[Deepblue]

http://joystiq.com/entry/1234000870054599/

A late night e-mail from Perrin Kaplan, VP of Marketing and Corporate Affairs at Nintendo of America, officially states that Zelda: Twilight Princess will be delayed until sometime after March 31, 2006, well beyond the prior official release date/window of “Holiday 2005.” Ostensibly, this extra time will be used for “new levels, more depth and even higher quality,” and will coincide with a “new global launch in 2006” to follow the current fiscal year (which ends on March 31st of 2006). What this translates to is that TP won’t be out anywhere until sometime after March next year.

Nintendo moving to counter the PS3 and Halo 3 rather than the launch of the Xbox 360?

http://joystiq.com/entry/1234000040054627/

If you listen very carefully, you can hear the crunching of thousands of Sony fanboy’s teeth (or is that just my recently purchased second hand gaming PC?) because of the news that John Carmack of id Software fame is backing the Xbox 360. He’s gone on the record at the recent QuakeCon with a killer quote that the Xbox 360 is ”the best development environment” he’s seen for a console. If I had a geek -> english translator handy it’d probably translate as “the 360 is my fave next-gen console”.

http://joystiq.com/entry/1234000540054507/

When Blizzard announced that its northern offices were being relocated to California, they announced that they were working on a new, unannounced project that was believed to be Diablo III.  Well, Blizzard’s PR people have quickly squashed that rumor, stating that the new project is neither a sequel to Starcraft or Diablo.

[Kosh]

stating that the new project is neither a sequel to Starcraft or Diablo.

Awww man. I want a sequel to Starcraft.........

[aldo_14]

I think Zelda is being positioned as a possible 'launch' title of the Revolution due to the backwards compatibility of that console.

[Deepblue]

That's really sad...

[Kamikaze]

I found Carmack's keynote details to be quite interesting...

http://techreport.com/etc/2005q3/carmack-quakecon/index.x?pg=1

Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor and expressed skepticism about the returns of multi-core designs and multithreaded software, especially in the short term. Graphics accelerators are a great example of parallelism working well, he noted, but game code is not similarly parallelizable. Carmack cited his Quake III Arena engine, whose renderer was multithreaded and achieved up to 40% performance increases on multiprocessor systems, as a good example of where games would have to go. (Q3A's SMP mode was notoriously crash-prone and fragile, working only with certain graphics driver revisions and the like.) Initial returns on multithreading, he projected, will be disappointing.

The PS3 and the Xbox 360 both use multi-core designs with a PPC base, perhaps the consoles won't perform worth their price if even Carmack can't take much advantage of the multi-core design.

Also, his opinion on the PS3:

As for the PS3, he liked sound of the noises Sony has been making about the PlayStation 3 as something of an open platform, and suggested that perhaps an open PS3 could become a computing platform something like the Amiga of old, with an excellent, fixed graphics subsystem. HDTV displays offer the fidelity to make this happen where it couldn't on past consoles.

[Deepblue]

Originally posted by Kamikaze
I found Carmack's keynote details to be quite interesting...

http://techreport.com/etc/2005q3/carmack-quakecon/index.x?pg=1



The PS3 and the Xbox 360 both use multi-core designs with a PPC base, perhaps the consoles won't perform worth their price if even Carmack can't take much advantage of the multi-core design.

Also, his opinion on the PS3:

 

You missed the part where he says it's a pain in his a**.

[Gai Daigoji]

Originally posted by Kosh



Awww man. I want a sequel to Starcraft.........

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Deepblue


You missed the part where he says it's a pain in his a**.

Most games coding is a pain in the arse, anyways....  Albeit, I wouldn't worry to much about development environments as the 2nd gen of games - the games that really take advantage of the machines abilities - will be determined more by profit.  i.e. which machine sold or is selling the most.

Hell, I remember the Gamecube was postured as being one of the easiest to develop for (And apparently the Xbox is the best), and the absolute bastard that (reputably) the PS2 is still became and remains the massive leader.

The thing that interested more from Carmacks speech was his attitude to AI; that it wasn't all that important and could be done with scripts alone rather than, say, context sensitive decision making.  I'm not sure that's particularly valid outside the realm of corridor shooters (which is after all ID's speciality); the larger and more immersive environments become, the more different ways the user can interact and thus the more 'responses' you'd need to script in.  So I think he was off-base there.

Oh, and 'that's really sad' - why?  What is?

[Kamikaze]

You missed the part where he says it's a pain in his a**.

I've yet to see a single news source that quotes him saying anything of the sort. He does praise the Xbox 360 a lot, but he compares it mostly to the PC and the driver-hell in developing for them.

If anything, he's fairly favorable towards both consoles:

From GameCloud

Much of the keynote speech was about Carmack's opinions of the next generation consoles, specifically the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 (the Revolution wasn't even mentioned). Carmack said that the original Xbox was easy to develop for thanks to solid dev tools and the Xbox 360 is the same way but that the PS3 will allow developers to get closer to the hardware performance.

[Ransom]

Well, Blizzard’s PR people have quickly squashed that rumor, stating that the new project is neither a sequel to Starcraft or Diablo.

Assuming it's not just another Warcraft game... Finally! A new IP from Blizzard! It's about damn time.

[Zuljin]

Originally posted by Ransom Arceihn

Assuming it's not just another Warcraft game... Finally! A new IP from Blizzard! It's about damn time.

Considering World of Warcraft has been out for a little while now, I assume it's an expansion pack for that.
Or it could be a new title entirely, but I'll hold my thumb on the expansion pack until I hear otherwise.

[aldo_14]

They're definately making a WoW expansion pack.  I think some players have actually managed to stumble onto the (incomplete) new areas thanks to a glitch, too.