First night with the Xbox = what's up with the Cube?

The Cube's hardware is good enough - just what Nintendo wants, and needs. Good hardware, good price, a good environment for Nintendo to sell lots of copies of its own games. Nintendo'll try and attract enough third party stuff onto the system to keep the crowd there for the first party stuff, but won't want so much third party stuff that any of the first party games will be overshadowed. Nintendo won't release lots of games on the system at any one time, so they can maximize the sales of each first party game, and so on. There will be some mature/older gamer stuff, but not enough stuff to compromise the kid-friendly image that protects Nintendo's core market.

Nintendo's not an aggressive company, and I don't think they're really looking to expand their market share... the Gamecube's the perfect hardware for Nintendo.

Anyone know if Nintendo is still carrying a relatively huge cash reserve? I remember reading something like that a year or so back.

well i wouldnt nessaceraly say all that

remember Mario, Zelda, Star Fox, and Metroid are all coming out around the same time

from what ive read and from a few developers ive had the opportunity to speek with i think the gamecube will attract developers bassed soley on ease of development

i think the PS2 has alot more power in it then weve seen so far but only a small handful of companies can really make use of it (though maybe with their new performance analyzer thing thatll change) but the gamecube sounds to be really easy for developers to get it to do what they want

Like ive told you befor ein the chat stone from a 3d artist stand point i like the GC because it can do 8 textures per pass
you reach a point in 3d art where more polys doesnt make a difference it ends up being all in the textures


One of my biggest rants on modern 3D games is that devs dont use enough of any hardwares texturing capability and just keep pushing more and more useless polys
you can do soo much with textures that you cant do with polys

thats why from an artist stand point the RE remake impresses me soo much
sure capcom could have made it like Code Veronica and made everything high poly and in 3d instead theyve decided to flex the Gamecubes texturing and lighting muscles and it looks increadible

but thats just me one thing ive learned in the last few years making art is there is soooo sooo much you can do with texturing that adding more polys to something would never do

I've had the XBox since the day it launched and I'm still amazed at the graphics in Halo and NFL Fever, it's amazing.


I'm hoping the 3rd party game companies come to their senses and release their games on Xbox.



I hope the XBox does not fail, it's an amazing piece of hardware.

John - more than whether Nintendo can attract new developers or not, I'm saying that I don't think Nintendo wants them.

Nintendo's chief concern is making sure that each one of their first party games sells a lot, and that their overall market share doesn't really drop. We saw that with the N64 - for Nintendo the N64 was a complete success. So, while third-party development is a necessity to keep their share of the market consistent, too much third-party development will get in the way of their first party game sales. That's what I think, at least.

Holding a big cash reserve just kind of highlights how conservative of a company Nintendo is.

The Gamecube is somewhat equivalent to that of an ATI Radeon card (ATI makes the card in the Gamecube)

And the X-Box is somewhat of an equivalent to that of a GeForce 4 TI4600.

That's a pretty big difference, the GeForce 4 simply has more raw power and visual quality, but the Radeon is definitely competition. The point is, raw poly power IS NOT the primary source of good graphics (Although it is very significant). It depends on the studio's programming and graphics producing skill. An example would be Soul Calibur on Dreamcast, that uses a PowerVR card (very weak by today's standards) the poly count in Soul Calibur is generally low but you cannot tell becuase of the skill the graphics designer used. Also the designers used very detailed texture mapping, that helps ALOT. I no longer compare consoles by raw hardware, Playstation 1 has taught me that good games come from good studios and you shouldn't be hardware dependant. Squaresoft tries to squeeze every bit of power they can get.

Rogue Leader looks pretty damn good on my TV. The only GameCube games that I have played that have been visually underwhelming to the point that it is an issue are the DC ports like Crazy Taxi.

Of course, I did not buy a Cube for texture mapping and poly mania. I want Mario, Metroid, and THQ wrestling titles. Capcom fighters would be nice, too, but they don't exactly push the hardware.

In any case, the Cube is light years ahead of the PS2, but I play more PS2 than GC. It's all about the gameplay, yo.

Rogue Leader- took 8 months to make. Start to finish. THATS AMAZING. What would the game have looked like if they took a whole year? If you listen to the commentary on Rogue they say they started the game one week before E3 and finished right before the Cubes launch. Thats pretty damn nice. Halo took like 4 years....

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Phire
The Gamecube is somewhat equivalent to that of an ATI Radeon card (ATI makes the card in the Gamecube)

And the X-Box is somewhat of an equivalent to that of a GeForce 4 TI4600.

That's a pretty big difference, the GeForce 4 simply has more raw power and visual quality, but the Radeon is definitely competition. The point is, raw poly power IS NOT the primary source of good graphics (Although it is very significant). It depends on the studio's programming and graphics producing skill. An example would be Soul Calibur on Dreamcast, that uses a PowerVR card (very weak by today's standards) the poly count in Soul Calibur is generally low but you cannot tell becuase of the skill the graphics designer used. Also the designers used very detailed texture mapping, that helps ALOT. I no longer compare consoles by raw hardware, Playstation 1 has taught me that good games come from good studios and you shouldn't be hardware dependant. Squaresoft tries to squeeze every bit of power they can get.

---

*cough* bullshit *cough*
I'm sorry to rain on your parade, but ATI does not make the GC's "Flipper Graphics Chip." Another company made the chip, then after it was finished ATI bought that company. There is absolutly no ATI technology in the Gamecube.

The Gamecube has some solid hardware, the reason the games don't look to sharp yet is because of all the PS2 ports. When some games designed from the ground up on the GC start shipping, we'll see the true power of the Gamecube. I'm looking forward to seeing Resident Evil in action myself. Only a couple more days.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Nick
In any case, the Cube is light years ahead of the PS2, but I play more PS2 than GC. It's all about the gameplay, yo.

---

Well, of course it's all about gameplay. I play my Neo Geo more than any of em' and the Saturn comes next. I just made a purly visual observation. It just kinda' startled me that the Xbox blew my eyeballs away right out of the starting gate. The Cube didn't and has yet to. I'm guessing that might change tomarrow tho'. Give the Cube's power a test drive? Why, thank you Capcom. Don't mind if I do!

I agree. For my money, Rallisport is undoubtedly the best looking game on the market today. I think about the Cube though, I just think it hasn't had anybody really focused on bringing the best out of it, other than Nintendo and Capcom. Gamecube is an extremely powerful system imo (proven by the likes of RE and Starfox Adventures), but no, it's not quite on Xbox's level. I can't wait until we start seeing second generation Xbox stuff :)