Giana Sisters Return on Dreamcast and GP32

[Legerdemain]

The sad thing is that Playstation2 wouldn't have become so big if it wasn't for Sony and their economical backup. In theory the Playstation2 wasn't at all the ultimate gaming console by any means. Hard to develop on, decent processor but less good graphic capabilites than say the Dreamcast.

If Sony would have been the ones to release the Dreamcast the world would probably have been greeted with better looking and smoother running games, and the developers would have had a marvelous and simple console to develop games on. Instead, the Playstation2 took the place as the best selling console and it is to me so illogical...

...but what to expect? The masses have never bothered about quality, just quantity, and thus the Playstation2 was the obvious choiche back then (and today to a lesser extent) simply because it had a larger game catalogue to offer (abeit the quality is obviously lacking in many titles, not to mention the horrid framerate in the oh so popular GTA - Vice City or the pathetic PAL conversion of Final Fantasy with black screen borders bigger than hell itself and a noticable speed loss).

The world works in mysterious, although extremely predictable ways.

[Legerdemain]

so you have the gamecube..it has good graphics, good titles, and bad features... the playstation2 has bad graphics, some good titles but not to many in my opinon...and great features... the Xbox has almost no titles... it has excellent graphics and loads of features....

What kind of features are you talking about here? Like the Playstation2 being able to play both music CD:s and movie DVD:s? The X-Box capable of doing the same?

Personally I do prefer a solid game-only system which is cheap and does what it is supposed to do in a good way. The Playstation2 has never done that according to me, and the graphics are really suffering due to the "not-so-extensively-implented" graphics effects one is being able to use with the graphics card inside the console.

The X-Box isn't really much more interesting as a gaming console, to me at least, 'cause it is all but a success in Japan and playing fast-paced-FPS I do prefer to do on a extensive PC-system. I mean, there isn't much power inside the X-Box... neither CPU nor graphics. It's a cheap end PC, more or less.

[Legerdemain]

...double posting. Weeeird.

[Legerdemain]

Yes, I do so see your point here. But, I still can't help feeling that I yet haven't seen anything (?) that have impressed me on the X-Box...  when compared to a fat PC it doesn't do much, and overall I think the lack of games and the quite often crappy programming of the games that makes them lag so tremendously much (I do prefer a game that run at a stable 15 FPS than a game that runs at 60 FPS but then suffers from these -20 FPS slowdowns at an annoyingly frequent rate... Halo, for example, isn't really the most pleasurable game to play if it is smoothness one wants) makes it for me an uneccessary investement.

I think of the X-Box more like a possible little cheap computer to install stuff on and run as a server... play around with Linux, emulators and stuff on. But, in the end, I guess it is a matter of taste. Besides, I wouldn't want to support Microsoft to the extent of buying the console (yeah, maybe second-hand, since no money is going back to them then).

Oh well.