That probably means about 300-350K copies WW. That's not great, but then... the holidays aren't over.
I wouldn't be surprised to see it hit 1 million WW by early next year, and since sequels have far less investment than original IPs, that probably doesn't qualify as a "flop" at all.
Forza looks like a great TV ad. Really sparkly, very clean. Not much like real life, but.. well its not real life, its just a sim, and people like to pretend they could drive the cars they see in TV ads.
Gran Turismo looks like actual vehicles. It's actually difficult to tell its not HDTV footage.
People will like one or the other, depending on how they perceive a racing sim should be.
Anyone who says the slide out pad is dumb, or that it isn't a good phone... is a fool.
It's a *great* phone, and the slide out pad is awesome (yeah, I have one). I dunno what they did with the battery optimization, but mine works brilliantly for 2 days on end without a recharge, and I have tons of email accounts to retrieve data from, 3D live wallpaper running at all times, I surf and IM plenty on the phone, and have Google GPS location stuff running -- the same can...
L. O. L.
Honestly it's difficult to tell the difference between an animation sampled at 15 fps and one sampled at 30 fps, unless you use a terrible compression scheme.
Uncompressed animations are pretty hefty in size -- we're talking 60-80MB in the typical shooter, as an example, for 15 fps anims. Good compression usually yields a colossal 10-to-1 redux (although faster schemes yield only about 4-to-1), and animation memory budgets, for a relatively complex animated game like...
That's not really a "trick", per se. It's standard practice for games which have more than one animated skeleton/animation set, and the 360 has the same problem. The 360 also has the additional issue of not having a zillion SPUs to assist with animation decompression, so the compression schemes have to be simpler (thus taking more RAM), or the number of characters animated each frame has to be less.
Panda is totally correct that working around these issues...
@Godmars290
Split memory pools is not really as big an issue as you might think. Typically, games use at least 256MB for screenbuffers/meshes/textures/ etc, and swapping in some additional space from main RAM isn't really a big deal.
Not any bigger deal than having to do tiled rendering in a small 10MB eDRAM framebuffer, for example -- maybe even easier. PC devs have done this same thing (as the PS3) for eons.
Level-5 is so awesome. I think I own every single one of their (western released) games.
This game looks really, really cool.
They should definitely charge for the service, if they want Vita software to succeed in lieu of pirated software. Do you think the mechanism that downloads the UMD also shreds the physical disc, so you can't just turn around and sell it?
Or return it to your pirate friend?
@402,
Consider for a moment that a SPU never suffers from a cache miss. Ever. Everything resides in what is, effectively, L2-cache-speed local storage (and/or in registers, obviously). Yes modern desktop CPUs have nice branch predictors, and huge caches. Those caches are still automated, and those processors still spend ~80% of their time *stalling* on cache misses -- which is the single largest performance hindrance to any modern desktop CPU.
Factor that...
@Kahvipannu
The Cell has been used for all sorts of stuff that go unnoticed by pixel counters, outside of MLAA.
Animation -- Lair was freaking impressive in this regard, animating entire armies on the battlefield at 1080p, even if the game wasn't a phenominon. Also MAG... 256 players. Guess how that's possible, and why crossplat console shooters tend to keep it under 30. There are youtube videos show over 100 of those players all gathered in the sa...
...ARMs are mobile processors, designed specifically for power-saving. Their performance is crap, compared to desktop CPUs -- the A5 in the new iPhone 4S is on par with a Pentium 4, and that's when all cores are in use.
I think its safe to say that MS and Sony will NOT be using ARM architectures in their next home consoles. Portables, sure -- battery life matters in that case, and ARM designs are good at saving power. That comes at a steep performance price, however.
The Elder Papers: Cloudedge
Sounds like one of those fictional countries games have to make up, to avoid getting their game banned in certain parts of the world.
I'm very glad that this XBox magazine sees it how it is. The mark of good journalism, IMO, untainted by fanboy delusions.
Maybe Microsoft will listen to what their fans want, better than they have in the past. Nothing wrong with having great exclusives, both in quality and quantity.
From the article:
"The PS3 Move setup holds an edge over it’s Kinect counterpart. It controlled better and was more fun to play."
When I tried this game out, I had the exact same feeling. I have no idea why journalists went so nuts over the Kinect version, and not the Move version.
I would wager that, if the PS3 allowed a full install, it would perform the same as, or better than, the 360 version. If you have a 7200rpm HDD, you can believe it would perform far better. Perhaps a future patch will allow a full install.
MegaTexture tech is hugely dependant on the drive speed. If you throw in a DVD or BD to the mix, you're bound to have some issues over a straight HDD version -- as evidenced by the differences between the 360 installed/uninstalled ve...
Draw distance is determined by software, not hardware... Also, the only way to "improve" texturing, without modifying the textures themselves, would be to (via BOTH software and accompanying GPU support) enhance things like AA quality or texture sampling.
This "rumor" is about as laughable as they get.
Something I would expect on the 360, and even the PS3. I wouldn't expect it on a PC, though. If the tech is so flaky that you need to defrag your HDD, and install 8+ GB in a fairly solid block... its not really ready for primetime.
Ah, the bitter tears of the used gamer.
Rise up, used gamers, and demand that retail include said pass with your used purchase! They sure as heck make enough profit from their 500% markup on your tradein...