.
Using a source that is alleged by some to exaggerate 360 sales, average annual sales:
Wii: 18.7M per year
PS3: 8.6M per year
360: 8.3M per year
When you look at long term trends we se...
it'll be PS2 vs 360 Arcade.
You can get a PS2 singstar bundle from Amazon for $120.
The internet predates the PC and the iPhone so how can anyone claim it was designed for either product?
It would be more accurate to say:
"The iPhone was designed for the internet but the PC was not."
Whereas the internet is fundamental to the iphone's functions, the internet was simply an add-on function for PCs. Anyone who remembers the good old days of unix email can testify to this.
They must not have played the previous versions.
Wow, GTA IV must be a veritable smorgasbord of new gameplay concepts!
Afterall, no matter good a game is, if GTA IV was just the same old gameplay with a new story and improved graphics, Eurogamer would not have given it more than, say, 7/10.
Right?
Compression isn't magic.
It's achieved through using mathemetical approximations of the original data to reduce it's data footprint. Video can only be compressed so much before image quality begins to worsen exponentially.
If you can live with significantly lower image quality just so you that you can call it 1080P then good for you. People with low standards are easy to please.
Just ask Rent-a-Center. They love people like that and try to provide t...
?
It has nothing to do with whether it's 360, PS3, PC or Wii.
The most important contributor to image quality is bit-rate.
Sending a true 1080P stream over an internet connection requires much more compression which results in all kinds of pixelation and other artifacts. More compression = worse image quality.
If you can't understand that basic scientific fact this discussion is beyond you.
Some of the more clever streaming systems (I won't n...
Apparently there are a lot of people who think unreliable, interruption prone, over-compressed mess that represents online movie streaming can even begin to compare with the pure fidelity of true 1080P Blu-Rays discs like Iron Man and Transformer that playback at a gorgeous 40mbps.
Even DVD's are capable of much higher continuous bit-rates than online video streams.
1080P streaming online is horrendous and unstable on any platform. It loses so much detail from excessive compression (only way to get 1080P via internet) that you get more better image quality from a standard 480P DVD.
The only way this makes sense is if Pachter knows about Microsoft's unannounced MMO deals.
He might.
Microsoft does distribute a best-of-breed 360 tools and middleware package which even includes tech developed by 3rd parties.
Even first gen 360 games featured shared technology and even coordinated gameplay concepts between first and third party developers. In fact, Microsoft is known to be very hands-on with any company doing 360 development.
The problem isn't the lack of investment, development, licensing or sharing of 360 exclusive middleware. Microsoft has don...
for a little bit of exclusive content for a multiplatform title, the visual failings of it's games are certainly not due to a lack of ambition or funding.
As for 1st party middle-ware, all Microsoft owned or funded studios using their own engines built their engines for the 360 architecture from the ground up.
If a 1st party game does not have SSAO it's only because the developers decided that it wasn't worth the performance trade-off for that particular game.
...
is that, unlike the PS3, the 360's run-of-the-mill, PC-like architecture does not benefit much from significant engine customization. The reason is that the rendering pipeline is very straightforward.
That's why we see that 360 games built on custom-built 1st party engines that are fully optimized for the hardware perform no better than the games built on tweaked off-the-shelf engines.
After 4 years, we can see ample proof of this as we compare existing games.
...
it appears that you're just determined to come up with lame excuses rather than face reality.
There are lots of engines built at great cost from the ground-up exclusively for the 360 and there are others, such as UE3, have been severely modified, also at great cost, specifically for the 360 hardware.
It's been 4 years.
There are no more excuses.
Because the game got poor reviews it's visuals are underrated.
While it had some occasionally inconsistent visuals it is without a doubt the most technically advanced game of it's type on any platform and certainly one of the most technically ambitious games of any type anywhere.
It's easy to draw faraway cities if you never get to go there but Lair was able to seamlessly display absolutely huge amounts of scenery while allowing one to hop onto a dragon and actually ...
1) DVD18 is just a two-sided DVD9, ie, it's two DVD's stuck together. To use the other side you have to take the DVD out and flip it manually, no different than having two discs.
2) The lack of hard-drive in 360's is a problem. You can get away with a DVD for PC games because all PCs have a hard-drive. You first install the game and play it off the hard-drive. On the 360, the console has to draw data directly from the DVD while rendering the game. This means that it can't pu...
Microsoft knows how to make money off Americans.
equate to "selling better?"
The 360 started going into decline ever since the Wii and PS3 came out and it's market share simply continues to shrink.
It has now dipped under 30% and continues to decline.