My General Thoughts on the Seventh Generation Console War

[Kurt_]

See PS3's Blu-Ray drive. Rather unnecessary and boosts the cost up way too much for most people.

[Jongamer]

Well I did have a post here, but I don't feel like being hated by the Admins and mods.

[vskid]

What I don't understand, is that with all the space developers have to use now (even DVDs are big), why aren't graphics and physics mind blowing. If Super Mario 64 (best game ever, in my all-powerful opinion) only takes up 8MB and has all the vast worlds and things to do and loads instantly, but now we have 4.7GB of storage available for all systems, and the Wii is even 8x faster than the N64, so why aren't gameplay and graphics 8x better?

Note: I'm not an idiot, I know there are limitations, but its still something to think about.

[teraflop122]

why aren't gameplay and graphics 8x better

"Graphics" as most people use the word is not quantitative, cannot be measured, and cannot be compared with an "8x" to other graphics.

Super Mario 64 used very small textures, even no textures (like on Mario himself, read: Gouraud shading) in some cases, thus allowing more data to be allocated to other things. I'm betting that modern games have exponentially larger and more numerous textures, as well as more geometrically complex levels.

Maybe you just aren't squinting hard enough at the screen?

[Gump-in-space]

You have to understand not just the limitations of the hardware but the limitations of the engineer who uses it.

About 15 years ago you only needed about 20 or 30 guys to make a title that pushes the hardware to the limit. Heck, the best football game I played on Genesis was done by 2 guys. But when you have around 40 guys to put out a generic title by today's standards, you begin to understand why it's really hard to blow people away anymore.