Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello everybody,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette,
Speaker 1: and I'm an editor here at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as always, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: Hey there, Crispy, insert coin. I'm sorry, that's great. I
Speaker 1: get Chris here unfortunately has a bit of a chest cough,
Speaker 1: and so when I catch him off guard like that,
Speaker 1: his bronchial tubes all protests at the same time, just
Speaker 1: like our listeners. Yes you can. You can hear uh
Speaker 1: a thousand tiny I'll vel I screaming at once and
Speaker 1: then we're suddenly silence. Yes, that's tragic. So the reason
Speaker 1: why I said insert coin in the first place was
Speaker 1: not to make Chris fall over, but was a cheap
Speaker 1: segue into our topic, which is a video game consoles. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: we which don't require coins, no, but you know, well
Speaker 1: they do a whole lot of coins. That's right, baby. Um.
Speaker 1: So you guys who have been with us the whole
Speaker 1: time may remember a long, long time ago. Uh, in
Speaker 1: a galaxy far far away, we talked about um, about
Speaker 1: video game consoles. But that was like our seventh episode.
Speaker 1: That was back when we did episodes that lasted five
Speaker 1: minutes and we talked like the guy from the micro Machines, right,
Speaker 1: And currently we do episodes that range about as long
Speaker 1: as your average German opera. So, uh, we thought felt
Speaker 1: it was about time to go back and re revisit
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Chris, Chris is just totally lost and that's
Speaker 1: trying to crack me up. No, but we thought we'd
Speaker 1: go back and revisit the episode UM and kind of
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about consoles, especially after getting
Speaker 1: a couple of iTunes reviews where people said we were
Speaker 1: lame because we don't cover gaming enough. You know, we're
Speaker 1: not a gaming podcast. You're not go to argue with you.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying we're not a gaming podcast. We are
Speaker 1: not a gaming podcast, but we do sometimes cover gaming
Speaker 1: because it falls under the umbrella of tech. But we're
Speaker 1: not exclusively about gaming, so that's why you're not going
Speaker 1: to hear that many episodes. So please feel free to
Speaker 1: write to Star Reviews about how we never talked about
Speaker 1: digital cameras. Please don't. If you're gonna, if you're going
Speaker 1: to write a review, make it positive. I know, stuff
Speaker 1: you should know said that they wanted more reviews, but
Speaker 1: they wanted to they wanted people to be honest. You know, one,
Speaker 1: give me a one star review. If you really don't
Speaker 1: like it, it tell us why. I'm telling you our
Speaker 1: listeners don't do that. Leave us five star reviews. I
Speaker 1: don't care if you tell us why. Okay, So, now
Speaker 1: that we've moved on, you can you can give honest
Speaker 1: reviews to stuff you should know that. Yes, feel free
Speaker 1: to give honest reviews to stuff you should know. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about video game consoles now that we've already
Speaker 1: a united all of our listeners. Now we weren't going
Speaker 1: to talk about all video game consoles. I mean we
Speaker 1: we could go back to the whole birth of Pong
Speaker 1: thing again. But if we start talking about history, will
Speaker 1: be here for about six German operas. Okay, here, well,
Speaker 1: let's let's do it this way. Tell me what video
Speaker 1: game consoles you currently owned that you actually could play
Speaker 1: like without having to hook him up to your TV, Like,
Speaker 1: what's hooked up to your settle? It's actually hooked up.
Speaker 1: The only the only things I have hooked up are
Speaker 1: technically the sake of Genesis just needs to be plugged in,
Speaker 1: but it is actually sitting on the entertainment console. Um.
Speaker 1: The only two that are actually hooked up and you
Speaker 1: can actually flip the switch and have it come on
Speaker 1: are the PlayStation two by Sony and the Nintendo We
Speaker 1: all right, and so for our listeners, here's what I
Speaker 1: have hooked up to my entertainment system where all you
Speaker 1: have to do is turn it on and it's ready
Speaker 1: to go. I've got the Nintendo sixty four. I've got
Speaker 1: the Nintendo GameCube. I've got the Nintendo we I've got
Speaker 1: the Sony PlayStation two. I've got the Sony PlayStation one.
Speaker 1: I've got the Xbox. I've got the Sega Dreamcast. I
Speaker 1: think that's it. You must have like a B C
Speaker 1: D E box. I have an HDTV with lots of inputs,
Speaker 1: and I'd also like to point out that I have
Speaker 1: a Nintendo DS Light, which does not need to be
Speaker 1: hooked up to a TV to play it. Yeah, take that, Pillette.
Speaker 1: So my Game Boy Black and White isn't a box, however,
Speaker 1: so that that might be another reason why we haven't
Speaker 1: really tackled video game consoles in a long time because
Speaker 1: Chris and I, uh, we've neither of us own all
Speaker 1: of the current generation consoles. That we is the only
Speaker 1: one we both own. And uh, it's not that we
Speaker 1: don't necessarily like the others. And there are other factors
Speaker 1: which we'll get into. We'll talk about that about, you know,
Speaker 1: why we own what we own and maybe why we
Speaker 1: don't own the other ones. But let's start just by
Speaker 1: hitting the basics. So let's start with the Xbox three sixty.
Speaker 1: It's Microsoft's entry and there of course that's the successor
Speaker 1: to the Xbox, which was very popular game console. And
Speaker 1: I would say it's the first of the current generation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was the first one out. It was the first
Speaker 1: one out on the market. And uh, I would say, well,
Speaker 1: I mean the we'se we has bigger numbers and sales,
Speaker 1: but the Xboxes, I mean, that's like the I think
Speaker 1: that's probably the go to choice for most gamers. Just
Speaker 1: just as in the side, are we going to talk
Speaker 1: about these all together and compare them or are we
Speaker 1: just gonna go one by one? Because I was gonna
Speaker 1: make a statement, I thought I don't want to ruin
Speaker 1: the go ahead. Um. Yeah, you know, the the of
Speaker 1: the three current generation consoles, they're really kind of different
Speaker 1: machines because the Xbox three sixty in the PlayStation three
Speaker 1: are high definition machines. They have very very high end processors,
Speaker 1: at least compared to you know, previous generations and the
Speaker 1: Wei for that matter, and um, they're really aimed at
Speaker 1: a different segment of the market, or were when they
Speaker 1: were released. I think they're all sort of converging on
Speaker 1: one another now, including the WE. For that, I think
Speaker 1: the WE is probably bubing the slowest of the three,
Speaker 1: and the other two are kind of flailing around trying
Speaker 1: to get to where the WE is. It's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting really well the WE is. UM. Part of the
Speaker 1: reason why the WE is so much less expensive, which
Speaker 1: helped it in sales, um, is because they used Nintendo
Speaker 1: decided to use off the shelf components. I mean, Sony
Speaker 1: spent a lot of money developing that processor, which is
Speaker 1: an amazing processor, especially for a game console. Um, but
Speaker 1: you know, Nintenna went, you know what, let's just take
Speaker 1: on of these and that thing are there, and um,
Speaker 1: six of those okay, We're done, and it it. It
Speaker 1: helped them because they helped them keep the cost low. Um,
Speaker 1: but it also means that it doesn't do ten a
Speaker 1: d P, which is you know, high definition. It basically
Speaker 1: looks as good as a DVD, which you know, as
Speaker 1: far as I'm concerned, I don't have an h D
Speaker 1: t V. I have a standard definition TV. So it's
Speaker 1: not that big a deal for you. So so for
Speaker 1: you your you know, it wouldn't really make a difference
Speaker 1: if you owned one of the other machines because you
Speaker 1: wouldn't really be able to tell the difference in effex quality.
Speaker 1: Your television is not capable of showing it. Mine is.
Speaker 1: That's another matter. That's that's not obviously not what's really
Speaker 1: important to me if I only own a WE and
Speaker 1: not an Xbox three sixty or a PS three. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the processors on the Xbox three six and p S
Speaker 1: three are much more powerful. Um. The p S three
Speaker 1: has got that that cell based architecture for the processor,
Speaker 1: which is pretty amazing stuff. I mean that it's it's
Speaker 1: really a powerful machine. I think you could say that
Speaker 1: the out of the three, the p S three has
Speaker 1: the most horsepower. Really potentially anyway you have to be
Speaker 1: able to design software that can take advantage of the hardware.
Speaker 1: It's not the hardware just doesn't like, doesn't make the
Speaker 1: game just run better on its own. You have to
Speaker 1: architect the software properly or else you're just not gonna
Speaker 1: see the benefit. And that's a benefit of having a
Speaker 1: gaming console too, because, as Jonathan Is frequently pointed out
Speaker 1: in past podcasts, um PC games suffer from this problem
Speaker 1: because you want to buy the latest, say Command and Conquer,
Speaker 1: you find out that your processor might squeak out playing
Speaker 1: the game, but you don't have enough RAM and your
Speaker 1: graphics processor. There's no way, right, yeah, you would. You
Speaker 1: would have to set all the settings solo that you're
Speaker 1: looking at stick figures throwing rocks at each other. So,
Speaker 1: I mean the console UH specs are a good thing
Speaker 1: and a bad thing. I mean, in this case, you
Speaker 1: have to write for Sony's UH specific custom chip and
Speaker 1: take advantage you know that that's really geared to making
Speaker 1: it look great on the machine, and in years to
Speaker 1: come you're still gonna be able to play games on
Speaker 1: it because people aren't gonna go out and write something
Speaker 1: for you know, another five mega hurts worth of processing
Speaker 1: power where another gigga hurts where the processing power because
Speaker 1: the console itself really hasn't changed. Yeah, and uh so
Speaker 1: let's let's jump back over to the xpox really quickly.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna mention that that comes in three flavors.
Speaker 1: Oh it does. Yeah, there's the day, there's the past.
Speaker 1: So there's the three that you can go shop for
Speaker 1: right now. Are the Xbox Arcade, which only has a
Speaker 1: two or fifty six megabyte hard drive. And yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Arcade only has two or fifty six megabyte hard
Speaker 1: drive um, which you know what, I remember back when
Speaker 1: I was a kid and I owned a two eighty six,
Speaker 1: where I would have thought two fifty six megabytes was
Speaker 1: going way more than you would ever need. Um. And
Speaker 1: it also is not compatible with older Xbox games because
Speaker 1: it doesn't have the hard drive capacity to run them. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: the Xbox three sixty, the flagship Basic, the Basic model,
Speaker 1: I just got a sixty gigabyte hard drive, so that's
Speaker 1: a pretty big jump. And it also comes with some
Speaker 1: stuff that the Arcade version doesn't come with, like a headset,
Speaker 1: comes with a network cable, um, and it's it is
Speaker 1: compatible with about three hundred titles from the original Xbox.
Speaker 1: Then you have the Xbox Elite. Yes, that's the hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty gigabyte hard drive and it's got all that
Speaker 1: stuff plus as an h d M I cable. Um,
Speaker 1: all three of them have the capability to plug in
Speaker 1: via hd M I into a television, but only the
Speaker 1: Elite actually comes with the cable. Otherwise you have to
Speaker 1: buy it separately. And those are eight billion dollars. I'm kidding. Approximately,
Speaker 1: we didn't price it before, but we are willing to
Speaker 1: bet it is. I'm willing left leg that it's eighty
Speaker 1: billion dollars. And once again our producer makes it into
Speaker 1: the segment. Yes, we will call him Stumpy from now on.
Speaker 1: So uh Now, the Xbox CPU, it's got three symmetrical
Speaker 1: cores running at three point two giga hurts. That's their CPU.
Speaker 1: I see you're reading the same information chart that I am. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm the one right underneath says to hardware threads per core,
Speaker 1: six hardware threads total. Yes, so it's a it's a
Speaker 1: powerful machine. And um, you know even yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: even now, several years after its release, this is still
Speaker 1: considered especially when you consider that it's just dedicated to gaming.
Speaker 1: You know, I've granted, okay, Microsoft would totally have me
Speaker 1: strung up for saying that, because there are other things
Speaker 1: you can do besides gaming. But that's what it. That's
Speaker 1: what it's. That primary missionary purpose is to play video
Speaker 1: game mission. You could tell what I think of their
Speaker 1: normal game set. It is nothing. There's nothing wrong with
Speaker 1: having video games be your primary reason for being. For
Speaker 1: many years in my teenage phase, video games were my
Speaker 1: primary reason for being, So I have no problem with
Speaker 1: a console that's that way. And that's it. It's an
Speaker 1: IBM power PC chip too, which I find kind of
Speaker 1: funny in a vague sort of way, since you know,
Speaker 1: Windows is linked to the Intel processor for you know, computers,
Speaker 1: yet they went with the IBM power PC chip, which
Speaker 1: was for a long time the Max processor, although not anymore,
Speaker 1: you know. And uh, it does have a custom a
Speaker 1: t I graphics processor as well, running Hurts five Mega
Speaker 1: Hurts with ten megabytes of embedded RAM. Yeah. That's a
Speaker 1: pretty impressive stuff too, I mean what and it's understandable
Speaker 1: because again Sony and Microsoft both really pushed the whole Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, this is the next step in evolution for
Speaker 1: graphics and uh, you know. That was that was the
Speaker 1: big focus, was that look at how much better this
Speaker 1: looks and sounds compared to the last generation consoles. That
Speaker 1: was their selling point. It's not the way Nintendo went,
Speaker 1: which you know ended up working really well for Nintendo.
Speaker 1: But we'll again go into that a little bit. What
Speaker 1: what do you you have some smartass comments? Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I was going to talk about the PS three as well.
Speaker 1: There was just an announcement today as of the recording
Speaker 1: of this podcast, so in the near distant past for
Speaker 1: for all listeners. Yeah, they'll they'll tell you which day
Speaker 1: it was that you can go back and look to
Speaker 1: find out what day it was that they announced the
Speaker 1: the brand new PS three Slim, which apparently you don't
Speaker 1: mess around with if you live in the South side
Speaker 1: of Chicago. Um anyhow, Yeah, it's basically, uh, the PS
Speaker 1: three in a new package. Um and except it does
Speaker 1: have a sort of semi meager hard drive just eighty gigs. No, No,
Speaker 1: it's up to now is it? The old one was
Speaker 1: a new one? Thought the Slim wasn't. Okay, sorry, I
Speaker 1: was hasty in my my pre podcast research because it
Speaker 1: just they just announced it. It was a rumor all morning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, and so then this one's gonna cost two,
Speaker 1: which is a big dip in price. I mean, that
Speaker 1: was the biggest problem that people had with the PS
Speaker 1: three for the longest time, was that it was the
Speaker 1: most expensive of the three current consoles on the market,
Speaker 1: and and Sony seemed unwilling to to cut that price
Speaker 1: year after year. And it was infuriating gamers who said,
Speaker 1: I want this system, but I refused to pay five
Speaker 1: bucks for it. Yeah, yeah, anyhow, Um, yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was very highly touted at the beginning, and people
Speaker 1: were talking about the PlayStation three and what it was,
Speaker 1: you know, the big impact it was gonna have in
Speaker 1: the market. And initially it did, like the first few
Speaker 1: days when people were lining up around the block to
Speaker 1: get their hands on them. And then you know, so
Speaker 1: many people just said, you know, look, I can't I
Speaker 1: can't afford that. Yeah, that purchase price was a huge
Speaker 1: hurdle that a lot of people just weren't willing to
Speaker 1: try and jump over. And uh, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: even when you factored in the fact that that has
Speaker 1: Blu Ray that that was because there was the cheapest
Speaker 1: Blu Ray player you could get for six hundred dollars
Speaker 1: is the cheapest Blu ray player. That's that's tough. But uh,
Speaker 1: and that's no longer the case, of course, now, I
Speaker 1: mean they're Blu ray Players, they're significantly less expensive than that.
Speaker 1: But but at the time it was the cheapest, and
Speaker 1: yet it still wasn't enough to get people to you know,
Speaker 1: jump ship on Moss. Now, you did have the enthusiasts
Speaker 1: who adopted it and loved it, and there were some
Speaker 1: really good games that came out pretty early for the
Speaker 1: p S three and still has a very good library. Um,
Speaker 1: there are some There's there's one major problem I would
Speaker 1: have with the p S three, and that's the lack
Speaker 1: of ability to unplug your previous PlayStations. Yes, that it
Speaker 1: would be the lack of backwards compatibility. You nailed it. Um,
Speaker 1: backwards compatibility is really important to me. And uh and yeah,
Speaker 1: well you know it's kind of because the way I
Speaker 1: wear my pants, so um, but yeah, backwards compatibility is
Speaker 1: really important. It's it's you don't want to necessarily have
Speaker 1: eight machines sitting around your television like Jonathan Strickland does. Well, no,
Speaker 1: you know, um, yeah, it's just it's it's not nemient
Speaker 1: to have that many devices all plugged into one television.
Speaker 1: And if you can upgrade your hardware but still have
Speaker 1: access to your old library of games, that's great. And
Speaker 1: some companies have been pretty good about and up until
Speaker 1: the PS three, Sony was one of them. The PS
Speaker 1: two could play PS one games, and that was, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why upgrading the PS two wasn't
Speaker 1: a big pain in the butt, because you knew you'd
Speaker 1: still be able to play all your old games, so
Speaker 1: you could trade in your PS one for you know,
Speaker 1: three dollars and put that towards your purchase of the
Speaker 1: PS two and uh and feel good about it. But
Speaker 1: the PS three not so much. Not backwards compatible, and
Speaker 1: there was a lot of there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are hoping that that would maybe be built
Speaker 1: into the new SLIM package, that you would have backwards
Speaker 1: compatibility added to that as some sort of firmware upgrade.
Speaker 1: It does not look like that's the case. It looks
Speaker 1: like the PS three will remain incompatible when you're talking
Speaker 1: about older titles. One thing, um, I think that one
Speaker 1: criticism I did see, and of course nobody has your
Speaker 1: hands on one of these as of right in the moment,
Speaker 1: uh is where's all that heat going to go from
Speaker 1: the processor? Because they said, you know, that's an awful
Speaker 1: slim case for such a big processing heat plant. You're
Speaker 1: would be interesting to see if that is an issue too.
Speaker 1: You remember when the PS two underwent its transformation, I
Speaker 1: mean they there was the same sort of thing like
Speaker 1: halfway through or maybe a little well, I guess halfway
Speaker 1: through the PS twos life it changed because he would
Speaker 1: the neat thing about the PS two. People are still
Speaker 1: making games for it. So they're still making games wore now, yeah, exactly. Still.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, Sony is still selling a
Speaker 1: lot of PS two's, which is another reason why backwards
Speaker 1: compatibility would be awesome, because that libraries only getting larger.
Speaker 1: Unlike like you know, Xbox. They discontinued Xbox titles when
Speaker 1: the Xbox three sixty came out. I mean they came out.
Speaker 1: There were some Xbox titles for a few months afterwards,
Speaker 1: and then that was it. And then you couldn't find
Speaker 1: Xbox titles in any current store. And now you can't
Speaker 1: even find them, and you stores because no one I
Speaker 1: mean whenever I go in they have the three sixty titles,
Speaker 1: but not the Xbox titles. Since I have an Xbox,
Speaker 1: that kind of bites for me. We don't get to
Speaker 1: play all these old games that I always want to
Speaker 1: get ahold of. That's because you know, Microsoft has that
Speaker 1: relationship with its developers, developers, developers, all right, all right, right, gosh,
Speaker 1: do you introduced me to that, by the way, it
Speaker 1: was my fault. Yeah. Um so yeah, Well let's see,
Speaker 1: I guess we want to get one of the spects
Speaker 1: on the PlayStation three at all. Well, they're a little
Speaker 1: more complex because you're talking about a cell based processor,
Speaker 1: so it's not apples to apples, no, no, um. And
Speaker 1: but it can't handle to tara flops of of math.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of math. That's a lot of math.
Speaker 1: I could only handle up to algebra two. So all
Speaker 1: right then I was pretty much a flop when it
Speaker 1: came to calculus. Yeah, but you know what I just
Speaker 1: thought of what we didn't talk about. Um yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you could you could tell sort of the way
Speaker 1: they go. And this is this is really just another
Speaker 1: sort of verbal side bar. Um. But U Xbox three
Speaker 1: sixty sort of hitched its horse to the h D
Speaker 1: DVD format as its high definition, yeah, versus versus the
Speaker 1: Blu ray player, which still sad trombone Yeah yeah. But
Speaker 1: it's it's funny though, because um that really actually this
Speaker 1: puts puts the we into context, because, um, you could
Speaker 1: tell what this is what these audiences are looking for.
Speaker 1: I mean people who buy, or at least initially bought
Speaker 1: the Xbox three sixty or initially bought the PlayStation three.
Speaker 1: They were looking for something that would do all of it,
Speaker 1: you know, high definition, high quality gaming. They're looking for
Speaker 1: something that can handle a lot of math can show you,
Speaker 1: you know, realistic three D interpretations of human beings, basically
Speaker 1: three D representations of human being shooting at one another,
Speaker 1: and when you weren't playing playing games, you were watching
Speaker 1: movies and high definition we A is for a totally
Speaker 1: different audience. Um. You know that it actually bundled a
Speaker 1: title with it, we Sports, which is not an accurate
Speaker 1: representation of a human being at all. They're not shooting
Speaker 1: it one another and you can't watch even a DVD
Speaker 1: on it. Um, So it's a completely different group of
Speaker 1: people buying this machine. At the outset, the people who
Speaker 1: bought WE'SE are people who wanted the gameplay that they
Speaker 1: could get with the WE remote and UH and the
Speaker 1: Nintendo characters. They wanted Mario, they wanted um, you know,
Speaker 1: Link from the Zelda series, and UH, you know, a
Speaker 1: sort of a new player in this case Sega their
Speaker 1: relationship with Sega, and they wanted Sonic. Well, they also
Speaker 1: wanted a game system that would let them play with
Speaker 1: other people in their living rooms. See. The thing about
Speaker 1: the Microsoft and Sony approaches are especially Microsoft with Xbox Live,
Speaker 1: was that the focus wasn't so much get a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of people in your room and play video games.
Speaker 1: It was link up with people who are in their
Speaker 1: living room across the city and shoot at them for
Speaker 1: a while. We're over the internet. They're shooting across my
Speaker 1: city anyway. But they don't really use game consoles for well,
Speaker 1: we do live in Atlanta, the but you know, from Nintendo,
Speaker 1: it was more about, hey, you know, we got a
Speaker 1: party going on right here, y'all, so why don't you
Speaker 1: pick up a WE mode and play? And UH and
Speaker 1: so that had an appeal to a different group as well. Often,
Speaker 1: UH will call one group the hardcore gamers and the
Speaker 1: others the casual gamers. So hardcore gamers are the ones
Speaker 1: who are really focused on on especially like say Xbox.
Speaker 1: They're focused on getting achievements, and they're focused on being
Speaker 1: the best they possibly can be on these games, and
Speaker 1: they want to dominate in various you know, first person
Speaker 1: shooters or strategy games. Uh, you know, they very objective oriented.
Speaker 1: And then you could argue that the people the main
Speaker 1: audience for the we are more experience oriented, not not
Speaker 1: experiences in like role playing games, but really like the
Speaker 1: experience of playing the game is more important than the outcome. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's just you know, kind of an armchair psychology
Speaker 1: sort of thing right there. But I mean, as an
Speaker 1: Xbox owner, part of that mentality was still back then.
Speaker 1: I mean that was part of that console as well.
Speaker 1: Was there a lot of some of the most popular
Speaker 1: games for the Xbox were these first person shooters and
Speaker 1: strategy games. Halo Halo which is but no, no first person, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's first person shooter. Um, there is another Halo game
Speaker 1: that's more of a third person strategy game. But the
Speaker 1: you can tell I don't own an Xbox wherever. Halo
Speaker 1: two was one of my favorite games on the Xbox.
Speaker 1: And uh, and again that was one of those where
Speaker 1: I would hook up with folks who are online and
Speaker 1: we'd all shoot at each other. Um, so, Nintendo We.
Speaker 1: Why is the Nintendo We the only game console current
Speaker 1: game console that you own? Chris, You've mentioned some reasons already. Um. Well, frankly,
Speaker 1: price had a lot to do with it. Sure, Um
Speaker 1: and the fact that I'm not a first person shooter gamer.
Speaker 1: So you know, those those systems appealed to me for
Speaker 1: some games, but the bulk of the games that I
Speaker 1: saw as being popular for those systems, I said, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, it's great. I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: who love those games, but they're not you know, I'm
Speaker 1: more of a casual gamer. Uh, you know, because I'm old.
Speaker 1: I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm getting there are Well, I
Speaker 1: really am old, But that's not why. Um yeah, because
Speaker 1: there I I know plenty of people who are forty
Speaker 1: and older who love, you know, shoot them up, plenty
Speaker 1: of younger people who love casual games. So I'm teasing,
Speaker 1: but um yeah, it's it's just one of those things
Speaker 1: that I just never got into. So I said, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I don't really want to play Xbox three sixty games. Um,
Speaker 1: I like some of the the PlayStation three games, but
Speaker 1: it's way too expensive. Um. Actually, you know I should
Speaker 1: say I should point out. You know, longtime fans of
Speaker 1: the podcast will say, wait a minute, you're a Ratchet
Speaker 1: and Claying fan. You should love the PlayStation three and
Speaker 1: that's a shooter. Yes, but it's sort of cartoony, so
Speaker 1: you know, if it's got humor in it, I can
Speaker 1: I can palate the violence a little bit more. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, okay, I stand, or I sit corrected in
Speaker 1: this case. Um, but um, yeah, I mean the WE.
Speaker 1: I said. I had an opportunity to play the WE
Speaker 1: at a friend's house, admittedly on a projector, so we
Speaker 1: were playing on the side of a wall and I
Speaker 1: just fell in love with it. I said, this is
Speaker 1: really cool. And when actually the same friend found one
Speaker 1: on the shelf and said, hey, you want me to
Speaker 1: grab this for you and pay me back? And I said, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: you know, two fifty dollars is a good price point
Speaker 1: for me. So um, you know it was. It was
Speaker 1: easy to do, and uh, I like a lot of
Speaker 1: the games. Plus I like the gameplay with the Wii
Speaker 1: remote and the nunchuck. Um, you know, as long as
Speaker 1: you don't fling it into your TV. UM. Plus I
Speaker 1: don't have a high definition television, so it's it's you know,
Speaker 1: PlayStation three games are virtually inaccessible to me. Um. You
Speaker 1: know I could, I could use an Xbox three sixty.
Speaker 1: And they actually have made inroads on reaching out to
Speaker 1: more casual gamers. I mean, the Arcade is designed for
Speaker 1: people who like classic arcade style games and and you know,
Speaker 1: games that are not as resource intensive as some of
Speaker 1: the you know, high end shooters. UM. And that that
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with with why I'm a
Speaker 1: wee person that in than I am. It's true a
Speaker 1: little person, UM send hate mail to Jonathan. So I'm
Speaker 1: also I'm also a fan of the Weed. That's the
Speaker 1: only current game console that I own. UH. The main
Speaker 1: reason why I purchased it. I agree, the price was
Speaker 1: a big factor way. And you know, when you only
Speaker 1: have so many hours of the day that you can
Speaker 1: even dedicate to playing a game, you start you really
Speaker 1: start thinking of return on investment. And UH. And also
Speaker 1: I wanted I wanted a system that would be UH
Speaker 1: and more likely find games that my wife would also
Speaker 1: like to play, because you know, that would be a
Speaker 1: way for us to hang out and have fun without
Speaker 1: uh you know, she wouldn't just go and to the
Speaker 1: bedroom and read a book while I'm out there, you know,
Speaker 1: fragging people on Halo. So that was nice. Um. I
Speaker 1: was really intrigued by the Wei mode. I wanted to
Speaker 1: see how well they implemented that, and it turns out
Speaker 1: it's pretty good implementation. Of course, they've added more to
Speaker 1: that with some dongles that you can buy plus yes,
Speaker 1: and uh so I was really interested in that. I
Speaker 1: thought that was a neat technology and I wanted to
Speaker 1: see how well it translated, especially for things like you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm sitting there thinking in my mind about the
Speaker 1: stuff I would love to be able to do, like
Speaker 1: lightsaber battles. So that was a definitely definite draw for me. Um.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that was the main reason why I looked
Speaker 1: at it, besides the you know, there's the price in
Speaker 1: the gameplay. Um. At this point, I actually am thinking
Speaker 1: about buying another console, and with the announcement of the Slim,
Speaker 1: I honestly don't know which one I would go for,
Speaker 1: although I'm leaning more towards the Xbox three sixty now.
Speaker 1: When I talked to you, you said that you were
Speaker 1: actually leaning more towards the slim. Yes, and why would
Speaker 1: that be? That would be the three words I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: Ratchet and Claim, which is an exclusive. So so that's
Speaker 1: that's a wow, that's the killer app Yeah for me,
Speaker 1: that would be again. Um, actually know there's quite a few.
Speaker 1: There's Halo three well, and some of them are available
Speaker 1: also on the Sony um. But the neat thing is
Speaker 1: that each even for for games that that cross platforms,
Speaker 1: often they have specific content dedicated to just one of
Speaker 1: the two platforms. Uh, Sony wins out in a big
Speaker 1: way on one of those because I think it was, Oh,
Speaker 1: which game was that? I want to say it was
Speaker 1: one of the fighting games where you could play as
Speaker 1: either Darth Vader or Yoda, depending on which version you have. Uh,
Speaker 1: it might have been um, oh, soul Caliber that version.
Speaker 1: And so if you have soul Caliber for the Xbox,
Speaker 1: you get Yoda. If you have Soul Caliber for the
Speaker 1: p S three, you get freaking Darth Vader. That's just wrong.
Speaker 1: I would need to get us Sony. He's the baddest
Speaker 1: mofo this side of Alderon, let me tell you. And
Speaker 1: I want to play as Darth Vader. So that may
Speaker 1: be enough for me to get up. Yes, I would
Speaker 1: be willing to bet that. Um. The console manufacturers don't
Speaker 1: really care if you buy the other guys, just so
Speaker 1: long as you buy one of theirs. Two um and
Speaker 1: I think I think the funny thing is we're reaching
Speaker 1: the upper length of our German opera. Um. But I
Speaker 1: think that the funny thing is ladies warming up. The
Speaker 1: reason that we got on this subject anyway was when
Speaker 1: we were brainstorming, we wanted to talk about next generation consoles,
Speaker 1: and there's virtually nothing that we're privy to that we
Speaker 1: can find out about. Part of it is that Sony
Speaker 1: announced not that long ago that they're just at the
Speaker 1: halfway mark for their the life of their console. But um,
Speaker 1: so we're like, we've got another five years of this.
Speaker 1: But um well, I mean, the thing is that the
Speaker 1: specs on these are robust enough where I think they
Speaker 1: could probably make them last a little longer. I think
Speaker 1: they've also learned a lesson that just because you get
Speaker 1: more powerful doesn't mean that you're going to sell a
Speaker 1: ton of consoles. That's not enough to to get the market. Now,
Speaker 1: you have to have more than just horsepower. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I was gonna spend like a minute and and tell
Speaker 1: you what I thought, or at least start the conversation
Speaker 1: on what I think is going to happen in the
Speaker 1: next generation. And I think it's already started happening. Um,
Speaker 1: I think you've got to have wireless between your between
Speaker 1: the machine and the Internet. You've got to have Internet access,
Speaker 1: but you've got to have wireless Internet access, and you've
Speaker 1: gotta have wireless between that and the remote. You gotta
Speaker 1: have motion sensing. I mean, that's why Microsoft is already Yes,
Speaker 1: that looks amazing. By the way, have you have you
Speaker 1: seen any of the videos and not not very much
Speaker 1: of it, not nearly enough of it, but it looks
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. Pretty if they can if they can really
Speaker 1: tweak that system to work the way that it worked
Speaker 1: at E three when they were demoing it, that is
Speaker 1: gonna be phenomenal. Well. I mean, considering they're talking about
Speaker 1: making that work for the PC and not just for
Speaker 1: the Xbox where it all becomes gesture based, and the
Speaker 1: success of the handheld phone games that use the accelerometer
Speaker 1: like on the iPhone, I think it's just gonna it's
Speaker 1: just gonna happen. Everything from now on is going to
Speaker 1: have that functionality, and I think that they're gonna design
Speaker 1: for basically every market. They're going to encourage developers from
Speaker 1: every walk of gaming because I think that, I mean,
Speaker 1: all the rhetoric we heard coming out of Sony channels
Speaker 1: when WE was announced was oh, this is just a
Speaker 1: kiddie game console. Like, well, they realized that, you know,
Speaker 1: people like to play a variety of different kinds of games,
Speaker 1: and which is why the WE is starting to see
Speaker 1: fighting games, like serious fighting games. No, there's some really
Speaker 1: bloody stuff on the Wii and and that wasn't the
Speaker 1: case early on. And you know you're seeing that, uh,
Speaker 1: Sony and and Xbox developers are starting to develop more
Speaker 1: family oriented party games and party games. So I think
Speaker 1: it's just it's just gonna all diversify. There's just certain
Speaker 1: technical things and certain developer things that you're just gonna
Speaker 1: see on all next generation consoles, no matter who it's from.
Speaker 1: I think ultimately it all boils down to gameplay over
Speaker 1: everything else. And I think that's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why the WE did so well, is because the WE
Speaker 1: mode was such a revolution in gameplay compared to the
Speaker 1: other systems that it was more compelling to a lot
Speaker 1: of people. Plus cheaper, Yeah, cheaper and more compelling. So
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of lessons learned during
Speaker 1: this current generation that you'll see in the next generation,
Speaker 1: and it may it may incur other people to get in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll probably see more integration of other services as well,
Speaker 1: like Netflix and Amazon things like that, so that you can,
Speaker 1: you know, so that it does become more of a
Speaker 1: media center. I mean, we've seen media centers trying to
Speaker 1: make their way in through the gaming market before and
Speaker 1: fail miserably because they were to to uh, narrowly oriented
Speaker 1: and very expensive. But you know, we're slowly moving that way.
Speaker 1: I mean, the Xbox and Sony are both kind of
Speaker 1: leaning towards that. Nintendo not quite as much, but there's
Speaker 1: still some of that in the Nintendo system as well.
Speaker 1: I was totally gonna get into mobile stuff, but we
Speaker 1: way don't have time. Maybe we should make a podcast.
Speaker 1: Okay in the future, we'll do a podcast about mobile gaming.
Speaker 1: Now we don't have to worry about it for another
Speaker 1: five or six months. Yeah. Uh, well, that brings us
Speaker 1: to our favorite segment, a listener mail. This listening mail
Speaker 1: comes from Greg, and Gregg says, thanks for the Linux podcast. However,
Speaker 1: only losers use Linux. Sigh. I know Chris is terrible
Speaker 1: for saying that. If you recall, I mentioned that Chris
Speaker 1: hate Linux and he says only users losers use it.
Speaker 1: But no, that was me and I was making a joke.
Speaker 1: So I apologize to all Linux users. You are not losers.
Speaker 1: You're all very special and we love all of you
Speaker 1: just as much as our Windows and Matt compatriots. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not your fault that you don't have a real operation.
Speaker 1: The house Stuffwork Systems Engineering team would like to take
Speaker 1: this opportunity to remind Jonathan that we control the servers
Speaker 1: used to serve his podcast, all of which are some
Speaker 1: form of Unix or Linux. We also control his Internet
Speaker 1: access at the office, and as a response to his
Speaker 1: unfortunate comments, and as a service to text stuffs Linux listeners,
Speaker 1: we have right limited him to twenty eight point eight
Speaker 1: kill a bits per second. Sorry, Jonathan, got root kidding.
Speaker 1: Long term fans know that we like that, we like
Speaker 1: to tease, and that's part of the thing is we
Speaker 1: like all kinds of tech, even though we don't all
Speaker 1: always know everything. About it. Speaking about teasing, this is
Speaker 1: a good opportunity for me to mention this. We did
Speaker 1: ask the question in our Linux podcast why is Windows
Speaker 1: seven called Windows seven when you can't make it add
Speaker 1: up to seven no matter how you count it. We
Speaker 1: received lots of interesting answers, most of which conflicted with
Speaker 1: one another, but we did receive a couple of of
Speaker 1: people responded with links to the official answer, which we
Speaker 1: linked to in our blog, the tech stuff Blog. So
Speaker 1: if you want to know the real answer to why
Speaker 1: Window seven is called Window seven, visit the tech stuff blog,
Speaker 1: look up the tech Stuff podcast round up for Lenox
Speaker 1: and you will find the answer. That also means stop
Speaker 1: emailing me with your various theories. We already know the
Speaker 1: real answer. I mean, I bet your theory is awesome,
Speaker 1: but I've read enough of them. Well there, and there
Speaker 1: are lots of them, which is really funny. Yes, there
Speaker 1: the So if you have something you would like to
Speaker 1: say to us that is not Windows seven oriented, please
Speaker 1: write us. Our email address is tech stuff at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. You can read all about these
Speaker 1: video game systems at how stuff works dot com and
Speaker 1: Crispy and I will game with you again. Really soon
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does
Speaker 1: it How stuff works dot com and be sure to
Speaker 1: check out the new Tech stuff blog now on the
Speaker 1: House Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you