Renegade Viking's Console Wars 2004

"High end PCs are as powerful as consoles coming out next year! Don't think those consoles are outperform your new PC, cause it probably won't"

Specs of Next Generation Consoles * The latest* I’ll try to keep this as much up to date as possible. Please reference that a lot is going to be unreviewed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2004 or E3. This is where all the big publishers unravel their products.

The Sony Playstation Pocket

Release Winter 2004

Publisher: Sony

Cost $150

Since Nintendo is a monopoly on the handheld market, Sony will try to brake the popularity of Nintendo’s overly popular GBA. GBA SP is as expensive as Gamecube. I own both. Sony’s new handheld with run minidvds like Gamecubes with a capacity of 1.8 Gigabytes. That’s plenty of space for any developer to make games on. It will have a 32-MB processor like GBA clocking at 350 MHz. This image quality may be in high resolution. What will be interesting in 2006 when Playstation 3 hits the market is if you can stick a PSP game into the DVD player and it will play. One of the key features is that it’ll have wireless connections based on the IEEE standard 802.11b. That’ll give you approximately 400 feet to stand in between with 11 MB of bandwidth. Playstation games will be re-ported to Playstation Pocket.  The screen will be 480x272. Some features it has is it’ll double as a MP3/WMA player. Movies can now be compressed to Mpeg 4.

Nintendo Duel Screen

Release 2004

Publisher Nintendo

Cost 150 – 200

Nintendo’s answer to Playstation Pocket. Nintendo will have 3 products out by the end of 2004. This new product will not play Gameboy Advance games. The new handheld will look somewhat kind of like Nokia Ngage. It’ll have 2 screens on right on top of each other. It will incorporate cell phone technology perhaps wireless technology. It will be more powerful then gameboy advance featuring 2 32MB processors hensing the name. Other confirmations on the Internet is that it’ll also hook up to Gamecube as a interactive tool. Actually, Nintendo just released the official specs. The handheld will be slightly more powerful than N64. N64 in low resolution, though on small LCD screen I bet it will look high resolution. GBA was high resolution, this will exceed GBA, bringing 3D games to handhelds finally! Expect ports of your favorite Nintendo 64 games. Though if Nintendo will only re-release their old titles, I'm not going to invest the cash.   To compete with PSP's wireless connection built in, Nintendo is doing  

the exact same thing....going wireless with 802.11 b standards.

PStwo

Sony’s released Playstation 2 in smaller form. It will look like PSone and cost $99 dollars.

2nd Generation High Res Consoles (MS XBOX II, PS3 and Nintendo's Generation after GCN)

You might of guessed it, home consoles with the ability to check email, browse the web, download patches, download movie clips, chat with your buddies on your home console. Truth is you cant see text too well on a low res TV. This was proven with Dreamcast's web browser. Text is barely readable.  None of the new consoles are going to include harddrives, if you want a harddrive, plan to dish out an extra 100 dollars. They are though going to at least have a 256-MB indegraded graphics chip on them. Most PC gamers realize all the console manufactures are doing is increasing the resolution.  Higher resolution means better graphics. We are either going to see 256 MB or 512 MB RDRAM. This will make all the consoles look smooth. I say the leading developers will accomplish 60 frames @ 1600x1200 in most games.  Though developers can always go back down to 1200x768 to get smooth frame rate. Except to pay 300 dollars of your new console w/o including controllers, memory cards and such. Me, I am being smart about it. I'll let someone else pay full price so they can sell it too a game store and I can get that game 10 dollars cheaper at least. If a game has been out for 5 months, I'll can be 20 dollars cheaper. As you see with used PSone and N64 games, the price rarely goes below 19 dollars.   

Modding will be half the fun. Modding is the soldiering of the console's motherboard so it will read home-made CDR / DVDRs. Once this is accomplished, you can program for the console.  In the past, programmers haven't really been able to make 3D game emulators. Though I think the future is limitless. We're start seeing a working PS2 emulator for Xbox 2 and a working Xbox emulator for Playstation 3. May take a few years though.  Right now most of the mod work is making use of the Xbox harddrive. There is a emulator that allows Xbox to read MP3s and play them in games for example.  In the future, someone is going to develop a working web browser for Xbox 2 and PS3 allowing owners to download game saves and mods directly to their hacked console. Though it will be kinda hard if you don't have a harddrive to put it on. The people at Alcohol-Soft are busy making improvements on their next generation application. Alcohol 120% might have support for next generation consoles in the future. It might not.

To read up on my older console wars page  from 2 years ago Go here