This is exactly what I'm talking about. Battlezone, the re-release by Activision, is a game my dad and I have many great memories and one of the first real multiplayer games we played online. I loved it, I liked Battlezone II also, but it wasn't as great as the original.
I have always liked Activision as a game company since Battlezone. I enjoy playing their games quite a lot and I have the distinct feeling that Blizzard will remain the same as always (one of, if not the best pc game house) and this stands to help further Activision and develop them as a higher quality company.
I'm very excited about this and think we will only see the PC industry be enhanced by such a merger. With Blizzards track record of releasing quality games when they feel they are ready, this model could easily translate to Activision and enhance their final products. I feel there maybe a trend of quality in the future of PC Gaming. When people look at Blizz, their profit margin on games, and the fact they rarely release them in time for the particular holiday season that corporate companies would force the game out... I think companies will realize, especially in the PC market, we want finished products, not products ready to be delivered under the Christmas Tree or released at the appropriate timing with the fiscal quarter or year, etc.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. I was instructed by management and actively participating in this many times per day. We were instructed to use confusion tactics and even click through options on the touchpad and also we were instructed to act as if something messed up and they needed to slide their credit card twice. Once was for the MSN activation, a few minutes later, oops looks like it didn't work, you need to slide your CC again to finish up this payment.
Why did they do this? First it was one of the major things tracked by the company on a PC sold vs MSN accounts setup. The company earned 25 dollars on the bottom line for every sign up and this of course was pure profit. If a store was not at least at a 50% attachment, with goals of 75-90%, our supervisors would be fired, and management could even be replaced. We had to get the sign ups per corporate, however, we were supposed to get the 75% goal the legit way. I'm sorry, but exactly how is that possible? Our strategy did not come from store managers, but was actually district wide, and believe to be regional and company wide. How were stores hitting 90-95% attachment ratios? The only people who couldn't be tricked were those not paying with a credit card, so you couldn't get 100%.
Oh and MS was COMPLETELY against this behavior and caught on to it. What they began doing is offering full refunds to customers who had never actually logged in and used the surface. They also modified the Terms with Best Buy and we would no longer earn our cut if the customers never signed up. Our solution? Simple, a single terminal window with a manual connection, and at the end of the night spending approximately 20 minutes to log on every single MSN activation that had been done that day.
Best Buy can burn in hell. I cannot believe I let my ethics be compromised by this sorry piece of crap company, but I needed my paycheck and I was a Yes Man. If you weren't a Yes Man at Best Buy, you were a Fired Man. To many, that's a pretty scary thing when you are self supporting yourself through college. It's easy to have Ethics when Mommy and Daddy will pay for your school, pay your bills, and take care of you. Not everybody is so lucky and not everybody wants to quit their job and look for another. Most saw it as an ends to a means and we would only have to do it for a couple of years until we could get real jobs.
whoa buddy you scare me... So consoles are harder for multiplayer and require more strategy...
I think I completely missed the bus on that one because console multiplayer is a good 5-7 years behind PC multiplayer and the complexities of the games offered in PC multiplayer offerings is many times great (due to such constrained processing capabilities on the consoles).
And please don't forget! PC's were the original controller market with the massive amount of offerings, with probably 20 times the offerings currently found available for the consoles today. However, this market has dried up for 2 reasons: First, mainly because the mouse keyboard is vastly superior as we generally need more than 6-10 buttons and you can see how clunky the controllers got with multiple shift buttons, etc. and secondly because the PC market has shrunk mainly due to the high cost of owning a game worthy rig.
Well I guess that's my point. I can't believe in any shape or form that a console game can be 'harder' or more 'strategic' that even the baseline PC multiplayer offerings and that doesn't include the lines of PC games that are all about complexity.
LMFAO you think the U.S. market is the largest in ANY FORM of video gaming? Damn you are out-date bro. Why do you think the new versions of consoles are being deputed in Europe and Asia first? WoW! Why do you think major game releases are doing a Worldwide release now? Because the European and Asian markets are larger now! they have much great penetration by the consoles and highspeed internet.
I guess we are the largest market if you are comparing North America, South America, Antartica, Australia, and Africa =)
no he wasn't lying, he beat it and then came over to another friends house were we played the co-op campaign until about 7am.
He didn't spoil the ending for us, but there is no way he lied to us, haha. Maybe he is just a good gamer? I know he helped us quite a bit doing the co-op campaign.
A friend of mine purchased it at midnight, went home, and beat it at 4:30am, lol.
So obviously this is a really content heavy single player game when it clocks in at 4-5 hours.
And if Halo multiplayer is the best that the 360 has to offer and folks need to take off work because it's so awesome... don't give em a good PC and a few multiplayer games... they will go on vacation permanently! I'm sorry, but Halo has never been the shining example of multiplayer anything. The hype is completely manufactured and only centered in the U.S. where gamers are easily impressioned by a cup with a Halo logo on it, haha. This game has to be bad ass, they got a lunch box for it!
Re:like comparing Halo 3 to Pokemon
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: 1
I'm surprised they even found an asian player in Asia who owned an xbox, lol. Are you sure those aren't Asian American's? They have been pretty dumbed the fook down since they were born in the US.
Re:like comparing Halo 3 to Pokemon
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: 1
lol wow a foolish slashdot reader, hard to come by, haha, maybe you should do some reading first before you comment. Research has shown that M games target the 10-14 year old audience because they 'think it's cool' and that is why there is so much flak on gaming in general right now. I don't remember the statistic off hand, but I think an M rated game out sells a teen rated game by about 10 to 1??? So go back to playing your kiddy games, I'll stick to real games like World in Conflict, Bioshock, and the likes.
Re:like comparing Halo 3 to Pokemon
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: -1, Troll
besides, serious games (read Asian game market) could give a fook about Halo. I mean real gamers are so beyond this shit it's not funny.
like comparing Halo 3 to Pokemon
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: -1, Troll
I mean come on, Halo 3's target audience is 8-14 year olds. That's the audience that is so manipulated by the cool Halo cup! w00t!
Give me a break. It's like reading a store about how awesome the new Pokemon DS game is...
But you have one major failure in your logic. WoW isn't stealing MMO players away from other competitive MMOs. It is creating new MMO players from those who used to refuse to pay a monthly fee for a video game they could never own, or never had a desire to try out an MMO as they were content with playing diablo, counterstrike, etc.
Well I think the RPG elements I was refering more to were the fact that you earn points to unlock units, and you have the choice on missions that are more for your type of challenge, etc. RPG that I was trying to infer was the more open the game is sounding. I agree with you on those WC3 and SC missions, like escorts and such. I like the idea of having a little more control of my destiny.
I love how this is sounding, so kinda RTS with a little RPG added. Sounds like a winner to me! this definitely just caused my pre-hype SC2 meter jump up a couple more notches.
Exactly, these researchers can be so fooled, haha. They see people buying more laptops and are like OMG! People only want laptops now, and fail to realize most people are not replacing their desktop every year, so their next PC purchase will probably be a laptop.
And the next question is how the hell do you track custom built PCs? I realize that you could track such a thing, but the problem is they most likely are tracking retail and manufactured PC/notebook channels... And while yes, people are buying more laptops now, how do they account for the so many of us who refused to get pre-packaged machines from compaq and gateway, haha. I could build my own laptop, but I'd prefer to just buy it. But no way in hell am I buying a pre-built desktop.
Their data is inherently flawed for the real world. But it's great for the manufacturer and retail world of pre-built PCs. Who wants that crap?
I prefer to be called a PC Enthusiast, not a die-hard desktop user. Besides, this is moot, because the PC enthusiast is what drives the mobile and PC innovation. You don't get a Pentium M, without a Pentium, you won't get a Mobile Core 2 Duo Extreme processor without a Core 2 Duo cpu.
This is like saying handheld gaming devices like the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, or MS Zune maybe? haha, will trivialize a Wii, PS3, or Xbox360.
Believe me, desktop users will also have the best hardware =) We don't have to be die-hard, we just have to be willing to accept nothing less than the best!
I just wanted to say I goofed on the HD numbers. I originally looked into the Series 3 Tivo HD when it was released as I own 2 normal tivo's currently. I thought it had a 300GB hard drive and it was roughly a 10:1 ratio on space. I now see that it's a 250GB hard drive and the new version will have a 90GB hard drive. My point is still very true and even more so with this knowledge. If 250GB = 30 hours, then 160GB = 17 hours, 1TB = 120 Hours.
What makes this so great and a hacker's dream is because the features it loses that cannot be purchased were worthless. The main reason for the Tivo HD is strictly to be able to record at that quality level. A normal tivo cannot do that.
So what you lose here that cannot be replaced is THX-certification which doesn't mean anything because who has a THX professionally installed, setup, and configured home sound system? The OLED display is no big loss.
The losses that people would miss are the glow in the dark remote (which can be replaced for 50 dollars) and ESPECIALLY the additionally recording space. The 600 dollar Series 3 has a 300GB hard drive and can record about 30 hours of HD content at that quality setting. This will have a 210 GB hard drive which can record about 20-21 hours of HD content.
It should be noted that a typical normal tivo right now comes with about 80 hours worth of programming space, so the 30 and 21 hours of HD quality recording really is a setback, but fortunately you can record programs at lower quality on the HD Tivo's.
However, what makes this is the hackers dream, is for roughly 700 dollars (only 100 dollars more than the top 30 hour tivo HD), you could purchase the remote and replace the 210GB drive with Hitachi's new 1TB drive and turn it into a 100 hour Tivo HD... which is truly awesome! And within a year we will probably see 1.5TB-2TB drives that could be put into this for even more recording volume.
As most competent players have always felt, the TOS found in most all video games is unenforceable. How long until the first banned account decides to sue the video game companies for taking 'their' items and characters away.
I'm very excited for this as it's one step closer to making gold selling legally acceptable.
Yea the world is so fooked up, having a life means you have to do something outside which is not allowed to involve electronics. I say move to Africa bitches.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Battlezone, the re-release by Activision, is a game my dad and I have many great memories and one of the first real multiplayer games we played online. I loved it, I liked Battlezone II also, but it wasn't as great as the original.
I have always liked Activision as a game company since Battlezone. I enjoy playing their games quite a lot and I have the distinct feeling that Blizzard will remain the same as always (one of, if not the best pc game house) and this stands to help further Activision and develop them as a higher quality company.
I'm very excited about this and think we will only see the PC industry be enhanced by such a merger. With Blizzards track record of releasing quality games when they feel they are ready, this model could easily translate to Activision and enhance their final products. I feel there maybe a trend of quality in the future of PC Gaming. When people look at Blizz, their profit margin on games, and the fact they rarely release them in time for the particular holiday season that corporate companies would force the game out... I think companies will realize, especially in the PC market, we want finished products, not products ready to be delivered under the Christmas Tree or released at the appropriate timing with the fiscal quarter or year, etc.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. I was instructed by management and actively participating in this many times per day. We were instructed to use confusion tactics and even click through options on the touchpad and also we were instructed to act as if something messed up and they needed to slide their credit card twice. Once was for the MSN activation, a few minutes later, oops looks like it didn't work, you need to slide your CC again to finish up this payment.
Why did they do this? First it was one of the major things tracked by the company on a PC sold vs MSN accounts setup. The company earned 25 dollars on the bottom line for every sign up and this of course was pure profit. If a store was not at least at a 50% attachment, with goals of 75-90%, our supervisors would be fired, and management could even be replaced. We had to get the sign ups per corporate, however, we were supposed to get the 75% goal the legit way. I'm sorry, but exactly how is that possible? Our strategy did not come from store managers, but was actually district wide, and believe to be regional and company wide. How were stores hitting 90-95% attachment ratios? The only people who couldn't be tricked were those not paying with a credit card, so you couldn't get 100%.
Oh and MS was COMPLETELY against this behavior and caught on to it. What they began doing is offering full refunds to customers who had never actually logged in and used the surface. They also modified the Terms with Best Buy and we would no longer earn our cut if the customers never signed up. Our solution? Simple, a single terminal window with a manual connection, and at the end of the night spending approximately 20 minutes to log on every single MSN activation that had been done that day.
Best Buy can burn in hell. I cannot believe I let my ethics be compromised by this sorry piece of crap company, but I needed my paycheck and I was a Yes Man. If you weren't a Yes Man at Best Buy, you were a Fired Man. To many, that's a pretty scary thing when you are self supporting yourself through college. It's easy to have Ethics when Mommy and Daddy will pay for your school, pay your bills, and take care of you. Not everybody is so lucky and not everybody wants to quit their job and look for another. Most saw it as an ends to a means and we would only have to do it for a couple of years until we could get real jobs.
whoa buddy you scare me... So consoles are harder for multiplayer and require more strategy...
I think I completely missed the bus on that one because console multiplayer is a good 5-7 years behind PC multiplayer and the complexities of the games offered in PC multiplayer offerings is many times great (due to such constrained processing capabilities on the consoles).
And please don't forget! PC's were the original controller market with the massive amount of offerings, with probably 20 times the offerings currently found available for the consoles today. However, this market has dried up for 2 reasons: First, mainly because the mouse keyboard is vastly superior as we generally need more than 6-10 buttons and you can see how clunky the controllers got with multiple shift buttons, etc. and secondly because the PC market has shrunk mainly due to the high cost of owning a game worthy rig.
Well I guess that's my point. I can't believe in any shape or form that a console game can be 'harder' or more 'strategic' that even the baseline PC multiplayer offerings and that doesn't include the lines of PC games that are all about complexity.
This has nothing to do with Sony, but if you ask me Warhawk's multiplayer is far more advanced than xbox live and their playermatching so uh yea.
LMFAO you think the U.S. market is the largest in ANY FORM of video gaming? Damn you are out-date bro. Why do you think the new versions of consoles are being deputed in Europe and Asia first? WoW! Why do you think major game releases are doing a Worldwide release now? Because the European and Asian markets are larger now! they have much great penetration by the consoles and highspeed internet.
I guess we are the largest market if you are comparing North America, South America, Antartica, Australia, and Africa =)
no he wasn't lying, he beat it and then came over to another friends house were we played the co-op campaign until about 7am.
He didn't spoil the ending for us, but there is no way he lied to us, haha. Maybe he is just a good gamer? I know he helped us quite a bit doing the co-op campaign.
A friend of mine purchased it at midnight, went home, and beat it at 4:30am, lol.
So obviously this is a really content heavy single player game when it clocks in at 4-5 hours.
And if Halo multiplayer is the best that the 360 has to offer and folks need to take off work because it's so awesome... don't give em a good PC and a few multiplayer games... they will go on vacation permanently! I'm sorry, but Halo has never been the shining example of multiplayer anything. The hype is completely manufactured and only centered in the U.S. where gamers are easily impressioned by a cup with a Halo logo on it, haha. This game has to be bad ass, they got a lunch box for it!
I'm surprised they even found an asian player in Asia who owned an xbox, lol. Are you sure those aren't Asian American's? They have been pretty dumbed the fook down since they were born in the US.
lol wow a foolish slashdot reader, hard to come by, haha, maybe you should do some reading first before you comment. Research has shown that M games target the 10-14 year old audience because they 'think it's cool' and that is why there is so much flak on gaming in general right now. I don't remember the statistic off hand, but I think an M rated game out sells a teen rated game by about 10 to 1??? So go back to playing your kiddy games, I'll stick to real games like World in Conflict, Bioshock, and the likes.
besides, serious games (read Asian game market) could give a fook about Halo. I mean real gamers are so beyond this shit it's not funny.
I mean come on, Halo 3's target audience is 8-14 year olds. That's the audience that is so manipulated by the cool Halo cup! w00t!
Give me a break. It's like reading a store about how awesome the new Pokemon DS game is...
But you have one major failure in your logic. WoW isn't stealing MMO players away from other competitive MMOs. It is creating new MMO players from those who used to refuse to pay a monthly fee for a video game they could never own, or never had a desire to try out an MMO as they were content with playing diablo, counterstrike, etc.
lol somebody played to many RTS's...
the point of a carrier group is to get close to the enemy's homeland and exact major devastation.
Well I think the RPG elements I was refering more to were the fact that you earn points to unlock units, and you have the choice on missions that are more for your type of challenge, etc. RPG that I was trying to infer was the more open the game is sounding. I agree with you on those WC3 and SC missions, like escorts and such. I like the idea of having a little more control of my destiny.
I love how this is sounding, so kinda RTS with a little RPG added. Sounds like a winner to me! this definitely just caused my pre-hype SC2 meter jump up a couple more notches.
This is pretty cool, if you get past the fact that you are going to play a game... to play another game.
It's kind of sad state of SOE. They have such a small base that they probably couldn't get anybody to produce a physical card set for them.
Instead they just try to detract from the actual game to keep people playing instead of trying out the massive breadth of MMOs available to them.
this isn't some case AMD dreamed up to test their 3-way Crossfire in it... it's a case used quite regular on the air cooling overclock scene.
Exactly, these researchers can be so fooled, haha. They see people buying more laptops and are like OMG! People only want laptops now, and fail to realize most people are not replacing their desktop every year, so their next PC purchase will probably be a laptop.
And the next question is how the hell do you track custom built PCs? I realize that you could track such a thing, but the problem is they most likely are tracking retail and manufactured PC/notebook channels... And while yes, people are buying more laptops now, how do they account for the so many of us who refused to get pre-packaged machines from compaq and gateway, haha. I could build my own laptop, but I'd prefer to just buy it. But no way in hell am I buying a pre-built desktop.
Their data is inherently flawed for the real world. But it's great for the manufacturer and retail world of pre-built PCs. Who wants that crap?
I prefer to be called a PC Enthusiast, not a die-hard desktop user. Besides, this is moot, because the PC enthusiast is what drives the mobile and PC innovation. You don't get a Pentium M, without a Pentium, you won't get a Mobile Core 2 Duo Extreme processor without a Core 2 Duo cpu.
This is like saying handheld gaming devices like the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, or MS Zune maybe? haha, will trivialize a Wii, PS3, or Xbox360.
Believe me, desktop users will also have the best hardware =) We don't have to be die-hard, we just have to be willing to accept nothing less than the best!
I just wanted to say I goofed on the HD numbers. I originally looked into the Series 3 Tivo HD when it was released as I own 2 normal tivo's currently. I thought it had a 300GB hard drive and it was roughly a 10:1 ratio on space. I now see that it's a 250GB hard drive and the new version will have a 90GB hard drive. My point is still very true and even more so with this knowledge. If 250GB = 30 hours, then 160GB = 17 hours, 1TB = 120 Hours.
What makes this so great and a hacker's dream is because the features it loses that cannot be purchased were worthless. The main reason for the Tivo HD is strictly to be able to record at that quality level. A normal tivo cannot do that.
So what you lose here that cannot be replaced is THX-certification which doesn't mean anything because who has a THX professionally installed, setup, and configured home sound system? The OLED display is no big loss.
The losses that people would miss are the glow in the dark remote (which can be replaced for 50 dollars) and ESPECIALLY the additionally recording space. The 600 dollar Series 3 has a 300GB hard drive and can record about 30 hours of HD content at that quality setting. This will have a 210 GB hard drive which can record about 20-21 hours of HD content.
It should be noted that a typical normal tivo right now comes with about 80 hours worth of programming space, so the 30 and 21 hours of HD quality recording really is a setback, but fortunately you can record programs at lower quality on the HD Tivo's.
However, what makes this is the hackers dream, is for roughly 700 dollars (only 100 dollars more than the top 30 hour tivo HD), you could purchase the remote and replace the 210GB drive with Hitachi's new 1TB drive and turn it into a 100 hour Tivo HD... which is truly awesome! And within a year we will probably see 1.5TB-2TB drives that could be put into this for even more recording volume.
As Cereal Killer would say, 'Hack the Planet'.
As most competent players have always felt, the TOS found in most all video games is unenforceable. How long until the first banned account decides to sue the video game companies for taking 'their' items and characters away. I'm very excited for this as it's one step closer to making gold selling legally acceptable.
Yea the world is so fooked up, having a life means you have to do something outside which is not allowed to involve electronics. I say move to Africa bitches.