After playing Metroid on the DS using the thumb-nubbin on the touch screen for aim, I'd come to a similar conclusion. It did really shock me that a portable fps could actually have that level of fast and accurate control.
I'd say that a small-ish glidepad operated with the thumb would be the best replacement for the right stick on a gamepad. Double tap to jump of course.
There's no particular reason to hate the game, I just couldn't be bothered to play it after about 3 hours because it was quite frankly dull. The level design seemed uninspired, the plot was so-so, the enemies and weapons felt very generic. It just didn't entertain me at all.
2K games could learn a lot from Infinity Ward. In fact, most FPS developers could learn a lot from Infinity Ward!
I was taught evolutionary theory in school, as far as I'm concerned it is well established as fact. Forcing someone out of their job for agreeing with somthing that is considered to be fact is unthinkable. What kind of a backward nation are you guys living in?
Agreed, the overuse of motion blur and colour corection make it look like the game's running on a 1st generation, budget lcd tv. Runs like an absolute dog as well. Shame they didn't get to put in the time and optimization that CoD 4 obviously got, because that looks amazing, runs much smoother and it's gameplay pisses all over Blacksite.
I think this is the question that anyone distributing TV over the internet should be asking themselves. I don't want to watch shows on my PC, I want to sit on my sofa and watch them on my tv. Given the choice of using a legal but DRM'd content delivery system, or using an illegal system that let's me actually watch tv on my tv, then I'm going to choose the later option every time.
Honestly, why would I want to watch TV sat at a computer when I have a big tv and comfy sofa? Do the people who came up with that idea even have a clue about how people consume entertainment? I will continue as I have been, downloading anything that looks good via P2P and watching them on my tv when I want to, probably watching an entire season in 1-2 sittings rather than weekly. This is how I consume entertainment, adapt to me or be ignored by me.
Upgraded my system last month and my RAID-0 2x80GB SATA-II array didn't get recognised when hooking it up to the controler on the new mobo. Do I miss them? No. I have a whole load of new games to play now that I couldn't run before. I am slightly annoyed about loosing some old level design stuff, but I've got no interest in that anymore. It was mostly sentiment and the fact that it represented 100's of hours in GTKRadiant. Not really missing the files makes me think that maybe I should stop hoarding all those old motherboards, drives and other crap that I think might come in usefull someday.
Did take a hell of a long time to re-download all my steam games though.
Well, there's no redundancy between PC and console for a start. I don't want to sit on the sofa with a keyboard accross my knees for 4 hours playing Tabula Rasa. Likewise I don't want to try and get 4 people round a 19" monitor to play Wii. TBH, I like having a collection of consoles. I can lend them to friends or move them into another room for other family members to play on.
..until I can get hardware H.264/AVC1 decoding in LinuxMCE using my Radeon HD card then? Months? Years? the day after the next big encoding standard is released?
...would be somthing that will fit in a VESA mount chasis and do full hardware decoding of H.264 and AVC1 from any container file.
Given that a lot of people would want to run somthing like LinuxMCE, having to decode 1080i using a foss decoder would require somthing in the region of an Athalon X2 5000+, which makes housing it in a tiny box and ventilating it properly somwhat troublesome.
In honesty, I'd rather not run an HTPC at all. XBMC was doing it all for me, right up until I got a HD screen and wanted to playback H.264/AVC1. Hopefully the exploit work on the 360 will continue at a rapid pace and we'll see XBMC360 sometime soon, then I can stop all this faffing around finding gfx cards that vsync properly, codecs that playback everything I want to watch without dropping frames and trying to find a frontend for it all that's usable without a kb/m. Would be nice to have somthing that "Just works" again.
"It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems"
Isn't it the place of the copyright holder to enforce copyright? Regardless of how incompatible it is with viacom's systems, a system that has been put in place to help copyright holders protect their works is still doing them a favor. Adapt or die Viacom.
I should probably use the preview button when posting at 3am.
At the end of the day you don't have to buy all of the hardware and certainly not all at once. Last gen of consoles I bought the Cube 1st on day of release, then the Xbox 9 months after that when there was a good package offer on it and finally got a used PS2 around a year later when I wanted to catch up on the titles I'd missed (By which point prety much all the games for it were dirt cheap as well). The PC is a constant and just gets a hardware upgrade every 2-3 years for about £300-£400. This time around I got the Wii 1st (last Xmas), did the PC upgrade 2 weeks ago, Will grab a 360 for myself some point in the next 6 months and will get a PS3 when the price comes down a lot or when I can find a compelling reason to do so (RFoM is just not enough to buy a console for).
Last thing I heared from MS about private servers on Live was that they were not going to release dedicated server software. Unless they've changed their stance then renting a clanserver is not an option.
Pro Gamers don't get consideration because they're a tiny minority. There are more people that play games on mobile phones than there are pro gamers. Why do mods get consideration? Once there was a game called Half-Life, for this game there was a mod called Counter Strike. HL and HL2 servers are at the top of the list way ahead of any other game on the server listings and 90% of the servers are running CS 1.6 or CS:S http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/. User created mods are more important to the fps market than pro gamers. All of the current big engines on PC let me create my own content for them using a well documented and community supported suite of tools. Where as players who were caught by MS playing custom Halo 2 maps against their friends over live were banned.
Other consoles could have the Wiimote, but they still wouldn't have Nintendo's attitude towards games and would probably not market them in the same way that Nintendo have. It's not just about the hardware or the software, but about the way that they've been put together in a cohesive package and
I never said that the PC was *only* for the hardcore. I said it was the platform of choice for the hardcore Shooter, Stratergy and MMO markets. Although shooters exist on consoles, there is no mod/mapping scene due to this type of content being a) not quality checked, b) a possible source of security exploits and c) somthing that might stop you from buying the manufacturer's add-on content. Pro gamers are not somthing that I'm giving consideration to here.
What the 360 is doing is taking the Xbox brand to the next level by providing a reasonably priced platform that's easy to develop for and makes it very easy for the user to get into online gaming and content. Live is a well thought out and cohesive experience, which generaly "Just works". This was somthing that was required to get more people into online gaming. However, to renforce my earlier point the hardcore shooter market will want private clan servers and modifications. This is somthing that you can't get with Live.
EA should feel welcome to take it's anual franchise games and develop them on the phantom. I'll be over here, playing Tabula Rasa, Bioshock, Portal, etc.
At the end of the day, what EA wants is unimportant compared to what the gamers want. You will never reach a wide audience with a "1 size fits all" console, because 1 size never fits all.
Wii is great for the family market and seems to be helping to bring wives and girlfriends into the gaming lifestyle in a way that's never been seen before.
Xbox 360 and Live are doing exactly what they were made to do.
PC is still the platform of choice for the hardcore shooter, stratergy and MMO market.
The PS3 is doing ummm... Somthing... Oh yeah, virtual house decoration and streaming media to their handheld, for those people that want a "gaming lifestyle" without the actual games part.
If you wanted to try and capture all of the above then your product would most likely be £1000 per unit over cost, and 3 years behind schedual.
Yeah, I much prefer taking part in the hundred meter sprint if everyone in the race has their legs tied together... It's just much too quick otherwise.
We already waited 8 months from the original release schedual due to valve wanting to make a simultanious cross platform release with the console ports and the retail boxes, which to my mind defeats the point of steam. What exactly is the point of being able to download the game if I don't get a substantial discount over the retail box cost and still have wait until the physical media is burned, printed, pakaged and shipped to retailers?
Main box with XP Pro SP2 has anything to do with updates switched off, including group policy settings.
Laptop with XP Pro SP2 (download but do not install) was switched off and didn't update at next run.
HTPC running Vista Ultimate (Notify only) was switched off and didn't update at next run.
File server running W2K Pro doesn't get updates anymore.
I think the reason that the 2 boxes that should have aquired the update didn't is because of high torrent traffic on my network. I usually have to switch off my torrents in order to connect to update without it timing out.
If anyone is really worried about future automatic updates breaking stuff or knocking out pirate copies then simply add the IP's for all the update servers to your hosts file, or if you wait a bit I'm sure that someone will make a little pack for Peergaurdian.
The noob area should take you from lvl 1-10 solo and be doable in aprox 4 hours once you get the hang of it, 2 if you have a powerleveler to assist. Next is the hated "Dunes" area, which is setup for lvl 10-20 in party play. Time here could be anything between 8 hours to a week depending on the quality of party that you manage to pick up.
With regards to not finding suitable party members, that is a common difficulty but in these events, you should try and scout your own party. Often some of the best parties I was in were the ones that didn't conform to the standard Tank, Healer, Puller, Nuker, Support & 1 more setup. Due to FFXI's subclass system it's entirely possible to put together a party with no main healer, instead using 2-3 players with a White Mage subclass to do the job of main healer and any other buff/debuff/support duties that their main class would do.
The best thing to do of course is to join one of the larger linkshells (guilds) and shout on your ls chat if you're missing a couple of vital classes for a party. The large linkshells will always have players with lots of classes on the go at once, so chances are they will be happy to change class and join you if they need to level up a class in that level range.
Spelling and Grammar died the day I started seeing driving school cars with "lrn2drv" written on the side of them I'm afraid. The english language has been brutalized and bastardized in far worse ways than in my post.
Care to comment on the PSP, or are you just grammar-trolling?
Slashdot Mirror
Coming up next: Climbing for Dollars!
After playing Metroid on the DS using the thumb-nubbin on the touch screen for aim, I'd come to a similar conclusion. It did really shock me that a portable fps could actually have that level of fast and accurate control.
I'd say that a small-ish glidepad operated with the thumb would be the best replacement for the right stick on a gamepad. Double tap to jump of course.
There's no particular reason to hate the game, I just couldn't be bothered to play it after about 3 hours because it was quite frankly dull. The level design seemed uninspired, the plot was so-so, the enemies and weapons felt very generic. It just didn't entertain me at all. 2K games could learn a lot from Infinity Ward. In fact, most FPS developers could learn a lot from Infinity Ward!
I was taught evolutionary theory in school, as far as I'm concerned it is well established as fact. Forcing someone out of their job for agreeing with somthing that is considered to be fact is unthinkable. What kind of a backward nation are you guys living in?
Agreed, the overuse of motion blur and colour corection make it look like the game's running on a 1st generation, budget lcd tv. Runs like an absolute dog as well. Shame they didn't get to put in the time and optimization that CoD 4 obviously got, because that looks amazing, runs much smoother and it's gameplay pisses all over Blacksite.
Am I the only person that's got Chris Rock and Joe Pesci's conversation about cellphones from Lethal Weapon 4 playing in there head right now?
I think this is the question that anyone distributing TV over the internet should be asking themselves. I don't want to watch shows on my PC, I want to sit on my sofa and watch them on my tv. Given the choice of using a legal but DRM'd content delivery system, or using an illegal system that let's me actually watch tv on my tv, then I'm going to choose the later option every time. Honestly, why would I want to watch TV sat at a computer when I have a big tv and comfy sofa? Do the people who came up with that idea even have a clue about how people consume entertainment? I will continue as I have been, downloading anything that looks good via P2P and watching them on my tv when I want to, probably watching an entire season in 1-2 sittings rather than weekly. This is how I consume entertainment, adapt to me or be ignored by me.
Goatse superimposed over Milkdrop... It's a scary thought.
...exactly what a hacker would do with my Xbox once he's taken control of it.
Upgraded my system last month and my RAID-0 2x80GB SATA-II array didn't get recognised when hooking it up to the controler on the new mobo. Do I miss them? No. I have a whole load of new games to play now that I couldn't run before. I am slightly annoyed about loosing some old level design stuff, but I've got no interest in that anymore. It was mostly sentiment and the fact that it represented 100's of hours in GTKRadiant. Not really missing the files makes me think that maybe I should stop hoarding all those old motherboards, drives and other crap that I think might come in usefull someday.
Did take a hell of a long time to re-download all my steam games though.
Well, there's no redundancy between PC and console for a start. I don't want to sit on the sofa with a keyboard accross my knees for 4 hours playing Tabula Rasa. Likewise I don't want to try and get 4 people round a 19" monitor to play Wii. TBH, I like having a collection of consoles. I can lend them to friends or move them into another room for other family members to play on.
..until I can get hardware H.264/AVC1 decoding in LinuxMCE using my Radeon HD card then? Months? Years? the day after the next big encoding standard is released?
Unfortunately not from Samba though, which suprises me since they're both MS babies. Burning my 1.3TB NAS to discs for playback would be troublesome.
...would be somthing that will fit in a VESA mount chasis and do full hardware decoding of H.264 and AVC1 from any container file.
Given that a lot of people would want to run somthing like LinuxMCE, having to decode 1080i using a foss decoder would require somthing in the region of an Athalon X2 5000+, which makes housing it in a tiny box and ventilating it properly somwhat troublesome.
In honesty, I'd rather not run an HTPC at all. XBMC was doing it all for me, right up until I got a HD screen and wanted to playback H.264/AVC1. Hopefully the exploit work on the 360 will continue at a rapid pace and we'll see XBMC360 sometime soon, then I can stop all this faffing around finding gfx cards that vsync properly, codecs that playback everything I want to watch without dropping frames and trying to find a frontend for it all that's usable without a kb/m. Would be nice to have somthing that "Just works" again.
"It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems"
Isn't it the place of the copyright holder to enforce copyright? Regardless of how incompatible it is with viacom's systems, a system that has been put in place to help copyright holders protect their works is still doing them a favor. Adapt or die Viacom.
I should probably use the preview button when posting at 3am.
At the end of the day you don't have to buy all of the hardware and certainly not all at once. Last gen of consoles I bought the Cube 1st on day of release, then the Xbox 9 months after that when there was a good package offer on it and finally got a used PS2 around a year later when I wanted to catch up on the titles I'd missed (By which point prety much all the games for it were dirt cheap as well). The PC is a constant and just gets a hardware upgrade every 2-3 years for about £300-£400. This time around I got the Wii 1st (last Xmas), did the PC upgrade 2 weeks ago, Will grab a 360 for myself some point in the next 6 months and will get a PS3 when the price comes down a lot or when I can find a compelling reason to do so (RFoM is just not enough to buy a console for).
Last thing I heared from MS about private servers on Live was that they were not going to release dedicated server software. Unless they've changed their stance then renting a clanserver is not an option.
Pro Gamers don't get consideration because they're a tiny minority. There are more people that play games on mobile phones than there are pro gamers. Why do mods get consideration? Once there was a game called Half-Life, for this game there was a mod called Counter Strike. HL and HL2 servers are at the top of the list way ahead of any other game on the server listings and 90% of the servers are running CS 1.6 or CS:S http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/. User created mods are more important to the fps market than pro gamers. All of the current big engines on PC let me create my own content for them using a well documented and community supported suite of tools. Where as players who were caught by MS playing custom Halo 2 maps against their friends over live were banned.
Other consoles could have the Wiimote, but they still wouldn't have Nintendo's attitude towards games and would probably not market them in the same way that Nintendo have. It's not just about the hardware or the software, but about the way that they've been put together in a cohesive package and
I never said that the PC was *only* for the hardcore. I said it was the platform of choice for the hardcore Shooter, Stratergy and MMO markets. Although shooters exist on consoles, there is no mod/mapping scene due to this type of content being a) not quality checked, b) a possible source of security exploits and c) somthing that might stop you from buying the manufacturer's add-on content. Pro gamers are not somthing that I'm giving consideration to here.
What the 360 is doing is taking the Xbox brand to the next level by providing a reasonably priced platform that's easy to develop for and makes it very easy for the user to get into online gaming and content. Live is a well thought out and cohesive experience, which generaly "Just works". This was somthing that was required to get more people into online gaming. However, to renforce my earlier point the hardcore shooter market will want private clan servers and modifications. This is somthing that you can't get with Live.
EA should feel welcome to take it's anual franchise games and develop them on the phantom. I'll be over here, playing Tabula Rasa, Bioshock, Portal, etc.
At the end of the day, what EA wants is unimportant compared to what the gamers want. You will never reach a wide audience with a "1 size fits all" console, because 1 size never fits all.
Wii is great for the family market and seems to be helping to bring wives and girlfriends into the gaming lifestyle in a way that's never been seen before.
Xbox 360 and Live are doing exactly what they were made to do.
PC is still the platform of choice for the hardcore shooter, stratergy and MMO market.
The PS3 is doing ummm... Somthing... Oh yeah, virtual house decoration and streaming media to their handheld, for those people that want a "gaming lifestyle" without the actual games part.
If you wanted to try and capture all of the above then your product would most likely be £1000 per unit over cost, and 3 years behind schedual.
Yeah, I much prefer taking part in the hundred meter sprint if everyone in the race has their legs tied together... It's just much too quick otherwise.
We already waited 8 months from the original release schedual due to valve wanting to make a simultanious cross platform release with the console ports and the retail boxes, which to my mind defeats the point of steam. What exactly is the point of being able to download the game if I don't get a substantial discount over the retail box cost and still have wait until the physical media is burned, printed, pakaged and shipped to retailers?
They should be right at home on /. then.
None of my boxes updated.
Main box with XP Pro SP2 has anything to do with updates switched off, including group policy settings.
Laptop with XP Pro SP2 (download but do not install) was switched off and didn't update at next run.
HTPC running Vista Ultimate (Notify only) was switched off and didn't update at next run.
File server running W2K Pro doesn't get updates anymore.
I think the reason that the 2 boxes that should have aquired the update didn't is because of high torrent traffic on my network. I usually have to switch off my torrents in order to connect to update without it timing out.
If anyone is really worried about future automatic updates breaking stuff or knocking out pirate copies then simply add the IP's for all the update servers to your hosts file, or if you wait a bit I'm sure that someone will make a little pack for Peergaurdian.
The noob area should take you from lvl 1-10 solo and be doable in aprox 4 hours once you get the hang of it, 2 if you have a powerleveler to assist. Next is the hated "Dunes" area, which is setup for lvl 10-20 in party play. Time here could be anything between 8 hours to a week depending on the quality of party that you manage to pick up.
With regards to not finding suitable party members, that is a common difficulty but in these events, you should try and scout your own party. Often some of the best parties I was in were the ones that didn't conform to the standard Tank, Healer, Puller, Nuker, Support & 1 more setup. Due to FFXI's subclass system it's entirely possible to put together a party with no main healer, instead using 2-3 players with a White Mage subclass to do the job of main healer and any other buff/debuff/support duties that their main class would do.
The best thing to do of course is to join one of the larger linkshells (guilds) and shout on your ls chat if you're missing a couple of vital classes for a party. The large linkshells will always have players with lots of classes on the go at once, so chances are they will be happy to change class and join you if they need to level up a class in that level range.
Everyone knows that "THERE IS NO GURLS ON TEH INTERWEBZ!!1!1"
[padding]
Ok, time for some message padding to let this get through the capfilter.
[/padding]
Spelling and Grammar died the day I started seeing driving school cars with "lrn2drv" written on the side of them I'm afraid. The english language has been brutalized and bastardized in far worse ways than in my post. Care to comment on the PSP, or are you just grammar-trolling?