If they would stop (falsely) believing that a) voting for a third party is a waste, and b) either major candidate is so much worse than the other, we might see some real change in this country.
Candidate #1 has 65% of the voters behind him. Candidate #2 has the remaining 35%. Now candidate #3 joins the race. He's similar to #1, and #1's supporters generally like him. So he manages to draw off half of Candidate #1's supporters. That means 65% would like to see either Candidate #1 or #3 elected, but Candidate #2, the one with the least support overall, will likely win.
You can't just vote your conscience, because it could have the side-effect of electing the person who most people think would be the worst choice. This is a dumb system. You can't blame the voters. They're forced into these stupid games by a poorly designed system. It's been long enough, the problem is recognized. It needs to be fixed.
A ranked system would be better to have more parties in the fray, but third parties are certainly far from useless even in the winner-take-all type of election we have right now. It's just an indirect rather than direct method of altering the outcome.
It's an indirect method that has the seriously bad side-effect of putting the person with the least popular policies in power for the next four years. I'd call that a deal-breaker, as would most people apparently, which is why third-parties get so much hate when they enter the race.
Fixed. The myth that voting for a third party may as well be a vote for the major candidate you dislike is a lie, yet it continually gets propagated.
When and how was it fixed? If a third party joins the race and a third of Obama supporters decide to vote for him, then both he and Obama will lose to McCain. I don't see any fix for that. Without some sort of ranked voting system, we're always going to have these stupid situations that have people trading votes over the Internet and such.
And imagine the farce we would have if there were groups of people encouraging speeding and screaming bloody murder every time someone got punished for being caught doing so. Kinda like we have here for piracy.
They aren't screaming because someone got caught or punished. It's because the penalties are so out of proportion to the infringement. Slapping someone with a $220,000 fine for "making available" 24 songs is just ridiculous. Maybe if we saw penalties for white collar crimes coming anywhere near these proportions, people might not feel they were so unfair.
I stand corrected on the demo. Didn't remember Sins having a demo, but then I bought it on release day, so I never had reason to play the demo.
No, we use different sets of laws because media has the unique disadvantage of being able to be reproduced at little to no cost, thus there being no natural mechanism in which to prevent the fraudulent acquirement of such products. Thus the primary remuneration value of the product, being an artistic work, is not in the constant creation of more physical goods, but in the assurance of future sales to recoup costs (time and money) that have already been invested in the development of said product. If software was as easy to design and invest in as, say, making a table; and like a table, the primary value of software was in the materials and labour (skills) required to craft each individual creation which was only of use to one customer at a time, we wouldn't have this problem.
There's also the little issue of the completely different basis for "intellectual property" law versus real property law. IP law exists to provide temporary control of IP in order to achieve publicly desirable ends, such as the creation of more works which will become freely available to the public after the term expires. It's not because it was believed that people should be able to own ideas. There was just a recognized benefit to allowing that temporary monopoly.
While you may not see the difference, it is there. The main problem with IP law these days is that the IP industry has managed to cut the public almost completely out of the bargain. So, we end up with a public that doesn't see the benefit of giving these people and corporations perpetual monopolies over IP when we get nothing from the bargain. Thus people lose respect for a corrupt system and chaos ensues. The industry acting only in their own self-interest has led to the public doing the same. Big surprise.
So in other words, they pirate because they want stuff for free, and any reason they give other than that is bullshit.
You can polarize it all you want, it doesn't make you correct or make the situation exactly the same for everyone. Some people pirate a game and then go out and buy it. I consider that to be different than those that pirate it, play it all they want, and never buy it. But whatever. Oversimplifying the problem will not help solve it.
So you agree: we need more DRM.
I think we've seen that DRM doesn't hurt pirates because the version they get bypasses the DRM. It certainly does hurt paying customers, especially when you go with the "more DRM is better" theory. That leads to crap like Starforce which probably did a lot more to encourage piracy than it did to prevent it.
Name one game where this is true to any non-negligible degree.
Sins is a pretty good example. There's a big difference in processing power needed for a small, very limited game with only a couple enemies like you get with the demo, and a real game that runs to the end and can have dozens or hundreds of planets and thousands of ships in play. I experienced some major issues myself when the battles got big. Wasn't much of a problem after I upgraded, but there was no way to know that it would bog down like that if I had just played a short, small map only partway through.
I know it's popular to suggest that marijuana isn't that bad, and perhaps it is. But that's really not a judgment to make until the facts are in. It's been less than 20 years since the more potent varieties have shown up, and it would be surprising if there were any reasonable conclusion for at least a decade or two. In cases like this the onus is always on the person that's arguing that it's safe. Basically because the harm of not doing is far less than the possible harm of doing in most cases.
That explains perfectly why much more harmful drugs like cigarettes and alcohol are legal... err.. wait..
But that's alright, because a new television season is here, and the Feds will throw lots of money around, and it's Tuesday and I'm tired after picking the kids up from soccer practice, and I've got to get to work early tomorrow, and what can one vote do, and voting for a third party is throwing my vote way, and... and... and... and...
Says the guy on the intarwebs.:) Seriously though, thanks to our ridiculous election system which is rigged to ensure that we only get two viable parties, voting for a third party isn't throwing your vote away, it's actually more like voting for the guy you can't stand, because he's ultimately the one that will likely win when the vote splits between the other two.
It's stupid, because pirates are just going to lie about it anyway (whether consciously or subconsciously).
Actually, a lot of pirates are quite candid about the reasons they do it. They know those reasons aren't justifications. But they are going to do it anyway. Kinda like the guy that speeds on the highway. He knows it's against the law, but he probably won't get caught so he'll do it anyway.
Saying that piracy doesn't matter because the pirates aren't your customer is akin to letting people shoplift because they aren't your customer.
Here we go again equating physical property with imaginary property. The analogy doesn't work. Never has. That's why we use two different sets of law for them.
Not to mention the fact that, out of all the reasons you listed, all of them clearly ARE the customers, because they wanted the game.
Just because they wanted the game for whatever reason doesn't mean they were willing to pay for it. If they couldn't download it, then they'd probably just move on. Maybe some percentage of them might buy it. The rest won't, so those were never going to be sales.
It has a demo. And reviews, movies, word of mouth, friends who've played it...
Demo, what demo?
It has a demo.
Even if there were a demo, demos don't really represent the final product when it comes to system requirements.
But until such time, these "reasons" to me sound more like a bunch of excuses that a pirate uses to justify their actions, rather than having to deal with the fact that they're criminals, wouldn't you agree?
Sure they're excuses. The point is that it doesn't matter what the excuse is. Some people will take what they can get for free, and others will pay for it. You can't really control it so, like Wardell was saying you focus on those that are willing to buy your product and you make sure you cater to them. That's how they succeed. That's why even a niche title like Sins, that cost less than a million to make, can sell half a million copies or more and make a nice big profit.
It's about the expectations of the players in the market. For instance, if you think that supply will continue to be tight, and you have a lot of oil (possibly sitting in the ground), you have an incentive to hold on to oil to sell it at higher prices. If, however, you believe that supplies may not be so tight in the future, you may be more willing to sell more oil now while prices are high.
But if you know that it will take at least 5 to 10 years before we see an actual increase in total oil production, then you realize that your investment is going to be safe for quite a while, and you can go look for other investments to hedge against the day that oil production actually does increase.
I doubt you have the same problem complaining about Christians, but regardless, that's not what I was doing.
I try to back up my claims when I make them. So if I did make a claim about Christians, I would at least try to present some evidence.
The same simply cannot be said of the Muslim community; there was very little condemnation of terrorist attacks and when there was it was disingenuous rhetoric like "we regret the deaths of innocents." (spoken by a CAIR representative). Now you have to ask them who they consider "innocent." Not me, certainly.
Until you can actually back that up with evidence, you just sound like another religious bigot.
True. Imagine how many thousands more it WOULD have made, had it not been pirated. Oh, by the way, what WAS the excuse for it being so? Didn't like the fact that it had a CD key? Price was too high? Really, I'd like to know. Seems like there's always something.
That's exactly the point. Maybe it would have made a lot more. Maybe it wouldn't have. Nobody knows, and hardly anyone really seems to want to find out anyway.
But like Stardock says, you can't worry about the people who aren't buying your game, because they aren't your customers. Asking what the reason was is just dumb. If there were thousands of people downloading it, then they each have their own reasons. You think there's just going to be one or two reasons for everyone? Maybe they just wanted to see if they'd like the game before they spend the money for it. Maybe they want to make sure it runs well on their system. Maybe they just don't have the money. There's probably a lot of different reasons.
I actually phrased it very carefully to allow for Steam, and that has been a very effective DRM.
It's been fairly unobtrusive DRM, which is why I use it. I don't think you could really call it effective, since every game available on Steam has been cracked pretty quickly. There have been problems with people getting "permission" from the system to play their games when the servers get overloaded due to the release of a very popular game. HL2 and Bioshock both come to mind. So it doesn't always succeed in staying out of the way.
You say SoaSE was an obscure title, and yet even though it had no DRM, it still sold over half a million copies? Seems like the vast majority of potential customers for such an obscure title must have paid their money for it even though they could have downloaded it for free. How does that help your argument?
Sure, and after reading a few of those and realizing that it's impossible to make DRM comply with them and still have even the slightest effectiveness, it becomes pretty obvious that the Gamer's Bill of Rights proposed by Brad Wardell of Stardock, which specifies no DRM, is the only good answer.
Now he has stated that he might be open to very limited DRM, such as a scheme that lasts only for the first month after release and is then removed. But essentially the idea is that DRM is a bad thing that hurts customers, and should therefore be done away with.
You CAN install Spore as many times as you like on the same set of hardware
Got a source for that? I don't believe that it matters whether you install it again on the same hardware or not. It doesn't revoke the previous installation, so the new installation counts against the 3 allowed installations.
I didn't claim we were angels, just that we are a hell of a lot MORE tolerant than the people who are asking us to be more tolerant of them who are, ironically, nearly completely intolerant of anybody else.
You speak as if all Muslims share the same beliefs and tolerances/intolerances. That's not even remotely true. There's probably as wide a range of beliefs within the Muslim faith as there is within the Christian faith. You can't just generalize about an entire religion that has 1.5 to 2 billion adherents.
The fact that the cost is going up almost from all providers almost certainly indicates that a lack of competition is allowing entrenched providers to raise their prices with no fear of customers going anywhere.
It means that the cell companies are likely colluding as well. Hell, the music industry has done it constantly, and the worst they ever get is the proverbial slap on the wrist. I don't see why other industries wouldn't do it too.
WASD took a while to get used to. One of the benefits is that it also frees up the thumb and little finger to do things like jump and crouch or run, which is helpful. With so many keys in close proximity, I can do all sorts of things quickly, like reloading or throwing a grenade, etc. It may not quite have the smoothness of analog, but it brings other benefits that more than compensate, IMHO. With a gamepad, I have to hold the damn pad, so I can only use two fingers and two thumbs. That's pretty limiting.
If it was, then the telecom and cable companies wouldn't be able to legislate themselves all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies. It's quite obviously not a free market.
I'll tell you why it changed...because jumping in Tomb Raider was not fun. It's difficult to judge a distances on a 2D screen which makes jumping puzzles frustrating.
Graphics have gotten to the point where you can judge distance pretty easily. The game mechanics are already there. Just look at Tomb Raider: Legend. It has a good control scheme and you can pull off lots of cool moves. The AC devs just punted and decided to make the game do everything for you. That's what made AC so boring that I couldn't even play through the second city. It was just the same thing over and over. I kinda liked the story too, but I just couldn't bear to keep playing.
I'm sure I could improve with practice, but it's still an inferior control mechanism to the mouse. I think Shadowrun pretty much settled the argument. They had to give console gamers auto-aim and handicap the PC players by throwing off the accuracy of the weapons if you make quick movements. If that's what they had to do to balance things, even though they had some excellent console players, then it clearly shows that the mouse-users had a distinct advantage.
Yes, I think FPS players would benefit from analog movement replacing WASD, because analog movement is more precise. I will grant that the mouse might be easier to use for aiming for some people without the learned ability to make fine movements with their right thumbs.
It's only more precise if the controller is set up to allow for a range of motion that facilitates that precision. Thumb knobbies just aren't designed for that. You can't make nearly as fine movements with those little sticks as you can using your fingers and the mouse.
Look at Shadowrun for example. The developers had to add auto-aim for console players, and nerf the mouse controls by throwing off aim if you make quick movements just to try to balance things between console players and PC players.
What doesn't make capitolism work is a bunch of people without jobs. The US economy is already falling apart, what you should be hoping for is for nvidia to clean up it's act, make better chips, sell lots of them and hire lots of employees.
True, that would help. The problem here is the management at nVidia. The ones responsible for the cover-up need to be tossed out on their asses without their golden parachutes. Then maybe the shareholders could have faith in the new management to move forward and get the company back on track.
Apologies for the double-reply, but I realized that you probably didn't get my meaning about the "simplified" aspect. With that I was referring to the fact that developers tend to cut out anything that they can't make work well with a gamepad. It's why we got things like the unified ammo in DX2, and why the inventory systems tend to suck in comparison with PC games. Then there's the problem of all the stuff that they make automatic in console games. We go from Tomb-raider-esque jumping and climbing to something like Assassin's Creed where all the skill is taken out of it and you just hold down a button and point him in the right direction. If I just wanted to watch something, I'd put in a movie.
Why would I want to use a finicky, imprecise controller for an RTS game? Not to mention having to play it at a lower resolution. Gamepads are fine for some types of games. RTS, FPS, and western RPGs are NOT meant to be played with gamepads. The experience sucks compared to the PC. I've tried it and I can't stand to play them with a gamepad. I spend more time compensating for the crappy controls than I do playing the game.
Slashdot Mirror
If they would stop (falsely) believing that a) voting for a third party is a waste, and b) either major candidate is so much worse than the other, we might see some real change in this country.
Candidate #1 has 65% of the voters behind him. Candidate #2 has the remaining 35%. Now candidate #3 joins the race. He's similar to #1, and #1's supporters generally like him. So he manages to draw off half of Candidate #1's supporters. That means 65% would like to see either Candidate #1 or #3 elected, but Candidate #2, the one with the least support overall, will likely win.
You can't just vote your conscience, because it could have the side-effect of electing the person who most people think would be the worst choice. This is a dumb system. You can't blame the voters. They're forced into these stupid games by a poorly designed system. It's been long enough, the problem is recognized. It needs to be fixed.
A ranked system would be better to have more parties in the fray, but third parties are certainly far from useless even in the winner-take-all type of election we have right now. It's just an indirect rather than direct method of altering the outcome.
It's an indirect method that has the seriously bad side-effect of putting the person with the least popular policies in power for the next four years. I'd call that a deal-breaker, as would most people apparently, which is why third-parties get so much hate when they enter the race.
Fixed. The myth that voting for a third party may as well be a vote for the major candidate you dislike is a lie, yet it continually gets propagated.
When and how was it fixed? If a third party joins the race and a third of Obama supporters decide to vote for him, then both he and Obama will lose to McCain. I don't see any fix for that. Without some sort of ranked voting system, we're always going to have these stupid situations that have people trading votes over the Internet and such.
And imagine the farce we would have if there were groups of people encouraging speeding and screaming bloody murder every time someone got punished for being caught doing so. Kinda like we have here for piracy.
They aren't screaming because someone got caught or punished. It's because the penalties are so out of proportion to the infringement. Slapping someone with a $220,000 fine for "making available" 24 songs is just ridiculous. Maybe if we saw penalties for white collar crimes coming anywhere near these proportions, people might not feel they were so unfair.
I stand corrected on the demo. Didn't remember Sins having a demo, but then I bought it on release day, so I never had reason to play the demo.
No, we use different sets of laws because media has the unique disadvantage of being able to be reproduced at little to no cost, thus there being no natural mechanism in which to prevent the fraudulent acquirement of such products. Thus the primary remuneration value of the product, being an artistic work, is not in the constant creation of more physical goods, but in the assurance of future sales to recoup costs (time and money) that have already been invested in the development of said product. If software was as easy to design and invest in as, say, making a table; and like a table, the primary value of software was in the materials and labour (skills) required to craft each individual creation which was only of use to one customer at a time, we wouldn't have this problem.
There's also the little issue of the completely different basis for "intellectual property" law versus real property law. IP law exists to provide temporary control of IP in order to achieve publicly desirable ends, such as the creation of more works which will become freely available to the public after the term expires. It's not because it was believed that people should be able to own ideas. There was just a recognized benefit to allowing that temporary monopoly.
While you may not see the difference, it is there. The main problem with IP law these days is that the IP industry has managed to cut the public almost completely out of the bargain. So, we end up with a public that doesn't see the benefit of giving these people and corporations perpetual monopolies over IP when we get nothing from the bargain. Thus people lose respect for a corrupt system and chaos ensues. The industry acting only in their own self-interest has led to the public doing the same. Big surprise.
So in other words, they pirate because they want stuff for free, and any reason they give other than that is bullshit.
You can polarize it all you want, it doesn't make you correct or make the situation exactly the same for everyone. Some people pirate a game and then go out and buy it. I consider that to be different than those that pirate it, play it all they want, and never buy it. But whatever. Oversimplifying the problem will not help solve it.
So you agree: we need more DRM.
I think we've seen that DRM doesn't hurt pirates because the version they get bypasses the DRM. It certainly does hurt paying customers, especially when you go with the "more DRM is better" theory. That leads to crap like Starforce which probably did a lot more to encourage piracy than it did to prevent it.
Name one game where this is true to any non-negligible degree.
Sins is a pretty good example. There's a big difference in processing power needed for a small, very limited game with only a couple enemies like you get with the demo, and a real game that runs to the end and can have dozens or hundreds of planets and thousands of ships in play. I experienced some major issues myself when the battles got big. Wasn't much of a problem after I upgraded, but there was no way to know that it would bog down like that if I had just played a short, small map only partway through.
Iro
I know it's popular to suggest that marijuana isn't that bad, and perhaps it is. But that's really not a judgment to make until the facts are in. It's been less than 20 years since the more potent varieties have shown up, and it would be surprising if there were any reasonable conclusion for at least a decade or two. In cases like this the onus is always on the person that's arguing that it's safe. Basically because the harm of not doing is far less than the possible harm of doing in most cases.
That explains perfectly why much more harmful drugs like cigarettes and alcohol are legal... err.. wait..
But that's alright, because a new television season is here, and the Feds will throw lots of money around, and it's Tuesday and I'm tired after picking the kids up from soccer practice, and I've got to get to work early tomorrow, and what can one vote do, and voting for a third party is throwing my vote way, and... and... and... and...
Says the guy on the intarwebs. :) Seriously though, thanks to our ridiculous election system which is rigged to ensure that we only get two viable parties, voting for a third party isn't throwing your vote away, it's actually more like voting for the guy you can't stand, because he's ultimately the one that will likely win when the vote splits between the other two.
It's stupid, because pirates are just going to lie about it anyway (whether consciously or subconsciously).
Actually, a lot of pirates are quite candid about the reasons they do it. They know those reasons aren't justifications. But they are going to do it anyway. Kinda like the guy that speeds on the highway. He knows it's against the law, but he probably won't get caught so he'll do it anyway.
Saying that piracy doesn't matter because the pirates aren't your customer is akin to letting people shoplift because they aren't your customer.
Here we go again equating physical property with imaginary property. The analogy doesn't work. Never has. That's why we use two different sets of law for them.
Not to mention the fact that, out of all the reasons you listed, all of them clearly ARE the customers, because they wanted the game.
Just because they wanted the game for whatever reason doesn't mean they were willing to pay for it. If they couldn't download it, then they'd probably just move on. Maybe some percentage of them might buy it. The rest won't, so those were never going to be sales.
It has a demo. And reviews, movies, word of mouth, friends who've played it...
Demo, what demo?
It has a demo.
Even if there were a demo, demos don't really represent the final product when it comes to system requirements.
But until such time, these "reasons" to me sound more like a bunch of excuses that a pirate uses to justify their actions, rather than having to deal with the fact that they're criminals, wouldn't you agree?
Sure they're excuses. The point is that it doesn't matter what the excuse is. Some people will take what they can get for free, and others will pay for it. You can't really control it so, like Wardell was saying you focus on those that are willing to buy your product and you make sure you cater to them. That's how they succeed. That's why even a niche title like Sins, that cost less than a million to make, can sell half a million copies or more and make a nice big profit.
It's about the expectations of the players in the market. For instance, if you think that supply will continue to be tight, and you have a lot of oil (possibly sitting in the ground), you have an incentive to hold on to oil to sell it at higher prices. If, however, you believe that supplies may not be so tight in the future, you may be more willing to sell more oil now while prices are high.
But if you know that it will take at least 5 to 10 years before we see an actual increase in total oil production, then you realize that your investment is going to be safe for quite a while, and you can go look for other investments to hedge against the day that oil production actually does increase.
I doubt you have the same problem complaining about Christians, but regardless, that's not what I was doing.
I try to back up my claims when I make them. So if I did make a claim about Christians, I would at least try to present some evidence.
The same simply cannot be said of the Muslim community; there was very little condemnation of terrorist attacks and when there was it was disingenuous rhetoric like "we regret the deaths of innocents." (spoken by a CAIR representative). Now you have to ask them who they consider "innocent." Not me, certainly.
Until you can actually back that up with evidence, you just sound like another religious bigot.
True. Imagine how many thousands more it WOULD have made, had it not been pirated. Oh, by the way, what WAS the excuse for it being so? Didn't like the fact that it had a CD key? Price was too high? Really, I'd like to know. Seems like there's always something.
That's exactly the point. Maybe it would have made a lot more. Maybe it wouldn't have. Nobody knows, and hardly anyone really seems to want to find out anyway.
But like Stardock says, you can't worry about the people who aren't buying your game, because they aren't your customers. Asking what the reason was is just dumb. If there were thousands of people downloading it, then they each have their own reasons. You think there's just going to be one or two reasons for everyone? Maybe they just wanted to see if they'd like the game before they spend the money for it. Maybe they want to make sure it runs well on their system. Maybe they just don't have the money. There's probably a lot of different reasons.
I actually phrased it very carefully to allow for Steam, and that has been a very effective DRM.
It's been fairly unobtrusive DRM, which is why I use it. I don't think you could really call it effective, since every game available on Steam has been cracked pretty quickly. There have been problems with people getting "permission" from the system to play their games when the servers get overloaded due to the release of a very popular game. HL2 and Bioshock both come to mind. So it doesn't always succeed in staying out of the way.
You say SoaSE was an obscure title, and yet even though it had no DRM, it still sold over half a million copies? Seems like the vast majority of potential customers for such an obscure title must have paid their money for it even though they could have downloaded it for free. How does that help your argument?
Sure, and after reading a few of those and realizing that it's impossible to make DRM comply with them and still have even the slightest effectiveness, it becomes pretty obvious that the Gamer's Bill of Rights proposed by Brad Wardell of Stardock, which specifies no DRM, is the only good answer.
Now he has stated that he might be open to very limited DRM, such as a scheme that lasts only for the first month after release and is then removed. But essentially the idea is that DRM is a bad thing that hurts customers, and should therefore be done away with.
You CAN install Spore as many times as you like on the same set of hardware
Got a source for that? I don't believe that it matters whether you install it again on the same hardware or not. It doesn't revoke the previous installation, so the new installation counts against the 3 allowed installations.
I didn't claim we were angels, just that we are a hell of a lot MORE tolerant than the people who are asking us to be more tolerant of them who are, ironically, nearly completely intolerant of anybody else.
You speak as if all Muslims share the same beliefs and tolerances/intolerances. That's not even remotely true. There's probably as wide a range of beliefs within the Muslim faith as there is within the Christian faith. You can't just generalize about an entire religion that has 1.5 to 2 billion adherents.
The fact that the cost is going up almost from all providers almost certainly indicates that a lack of competition is allowing entrenched providers to raise their prices with no fear of customers going anywhere.
It means that the cell companies are likely colluding as well. Hell, the music industry has done it constantly, and the worst they ever get is the proverbial slap on the wrist. I don't see why other industries wouldn't do it too.
WASD took a while to get used to. One of the benefits is that it also frees up the thumb and little finger to do things like jump and crouch or run, which is helpful. With so many keys in close proximity, I can do all sorts of things quickly, like reloading or throwing a grenade, etc. It may not quite have the smoothness of analog, but it brings other benefits that more than compensate, IMHO. With a gamepad, I have to hold the damn pad, so I can only use two fingers and two thumbs. That's pretty limiting.
I thought this was a free market system.
If it was, then the telecom and cable companies wouldn't be able to legislate themselves all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies. It's quite obviously not a free market.
I'll tell you why it changed...because jumping in Tomb Raider was not fun. It's difficult to judge a distances on a 2D screen which makes jumping puzzles frustrating.
Graphics have gotten to the point where you can judge distance pretty easily. The game mechanics are already there. Just look at Tomb Raider: Legend. It has a good control scheme and you can pull off lots of cool moves. The AC devs just punted and decided to make the game do everything for you. That's what made AC so boring that I couldn't even play through the second city. It was just the same thing over and over. I kinda liked the story too, but I just couldn't bear to keep playing.
I'm sure I could improve with practice, but it's still an inferior control mechanism to the mouse. I think Shadowrun pretty much settled the argument. They had to give console gamers auto-aim and handicap the PC players by throwing off the accuracy of the weapons if you make quick movements. If that's what they had to do to balance things, even though they had some excellent console players, then it clearly shows that the mouse-users had a distinct advantage.
Yes, I think FPS players would benefit from analog movement replacing WASD, because analog movement is more precise. I will grant that the mouse might be easier to use for aiming for some people without the learned ability to make fine movements with their right thumbs.
It's only more precise if the controller is set up to allow for a range of motion that facilitates that precision. Thumb knobbies just aren't designed for that. You can't make nearly as fine movements with those little sticks as you can using your fingers and the mouse.
Look at Shadowrun for example. The developers had to add auto-aim for console players, and nerf the mouse controls by throwing off aim if you make quick movements just to try to balance things between console players and PC players.
Like this?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9982898-7.html
or this?
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3885
That's just from the first page of my first search.
What doesn't make capitolism work is a bunch of people without jobs. The US economy is already falling apart, what you should be hoping for is for nvidia to clean up it's act, make better chips, sell lots of them and hire lots of employees.
True, that would help. The problem here is the management at nVidia. The ones responsible for the cover-up need to be tossed out on their asses without their golden parachutes. Then maybe the shareholders could have faith in the new management to move forward and get the company back on track.
Apologies for the double-reply, but I realized that you probably didn't get my meaning about the "simplified" aspect. With that I was referring to the fact that developers tend to cut out anything that they can't make work well with a gamepad. It's why we got things like the unified ammo in DX2, and why the inventory systems tend to suck in comparison with PC games. Then there's the problem of all the stuff that they make automatic in console games. We go from Tomb-raider-esque jumping and climbing to something like Assassin's Creed where all the skill is taken out of it and you just hold down a button and point him in the right direction. If I just wanted to watch something, I'd put in a movie.
Why would I want to use a finicky, imprecise controller for an RTS game? Not to mention having to play it at a lower resolution. Gamepads are fine for some types of games. RTS, FPS, and western RPGs are NOT meant to be played with gamepads. The experience sucks compared to the PC. I've tried it and I can't stand to play them with a gamepad. I spend more time compensating for the crappy controls than I do playing the game.