I'm not a fan of politicians who see fit to violate our personal freedom because they think they know better than we do, but I'm frankly not too concerned if these limitations stay true to European tradition. Because then it'll still be possibly for minors to play violent video games, though only if their parents take an interest in their childs hobby because they'll have to purchage the games.
If it ever takes an American style approach though, then it'll be absolutely horribly. Imagine going to jail for two and a half year because you let your son, or daughter, play fallout with their friends.
Usually I'd be one of the silent lurkers who just don't buy SOE products and keep all quiet about it, but I just wanted to comment - because I actually liked SWG in the beginning.;) However I disliked EQ, I hated EQ2 and while I'm not sure if it's fair to call V:SOH a SOE product I sure found it, and the way it was handled, upright repulsive.
It might be fair to mention that the MMOs I do like (asherons call, shadowbane and eve-online) are far from the EQ model, well maybe except for anarchy online and dark age of camelot?
I disagree, you would've been right a few years ago but now those kind of views are frankly a little dated because Apple have made some real improvements when it comes to gaming, and having good drivers, ever since World of Warcraft made it big. In recent year they've become more of an interresting market segment aswell, because everyone and their mothers have been picking up on the brand since the ipod - more so since the x86 took over and made it possible to play games on macs via things like bootcamp.
Whether or not the latter makes you right on game developers being happy with making windows games that also runs on macs with windows remains to be seen. However we have to recognize that PC gaming isn't the most attractive platform for developers anymore, consoles make bigger sales and because of that more and more developers are doing cross platform games - so it frankly wouldn't be much of a surprise if mac gaming picked up.
It's not news that Linux likely could substitute Windows on most household and office desktops if it wasn't for the lack of video game support, and the fact that your average office rat would need heavy retraining to use his, or her, new tools. So to me it frankly sounds like things are looking increasingly bright for lazy Linux fans than bad for Windows, however great it is Ubruntu is still Linux and there is still a wide range of reasons for people not to use it - while saving money is the only real advantage to people who aren't going to use their open source license beyond installing a different skin for hearts.
I won't despute the lore and the quests being interresting in elderscroll games, some of the stories are even half-decent. Unfortunately nothing ties it together in a good narrative, the dialog is rotten and the NPCs are monotome at best - worse yet they're all goofy and dumb about almost everything that takes place. Of course the latter never truely comes to the test because you can't act completely morbid - and I guess Bethsoft should have the benefit of doubt.
Still, Fallout 1 is one of the few video games with a narrative that could go book or movie and come out rather good. Something no elderscroll game would be capable off, of course Fallout 2 probably couldn't either though I suppose it would make the perfect bad sequel.
Lastly, yes you should buy the original fallout games right now, I still play mine one a regular basis. Just remember to get the correct patches if you get the violated versions - available on http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php though I guess this would be illegal in a few countries where the government knows better than you.
I am however still somewhat doubtful about Bethsoft pulling off another Fallout games, which will be to the liking of us old fanatical fanboys. Interesting narrative, dialog and npcs hasn't excatly been the most delicious thing on the plate in any recent Bethsoft game (if ever) - and those are some of the key aspects you will want to master if you're going to succeed in making a Fallout game. Naturally Bethsoft havn't gotten to the position they are in now by making horribly games - and seing how they're Fallout fans themselves they probably know about these keys without any of us fanboys screaming at them.;)
Still, the morbid attitude/feel, the wicked approach to morals where everything goes because nothing is really right or wrong and of course the freedom to commit violence hasn't really been mastered by anyone in the gaming industry aside from "Trokia Trio" (Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson). I don't see how Bethsoft will ever handle that, when Black Isle themselves weren't fully capable of doing it in Fallout 2 after the Trokia trio had left to form, well Trokia.:p
There is always hope I suppose, at least this teaser builds a solid foundation for hope. But I, and others like me will likely remain bitter skeptics until having completed the game.
I watched the gameplay video and I liked most of what I saw in it, but they're talking an awful lot about recapturing the things that made starcraft great - only the things they focus on are counter strategies, battle.net play and diverse factions. Which is great, but that alone doesn't make a new starcraft - and I'm worried that Blizzard won't be able to own up to the great gameplay they used too.
Which seem to be a problem in recent Blizzard releases, because where the gameplay itself used to be their strongest advantage it now seems to be the weakest. World of Warcraft doesn't sell copies because it has great gameplay, but because it functions as a virtual stamp collection with friends. You, me, everyone gets addicted to the game because you can achive achive achive - but where diablo 2 which also focused on achivement actually was fun while you achive World of Warcraft isn't. At least that is how I experienced the reactions on recent Blizzard games. I know about 50 people who own Warcraft 3, but the only thing they use it for is Dota which is a player made map/mod. I also know quite a lot of people who keep playing World of Warcraft despite continuously complaining about it feeling more like a job than a video game.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it does seem to fit with the massive stream of talented developers who fled Blizzard a few years ago - leaving to companies like Flagship studeos, red5 and so on. Which is where I personally believe we'll be seing the next Starcraft/Diablo/Warcarft quality games comming from in terms of gameplay. Naturally both Blizzard and Starcraft are huge brands, and I very much doubt Starcraft 2 will fail in any way - but to fans who agree with me I do believe it'll be unable to provide the kind of magic the origianl Starcraft did.
One day I think it would be delightful if one of these mmo "vets" turned out to be someone who actually had something interesting to say. Obviously Sanya Weathers is a well known name around the mmo community, at least for people who've been around the daoc herald, and apparently that is enough to reach slashdot - but an actual story going with that big name would be mighty neat.
Oh well, maybe it's just me being a bitter old man, but all this recent action with some former mmo community nut yabbing abouts doesn't really do it for me.
I'm not a fan of trolling, but I certainly don't like the self-righteous community police either - and at least when both groups are around they keep eachother busy rather than going after me.
These fees, and a growing trend aswell. It's a pretty sneaky strategy, and I can see the logic in a small fee not being a problem - well until everything has a small fee of course - which is where we're heading.
I liked the Hellgate concept, but I'm certainly not going to be their consumer whore, so I'll just skip it instead.
In what I can only see as good news, the Fallout IP has been sold to Bethesda Softworks.
This is correct, if you havn't actually played Fallout before. If you have, and you're hoping for a real follow up then it's really the worst news you could recieve. Bethesda Softworks have made a lot of good games, and a lot of people love the elder scroll series. But they have never, in any of their products, displayed any of the morbid humor, dusky moral or brilliant dialog that made Fallout into Fallout. They are not alone though, noone has ever really captured the essence that is present in all Black Isle (later Trokia and Obsidian Labs) games, but Bethesda Softworks probably couldn't be further off than they are.
Of course this doesn't mean Fallout 3 is going to be a bad game, it may dissappoint Fallout fans by the hordes, but the newer generations of gamers are probably in for a sweet experience. A quick stroll around the Fallout fan community will show you that I'm hardly the only one who thinks Bethesda Softworks making a Fallout is going to turn out bad - there are pages of fan written arguments as to why it's a bad idea on communitie like NMA - and it makes me wonder why Bethesda Softworks simply didn't build their own post apoc world from scratch.
We just want to see another game like X-COM.
And hopefully we will with http://www.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/ - yeah it's an add and I feel dirty, but you'd think that someone talking about wanting a spiritual sequal to the x-com series would at least bother to do a quick google search before publishing the article.:P
A quick search on google tells you that the second most popular online world RuneScape, hasn't broken a million active accounts yet. Dungeons and Dragons online, Vanguard Saga of Heroes and Lord of the Rings online are just a few of the overhyped games said to be the next World of Warcraft, we all know now that most of them turned out to fail at that rather misserably. I don't think it's the popularity of the Warcraft universe, but rather their inability to deliver a package which was a complete as people new to MMOs expected.
Complete not just as in a finished almost bugfree game, but also complete as in what you feel when you play through the games gameplay, if everything you see on your screen feels like it belongs visually in the world and so on. - All those things were nailed down by Blizzard in World of Warcraft, and I can understand why people would expect that of any MMO, but in my ten years of MMOing I've never seen anything deliver a package as complete as World of Warcraft, and I doubt I will unless it comes from Blizzard - so it makes me wonder just how much the market can expand.
More likely it's due to the Wii hardware's close kinship to the Gamecube... The Wii is an economy system...
I think both of these, and the lower game costs are all the result of a very intelligent marketing by Nintendo. The playstation 3 has some awesome hardware but that same hardware is the cause of it's high price - a price a lot of people simply aren't willing to pay for a gaming console despite it's power. Even worse, to experience all that graphical power, and, the blu-ray features to their fullest you need a television/sound set - which a lot of people won't have for a long while...
The 360 is somewhere in between, it did have a whole year to extablish itself as the first next-gen console, but it shares those nasty 60$ games with the ps3. I don't know about everyone of course, but around here you won't see students like me buying 60$ games unless it's an absolute musthave like Final fantasy, Gears of War, Mass Effect and so on. Sire I ended up renting Lost Planet with a few friends to play over a weekend - but I bought WarioWare and Raymond.
You're right though, it's all about what we're willing to pay - but I think 60$ "so-so but still good" games shoot beyond what a lot of us are willing to pay for them - no matter what kind of system they're for.
wait, are you saying that somehow innovative games are constantly pirated and therefore get crap sales, but nobody pirates mainstream games, and therefore we end up with more mainstream games?
No, I think it's safe to asume that mainstream games get pirated by more people percentage wise. But they'll sell enough copies total to keep investors happy despite it - especially right off the boat. Which seems to be rather important in the industry, because even games that have gone down in history, like fallout, and sold millions of copies total got their crews shafted because of their failure to initiate high instant sales.
I don't know about you but the last thing I would personally want after having created an "unknown" great game would be to get fired over low sales because people, who will later become trusty customers, chose to see what the fuss was about in a pirated version of your game.
The gaming industry is a funny place really, we the gamers want good innovative games with breath taking storytelling but whenever such a game arrives for the PC it ends up with horrible sales because it gets heavily pirated. So naturally smaller companies, one example being trokia, dies down due to lack of willing investors while giant companies like Blizzard and EA triumphs on by selling the same mainstream games year in and year out.
No I'm not a big fan of hefty anti piracy, but then I guess you need it in a world where people don't pay you unless they have too - whether they love the game or not. - Going for consoles is another sollution, one that has carried companies like bioware far.
*You* don't care. But there are people that do.
You're right of course, but aslong as the blu-ray/hd-dvds cost more money than regular dvd movies I think you'll find a lot of people who aren't going to care. I'm a student so I might be tained by my notoriously low income, but then again, a lot of gamers are students with notoriously low incomes.
In Denmark most dorms are connected to the university networks, which means you've got to share your internet connection from a computer in order to get your console past the login programs. Easily done with cables, not so easily or inexpensively done with wireless. I don't know if the ps3 is wireless only like the wii, but I do know that every x360 around here is on live while only one wii is.
I went looking with a friend who wanted one a couple of weeks back, and sure enough every store told us they didn't have em until april. Then we wondered by an electronics supermarket where it would be possible for him to order one with a weeks notice, though we never got to test the truth of that as we found 6 machines sitting in the local toys are us.
I don't know if this is geniue but things sure have changed in my dorm doing the past few years. Two things have happened, people have gotten laptops, and given up their computer tables when they started using their flatscreen television as monitors. The laptops flying around a student community, at least here in tax heavy daneland, aren't really capable of any sort of top end gaming, and sitting in your bed/sofa while playing games isn't really optimal for keyboard/mouse either. So quite naturally most of the gaming that goes on here, and there is quite a lot, has moved to consoles.
I havn't joined the boat yet, I have a laptop but I also have a stationary pc and I got a normal television because I could get ten times the television for less money. But my gaming machine is ageing fast, and I've got to say that the console gaming has made me consider whether or not I'll ever upgrade it again. I don't think I will.
Does it occur to you that perhaps they want to appeal to a variety of different markets? Does it occur to you that perhaps they want to give different consumers different things, and that perhaps they are attempting to use multiple revenue models to support different sorts of costumers?
I think that is excatly why Sony is making home, but that doesn't mean everyone is going to like it. I currently own a wii and an x360, and I wouldn't really mind completing my set with a ps3. But the reason I buy consoles is because I want to play games on them, and I buy/get into the online services because I want to play games with friends. Which is fine, home/mii/xbox-live certainly doesn't prohibt any of that it seems, but they do all have features I don't really want.
One of those features is the "achivements" which I consider to be virtual stamp collections. I'm not denying that a lot of people like to collect virtual stamps for their online achivements, just look at a game like world of warcraft, but it's not something I personally care about so naturally I want it to be possible to ignore such things when I use the online services. I don't know if it's true, but I have the feeling ignoring/avoiding the virtual stamps (and their fanatic collectors) isn't going to be as easy in home as it is on live.
More than this I'm affraid that home will turn into be some sort of Sony controlled "second-life" clone, where they'll fill your space with advertisement, and possible all sorts of viral marketing when they, or a 3rd party company wants to promote new games.
I don't have a problem with any of it really and I think it'll become rather popular too, but I'd like to know how easy it'll be fore me to avoid all of it and still play online games with my friends. At the moment it seems like it'd be a hazzle, and that is just frosting on a line of "issues" which are making me reluctant about buying a ps3. There is the price, it's line-up, giant enemy crabs in Japanese history and now this.
I agree with what you're saying, but the sad truth is that some games just don't deliver a working online part. I remember countless times where a couple of friends and I were heading for an online gaming session in whatever, that turned out to be a load of frustrations because the online service just didn't work.
If that is the alternative, then I sure hope live catches on on windows aswell. More so because I own an xbox, and it'd be nice to play from that with friends of mine who can actually afford hardware that is useful under vista.:p
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a fan of politicians who see fit to violate our personal freedom because they think they know better than we do, but I'm frankly not too concerned if these limitations stay true to European tradition. Because then it'll still be possibly for minors to play violent video games, though only if their parents take an interest in their childs hobby because they'll have to purchage the games.
If it ever takes an American style approach though, then it'll be absolutely horribly. Imagine going to jail for two and a half year because you let your son, or daughter, play fallout with their friends.
Usually I'd be one of the silent lurkers who just don't buy SOE products and keep all quiet about it, but I just wanted to comment - because I actually liked SWG in the beginning. ;) However I disliked EQ, I hated EQ2 and while I'm not sure if it's fair to call V:SOH a SOE product I sure found it, and the way it was handled, upright repulsive.
It might be fair to mention that the MMOs I do like (asherons call, shadowbane and eve-online) are far from the EQ model, well maybe except for anarchy online and dark age of camelot?
I disagree, you would've been right a few years ago but now those kind of views are frankly a little dated because Apple have made some real improvements when it comes to gaming, and having good drivers, ever since World of Warcraft made it big. In recent year they've become more of an interresting market segment aswell, because everyone and their mothers have been picking up on the brand since the ipod - more so since the x86 took over and made it possible to play games on macs via things like bootcamp.
Whether or not the latter makes you right on game developers being happy with making windows games that also runs on macs with windows remains to be seen. However we have to recognize that PC gaming isn't the most attractive platform for developers anymore, consoles make bigger sales and because of that more and more developers are doing cross platform games - so it frankly wouldn't be much of a surprise if mac gaming picked up.
It's not news that Linux likely could substitute Windows on most household and office desktops if it wasn't for the lack of video game support, and the fact that your average office rat would need heavy retraining to use his, or her, new tools. So to me it frankly sounds like things are looking increasingly bright for lazy Linux fans than bad for Windows, however great it is Ubruntu is still Linux and there is still a wide range of reasons for people not to use it - while saving money is the only real advantage to people who aren't going to use their open source license beyond installing a different skin for hearts.
I won't despute the lore and the quests being interresting in elderscroll games, some of the stories are even half-decent. Unfortunately nothing ties it together in a good narrative, the dialog is rotten and the NPCs are monotome at best - worse yet they're all goofy and dumb about almost everything that takes place. Of course the latter never truely comes to the test because you can't act completely morbid - and I guess Bethsoft should have the benefit of doubt.
Still, Fallout 1 is one of the few video games with a narrative that could go book or movie and come out rather good. Something no elderscroll game would be capable off, of course Fallout 2 probably couldn't either though I suppose it would make the perfect bad sequel.
Lastly, yes you should buy the original fallout games right now, I still play mine one a regular basis. Just remember to get the correct patches if you get the violated versions - available on http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php though I guess this would be illegal in a few countries where the government knows better than you.
I like the teaser, I didn't want too but I do.
;)
:p
I am however still somewhat doubtful about Bethsoft pulling off another Fallout games, which will be to the liking of us old fanatical fanboys. Interesting narrative, dialog and npcs hasn't excatly been the most delicious thing on the plate in any recent Bethsoft game (if ever) - and those are some of the key aspects you will want to master if you're going to succeed in making a Fallout game. Naturally Bethsoft havn't gotten to the position they are in now by making horribly games - and seing how they're Fallout fans themselves they probably know about these keys without any of us fanboys screaming at them.
Still, the morbid attitude/feel, the wicked approach to morals where everything goes because nothing is really right or wrong and of course the freedom to commit violence hasn't really been mastered by anyone in the gaming industry aside from "Trokia Trio" (Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson). I don't see how Bethsoft will ever handle that, when Black Isle themselves weren't fully capable of doing it in Fallout 2 after the Trokia trio had left to form, well Trokia.
There is always hope I suppose, at least this teaser builds a solid foundation for hope. But I, and others like me will likely remain bitter skeptics until having completed the game.
I never knew video gaming had so much drama! ^_^
I watched the gameplay video and I liked most of what I saw in it, but they're talking an awful lot about recapturing the things that made starcraft great - only the things they focus on are counter strategies, battle.net play and diverse factions. Which is great, but that alone doesn't make a new starcraft - and I'm worried that Blizzard won't be able to own up to the great gameplay they used too.
Which seem to be a problem in recent Blizzard releases, because where the gameplay itself used to be their strongest advantage it now seems to be the weakest. World of Warcraft doesn't sell copies because it has great gameplay, but because it functions as a virtual stamp collection with friends. You, me, everyone gets addicted to the game because you can achive achive achive - but where diablo 2 which also focused on achivement actually was fun while you achive World of Warcraft isn't. At least that is how I experienced the reactions on recent Blizzard games. I know about 50 people who own Warcraft 3, but the only thing they use it for is Dota which is a player made map/mod. I also know quite a lot of people who keep playing World of Warcraft despite continuously complaining about it feeling more like a job than a video game.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it does seem to fit with the massive stream of talented developers who fled Blizzard a few years ago - leaving to companies like Flagship studeos, red5 and so on. Which is where I personally believe we'll be seing the next Starcraft/Diablo/Warcarft quality games comming from in terms of gameplay. Naturally both Blizzard and Starcraft are huge brands, and I very much doubt Starcraft 2 will fail in any way - but to fans who agree with me I do believe it'll be unable to provide the kind of magic the origianl Starcraft did.
One day I think it would be delightful if one of these mmo "vets" turned out to be someone who actually had something interesting to say. Obviously Sanya Weathers is a well known name around the mmo community, at least for people who've been around the daoc herald, and apparently that is enough to reach slashdot - but an actual story going with that big name would be mighty neat.
Oh well, maybe it's just me being a bitter old man, but all this recent action with some former mmo community nut yabbing abouts doesn't really do it for me.
I'm not a fan of trolling, but I certainly don't like the self-righteous community police either - and at least when both groups are around they keep eachother busy rather than going after me.
These fees, and a growing trend aswell. It's a pretty sneaky strategy, and I can see the logic in a small fee not being a problem - well until everything has a small fee of course - which is where we're heading.
I liked the Hellgate concept, but I'm certainly not going to be their consumer whore, so I'll just skip it instead.
In what I can only see as good news, the Fallout IP has been sold to Bethesda Softworks.
This is correct, if you havn't actually played Fallout before. If you have, and you're hoping for a real follow up then it's really the worst news you could recieve. Bethesda Softworks have made a lot of good games, and a lot of people love the elder scroll series. But they have never, in any of their products, displayed any of the morbid humor, dusky moral or brilliant dialog that made Fallout into Fallout. They are not alone though, noone has ever really captured the essence that is present in all Black Isle (later Trokia and Obsidian Labs) games, but Bethesda Softworks probably couldn't be further off than they are.
Of course this doesn't mean Fallout 3 is going to be a bad game, it may dissappoint Fallout fans by the hordes, but the newer generations of gamers are probably in for a sweet experience. A quick stroll around the Fallout fan community will show you that I'm hardly the only one who thinks Bethesda Softworks making a Fallout is going to turn out bad - there are pages of fan written arguments as to why it's a bad idea on communitie like NMA - and it makes me wonder why Bethesda Softworks simply didn't build their own post apoc world from scratch.
But we'll see what happens, hopefully I'm wrong.
Oops that wasn't "preview". :p Damn you karma!
We just want to see another game like X-COM. And hopefully we will with http://www.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/ - yeah it's an add and I feel dirty, but you'd think that someone talking about wanting a spiritual sequal to the x-com series would at least bother to do a quick google search before publishing the article. :P
A quick search on google tells you that the second most popular online world RuneScape, hasn't broken a million active accounts yet. Dungeons and Dragons online, Vanguard Saga of Heroes and Lord of the Rings online are just a few of the overhyped games said to be the next World of Warcraft, we all know now that most of them turned out to fail at that rather misserably. I don't think it's the popularity of the Warcraft universe, but rather their inability to deliver a package which was a complete as people new to MMOs expected.
Complete not just as in a finished almost bugfree game, but also complete as in what you feel when you play through the games gameplay, if everything you see on your screen feels like it belongs visually in the world and so on. - All those things were nailed down by Blizzard in World of Warcraft, and I can understand why people would expect that of any MMO, but in my ten years of MMOing I've never seen anything deliver a package as complete as World of Warcraft, and I doubt I will unless it comes from Blizzard - so it makes me wonder just how much the market can expand.
More likely it's due to the Wii hardware's close kinship to the Gamecube... The Wii is an economy system...
I think both of these, and the lower game costs are all the result of a very intelligent marketing by Nintendo.
The playstation 3 has some awesome hardware but that same hardware is the cause of it's high price - a price a lot of people simply aren't willing to pay for a gaming console despite it's power. Even worse, to experience all that graphical power, and, the blu-ray features to their fullest you need a television/sound set - which a lot of people won't have for a long while...
The 360 is somewhere in between, it did have a whole year to extablish itself as the first next-gen console, but it shares those nasty 60$ games with the ps3. I don't know about everyone of course, but around here you won't see students like me buying 60$ games unless it's an absolute musthave like Final fantasy, Gears of War, Mass Effect and so on. Sire I ended up renting Lost Planet with a few friends to play over a weekend - but I bought WarioWare and Raymond.
You're right though, it's all about what we're willing to pay - but I think 60$ "so-so but still good" games shoot beyond what a lot of us are willing to pay for them - no matter what kind of system they're for.
wait, are you saying that somehow innovative games are constantly pirated and therefore get crap sales, but nobody pirates mainstream games, and therefore we end up with more mainstream games?
No, I think it's safe to asume that mainstream games get pirated by more people percentage wise. But they'll sell enough copies total to keep investors happy despite it - especially right off the boat. Which seems to be rather important in the industry, because even games that have gone down in history, like fallout, and sold millions of copies total got their crews shafted because of their failure to initiate high instant sales.
I don't know about you but the last thing I would personally want after having created an "unknown" great game would be to get fired over low sales because people, who will later become trusty customers, chose to see what the fuss was about in a pirated version of your game.
The gaming industry is a funny place really, we the gamers want good innovative games with breath taking storytelling but whenever such a game arrives for the PC it ends up with horrible sales because it gets heavily pirated. So naturally smaller companies, one example being trokia, dies down due to lack of willing investors while giant companies like Blizzard and EA triumphs on by selling the same mainstream games year in and year out.
No I'm not a big fan of hefty anti piracy, but then I guess you need it in a world where people don't pay you unless they have too - whether they love the game or not. - Going for consoles is another sollution, one that has carried companies like bioware far.
But it sure looks like slashdot desperately needs more chaotic aligned people! ;)
*You* don't care. But there are people that do.
You're right of course, but aslong as the blu-ray/hd-dvds cost more money than regular dvd movies I think you'll find a lot of people who aren't going to care. I'm a student so I might be tained by my notoriously low income, but then again, a lot of gamers are students with notoriously low incomes.
In Denmark most dorms are connected to the university networks, which means you've got to share your internet connection from a computer in order to get your console past the login programs. Easily done with cables, not so easily or inexpensively done with wireless. I don't know if the ps3 is wireless only like the wii, but I do know that every x360 around here is on live while only one wii is.
I went looking with a friend who wanted one a couple of weeks back, and sure enough every store told us they didn't have em until april. Then we wondered by an electronics supermarket where it would be possible for him to order one with a weeks notice, though we never got to test the truth of that as we found 6 machines sitting in the local toys are us.
I don't know if this is geniue but things sure have changed in my dorm doing the past few years. Two things have happened, people have gotten laptops, and given up their computer tables when they started using their flatscreen television as monitors. The laptops flying around a student community, at least here in tax heavy daneland, aren't really capable of any sort of top end gaming, and sitting in your bed/sofa while playing games isn't really optimal for keyboard/mouse either. So quite naturally most of the gaming that goes on here, and there is quite a lot, has moved to consoles.
I havn't joined the boat yet, I have a laptop but I also have a stationary pc and I got a normal television because I could get ten times the television for less money. But my gaming machine is ageing fast, and I've got to say that the console gaming has made me consider whether or not I'll ever upgrade it again. I don't think I will.
Considering how big a business rpgs are these days and there isn't a single one on the list.
Does it occur to you that perhaps they want to appeal to a variety of different markets? Does it occur to you that perhaps they want to give different consumers different things, and that perhaps they are attempting to use multiple revenue models to support different sorts of costumers?
I think that is excatly why Sony is making home, but that doesn't mean everyone is going to like it. I currently own a wii and an x360, and I wouldn't really mind completing my set with a ps3. But the reason I buy consoles is because I want to play games on them, and I buy/get into the online services because I want to play games with friends. Which is fine, home/mii/xbox-live certainly doesn't prohibt any of that it seems, but they do all have features I don't really want.
One of those features is the "achivements" which I consider to be virtual stamp collections. I'm not denying that a lot of people like to collect virtual stamps for their online achivements, just look at a game like world of warcraft, but it's not something I personally care about so naturally I want it to be possible to ignore such things when I use the online services. I don't know if it's true, but I have the feeling ignoring/avoiding the virtual stamps (and their fanatic collectors) isn't going to be as easy in home as it is on live.
More than this I'm affraid that home will turn into be some sort of Sony controlled "second-life" clone, where they'll fill your space with advertisement, and possible all sorts of viral marketing when they, or a 3rd party company wants to promote new games.
I don't have a problem with any of it really and I think it'll become rather popular too, but I'd like to know how easy it'll be fore me to avoid all of it and still play online games with my friends. At the moment it seems like it'd be a hazzle, and that is just frosting on a line of "issues" which are making me reluctant about buying a ps3. There is the price, it's line-up, giant enemy crabs in Japanese history and now this.
I agree with what you're saying, but the sad truth is that some games just don't deliver a working online part. I remember countless times where a couple of friends and I were heading for an online gaming session in whatever, that turned out to be a load of frustrations because the online service just didn't work.
:p
If that is the alternative, then I sure hope live catches on on windows aswell. More so because I own an xbox, and it'd be nice to play from that with friends of mine who can actually afford hardware that is useful under vista.