Very interesting stuff Subbie! Can you talk abit about the cpu? The demos for the Resident Evil and Metal Gear games looked halfway decent, midway between a ps2 and xbox 1 or 360. Is it sluggish or has rendering issues? I agree completely on the hardware. I was sold on one until I saw the leaked pics.
Resident evil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8BWvgtqDUw Metal gear http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCplNPum5jY
Ah man I thought you meant PSP2 demos, no wonder I didn't find anything The 3DS AFAIK is using a regular ARM, probably 11, no cortex. For GPU theres the PICA200, which explains the unimpressive graphics
3D is a legitimate reason to buy something over having two screens anyday. The gimmick was the DS' double screen setup, 3D seems to hold water but at that price point it's an expensive toy for what is mostly a low-budget demographic. I don't doubt that many adults, including myself, would shell out the cash but for a 10 year old kid a 300USD device is like giving a kid a porsche.
Yeah, as best as I can say. It's an arm 11 at an eh clock speed (can't give exact speed or if it's 2 cores atm). While an arm 11 is a big step up from the arm9 and is more capable at handling 3d, it's still no cortex A8 or A9. Also while some 3DS games look nice, you can tell they're riding heavily on the GPU (RE looks nice but is high on shaders but contains boxy low poly enviroments). Games that aren't pushing crazy shader effects like normal mapping will not look as hot. Sure 3DS does have some shader support but it's limited to vertex processing shaders only. You really should have both Vert & fragment shaders at min (Geometry shaders would just be icing on the cake).
In an industry so overloaded with hype that's an extraordinarily poor way of measuring success. If you take this approach almost everything could have done better in some respect, could've dominated the competition just a little more, so maybe they're all "complete failures" by your logic? Or is the only success in videogames the one that sells the most? (Nice to see you back again and settling into your old habit of shifting the goalposts whenever you say something stupid, by the way.)
Well personally I won't be paying $250 or $300 for a 3DS. I barely get much play out of my current DS. Portables just don't work for me these days. When I'm not at home, I generally am not gaming. I did pay like $250 for the PSP, but I really wanted the Mega Man games.
I wont buy one, for the simple fact that is obvious ninty is testing the waters here. Take the first DS, compared to the Lite it was a fugly brick. This one has shabby plastics and a huge pricetag to boot, so I'll pass. May I add that one HUGE advantage the DS had over the PSP was that the last one was kinda expensive at the time, and scarce. If by chance sony launches the PSP2 at $250 or even less we may see a reverse situation. You can say the same of the arm9 in the DS compared to the arm7 in the GBA, but at the end all those portables got relatively old CPUs at launch
