Zucker talks about Stranglehold, PS3 price and blu-ray

Midway's CEO and president gives his views on Blu-ray and the price of PS3, and explains the publisher's "fewer, bigger, better" approach to next-gen development in this exclusive chat.

--Eurogamer

[Zaskark5]

ps3 will fail to sell and the Wii and the Xbox 360 will dominate!

[TheMART]

What he says...

"Well you get a blu ray... a blu ray. Yeah you get a blu ray (damn I don't know what to tell anymore about the PS3) oh yeah you get a hard drive (well that's something new)"

Then say nothing at all if this is what one brings...

[Marriot VP]

This guy really doesn't say anything, I just saw it so I posted the video.

[shotty]

He can't really say anything about the ps3. "Well it has blu-ray, it's blu-ray, the ps3 is reasonably priced" This guy is an idiot. He gives no reason why blu-ray is an advantage. Sure it can hold more info but the ps3 drive has a way slower read speed than the xbox 360. Read speed is way more important than disc capacity. The xbox 360 can pull info off the disc at 130Mb/sec while the ps3 does it at 75Mb/sec. This is a big difference which is why sony had the harddrive to make the gap a bit smaller but the xbox 360 also uses the harddrive to cache data. This is a reason a game like oblivion would have a hard time running on the ps3.

[DJ]

http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/
2x Blu-ray transfers data at 72Mbps, and unlike DVD it maintains constant speed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
The 12x DVD drive in the 360 has a max data transfer rate of 16.0 MBps. But there's a catch and it has to do with the way the two drives work. In this case, the terms 12x and 2x become pretty meaningless once you see the maximum and minimum data rates of both drives.
http://www.gamespot.com/pag...
"There seems to be a bit of confusion about Blu-ray's read speeds in
comparison to DVD's read speeds specially given the Xbox 360's 12x DVD
rating. I am going to attempt to clarify the differences.

The first
difference that should be noted in a DVD vs Blu-ray discussion is that
DVD's are Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) and Blu-ray is Constant
Linear Velocity (CLV).

CAV: The drives transfer rate is
variable. Information on the inside tracks of the disc is read at
approximately half the speed as the information on the outside of the
disc.

CLV: The drives transfer speed is linear or
constant regardless of whether information is on the inside tracks of
the disc or the outside.

This is important to note because each of DVD's X ratings have a minimum and a maximum read speed and the advertised read speed is taken from the maximum, consequently a DVD drives maximum read speed is almost never realized. On the other hand Blu-ray's only has one constant read speed:"
http://img25.imageshack.us/...
"Another
important note about CAV drives (e.g. DVD) is that because information
on a disc is written from the inside to the outside the X rating is
never realized unless the disc is entirely full.
Example:

The maximum read speed of a disc that is only half full on a
12x drive is only 12MBps compared to the drives maximum of 16.5MBps."

And here's the real kicker.
"At 2x Blu-ray can read as fast as 12x DVD's minimum read speed." And most of the data on a DVD will be read at LESS than the Max data rate.

DVD drives have variable data rates, but Blu-ray drives have constant data rates. While the 360's DVD drive has a higher max rate than the PS3's BD drive, the PS3's BD drive can keep up with the 360's minimum data rate. DVDs read at Max speed when the data is at the very center of the disc, and slopes down as the laser travels to the outer rim.

Something that seems to be left out of the playstation equation is HDD caching. PS3 developers can cache data onto the PS3's hard drive as soon as the console is turned on. This results in faster load times if game developers utitlize it (which they are). Sadly, 360 developers can't utilize caching at all since not all of the consoles are sold with a hard drive. People below me are going to spin HDD caching as irrelevant, which is ridiculous since the original Xbox had great load times due to Hard Drive caching.

Saints Row is actually missing certain features that Volition wanted to put in due to the fact that they can't do HDD caching, and the developer was pretty open about its frustrations with the 360.

"Last but not least, after we were told that there was no ability to fly aircrafts in the game due to the DVD drive's inability to stream the environment fast enough in full 720p resolution. We asked Jacques Hennequet (Producer for Saint's Row), If the Xbox 360 Hard Drive was standard across both SKU's, would flying aircrafts in the game have been a reality?, Jacques simply answered Yes. While he completely understands why MS made the decision to not include a hard drive in the Core System, I think he felt somewhat disappointed, as it could have opened up much more possibilities within the gameplay for Volition's first Xbox 360 title." "I am a little nervous that with streamed data (ie where data is loaded constantly from disc), the Xbox 360 will still be quite restricted because of the DVD format disc."
http://www.maxconsole.net/?...
http://www.edge-online.co.u...

And now you know why Sony stuck with Blu-ray AND put an HDD as standard; they benefit consumers by helping developers.

[Marriot VP]

Also to note I really can't wait for stranglehold for the 360. It's gonna be sweet if you've seen the long demo video.

[Dick Jones]

for years, i doubt their gunna start during this interview. They have let MK series stagnate bringing nothing new to the table other than killing off tried and true gameplay. Spy Hunter a top IP? WheelMan with Vin Diesal? Stranglehold with John Woo? Why don't these clowns do us all a favor and stop making games and just make movies cuase thats sounding like what they want to do anywase.