I was really excited about this keyboard back when they first announced it and they posited that it would cost approxmiately $100. Now that it's finally becoming a reality several years behind schedule, and is going to cost approximately $1500, I don't know how anybody can really still be looking foward to it.
Quite, the concept is cool but we're talking about a keyboard with programmable icons on it. Big deal. I would hope that self-claimed l33t gamerz would be capable of remembering keys without having pretty pictures to show them.
As stated you don't have to spend $90. You can easily find cables for far less on eBay or Monoprice or countless other places. As for analogue being better, I don't see anything you say to support that. Sure, a device might have a busted HDMI implementation, but otherwise it's highly likely that it would deliver the exact same signal via analogue or digital. Except analogue would degrade and digital wouldn't. Further, HDMI 1.3 supports so-called "deep" colour schemes where two capable devices can be transmitting up to 48bits per pixels.
Cable quality matters in so far as a cable must meet its technical requirements. But all HDMI cables do meet their requirements. Most HDMI cables under 6ft would even do 1080p with no trouble. A $6 HDMI cable does exactly the same job as a $100 monster cable. Bits are bits. The data either gets from one end to the other or it doesnt.
The slightly bizarre part is when someone disagrees and claims Monster is better somehow even though they're probably typing their retort on a computer with generic SATA / IDE / USB / DVI-D cables and does't get the irony. The only difference from going cheap is you have $94 in change to spend on disks, games, beer or whatever. Monster cables are a rip-off. You could buy more than 10 generic cables for the price of one Monster cable on the internet.
You can buy a 3ft HDMI cable for something like $4, 6ft for $6. Yes you can buy some ludicrously expensive HDMI cables but you can blame consumer ignorance and retailer greed for that. There is no reason to spend that much seeing as it is digital.
I see no reason at all to use component in an everyday situation if your device (be it a 360, PS3, DVD player etc.) and TV both support HDMI. It would be as dumb as connecting your PC to your monitor with VGA even when both have DVI-D support. The picture quality is far better over HDMI / DVD-D because it's digital. Analogue by definitiion degrades so even the best composite signal will still be worse than HDMI.
Probably nothing at all. Theoretically you could mod a 360 to give you an unfair advantage - perhaps you could flood the server with bogus packets to kill it, or use your mod to see things that a game wouldn't normally show etc.
I think in reality it has more to do with piracy. Despite the protestations of "homebrew" people, it's quite obvious what most modchips are for. By denying pirates a substantial chunk of gameplay experience it may help deter a lot of piracy. I'm sure MS would actually brick modded consoles if they knew of a surefire way to do it. Instead, this is a second best option.
That would be plausible if we weren't talking about Michael Bay. One second cuts and bombastic music blaring over everything are his trademark. I'm sure you might see some slower "transforming" or even slo-mo (another trademark) in places but do you really care to go and see the movie because of that? He's made so many shitty movies that the default assumption should be that this one will be bad too. Of course we might all be pleasantly surprised, but better to wait for critics to say as much before wasting an evening & money to find out.
It looks like the modelers and animators didn't bother figuring out how to make them transform in a meaningful way. Instead they make a bunch of spinning metal with a ridiculous amount of motion blur and play the "transform sound" and it just makes a jumbled looking mess.
Michael Bay films never make sense. They're not even internally consistent. It's a wonder that his movies even make money considering how bad they usually are.
"Fun over graphics" is one of those idiotic remarks made by some Wii owners to defend the system. Of course games can be fun on the Wii, no one claims otherwise. After all, games were fun on lesser systems. But as you say there is not some inverse rule where fun decreases as graphics get better. After all by that definition it means the N64 is more fun that the Wii.
The Wii is simply underpowered compared to the other "next gen" consoles. Games have to work within the limits, but it doesn't mean other systems are less fun. People have a ton of fun playing Oblivion, or Gears, or Resistance, or [insert any game here]. I can't imagine Oblivion or Gears being more fun on the Wii especially since everything (not just graphics) that makes those games great would have to be slashed to make it fit in the reduced architecture.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather have a single gem like Super Paper Mario than 34 unnamed, generic, run of the mill "games". I'm sorry, but I'm not 14 anymore. I don't have time to play constant mediocrity. So a single really fun game is going to appeal to me more than a gluttony.
And how do you know that none of these games are gems? To blanket dismiss all of them is sheer idiocy especially since you seem to know nothing about any of them.
I don't think it would be any exaggeration to say that if Little Big Planet were a Nintendo game that people such as yourself would be raving about it right now. But since it isn't a Nintendo game, you simply hand wave it away and claim it to be "mediocre". Likewise with hotly anticipated titles such as Drake's Fortune, Lair, Heavenly Sword, Ratchet & Clank and Warhawk, ALL of which are getting extremely positive previews.
And while I'm on the topic, I'd like to point out that Super Paper Mario literally defines what Nintendo means by "fun over graphics". The graphics are quite pretty vector drawings, but there is no $4,000,000, ultra-realistic, shiny armored characters that look good on an HDTV. Instead, the company put their budget into every aspect of the game.
Fun is not inversely proportional to graphics. Another silly assertion.
Can anyone explain how both KDE and Gnome have been working for years with the entire open source development world supporting them and they can't make anything even remotely close to the polish and UI level of this:
The problem with voluntary efforts is that they don't really have a GUI designer and a developer. Normally they're one and the same so you end up with something that looks great from a developer's perspective but probably not to others. This usually means GUIs that range from okay, to cluttered, to abysmal, to unusable trash (unless you're the developer). What projects like KDE & GNOME need to do (and are doing to some extent) is to put designers to work on projects and to enforce design to ensure a decent quality threshold. Afterwards the app should be let loose into the hands of real users and appropriate changes made in response to feedback.
Anyway I think GNOME & KDE have decent GUI. But KDE is still too cluttered with obscure options, buttons and menus, so I think GNOME is more usable by a mile. That is probably why GNOME gets a lot more mindshare, especially in enterprise deployments where admins don't want to have to handhold their users the whole time.
Why would they let the Human Interface Guidelines langush? The consistency of the experience in using a Mac is a big plus. But, given the number of inconsistencies that have crept into OSX the past few versions, it's completely obvious to see it hasn't been a priority to them.
Once you've sat down and played a while you don't even think about it. Lately I've been playing a lot of FPS titles on my 360 (Battlefield 2: MC, Call of Duty 2 / 3, Halo 2) and I don't even notice the controller.
I disagree. Playing a FPS on a controller is not as easy as a mouse and I doubt there is anybody would could seriously claim that it was. You simply don't have the same precision or the ability to spin or move as quickly as you do with a mouse. You might get used to a controller but you will never get the same speed or accuracy that a mouse offers. That's not to say that games haven't made the best of the bad situation and may have nice control schemes but a mouse and keyboard is a very intuitive and unmatched system for shooter games.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the next Unreal Tournament appears. They are saying that it will support mouse & keyboard on consoles. I expect they'll have to put a switch on matchmaking for this because those people stuck with controllers would be soundly thrashed every time.
The Cult Of Scientology doesn't like Psychologists because they are people who know how to avoid CoS' mind games and tricks.
Scientology doesn't like psychiatrists because their dead leader was nuttier than a fruitcake. He had several run-ins with psychiatrists and developed a pathological hatred of them. All that hate was funnelled into his religion so that in turn his believers have become as nutty and paranoid as he was.
Ron the Nut is a good site if you want to see what a miserable excuse for a human Hubbard really was. Total and complete slime.
To be precise, you'd spend about half a million to get to the point where they spring the space opera story on you. Once you've been suckered that far, there's a very strong psychological incentive to keep believing them, rather like the suckers who've fallen for the 419 scams.
Blizzard, take heed and adjust your price plans accordingly.
I mean, for Christ's sake, people. Is there a limit to how ridiculous you can get?
I don't know if this was deliberate or not, but every religion is fundamentally ridiculous, including believing Jesus Christ was the son of god etc. After all, Christianity started off as a cult as I'm sure did every other religion. The only thing that separates L Ron Hubbard and Jesus Christ is 2000 years of propoganda.
So its important to push back on cults like Scientology whenever possible. Nip them in the bud. Expose their fantasist, insane, compulsive liar, tax dodging dead leader. Expose the lies they've built up around the man (war hero, explorer etc.). Expose their ridiculous teachings (Xenu etc.) and the money you have to pay to hear such garbage. Do everything to innoculate potential cult members before they are financially and psychologically ruined. The world already has enough religions, it doesn't need any more. Especially one as fundamentally rotten as scientology.
Funny- I play all my PC games on the absolute lowest settings, to improve performance. So no, to many of us graphics *don't* matter at all to gameplay. If Zelda had an HD option and you gave me an HDTV to play it on I still wouldn't use it.
That has to be the most nonsensical rationalisation yet. Seriously. There is not a single person who would intentionally set their console to have a worse experience than their hardware is capable of reliably delivering. No one.
Or perhaps there is. Perhaps there really are people who set their HD sets to SD for some unfathomable reason, set the TV to black and white and mute the sound. After all, none of those things matter to gameplay right? I think they're called masochists. Or fanboys.
No, they don't. Gameplay is what you do in the game, not what special effects are drawn to the screen.
What a strange thing to say. Are you claiming that Oblivion would be as much fun to play if you stuck it on the lowest quality settings and resolution? Of course it isn't and nobody would ever play it that way if their PC were capable of higher settings. Or turn it around - would Zelda Twilight Princess be a better game if it offered 720p with beautiful textures, long draw distances, swaying grass, stars, rippling water etc. Of course it would. Graphics don't necessarily mean better gameplay but they can and do draw you into the game.
The same with console games. Sure, graphics are not the only reason to buy a game, but neither is there some inverse relationship between graphical quality and the amount of "fun" in a game.
Claiming that the Wii is somehow better for being underpowered by comparison is pretty peculiar logic indeed. Graphics, sound, memory, processing power are just tools. You can still make a lousy game from them, but you can also make amazing games, games which would be utterly impossible on the Wii.
Even Miyamoto says it - "The hardware is basically a GC. We've upgraded our development tools to new versions but, you can still use GC programs as they are. With that in mind, I thought we could remake GC titles for the Wii and modify them to work with the Wii remote so that they're more fun to play.".
So let me first to say that he is NOT a charlatan, a huckster, a cheap parlour act, a one trick pony, a snakeoil salesman, a vulture preying on the weak minded, a media whore, an insult to intelligence, a talentless liar or a boil on the face of humanity.
No indeed. He is a great man whom aliens have seen fit to bestow the ultimate of powers - spoon bending. All hail our galactic overlords and their glorious Earth bound representative!
I know what said and I know that nobody could take it seriously as a threat. However it was a mistake to say anything remotely threatening because the cult could and did use it against him.
I've seen the setting but to be honest the last time I had to get my hands dirty was in FC3 I believe when my console was filling up with SELinux policy violations and I had to turn it off. Since then it's gotten nicer so I just leave it on and trust it to be correct. I have looked at policy files though and they are pretty scary.
Even if you set some audit mode, you'd still have to do a full soak test of an app to catch everything, including the one time in a thousand that it want to access some dir or load some lib which brings in its own requirements.
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Quite, the concept is cool but we're talking about a keyboard with programmable icons on it. Big deal. I would hope that self-claimed l33t gamerz would be capable of remembering keys without having pretty pictures to show them.
As stated you don't have to spend $90. You can easily find cables for far less on eBay or Monoprice or countless other places. As for analogue being better, I don't see anything you say to support that. Sure, a device might have a busted HDMI implementation, but otherwise it's highly likely that it would deliver the exact same signal via analogue or digital. Except analogue would degrade and digital wouldn't. Further, HDMI 1.3 supports so-called "deep" colour schemes where two capable devices can be transmitting up to 48bits per pixels.
Monoprice.com or any eBay seller will sell you a 6ft cable for under $6. HDMI cabling is dirt cheap assuming you don't buy the branded models.
The slightly bizarre part is when someone disagrees and claims Monster is better somehow even though they're probably typing their retort on a computer with generic SATA / IDE / USB / DVI-D cables and does't get the irony. The only difference from going cheap is you have $94 in change to spend on disks, games, beer or whatever. Monster cables are a rip-off. You could buy more than 10 generic cables for the price of one Monster cable on the internet.
You can buy a 3ft HDMI cable for something like $4, 6ft for $6. Yes you can buy some ludicrously expensive HDMI cables but you can blame consumer ignorance and retailer greed for that. There is no reason to spend that much seeing as it is digital.
I see no reason at all to use component in an everyday situation if your device (be it a 360, PS3, DVD player etc.) and TV both support HDMI. It would be as dumb as connecting your PC to your monitor with VGA even when both have DVI-D support. The picture quality is far better over HDMI / DVD-D because it's digital. Analogue by definitiion degrades so even the best composite signal will still be worse than HDMI.
I think in reality it has more to do with piracy. Despite the protestations of "homebrew" people, it's quite obvious what most modchips are for. By denying pirates a substantial chunk of gameplay experience it may help deter a lot of piracy. I'm sure MS would actually brick modded consoles if they knew of a surefire way to do it. Instead, this is a second best option.
That would be plausible if we weren't talking about Michael Bay. One second cuts and bombastic music blaring over everything are his trademark. I'm sure you might see some slower "transforming" or even slo-mo (another trademark) in places but do you really care to go and see the movie because of that? He's made so many shitty movies that the default assumption should be that this one will be bad too. Of course we might all be pleasantly surprised, but better to wait for critics to say as much before wasting an evening & money to find out.
Michael Bay films never make sense. They're not even internally consistent. It's a wonder that his movies even make money considering how bad they usually are.
The Wii is simply underpowered compared to the other "next gen" consoles. Games have to work within the limits, but it doesn't mean other systems are less fun. People have a ton of fun playing Oblivion, or Gears, or Resistance, or [insert any game here]. I can't imagine Oblivion or Gears being more fun on the Wii especially since everything (not just graphics) that makes those games great would have to be slashed to make it fit in the reduced architecture.
Don't forget HDTVs. Sony is selling them by the metric shitload.
And how do you know that none of these games are gems? To blanket dismiss all of them is sheer idiocy especially since you seem to know nothing about any of them.
I don't think it would be any exaggeration to say that if Little Big Planet were a Nintendo game that people such as yourself would be raving about it right now. But since it isn't a Nintendo game, you simply hand wave it away and claim it to be "mediocre". Likewise with hotly anticipated titles such as Drake's Fortune, Lair, Heavenly Sword, Ratchet & Clank and Warhawk, ALL of which are getting extremely positive previews.
And while I'm on the topic, I'd like to point out that Super Paper Mario literally defines what Nintendo means by "fun over graphics". The graphics are quite pretty vector drawings, but there is no $4,000,000, ultra-realistic, shiny armored characters that look good on an HDTV. Instead, the company put their budget into every aspect of the game.
Fun is not inversely proportional to graphics. Another silly assertion.
Those record losses undoubtedly include a lot of one off charges. I doubt the market is too bothered by those.
Why don't you go to GameSpot, 1Up, Neogaf, Kotaku, Destructoid, GameSpy, IGN, Eurogamer or any other game site and find out?
The problem with voluntary efforts is that they don't really have a GUI designer and a developer. Normally they're one and the same so you end up with something that looks great from a developer's perspective but probably not to others. This usually means GUIs that range from okay, to cluttered, to abysmal, to unusable trash (unless you're the developer). What projects like KDE & GNOME need to do (and are doing to some extent) is to put designers to work on projects and to enforce design to ensure a decent quality threshold. Afterwards the app should be let loose into the hands of real users and appropriate changes made in response to feedback.
Anyway I think GNOME & KDE have decent GUI. But KDE is still too cluttered with obscure options, buttons and menus, so I think GNOME is more usable by a mile. That is probably why GNOME gets a lot more mindshare, especially in enterprise deployments where admins don't want to have to handhold their users the whole time.
I see little evidence Apple care about consistency any more. As you say their apps seem to change from one release to the next with more and more use of the wretched chrome for no discernable reason. It's interesting to read about an eight year old article from the Interface Hall of Shame article about Quicktime 4.0 and realise nothing has really changed much. iTunes on Windows has an atrocious UI which is funny considering how Apple used to preach consistency but now see fit to ignore it when it suits them.
I disagree. Playing a FPS on a controller is not as easy as a mouse and I doubt there is anybody would could seriously claim that it was. You simply don't have the same precision or the ability to spin or move as quickly as you do with a mouse. You might get used to a controller but you will never get the same speed or accuracy that a mouse offers. That's not to say that games haven't made the best of the bad situation and may have nice control schemes but a mouse and keyboard is a very intuitive and unmatched system for shooter games.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the next Unreal Tournament appears. They are saying that it will support mouse & keyboard on consoles. I expect they'll have to put a switch on matchmaking for this because those people stuck with controllers would be soundly thrashed every time.
Scientology doesn't like psychiatrists because their dead leader was nuttier than a fruitcake. He had several run-ins with psychiatrists and developed a pathological hatred of them. All that hate was funnelled into his religion so that in turn his believers have become as nutty and paranoid as he was.
Ron the Nut is a good site if you want to see what a miserable excuse for a human Hubbard really was. Total and complete slime.
Blizzard, take heed and adjust your price plans accordingly.
I don't know if this was deliberate or not, but every religion is fundamentally ridiculous, including believing Jesus Christ was the son of god etc. After all, Christianity started off as a cult as I'm sure did every other religion. The only thing that separates L Ron Hubbard and Jesus Christ is 2000 years of propoganda.
So its important to push back on cults like Scientology whenever possible. Nip them in the bud. Expose their fantasist, insane, compulsive liar, tax dodging dead leader. Expose the lies they've built up around the man (war hero, explorer etc.). Expose their ridiculous teachings (Xenu etc.) and the money you have to pay to hear such garbage. Do everything to innoculate potential cult members before they are financially and psychologically ruined. The world already has enough religions, it doesn't need any more. Especially one as fundamentally rotten as scientology.
That has to be the most nonsensical rationalisation yet. Seriously. There is not a single person who would intentionally set their console to have a worse experience than their hardware is capable of reliably delivering. No one.
Or perhaps there is. Perhaps there really are people who set their HD sets to SD for some unfathomable reason, set the TV to black and white and mute the sound. After all, none of those things matter to gameplay right? I think they're called masochists. Or fanboys.
What a strange thing to say. Are you claiming that Oblivion would be as much fun to play if you stuck it on the lowest quality settings and resolution? Of course it isn't and nobody would ever play it that way if their PC were capable of higher settings. Or turn it around - would Zelda Twilight Princess be a better game if it offered 720p with beautiful textures, long draw distances, swaying grass, stars, rippling water etc. Of course it would. Graphics don't necessarily mean better gameplay but they can and do draw you into the game.
The same with console games. Sure, graphics are not the only reason to buy a game, but neither is there some inverse relationship between graphical quality and the amount of "fun" in a game.
Claiming that the Wii is somehow better for being underpowered by comparison is pretty peculiar logic indeed. Graphics, sound, memory, processing power are just tools. You can still make a lousy game from them, but you can also make amazing games, games which would be utterly impossible on the Wii.
Even Miyamoto says it - "The hardware is basically a GC. We've upgraded our development tools to new versions but, you can still use GC programs as they are. With that in mind, I thought we could remake GC titles for the Wii and modify them to work with the Wii remote so that they're more fun to play.".
No indeed. He is a great man whom aliens have seen fit to bestow the ultimate of powers - spoon bending. All hail our galactic overlords and their glorious Earth bound representative!
I know what said and I know that nobody could take it seriously as a threat. However it was a mistake to say anything remotely threatening because the cult could and did use it against him.
Even if you set some audit mode, you'd still have to do a full soak test of an app to catch everything, including the one time in a thousand that it want to access some dir or load some lib which brings in its own requirements.