Don't forget also that Microsoft doesn't say "get out of here" to developers who want to sell scifi first-person shooters, nor does Nintendo ban developers from making 3D platformers or go-kart racing games. Any developer who wants to make a game for the Xbox 360, Wii or PS3 is encouraged to do so, even if a game might compete with, or demolish the sales of, one of their in-house games (there are, of course, some content restrictions relating to sexual content and such, but they're not intended to stifle competition).
PS- I should note that I'm 36 years old and I owned the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 in their heydays and, obviously, at ages where I was most impressionable. One would think that if anyone was going to be stupidly nostalgic, it would be me.:)
And those are just a couple of consoles. How about Civilization, Doom, The Sims, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Grand Theft Auto III, Baldur's Gate, Diablo (1 and 2), Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandago, Tie Fighter...oops, went to 12.
Anyone who claims that game design somehow peaked in the 1980s is locked in a nostalgic haze.
Re:Creature Creator: Issue with Video Card
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
Talk about a glass-half-empty attitude. Would you have preferred that the Creature Creator allowed itself to be installed, give you the illusion that you've got the horsepower to handle the real game and cause you to buy it, only to find out that the game is unplayable on your machine?
I hate to be the one to break it you, but one of the required costs of playing most new games is keeping your hardware relatively current. 5-year-old video cards aren't typically going to cut it, any more than will 5-year-old CPUs. These companies are in the business of selling games that look good and play well on current hardware and, hopefully, future hardware. To accommodate all the older machines currently in use would require extraordinary time and money, and probably wouldn't help the bottom line.
For the record, I don't have a PC that can run Spore and may not for quite a while.
[blockquote]The original Buffy game on the Xbox stayed very true to the show, and was a great 3D brawler. In addition, it was one of the few (if not the only) game to successfully transfer a 2d fighting system into true 3d space.[blockquote]
That game doesn't get enough props - probably because it was on a system that never truly caught fire. I played through the whole thing 3 times because killing vampires was just a blast, and the way fights played out really reminded one of the TV show (as long as one avoided "button mashing").
Oh yeah, and holy water-filled super-soaker FTW.:)
Agreed. I would think that an IP based on a single person in each generation would make for a lousy MMO. Everything in the Buffyverse is about exceptions to rules, and that's believable when you follow a few characters around. But when you get into an MMO environment, the exception quickly becomes the rule as everyone takes the "chosen one" class or the "vampire with a soul" class.
To be fair, BTVS ended with the creation of thousands of mini Slayers. And, as a bonus, it would finally give dudes a good excuse to play a hot chick in an MMO.
Yes, the hard drive is required to play Xbox games. This, of course, is because Xbox games were often designed to use the hard drive for caching. Some games wouldn't even allow the use of memory cards to save games (Knights of the Old Republic, for example, saved a snapshot of memory instead of designing a proper save structure).
Fair enough, and that probably goes for a lot of post-release content. Still, the games are playable without the hard drive, requiring only a place to save one's game(s). It's worth noting, too, that many of the Xbox Live games are also compatible with memory cards and don't require the hard drive.
When the 360 first came out with its two versions, I was like many who considered the non-HD version to be "lame." Since then, considering the price reduction and the improvement of the package (wireless controller instead of wired, and memory card included), and considering the hard drive doesn't impart a significant gaming speed increase (unless one installs to hard drive; is that feature out yet?), I've come to the conclusion that the 360 Arcade version can make good economic sense to someone who wants to play the "big" games on a budget. Heck, even going to high definition with the Arcade version through purchase of component or HDMI cables leaves the 360 Arcade cheaper than the Wii.
I get that/. is home to those who might be considered (or even consider themselves) "hardcore," but I'm still perplexed by the characterization of the Xbox 360 Arcade as "stripped down." That version includes everything needed to start playing 360 games including a memory card (256MB), and they've even been packing in a wireless controller; the original no-hard-drive unit had no memory card and a wired controller. And this price cut isn't insignificant - the drop from $280 to $200 is 28.6%, which is huge and makes the 360 - even if one goes out and buys new video cables for high-definition - cheaper than the Wii. So, Microsoft is including more stuff than they used to and charging significantly less money. That seems more like "a good deal" than "stripped down."
Disclaimer: I love the Wii, respect the value of the PS3 for those who want Blu-ray and sold my 360 last year.:)
To answer your first question, I found a refurbished 20GB hard drive on Gamestop.com for $60. To answer your second question, no, GTA4 does not require a hard drive (the box says it requires 1 MB of space to save). AFAIK, the only boxed 360 game that requires a hard drive is Final Fantasy XI.
Package deals are stinko, especially if you're willing to bend/break copyright to get your TV via Bit Torrent. What's most annoying to me about the cable package deals is that the stuff is already right there. Apart from the fees they pay the content providers per subscriber, there's no excuse for their gouging. Their "phone" service is even more annoying since a microphone and speaker are all you need for Internet telephony, yet they want to charge $30/month for it on top of the broadband. When you opt for phone service on top of DSL at least you get the benefit of having an available phone when the power and/or Internet are down...
Keep watching the DSL situation. When I moved into my current place, I found out that Qwest was rolling out much higher speeds. I picked up a 12-Mbps (10-Mbps actual) connection for the same price as cable service. I wish the upload speed was higher, but my downloads are moving faster than they were with cable at my last place.
Fuhgeddaboutit. Trying to figure out Alan Moore's legal relationship to his creations requires a lot of nerd knowledge that none of us should have.
What really amuses me is that had DC gone ahead and let Alan use the Charlton characters (The Question, Blue Beetle, etc.; as was originally intended), there wouldn't have been any question at all of him ever owning Watchmen, any more than there'd be a question of him owning Superman or Batman if he wrote a story about them.
Me: "Got some spicy ribs?"
BBQ worker: "Yep."
Me: "Have some of those ready when I get there."
BBQ worker: "Okay. Want some potato salad, too?"
Me: "Hell, yes!"
BBQ worker: "See you in a few."
Me:
Here's the deal with Alan Moore's rights to Watchmen: Until Watchmen is allowed to go out of print (for 5 years, IIRC), DC owns the property and Alan Moore doesn't. At the time he entered into his agreement with DC, Moore didn't imagine that DC would keep the product(s) in print indefinitely (cue "Sucker!"). So, the short answer is that Moore didn't sell any movie rights because he's never had them to sell.
I'm just shocked that this restaurant doesn't take orders over the phone at all! I've never encountered a restaurant that would take to-go orders via the web and not via voice. Has dialing a phone number and talking to a human being become that taxing?
I actually continued to think about your post as I was reading on, and decided that this was probably the direction you were going with your thoughts. Well said.:)
While one can HOPE that the game revives the Wing Commander genre, I think too many space sim developers focus too much on realism and/or pretty graphics to truly understand why the simplistic Wing Commander engine was so popular.
I hate to tell you, but the "simplistic" Wing Commander engine drove people to increase their memory and upgrade to 386 from 286, and it was all about the pretty-pretty. Later installments continued to up the ante with their live-action video cutscenes (starring real actors - Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, to name three who aren't Ginger Lynn Allen) and higher resolution graphics.
Take a look at Freelancer if you'd like to see where Chris Roberts probably would have gone graphically with the Wing Commander series if he hadn't left it behind. Heck, you can even see increased "realism" in Wing Commander IV where the graphics took a pretty big jump past those of III.
The truth is that the Wing Commander games were about graphics and a simple (perhaps simplistic) storyline from start to finish. Even Privateer 1 and 2, despite being spinoffs of the main series, had graphics that, at the time, were about as good as space games got.
Apparently, Will Wright and company weren't at all satisfied with the idea of people creating monstrous amounts of after-market content for their Sims games. Not only have they whet the appetites of all the people who enjoy the Creture Creator for the retail game, but they also get to sell Spore right out of the gate as having "millions of creatures available online." The only expense involved was building the software for creature creation, and they would have done that anyway. Brilliant!
Was Maxis really forced to concentrate their efforts or was it just that there was a glut of Sim[x] games on the market? I recall that for a while there I could barely keep up with the Sim series, and really didn't care if I did because one game (well, two: SimEarth and SimLife I quite enjoyed) could keep me occupied for months. Also, prior to being bought by EA, Maxis was releasing 2 versions of every game (DOS and Windows) which must have complicated, and further spread thin, their development resources. I remember being daunted by the large number of Sim boxes on the Software, Etc. wall when I'd go for my weekly browse and biweekly buy. The Sims and SimCity are probably much better today than they would have been if EA/Maxis was still pumping out a bunch of SimFranchises.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't screwing one's sources against the journalistic ethic?
Try the veal!
Is this one of those "if a tree falls in the forest would it make a sound" questions?
Don't forget also that Microsoft doesn't say "get out of here" to developers who want to sell scifi first-person shooters, nor does Nintendo ban developers from making 3D platformers or go-kart racing games. Any developer who wants to make a game for the Xbox 360, Wii or PS3 is encouraged to do so, even if a game might compete with, or demolish the sales of, one of their in-house games (there are, of course, some content restrictions relating to sexual content and such, but they're not intended to stifle competition).
PS- I should note that I'm 36 years old and I owned the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 in their heydays and, obviously, at ages where I was most impressionable. One would think that if anyone was going to be stupidly nostalgic, it would be me. :)
And those are just a couple of consoles. How about Civilization, Doom, The Sims, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Grand Theft Auto III, Baldur's Gate, Diablo (1 and 2), Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandago, Tie Fighter...oops, went to 12.
Anyone who claims that game design somehow peaked in the 1980s is locked in a nostalgic haze.
Talk about a glass-half-empty attitude. Would you have preferred that the Creature Creator allowed itself to be installed, give you the illusion that you've got the horsepower to handle the real game and cause you to buy it, only to find out that the game is unplayable on your machine?
I hate to be the one to break it you, but one of the required costs of playing most new games is keeping your hardware relatively current. 5-year-old video cards aren't typically going to cut it, any more than will 5-year-old CPUs. These companies are in the business of selling games that look good and play well on current hardware and, hopefully, future hardware. To accommodate all the older machines currently in use would require extraordinary time and money, and probably wouldn't help the bottom line.
For the record, I don't have a PC that can run Spore and may not for quite a while.
[blockquote]The original Buffy game on the Xbox stayed very true to the show, and was a great 3D brawler. In addition, it was one of the few (if not the only) game to successfully transfer a 2d fighting system into true 3d space.[blockquote]
:)
That game doesn't get enough props - probably because it was on a system that never truly caught fire. I played through the whole thing 3 times because killing vampires was just a blast, and the way fights played out really reminded one of the TV show (as long as one avoided "button mashing").
Oh yeah, and holy water-filled super-soaker FTW.
Hey, I'm with you, but some find that excuse less "good" and more "creepy."
To be fair, BTVS ended with the creation of thousands of mini Slayers. And, as a bonus, it would finally give dudes a good excuse to play a hot chick in an MMO.
Yes, the hard drive is required to play Xbox games. This, of course, is because Xbox games were often designed to use the hard drive for caching. Some games wouldn't even allow the use of memory cards to save games (Knights of the Old Republic, for example, saved a snapshot of memory instead of designing a proper save structure).
Fair enough, and that probably goes for a lot of post-release content. Still, the games are playable without the hard drive, requiring only a place to save one's game(s). It's worth noting, too, that many of the Xbox Live games are also compatible with memory cards and don't require the hard drive.
When the 360 first came out with its two versions, I was like many who considered the non-HD version to be "lame." Since then, considering the price reduction and the improvement of the package (wireless controller instead of wired, and memory card included), and considering the hard drive doesn't impart a significant gaming speed increase (unless one installs to hard drive; is that feature out yet?), I've come to the conclusion that the 360 Arcade version can make good economic sense to someone who wants to play the "big" games on a budget. Heck, even going to high definition with the Arcade version through purchase of component or HDMI cables leaves the 360 Arcade cheaper than the Wii.
I get that /. is home to those who might be considered (or even consider themselves) "hardcore," but I'm still perplexed by the characterization of the Xbox 360 Arcade as "stripped down." That version includes everything needed to start playing 360 games including a memory card (256MB), and they've even been packing in a wireless controller; the original no-hard-drive unit had no memory card and a wired controller. And this price cut isn't insignificant - the drop from $280 to $200 is 28.6%, which is huge and makes the 360 - even if one goes out and buys new video cables for high-definition - cheaper than the Wii. So, Microsoft is including more stuff than they used to and charging significantly less money. That seems more like "a good deal" than "stripped down."
:)
Disclaimer: I love the Wii, respect the value of the PS3 for those who want Blu-ray and sold my 360 last year.
To answer your first question, I found a refurbished 20GB hard drive on Gamestop.com for $60. To answer your second question, no, GTA4 does not require a hard drive (the box says it requires 1 MB of space to save). AFAIK, the only boxed 360 game that requires a hard drive is Final Fantasy XI.
Package deals are stinko, especially if you're willing to bend/break copyright to get your TV via Bit Torrent. What's most annoying to me about the cable package deals is that the stuff is already right there. Apart from the fees they pay the content providers per subscriber, there's no excuse for their gouging. Their "phone" service is even more annoying since a microphone and speaker are all you need for Internet telephony, yet they want to charge $30/month for it on top of the broadband. When you opt for phone service on top of DSL at least you get the benefit of having an available phone when the power and/or Internet are down...
Keep watching the DSL situation. When I moved into my current place, I found out that Qwest was rolling out much higher speeds. I picked up a 12-Mbps (10-Mbps actual) connection for the same price as cable service. I wish the upload speed was higher, but my downloads are moving faster than they were with cable at my last place.
Fuhgeddaboutit. Trying to figure out Alan Moore's legal relationship to his creations requires a lot of nerd knowledge that none of us should have.
What really amuses me is that had DC gone ahead and let Alan use the Charlton characters (The Question, Blue Beetle, etc.; as was originally intended), there wouldn't have been any question at all of him ever owning Watchmen, any more than there'd be a question of him owning Superman or Batman if he wrote a story about them.
Me: "Got some spicy ribs?" BBQ worker: "Yep." Me: "Have some of those ready when I get there." BBQ worker: "Okay. Want some potato salad, too?" Me: "Hell, yes!" BBQ worker: "See you in a few." Me:
They might if it opens a release date for Fox.
For what? "X-Files 3: We Just Won't Take The Hint?"
"Have fun storming the castle!"
Here's the deal with Alan Moore's rights to Watchmen: Until Watchmen is allowed to go out of print (for 5 years, IIRC), DC owns the property and Alan Moore doesn't. At the time he entered into his agreement with DC, Moore didn't imagine that DC would keep the product(s) in print indefinitely (cue "Sucker!"). So, the short answer is that Moore didn't sell any movie rights because he's never had them to sell.
I'm just shocked that this restaurant doesn't take orders over the phone at all! I've never encountered a restaurant that would take to-go orders via the web and not via voice. Has dialing a phone number and talking to a human being become that taxing?
I actually continued to think about your post as I was reading on, and decided that this was probably the direction you were going with your thoughts. Well said. :)
While one can HOPE that the game revives the Wing Commander genre, I think too many space sim developers focus too much on realism and/or pretty graphics to truly understand why the simplistic Wing Commander engine was so popular.
I hate to tell you, but the "simplistic" Wing Commander engine drove people to increase their memory and upgrade to 386 from 286, and it was all about the pretty-pretty. Later installments continued to up the ante with their live-action video cutscenes (starring real actors - Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, to name three who aren't Ginger Lynn Allen) and higher resolution graphics.
Take a look at Freelancer if you'd like to see where Chris Roberts probably would have gone graphically with the Wing Commander series if he hadn't left it behind. Heck, you can even see increased "realism" in Wing Commander IV where the graphics took a pretty big jump past those of III.
The truth is that the Wing Commander games were about graphics and a simple (perhaps simplistic) storyline from start to finish. Even Privateer 1 and 2, despite being spinoffs of the main series, had graphics that, at the time, were about as good as space games got.
Apparently, Will Wright and company weren't at all satisfied with the idea of people creating monstrous amounts of after-market content for their Sims games. Not only have they whet the appetites of all the people who enjoy the Creture Creator for the retail game, but they also get to sell Spore right out of the gate as having "millions of creatures available online." The only expense involved was building the software for creature creation, and they would have done that anyway. Brilliant!
Was Maxis really forced to concentrate their efforts or was it just that there was a glut of Sim[x] games on the market? I recall that for a while there I could barely keep up with the Sim series, and really didn't care if I did because one game (well, two: SimEarth and SimLife I quite enjoyed) could keep me occupied for months. Also, prior to being bought by EA, Maxis was releasing 2 versions of every game (DOS and Windows) which must have complicated, and further spread thin, their development resources. I remember being daunted by the large number of Sim boxes on the Software, Etc. wall when I'd go for my weekly browse and biweekly buy. The Sims and SimCity are probably much better today than they would have been if EA/Maxis was still pumping out a bunch of SimFranchises.