From Andrew B., a link to a terrific article about the Soviet home computer: the BK-0010.
Never heard of it? Neither had I. Here's a description:
The BK-0010 was first released in 1985 (and later updated to superior models like the BK-0011) and featured a 3MHz K1801VM1 processor, 32kb of RAM, another 32kb of ROM, 4 color 256*256 or b&w 512*512 graphics, QBUS, a parallel port and used a typical for the era tape recorder as a storage device.
And, to get to the point, it played games. Lots of screenshots here, and the article mentions that there are even emulators available.
Greg Tito wrote a very witty article for the The Escapist called "Cubicle Savannah," in which he describes how he plays games all day at his job. Excellent writer, a very funny read, and you can find it here.
Stephen Smith sent me an interesting link to an article written by a developer about why games go bad--or, at least, one reason. In a word: management. That's not always why games go bad, but it's still a good read.
From Noah Dullis, the news that Fahrenheit (the uncut, European version of Indigo Prophecy) can be downloaded from Direct2Drive for $19.95. They're calling it Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Director's Cut. That's a great price for a very interesting game. Oh, and they also have Space Rangers 2 for $29.95--without Starforce copy protection.Direct2Drive has a pretty meaty selection of games. I've never used them before but it certainly makes me curious. Here's a link to their site.
DQ reader Rafael Leckie sent me this e-mail over the weekend:
You mentioned on your blog that Madden looked virtually identical on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 at E3 this year. I'm not sure that this is really a good comparison (of the 2 consoles potential graphics) as EA is apparently doing all of their development on 360 dev kits and will be merely porting it over to the PS3. I don't remember precisely where I heard this, but they spent quite a bit of time on the game engine and didn't want to repeat the work and effort for a new system. So in this case the comparision may really be that of an apple to its own reflection in a mirror.
That's a good point. It also raises the question: how many other developers are going to do this? And how much time do you save porting it over as opposed to developing from the ground up for that platform?
Here's another bit of information via The Inquirer:
The slightly more curious bit, encouraging and disturbing at the same time, is the current state of RSX. The disturbing part is that the slide I was shown had "Current DEH's aren't final spec or speed" in bold letters. Speed, OK, but not final spec at this point in time leaves precious little room for debugging before the console release. On a different note the current ones are running the RSX core at 420MHz with 550 expected for launch. Memory is set at 600MHz with 700 hoped for as final.
I'm not going to claim that an article in The Inquirer is hard proof of anything (The Inquirer is both very good and very bad, often on the same day), but specs not being finalized and dev kits not running at full speed would not be surprising, given just how far behind Sony appears to be.
The point of all this is that it's really doubtful that anyone at this point really knows what the PS3 can do. And we may not know for another eighteen to twenty-four months.
Oh, and one last bit of news: another brilliant Sony European exec said in an interview last week that "market share didn't matter." Good thing.
And with that, I'm starting an embargo on writing about the PS3 or the 360. The story just keeps repeating itself: Sony exec opens mouth, inserts foot. Up our ass. There are plenty of other things to write about, because this has gone on long enough to lose its novelty. So no PS3 or 360 stories this week.