The road to the future has branching paths, but my branch prediction unit is offline.
25 May 05

I guess I should congratulate the big winner. Yes, it almost seemed impossible at times, but it happened. Brad defeated Ken to become the all time game show winner on Jeopardy. Oh and I guess someone named Carrie won some idol or something, too.

Sometimes I really don't understand people. There was a lot of speculation about what was shown on the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Was it real, was it prerendered, what will the games look like? Now people are upset to find that no one has final hardware yet. Some of the components aren't finalized. The revolution was an empty box. Whatever.

I wasn't expecting to see technical analysis of the motherboard designs. I'd actually be pretty upset if everyone had finalized their hardware and started etching the silicon. If that were true, why are we waiting to launch. No, E3 was about design philosophy and expected direction and performance. That's why I was upset with Nintendo. They basically just said, "We're going somewhere else." Then they left.

I noted a couple of things from the key players. Microsoft wants to create bigger and more accessible worlds. They want to be a media center in the sense that all media can be piped through the 360 from anywhere on the network. Go one place for all your stuff, gaming, movies, music and communication.

Sony is going in the same direction but getting there differently. They want a media center that can do everything for you. It can connect to a camera across the internet. It can convert your audio and video files real time. Sure it can pull things, but it can manipulate them too. We'll have to see if that turns out to be a subtle difference or something radically different.

Finally, I wanted to add one thought. Remember all the hype about upcoming physics accelerator cards? Physics is going to be the new lighting. More physics makes the world more real. Well, as far as we know, none of the consoles are implementing a physics chip. However, some developers, notably Epic, have mentioned that the power of the cell mimics the physics chip. Once the SDK is ported to PS3, the cell will be able to do everything the physics accelerator can. That might turn out to be the big difference in PS3 vs. Xbox 360 games. You'll get more loose objects, more particles and more effects going on around you. That sounds more fun than decoding a lot of video streams.

Jason