Blog of a crazy man

I’m sorry. My posts have been less than regular lately. Tuesday begins finals week at school, so chances are, I’m not going to get much more posting in until Friday at the earliest. You can expect a return to normal crazyness after that.

It’s official, next year’s big three will be the Sony Playstation 3, Microsft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Revolution. All of them putting on their shows at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo, for you non-gamer types). So I’m going to break them down by analyzing the consoles hardware, style, and appeal factors. I’m also going to be extremely biased toward Nintendo :).

Hardware:
It looks like the Playstation 3 is going to come out on top in this category. Nobody knows for sure how powerful the Revolution is going to be, but not many are expecting its hardware to be much more powerful than the Xbox 360 which is only about half as powerful as the Playstation 3. Although the Revolution could come out to be the most powerful, it seems very unlikely.

Style:
Xbox 360 is the winner, hands down. The Xbox 360 is just beautiful. Microsoft spent alot of money on the design, and it shows. The wonderfully concave design carries the friendly, yet strong, feel that complements the Xbox quite well.

The comparison here is the Playstation 3, which is quite possibly, the ugliest device I have ever seen. Its bloated, dominating feel make the console look like something that would scare you rather make you want to hug it, which is what the Xbox 360 makes you want to do. The concave sides make the console look more like a decorous trash can rather than a game system. I just don’t feel the Playstation 3 design, though that may just be my opinion.

The Revolution finds its home nicely in the middle. It’s squared off design gives the feel of power, but the small form factor and simplicity of design make it feel like something you can reach out touch, though it doesn’t quite have the cuddle factor of the Xbox 360. Better than the Playstation 3, but worse than the Xbox 360, the Revolution finds itself comfortably average.

Customer Appeal:
This is a tough one. I’d say its going to be a toss up between the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Xbox 360 looks poised to take top spot if only for the fact that it will be the first of the three to be released, but without the power to back it, it may not be able to hold its own against the Playstation 3. The Xbox 360’s greatest feature appeal is its networking and customization. Playstation 3’s greatest feature is its power, but it may lose customers because of its poor style.

Revolution will definitly gain market share, but how much remains to be seen. The “All Access Gaming,” which provides access to not only Revolution game disks, but also Gamecube disks and download access to games from the NES, SNES, and the N64, will give it a retro gamer feel, and its small form factor is going to give it an appeal to a larger, more casual gamer audience. The bigest hindrance to the console is going to be the bad reputation carried over from the Gamecube, which missed the ball on alot of emerging features and processing power. Nobody knows what the processing ability of the Revolution is going to be, but estimates leave it around the same power as the Xbox 360 which won’t help it any.

Nintendo will probably only gain a niche market akin to that of Apple Computers. While Nintendo will very likely be able to keep pumping out games that keep our attention, it doesn’t look like they’re going to have deep enough pockets to take a big market. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo focuses solely on games, which gives them great design, but small budget and even smaller market share.

Though there’s still hope that Nintendo will gain the top spot it deserves.

My sister-in-law, Joy, came to visit today. She’s going to be staying through Wednesday. If I don’t have any major updates then you can blame her :), but if I do update, then you can ignore this message.

I’m also probably going to be going to Florida for a month or so starting in June. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be stuck with only dial-up access, so I’ll try to keep regular updates, but I’m not making any guarantees.

Of course, when I don’t update, my blogroll provides plenty of reading material :).

The time traveler convention was yesterday, and from the site:

The convention was a success! Unfortunately, we had no confirmed time travelers visit us.

To anybody who would have thought of this it would be obvious why the convention had no time travelers, because time travel to the past is never invented. This can be obvious for one simple reason, we don’t already know about it. If anybody had figured out how to travel back in time it would be inevitable that eventually somebody would go back to the first humans and give them time travel technology, it would be something we all grew up with.

Also, if time travel were possible, why would you come to 2005?

Wired has an article called “Dome Improvement” which explores the increasing trend of industrialized nations to have rising IQ scores.

The article explores the idea and ultimately came to the conclusion that any genius probably already knew: video games, TV, and the internet make you smarter.

The interesting side-effect of this is that standardized test scores are going down. By spending all our time playing video games, our IQs have gone through the roof, but book smarts and facts have gone out the window. I guess it depends on how you look at it weather you think this is a good thing or not.

Link.

Update:
Kottke.org has a similar article but references much more than just Wired.

Link.

Alright, so some guys at MIT have a great idea, make a convention for time travelers, publicize it, and sometime in the future when time travel is invented, everybody will come back in time and attend the convention.

The strange part about this is that it could theoreticaly work. Time travel might be possible, and if it is than the rest is just a matter of publicity, but if the convention becomes like a giant wookstock of time travelers, than that won’t be a problem.

There’s a link to donate to a refreshments fund, but you could also steal a page from The Restaraunt at the End of the Universe and deposit a penny in a savings acount and leave the account info on some piece of clay and hope that a future time traveler recieves the then millions of dollars and comes back in time and deposits it into the refreshments acount.

Link.