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But why would they develop for this when there's XBLA

Not meeting the standard organizational qualifications for console developers, for one thing.

and XBLIG

Only available in a few countries.

and Steam

PC has no culture of connecting multiple gamepads to one machine. Instead, players are expected to buy multiple copies for multiplayer.

"It would be cruel to say that [people who complain about the use of Comic Sans on the Higgs Bosson announcement] picked on the font because it was the only part of the presentation they understood [...but...] that's exactly what happened. The scientists had just used a machine that makes the Saturn V moon rocket look like a sparkler to interrogate reality itself, and these dumbasses were trying to look superior because they prefer letters with curly bits at the ends."

source

Writer of lame fanfiction and sci-fi genre pioneer, apparently:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19949_the-6-most-important-sci-fi-ideas-were-invented-by-hack.html

Most parents would not want to buy 3 copies of a game for ONE COMPUTER just so their kids could play too.

On the other hand, my aunt already bought two copies of a Mojang title so that two of her kids could play together. It's too bad most PC game developers are too greedy to implement spawn installation or screen sharing.

Behold THE HORROR:

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_90_the-world-tomorrow-if-internet-disappeared-today/?view=article

(allow cracked.com and crackedcdn.com, hit "article view")

I'm pretty sure there are PC versions of Winning Eleven (or rather Pro Evolution Soccer as it's called outside of Japan). No need for emulators.

I imagine that in a lot of cases, there are features that console versions have that are cut from PC versions, such as the ability to use more than one gamepad with one machine and one screen. In certain console game genres, a mode supporting two players on one machine is to be expected, but the PC version assumes LAN or online play and thus requires a separate PC and copy of the game per player to make more money for the publisher. No, screen-peeking is not always a blocker, especially in e.g. fighting games and games with co-op missions. In these cases, this makes the console version more desirable for a media PC than the PC version.

A tremendous amount of the language of American freedom comes from Native American colonies. Our constitution bears a remarkable resemblance to that of the Iroquois Confederacy, in fact there's a Senate Resolution acknowledging that document as a vital inspiration for our constitution. The only reason Europeans could have settled north America, was because 95% of the native American population was wiped out by plague (up until that time early European colonies often resorted to cannibalism when things got particularly ugly. Oh, did I mention that a huge number of European settlers simply joined the native tribes? They were welcomed and so most tribes had a significant percent of white mixing by the time of western expansion. For an really incredible look at our bogus history take a look here. Its truly fascinating.

Relevant:

http://www.cracked.com/article_15231_7-reasons-21st-century-making-you-miserable.html

M4n, your signature compels me to post this link: http://www.cracked.com/funny-5691-vuvuzelas/

Not all games are FPS or RTS. Would you rather buy a separate gaming PC and separate copy of each game for each member of your household or one machine that can be used by two to four players at once, holding gamepads and looking at one large screen?

Ohhoho, hoho, no.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-actual-live-action-akira-script-worse-than-you-think/

The advantage of a gaming console is that you can sit with your kids in the same room and laugh and play games.

I agree that that's one advantage of a console over a PC running a game designed for a mouse and keyboard. But why can't one plug a couple USB gamepads into a PC and do the same, other than publisher greed that has lately been spreading to the consoles anyway?

using the xbox controller on the PC is a great transition

I agree. Which PC games do you recommend for using two Xbox 360 controllers on one PC, one in your hands and one in your son's?

few consoles have ever allowed you to play the same console game on a portable (the turbographx 16 comes to mind though)

That and the Game Gear, which plays games for Sega Master System through a simple pin adapter. And the Game Boy Advance, which plays NES games through aftermarket flash cards. And the Nintendo DS, which plays Super NES games through aftermarket flash cards. And portable famiclones and super famiclones.

With Steam cloud saves and a laptop I can play the same game at home or on the road without buying the software twice.

But can you and your son play a 2-player game without buying the software twice? I'm not aware of a lot of current PC games that allow spawn installation or screen sharing.

all the various anti piracy measures do is limit casual piracy, that is kids [...] buying a single copy of a game to play at a lan party

And now you know why PC games tend not to support split or otherwise shared screen multiplayer in the living room: selling four copies is more lucrative for the publisher.

Why not use an htpc/gaming pc? You can get most of the xobx games for windows

The kind of game that works best on a console is the kind of game that works best in the living room, and that tends toward fighting games and party games. Are Mortal Kombat (2011) and the other Xbox 360 fighting games ported, or is the fighting section of the PC aisle just Street Fighter IV and more Street Fighter IV?

no subscriptions for basic multiplayer access, the games on windows tend to come out a few $ cheaper

You're right about single-player games. But for two players, you're far more likely to need two machines and two copies of the game on a PC than on a console because major developers assume that nobody owns an HTPC. Compare $60 for one copy of a $60 console game to $80 for two copies of a $40 PC game. It gets even more expensive if your kids are gamers too, or if your family expects you to host the entertainment at annual reunions.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-to-tell-youre-getting-too-old-video-games/

It's a pretty thoughtful article written by someone who enjoys video games.

As for my personal preference, I don't have a lot of time for games so I don't find beating my head against a wall to get past a boss to be all that rewarding. This coming from someone who used to do just that on platformers.

I think it's just a process of changing tastes. I remember when I didn't like to read books without pictures. I remember when black and white movies didn't have enough going on to sustain my attention. Would any teenager appreciate a reflective story about the loss of youth the way someone in their 40's regretting past mistakes would?

I think there's room for games aimed at adults, it's just that the market isn't yet willing to go there. It's sort of like people thinking women don't like porn. Hello? Romance novels? They love porn. You're just doing it wrong.

most PC games don't support multiple gamepads

I have a device, made by Microsoft no less, that allows me to connect 4 wireless Xbox 360 controllers to my PC.

I too own a USB hub allowing connection of four wired game controllers. It's just that the big-name PC games tend not to support multiple gamepads plugged into such an adapter for $ome rea$on. Quoting David Wong:

Sorry, you know damned well that technical limitations aren't the reason everyone is dropping split screen. [...] You're dropping it because four players on a split screen are playing off one $60 copy of the game. Four players playing online need four copies ($240).

Have you any suggestion for good PC games to use with multiple Xbox 360 controllers, apart from those listed here?

I know a country where no one like Bill Gates would EVER be allowed to get all that evil money, or live past age 10 for that matter.

Why don't you get a one-way ticket there?

Yeah, if people actually go back and read the Batman comics that were being written then, they're just as campy and ridiculous as the show.

Still, the post-Burton, pre-Nolan Batman's were fucking shit-tacular. I'm actually more insulted by those movies now that I know that someone that purported to actually give a shit about the characters was involved in the production. Before I could chalk it up to Hollywood humping another property to death because it has no soul or sense of when to quit while ahead, but now I wonder if we weren't just being trolled or something.

Too true... I remember when TLC first started, it was pure awesomeness: it had programs like Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, all sorts of history and science documentaries.

After tuning out for a few years, I was blown over by how the programming on that channel has turned to garbage: http://www.cracked.com/article_18449_the-tlc-experiment-just-how-dumb-learning-channel.html

I would happily pay double to get TLC, Discovery, Scifi, and other channels back to the quality they used to have, but apparently the majority has decided that every channel must produce reality show crap instead.

No word on which candidate is most fit to defend America against shambling hordes of undead seeking to destroy civilization in the zombie apocalypse (perhaps that will be brought out in the debates).

Obviously, Obama would be best against the Zombies. Romney would be best against the Vampires. Or maybe it's the other way around.

By this same token, a duochrome-colorblind person can petition for color-adjusted films.

Have you ever wondered why movies are trending toward an orange and teal color scheme? That's the scheme that happens to work best with common forms of color blindness.

This article pretty much sums up the whole hellish process. I have a friend who has had a couple of foreign wives and he said it was spot on http://www.cracked.com/article_18552_so-you-want-to-be-american-5-circles-immigration-hell.html

Actually, it could be *any* wine dressed up with a fancy enough label.

It always fascinates me how people dismiss any game/system they don't like as being for younger audiences.

Smartphones are for people who can pay a smartphone's monthly bill. Kids in grade school can't.

If you've ever spent much time on a mass transit system since the DS came out

Slashdot is operated from the United States. The United States relies much less on mass transit than some other countries do, and that's because GM, big oil, and a couple tire companies bought the mass transit industry to kill it. GM was convicted of conspiracy but got only a $5,000 slap on the wrist.

Good article on this here: http://www.cracked.com/article_18757_5-things-you-wont-believe-arent-in-bible.html

Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about censorship. I know 100 people who know nothing else about the book except cliff notes or what they got off wikipedia are about to make that comment. So I'll save you the trouble. It was about TV and the mental wasteland that he thought it represented.

Actually, Fahrenheit 451 was most certainly about censorship. Ray Bradbury may not have thought so, but that honestly doesn't matter. The article you're linking refers to a story where UCLA students were telling Bradbury he was wrong, and that the story was about censorship. This apparently angered him, but the students were right. They were right because the author's intentions aren't a valid or even interesting concern about a work of literature. What matters is what the readers get out of it. If they get something meaningful, but completely different than what the author intended, that's what the story was about to them.

In the case of Fahrenheit 451, just about everyone gets the censorship message. It's really not relevant whether Bradbury intended to send that message or not.

Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about censorship. I know 100 people who know nothing else about the book except cliff notes or what they got off wikipedia are about to make that comment. So I'll save you the trouble. It was about TV and the mental wasteland that he thought it represented.

That's what Bradbury said his intention was. As with all literature, the author's intention is only a part of what readers get from the book; often, even usually, there is far more in the work than the author consciously put in. Even the very best of authors are notoriously poor at picking out what their audience will find in their own work.

Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about censorship. I know 100 people who know nothing else about the book except cliff notes or what they got off wikipedia are about to make that comment. So I'll save you the trouble. It was about TV and the mental wasteland that he thought it represented.

They tried it with Omaha, but that city's Chamber of Commerce is not one to be trifled with.

Might need a bit more historical data to back that up... It's pretty well known that Vikings did come to the new world, but I haven't seen anything yet to suggest they were pushed out by the natives.

I'm not even saying you're wrong, just that I haven't heard about it (and would find it fascinating...)

I only learned about this lately myself. Have a shuftie at this:

The Myth:

Our history books don't really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became an endangered species. Some warring, some smallpox blankets and ... death by broken heart?

When American Indians show up in movies made by conscientious white people like Oliver Stone, they usually lament having their land taken from them. The implication is that Native Americans died off like a species of tree-burrowing owl that couldn't hack it once their natural habitat was paved over.
But if we had to put the whole Cowboys and Indians battle in a Hollywood log line, we'd say the Indians put up a good fight, but were no match for the white man's superior technology. As surely as scissors cuts paper and rock smashes scissors, gun beats arrow. That's just how it works.

The Truth:

There's a pretty important detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handoff from Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in the immediate aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In the decades between Columbus' discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history raced up the East Coast of America. Just two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's written history, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts.

In the years before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as "densely populated" and so "smoky with Indian bonfires" that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.

Historians estimate that before the plague, America's population was anywhere between 20 and 100 million (Europe's at the time was 70 million). The plague would eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent of the native population. For comparison's sake, the Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population.

While this all might seem like some heavy shit to lay on a bunch of second graders, your high school and college history books weren't exactly in a hurry to tell you the full story. Which is strange, because many historians believe it is the single most important event in American history. But it's just more fun to believe that your ancestors won the land by being the superior culture.

European settlers had a hard enough time defeating the Mad Max-style stragglers of the once huge Native American population, even with superior technology. You have to assume that the Native Americans at full strength would have made shit powerfully real for any pale faces trying to settle the country they had already settled. Of course, we don't really need to assume anything about how real the American Indians kept it, thanks to the many people who came before the pilgrims. For instance, if you liked playing cowboys and Indians as a kid, you should know that you could have been playing vikings and Indians, because that shit actually happened. But before we get to how they kicked Viking ass, you probably need to know that ...

More...

I haven't done a huge amount of research into this, but if it's true then it sounds to me like someone needs to get busy digging deeper into American history and bringing Hollywood up to speed on it.

Cracked.com was really on to something recently. http://www.cracked.com/article_18718_6-famous-unsolved-mysteries-that-have-totally-been-solved.html

Looks very promising. Interested to see what comes of it.

Short question: How will you keep this show from ending in suck?

Longer version of question: see here. The Lifespan of a TV Show.

Good stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Wasted stories start out good but then get stretched out to the point that the writer simply loses interest and is phoning it in. Television suffers from this disproportionately because network execs are selling viewer eyeballs to advertisers and don't really give a damn what goes between the commercial breaks. They'll keep a show going until it's no longer profitable and cancel it. Hence you get what's depicted in the Cracked post above. I can think of a lot of shows that started out strong, ended terribly, and don't hold up for a rewatch.

Do you have a plan? Something better than the Cylons because they said they had a plan and most certainly didn't.

who cares?

Remarkably, we've pretty much had the Earhart mystery solved ever since partial remains were found on an island... in 1940. That's right, 70 years ago. Only four years after she vanished.

Read more: 6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries (That Have Totally Been Solved) | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_18718_6-famous-unsolved-mysteries-that-have-totally-been-solved.html#ixzz1wlalcIS3

Chuck Norris was the first man to set foot on Neil Armstrong!

I get your point, but it also illustrates how employers unrealistically expect top-notch talent for pretty much every job, when in reality most experienced people are competent if not good. Only a small percentage of people in any field are really good at what they do, and they are in a position to demand high salaries that employers don't want to pay.

Worse, people have grown up with the expectation that becoming a top performer is easy if you just focus and "work smarter." It's the "Karate Kid" effect that David Wong wrote about:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18544_how-the-karate-kid-ruined-modern-world.html

I won't accept it unless they adhere to #3 on: http://www.cracked.com/article_17392_6-sci-fi-movie-conventions-that-need-to-die_p2.html

Perhaps if the Indians had done the same to the Europeans right from the beginning (instead of handing them land), they would still control America.

The Natives did (here) (humorously here). As history has shown all this accomplished was delaying things. Also the Natives were in number compared to when the Europeans started colonizing the New World.

Notice how the europeans had zero success taking-over China despite repeated attempts..... because the Chinese rejected the invaders.

The greatest killer of all was disease, failure of their own immune systems. Disease wiped many of these people out, this is documented with Cortez, too. There is some evidence of the affect these epidemics had relating to the carbon dioxide levels around the time of Columbus' arrival.

Also related, you may find Lies My Teach Told Me an interesting read.

I would disagree.

http://www.cracked.com/article_14982_the-9-manliest-names-in-world.html

Or they could always buy a PC...It could even run Microsoft Windows, and be controlled with an Xbox game controller.

Much noise has been made about Xbox 360 and PS3 games' multiplayer modes going online-only as opposed to split- or otherwise shared-screen. But PC games are even less likely than Xbox 360 games to support even two players on one machine.

The interesting question to me about this is always how much of a Church's revenue flows back out as social works.

If you sincerely believed that the existing governments were about to collapse and that the world would fall under the rule of a heavenly kingdom, wouldn't helping people learn about the coming kingdom count as social work?

If a church uses the money to build a more beautiful sactuary, or a recreation center that primarily benefits the members, then it's not much more charitable than paying a monthly fee to Bally's or a country club.

I don't know about the finances of other religious groups, but the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses separates the congregation's donations into three categories:

• "Local congregation expenses" covers mostly utilities and maintenance of the Kingdom Halls. The elders don't get any of this; they serve as volunteers.
• "Worldwide work" covers printing of The Watchtower, the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, and other free literature, along with legal defense of the Witnesses' house-to-house teaching work.
• "Kingdom Hall construction" covers building new Kingdom Halls, the buildings in which each congregation meets twice a week. In general, one Kingdom Hall can serve three congregations, and congregations split when they threaten to exceed one monkeysphere. So on average, that's one Kingdom Hall for every 300 Witnesses and associates.

The books of Jehovah's Witnesses are open. You can go into any Kingdom Hall and look at a report of amounts contributed to and paid from each category before the public talk every Sunday.

1/100th the rate? Where on earth did you get that number? CGI is currently the most time consuming and expensive part of most major movies these days. The reason they do it is not because it's cheaper, but because they can do things that are impossible or impractical with traditional film making. Sometimes because it's cheaper, as well, but a lot of times the real thing is still cheaper and of course looks better.

Watch a car blow up in a cheap cable TV show. Looks fake, like CGI? Yep, it was, and they paid crappy artists to do it quickly. Watch a car blow up in a $100M action movie. Looks real? That's because it was, and blowing up a bunch of cars was still cheaper and more realistic than what it would take to render a CGI scene of remotely similar quality...

So what you're saying is that the author is a plagiarist (from March 26, 2011)?

so-you-want-to-be-american-5-circles-immigration-hell

http://www.cracked.com/article_19142_5-soviet-space-programs-that-prove-russia-was-insane.html

one has three choices when it comes to consoles: Not buy one at all, buy one for each of the kids, or watch the shared console get utterly destroyed in a fight. [...] If the kids want games, that is what the PCs are for.

One likewise has three choices when it comes to gaming PCs: Not buy one at all, buy one for each of the kids, or watch the shared gaming PC get utterly destroyed in a fight. And one still has to buy a copy of each game for each PC.

Keep moving forward.

Now if they can only find a genetic link in why so many people on /. have Assburgers~

reference:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-real-diseases-that-have-somehow-become-trendy/

Having a bunch of games that look the same sounds awful to me.

You mean like Generic Real-Is-Brown Military FPS #23 or Generic Teal-And-Orange Film #41?

Having a bunch of games that look the same sounds awful to me.

You mean like Generic Real-Is-Brown Military FPS #23 or Generic Teal-And-Orange Film #41?

http://www.cracked.com/article_18570_6-companies-that-make-money-solving-problems-they-made-up.html
#5, Cracked is right on the mark (they're often great at humor that makes a point)

If I were to have them bring their laptops, I'd have to buy each of them a copy of the game, but I'll grant that that's easier when Steam sales are going on. But more importantly, I'd first have to buy each of them a gaming laptop, as opposed to a laptop that's designed for homework and Facebook. Consoles are far cheaper than that. And consider the case of someone who left home without a laptop because he didn't foresee in advance getting an itch to play a video game.