Password Safe is indeed a tremendous tool. Not so much for the logon password (which I would need to have remembered before being able to launch Password Safe anyway) as for the obscure passwords that expire every 90 days and get used once or twice in that time. Where I work we have all sorts of passwords, way too many to remember without writing them down. Password Safe effectively lets me just remember one.
I think I speak for the majority of people I know when I say: neither.
Exactly. In this article they're talking specifically about PCs. Why would you want a Blu-Ray or HD DVD drive in your PC? I got a DVD drive with my computer over three years ago. Number of games I've bought since then that came on a DVD: zero. There have been a few that had DVD versions, mostly special editions, but they're hard to find. No game that I'm aware of has required a DVD drive to play.
For backup, who actually needs 40GB of storage? Is everyone supposed to be making HD home movies in the next five years? If you do need 40GB of backup storage, buy a harddrive. I just can't see a lot of demand for either of these formats any time soon. The market is moving toward network storage and content-on-demand, not another type of physical media.
Sure there have been treasure hunts before, but now it's all one big advertisement! The point of the game isn't to find the treasure, it's to get media coverage like this! Revolutionary!
Nintendo has not announced a price. Whatever source you're citing is no more reputable than the rest of the gaming media speculating on the price of the Wii. Merrill Lynch is predicting $200.
How so? They make crappy games, they aren't making money and their employees hate them enough to sue. What could possibly qualify them as a "great" company? EA has absorbed some great companies (Westwood, Bullfrog, etc) but they didn't rub off.
I would imagine that with God of War 2 it's a matter of making a sequel using the same engine very quickly, hitting next Christmas season and selling a sh*t-ton of copies to the massive number of PS2 owners, versus writing a new engine for a new system and either missing Christmas or having to cut corners, all so they can try to drive new console sales. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
You guys must have a lot more free time than I do. I only own a GC, GBA, Genesis and PS2. The Genesis isn't even plugged in and I haven't played the GBA in over a month.
selling your devices as quickly as you can produce them
That's one way of putting it. Another would be that they torpedoed the original XBox during what could've been their most profitable Christmas season ever by making everyone want something they couldn't have, and making what they could have undesirable. They didn't even have enough 360's to fill all of the preorders, which means that every console they sold before Christmas was already spoken for, and would've sold whenever they launched. By launching for the Christmas season and doing a huge marketting blitz to start the next generation when they had no 360s to sell, they left a huge amount of money on the table. Right now is when the XBox is cheaper to manufacture than its ever been, and they through all those sales away just to be first to market.
As to the other points, none of them matter. All that matters is whether MS makes money off the 360. They lost money on the XBox over its entire life cycle, and until the PS3 actually comes out the only thing you have to compare the 360 to is past launches. The 360 hasn't sold anywhere near as well as the PS2 did at launch. And despite all the hype about their world-wide launch, the 360 is the laughingstock of Japanese gaming. There isn't a single console including the GC and PSP that aren't outselling it there.
Over the years it's become clear to me that McNealy doesn't disagree with Microsoft's monopolist practices. He hates Gates because he wishes Sun was the monopoly, but since it's not he's forced to compete in other ways. If he really believed in open source for its own sake, rather than as a way to pry customers away from Windows, you would've seen Java being open sourced from the beginning, like IBM has done with some of their projects. Instead Sun has tried to use Java to force people into their vision of computing, with thin clients on the desktop and big-iron Sun servers on the back-end. Which is silly, considering how cheap desktop processing power and storage have gotten. Sure, you can offload your applications and storage onto application servers, but it's kind of pointless when the client is a 2GHz Dell box with a 250GB harddrive.
Exactly. This whole "statistical equality at any cost" meme needs to die. In my experience, women are not being prevented from going into IT, nor are they confronted with a hostile work environment if they do choose to. Instead, they're choosing not to go into it because they find it boring. What are we supposed to do, press-gang them into programming? Tell any girl who scores in the 90th percentile in math that they have to major in CompSci whether they want to or not? Give me a break. Nobody whines about the lack of male nurses or primary school teachers.
This whole thing derives from two issues. 1) the erroneous assumption that if there is a statistical imbalance in one sector of employment, it must be the result of sexist hiring practices and 2) the slightly less erroneous assumption that videogames are targetted at teenaged boys. The fact of the matter is, girls are already playing games, and games that appeal to both genders, such as WoW, The Sims and Kingdom Hearts, sell like gangbusters. However, those games never get any press. The media perception of games is tied to male power-fantasy games like Doom, Halo and Grand Theft Auto. This perpetuates the myth that the entire gaming industry is made up of those types of games. Games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing get completely ignored.
The simple truth is that girls are playing games already. The outcry about the supposed lack of games for girls is really a call to eliminate games for boys. They may be saying that there need to be games for girls, but that can't be what they mean because there are games for girls. What they really mean is that there shouldn't be any games that aren't for girls.
I'm the same as you, I got a PS2 back in the summer when I ran out of GC games, and God of War and Romance of the Three Kingdoms X were out for the PS2. For whatever reason, it seemed like nothing good came out last fall. Now with Chibi Robo and Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, the GC drought may be over.
The number of crappy PS2 games never really bothered me, because I don't play crappy games. There are plenty of crappy games on every system, it just means you have to do more than look at the back of the box when deciding what to buy. The only question that really matters is how many good games does a system have? PS2 has a lower percentage of good games than the GC, but it has more good games total.
Couldn't agree more. If you want to argue that there isn't enough innovation in gaming, you might have a case. However, the people who complain about "sequelitis" are not representetive of the majority of gamers. Halo 2, Kingdom Hearts 2, the Final Fantasy's and Grand Theft Auto's and EA's sports franchises all sell huge numbers. The best games of last year in my opinion were Resident Evil 4 and Civ IV, both "franchise" games. It didn't make them any less fun. And the DS, Revolution and Guitar Hero all serve as counter-examples even to the idea that there is a lack of innovation.
As far as the industry, the market, the sales figures... there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of it, for the industry as a whole. Certain devs and publishers may be in trouble, but that's an indictment of their businesses and products, not the industry. This console generation sold more than any previous one. The PS2 sold more consoles than every console Nintendo has ever made, put together. Hardcore gamers may fondly remember the 8- and 16-bit days, but the reality is that this is gaming's golden age.
They can say "We are not the Star Wars company" all they want, but until they have more than one game on their current product list that doesn't have Star Wars in the title, they are the Star Wars company.
Any number greater than zero is surprising. But I guess if you're already paying $300 to play Lumines, an extra $20 to watch Spider Man is just a drop in the bucket.
Most of the power in the 360 is being devoted to rendering pretty pictures on HDTVs. Nintendo made a strategic decision not to support HDTV, and thus they don't need all that extra power. Games can't really look much better than RE4 on a standard TV.
I thought the cutscenes were pretty meh. What blew me away was when you go back to the village in the lightning storm, and it's pouring rain, and the lightning briefly illuminates the farm wife coming at you with a rusty carving knife. In-frickin-sane. The mine was pretty cool too.
Also, the water effects for the boating section were as good as those in Wave Race: Blue Storm, which is an entire game devoted to boating.
3. The mod system. Definately the biggest failure. XML and Python is great, but my big reason for staying with Java and PHP is simple, documentation.
Do you want some cheese with that? It's their "biggest failure" because you don't like the language they chose? Well, I guess this is Slashdot.
Since when are developers required to provide documentation for modders? As I recall, Total Annihilation had a whole whack of user-created units, and there was no documentation or support. They cracked the file format the old fashioned way, with a decompiler and a hex editor. And you're whinging about having to go online to find documentation. Boo freakin' hoo. Firaxis sold you a game, not an IDE.
Civ IV is better than Civ III in every way. It's worth dealing with the crappy framerate and the occasional CTD. Plus, they've released a couple patches that fixed a lot of the bugs and cleaned up some of the memory issues. I agree that the 3D engine is unnecessary, and a game like Civ should run better on a low-end box than it does. If there was an option to turn off 3D and use static sprites, I would use it in a heartbeat. However, the game underneath that needlessly shiny exterior is still the best Civ game ever, and if your machine will physically run it, however poorly, there is no reason to keep playing Civ III. Just make sure you bring enough catapults when you attack a city.
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Password Safe is indeed a tremendous tool. Not so much for the logon password (which I would need to have remembered before being able to launch Password Safe anyway) as for the obscure passwords that expire every 90 days and get used once or twice in that time. Where I work we have all sorts of passwords, way too many to remember without writing them down. Password Safe effectively lets me just remember one.
For backup, who actually needs 40GB of storage? Is everyone supposed to be making HD home movies in the next five years? If you do need 40GB of backup storage, buy a harddrive. I just can't see a lot of demand for either of these formats any time soon. The market is moving toward network storage and content-on-demand, not another type of physical media.
Sure there have been treasure hunts before, but now it's all one big advertisement! The point of the game isn't to find the treasure, it's to get media coverage like this! Revolutionary!
I thought it was obvious too, but I guess when there's a grant involved the relative obviousness of the results is irrelevant.
Nintendo has not announced a price. Whatever source you're citing is no more reputable than the rest of the gaming media speculating on the price of the Wii. Merrill Lynch is predicting $200.
50 year old men are icky.
I would imagine that with God of War 2 it's a matter of making a sequel using the same engine very quickly, hitting next Christmas season and selling a sh*t-ton of copies to the massive number of PS2 owners, versus writing a new engine for a new system and either missing Christmas or having to cut corners, all so they can try to drive new console sales. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
You guys must have a lot more free time than I do. I only own a GC, GBA, Genesis and PS2. The Genesis isn't even plugged in and I haven't played the GBA in over a month.
I bought my girlfriend a DS with Nintendogs for her birthday and got laid that night, so that would be my advise.
As to the other points, none of them matter. All that matters is whether MS makes money off the 360. They lost money on the XBox over its entire life cycle, and until the PS3 actually comes out the only thing you have to compare the 360 to is past launches. The 360 hasn't sold anywhere near as well as the PS2 did at launch. And despite all the hype about their world-wide launch, the 360 is the laughingstock of Japanese gaming. There isn't a single console including the GC and PSP that aren't outselling it there.
Sofa king Wii Todd Ed.
Not yet, but soon!
Over the years it's become clear to me that McNealy doesn't disagree with Microsoft's monopolist practices. He hates Gates because he wishes Sun was the monopoly, but since it's not he's forced to compete in other ways. If he really believed in open source for its own sake, rather than as a way to pry customers away from Windows, you would've seen Java being open sourced from the beginning, like IBM has done with some of their projects. Instead Sun has tried to use Java to force people into their vision of computing, with thin clients on the desktop and big-iron Sun servers on the back-end. Which is silly, considering how cheap desktop processing power and storage have gotten. Sure, you can offload your applications and storage onto application servers, but it's kind of pointless when the client is a 2GHz Dell box with a 250GB harddrive.
Exactly. This whole "statistical equality at any cost" meme needs to die. In my experience, women are not being prevented from going into IT, nor are they confronted with a hostile work environment if they do choose to. Instead, they're choosing not to go into it because they find it boring. What are we supposed to do, press-gang them into programming? Tell any girl who scores in the 90th percentile in math that they have to major in CompSci whether they want to or not? Give me a break. Nobody whines about the lack of male nurses or primary school teachers.
This whole thing derives from two issues. 1) the erroneous assumption that if there is a statistical imbalance in one sector of employment, it must be the result of sexist hiring practices and 2) the slightly less erroneous assumption that videogames are targetted at teenaged boys. The fact of the matter is, girls are already playing games, and games that appeal to both genders, such as WoW, The Sims and Kingdom Hearts, sell like gangbusters. However, those games never get any press. The media perception of games is tied to male power-fantasy games like Doom, Halo and Grand Theft Auto. This perpetuates the myth that the entire gaming industry is made up of those types of games. Games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing get completely ignored.
The simple truth is that girls are playing games already. The outcry about the supposed lack of games for girls is really a call to eliminate games for boys. They may be saying that there need to be games for girls, but that can't be what they mean because there are games for girls. What they really mean is that there shouldn't be any games that aren't for girls.
I'm the same as you, I got a PS2 back in the summer when I ran out of GC games, and God of War and Romance of the Three Kingdoms X were out for the PS2. For whatever reason, it seemed like nothing good came out last fall. Now with Chibi Robo and Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, the GC drought may be over.
The number of crappy PS2 games never really bothered me, because I don't play crappy games. There are plenty of crappy games on every system, it just means you have to do more than look at the back of the box when deciding what to buy. The only question that really matters is how many good games does a system have? PS2 has a lower percentage of good games than the GC, but it has more good games total.
Couldn't agree more. If you want to argue that there isn't enough innovation in gaming, you might have a case. However, the people who complain about "sequelitis" are not representetive of the majority of gamers. Halo 2, Kingdom Hearts 2, the Final Fantasy's and Grand Theft Auto's and EA's sports franchises all sell huge numbers. The best games of last year in my opinion were Resident Evil 4 and Civ IV, both "franchise" games. It didn't make them any less fun. And the DS, Revolution and Guitar Hero all serve as counter-examples even to the idea that there is a lack of innovation.
As far as the industry, the market, the sales figures... there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of it, for the industry as a whole. Certain devs and publishers may be in trouble, but that's an indictment of their businesses and products, not the industry. This console generation sold more than any previous one. The PS2 sold more consoles than every console Nintendo has ever made, put together. Hardcore gamers may fondly remember the 8- and 16-bit days, but the reality is that this is gaming's golden age.
Nonsense. Hayden Christensen's wooden monotone would be absolutely perfect as young-Kirk.
They can say "We are not the Star Wars company" all they want, but until they have more than one game on their current product list that doesn't have Star Wars in the title, they are the Star Wars company.
Any number greater than zero is surprising. But I guess if you're already paying $300 to play Lumines, an extra $20 to watch Spider Man is just a drop in the bucket.
Most of the power in the 360 is being devoted to rendering pretty pictures on HDTVs. Nintendo made a strategic decision not to support HDTV, and thus they don't need all that extra power. Games can't really look much better than RE4 on a standard TV.
I thought the cutscenes were pretty meh. What blew me away was when you go back to the village in the lightning storm, and it's pouring rain, and the lightning briefly illuminates the farm wife coming at you with a rusty carving knife. In-frickin-sane. The mine was pretty cool too. Also, the water effects for the boating section were as good as those in Wave Race: Blue Storm, which is an entire game devoted to boating.
Since when are developers required to provide documentation for modders? As I recall, Total Annihilation had a whole whack of user-created units, and there was no documentation or support. They cracked the file format the old fashioned way, with a decompiler and a hex editor. And you're whinging about having to go online to find documentation. Boo freakin' hoo. Firaxis sold you a game, not an IDE.
Civ IV is better than Civ III in every way. It's worth dealing with the crappy framerate and the occasional CTD. Plus, they've released a couple patches that fixed a lot of the bugs and cleaned up some of the memory issues. I agree that the 3D engine is unnecessary, and a game like Civ should run better on a low-end box than it does. If there was an option to turn off 3D and use static sprites, I would use it in a heartbeat. However, the game underneath that needlessly shiny exterior is still the best Civ game ever, and if your machine will physically run it, however poorly, there is no reason to keep playing Civ III. Just make sure you bring enough catapults when you attack a city.