[quote="Salvation122";p="226939"]You obviously missed my point, which was that if it did not appeal to the hardcore gamers, it would certainly not appeal to the "masses of morons."[/quote]
I didn't say it doesn't appeal to the hardcore gamer.
All I said was, the primary source of its success IS the casuals.
So what? They didn't buy it because they thought it was "cool;" they bought it because they wanted to play a handful of sports games and GTA. There's absolutly nothing wrong with that, and it makes them no different than any other casual gamer.
GTA and sports games = "cool". Playing sports games and GTA = 'seen as "cool"'. Easy enough to comprehend, right? One of my cousins was bored out of her mind watching and playing Smash Bros. Melee, SoulCalibur 2, and F-Zero GX, but she says she plays Grand Theft Auto: Vice City all the time. >_>
Name, quote, publication. Everything I've read has said that of the three, the X-Box is the easiest to program for, because DirectX does a whole lot of it for you.
I didn't say GCN is the easiest to code, either. That's twice in a row you've put words in my mouth.
Names would be various developers who frequented Beyond3D's late console forum. But here's a simple enough one for you: Prince of Persia had large teams for both PS2 and Xbox, with 1-2 guys doing the GCN port. And look! The GCN port turned out fine. Sounds REALLY HARD!
btw, dmpotter, yes, Direct3D has come a very long way since DX5. Xbox uses D3D8.1, and MS provides a lot of pre-written sample code (one big example would be Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions, which is 90% nVidia sample code). GameCube's API is more OpenGL-like.
Third-party developers means "people writing code that aren't Nintendo." They have precious few of those. (And, actually, in my area, X-Box easily gets twice as much shelf space as Cube, and the PS2 has much more than the X-Box. I cite Target, Wal-Mart, and EBX.)
Well then no games released in the first two years of PS1's life were third-party, nor were a lot of early N64 games. Many dev kits include a number of common libraries for simple tasks.
And yes, my local Target, Wal-Mart, and K-Mart have a more space (not a LOT more space, but more space period) for Xbox than GCN... but my EB has very similar sized Xbox and GCN sections (they look different sized here because of the odd shape of the store, but they're much closer than they seem), and again, my local BBuy and TRU have just about identical-sized GCN and Xbox sections. All depends on your area, and where you look, really.
Actually, now that I think about it, my local TRU's GCN section is *larger* than Xbox's - a chunk of the shelf space on Xbox's side is reserved for N64 and Dreamcast leftover stock.
Skorpion wrote:The point remains that the PS2 and XBox controllers next to it were nearly unharmed.
Dunno about your area, but where I live, both at Best Buy and Toys-R-Us, the GCN stands see a lot more play than PS2 and Xbox setups combined.
And finally, wrt sticks in general: GCN's sticks are by far the most precise of the lot this gen, but like N64 they seem to sacrifice sturdiness a bit for better precision (even when they're a bit loose they still work beautifully).
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