Slashdot Mirror
New Halo 2 Details
Grinn writes "Gamesarefun.com has obtained some new information about Halo 2. Most interesting is the ability to hold two weapons at once, each operating individually on the left trigger or the right." Although apparently sourced via a German site, this may be similar info to that contained in the new June issue of the US Official Xbox Magazine. And even if it's not due for a while, the Halo series continues to be a serious killer app for Microsoft's console.
AI has to operate by constantly checking the environment, running through a series of checks, then decide what it should do. Sometimes what it should do is continue what it was doing before, other times it should start something completely new. Now picture yourself playing a game with driving and walking. When you walk, you can quickly jerk the stick in the opposite direction, and (with the exception of some slight skidding) change directions. Therefore the ai can make these same quick decisions. Now, when you are driving a car, you can jerk the stick in the opposite direction, but in a realistic driving game, its going to slowly arc in that direction like a real car would. Now, this extends the time it takes for one of these things to actually execute completely. When you as a player are driving a car, you predict where you want the car to be by looking into the future further than you would if you were just walking your character around. Basically, this looking farther into the future is exactly what makes creating a proper reacting ai for a car that much more difficult. er something... =)
PaleHour
The Xbox provides something you overlooked, competition. With this console on the market other companies are forced to address their price matrix, and adjust accordingly. Who wins? We, the gamers do. Your inability to form a coherent thought without the intentional adolescent misspelling leads me to believe that my points are wasted on you.
An interesting read It is a little more recent than your vauge statistics from "last November".
"Video game sales disappoint
Reuters
Sales of video games in the United States rose 8 percent in March over the same month last year as Japan's Nintendo lit up the charts with three hit games, industry analysts said on Tuesday, citing market research.
Sales of games for the latest generation of consoles -- Sony's PlayStation2, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube -- rose 36 percent, Deutsche Bank Securities' Jeetil Patel said, while sales for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance handheld rose 32 percent.
Patel and other analysts based their figures on monthly market research from the privately held NPD Group.
SoundView Technology Group analyst Shawn Milne estimated Nintendo's sales for March at $101.5m, or about £65m, up 168 percent from a year ago and well ahead of No. 2 Electronic Arts at $62.3m.
The top-selling game of the month, he said, was "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" for GameCube, doing nearly $41m in sales on 826,352 units sold.
"We view the March industry software data as disappointing, noting that, excluding the strong software sell-through by Nintendo, industry software sales would have been down 8.3 percent," J.P. Morgan analyst Dean Gianoukos said in a note.
But Gianoukos also said he expected EA, Activision and THQ to meet or beat their estimates for the March quarter.
Sony's PS2 ended the month with a 37.8 percent share of the hardware market, Gianoukos said, followed by 14.7 percent for the Xbox and 10.7 percent for the GameCube.
There was a 70 percent decline from a year earlier in sales of games for so-called "legacy" platforms like Sony's original PlayStation and Nintendo's last-generation N64, Patel said.
That decline was a drag on overall sales growth, he said."
I am me...I think
Well, Doom III is coming to Xbox and no other platforms, I'd say that is a pretty killer app. I've read that Brute Force should be good, too.
The gun-in-each-hand thing is something Bungie did with its earlier shooter, Marathon 2. One of the guns was a shotgun... the readme file had a little joke about how it was "too complicated to detail" how actually you could reload it without using your other hand.