you pretty much nailed it. sony+ibm's Cell processor is generating a lot of hype. whether it'll live up to the hype is anyone's guess. sony's pretty damn good at hyping up their products (with the exception of their MP3 players, which are pretty much dead in the water), so it could just be clever marketing. but i'm sure the PS3 will be a pretty decent performer, at the very least.

there's not enough information about nintendo's next system to tell how it'll perform. one thing's for sure; it'll have to be leaps and bounds beyond the PS3 in every way imaginable, or it'll share the same fate as GC and N64

 

People always seem to forget that the PS2 beat the XBox to market by more than a year. Of course it's graphics are worse than the Xbox. Compare any top-of-the-line PC from today to one from a year ago, and it will be the same story. I remember when the PS2 came out, I was amazed by the graphics. Then a year later, the Xbox came out. And while the graphics were better than the PS2's, they didn't have the same "amazing" quality that the PS2 did initially.

While I agree that the better Xbox graphics are a good reason to buy the Xbox over the PS2 now, talking about them as "lagging" is incorrect. They were actually an industry leader, and the Xbox was playing catchup from the get-go, and had to have better graphics due to its later release date and limited game selection (initially), or it would have flopped.

That being said. I don't own a console. h: That's what I have a PC for, which owns any console in terms of graphics/sound/# of games/playability, etc.

 

Well, it depends on what you wanted to do with the system. If you compare early DC games to early PS2 games, and look out how much sooner the DC arrived than the PS2 did, you'd be amazed (Hell, every DC game could be played in Progressive scan and hooked up to a VGA monitor no prob). What sold the PS2 was the ability to play PS1 games and be a home DVD player, while having very good graphics. The PS2 has had a checkered history, and it's a good console, but it's taken years until games have come out to really push the system (GTA:SA, MGS3, Killzone, GT4, etc...). The PS2 was a very complex console to program for, and it basically had none of the attributes that we should expect (effective built in AA, standard 480p and 16x9, blah blah...) and expected the developers to determine what they needed in the game. If Sony can learn from these mistakes, the PS3 will be a runaway hit... it's just a question of seeing what will happen...

 

You buy the console based on the games you want to play. It really doesn't matter if the PS3 has 64mb of video ram and uses an Nvidia "Humpyoursister5.0" chip. If it doesn't have any good games, noone will buy it.

 

I agree with you about the Dreamcast. It was a good system, and I'm surprised it tanked the way it did.

Do you mean "push the system" as in push it to its performance limits, or push as in advertise/have games that people want to buy? I'm hoping you mean the latter, because GTA:SA and GT4 are obviously sequels to games that were "must-have" items when PS2 was pretty new.

As far as the PS2 lacking support for 480p, and 16x9, back in 2000 I didn't know a single person who had a TV capable of displaying either of those modes. HDTV, LCDs, and plasmas were all either in their infancy or not yet on the market in any sort of reasonable quantity. I didn't know the DC had 480p support, but I also didn't know anyone who even wanted to hook up their console to a PC monitor or HDTV until a year ago. The PS2 would have had to be pretty prophetic to predict in 2000 what people would want from a console in 2005.

 

actually they said it wont improve that much over gc or suttin is what i heard, they want to reinvent the way games are played... they think they can kill the current trend with new ways of doing things (exhibit one... the DS with its touch screen)

 

I meant the former. The PS2 until recently was relatively untapped in terms of processing power. Early games couldn't make use of the new programming involved with 2 vector units and only 4MB of video ram that was tied to the main processor much like cache. Very unusual hardware design that required an entirely new form of design. In the last year, they started getting it right, but it took like 3-4 years to get there

Not true. PS2s have the capability for progressive scan game playback and 16x9 monitor support in them, but it wasn't "enforced" or made practical. Implementation and design of the progressive engines and 16x9 were left up to the programming team to figure out. I much prefer the XBox's implementation of telling the system of the best your TV can handle, and having it autonomously do it's best to meet that with the game you're playing.

 

Your knowledge of consoles >>>>> mine.

I'm a PC Gamer anyway. Consoles are cool, but limited in their functionality. Especially now, so late in their life cycle. They were much cooler when they were new and had better graphics/games than PCs. Currently PC games blow consoles out of the water. It should be cool when the PS3/XBox 2 come out, as they should once again have killer graphics and games, at least for the first year or so.

 

And unfortunately, that's still 10 more great exclusives than PS2 has. PS2 may have many more games than GCN, but 98% of them suck, and the ones that are really good aren't exclusive to the PS2.
Quality > Quantity

 

yeh, i love gamecubes "quality" construction too.. you cant put the fugger anywhere! and the controller... dont even get me started

xbox>ps2>type-s>*>n64>gamecube in the controlere territory