Joelcool7 said:
You are somewhat correct. But I notice in your argument you only name a few of the more polished GameCube games. Take ResidentEvil4 and ResidentEvil4 on PS2 and sit them side by side and you see the hardware's differances. Capcom tried as hard as they could to directly port RE4 but the PS2 version still looked a little grainy and not as polished as its GameCube counter part. Infact it has been argued that GameCube's ATi/IBM proccessors made it almost as powerful as the X-Box. You did name some of the best looking games on the PS2 and yes they do look pretty good. But to be honest GodOfWar2 and Shadow Of the Collosus. Games like Sega's Spartan Total War and EternalDarkness which I'd say are the closest game's to GodOfWar on a genre basis do look just as good if not better then their PS2 counter parts. Take a look at Konami's MetalGearSolid:TwinSnakes and compare it to MetalGearSolid3 for example. You can see the differance in hardware strength. Installed Base plays a role to me but not much of one. PS2 had the largest installed base and PS3 sold worth crap. The Super Nintendo had the largest installed base (From NES/GameBoy) yet the N64 bombed compared to the PlayStation. Brand loyalty does play a role. GameCube is the perfect example it survived pretty much on loyal gamers and hardcore gamers who bought all three systems. But I don't think even installed base plays the big role. I think its all about game quantity, many would argue Nintendo has always had the best first party titles, yet it still failed with 64 and GameCube. It was quantity that won the PS2's battle and now with Wii it isn't the high quality first party software winning the war alone. It's the quantity of party games shovel ware and innovative software. It's quantity that wins console wars unfortunetly! |
I have to disagree with the cross-platform comparisons -- the GC was considerably easier to develop for than the PS2, and thus most cross-platform games were shorted on the PS2, because the developer iterated faster by developing on the GC/XBox primarily. If you want to compare two consoles via software, the best way to do it, is to compare exclusives -- where the developer had to focus on the console at hand. Cross-platform games *always* have a console bias, due to the fact that its just plain easier for a dev studio to support one platform of development (from every standpoint, but especially IT, meaning having every engineer/artist/designer have the same kind of devkit, dev software, and working build) as a primary, and assign a small team to ensure that their engine ports to the other platforms throughout development.
RE4 was built primarily on the GC, by a Japanese development studio that favored Nintendo development over Microsoft development. You can compare it to an exclusive, like God of War, but comparing it to its PS2 counterpart is actually a bit unfair.
As I said, the PS2 and GC exclusives are actually quite similar, graphically, in my opinion. You could argue that, despite "real" hardware performance being similar, that the PS2s much greater learning curve effectively lowered its games' performance over the console's lifetime. I would definately say that's true... and frankly, that's what matters in the end to the user. In that sense, the only sense that matters, the PS2 was the slowest of its generation.
In the current generation, the same is true of the PS3 vs X360 -- except that the PS3 appears to actually be a bit superior when handled by a talented team, as opposed to "near equal". At this time though, the PS3 and X360 are only just getting to be "on par", from the user's perspective... the PS3 has suffered a bit from its learning curve thusfar (I would say very similar to PS2/GC comparisons, actually), although that trend does appear to be on the downward slope.
The Wii... is unique. It is, effectively, the very first "casual console" -- it almost deserves another comparison catagory, all to itself. Claiming it competes with the PS3 and 360 is actually somewhat of a stretch, in my opinion. I think you could argue that a large number of Wii owners would never have purchased a PS3 or X360 to begin with.
