Random thoughts

The game is technically advance over 90% of console games out there, and there are virtual babes on the scene, but nothing to wet my pants over. I would only wet my pants when Half-life 2 comes out – oh yeah - I almost did when I first ran Doom 3 on my home PC. Agree with the extreme polygon ratios – damn, it’s like 300% that of any PS2 game. Yes, it’s true if I set it too near MAX everything. But still though – no one can deny Doom 3 is currently state-of-the-art in graphics and a step ahead of 9 out of 10 games out for PC today.

I’m trying to imagine PS2 without anime would be like:

Erasing all RPGS off the system including Final Fantasy, Star Ocean, Grandia, Nippin Inchi titles, Suideoken games, Kingdom Hearts, Dark Cloud, Tales of Destiny, .Hack, Xenosaga, Shin Megami Tensei games, Shadow Hearts
No Devil May Cry
No Castlevania
No Dead or Alive 2
No Soul Caliber 2
No Resident Evil games
No Zone of the Enders
No Front Mission
No Fatal Frame franchise
No Virtua Fighter
No Shinobi
No Nightshade
No ridge racer
No Tekken

And then trying to imagine Xbox without anime or hendai would be like:

Erasing all the 3D fighting games
No Panzer Dragoon games
No beach volleyball games from Tecmo
No Japanese games whatsoever and there aren’t that many to begin with

My second discussion about this was when David and I use to play Sonic 2 and Jungle Strike on Sega Genesis. I bought him Sonic 3D Blast for his birthday which means we played within a year of the next generation consoles’ debut. I know now that Sonic 3D Blast was the worst Sonic game ever name. Oops. I was a little confused because I saw Genesis version 3 on the shelf so as a kid I didn’t realize that Saturn, N64, or Playstation were out. I know Genesis has been died for 8 years – some say 10 years ever since Sega brought Saturn to stores. This was before I owned any electronic game console of my own. This is SEGA though. I told him that if SEGA made a Dreamcast 2, I would buy it. That’s the climax. Now SEGA games are scattered across 5 platforms (PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, Gameboy Advance, Nokia Ngage) In 1999 and 2000, he and I played Dreamcast like most would normally play Playstation 2. I was shocked that Dreamcast would be short lived. In fact, I was going to buy the successor to Dreamcast if there ever was one.

For Xbox, the best thing that it has a hard drive to store game saves and the worst is the bulky controller. 75% of the poll suggests that the Xbox controller is too big to play on and the Gamecube controller is very oddly configured. The real answer here is how to make a controller as close as the PS2 controller (Dual Shock 2) without getting into a law suit with Sony. The biggest disadvantage of PS2 is that it’s graphical GIGA-FLOP power, but the best advantage is the variety of good games out for it. To give you an idea of how much 1 gigaflop is – the Dreamcast could do a maximum of 1.2 Gigaflops like in games Quake III Arena, Sonic Adventure 2, Grandia 2 or Skies of Arcadia that really show the consoles abilities. The PS2 can do about 6 gigaflops. Gamecube’s advantage is often seen that it comes out with the best 1st party titles of the 3 competitors. The worst part is that it can not play movies which are totally out of whack since the Panasonic Q DOES exist, and this wouldn’t be the case if the most wasn’t referring to the norm. PC Engine is preferred to the best because it has the most games (which is kind of unfair in this sense) I would think that this answer is illegal although it is true according to a few polls on the net.

The way I see it is I’m never buying new again. Used Xboxes are not only less expensive, they come with the previous user’s game saves most of the time. The only time I should buy new is if I collect them and want an unopened Xbox to show off when it is antique. I buy to play it – not for showcase. Therefore, buying used doesn’t bother me.

This is Ian signing off.