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Back when the average mp3 player had about 256 meg of memory, I felt so smug for picking up an mp3 CD player: exactly the same as a regular portable CD player, but you could also burn mp3s to a regular CD and play them! Yeah, it was bulky, and trying to find an individual song was an immense pain but I had a bajillion times the songs the rest of you plebeians had with me  It was actually a lot cheaper than most other mp3 players at the time as well. This was back in about 2004, so if you wanted more than a gig of storage, you were looking at shelling out several hundred for an iPod, whereas the player I bought only cost me around £70: about the same as you'd pay for a decent CD player of the day. It actually kept me going for a couple of years, until technology moved on and I found I could get a 4gig mp3 player for around £50, and I fully committed to digital ever since.
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Jul 13, 2012 08:17
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Rare Collectable posted:Like this? Behold: The Sega Megazord! Painful Dart Bomb posted:Game Gear? Pshyeah, who needs that crap when you've got... I got one for Xmas when I was a kid. Wound up buying one off ebay a couple of years back and wondered how I could be so dumb to ask for something like this and not wind up choking to death on my cereal or something. And didn't it take four or six AA batteries? I still have it, but gently caress digging it out.
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Jul 14, 2012 01:21
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Wasn't the MD stupidly popular in Japan? I remember hearing it was the fact that it never really took off in the West that killed it as a format.
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Jul 15, 2012 16:11
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Factory Factory posted:I thought it was as much that the PS3 pushed out a huge install base for Blu-Ray players that people could essentially get "for free" with the purchase of a game system. When BD and HD-DVD first came out, the players were something like $1000, so even a $600 console used only as a player was a surprisingly good deal. So, y'know, using a loss-leader to win the format war. I've heard it argued that it would've taken a hell of a lot longer for DVD to take off if it weren't for the PS2 for the same reasons. Granted, by that point, DVD players had been around for a few years and were a more reasonable price, but that essentially swayed a lot of people towards adopting DVD as a format.
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Jul 17, 2012 03:41
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Ramadu posted:What were the alternatives to DVD at the time? I lived through it and I don't even remember. Oh god I'm so old. It was still really VHS, with people occasionally suggesting CDs as a possible successor. I remember lots of people I knew refusing to part with their movie collections or their videos - you couldn't record live TV with a DVD (at the time), after all. However, after the PS2 came out, people really started to become more comfortable with the idea of replacing their movies for something shinier. The fact that fancier TVs were becoming more affordable to show off your shiny new discs probably didn't hurt either. It may be coincidental, but the two did seem to go hand in hand.
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Jul 17, 2012 03:52
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Nasgate posted:Screw Ipods and Zunes, my family used Zen players I had the redesigned 16gig Creative Zen up until about two or three years ago. It was the size of a credit card (which was included as part of their marketing!) and was capable of playing video, listening too the radio and all kinds of other fancy crap! It also had an SD card slot, which was finicky when it came to listening to music (it tended to play everything from either the player OR the card, but never both) but great if you loaded it up with TV shows or whatever. It came with its own video conversion software which reduced the size of a file by about 2/3rds or more so you could get a good number of complete series onto even a gig of space. It was terrible if whatever you were watching was over an hour in length though: whether it was the fault of the player or the software, I could never watch a movie that didn't suffer serious desync issues after more than 20 minutes of play. What eventually killed it was a simple drop: one fall onto concrete and that was it. Any kind of jolt (or movement, for that matter) caused the player to crash utterly, to the point where even the hard reset function wouldn't work. Not the handiest thing when you're talking about a portable player you keep in your pocket. After that, I finally caved and bought a 120gig ipod off a friend. It's nice being able to take almost my entire music collection with me wherever I go, but the screen on the Zen really beat it by miles.
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Jul 18, 2012 02:34
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mrkillboy posted:They're coming back into the public consciousness with things like the Pebble getting huge publicity, though now they're paired with smartphones and pretty much act as secondary displays and inputs rather than be standalone devices. I had that and the followup model. The second had a feature where you could get it to play a little flourish when you opened it up. I had one that made it play a noise that sounded like R2D2 falling down some stairs. I actually got into a semi-argument with a friend over having a phone that doubled up as an mp3 player:she said that having both in one unit was a wonderful convenience. I said I was paranoid that listening to music constantly (as I do when I'm out and about) would kill the battery when I needed it most. That, and if I lose or break my phone, I still have my mp3 player, and vice versa. Neither of us could agree to disagree, so she has her shiny new iphone and I have my ipod (with about 3x the storage space of her phone) and Sony Ericsson W810. We're both happy the way we are.
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Jul 29, 2012 15:49
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redmercer posted:You call that a brick? Here's a brick: That looks like a Dreamcast VMU had sex with a breeze block.
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Aug 3, 2012 10:15
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I'm going to go a step further: dedicated gaming machines. Home and handheld consoles aren't allowed to play games anymore, they have to do everything else too. I appreciate my consoles being able to play DVDs and video files, but past that, the usefulness of stuff like GPS, 3D cameras, hell, even the ability to update Facebook trails off sharply.
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Aug 7, 2012 21:04
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Fuzz1111 posted:You recall correctly, you could probably use a hammer on the play/rewind switch without doing damage. Still precise enough that the thing played cassette tape at perfect speed (and if you were careful, it was gentle enough not to stretch the tape even though it was far weaker than it what it was designed for). Considering how prevalent and popular, say, the .mkv format is, you'd think adding that to the PS3/60 would be a no-brainer, but noooo... There's a weird feeling when the little portable media player that plugs into your TV you got for £30 last week is, technically speaking, better at the home media thing than the £200 monolithic wunder-console.
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Aug 8, 2012 11:50
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RagnarokAngel posted:I missed the part where these optional features in any way hinder your ability to play games? They don't? My point was that consoles and handhelds seem to have 'plays games really well' as less of a priority these days. I've heard it argued that the Vita would probably be more appealing if it wasn't bogged down with so much crap, and the 360 menu is more cumbersome since they redesigned it with Kinect in mind. They're trying to cram as many extra features in without actually asking if it makes the package any more attractive.
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Aug 8, 2012 15:59
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:28 |
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'What happens when goths discover brown' is always my favourite description of it. Then I feel sad because I actually like steampunk...
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Aug 8, 2012 19:29
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