5 ms·
for me sony is not the apple of its era but much more. It is simply spoken the greatest electronics company that ever existed and their peak was the AIBO
by ousta 9y ago
for me sony is not the apple of its era but much more. It is simply spoken the greatest electronics company that ever existed and their peak was the AIBO
- frou_dh 9y agoSorry to be a grouch, but I had an AIBO (2nd gen) and the thing was overall corny and very limited, even at the time. Lightyears away from inducing any suspension of disbelief. (It's that robotic dog, for anyone wondering)
- astrodust 9y agoNo love for the PS2 which was the champion of its era? By the time the PS3 rolled around Sony was getting a little too full of itself, lacking the competitive fire that made products like the Walkman and the Trinitron screen. It was a good console, but not one that redefined what a console was.
- digi_owl 9y agoAnother thing that happened in that time was the infighting between the media production branches and the electronics branch.
- laumars 9y ago> No love for the PS2 which was the champion of its era? Champion perhaps in terms of sales, but the Dreamcast felt like the more forward thinking console of that generation. It introduced the console industry to online gaming, downloadable content (it was free on the DC though), the idea of games being able to write portable mini games. Ok, that was badly executed but the VMU still had other cool quirks which was new for its era, like an LCD screen showing in game graphics. The PlayStation 2, as nice as it was, was really just a hardware upgrade rather than a paradigm shift
- rbanffy 9y agoThe Dreamcast ran a version of Windows CE. It's kind of a recurring pattern - you partner with Microsoft, they learn from you, help you design just the perfect API for your use case, then they launch either a competitor or something that allows their licensees to compete against you. At the time we called it a bacon and eggs partnership where they are the chicken and you are the pig.
- laumars 9y agoThe Windows CE APIs were an optional interface rather than its primary OS. But most developers chose to use Sega's APIs rather than CE.
- rbanffy 9y agoWasn't DirectX developed at more or less this time?
- laumars 9y agoDirectX had already been out quite a few years by that point. I think I was writing PC games in DirectX 6 or 7 (I forget which) around the time the Dreamcast was released, so it was already quite a few versions along. That all said, I don't recall DirectX being hugely popular - or at least for games development - until around that era or not that long before. So it might have felt like it was pretty new back then. Particularly with how some of the new releases being quite a fundamental change from their previous releases (I seem to recall one version of DirectX (possibly 7?) dropped the previous version of Dx's DirectDraw APIs in favour of promoting Direct3D for all 2D rendering).
- abritinthebay 9y agoEvery PlayStation after the first is just a middle-of-the-road play it safe machine imo. The first was truly groundbreaking in many ways (though some might say that was in part due to Sony was originally developing it with a games company). After that later generations have mostly just gone with “make it faster” style evolution and taking the best parts of the previous generations competitors. No drive to evolve like we’ve seen from Nintendo (Wii, Switch) or MS (Kinect, XBL, or even their games sharing ideas that got them pilloried).
- astrodust 9y agoI had a Dreamcast at the time too and while it felt kind of fresh and new, it also felt like it was going on the Neo Geo trajectory: Really cool but something that will never be fully appreciated until after it fails. The PS2 was better in that it not only became popular, but it had a huge wealth of titles for it. The true gems for a console come out usually near the end of the life-cycle when everyone's pushing the hardware to the limit. Sadly the Dreamcast never got that far.
- Forbo 9y agoApparently you never experienced the aberration that was their earlier generations. Sony had decided in their infinite wisdom to make their laser lenses out of acrylic instead of glass, causing them to discolor and fail. I've never been as frustrated with a console as I have reading "disc read error" dozens of times a day.
- astrodust 9y agoI never had any problems with the PS2 like that, the thing worked like a champion. I did get "red ringed" on the 360, though. At least lens replacement is a simple thing, not like changing the solder.
- flavio81 9y ago>the greatest electronics company that ever existed That must be Philips. Google "Philips natlab".