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Nintendo Switch

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Re: Nintendo Switch

#221

Post by mypalmike »

masklinn wrote: post #182
fsloth wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As years go by the less I'm convinced that the platform with the fastest hardware is the best. With consoles, on the technical front, I want constant fluid framerates and predictability. For instance, I fail to see how PS4 Witcher 3 could be better than Witcher 3 on XBox one by any standard I care about when gaming (and I'm a professional graphics programmer). That said, yes, it seems Sony is winning this generation…

> As years go by the less I'm convinced that the platform with the fastest hardware is the best. It's never been the case. The GC was the most powerful console of its generation, the PS2 was by far the least powerful one (with the possible exception of the Dreamcast, not quite sure where that one was).

Gamecube was quite memory-limited both in main and video RAM compared to XBox and PS2. My team was not the only one that had to play tricks to fit on that thing, swapping in and out parts of main memory (to/from the overly spacious audio memory area IIRC).

Re: Nintendo Switch

#222

Post by pjmlp »

misingnoglic wrote: post #143
chalupa-man wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do want to point out that it matches current consoles in the US, but is actually going to be significantly more expensive than anything on the market in many countries. Where I am, for example, if they release at exactly the US price -- which they won't, prices always get inflated -- a Switch will cost more than a PS4 that comes packed with Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Dishonored 2, three hit games. On top of this, I thi…

Regarding the iPad, do kids/parents see that as a gaming device? You can't get real games on one of those.

Even grown ups.

For me playing has mostly moved into the phone and tablet as I am often on the go.

RTS games are great for touch interfaces.

Re: Nintendo Switch

#223

Post by jbergens »

misingnoglic wrote: post #143
chalupa-man wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do want to point out that it matches current consoles in the US, but is actually going to be significantly more expensive than anything on the market in many countries. Where I am, for example, if they release at exactly the US price -- which they won't, prices always get inflated -- a Switch will cost more than a PS4 that comes packed with Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Dishonored 2, three hit games. On top of this, I thi…

Regarding the iPad, do kids/parents see that as a gaming device? You can't get real games on one of those.

Depends on the parents and the kids. Some kids love to play on their tablets and others prefer 3DS or similar. You can't say that no kids (or teenagers or adults) play on tablets.

Re: Nintendo Switch

#224

Post by inDigiNeous »

eltoozero wrote: post #84
derefr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In HCI terms, the Gamecube didn't do much. But it was Nintendo's single largest leap in architecture and hardware power—it sticks out above their console "power curve" trend-line quite strikingly. The Wii was basically just a higher-clocked (~2x CPU and GPU) Gamecube—much more like the XBO S or the PS4 Pro are for this generation, than like the architectural reinventions Nintendo usually gets up to. The fact that it…

Dolphin EMU really highlights how strong and under-appreciated so many of the GameCube gen games are: Viewtiful Joe, F-Zero X, Luigi's Mansion, Mario Sunshine, Pikmin, Wind Waker, and especially the Metroid Prime series are outgrageously good games. Hard to think of any real bombs in that entire library TBH.

Oh man, games like F-Zero GX, you just don't get this stuff on Sony or Microsoft consoles. Also Metroid Prime, Super Smash Bros Melee! Stuff of legends. 4 player support on the same couch? Damn. Gamecube might have been the best console from Nintendo in my view.

Re: Nintendo Switch

#225

Post by satysin »

darrennix wrote: post #21

Watching the graphics quality of the Zelda demo, I can't help but think: If only this weren't on Nintendo. The graphics look equivalent to Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (2002). As with so many Nintendo demos; I find myself wishing they were a cross-platform game studio rather than a lagging hardware company.

> The graphics look equivalent to Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (2002).

What?! Okay so it might not look quite as pretty as The Witcher 3 or Uncharted 4 but it still looks modern. The explosion/fire/smoke effects are beautiful. The art style isn't for photo-realistic but to have a unique-yet-familiar style that allows them to make use of exaggerated/cartoon-like presentation.

Saying it looks like a 15 year old game is extremely unfair and totally wrong.

Re: Nintendo Switch

#226

Post by codesushi42 »

pvg wrote: post #218
codesushi42 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is completely wrong and must be confusing PS1 with the unreleased add-on, which would make more sense. The Nintendo Playstation is not much more than an SNES with a CD-ROM drive and some extra memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg He is probably too young to have grown up with a PS1. I believe reading at the time that Sony poured close to $1bn into developing the PS1 hardware. This made sense-- the S…

I think the argument is still worth hearing, even if it's off your lawn. I mean, I also think it can't possibly be right but it can probably be sorted out without getting into a 'you were too young' pee-fest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specific...

vs

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~dherring/cgt141/project1/comparis...

http://www.giantbomb.com/super-fx-chip/3015-7544/

Take a look for yourself. They are nothing at all alike.

Re: Nintendo Switch

#227

Post by inDigiNeous »

derefr wrote: post #63
pvg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the biggest leap in power be the N64?

The SNES lasted a while in the market, and—almost uniquely among consoles—it ramped up in power over its lifetime by putting coprocessors like the SuperFX into game carts. By the end of its lifetime, the "system" of the SNES + a cart like Starfox, was much closer to the N64 than the base SNES, making the N64 much less of a shift than it seemed. Interestingly, if you think of the PSX as descending from the SNES archit…

According to Square programmers about the power of PSX vs N64, (source from the recent excellent article about Final Fantasy 7: http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7)

"I kind of had a suspicion that things weren’t going too well for the 64 at that point, because … one of my responsibilities … was to write performance applications that compared how well the 64 fared against the prototype [PlayStation]. And we’d be running parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you’d have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second. And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]. Of course, the drawback of the [PlayStation] is it didn’t really have a z-buffer, so you’d have these overlapping polygons that you’d have to work around so that you wouldn’t get the shimmering [look]. But on the other hand, there was no way you’d be able to get anything close to what FF7 was doing [on PlayStation] on the 64 at that time."

So, at least according to the square programmers the PSX was more powerful when it came to raw polygon processing power. Of course N64 was doing much more with it's hardware, and also having a Z-buffer for real depth information, so these numbers are not really directly comparable.

Re: Nintendo Switch

#228

Post by Aaargh20318 »

webkike wrote: post #5

Looks incredibly interesting. If Nintendo opens this platform to indie developers it could become hugely successful

Apparently they are. I can't find the source anymore but I read it was going to be open for everyone. Dev kit is supposed to be $3k.

Re: Nintendo Switch

#229

Post by asendra »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #105
ekianjo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're the only company who puts so much effort into maximizing their software with the uniqueness of their hardware. You can hardly say that for the WiiU...

The different game modes introduced through the hardware, namely the gamepad, seem quite revolutionary to me. Who else has been doing that (other than Nintendo with DS to some extent)?

I think what he meant to say was that the Wii U has been mostly underutilized.

Re: Nintendo Switch

#230

Post by dkersten »

pjmlp wrote: post #222
misingnoglic wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the iPad, do kids/parents see that as a gaming device? You can't get real games on one of those.

Even grown ups. For me playing has mostly moved into the phone and tablet as I am often on the go. RTS games are great for touch interfaces.

Can you recommend any good RTS games for iOS?

Personally, I use my iPad for games when I travel (and sometimes during my twice-a-week commute) and at home I play games almost exclusively on PS4. I rarely, if ever, play games on my laptop now, despite having over 300 games on Steam.

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