The 360 controller has come to be my favorite (though i have yet to touch the ps3 one), though I would prefer that they flatten the tops of the buttons a bit so they don't hurt my fingers during long play sessions where you might be aggressively pressing them. The dpad gets the job done too, though I do like the playstation style d pad a lot.
The 360 controller's dpad is awful - probably the worst I've ever used. Any 2D game (fighters especially) aren't playable with the default controller due to the dpad. I tried playing Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix with the controller, and I just couldn't do it.
I was really happy when I saw that there will be a box with all of the Fallout 3 content in it later this year. I've been meaning to pick up Fallout 3 for a while not, but just haven't gotten around to it. While I'll have to wait a bit longer, given that I'm essentially getting all of the DLC for free, that's a deal that I can't pass up.
The game's been out for about a month; online multiplayer is a complicated bit of code that has to have been in development for almost the entire length of the project.
Except the game shipped with online multiplayer - you can play through the game co-op with a partner, either locally or online. Surely that code could be reused for this mode - sure, you need to support 4 players instead of 2, but I can't see that being harder than writing the multiplayer code in the first place.
That said, even ignoring the fact of how this was announced, I still don't see the point. Playing deathmatch where you can't shoot and move at the same time sounds like a really, really bad idea.
Except this isn't the resurrection of Sierra. Sierra was part of Vivendi, which is now part of Activision/Blizzard (since Vivendi previously owned Blizzard). As part of the merger, Activision/Blizzard didn't pick up the Ghostbusters game. It's Atari who know owns the rights to publish Ghostbusters.
I'm afraid that the Sierra brand is likely gone for good now - I doubt Activsion/Blizzard has any reason to bring it back at this point.
While I read that too, I went ahead and set up a free account to see what the game was like. I was never asked for my credit card number - I assumed that they changed the sign up policy since they wrote that page on their support site.
They did, but only barely. I recall hearing that shortly before they acquired NEXT that the chief executives were shopping the company around, hoping to get bought out. However no one even wanted to buy them.
Apple of 1985 is very different from the Apple of 2008, however. I would say that Apple is much, much more popular now than it was then. While the Mac probably hasn't gained much marketshare since then, the popularity of the iPod and iPhone have given Apple a pretty solid foundation right now. In the short term, I don't see Apple having any problems, but the real question is if Apple's new leadership would be able to keep this track record going.
* As an outside chance (probably more likely for 2010), one of the major online-distribution retailers will try to impose a console-style mandatory feature set for games sold over the service, standardising control systems and adding features such as achivements.
Steam is actually close to doing this already. If you ignore the games that are repackaged for Steam (games like Bioshock, Fallout 3) but focus only on the made-for-Steam games, they all have achievements (well, those released after Achievements were added to steam around the release of The Orange Box), and you can press Shift+Tab to bring up the Community UI (Friends list, your profile, etc.). At least I've come to expect these features on a Steam game, and miss them when they aren't there.
Have you checked back to see if your extensions/scripts have been updated to work with FF3? I could see that being the case right around when it was released, but hopefully they should be updated by now (assuming that they are still actively developed).
There are a variety of themes that you can use to make FF less ugly - I don't like the default theme myself on Windows (the default Mac one is fine; I'm not sure about the default Linux theme). Personally, I like Qute when running on Windows (it was the default theme during the pre-1.0 days, if you were using FF back then). I'm sure there are other themes that make FF less ugly, as well.
Personally, on OS X at least, I've found FF3 to be much, much better than FF2. It's very stable, and uses a lot less memory. I only have about 5 extensions installed, but I haven't had any problems with it at all since its release (aside from some extension oddness, but that is hardly Mozilla's fault).
That's what I'm leaning towards doing, actually. My current PC is ~4.5 years old, and can play some games, but most have minimum requirements that are well above it.
The only downside to the PC approach (aside from waiting for some releases, as you said), is that you need to be very careful regarding DRM.:(
I'd agree with you, except for one small problem: DRM. Many PC games that are ports of console titles are so filled with limiting DRM that you can't install them without messing up your computer. Take Mirror's Edge (currently available for the 360 and PS3) - while I haven't heard an official announcement yet, I would be very surprised if it didn't include SecureROM since EA is publishing it. Even if they are "generous" and allow 5 installs (like with Red Alert 3) instead of 3 (like with Spore), you still can't uninstall SecureROM without reinstalling your operating system. That is not something that I want to support with my money.
I realize that developers and publishers need to do something to protect their games on the PC, but that's just going too far. While there is some DRM built into console titles, it is no where near as bad as with PC games.
That's very true. If that's the direction that Nintendo wants to go, more power to them. I just don't think that I'm their target market anymore, sadly.
You said what I meant to say - the Wii just can't handle what the others can. I'm no Nintendo fanboy, but I've always enjoyed their games. If they can't keep up with the others come the next generation of consoles, I doubt that I'll buy the Nintendo console next time around.
But graphics do matter, to some extent. How many games have been developed for the Xbox 360 and/or PS3, but not for the Wii (or maybe a PS2/watered down port was released on the Wii instead)? I only have a Wii (have thought about getting a 360 or PS3, but nothing more as of yet), and there have been quite a few games that I would like to play, but can't, since they haven't been ported to the Wii.
Don't get me wrong - Nintendo makes some great games given the capabilities of the Wii. They're just tying third party developers' hands in the process.
If Nintendo's next console doesn't have the same amount of horsepower as its competitors, then it's going to start losing the hardcore audience (more than they already are, at any rate). Maybe they only want to cater to casual gamers and make tons of money that way - that is their choice, after all. But they shouldn't expect the hardcore gamers to be excited about their hardware if they don't keep up with the times.
It was only in the last week or so that Atari announced that they would be publishing it. I'm glad they did, though - from the sounds of it the game is nearly complete (including all of the voice acting). Would be a shame if it never got released, since it sounds like it will actually be good.
Originally, Ghostbusters was to be published by Vivendi/Sierra. However, when Vivendi merged with Activision to form Activision/Blizzard, they decided that they didn't want to publish this game (since they couldn't "monetize" this game every year...yay greed). Atari eventually came along and scooped up the rights to publish it.
I think originally it was supposed to be released around this time of year, however it was delayed for some reason (supposedly due to the merger, but that seems kind of odd to me).
Plus, I believe that this mod was originally called "Black Mesa Source" (hence the website URL), but Valve requested the name change so that it wouldn't be confused with an official project. If they didn't approve of the project at all, they would have just shut them down then instead of only requesting a name change.
Ghostbusters was originally to be published by Vivendi. Vivendi was swallowed up by the Activision/Blizzard merger, and they decided to pass on the game (apparently because it couldn't be re-released every year).
It's definitely great news that a publisher finally picked this game up. From what I've read, it sounds like it will actually be pretty good.
For better or for worse, it looks like Bioware is making this game instead of a KOTOR sequel. Their reasoning seems to be that they have a ton of story ideas, and they can get them into games easier in an MMO than in multiple sequels.
The one difference is that the base package doesn't contain a campaign for each race - you need to buy that separately. I don't know about anyone else, but I was assuming that Starcraft 2 would follow the Starcraft 1 model of having a campaign for each race.
Of course, the downside to that is that you can kind of tell the outcome of the story by the order of the campaigns (i.e. you knew the Protoss "won" in the original, since their campaign was last...or at least that's what I assumed when I was playing through it back in the day).
While I'm not pleased by this turn of events, I'm going to hold off judging it until we get more info. If all three are the cost of a full game, that would be bad. If you can buy one of the three, and get the other two for the price of an expansion each, that wouldn't be so bad. In any event, having longer campaigns is a nice improvement.
You can back up most save games to an SD card, however there are some games you can't - SSBB and Mario Kart, and probably others too. I have no idea why these saves are "special", but they are. Maybe something to do with unlocking new content or something?
I don't keep up on wireless security too much, but I thought that WPA2 was, as of now at least, unbreakable? Or at least nowhere close to as bad as WEP.
I've actually thought about doing this, but doesn't having any WEP access point up and running compromise the security of your network? While an attacker could only attack the WEP AP (easily), once they do it seems like they would still have complete access.
It's possible that I'm missing something, and hopefully I am, since it would be nice to use my DS online without downgrading to WEP.
I'm happy to help anyone, newbie or not, but I can do all of the above on public forums and Usenet newsgroups (for the record, I lurk at comp.lang.c++.moderated and microsoft.public.dotnet.*). The advantage of the latter is that I only read (and reply) to questions that I know are within my areas of competence.
Couldn't you do that on Stack Overflow as well, if you wanted to? I'm not saying that one is necessarily better than the other, but on Stack Overflow you could just read the questions with a specific tag, and all of the other stuff that you aren't interested in is filtered out.
Granted, this assumes that the poster tags their questions correctly, anyone can tag any post once they reach a certain reputation level.
Lots of companies drop out features before it's released fora variety of reasons or leave it as experimental (just look at ZFS in Leopard and its Read Only capability).
While I agree with your other points, in this case I don't think Apple has ever announced that ZFS would be in OS X - it was all rumors and hearsay, IIRC.
Slashdot Mirror
The 360 controller's dpad is awful - probably the worst I've ever used. Any 2D game (fighters especially) aren't playable with the default controller due to the dpad. I tried playing Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix with the controller, and I just couldn't do it.
The name is still around, but it's definitely not the same company. See Wikipedia for the full history.
I was really happy when I saw that there will be a box with all of the Fallout 3 content in it later this year. I've been meaning to pick up Fallout 3 for a while not, but just haven't gotten around to it. While I'll have to wait a bit longer, given that I'm essentially getting all of the DLC for free, that's a deal that I can't pass up.
Except the game shipped with online multiplayer - you can play through the game co-op with a partner, either locally or online. Surely that code could be reused for this mode - sure, you need to support 4 players instead of 2, but I can't see that being harder than writing the multiplayer code in the first place.
That said, even ignoring the fact of how this was announced, I still don't see the point. Playing deathmatch where you can't shoot and move at the same time sounds like a really, really bad idea.
Except this isn't the resurrection of Sierra. Sierra was part of Vivendi, which is now part of Activision/Blizzard (since Vivendi previously owned Blizzard). As part of the merger, Activision/Blizzard didn't pick up the Ghostbusters game. It's Atari who know owns the rights to publish Ghostbusters.
I'm afraid that the Sierra brand is likely gone for good now - I doubt Activsion/Blizzard has any reason to bring it back at this point.
While I read that too, I went ahead and set up a free account to see what the game was like. I was never asked for my credit card number - I assumed that they changed the sign up policy since they wrote that page on their support site.
They did, but only barely. I recall hearing that shortly before they acquired NEXT that the chief executives were shopping the company around, hoping to get bought out. However no one even wanted to buy them.
Apple of 1985 is very different from the Apple of 2008, however. I would say that Apple is much, much more popular now than it was then. While the Mac probably hasn't gained much marketshare since then, the popularity of the iPod and iPhone have given Apple a pretty solid foundation right now. In the short term, I don't see Apple having any problems, but the real question is if Apple's new leadership would be able to keep this track record going.
Steam is actually close to doing this already. If you ignore the games that are repackaged for Steam (games like Bioshock, Fallout 3) but focus only on the made-for-Steam games, they all have achievements (well, those released after Achievements were added to steam around the release of The Orange Box), and you can press Shift+Tab to bring up the Community UI (Friends list, your profile, etc.). At least I've come to expect these features on a Steam game, and miss them when they aren't there.
Have you checked back to see if your extensions/scripts have been updated to work with FF3? I could see that being the case right around when it was released, but hopefully they should be updated by now (assuming that they are still actively developed).
There are a variety of themes that you can use to make FF less ugly - I don't like the default theme myself on Windows (the default Mac one is fine; I'm not sure about the default Linux theme). Personally, I like Qute when running on Windows (it was the default theme during the pre-1.0 days, if you were using FF back then). I'm sure there are other themes that make FF less ugly, as well.
Personally, on OS X at least, I've found FF3 to be much, much better than FF2. It's very stable, and uses a lot less memory. I only have about 5 extensions installed, but I haven't had any problems with it at all since its release (aside from some extension oddness, but that is hardly Mozilla's fault).
That's what I'm leaning towards doing, actually. My current PC is ~4.5 years old, and can play some games, but most have minimum requirements that are well above it.
The only downside to the PC approach (aside from waiting for some releases, as you said), is that you need to be very careful regarding DRM. :(
I'd agree with you, except for one small problem: DRM. Many PC games that are ports of console titles are so filled with limiting DRM that you can't install them without messing up your computer. Take Mirror's Edge (currently available for the 360 and PS3) - while I haven't heard an official announcement yet, I would be very surprised if it didn't include SecureROM since EA is publishing it. Even if they are "generous" and allow 5 installs (like with Red Alert 3) instead of 3 (like with Spore), you still can't uninstall SecureROM without reinstalling your operating system. That is not something that I want to support with my money.
I realize that developers and publishers need to do something to protect their games on the PC, but that's just going too far. While there is some DRM built into console titles, it is no where near as bad as with PC games.
That's very true. If that's the direction that Nintendo wants to go, more power to them. I just don't think that I'm their target market anymore, sadly.
You said what I meant to say - the Wii just can't handle what the others can. I'm no Nintendo fanboy, but I've always enjoyed their games. If they can't keep up with the others come the next generation of consoles, I doubt that I'll buy the Nintendo console next time around.
But graphics do matter, to some extent. How many games have been developed for the Xbox 360 and/or PS3, but not for the Wii (or maybe a PS2/watered down port was released on the Wii instead)? I only have a Wii (have thought about getting a 360 or PS3, but nothing more as of yet), and there have been quite a few games that I would like to play, but can't, since they haven't been ported to the Wii.
Don't get me wrong - Nintendo makes some great games given the capabilities of the Wii. They're just tying third party developers' hands in the process.
If Nintendo's next console doesn't have the same amount of horsepower as its competitors, then it's going to start losing the hardcore audience (more than they already are, at any rate). Maybe they only want to cater to casual gamers and make tons of money that way - that is their choice, after all. But they shouldn't expect the hardcore gamers to be excited about their hardware if they don't keep up with the times.
It was only in the last week or so that Atari announced that they would be publishing it. I'm glad they did, though - from the sounds of it the game is nearly complete (including all of the voice acting). Would be a shame if it never got released, since it sounds like it will actually be good.
Originally, Ghostbusters was to be published by Vivendi/Sierra. However, when Vivendi merged with Activision to form Activision/Blizzard, they decided that they didn't want to publish this game (since they couldn't "monetize" this game every year...yay greed). Atari eventually came along and scooped up the rights to publish it.
I think originally it was supposed to be released around this time of year, however it was delayed for some reason (supposedly due to the merger, but that seems kind of odd to me).
Plus, I believe that this mod was originally called "Black Mesa Source" (hence the website URL), but Valve requested the name change so that it wouldn't be confused with an official project. If they didn't approve of the project at all, they would have just shut them down then instead of only requesting a name change.
Ghostbusters was originally to be published by Vivendi. Vivendi was swallowed up by the Activision/Blizzard merger, and they decided to pass on the game (apparently because it couldn't be re-released every year).
It's definitely great news that a publisher finally picked this game up. From what I've read, it sounds like it will actually be pretty good.
For better or for worse, it looks like Bioware is making this game instead of a KOTOR sequel. Their reasoning seems to be that they have a ton of story ideas, and they can get them into games easier in an MMO than in multiple sequels.
The one difference is that the base package doesn't contain a campaign for each race - you need to buy that separately. I don't know about anyone else, but I was assuming that Starcraft 2 would follow the Starcraft 1 model of having a campaign for each race.
Of course, the downside to that is that you can kind of tell the outcome of the story by the order of the campaigns (i.e. you knew the Protoss "won" in the original, since their campaign was last...or at least that's what I assumed when I was playing through it back in the day).
While I'm not pleased by this turn of events, I'm going to hold off judging it until we get more info. If all three are the cost of a full game, that would be bad. If you can buy one of the three, and get the other two for the price of an expansion each, that wouldn't be so bad. In any event, having longer campaigns is a nice improvement.
You can back up most save games to an SD card, however there are some games you can't - SSBB and Mario Kart, and probably others too. I have no idea why these saves are "special", but they are. Maybe something to do with unlocking new content or something?
That works fine, except for the fact that MAC addresses can be easily spoofed.
I don't keep up on wireless security too much, but I thought that WPA2 was, as of now at least, unbreakable? Or at least nowhere close to as bad as WEP.
I've actually thought about doing this, but doesn't having any WEP access point up and running compromise the security of your network? While an attacker could only attack the WEP AP (easily), once they do it seems like they would still have complete access.
It's possible that I'm missing something, and hopefully I am, since it would be nice to use my DS online without downgrading to WEP.
Couldn't you do that on Stack Overflow as well, if you wanted to? I'm not saying that one is necessarily better than the other, but on Stack Overflow you could just read the questions with a specific tag, and all of the other stuff that you aren't interested in is filtered out.
Granted, this assumes that the poster tags their questions correctly, anyone can tag any post once they reach a certain reputation level.
While I agree with your other points, in this case I don't think Apple has ever announced that ZFS would be in OS X - it was all rumors and hearsay, IIRC.