I see you've met Rol, the most sracastic person on the forums.

No need to insult him.  He's only kidding.  And even if he wasn't...there's no need to flame. Ever.

I talked to him Tuesday and he had already been on it.  He was in an earlier beta I guess.  He is completely uninterested in it now though.  I talked to him again today and he said he went on it to show it to someone else.  He didn't tell me what his friend's reaction was, but implied that it wasn't interesting to him at all.  He may have used the word "gay".

I'm not going to justify my statement to you, Leo-J.  You're the one here who is always full of shit.  Your mythical town has had Wiis in stock for two years.  My story is 100% true, and if you don't want to buy it that's your problem not mine.  Liars routinely assume others lie.

A lot of people don't like the idea of home.  I explained it to my girl yesterday and she thought it was stupid.  After reading the reviews of the execution for home, it sounds more like it is intended to be a money making machine than a real social network.  You aren't going to get a cross section of regular people on Home either -- you'll have mostly hardcore gamers and I bet at least 95% of the people on Home will be male (regardless of how their avatars look).

No, because:

a) LBP isn't free, you have to pay 60 bucks for it.

b) XNA offers standalone games, not levels for a game you already have.

XNA launched with the release of NXE, and while the majority of games are probably utter shit, there may be one or two worth paying for.  I believe the prices are at most a couple of dollars.

home might not be the next facebook, but it makes psn better than xbox live, in value at least.
btw, i havent been on xbl since i discovered gears 2's horrible online, im sorry microsoft, but our ride is about to be over.

 what you said is correct, except for the part about wii being the first to create avatars. nintendo didnt create avatars, they were just the first to use them in online networking.

yeah i quess u said it better

don't u get mixed up with my profile pic i always do with urs there pretty close in color shade

Dedicated servers are "old tech".  All they really do is make multiplayer gaming more laggy by requiring everything to go through one more hop.  XBL has no dedicated (game session) servers, it was designed to not need them.  P2P FTW. :)

Dedicated servers also mean when a publisher wants to kill a game they can just shut down the service.  The only games this can happen to on XBL are EA games because EA strongarmed Microsoft into letting them run their own matchmaking servers.  And ... EA has already started shutting down game servers to sell newer games - good luck playing a 2yr old sports game online.

True, the concept of avatars is prior to consoles.  You could argue that nearly anything that gets to consoles was done years (or decades) before.  Online gaming, avatars, home, whatever.

There is an inherant difference between the way Nintendo implemented avatars and the way Microsoft/Sony implemented avatars, however.

Nintendo used avatars and avatar creation as a vehicle for getting regular people into games.  It makes them more interested in what they're doing and they have a better understanding of who they are in games.  This opens gaming up to everyone, plus making lookalike Miis and other things is just fun.  Part of the reason it was/is fun is because Nintendo was the first to do it on a home console -- it was sort of novel, especially with their approach.

Microsoft and Sony are using Avatars/home/NXE to drive micro transactions.  Microsoft wants to eventually sell you clothes and other items for your avatars and Sony is taking that two steps further by encouraging you to buy branded items both for your residence as well as for your avatar itself.  They want you to go to the mall and buy virtual clothes (with real money) as a pass time and they want you to buy fancy houses and furniture not to actually use, but to impress other people.

Nintendo's approach became instantly successful and is one of the driving forces behind the Wii's insane sales.  It has pulled non-gamers into games and kept their interest.  Now you've got your Mii for Wii Fit, you've got it for Mario Kart (Mario Kart shows you who is playing with you and where they're from on a globe), as well as a variety of other uses.

You are confusing "centralized" servers with "dedicated" servers.  Centralized servers, for example, a random Xbox 360 hosting a Halo 3 game, requires all clients to connect to that server and send the server information.  The server then sends that information to each client.  Centralized servers are, by far, the most popular way for doing large online games like Halo 3 (anything with more than 4 players typically).

Dedicated servers are servers set up professionally with bandwidth dedicated just for hosting your game.  So rather than some random Xbox 360 in some guy's house serving as your server, there is a machine in a data center with professional and fast internet hosting serving the game. 

It is also worth nothing that whichever Xbox is operating as the server has a "host advantage" meaning they have no Internet latency to themselves whereas everyone else has latency to them.  Further, if the host quits during a game you'll find that the game halts and has to select a new host and resynchronize.

Dedicated servers are unquestionably superior to non-dedicated servers.  In both cases, you have the same number of "hops" in the sense that you used the word "hop".

why does ms have to say these things? arent they wining? or maybe they are felling treatened by sony, maybe ms have played all treir carts and all they do is bash sony because they are nervous.

@ leo-j

I don't know, because the ps3 doesn't have it! *facepalm*(a black hole just formed in my logic, don't blame me, I just don't feel like arguing right now, you fill in the blankS.)