Go suck a kiwi. Slashdot is based in the US and when the dollar sign is used it is presumed to mean US dollars unless otherwise noted - unless, of course, you have a good reason for thinking that the post referencing $400 meant NZ$, AU$, CA$ or some other currency. If someone DOES mean another country's currency when using a bare dollar sign on Slashdot, then that person is being unclear, either purposely or stupidly.
An optional larger hard drive has been an inevitably for the 360. I suspect that there are two reasons they're holding out on offering bigger hard drives:
1) Every time they sell a 20GB drive for $100, a sold-for-a-loss core system gets its wings (and profitability).
2) They're probably either still working on, or preparing for release, a secure method to transfer data - at least game saves, since downloaded content can be re-downloaded (for demos and videos, I can see gamers simply leaving them on the old drive and swapping when they want that content) - between hard drives.
So, once MS has milked all they feel they can out of #1, and have perfected (at least by MS standards) #2, we'll probably see a drop in price for the 20GB drive with a 60GB or 80GB model taking over the $100 price point.
Of course, polling equipment in our state (or, at least, here in Portland) has, in essence, consisted of some boxes of ballots, some boxes of pens and some empty lock boxes. I remember being perplesed by all the "hanging chad" nonsense, wondering why people needed fancy hole-punching to make voting happen.:)
Yah. I don't get why these companies hose y'all like that. Even the evil VAT and other taxes shouldn't cause a near-doubling of prices. It would be interesting to see an internally generated breakdown of how they (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) come up with their international pricing schemes. It can't be just the higher volume of sales in the US since, presumably, the volume of an internationally available product should be counted in total instead of per-country.
Yeah, and the previous generations weren't being marketed based on their ability to do HDTV. The only console that might fit into your argument would be the Xbox - for which all but a couple titles had 480p ("Kung Fu Chaos" is the only non-480p Xbox game I can think of off hand, supposedly because the developer used graphical effects that relied on interlacing) - which didn't come with component cables.
It's easy to see why someone would be irritated that a console whose primary marketing efforts seem to be focused on HD content (both games and Blu-Ray) would ship without that capability "in the box." Personally, I don't care since I don't tend to buy consoles at launch and $500 seems like too much, component cables or not. But, if Sony is shipping with composite only then they are, technically, shipping an NTSC console that can be upgraded to an HDTV console. Hell, even the last DVD player I bought (a Toshiba with 480p output for my parents) included component cables in the box.
Finally, I would note that your pricing is way off. The PS3 doesn't come with component out built into the machine. You have to buy one of their adaptors to allow component output, which at least doubles the prices you "quote."
I think there was a log-jam somewhere in the system. I had mod points that were set to expire on 10/29 which were showing as available when I logged in yesterday (I don't mod much, but I like to have the option to do so on occasion, so I haven't set myself to "no-mod").
Yes! You too can make Slashdot posts out of simple math! Just to show how much confidence I have in my system, for a limited time I will tell you that 0.6 miles equals 1 (yes, ONE!) kilometer!
I agree with you in the main, though I will say that unless I'm giving a patently false statistic ("99% of all mean over 30 have had sex with a dog.") I won't give it in an Internet post without citing my source (with or without a link). By the same token, though, I won't attack someone for a statistic unless I can't find the information myself, and even then I'll ask for the source before biting the person's head off.
I think in most cases behavior like that exhibited by the person to which I was replying is based at least partially on a belief that one's own experience is the same as that of the rest of society. So, if he doesn't have an HDTV and none of his friends or family have one, that means that it's impossible for any significant percentage of the population to have an HDTV (or two, such as in my home). Blinders like that probably do get comfortable after a while, perhaps preventing eyestrain from using the entirety of one's vision.
As to attitudes in general, I have to admit that my personality is very different on the Interweb than in real life. In real life, I snub 90% of strangers who try to talk to me.;)
Um, no. Dragon's Lair 3D and Enter The Matrix were both playable (well, as "playable" as lousy games can be) at 1080i on the Xbox. Further, there were a bunch more games (mainly sports titles, perhaps most notably a couple of Tony Hawk games) that were playable at 720p.
Further, trying to argue that the PS2's graphics were comparable to those on the Xbox based on a very few PS2 games that pushed the console hard is disingenuous at best. For example, Konami did an awful job porting MGS2 to the Xbox - does that mean that the Xbox somehow couldn't handle MGS2-level graphics? If so, then how did Splinter Cell happen?
On average, the graphics capabilities of the Xbox blew away the PS2 and claiming anything different marks one as "that type of boy which shall not be named."
None of the above means that the PS2 didn't have a lot of great games, making it a very worthwhile console purchase - on the contrary, anyone who enjoys console games and doesn't own one already really should. It just means that the PS2 was generally weak in the graphics department, even compared to the Dreamcast, let alone the Xbox and Gamecube.
You know what's great about Internet postings? It's how people can be so certain of themselves and yet not provide fact one to back up that certitude. Go, man, go!
It's worth noting that Amazon is advertising a 360 deal where if you purchased a console you got $50 off the price of a game (Dead Rising, Madden 07, Oblivion and Lego Star Wars 2 - all listing at $49.99 on the site) - the deal ends today. While I know Amazon can afford to make great deals on stuff, the margins on new games are still very small, so someone is probably subsidizing this sale. If it's Microsoft, then it would imply that either a price drop or a bundle of 360 plus a game (which would be, in effect, a price drop if the game is desirable) is on the horizon.
Hell, most weeks there are more GBA new releases than Xbox in Japan.
Wow, talk about obvious. Throughout this past generation, most weeks there have been more GBA releases in the United States than any of the three home consoles. The GBA has been monstrously popular all over the world and developers can make GBA games for virtually nothing compared to the cost of developing for home consoles (and, the [low] quality of GBA games, on average, tends to reflect this). It's looking more and more likely that this pattern is moving over to the DS and will continue throughout the 360/PS3/Wii generation.
While there are a few games that are not region-locked, the vast majority are. A much easier explanation would be that I don't believe Gamertags are "region locked," at least in the sense that they are restricted to 360 hardware from one region. So, if one has, for example, a 360 from Japan and plays Japanese import games using the same Gamertag as they use on their US console, their Gamerscore can go over that which is possible using only games from one region.
I might not do anything about someone's propensity to emit noxious gas from their butthole in my presence, but that doesn't mean that I have given my 'tacit approval' for them to rip huge farts while standing in the same room with me.
Considering that "tacit" approval is something inferred rather than implied (the latter would mean words or actions indicating approval - like, perhaps, applause - which would remove the "tacit" part), the person farting could indeed infer your approval from your inaction in response to his or her flatulence.
It has nothing to do with hardware capability. I also don't imagine it has anything to do with licensing the CODECs - the Divx/Xvid people would probably be happy to be able to put the 360 on their list of hardware supporters and Microsoft could get back any licensing fees by simply making the upgrade a pay feature on Xbox Live Marketplace.
No, the likely reason MS is avoiding this is because Divx/Xvid-encoded files comprise the majority of copyright-violating video on the Interweb these days. Microsoft has a financial stake in protected file formats on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and has no interest in annoying the movie industry.
This is a point that people seem to ignore. They also often seem to believe that because a game has not been announced as having a port means that it's not in development. When Splinter Cell came out, there were those who believed that the game would never appear on PS2 or GC just because Ubisoft had not made announcements about ports. It was only a matter of months before [inferior] ports of Splinter Cell were available for both the PS2 and Gamecube. Even more to the point, MGS2 was a "PS2 exclusive" until, of course, Xbox got a [crappy] port of that [barely interactive movie] as well.
Square Enix has already announced intentions to support all 3 consoles. Wii will have another FF: Crystal Chronicles game fairly early in its life, the 360 already has Final Fantasy XI (old and weak to my mind, but people still play it) and the DS is getting a bunch of Square love.
Apart from first-party titles, exclusives will only remain exclusive as long as it's profitable for a company to keep them so. That may have been a given on the PS2 but it remains to be seen if the PS3 is going to see the kind of market share to maintain 800-lb gorilla status.
So, let's see if I can understand your point here. Microsoft is bad because they took a service that was only available to people who paid for it, added a whole bunch of stuff, and made those additions (at least in terms of game demos and videos) available for people who don't want to pay for the service. AND, the fact that they did this is somehow a slippery slope towards forcing people to may more for the service, despite the fact that the price for full Xbox Live [Gold] access hasn't changed while free [Silver] stuff has been added.
You missed one of the results of Marvel's suit against City of Heroes: Cryptic is developing the upcoming Marvel MMOG. I think you can pretty much call the whole situation a big win by Cryptic since they not only didn't have to pay Marvel any money but in fact are now cashing Marvel checks.:)
Well, it depends on the exact reasoning behind the petition, which the referenced news bite (can't call it an article) admits it doesn't have. For example, if I walk into court and call the judge a flaming asshole, I can be held in contempt of court and put in jail. There's no necessity for my guilt to be proven further because what I did was right there in court and on the record. The same might apply to a situation where a lawyer is under a "gag order" and goes on TV in defiance of the order. That lawyer can be held in contempt and, again, there's no trial involved once the violation of the judge's order is in evidence. Such situations can still be eligible for appeal, but a trial per se isn't necessary for the judge to make the initial decision.
Again, I don't know the details of this specific claim, but there's a reason why many (most?) lawyers want to be judges. A lot of power comes with the robe, even in this age of "mandatory minimums" and the like.
Some games just plain aren't suited to the achievements. Developers then go out of their way to use up their allotment. This results either in inane achievements, or in-game tasks that don't fit the game genre. It also encourages and rewards unhealthy gaming habits.
Oh, please. Similar things have been happening on a game-by-game basis for years. How about trying to unlock everything in Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Gamecube? Or trying to get every materia in Final Fantasy VII? Hours upon hours of mostly inane gameplay in order to unlock things that have little to no impact on how fun the base game is.
All Microsoft has done is implemented a system that applies to every game and allows a gamer to watch his overall gaming progress across all games. Even without Microsoft's encouragment, there would still be many games that would "force" you to do ridiculous things in order to unlock special features of some sort. For example, every version of Lego Star Wars II encourages a player to go through the game over and over again (and to do so perfectly, and to do so in weird ways) if you want to unlock every little facet of the game - with the Xbox 360 it just gives you slightly more encouragement if you're in love with the Achievement/Gamerscore system.
And developers still have quite a lot of freedom in the area of achievements. If they choose, they can use the minimum number of achievements (I think it's 10) and make them an easy and natural outgrowth of playing the game. Your example of Dead Rising, to me, is an example of doing the system right where you'll get a lot of achievements just playing the game normally. If there are some achievements with ridiculous requirements, it's still your choice whether or not to pursue them.
In short, complaining about the achievement system is just silly. If you don't like it and/or find the Gamerscore meaningless, then just ignore the achievements and play like you always have. If you think it's important and fun to get as many achievement points as possible, then go crazy with it. Me, I fall into a middle ground where in some games the achievement system drives me to improve my skills (I'm still trying every day to get better at timed Bejeweled 2), but if I think an achievement is "dumb" then I ignore it.
The achievement system can only ruin games if you, as the player, let it.
Slashdot Mirror
Go suck a kiwi. Slashdot is based in the US and when the dollar sign is used it is presumed to mean US dollars unless otherwise noted - unless, of course, you have a good reason for thinking that the post referencing $400 meant NZ$, AU$, CA$ or some other currency. If someone DOES mean another country's currency when using a bare dollar sign on Slashdot, then that person is being unclear, either purposely or stupidly.
An optional larger hard drive has been an inevitably for the 360. I suspect that there are two reasons they're holding out on offering bigger hard drives:
1) Every time they sell a 20GB drive for $100, a sold-for-a-loss core system gets its wings (and profitability).
2) They're probably either still working on, or preparing for release, a secure method to transfer data - at least game saves, since downloaded content can be re-downloaded (for demos and videos, I can see gamers simply leaving them on the old drive and swapping when they want that content) - between hard drives.
So, once MS has milked all they feel they can out of #1, and have perfected (at least by MS standards) #2, we'll probably see a drop in price for the 20GB drive with a 60GB or 80GB model taking over the $100 price point.
And how do people in other "live-voting" places prove that their vote was counted? And counted correctly?
As an individual, barring known fraud/error, at some point you have to trust the system.
Of course, polling equipment in our state (or, at least, here in Portland) has, in essence, consisted of some boxes of ballots, some boxes of pens and some empty lock boxes. I remember being perplesed by all the "hanging chad" nonsense, wondering why people needed fancy hole-punching to make voting happen. :)
Vote by mail is indeed the bomb.
Yah. I don't get why these companies hose y'all like that. Even the evil VAT and other taxes shouldn't cause a near-doubling of prices. It would be interesting to see an internally generated breakdown of how they (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) come up with their international pricing schemes. It can't be just the higher volume of sales in the US since, presumably, the volume of an internationally available product should be counted in total instead of per-country.
Bro, unless you live outside the US then the PS2 was never priced higher (except on eBay, for suckers) than $300.
Yeah, and the previous generations weren't being marketed based on their ability to do HDTV. The only console that might fit into your argument would be the Xbox - for which all but a couple titles had 480p ("Kung Fu Chaos" is the only non-480p Xbox game I can think of off hand, supposedly because the developer used graphical effects that relied on interlacing) - which didn't come with component cables.
It's easy to see why someone would be irritated that a console whose primary marketing efforts seem to be focused on HD content (both games and Blu-Ray) would ship without that capability "in the box." Personally, I don't care since I don't tend to buy consoles at launch and $500 seems like too much, component cables or not. But, if Sony is shipping with composite only then they are, technically, shipping an NTSC console that can be upgraded to an HDTV console. Hell, even the last DVD player I bought (a Toshiba with 480p output for my parents) included component cables in the box.
Finally, I would note that your pricing is way off. The PS3 doesn't come with component out built into the machine. You have to buy one of their adaptors to allow component output, which at least doubles the prices you "quote."
I think there was a log-jam somewhere in the system. I had mod points that were set to expire on 10/29 which were showing as available when I logged in yesterday (I don't mod much, but I like to have the option to do so on occasion, so I haven't set myself to "no-mod").
Yes! You too can make Slashdot posts out of simple math! Just to show how much confidence I have in my system, for a limited time I will tell you that 0.6 miles equals 1 (yes, ONE!) kilometer!
I agree with you in the main, though I will say that unless I'm giving a patently false statistic ("99% of all mean over 30 have had sex with a dog.") I won't give it in an Internet post without citing my source (with or without a link). By the same token, though, I won't attack someone for a statistic unless I can't find the information myself, and even then I'll ask for the source before biting the person's head off.
;)
I think in most cases behavior like that exhibited by the person to which I was replying is based at least partially on a belief that one's own experience is the same as that of the rest of society. So, if he doesn't have an HDTV and none of his friends or family have one, that means that it's impossible for any significant percentage of the population to have an HDTV (or two, such as in my home). Blinders like that probably do get comfortable after a while, perhaps preventing eyestrain from using the entirety of one's vision.
As to attitudes in general, I have to admit that my personality is very different on the Interweb than in real life. In real life, I snub 90% of strangers who try to talk to me.
Oh, stop it. Maybe if we in the US had kangaroos wandering through our houses at all hours, THEN we could compare standards of living.
Um, no. Dragon's Lair 3D and Enter The Matrix were both playable (well, as "playable" as lousy games can be) at 1080i on the Xbox. Further, there were a bunch more games (mainly sports titles, perhaps most notably a couple of Tony Hawk games) that were playable at 720p.
Further, trying to argue that the PS2's graphics were comparable to those on the Xbox based on a very few PS2 games that pushed the console hard is disingenuous at best. For example, Konami did an awful job porting MGS2 to the Xbox - does that mean that the Xbox somehow couldn't handle MGS2-level graphics? If so, then how did Splinter Cell happen?
On average, the graphics capabilities of the Xbox blew away the PS2 and claiming anything different marks one as "that type of boy which shall not be named."
None of the above means that the PS2 didn't have a lot of great games, making it a very worthwhile console purchase - on the contrary, anyone who enjoys console games and doesn't own one already really should. It just means that the PS2 was generally weak in the graphics department, even compared to the Dreamcast, let alone the Xbox and Gamecube.
You know what's great about Internet postings? It's how people can be so certain of themselves and yet not provide fact one to back up that certitude. Go, man, go!
It's worth noting that Amazon is advertising a 360 deal where if you purchased a console you got $50 off the price of a game (Dead Rising, Madden 07, Oblivion and Lego Star Wars 2 - all listing at $49.99 on the site) - the deal ends today. While I know Amazon can afford to make great deals on stuff, the margins on new games are still very small, so someone is probably subsidizing this sale. If it's Microsoft, then it would imply that either a price drop or a bundle of 360 plus a game (which would be, in effect, a price drop if the game is desirable) is on the horizon.
Wow, talk about obvious. Throughout this past generation, most weeks there have been more GBA releases in the United States than any of the three home consoles. The GBA has been monstrously popular all over the world and developers can make GBA games for virtually nothing compared to the cost of developing for home consoles (and, the [low] quality of GBA games, on average, tends to reflect this). It's looking more and more likely that this pattern is moving over to the DS and will continue throughout the 360/PS3/Wii generation.
While there are a few games that are not region-locked, the vast majority are. A much easier explanation would be that I don't believe Gamertags are "region locked," at least in the sense that they are restricted to 360 hardware from one region. So, if one has, for example, a 360 from Japan and plays Japanese import games using the same Gamertag as they use on their US console, their Gamerscore can go over that which is possible using only games from one region.
Considering that "tacit" approval is something inferred rather than implied (the latter would mean words or actions indicating approval - like, perhaps, applause - which would remove the "tacit" part), the person farting could indeed infer your approval from your inaction in response to his or her flatulence.
It has nothing to do with hardware capability. I also don't imagine it has anything to do with licensing the CODECs - the Divx/Xvid people would probably be happy to be able to put the 360 on their list of hardware supporters and Microsoft could get back any licensing fees by simply making the upgrade a pay feature on Xbox Live Marketplace.
No, the likely reason MS is avoiding this is because Divx/Xvid-encoded files comprise the majority of copyright-violating video on the Interweb these days. Microsoft has a financial stake in protected file formats on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and has no interest in annoying the movie industry.
This is a point that people seem to ignore. They also often seem to believe that because a game has not been announced as having a port means that it's not in development. When Splinter Cell came out, there were those who believed that the game would never appear on PS2 or GC just because Ubisoft had not made announcements about ports. It was only a matter of months before [inferior] ports of Splinter Cell were available for both the PS2 and Gamecube. Even more to the point, MGS2 was a "PS2 exclusive" until, of course, Xbox got a [crappy] port of that [barely interactive movie] as well.
Square Enix has already announced intentions to support all 3 consoles. Wii will have another FF: Crystal Chronicles game fairly early in its life, the 360 already has Final Fantasy XI (old and weak to my mind, but people still play it) and the DS is getting a bunch of Square love.
Apart from first-party titles, exclusives will only remain exclusive as long as it's profitable for a company to keep them so. That may have been a given on the PS2 but it remains to be seen if the PS3 is going to see the kind of market share to maintain 800-lb gorilla status.
So, let's see if I can understand your point here. Microsoft is bad because they took a service that was only available to people who paid for it, added a whole bunch of stuff, and made those additions (at least in terms of game demos and videos) available for people who don't want to pay for the service. AND, the fact that they did this is somehow a slippery slope towards forcing people to may more for the service, despite the fact that the price for full Xbox Live [Gold] access hasn't changed while free [Silver] stuff has been added.
Well played!
You missed one of the results of Marvel's suit against City of Heroes: Cryptic is developing the upcoming Marvel MMOG. I think you can pretty much call the whole situation a big win by Cryptic since they not only didn't have to pay Marvel any money but in fact are now cashing Marvel checks. :)
Well, it depends on the exact reasoning behind the petition, which the referenced news bite (can't call it an article) admits it doesn't have. For example, if I walk into court and call the judge a flaming asshole, I can be held in contempt of court and put in jail. There's no necessity for my guilt to be proven further because what I did was right there in court and on the record. The same might apply to a situation where a lawyer is under a "gag order" and goes on TV in defiance of the order. That lawyer can be held in contempt and, again, there's no trial involved once the violation of the judge's order is in evidence. Such situations can still be eligible for appeal, but a trial per se isn't necessary for the judge to make the initial decision.
Again, I don't know the details of this specific claim, but there's a reason why many (most?) lawyers want to be judges. A lot of power comes with the robe, even in this age of "mandatory minimums" and the like.
Oh, please. Similar things have been happening on a game-by-game basis for years. How about trying to unlock everything in Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Gamecube? Or trying to get every materia in Final Fantasy VII? Hours upon hours of mostly inane gameplay in order to unlock things that have little to no impact on how fun the base game is.
All Microsoft has done is implemented a system that applies to every game and allows a gamer to watch his overall gaming progress across all games. Even without Microsoft's encouragment, there would still be many games that would "force" you to do ridiculous things in order to unlock special features of some sort. For example, every version of Lego Star Wars II encourages a player to go through the game over and over again (and to do so perfectly, and to do so in weird ways) if you want to unlock every little facet of the game - with the Xbox 360 it just gives you slightly more encouragement if you're in love with the Achievement/Gamerscore system.
And developers still have quite a lot of freedom in the area of achievements. If they choose, they can use the minimum number of achievements (I think it's 10) and make them an easy and natural outgrowth of playing the game. Your example of Dead Rising, to me, is an example of doing the system right where you'll get a lot of achievements just playing the game normally. If there are some achievements with ridiculous requirements, it's still your choice whether or not to pursue them.
In short, complaining about the achievement system is just silly. If you don't like it and/or find the Gamerscore meaningless, then just ignore the achievements and play like you always have. If you think it's important and fun to get as many achievement points as possible, then go crazy with it. Me, I fall into a middle ground where in some games the achievement system drives me to improve my skills (I'm still trying every day to get better at timed Bejeweled 2), but if I think an achievement is "dumb" then I ignore it.
The achievement system can only ruin games if you, as the player, let it.
Isn't that the cult to which Tom Cruise belongs?