PlayStation Move Uses Just 2MB of System RAM

Nice...

When the Wii was launched it was heralded by Microsoft and Sony as a gimmick, just a passing fad and a toy. Now we find both of them shamelessly and openly copying the Wiimote. It just shows how right Nintendo got it.

I can understand what you're saying about Sony's Move... but how the hell is Natal copying the Wii? They even demonstrated the Natal concept in the Ewan McGregor/Scarlett Johansson movie 'The Island', which was released well over a year before Nintendo Wii, in 2005.

Fanboy fail.

Interesting, if this gadget was on a PC I bet the program would be bloated out to 20 or 30 megabytes. This tells me efficient coding is still around, another reason I like Linux on my laptop.

Any fool can put together a concept briefing. M$ has spies and knew what Nintendo was up to so they do some public briefing to cover their arses if they decide to copy them, enough said about the convicted monopilist Microsoft. No, I don't own a Wii.

Hmmmm....At first I thought the low memory usage was pretty cool until I read the part about required processing power. It will be interesting to see what Sony has to say.

I'll agree with you on the Sony copying part. Sony hasnt just copied the Wiimote to an ugly extend but it copied XBL and everything else that's helped make OS3 interesting this whole gen is Sony copying ideas the past 2-3 years.

One thing though. Whats Natal got to do with all this? Natal has nothing similar at all with anything thats been released so far.

Didn't Sony come out with something similar to Natal already? Albeit not as nice, but still very similar.

I'd imagine that the cell has plenty of spare grunt, 6 cell cores + the 7th reserved for the O/S should leave enough for the motion calculations - it's not as though Sony is asking the gfx core to do the heavy lifting...

A little off-topic but it seems Nintendo was offered Natal first:

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events [...] al/1386922

Sony's system uses the PS Eye and the Move controllers. It's a hybrid between Natal and the Wii.

The argument between Wiimote (or Move or whatever you want to call it) and Natal reminds me of one of the bits from one of the Back to the Future films - main character shows some kids how to use an arcade game with gun things (I think) and their response is 'you have to use your hands? Rubbish' or some such.

At least by saying 'under one frame' they're saying there should be no noticable lag (that's how I'd read it) - although I suppose it doesn't also say "and the frames will still come as often rather than being 60spf"

I'm more chuckling while M$ steps all over itself desperately trying to avoid having to offer or include in the next gen Xbox a Blue Ray player. I know everyone hates Blue Ray and Sony but to date mainstream consumer bandwidth is still isn't sufficient to replace BR as a 1080P high def source.

When the PS3 first came out, there were few games to begin with. As that platform matured, more games were released, none of which to my knowledge could have effectively used a wand-type input controller device. The PS3 - like the Xbox 360 - was and is marketed to the adult and older adolescent male. The Wii on the other hand was and is marketed towards the family, women, and children. I personally don't give a damn what Wii users think of the new Sony controller.

When the PS3 first came out, there were few games to begin with. As that platform matured, more games were released, none of which to my knowledge could have effectively used a wand-type input controller device. The PS3 - like the Xbox 360 - was and is marketed to the adult and older adolescent male. The Wii on the other hand was and is marketed towards the family, women, and children. I personally don't give a damn what Wii users think of the new Sony controller.

Damn. Sorry about the double post.

The problem with the Cell is that the SPEs have zero instruction capability on their own; they're basically 'dumb' SIMD units for the main core. So it's really not a lot of "available" power; it's just that the cores simply can't be usable at ALL in most applications, as the single real core in the chip isn't able to crank out enough instructions to keep the SPEs busy unless it's handling things like streaming media. (read: the SPEs were designed specifically for handling high-def movies. They were NEVER designed for gaming in the first place)



Indeed, the 360/PS3 were marketed more toward the immature, late teens/20s males. Though that doesn't have anything to do with the games being "hardcore" or not; it just means that sexual references, crude jokes, and plenty of violence are required. (oh, and the only available colors are gray, brown, black, and muzzle flash/bloom) But having a rating that's higher than "E" doesn't make a game "hardcore," just like being E-rated doesn't make it NOT hardcore. "Hardcore" means more of a focus on skill-requiring gameplay... And while there's tons of Wii shovelware, a lot of Nintendo's own titles show that they've not lost their touch from when they distilled the type back in the 1980s; while Super Mario Galaxy may be far more colorful than any of the million Halo wannabe games, (that all mysteriously fall far short of how much a blast Halo is to play) it's one of the hardest games out there, particularly on a few of the later levels. (ironically, Halo itself isn't exactly a bleak-colored game; it's fairly colorful)

At any rate, it still remains that the PS3's "Move" is indeed a direct rip-off of the Wii's controller... It wouldn't have been so funny had Sony not gone for a few years calling the Wii's input method a "worthless gimmick." But alas, here we are, and Sony, as usual, winds up being hilariously hypocritical.

The Wii's controller wouldn't be a worthless gimmick if it didn't have such terrible tracking and lag.

Efficiency is the way of the game great job Sony now it would have been nice had the console had 512mb of ram out side the gpu. The gpu however wasn't the best choice.

While I agree that the controllers are somewhat Wii-inspired, I'm not sure it proves Nintendo "got it right." The bottom line is that the Wii sold most of its units when it was priced way below the competition. A lot of games for Wii sell very well and do not use motion control hardly at all.

In my opinion the Wiimote *is* a gimmick, if an occasionally fun gimmick. But the primary success of the Wii was the incremental upgrade to their previous generation, allowing a much cheaper cost of development, and thus cost to the end user (even though that cost was quite inflated). A lot of the uses of the Wiimote in games feel tacked on (Mario party) and can often be more cumbersome than an alternative controller.

The brilliance of the Wiimote may actually be simplistic it is. It goes back to as few buttons as an NES, making it easier for video gaming neophytes to approach. But for people who have been gaming for years, it's quite annoying when you only have one crappy joystick vs. two fully directional ones. Hence the market divide.

I don't think Sony's solution will attract too many customers. Wii customers and PS3 customers are just different markets. Why would you buy a PS3 to play a few motion games when there are so many already out for Wii (and Wii costs less)? On the other hand it allows them to sell peripherals and PS3 owners can now take advantage of the (few, IMO) cases where a motion controller actually improves the experience.

%10 to %15 ?! I never would have guessed it's that high. I was thinking natal had it's own chip built in. Thats a huge hit!!

Everyone copies each other. Sony copied Microsoft's online functionality, Microsoft copied HDMI output and Sony's dual analog controller (only changing the layout). Microsoft gets movie streaming, Sony and Nintendo follow suit. Sony creates DVD format and first DVD based console player, Microsoft gets into console business. Wii has Mii's, Microsoft gets Mii-too's. And so on and so forth. It's a constant race of progress.

I will agree; for the most part, the motion controls are a gimmick. The only place where it doesn't really serve as a gimmick is when the pointer is used for crosshair-aiming in FPS-style gaming modes. In that case, it's most certainly not a gimmick, albeit many complaints could be made that it makes things TOO easy. It's just a shame that there are hardly any games that use this; you've got Metroid Prime 3, The Conduit, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, and not much else. After all, basically combining that with an analog stick allows a gamer to have the best of both input worlds; the stick's high-precision control of movement, and the real-time looking-around to rival the PC mouse.

So while perhaps it wasn't so much that the Sony admittance is that "Nintendo got it right," rather that "Nintendo was right to cash in on this."



Giving it a separate processor to handle everything would've made programming it an utter pain; unlike a GPU or even, say, a physics processor, you can't just call up a routine and offload it; that kind of hardware are "co-processors;" there is no specific sort of process that'd be exclusive to using something like Natal, as many of its functions are tied so tightly into the main functioning of a game that it literally HAS to be handled in the same process as the main game. That means using the main CPU.



It's a bit more than that; movie streaming is really something consoles stole from the PC. As for controllers... Sony stole off of Nintendo with their playstation controllers, Nintendo stole back for the Game Cube, and Microsoft perfected the design for the 360. (at least, in my opinion perfected)

And I would point out that the Xbox is, in fact, not Microsoft's first foray into the console business; some might remember the old "MSX" they developed back in the 1980s; it didn't fare well, but was rather capable, sporting better graphics than the NES, but worse audio. More importantly, it was actually the console that gave rise to three very famous series, being Dragon Quest, Castlevania, and (most-remembered by fans) Metal Gear.

MSX was just a standard O/S platform. MS don't have a hand in designing the consoles. And if i remember correctly, MSX are home computers rather than dedicated consoles. But they are involved in the process with the other console making business partners, mostly japanese.

Actually, while it is true that the MSX is more a "home computer" than a console, Microsoft DID actually design the whole architecture for them. They simply licensed it out for production/sale by other Japanese companies. Of course, this isn't ENTIRELY unlike what occurs with modern consoles, where in Microsoft's case they contract out the work of actual console assembly.

Of course, the line between "home computer" and "console" isn't always clearly distinct, hence why I personally consider it more a console, since that's where most of its success came as.