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Traded in DS Lite for Xbox 360
So I got really tired of the DS. Mario Kart and all those other games only get you for a few weeks. So me, in my infinite wisdom, traded my DS Lite and all it's games (5) for $150. Not a bad trade, and the guy I knew that works there immediately said when I walked in, "Trading in your DS Lite for an Xbox 360?" It's like he read my mind. Then he said the DS sucked and he did the same thing, got rid of his PSP to get it. So did I. And then he got an Xbox 360. And I had remembered him boasting about his 360 when I went to trade in MY psp for a ds lite. I realize now, that I should have just gotten the 360, instead of getting a DS Lite and a whole bunch of games.
Portable gaming in general, just doesn't appeal to me anymore. There's something about console gaming that pulls me in. One reason, is because I can just hook my 360 up to my CRT Monitor, which looks awesome by the way. Plus, I can play all those games that are coming out, like Halo3, TF2, HL2: Eps2, and Gears of War. Also, I have to say that Dead Rising is freaking sweet. It's like GTA with zombies everywhere instead of people. That and Ghost Recon were just awesome.
Anyway, DS sux. If you don't have a 360, get one. You won't be disappointed. But remember this when buying. Get the premier, cause you need a hard drive. Trust me, you NEED it. Also, wireless controllers are amazing and first experience I've had with them is on the 360. For god's sake, you can start the machine with the controller. And if you have the extra money, get a VGA cable for the 360. If you don't have an HDTV, but do have a CRT or LCD monitor, this is great.
Another thing that's sort of funny, and saved my ass by the way, when I went into gamestop, I had $255 and $150 in DS Merchandise. As you can tell, I didn't have enough money to buy the 360, and I realized I was going to over draft. But I was crazy enough to not care. However, even after the cashier counted my money three times, he counted it to be $355 instead of $255. I kept my mouth shut. He knew he did something wrong but I just didn't intervene. Then I went home, and I got a call from the store from that same guy. He said,"So how much money did you hand me, cause something definitely went wrong." I replied with," I don't know dude, do you want me to come down?" And luckily, he said no and said it wasn't a big deal. So, thanks to a stupid employee, I gypped gamestop by $100. Sweet!
Portable gaming in general, just doesn't appeal to me anymore. There's something about console gaming that pulls me in. One reason, is because I can just hook my 360 up to my CRT Monitor, which looks awesome by the way. Plus, I can play all those games that are coming out, like Halo3, TF2, HL2: Eps2, and Gears of War. Also, I have to say that Dead Rising is freaking sweet. It's like GTA with zombies everywhere instead of people. That and Ghost Recon were just awesome.
Anyway, DS sux. If you don't have a 360, get one. You won't be disappointed. But remember this when buying. Get the premier, cause you need a hard drive. Trust me, you NEED it. Also, wireless controllers are amazing and first experience I've had with them is on the 360. For god's sake, you can start the machine with the controller. And if you have the extra money, get a VGA cable for the 360. If you don't have an HDTV, but do have a CRT or LCD monitor, this is great.
Another thing that's sort of funny, and saved my ass by the way, when I went into gamestop, I had $255 and $150 in DS Merchandise. As you can tell, I didn't have enough money to buy the 360, and I realized I was going to over draft. But I was crazy enough to not care. However, even after the cashier counted my money three times, he counted it to be $355 instead of $255. I kept my mouth shut. He knew he did something wrong but I just didn't intervene. Then I went home, and I got a call from the store from that same guy. He said,"So how much money did you hand me, cause something definitely went wrong." I replied with," I don't know dude, do you want me to come down?" And luckily, he said no and said it wasn't a big deal. So, thanks to a stupid employee, I gypped gamestop by $100. Sweet!
Comments
I too will most likely trade my DS for a 360, because I haven't seriously used it in months. The same thing happened when I bought an original Game Boy many moons ago. It's a novelty for a week or so, but a precipitous drop in interest occurs after that. Also, the Opera browser doesn't look all that good, and the promise of that browser was a big selling point for me in the first place. No regrets though, Phoenix Wright was worth the price of admission alone.
By the way thane you do know that another Phoenix Wright is coming out relatively soon for the DS? Is there some game for the DS that you are looking for?
Personally I would never trade in a video game system, but I guess that is the collector/gamer that I am. I hardly play my DS at home since portable gaming is well portable. But I make sure I bring it with me when I go out and find it very satisfying out in the world when I have nothing to do.
Personally, I find the X-box 360 to be cool, except for one thing. Lack of quality games however is a major downfall. Dead Rising is really cool, but other then that I haven’t seen any games that really go above and beyond. Many of the games look very pretty but other then that there is not much behind them (Ninety-nine nights, which was not worth the 60 dollars it cost).
DS defense force out!
1) Connect to Game Cube
2) DS does not allow for linking of GBA games
3) DS does not play anything older than GBA games
Seriously, you need to think a little more before you purchase. I'll bet you'll be talking about how much the 360 sucks before six months are up. I mean, you bought a PSP, loved it, decided it actually sucked, traded it for a DS, loved it, decided it actualy sucked, traded it for a 360... I notice a pattern.
The upcoming flood of new DS games is staggering, and most of them look well worth the money. There's also the fact that the primary use of the DS is still social gaming. Go to any con, and you'll see countless Tetris/Bomberman/Mario Kart/Metroit/whatever circles. Any open corner is taken over by DS players. Not owning one means you'll really miss out on that.
Portable gaming is the best thing going in the console world at the moment. From when the DS was released until (probably) when the Wii is, the DS has been my primary console. The soon-to-be-released games for it are going to seriously interfere with my Wii action.
Do the world a favor. Do not become a stock broker. Long term investing is not your area of expertise.
You're right Scott, I should have gamefly, and I already do. It's an awesome service, and I get three games at any time for $15 at month. It's not a bad deal, AT ALL. But the five games I bought in the beginning were from gamestop after trading in my psp. It's better than going to blockbuster for $7 for one game for five days of renting. In fact, I haven't bought any games for the 360 yet. I'm still deciding. I want to buy them all, but that would be wasteful, since I can just beat a game and be done with it. But I shouldn't worry about losing money on games, because those five ds games were the first in a long time I've actually bought instead of renting.
The main reason I got the 360 was because I needed a gaming machine, and not a portable one, something that could play FPS's. My macbook wasn't capable of that, and was only able to play games like HL1 and CS1.6 (played HL2 fine). What's so great for me is that Halo 3, Halo Wars, TF2, HL2 Eps2, Gears of War, GTA4, Time Shift, and Assassin's Creed are coming out for 360. By the way, Assassin's Creed was originally just coming out for PS3, but the company that made the game got scared about their sales, so they're making it available for the 360 (poor Sony, do they even exist anymore).
DS was OK, but I'm not into the whole Nintendo, cartoony, cute thing. That whole stereotype is very true and seems to make other games look like duplicates. It's like any game that starts with the word "Mario", looks like another game I've played with a differnt control scheme and goal. All I can say, is that Microsoft has the whole gaming platform creation down pat, for serious games with cinematic game play. I know, I know, I know. You guys hate that people want games for that very reason. But believe it or not, better, high rez textures and lighting and all that jazz usually make for a better game. At least for me it does. Sorry to be the rebel. The only reason I've disliked this type of game, is that my computer couldn't handle them. Thanks to the Xbox/Zune creators at MS, I can play these games on a $400 machine.
My sis is wanting a wii for Christmas anyway, so I guess I'll get the best of both worlds. Can't wait to pay $60 for a controller. : (
Haha! Funny that you say that, cause I'm in this BPA club (Business Professionals of America) and a lot of the education you get from that is on the stock market. But, I went to the state leadership conference and got elected president. I guess I look the part, but I just don't know the stuff. ; )
And if I lost any money on any of the trade-ins I did, I think the hundred dollars they added to the cash I supposedly had made up for it.
As for Rym's statement on having a DS for cons, that doesn't make a diff in my situation. I live in KS and everbody here has a PSP and not a DS. Also, I don't go to cons because for one, I'm not a hard core geek, my friends aren't either, I don't live near to any, and I'm only 17. If I need a DS for a con, I'll borrow my brother's.
That's also something that I should have brought up. There are still two DS Lites in my house. If I really wanted to play one I could. As often as I used to, trading it worked all for the better. Besides, my family is pretty sharing. My siblings and I play one another's games quite a bit and it's not big deal.
It's like, when I trade in my PSP for a DS, Rym and Scott agree with my decision. But when I trade my DS for a 360, and say positive things about the console, they jump all over it. No offense, but I sense a little Nintendo fanboyism.
That also brings up another issue. The PC game market is dying for several reasons. One, having to buy new hardware is just as expensive as getting a new console, so people want the most for their money and get a new system. Another is that consoles have many more titles than that of the pc. In fact, that's partly why many PC games are translated over into console games, like FEAR for example. It was great on PC, but the demo of FEAR on the 360 just looks and runs better in my opinion.
I do agree. I should have gone straight from PSP to Xbox. But hey, at least I know now I don't like the portable consoles. I'll just stick with the old, nobby controller. But right now, I'm just going through this shock on how good it looks. I used to have a high end gaming PC, and that was nothing compared to the graphics processing you're getting with this machine.
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
- 3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
- 2 hardware threads per core
- 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
- 1 MB L2 cache
CPU Game Math Performance
- 9 billion dots per second
Custom ATI Graphics Processor
- 500 MNz
- 10 MB embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
- unified shader architecture
Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
- 700 MNz DDR
Memory Bandwidth
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s frontside bus
Audio
- Mulitchannel surround sond output
- Supports 48khz 16-bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32 bit processing
- 256+ audio channels
With these specs, it's hard not to notice why. But the truth is, PS3 games are going to look better. I don't like the sound of it but it's true. One of the biggest reasons is that Blue Ray can hold more high rez textures and information. The 360 could process those, but it doesn't have high capacity media disks. You're comparing 10GB to almost a 60GB disk. However, I've heard that Microsoft will start releasing HD-DVD games in the same package of the DVD game, but with higher resolution textures.
just a rumor!
Just what PC games are you playing that require you to buy new computers so often? For under $1000 I can build a computer that will serve as an excellent gaming box for at least five years.
However, my three year old $400 IBM "employee discount" computer does everything else just great. Since I only play one game, I can't justify buying a new computer - whereas a console like the Wii would make sense.
Let's face it, if it weren't for games, most people would do just fine with a cheap computer. The only exception might be video playback, but I suspect that's not a big problem. It's not like sending email, surfing the web and word processing need that much power.
As a total aside, have you guys seen this Java NES emulator that was "dugg" yesterday? It's a little clunky, but there are some nice games for a quick diversion at work.
Operating System: Windows XP (32-bit) with Admin rights
Processor: 1.7 GHz Intel Celeron D / Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP/ Sempron or greater
DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Video Card: 128Mb Video card or more
Disk Space: 2.3 GB free hard drive space or more
CD Speed: 8x or faster DVD drive
RAM: 512 MB of RAM or mor
My three year old computer exceeds these requirements. For $400 I could easily purchase a computer that blows these requirements out of the water. At this point in time, buying expensive computers to play games is just a penis-measuring game.
As for the Java NES emulator, that's been around for years. Maybe that particular incarnation is new, but I have been seeing emulators embedded in web sites for years. I guess it would be useful if you can't install software on your work PC.
Lastly, I don't know jack about flying. Regardless, I do know that X-Plane is the be-all end-all of flight simulation.
I wouldn't play an FPS I couldn't get at least a solid 60fps in at reasonably high quality.
One thing I have used is VATSIM, which is pretty amazing. It's a network of pilots and air traffic controllers. The controllers provide real-time air traffic control. I've been a controller, and the training is pretty impressive. It's quite realistic.
I go through phases with flight simulator where I will play it for a while and then shelve it for a few months. I have to admit that it can be boring. I've never been one for an 8 hour flight. It is, however, a pretty good educational tool. It's actually harder for me to fly a plane on Flight Simulator than in real life. You don't get the peripheral vision, motion detection, etc. that you get in real life.
Damn, I hated that thing.
1) Anything above 20 FPS is absolutely fine since the eye won't notice the difference.
2) Computers work differently than film, and the eye will absolutely notice the difference between 30FPS and 70FPS.
I've read compelling arguments on both sides, although it's been a while so I don't remember the details.
In just about any serious 3D game there is an option to enable vertical sync. Enabling this will tell the GPU to render the same number of frames per second as your monitor will display. It will place these frames in the framebuffer with exact timing, so that each and every one of them will be drawn on the monitor. Your hardware will not waste resources rendering extra frames, but your GPU might expend a few extra resources to keep the exact timing.
The problem with vertical sync is that your computer usually can't render that many fps all the time. 75fps or even 60fps is a pretty high number for a very advanced game. As you may know, framerates often fluctuate wildly during actual gameplay. Walking down an empty hallway will usually be a pleasant experience at 100fps+. A large field with lighting, water and a million enemies will drop those fps down to 40.
In any individual game I would suggest you first play without vsync and display the fps meter. If during gameplay the fps never drop below the vertical refresh of your monitor, then set vsync for that game. If your fps go below the refresh rate of the monitor, do not set vsync for that game. Having vsync enabled while the fps drop below the refresh of the monitor is much worse than having the fps drop when vsync is disabled. The video card will be unhappy if it is trying to synchronize framebuffer swaps while no new frames are available.
Vertical sync between the framebuffer and the monitor is the best you can possibly do. If you render more frames than your monitor can display, then your video card will be swapping the frame buffer before the frame is rendered to the screen. So on a 75hz monitor, 100fps and 76fps will be essentially identical because only 75 frames actually go to your monitor and your eyes. The actual 75 frames that show up might be slightly different, but unless other options like anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, etc. are different, it doesn't make a meaningful difference which 75 frames you see.
Is rendering more frames than your monitor displays always bad? No. It means that when the game gets hot and heavy, you will still render enough frames to maintain vsync. It also means that you might be able to afford cranking up the rendering options to make the frames prettier without causing rendering lag. But if your vertical refresh is 60Hz, maintaining 100fps is no different than maintaining 80fps. That is the reality of the technology.
Now, when it comes to eyeballs, I have no clue. Can the human eyeball detect 80fps vs 60fps? Can it see 16.7 million colors at once? Will you be able to tell apart two different frame rates in a double-blind test? These are not things I know about. Do not ask me.
I can tell you that I have seen monitors with 80Hz refresh rates running games at perfect vsync, and it looked damn smooth. I can tell you that your game will look nicer if you enable the higher quality graphics options. The higher texture resolution you have, the more advance lighting algorithms you employ, the more advanced bump mapping, the more anti-aliasing, the more anisotropic filtering, etc. will all make the game look better and decrease your frame rate. If you are playing a game for its good looks, I suggest you turn the graphic settings up as high as you can while keeping the fps above your personal tolerance level. If you are playing a game to compete, I suggest you turn off as many graphical enhancements as you need to in order to achieve perfect sync.
Personally, if I am playing any sort of competetive 3D multiplayer game on the PC I turn every rendering option down to the minimum, unless it gives me an in-game advantage. A good example is Tribes 2 where I maximize the viewing distance and disable nearly all the textures. The only exception to this is if my computer is so powerul it can play the game at max graphics without breaking a sweat.