The question is the degree of the abstraction. For example, using a mouse to move a picture around a computer screen is an abstraction, but it's a fairly natural one - move hand to right, arrow moves to right. If I try the same thing using a directional pad then I am going to have to compensate for the length of time a button is pressed and perhaps how hard it's pressed (assuming an analog button). These factors increase the amount of work I need to do in order to move the arrow on the screen to a precise location. Depending on how well the Revolution's "wand" ends up working, it should allow a more "direct," intuitive interface with what is happening on screen than would a joystick or D-pad.
"I'd think if they were going to ship a product that was horribly flawed they would notice it before they spent millions of dollars to bring it to market."
The Power Glove and other non-standard controllers were not designed to be the primary controllers for their respective consoles. In other words, you weren't going to buy an NES with just a Power Glove inside, nor just a light gun, nor just a DDR pad, and on and on. One can reasonably assume that the new controller will work just fine out of the box because doing otherwise would just plain kill the console.
As for Takahashi's whine, he seems to be talking out of the proverbial hindquarters. Of course controllers have "that much influence on games," just like my keyboard and mouse have huge influence when I work with a PC. Of course, I can see this kind of griping being commonplace as people have to get used to something new after being weaned for so long on more traditional stick/pad controllers. Change scares people...
"Very few games can currently take any significant advantage of multicore. Nearly all through 2005 do most of their cpu intensive work in a single thread. That by implication leaves the other core free to do something else."
This is why all the snappy dual-core multitasking with games is probably a temporary situation. How long is it going to be before game developers are designing their games to take advantage of the multiple cores that are taking over the market? Many of them are already working on their multithreading chops so that their X360 and PS3 games "rock," and I'm sure they'll be able to bring that experience to the PC table as well. Add in the regular applications moving in the same direction (as some already have - video encoders in particular) and we'll be back to applications and games being sworn enemies again in no time.
Here's the thing: My point is that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the DS such that the redesign is a huge priority. The reason people didn't "just say no" as I suggested is that the DS is a great machine with some great games. That the DS Lite is a big slap to folks who bought the original design is the suggestion I was refuting.
Now, if I saw someone making a similar suggestion regarding the move from GBA to GBA SP, I'd say they had something. The GBA screen was so awful that thousands of people bought the materials to hack in a front-light solution - I bought two Afterburner kits myself so that both my mom and I could have a decent GBA experience.
The GBA needed a case-cracking overhaul, whereas the DS needs just minor tweaks.
"...a discount for those who purchased the original would result in amazing PR, especially since the people who would take advantage of it are their most valuable customers (buying early and often)."
Sure it would be "amazing PR." It would also incur an "amazing loss of profit for no good reason."
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the original DS design. It may be a tad larger than one would hope and the stylus is a bit too small, but the system is very playable and enjoyable. Further, if those things were showstoppers it would have been really easy for folks to "just say no" and wait for the inevitable redesign.
The folks who would buy new DS systems "early and often" are exactly the people who would have known - from the first day of the system's release - that Nintendo would eventually release a nicer version of the console. I mean, really, last year saw the release of no less than two new versions of the GBA (Micro and updated SP with brighter screen)! Who here really thought, prior to the announcement of DS Lite, that Nintendo was not going to update the DS?
"Hosed" is exactly the right word! The "old" DS design completely sucks - so badly in fact that you can't even really play games on it. Is it even compatible with the newer DS games coming out? And getting it as a gift in December really blows. That might be worst of all since everyone knows that the best part of gaming is waiting six months or more for new hardware!
What you're asking is exactly what the linked article does...it puts a wide variety of CPUs through their paces with particular attention to the Core Duo. Just read the article and then check out Newegg and you should have a good concept of price v. performance.
Is it really more fun when it takes 30 sword slashes to cut down an opponent in an RPG? Is it more fun when you hack a guy 15 times in the face with a dagger, then stab him and the knee and he dies? Is it fun when you block a swinging mace with your wooden bow and you don't even get knocked backward?
I've heard people propose these kinds of changes to videogames before, and I just don't that, in general, they would work. The first, and biggest, problem as I see it is that if you tried to model accurate behaviors of bodies when being struck by melee weapons, you would make combat boring. If I get one proper slashing hit on an enemy with, say, a great axe, they (assuming human proportions) are going to the ground. It really doesn't matter where they're hit, unless they're completely inhuman - either something vital is hit, they're going into shock, or they're just responding naturally to a hard, painful blow.
Then, there's the issue of fairness in RPGs. Most RPGs over the years use the same basic system to determine NPC and PC attributes. There may be differences in weaponry and special skills, but things usually come down to attack versus defense and damage versus life (hit points). Going the route of realism would mean that if an NPC takes one of the PC's legs out, that's the ballgame. At least in the "melee world," if you can't stand you can't fight. Even adding in armor that can be damaged doesn't help since it would mean armor being ineffective after a fight or two, requiring constant trips to a blacksmith.
I guess I just don't think that most games would benefit from adding a lot of "realism" to fighting because real fighting sucks.:)
It seems like both Dish and DirecTV would have to work closely with TiVo in terms of licensing in order to retain functionality - assuming, of course, that this isn't already happening at DirecTV. But it doesn't necessarily have to just be the satellite companies. Most (all?) of the major cable companies have PVRs available, and if their boxes infringe on TiVo's patents they'd better be getting ready to either downgrade their systems or belly up to TiVo's bar and ordering up some licensing...
My favorite part: "I am speaking as a career software developer and lifelong Apple devotee. But i'm not touching boot camp again while in Beta and will still be wary beyond that."
Hi, career software developer! Nice job screwing up something that most non-software developers seem to have had no trouble with! And the fact that you knew it was in beta and are still whining like a little bitch? Priceless!
Seriously, though, I have to say that I think Apple did exactly the right thing in releasing this software, even if it is imperfect. There were too many people determined to dual-boot Windows, and who were willing to do so in "hack" fashion, for Apple to ignore and leave out in the cold. While I'm sure they're still having to deal with support calls on this, I think it would have been much worse had they waited six months while user after user used completely unsupported third-party solutions to get the job done. And, if folks are wary of Boot Camp still being beta, they benefit from the early release as well, in the sense that they now know that Apple is working on a solution that will be available in the next big OSX release. Considering Apple usually keeps their info top secret until actual release, that seems uncharacteristically open of them.
"You've lost the plot I think trying to make analogies. If you buy business class tickets, don't complain when someone gets upgraded to first class for free and you don't."
You're absolutely right. I [almost] completely missed that point. I would still question it a bit in the sense that if I buy a DIMM that overclocks by 10% and someone else buys the same product for the same price and it overclocks by 20%, it would be like one person in business class being served filet mignon while the person sitting next to them gets a baloney sandwich. After reading the exhaustive description of chip manufacturing above, though, I think it just comes down to knowing what you're buying, and from whom. If you buy the cheapest memory possible you're probably - hopefully? - not going to get the same consistent quality as if you lay out the cash for the "Super Deluxe Platinum Edition OC Special" RAM.:)
Thanks a lot for the interesting response. I obviously knew that variables were inevitable in the production of chips such as these (as they are in the production of anything), but your discussion of the way chip manufacturers build extra headroom into their products to increase their reliability is very enlightening. At the very least, it reminds me that there is truth in the old saw, "You get what you pay for."
I guess the difference I see is that business class is available for purchase at a higher price if I want it, and it is (depending on the airline/airplane, of course) a well-defined difference.
I see your point about supply/demand and, again, I personally have no problem as long as the memory works as advertised. That said, if I do pay for an upgrade to, say, the higher grades of Corsair/Crucial/etc. memory I would think there would be little variability amongst those "top-quality" products. If there is a big quality/overclock difference between two sticks of that RAM, then for what am I paying?
Of course, as usual for Slashdot, this conversation is pretty much mental masturbation since this particular article doesn't provide us with enough information to make any conclusions.:)
You or I may have nothing to complain about (I'm not the type who would do the overclocking thing). But if someone buys, say, four 1GB sticks of RAM from the same company, bearing the same model numbers, they should expect there to be very little difference between the four sticks in terms of their quality, from their longevity to, yes, their overclocking potential.
I don't know if I care for the methodology here (the sample size seems too small to draw good conclusions), but it certainly could prove to be valuable information for people trying to build their kick-ass PC.
You'd have a better point if the suspicion was simply that a company takes the product out of its packaging and makes sure that it works. For example, if I'm a company sending a video card to a known reviewer I might put it in a PC and make sure a game or two could run. I don't see anything too bad about that, assuming the company has confidence that the end-user failure rate will be miniscule. That would actually skew the results closer to average since the average purchaser would get a working product.
But, in this case, they're trying to test the idea that a manufacturer would take a bunch of product, benchmark the samples, then send out the one that performs best. In that situation, the manufacturer is deliberately making the review experience better than that which would be enjoyed by the average customer.
A friend and I were talking about this very issue recently. While I tend to agree that PC games should be entirely flexible in terms of resolution (since there are far too many display options and aspect ratios available), I realized that there was one factor which could be important to a game developer: Preserving the cinematic intent of the game. For example, if a game is supposed to surprise you by attacking from behind, it can't really have a third-person viewpoint available. The same could be true in a 4:3 versus 16:9/16:10 situation in that the level/game designer might want to constrain the viewpoint to 4:3 in order to cause a sense of claustrophobia while enemies are off to the sides just out of vision.
In a similar vein, I could see where some people operating with their 17" 4:3 screen in a multiplayer "twitch" environment could be upset that their opponent is getting a much wider view on their 23" 16:10 screen. Then again, that kind of issue has been in play for a while now with the potentially large disparity between video cards/monitors and their available resolutions (i.e., someone at 1600x1200 on a 21" screen is going to be able to see better than someone at 800x600 on a 15" screen.).
Of course, if the only reason a developer puts limitations on resolution is because of bad programming, then that's no kind of excuse.:)
The problem is that when developers make console games their goal is to optimize so that they're using every nook and cranny of the system. Microsoft, therefore, can't let their Live service take any resources if a game is running, or else risk performance problems (up to and including crash mode) in the game. The only way they could have avoided that is to create a separate subsystem (including CPU and memory) through which things like background downloading could be processed. This would have increased the cost of the system and it's already an expensive device.
The same thing, of course, happens on the PC all the time but PC gamers either a) overdo their systems specs so that there's headroom available for background activities (i.e., people with multiple CPUs/CPU cores using one for their game while the other is busy with something else), b) put up with slowdowns in game performance while background activities are running or c) turn off everything they possibly can in the OS to squeeze out a little extra performance in their game.
I fear for people getting used to their dual-core systems being able to easily handle gaming plus extra tasks because game developers are going to want to leverage the available power, once again leaving little power for multitasking...
I thought of that myself. Then I realized that it would be simpler - if one is going to get an external drive - to dedicate 40-60 GB to the Windows partition and just use the external drive for OSX storage. After all, at least on the iMac I'll be buying later this month that would still leave 100+ GB for OSX on the main drive with plenty of space for whatever Windows gaming I want to do.
I was so close to buying a cheap Windows box (my old main PC has died and it just doesn't feel worth fixing considering how crappy it is for gaming), but now that Apple's going out of their way to help me dual-boot I'll happily spend the extra money to get the Mac I've wanted - but previously couldn't really afford - since about 1988.:)
There are great Star Wars games, good Marvel Comics games, good LOTR games, the classic TMNT game, etc.
There are many licensed games that are genuinely good. The idea that licensed games are all bad comes from the fact that they (even the bad) tend to get heavy marketing support and when they flop everyone knows, and many have played. Usually, when a non-licensed game is bad fewer people play it and it never gets enough mindshare to be memorable...there are exceptions, of course, but the memorable non-licensed flops are usually pre-release over-hype situations (hi, Daikatana!) in an established series and/or from an established developer.
Just to nitpick a bit...26 episodes of a half-hour TV show originally aired on commercial TV does not equal 13 hours. There are 20-22 minutes of show per episode with comes out to 8-9 hours of actual programming. So, four movies (assuming 90 minutes each - they'll probably try to get them around 85-95 minutes) comes out to about 17-18 episodes worth of material. Depending on the timing - faster is best assuming the quality is there, of course - that's not too bad at all.
Wow, you and others are really bitter about this for some reason.
I don't think the point is that playing for 12 hours is an achievement of note. I think the interest comes from the fact that a game reviewer is playing a game and, essentially, demoing it for folks for 12 hours live on the Internet. I can see where people might find that interesting, especially if they're one of the people - the many people if online talk means anything - who are considering buying an Xbox 360 or new PC components specifically for this game. For those people, the cost of a month's subscription to the site in order to watch the proceedings (perhaps not all 12 hours) might be well worth the money. It could also provide some insight into the thinking of a professional game reviewer while he's actually playing a game.
Again, playing for 12 hours is no achievement at all. Like many, I've done 24+ hours stopping only to let caffeinated liquid out of my body. But that doesn't mean that this event isn't worthwhile or interesting.
Pedantic? Yes, thank you. Actually, the Star Wars franchise is owned by George Lucas and Lucasfilm, Ltd. 20th Century Fox has the distribution rights.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The question is the degree of the abstraction. For example, using a mouse to move a picture around a computer screen is an abstraction, but it's a fairly natural one - move hand to right, arrow moves to right. If I try the same thing using a directional pad then I am going to have to compensate for the length of time a button is pressed and perhaps how hard it's pressed (assuming an analog button). These factors increase the amount of work I need to do in order to move the arrow on the screen to a precise location. Depending on how well the Revolution's "wand" ends up working, it should allow a more "direct," intuitive interface with what is happening on screen than would a joystick or D-pad.
"I'd think if they were going to ship a product that was horribly flawed they would notice it before they spent millions of dollars to bring it to market."
Hello, Virtual Boy! How have you been?
The Power Glove and other non-standard controllers were not designed to be the primary controllers for their respective consoles. In other words, you weren't going to buy an NES with just a Power Glove inside, nor just a light gun, nor just a DDR pad, and on and on. One can reasonably assume that the new controller will work just fine out of the box because doing otherwise would just plain kill the console.
As for Takahashi's whine, he seems to be talking out of the proverbial hindquarters. Of course controllers have "that much influence on games," just like my keyboard and mouse have huge influence when I work with a PC. Of course, I can see this kind of griping being commonplace as people have to get used to something new after being weaned for so long on more traditional stick/pad controllers. Change scares people...
"Very few games can currently take any significant advantage of multicore. Nearly all through 2005 do most of their cpu intensive work in a single thread. That by implication leaves the other core free to do something else."
This is why all the snappy dual-core multitasking with games is probably a temporary situation. How long is it going to be before game developers are designing their games to take advantage of the multiple cores that are taking over the market? Many of them are already working on their multithreading chops so that their X360 and PS3 games "rock," and I'm sure they'll be able to bring that experience to the PC table as well. Add in the regular applications moving in the same direction (as some already have - video encoders in particular) and we'll be back to applications and games being sworn enemies again in no time.
Here's the thing: My point is that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the DS such that the redesign is a huge priority. The reason people didn't "just say no" as I suggested is that the DS is a great machine with some great games. That the DS Lite is a big slap to folks who bought the original design is the suggestion I was refuting.
Now, if I saw someone making a similar suggestion regarding the move from GBA to GBA SP, I'd say they had something. The GBA screen was so awful that thousands of people bought the materials to hack in a front-light solution - I bought two Afterburner kits myself so that both my mom and I could have a decent GBA experience.
The GBA needed a case-cracking overhaul, whereas the DS needs just minor tweaks.
"...a discount for those who purchased the original would result in amazing PR, especially since the people who would take advantage of it are their most valuable customers (buying early and often)."
Sure it would be "amazing PR." It would also incur an "amazing loss of profit for no good reason."
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the original DS design. It may be a tad larger than one would hope and the stylus is a bit too small, but the system is very playable and enjoyable. Further, if those things were showstoppers it would have been really easy for folks to "just say no" and wait for the inevitable redesign.
The folks who would buy new DS systems "early and often" are exactly the people who would have known - from the first day of the system's release - that Nintendo would eventually release a nicer version of the console. I mean, really, last year saw the release of no less than two new versions of the GBA (Micro and updated SP with brighter screen)! Who here really thought, prior to the announcement of DS Lite, that Nintendo was not going to update the DS?
"Hosed" is exactly the right word! The "old" DS design completely sucks - so badly in fact that you can't even really play games on it. Is it even compatible with the newer DS games coming out? And getting it as a gift in December really blows. That might be worst of all since everyone knows that the best part of gaming is waiting six months or more for new hardware!
I'm pretty sure the above is sarcasm...
What you're asking is exactly what the linked article does...it puts a wide variety of CPUs through their paces with particular attention to the Core Duo. Just read the article and then check out Newegg and you should have a good concept of price v. performance.
Is it really more fun when it takes 30 sword slashes to cut down an opponent in an RPG? Is it more fun when you hack a guy 15 times in the face with a dagger, then stab him and the knee and he dies? Is it fun when you block a swinging mace with your wooden bow and you don't even get knocked backward?
:)
I've heard people propose these kinds of changes to videogames before, and I just don't that, in general, they would work. The first, and biggest, problem as I see it is that if you tried to model accurate behaviors of bodies when being struck by melee weapons, you would make combat boring. If I get one proper slashing hit on an enemy with, say, a great axe, they (assuming human proportions) are going to the ground. It really doesn't matter where they're hit, unless they're completely inhuman - either something vital is hit, they're going into shock, or they're just responding naturally to a hard, painful blow.
Then, there's the issue of fairness in RPGs. Most RPGs over the years use the same basic system to determine NPC and PC attributes. There may be differences in weaponry and special skills, but things usually come down to attack versus defense and damage versus life (hit points). Going the route of realism would mean that if an NPC takes one of the PC's legs out, that's the ballgame. At least in the "melee world," if you can't stand you can't fight. Even adding in armor that can be damaged doesn't help since it would mean armor being ineffective after a fight or two, requiring constant trips to a blacksmith.
I guess I just don't think that most games would benefit from adding a lot of "realism" to fighting because real fighting sucks.
It seems like both Dish and DirecTV would have to work closely with TiVo in terms of licensing in order to retain functionality - assuming, of course, that this isn't already happening at DirecTV. But it doesn't necessarily have to just be the satellite companies. Most (all?) of the major cable companies have PVRs available, and if their boxes infringe on TiVo's patents they'd better be getting ready to either downgrade their systems or belly up to TiVo's bar and ordering up some licensing...
My favorite part: "I am speaking as a career software developer and lifelong Apple devotee. But i'm not touching boot camp again while in Beta and will still be wary beyond that."
Hi, career software developer! Nice job screwing up something that most non-software developers seem to have had no trouble with! And the fact that you knew it was in beta and are still whining like a little bitch? Priceless!
Seriously, though, I have to say that I think Apple did exactly the right thing in releasing this software, even if it is imperfect. There were too many people determined to dual-boot Windows, and who were willing to do so in "hack" fashion, for Apple to ignore and leave out in the cold. While I'm sure they're still having to deal with support calls on this, I think it would have been much worse had they waited six months while user after user used completely unsupported third-party solutions to get the job done. And, if folks are wary of Boot Camp still being beta, they benefit from the early release as well, in the sense that they now know that Apple is working on a solution that will be available in the next big OSX release. Considering Apple usually keeps their info top secret until actual release, that seems uncharacteristically open of them.
"You've lost the plot I think trying to make analogies. If you buy business class tickets, don't complain when someone gets upgraded to first class for free and you don't."
:)
You're absolutely right. I [almost] completely missed that point. I would still question it a bit in the sense that if I buy a DIMM that overclocks by 10% and someone else buys the same product for the same price and it overclocks by 20%, it would be like one person in business class being served filet mignon while the person sitting next to them gets a baloney sandwich. After reading the exhaustive description of chip manufacturing above, though, I think it just comes down to knowing what you're buying, and from whom. If you buy the cheapest memory possible you're probably - hopefully? - not going to get the same consistent quality as if you lay out the cash for the "Super Deluxe Platinum Edition OC Special" RAM.
Thanks a lot for the interesting response. I obviously knew that variables were inevitable in the production of chips such as these (as they are in the production of anything), but your discussion of the way chip manufacturers build extra headroom into their products to increase their reliability is very enlightening. At the very least, it reminds me that there is truth in the old saw, "You get what you pay for."
I guess the difference I see is that business class is available for purchase at a higher price if I want it, and it is (depending on the airline/airplane, of course) a well-defined difference.
:)
I see your point about supply/demand and, again, I personally have no problem as long as the memory works as advertised. That said, if I do pay for an upgrade to, say, the higher grades of Corsair/Crucial/etc. memory I would think there would be little variability amongst those "top-quality" products. If there is a big quality/overclock difference between two sticks of that RAM, then for what am I paying?
Of course, as usual for Slashdot, this conversation is pretty much mental masturbation since this particular article doesn't provide us with enough information to make any conclusions.
You or I may have nothing to complain about (I'm not the type who would do the overclocking thing). But if someone buys, say, four 1GB sticks of RAM from the same company, bearing the same model numbers, they should expect there to be very little difference between the four sticks in terms of their quality, from their longevity to, yes, their overclocking potential.
I don't know if I care for the methodology here (the sample size seems too small to draw good conclusions), but it certainly could prove to be valuable information for people trying to build their kick-ass PC.
You'd have a better point if the suspicion was simply that a company takes the product out of its packaging and makes sure that it works. For example, if I'm a company sending a video card to a known reviewer I might put it in a PC and make sure a game or two could run. I don't see anything too bad about that, assuming the company has confidence that the end-user failure rate will be miniscule. That would actually skew the results closer to average since the average purchaser would get a working product.
But, in this case, they're trying to test the idea that a manufacturer would take a bunch of product, benchmark the samples, then send out the one that performs best. In that situation, the manufacturer is deliberately making the review experience better than that which would be enjoyed by the average customer.
A friend and I were talking about this very issue recently. While I tend to agree that PC games should be entirely flexible in terms of resolution (since there are far too many display options and aspect ratios available), I realized that there was one factor which could be important to a game developer: Preserving the cinematic intent of the game. For example, if a game is supposed to surprise you by attacking from behind, it can't really have a third-person viewpoint available. The same could be true in a 4:3 versus 16:9/16:10 situation in that the level/game designer might want to constrain the viewpoint to 4:3 in order to cause a sense of claustrophobia while enemies are off to the sides just out of vision.
:)
In a similar vein, I could see where some people operating with their 17" 4:3 screen in a multiplayer "twitch" environment could be upset that their opponent is getting a much wider view on their 23" 16:10 screen. Then again, that kind of issue has been in play for a while now with the potentially large disparity between video cards/monitors and their available resolutions (i.e., someone at 1600x1200 on a 21" screen is going to be able to see better than someone at 800x600 on a 15" screen.).
Of course, if the only reason a developer puts limitations on resolution is because of bad programming, then that's no kind of excuse.
The problem is that when developers make console games their goal is to optimize so that they're using every nook and cranny of the system. Microsoft, therefore, can't let their Live service take any resources if a game is running, or else risk performance problems (up to and including crash mode) in the game. The only way they could have avoided that is to create a separate subsystem (including CPU and memory) through which things like background downloading could be processed. This would have increased the cost of the system and it's already an expensive device.
The same thing, of course, happens on the PC all the time but PC gamers either a) overdo their systems specs so that there's headroom available for background activities (i.e., people with multiple CPUs/CPU cores using one for their game while the other is busy with something else), b) put up with slowdowns in game performance while background activities are running or c) turn off everything they possibly can in the OS to squeeze out a little extra performance in their game.
I fear for people getting used to their dual-core systems being able to easily handle gaming plus extra tasks because game developers are going to want to leverage the available power, once again leaving little power for multitasking...
I thought of that myself. Then I realized that it would be simpler - if one is going to get an external drive - to dedicate 40-60 GB to the Windows partition and just use the external drive for OSX storage. After all, at least on the iMac I'll be buying later this month that would still leave 100+ GB for OSX on the main drive with plenty of space for whatever Windows gaming I want to do.
:)
I was so close to buying a cheap Windows box (my old main PC has died and it just doesn't feel worth fixing considering how crappy it is for gaming), but now that Apple's going out of their way to help me dual-boot I'll happily spend the extra money to get the Mac I've wanted - but previously couldn't really afford - since about 1988.
So, are you disagreeing with me by asserting that all licensed games are bad? They're not.
Maybe you're disagreeing and asserting that all non-licensed games are good? That's not true, either.
I don't think you understand what the words "I have to disagree" mean...
There are great Star Wars games, good Marvel Comics games, good LOTR games, the classic TMNT game, etc.
There are many licensed games that are genuinely good. The idea that licensed games are all bad comes from the fact that they (even the bad) tend to get heavy marketing support and when they flop everyone knows, and many have played. Usually, when a non-licensed game is bad fewer people play it and it never gets enough mindshare to be memorable...there are exceptions, of course, but the memorable non-licensed flops are usually pre-release over-hype situations (hi, Daikatana!) in an established series and/or from an established developer.
Just to nitpick a bit...26 episodes of a half-hour TV show originally aired on commercial TV does not equal 13 hours. There are 20-22 minutes of show per episode with comes out to 8-9 hours of actual programming. So, four movies (assuming 90 minutes each - they'll probably try to get them around 85-95 minutes) comes out to about 17-18 episodes worth of material. Depending on the timing - faster is best assuming the quality is there, of course - that's not too bad at all.
Wow, you and others are really bitter about this for some reason.
I don't think the point is that playing for 12 hours is an achievement of note. I think the interest comes from the fact that a game reviewer is playing a game and, essentially, demoing it for folks for 12 hours live on the Internet. I can see where people might find that interesting, especially if they're one of the people - the many people if online talk means anything - who are considering buying an Xbox 360 or new PC components specifically for this game. For those people, the cost of a month's subscription to the site in order to watch the proceedings (perhaps not all 12 hours) might be well worth the money. It could also provide some insight into the thinking of a professional game reviewer while he's actually playing a game.
Again, playing for 12 hours is no achievement at all. Like many, I've done 24+ hours stopping only to let caffeinated liquid out of my body. But that doesn't mean that this event isn't worthwhile or interesting.
Pedantic? Yes, thank you. Actually, the Star Wars franchise is owned by George Lucas and Lucasfilm, Ltd. 20th Century Fox has the distribution rights. :)
Sorry. I haven't been paying attention for the last couple weeks due to my PC being fried. :)