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and the Xbox, while reasonably popular, is not profitable for Microsoft.

FALSE. You are two years behind the times.

Google's ventures outside search and advertising have been ignorable so far.

Yeah, nobody gives a shit about Android. Er, wait.

Even IBM's foray into personal computing, historically important though it was, is history.

You miss the point completely. The big money now is not in PCs, it's in services. Margins on commodity PCs are razor-thin. IBM is going where the money is, and for that matter, where the future is. Devices change. Back-ends persist.

Now Apple wants to enter a field in which they not only have no experience, but also lack experience in the entire underlying field of large-scale, massively parallel computing? And they think they're going to do this by buying an unknown and unproven startup?

Google was once an unknown and unproven startup. Useful web search was invented by Inktomi, which was nobodytomi (or you, or anyone else) before that. If you don't know what you're doing, hiring someone who does (or in this case, buying a company and getting employees and IP) is a reasonable way to enter a market.

The odds of it going anywhere are not good, and if it pisses off enough iPhone owners, it might damage the core company as well.

The iPhone would have to crawl out of your pocket and rape your baby to make the average Apple phone discard it in disgust.

ObDisclaimer: I am a recovered former Mac user who doesn't think Apple will even try to get into search.

XBox Profits up, sales down. If they get a long tail they may break even - and for Microsoft that's doing well. What does it say for a company that they hope to get out what they put in over a decade, inflation notwithstanding? And what about the failure rate? Is putting out products that fail half the time harming their brand? That's a reasonable expectation. If Boeing planes failed to stay airborne, or Toyota cars failed to operate safely less than 99.99% of the time, we'd have a serious issue with that. Somehow though Microsoft is getting away with quality control that nets 0.5 9's. How is that even possible?

The original Silent Hill is a much better game than Silent Hill 2. More creepy atmosphere, less "oh how convenient all the windows are boarded up and the lights are all broken" with random stuff jumping out for no reason to scare you. (If you prefer the latter, go with the Resident Evil series.)

Happily there's a remake of the original Silent Hill on the Wii which allegedly improves on it by offering Wii remote control of the flashlight, etc. You can also get the PS1 original from PSN.

However, I must say that I do not like having words put in my mouth. You made a statement about what could reduce the piracy rate. I pointed to an article that explored those very things, ran figures for them, and noted that those things had no effect on the piracy rate at all. I was speaking entirely of the ratio of pirated copies to legitimate copies, and you kept trying poke holes in the argument that a download is equal to a lost sale. I never made that claim, the article never made that claim, and frankly the claim was irrelevant to the ratio. That makes it a straw man.

And I pointed out that we really have no way to know at all whether or not those "things" really had an effect on the piracy rate, regardless of what graphs your article has. And that, as a result, your claim of those "things" being an "utter failure" at affecting piracy is such an extreme statement that it's only valid if we were otherwise assuming every pirated download as a lost sale. Not a straw man at all, nor was it putting words in your mouth.

I will point out, though, that if the sales figures for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are representative of a successful game - over 6 million copies sold for console vs. approximately 350,000 sold for PC - then the reason that the big game makers are going for the console market has a lot more to do with the size of the market than it does with the financial cost of DRM. Console games are less complex to develop (the PC game platform is really something like a hundred similar platforms, all with their own quirks, whereas a game that works on one X-Box 360 will work on all X-Box 360s), have fewer piracy issues, and a far larger market.

Well first, you got your facts wrong. http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=5826 I dunno, maybe you have a bad source but according to my math, 12% of 7 million comes to 840,000, not 350,000. I also find it quite amusing that you would choose MW2 as your example of poor sales on the PC. You are aware that several hundred thousand gamers boycotted the game, precisely because it didn't offer the value that it should have? http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?dedis4mw The main reason though that some developers are finding it hard to get PC game sales to match console sales is because PC gamers are too busy playing games on their PCs that simply can be done properly on console. Namely, MMOs. Or to be specific, WoW. And yet, despite all the boycotts, despite all the piracy, despite the millions of gamers who previously would have been their target audience that are now plaing MMOs, they still managed to sell enough copies of MW2 for PC to make it the most successful PC version of Call of Duty ever. http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/modernwarfare2/news.html?sid=6241052 Yep, I guess they should just pack in their PC gaming devision because it's clearly not profitable enough.

Or, put bluntly, why would any developer put the effort into selling around half a million copies for PC if they're REALLY lucky when they can put less effort into selling a few million for consoles first?

Maybe because the game they want to create just won't work well on consoles? Or maybe because there's already so many games for consoles available, and with the big publishing houses focusing more on consoles it's a lot easier to make a profit on PCs? How about because the installed base for PCs dwarfs that of all modern consoles put together? Not all games have to be cutting-edge 3D you know. The PC game market includes far more than the retail boxed products, and way more than consoles could ever hope to offer.

And that is my last word in this discussion. I will not reply further.

Good for you.

But what pissed me off (and why I don't host with them anymore) was the overly terse statement that was obviously carefully reviewed to make it damned hard to sue them. Was I ever going to sue them? Probably not, maybe just ask for a break on that month's hosting or something.

You wouldn't but come on, you know how we Americans are. We sue when we can't play Halo for a few days.

Chances aren't bad that someone was looking for a lawsuit, heading it off at the pass had a chance to prevent some stupid lawsuits which would waste time and only benefit lawyers, possibly requiring some invasive, poorly thought-out court-ordered hinderance which would have slowed the recovery.

It's actually verbatim from what he said in a Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference in San Francisco . (start reading after "[UPDATE]")

It was also heavily dumbed down (universal ammo, no skill system, lame biomod system, terrible inventory system, only two modifications per weapon, no computer hacking, no separate multitools/lockpicks, less dialogue choices and no consequences for actions) to cater towards the brainless console masses.

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/adventure/deusextheconspiracy/review.html

Thats the port of the original game to the PS2. It has the same stuff the PC version has, though they did take out limb damage and broke the levels into separate parts. They also diddled with the UI a bit, some PC players even say the PS2 versions inventory system is more reasonable. They also threw in keyboard and mouse support.

That's how you do a port. Don't blame consoles overall for DX2, blame the developers for underestimating (and insulting) Xbox players in that PC snob "console players are just a bunch of Madden addled teenagers without brains" sort of way.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6199172.html

Pardo also said that the second two releases could be considered expansion packs, but that "we really want them to feel like stand-alone products."

i.e., they will charge full price.

I found that the "Cars" game pretty good. Quite fun to play actually. Not sure if it was worth the price of a full game, but overall it wasn't bad. Some sites agree and give it a good rating.

Who here has put underhanded code in released products?

I admit to adding and concealing the flight cam easter egg in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Rebublic. It wasn't nearly as clever as the contest entries, and it would be impossible to claim innocence if I was caught, but I enabled the "debug" cam using a generic-sounding external variable, put the code inside an "#ifndef _DEBUG" block, added a comment to describe the code as some boring debug message thing (hardly worth looking at), and had a little loop to decode the "Punch it, Chewie!" message to that the string wouldn't show up in the executable.

Yes, well my hair is a bird. Your argument is invalid.

What I love about that is that it parses as a true statement in symbolic logic. Since the assumption is false (my hair is a bird) it is logically true statement to conclude anything from it (i.e. if my hair is a bird then your argument is invalid). Of course, it's a fairly worthless statement, but amusing all the same in its unassailable nature.

Further, the internet police wish to inform you that you must link to the relevant picture when invoking any meme-ish items.

As for joysticks, you ever tried to play a flight sim without one (of course it was your smart ass answer, so I'll let it slide).

Freelancer.

Now I'm stuck in this dilemma of whether or not to watch even just a part of it. Having never seen it, the worst piece of anything I've ever watched was the Sequel to Starship Troopers, which is similar in to how you describe it. It's so bad I had to turn it off, and I can not possibly bring myself to watch it again.

But since I know there is something worse... something so terrible... It's like I have to see it to broaden my perspectives. Maybe it will be a life changing situation for me (Like someone else commented, it drove his friend to drink). Maybe I will reach an ultimate state of enlightenment after seeing the worst piece of recorded entertainment. Just to push the boundaries of what is possible, seems like a goal anyone would set.

But on the other hand, I -LIKE- Star Wars. Like, more than like, but not quite obsessive fan love. See when I was a Kid I owned the entire Star Wars: The Essential Guide collection of books. I had every line memorized and could spew the dialogue back to you without any hesitation. I -WAS- a fanboy. But I've kind of grown out of it, but it still holds a special place in my heart. I still play X-Wing vs Tie Fighter every now and then. I still claim that Dark Forces were the highlight of Lucas Art's first person shooters, and that Battlefront 2 still doesn't reach the entertainment value of Jedi Academy (though Jedi Outcast was a much better storyline by far). And while Force Unleashed was good in it's own right, it never earned an emotional spot like Droid Works.

So what will it be - A gift to perception to help me better understand the world around me, despite how painful it might be to endure...

Or a horrible piece of Malice that will destroy everything my childhood has loved and charished, leaving me a half empty shell of a human being not worth living...

That's not how wifi works, it doesn't just randomly drop or become unstable unless the hardware itself is fault in which case yes, you would get disconnected.

I guess you don't own a microwave oven. ;)

When a connection becomes weak it doesn't send any less data back and forth to the client, what changes is the proportion of usable data to the proportion of redundant data for error checking and correcting, this has the effect of making the wifi connection speed appear slower, so for example if you have a wifi connection of 54mbps that means you're transmitting/receiving say, 54mbps of usable data along with 6mbps of data for error checking/correcting, when you move away from the access point and your speed drops to 10mbps you're still receiving 60mbps or whatever of data overall, but 50mbps of that is for error checking/correcting.

Er, that's not really how wifi works... it steps down to different transmission schemes when the signal/noise ratio gets too low.

But that's beside the point, because the console and the Live service don't care about the physical details of your connection. What they notice is that when your connection is interrupted (say, you turn on the microwave), packets start getting lost. Packet loss has the effect, at the TCP level, of making the connection slower, but that's because the sender's buffer fills up while it's retransmitting the old packets that were dropped. Xbox Live can't tell whether you've put your router on standby for a few seconds, or whether you're experiencing radio interference that causes all of Live's packets to be dropped for a few seconds, or whether some router anywhere in between is temporarily overloaded.

In fact, I just tried it myself: after pressing the standby button, it took 2-3 minutes before I was signed out of Live.

It's absolutely not possible to read/write the memory of modern consoles unless you get access to an execution environment where you can execute your own code (outside the limited sandbox of say, XNA).

So it's a good thing consoles are never vulnerable to buffer overflows and other expoits that let you run your own code, right? Oh wait, they are. That's how the Xbox, PSP, and Wii softmods work.

Maybe the 360 isn't vulnerable, but all we can really say is that none have been found yet.

This is why despite the console having been out since 2005, no such hack has yet been successful- all hacks have depended on detectable modifications to DVD drive firmwares and similar.

There's no inherent reason why a firmware mod would have to be detectable. The console can only check the drive's firmware by going through the drive. If the drive has been modified to lie about the contents of its own firmware, what's the console going to do about that?

CoD: MW2 certainly doesn't [have auto-aim in multiplayer] and I'm pretty sure MW and CoD5 didn't either.

COD 4 did, and from what I can tell, so do World at War and Modern Warfare 2. Maybe it's subtle enough that you don't notice it, but it's helping you nonetheless.

This is another straw man argument, pretty much everyone had an SDTV before HDTV came along

I'm not sure you know the difference between strawman and analogy.

How did a faulty power supply cause an RROD when the power supply is external and RROD represents an internal hardware fault?

RROD indicates a "general hardware failure". After several weeks,

That's not how wifi works, it doesn't just randomly drop or become unstable unless the hardware itself is fault in which case yes, you would get disconnected.

I guess you don't own a microwave oven. ;)

When a connection becomes weak it doesn't send any less data back and forth to the client, what changes is the proportion of usable data to the proportion of redundant data for error checking and correcting, this has the effect of making the wifi connection speed appear slower, so for example if you have a wifi connection of 54mbps that means you're transmitting/receiving say, 54mbps of usable data along with 6mbps of data for error checking/correcting, when you move away from the access point and your speed drops to 10mbps you're still receiving 60mbps or whatever of data overall, but 50mbps of that is for error checking/correcting.

Er, that's not really how wifi works... it steps down to different transmission schemes when the signal/noise ratio gets too low.

But that's beside the point, because the console and the Live service don't care about the physical details of your connection. What they notice is that when your connection is interrupted (say, you turn on the microwave), packets start getting lost. Packet loss has the effect, at the TCP level, of making the connection slower, but that's because the sender's buffer fills up while it's retransmitting the old packets that were dropped. Xbox Live can't tell whether you've put your router on standby for a few seconds, or whether you're experiencing radio interference that causes all of Live's packets to be dropped for a few seconds, or whether some router anywhere in between is temporarily overloaded.

In fact, I just tried it myself: after pressing the standby button, it took 2-3 minutes before I was signed out of Live.

It's absolutely not possible to read/write the memory of modern consoles unless you get access to an execution environment where you can execute your own code (outside the limited sandbox of say, XNA).

So it's a good thing consoles are never vulnerable to buffer overflows and other expoits that let you run your own code, right? Oh wait, they are. That's how the Xbox, PSP, and Wii softmods work.

Maybe the 360 isn't vulnerable, but all we can really say is that none have been found yet.

This is why despite the console having been out since 2005, no such hack has yet been successful- all hacks have depended on detectable modifications to DVD drive firmwares and similar.

There's no inherent reason why a firmware mod would have to be detectable. The console can only check the drive's firmware by going through the drive. If the drive has been modified to lie about the contents of its own firmware, what's the console going to do about that?

CoD: MW2 certainly doesn't [have auto-aim in multiplayer] and I'm pretty sure MW and CoD5 didn't either.

COD 4 did, and from what I can tell, so do World at War and Modern Warfare 2. Maybe it's subtle enough that you don't notice it, but it's helping you nonetheless.

This is another straw man argument, pretty much everyone had an SDTV before HDTV came along

I'm not sure you know the difference between strawman and analogy.

How did a faulty power supply cause an RROD when the power supply is external and RROD represents an internal hardware fault?

RROD indicates a "general hardware failure". After several weeks,

"Just what we need - more people thinking that since they can play games they can do it in real life."

The description leaves out that he beat 25,000 other Gran Turismo players in a online contest sponsored by a magazine for which the grand prize was to race in a real race car. When he won and actually drove well, then he became a pro race driver.

So really, the gaming only gave him the opportunity to try to race for free. It could have been a contest for anything really, could have won a pie eating contest with the prize being racing. The description and article are a bit misleading. I might be great at trama center, I might even win a contest against thousands of other people, but until I'm given a real scalpel, perform surgeries and save patients, medical doctor I am not.

Winning race car contest != great race car driver in real life

No. Crysis DX9 vs. DX10 really is no appreciable difference at all -- in Crysis, the Very High setting is locked for DX10 only, but this is a totally artificial limitation, probably to try and drum up support for DX10. Even at that, the difference between High and Very High is not earth-shattering. The Internet quickly figured out how to enable all of the Very High graphics setting for DX9 through .INI tweaks, even before Crysis was on store shelves. Being called out on their bullshit, Crytek then released Crysis: Warhead with the Enthusiast (Very High) graphics setting unlocked in DX9. Here is a great article with screenshots:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182140/index.html

Big Rigs got a score of 1 out of 10, although I'm assuming that is because GameSpot doesn't have a 0 score on their scale.

He later added, "We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."
If that sounds like it would create a corporate culture that isn't all sunshine and hugs, then it's mission accomplished for Kotick. The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the global economic downturn, adding, "We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

Anyway, enjoy your anger.

If a magazine or website is really scoring out of 10 or out of 100, then we ought to see some 1's and 2's. But we don't do we ?

My wife and I were having this same discussion the other day. I was going through some reviews of games that just came out, comparing them to older games in the series. When I spotted one and mentioned the poor review, my wife asked what was the score. "6 out of 10". She was confused that a bad game got such a high score.

I guess I've been reading these reviews for so long, I didn't think of it anymore. 10/10 is awesome, 9/10 is great, 8/10 is good, 7/10 is okay, 6/10 is poor, 5/10 and lower is terrible.

"But when was the last time you saw a 5/10?" I honestly didn't know. Even the big-name movie tie-ins that we all know to be awful will somehow manage to score "6.5". I actually had to go look up some reviews to find lower than "6" - but they are out there.

I've started to view the "out of 10" or "out of 100" scores like the old A-F grading system we used in school. A is 9/10 or 10/10 ("A+"), B is 8/10, C is 7/10, D is 6/10 ... F is 5/10 or lower. It's not ideal to view games this way, but it makes sense of the review scores.

Go visit Gamespots review page. You'll see some low scores. Right off the bat there is Tony Hawk Ride only got a 3.5. I chose Gamespot because they were part of the whole Gerstmann firing. Not to say there aren't sites out there that don't do it to keep advertisers or to get preview copies first or to even get special treatment where if the reviewer gives it a good score then they are allowed to post their review before everyone else. 1up did a great article on this that I can't find. I guess my point is that their are some reviewers who take their job seriously, while others are in it for the monies.

Please folks the rules are you can not get on live if you mode your box. You still have your XBox you just can not play it on line anymore.

Not true. http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=27102710
Microsoft is not allowing banned xbox to connect to media center either. This isn't just about disabling the ability to game on xbox live. They are trying to kill the used xbox 360 market with this move.

What the fuck? That doesn't even make sense. You're going to judge people based on the random thing they are doing when an emergency hits?

No, I'm just not convinced that an on screen emergency alert IN A FUCKING GAME is the right way to let people know there's an emergency happening. What I meant is that if there's an obvious state of emergency and people are still online playing a fucking game that's their problem. That should have been clear to anyone.

The tiny proportion of people playing an online game is an awful target. Loudspeakers on the street would probably be more effective even though it's not very effective at all.

The difference between WOW and TV is TV is a traditional medium for delivering the news and TV reaches a much wider community than that of a single online game (or small group of them).

You might as well create a special information group that knocks on doors. At least they wouldn't fucking ask you if you were playing WOW or chess or some shit.

What? You mean even though 72% of US residents age 6-44 are gamers?

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6188668.html

57% of which play online?

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6205841.html

Yeah, i guess that over 40% of the US, AKA "The tiny proportion of people playing an online game..." certainly is an "awful target".

And i KNOW TV is a traditional medium, but the whole point is that the world changes and we should look at what new mediums make sense. I personally don't even HAVE cable, i watch Hulu, and i DO feel a bit cut off because of it - I wish that I had an easy way of accessing public notifications, but its not worth 50 bucks a month for me just to have cable just to get that.

And I know you meant that if there is an obvious emergency people shouldn't be playing games, but *that* is what I said doesn't make sense... because you're assuming that emergencies are only ever going to be obvious immediately, which is stupid. *as i said* some emergencies only become obvious after you've lost precious time, like when a fire finally gets close enough for you to notice. Having an extra 15 minutes to get your shit together can SAVE LIVES and that's the whole point of an early warning system.
If 40% of the US isn't watching TV, they're playing games, we should notify those people too. And yes i know that doesn't mean 40% are playing them at all times, but the point is LOTS more people play games in the evening instead of TV, so it makes sense to look at how to let them know.
-taylor

What the fuck? That doesn't even make sense. You're going to judge people based on the random thing they are doing when an emergency hits?

No, I'm just not convinced that an on screen emergency alert IN A FUCKING GAME is the right way to let people know there's an emergency happening. What I meant is that if there's an obvious state of emergency and people are still online playing a fucking game that's their problem. That should have been clear to anyone.

The tiny proportion of people playing an online game is an awful target. Loudspeakers on the street would probably be more effective even though it's not very effective at all.

The difference between WOW and TV is TV is a traditional medium for delivering the news and TV reaches a much wider community than that of a single online game (or small group of them).

You might as well create a special information group that knocks on doors. At least they wouldn't fucking ask you if you were playing WOW or chess or some shit.

What? You mean even though 72% of US residents age 6-44 are gamers?

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6188668.html

57% of which play online?

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6205841.html

Yeah, i guess that over 40% of the US, AKA "The tiny proportion of people playing an online game..." certainly is an "awful target".

And i KNOW TV is a traditional medium, but the whole point is that the world changes and we should look at what new mediums make sense. I personally don't even HAVE cable, i watch Hulu, and i DO feel a bit cut off because of it - I wish that I had an easy way of accessing public notifications, but its not worth 50 bucks a month for me just to have cable just to get that.

And I know you meant that if there is an obvious emergency people shouldn't be playing games, but *that* is what I said doesn't make sense... because you're assuming that emergencies are only ever going to be obvious immediately, which is stupid. *as i said* some emergencies only become obvious after you've lost precious time, like when a fire finally gets close enough for you to notice. Having an extra 15 minutes to get your shit together can SAVE LIVES and that's the whole point of an early warning system.
If 40% of the US isn't watching TV, they're playing games, we should notify those people too. And yes i know that doesn't mean 40% are playing them at all times, but the point is LOTS more people play games in the evening instead of TV, so it makes sense to look at how to let them know.
-taylor

I'm trying to figure out if I'll get a "woosh". Can you cite anything about China's once booming recording industry that's now died? The facts are that pirates (and I'm not one) spend more on music than non-pirates. Here are some citations:
http://www.switched.com/2009/11/03/music-pirates-also-buy-more-tunes-than-others-poll-finds/
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Pirate-Fileshare-Music-Download-Illegal,news-5001.html
http://www.mixx.com/stories/9014955/music_pirates_spend_more_on_tunes_than_non_pirates_finds_poll
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=27090916
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/02/music-pirates-spend-more-on-music-than-their-legal-law-abiding/
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars

In the US it is generally known that almost everyone speeds and have for 80 years or so

In some places where it's obvious that the speed limit for the road conditions are way too low. Especially during the '70s when the national speed limit was 55 and had been reduced from 70 or higher in most places. here in town I notice that people drive well UNDER the limit most of the time; the speeding is mostly on straight interstates.

Law enforcement has been "cracking down" and imposing draconian penalties on speeders since the beginning of the automobile era.

A hundred dollar fine is a draconian penalty? When I'm travelling I notice that the speeders are all driving Hummers and Escalades and the like -- to these people, a hundred bucks is NOTHING.

Are you trolling, joking, or just ignorant?

How about a game where you assassinate the president?

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/jfkreloaded/index.html

Not as recent, but there it is.

I was a huge fan of the Baldur's Gate (got both PC and Mac versions of all of them) series so I'll be getting this. It also helps to know that there's no DRM other than the disk check. So Bioware have come to their senses after the excursion into the DRM land with Mass Effect (that was using the dreaded SecurROM).

Probably not the best description as you correctly pointed out, when I wrote that I was thinking of Demons souls on the PS3, basically you play by yourself but while playing people can join your game and help or hurt you.

On the other hand, Nintendo's profits fell by...

Despite having profits fall, Nintendo still had profits where Sony lost nearly $700 million in the last 6 months.

There's a nice overlay image here to see the size difference.

Article just has some videos, but here's a few pictures of it.

And I suggest a good behaviour when they fly in - otherwise these machines will come in.

There was Myst. This game didn't really have a plot, but did have beautifully rendered scenes along with background music. Eventually it was turned into a 3D first person perpective game, but which didn't get so good reviews

"- Make the game challenging. Make it 'hard' without actually even having be hard. But give the gamer a sense of accomplishment. You don't do this by making him have to shoot 30.000 of identical aliens btw"

See: Serious sam : The First encounter

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/serioussamthefirstencounter/index.html

One of the best games since Doom / Doom 2. Sometimes there is a LOT to be said for simple over the top arcade game style.

Still one of my all time favorite games.

Incidentally, EA bought the rights in response to 2K gaining significant market share on Madden. Additionally, 2K had started to sell their annual edition for $20 (Half of what Madden cost at the time). Rather than enter into a price-war, EA decided they could screw everybody out of their money by making a deal.

Sports games are the ones with the lowest overall development costs for EA. They get to re-use 90%+ of the assets and code from the previous year and get to charge full price. All they need to pay is marketing and licensing. It's a perfect market for a price war, and you can only sustain high prices by changing the rules.

PC games have had ads for a very long time. The first game that comes to mind is World Cup 98, which had ads for Snickers, JVC, Mastercard, Opel, Fujifilm, Gilette, Braun and Adidas (check the screenshots on Gamespot). Something like that doesn't bother me at all, it adds to realism and immersion (it's better than billboards that say Snockers, JCV and Adadis), and I'm fine with publishers trying to make a few extra bucks.

What I'm trying to say is, it's not the ads that I'm worried about, it's the "anonymous" information they're sending back and forth. I trust they won't send any of my "personal" information (name, telephone number, personal e-mails), but where do you draw the line?

"PS3 really isn't "standard def. TV friendly".... My experience with using a PS3 in standard def resolution was eye-strain inducing, trying to read many of the text fonts the games would display."

I use a ps3 on a 5 yr old reasonably-sized SDTV and you couldn't be more correct. It is a HUGE pain to try to play any games with small print. PixelJunk Monsters is almost not playable because your character is too small to see, and you can forget trying to read any subtitles or instructions. I keep looking for a way to increase text size or change the screen size but it seems everything is set-up properly to display in SD, it's just the way the games display.

I'll probably get a HDTV within the next year so it's not a huge deal, I really bought the ps3 to play one particular game and that works well, and lately I've been using it for Hulu and the seemingly endless supply of free game demos so I'm satisfied.

The Republican base is truly frightening, on a Taliban level

The Democratic base is truly frightening, on a Lenin level. See how easy it is to put the shoe on the other foot? Can't you just admit that you are rationalizing the failings of the Democratic Party?

They are the American religious zealots who BY THEIR OWN ADMISSION want to turn America into a theocracy

So what? The Democratic liberal base wants to turn America into some sort of socialist paradise where people will be punished for being productive, the government will mandate "fairness" in free speech and nobody will be allowed to own a firearm. I really don't regard that as any improvement over the desires of the far-right.

Republicans and Democrats both want to pilfer my wallet and give it to their contributors, but only one of those two groups wants to invade my bedroom.

Right, and the second group wants to invade your gun safe, radio station and video game. I'm still waiting for you to tell me why this is better.

They seem to believe that God wants them to be rich because they are better than me

And Democrats seem to believe that I'm rich because I'm a selfish SOB who stole from the poor. See how absurd these types of sweeping generalizations are?

because I should know my place and not try to climb above it

Sounds like the Democratic politicians that think there should be a different standard for the elite and whom advocate in favor of "progressive" taxation that punishes people who have the nerve to make more money than the rest of the herd.

Sure, I'd like something else, but voting for anyone else but the Democrats in our current system is simply asking for the American Taliban to turn our country into a theocracy, and I will not have that.

And yet, amazingly enough the Republicans controlled all three branches of the Federal Government for six years and we didn't become a theocracy. So what you are really doing is supporting the political system that you claim to hate because you've been whipped up into a fearful frenzy and think that agents of the state are going to bash down your bedroom door and arrest you for having sex outside the confines of the missionary position between a married heterosexual couple.

It sounds to me like you've bought the fear being sold by the DNC hook, line and sinker. Eventually you'll wake up and realize that the shit they are shoveling is virtually the same as the shit that the Republicans are shoveling. The Democrats are just shoveling it from a different pile and using a different salesman to try and sell it to you.

News Flash: Sony makes more than just PS3's!

You're right: it also makes PSP and PS2. The article on GameSpot is mostly about Sony Computer Entertainment, the division that makes PlayStation products, not Sony Music or Sony Pictures.

A big part of the problem is, obviously, because game manufacturers are reluctant to use a female or minority character as a villain. "It's discrimination!" the protesters cry! (Yes, I'm serious, look what happened when a Tom Clancy game set in El Paso had Hispanic villains.) That right there cuts minority representation in half, or worse.

The first real-time 3D engine I ever played or saw was Midwinter for the Amiga. It was released in 1989, 4 years before Doom, and featured flat-shaded polygon rendering in a true 3D environment. I just remember the environment being incredibly huge and immersive, and I spent many hours walking and skiing around desolate white landscapes.

Wikipedia article (which mentions nothing whatsoever about the game's technical aspects);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwinter_(video_game)

Screenshot of the 3D environment (Atari ST version):
http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/midwinter/screenshots/gameShotId,362797/

Gamespot seems to be one of the few that actually recognize how groundbreaking this game was:
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/unsung_heroes/sec2_10.html

Good games? They have no clue what the hell that is, they're too busy pumping out trash like Imagine Babyz.

(No really, that's not my misspelling.)

Brought to you by the same assholes that loved Starforce (until they were sued for their crippleware).

Guess SecuROM isn't intrusive enough for them.

The Sims 2 (and 3, or so I heard) also work like that.

Gamespot's performance guide for The Sims 2 says it best:

"The Sims 2 runs contrary to the normal gaming upgrade model that usually calls for a bigger video card. With most games, you can get away with upgrading your graphics to squeeze out better performance. But with The Sims 2, you can kick that whole way of thinking to the curb. It would honestly be hard to find another game that depended less on the video card. You can play the game on a GeForce 7800 GTX and a GeForce 6600 GT and you won't notice a difference in performance. The Sims 2 lives and breathes on raw CPU power; of course, copious amounts of RAM never hurt either."

And...

"If there were a game that needed CPU power more than The Sims 2, we'd be surprised. Even with a moderately powerful 3.4GHz Pentium 4, The Sims 2 can barely eke out 40 frames per second. When we pumped the resolution up to 1600x1200 to try to tax the video card, the frame rate counter didn't budge one bit. The same pattern followed us as we used slower grade CPUs. Our GeForce 6800 Ultra begged for something to do, but The Sims 2 diverted all the CPU power to the AI and other game engines"

http://au.gamespot.com/news/6185347.html

And that's only 1 vendor.

I don't see why this is such a bad idea. It's the next logical progression from major league eating.

Not sure why there is so much speculation on the basics of the story line when blizzard has already been talking about this for some time.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6176224.html?tag=top_stories;title;0

It will cover part of the lore before the timeline for WoW began. All the comments about the movie trying to replicate a repeatative gameplay mechanic have obviously never paid one bit of attention to the game or read any of the quest logs etc. There is plenty of story there. The game must remain static so people can take part over and over again but the STORY is not static. They tried to remedy some of this in the last xpac by using phased zones where different players see different things depending on what quests they have completed.

Too bad the graphics of pixeljunk monsters suck ass.

Yet, good games don't necessarily need good graphics.

I actually find the 2D graphics of Pixeljunk Monsters to be a nice feature. It means the graphics aren't distracting. I can concentrate on the point of the game: to build towers to defend my objective. That's all the game is about, fun gameplay. Graphics are secondary.

Monsters was very popular on PSN, so much so that the developers are re-releasing the game for PSP. It's pretty much the same game, plus some bonus levels. The same 2D graphics are there. If anything, looks like they emphasized the black outline around game objects (probably to make them easier to see on the smaller screen.) And it will probably sell very well on the PSP.

The person who obtained the images chose to ignore this and harvest thousands of high resolution images (why does Wikipedia need high-res to display 96dpi???)

Capcom once defined state-of-the-art high resolution graphics as 256x240px.

Yes, if you don't enable memory remapping, Windows 7 just see about 3.2-3.7gb (depends on what you have hooked up, bios, etc.) but a 32-bit OS should be able to see the whole 4gb.

I have tested in Windows Vista 32-bit with Memory Remapping and you actually see the 4gb. But truth is, this could lead to other problems as it depends on how the manufacturer implements the remapping.

To be honest, switching to 64-bit edition is better.

Here is a screenshot from Vista 32bit and 4gb of ram.

I don't know of a single video game that actually trains you to use a weapon.

Silent Scope, an arcade game with a realistic sniper rifle. Silent Scope had a small LCD screen in the rifle's scope which provided a close-up view. That bothered some people, and no game has used that idea since.

And, of course, there's a whole series of "Deer Hunter" games, popular in red states.