My post may need to have been more precisely worded, but the reason I wrote the post was that you have written opinions on MMO's, classic gaming, and DRM when all this article is about is a single-player, new, console-only title. There is no subscription, because it's singleplayer. Interest in classic games is irrelevant because it doesn't pertain to the story. There is no SecuROM on a console game, because you can only run it on a console anyway. It appeared that you were damning all of modern gaming in a simple topic hyping up one particular 360 game.
Jerry made a comment about whether computers of the future would be like delicious cake. He then said that if he was right Bill should adjust his shorts (something like that). And then Bill wiggled. So I guess there you go, Windows Vista Delicious Cake edition confirmed.
I don't get all this immense overhype over new games or ceaseless whining because a game comes out on a console first or doesn't come out on the PC at all.
PC ports can come out months or a year after the console release, meaning most people who really wanted to play the game have already done so. The PC ports are also generally shoddy. The idea is "can we make this 360 program compile and run on a Windows machine" and they leave it at that.
Don't you people find gaming fun in maybe digging out some old titles and downloading a few new levels to play?
Yes I do, and so do many. However, I'm not going to say, "to hell with all gaming after 1995" just because my friends and I have fun with a few retro games at our LANs.
I don't get this online games thingie anyway. I play a lot of games and maybe it's an attention span thing but I *really* don't want to devote a fair proportion of my life to just *one* game like WoW or this new Star Wars game.
This Star Wars game isn't an MMO like World of Warcraft, so I don't quite know what you mean by this. There's a difference between paying 15 dollars a month to continue to play one game (WoW) and simply riding the hype train leading up to a game's release (this game). Riding the hype train can lead to cynicism due to broken promises, but it's fun while it lasts. Sometimes it's more fun than the actual game.
I don't mind taking my time finishing a game like HL2 because I've no reason to rush and I'm going to look pretty stupid as a fat middle-aged bloke going into my office and bragging to my workmates about how I'm so amazing for "getting past the tripods" before they did.
Yeah, you would. Good thing most gamers don't do that.
And then there's the endless copy-protection and DRM shit to contend with
I wouldn't know, I immediately install a crack for every game I buy after I buy it. They aren't hard to find. (=
It's very simple - a lot of games companies treat us like shit because far too many gamers have let them get away with it for far too long.
That's true, but I'm not sure what that has to do with this particular story.
Perhaps you should buy a couple of recently hyped games and see what the fuss is all about before passing judgement on this hobby and everyone who has it. Who knows, they might be more fun than you originally thought. (=
But if you're choosing a "profile, resolution, and quality," you could use Handbrake for free. It does all of those things. If you don't want to touch command line stuff, don't. Handbrake's GUI will generate it all for you. Plus it's open source.
I recently decided to reinstall Civ IV just to play a quick game. I came home from classes early in the afternoon, and the next thing I knew it was dark out. Every Civilization game since the first one I played (II) has been able to do this to me. It's crazy. No matter how much Sid Meier tinkers with the Civ formula, the result is always the same: once I click the icon, I kiss the rest of my day goodbye.
I don't think graphics are a problem. Yes, I know the graphics in Quake I, Diablo I, Red Alert I, and Half-Life I are "bad." But I love them nonetheless. Also, I have played NONE of those games before I was 17. I'm 19 now, so I haven't had too much time to get nostalgic over them.
The problem with really old games is CLUNKINESS. You know, how in the original Metroid Samus's beam gun only shoots two inches before the shot disappears? Or how Link's shield in the original Zelda only works against projectiles, and it's fickle at that? How about leaving games on all night because otherwise you need to start from the beginning?
I think everyone has a certain level of "clunk" that they are willing to tolerate. The things I listed above may be fine for others. Someone may get frustrated at my childhood favorites like Kirby Superstar, Sonic 2, or Civ II, for whatever reason.
I don't think there are really that many graphics whores out there. I do, however, think that there are people who are used to modern saving systems, matchmaking systems, control systems, etc. that make modern games feel more refined than their "classic" counterparts. Who knows, maybe in the future people won't understand why our online shooters had hitboxes, or why our online fighters lagged so much. Maybe it will seem weird that MMO's of today took cuts in detail to render large open spaces. Hell, maybe they will think it odd that we stored our games on discs instead of hard drives. As new generations come and go, the average level of tolerable clunkiness will move forward. Maybe someday Call of Duty 4 or World of Warcraft will be as old as some people would be willing to go.
And then old people will reminisce about the days when 360 and PS3 graphics were "next-gen."
Things I anticipate doing once these 3 billion people are hooked up:
-Send the first goatse link
-Be the first to solicit cybersex
-and ask "a/s/l?"
-Degenerate various African languages into their equivalents of "AOLspeak."
-Accuse them of being teenage boys unless they "show pics"
-ATTN:
Dear Sir/M,
I am Mr. Johnathan Ashcroft. an Auditor of a BANK OF THE WASHINGTON, DC. (FCT). I have the courage to Crave indulgence for
this important business
believing that you will never let me down
either now or in the future.
If you go by performance on the ACID tests, Webkit passes ACID1 and ACID2 (like all modern browsers including IE8 beta), and gets between 75-100 on ACID3, depending on whether it's Safari stable, Safari development, or Google Chrome. Firefox passes Acid1 and 2 and gets a 71/100 stable and an 85/100 development version.
If we're basing engines purely on W3C standards support, there isn't enough difference to scrap either. Even getting a perfect on the Acid3 test won't imply complete compliance. Nobody's there yet. The best anybody can do is keep the rendering engines competing so they have a reason to improve.
I think there's some rose-colored glasses being donned, however. Even when I was a kid (very early 90's) I remember seeing plenty of Disney and movie tie-in games, sidescrolling beat-em ups, platformer mascot wannabes, tournament fighters, etc. Just because the genres have changed, the general idea has stayed the same: Successful genres will lead to clones and copycats. There used to be a lot of sci-fi and future-gladiator type shooters. That military style and squad-based shooters have become more popular only suggests a change in fashion, rather than a decline in innovation.
I was hoping for Jazzy $animal. I know what Jaunty means, but when hearing the sound of the word I think "jaundice." When I hear jazzy I think "awesome."
Have you ever considered that back in the 80's, people simply didn't have the technology to make affordable systems for handling today's 3d games? I'm willing to bet that if today's hardware was affordable commodity hardware in the 80's, you wouldn't be seeing ASCII. Good graphics have always been a selling point. It made the NES superior to Atari's consoles. It's what made Doom so popular (for the time, it was considered realistic), and the reason Myst devastated the adventure gaming genre.
Despite what you may think, we are not stuck in a world devoid of "clever" video games. Despite it's DRM, Spore certainly fits the bill. Mirror's Edge looks to be interesting, being a first person "runner" that makes you depend on your agility, not guns, to survive. Stardock's own Sins of a Solar Empire runs on modest hardware and provides an intriguing mix of RTS and Civilization in space. TellTale games has been reviving the adventure game genre with several of its own episodic series.
Heck, who said you had to stick with AAA titles? Try the shareware title "Hacker Evolution," a hacking sim that has you typing on a command line to steal money and gain unauthorized access to computers worldwide. There's stuff out there if you actually look.
An acquaintance gave me his stack of old Xbox 360 games. So downstairs, I have a stack of six modern-day military squad-based tactical shooters. PC is hardly the only platform that has clones. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, to a point.
Granted this is anecdotal, but on my home PC I've been using Google Chrome exclusively for a couple of days now and I really like it. It doesn't take several seconds to boot like Firefox has for a while now.
Performancewise, I compared my current Firefox window with ten tabs open (Slashdot, Kotaku, Penny Arcade, Google, Yahoo, CNN, Craigslist, Pokemon.com, Newegg, The Tech Report as test tabs) to Google Chrome with the same ten tabs. Firefox came out to 123MB, Chrome was 179 BUT Firefox was chugging as the 10 pages were loading (this was on an old single-core Athlon 64 with 512MB ram), while there was no slowdown whatsoever on Chrome on the same machine. Sure, don't use it if you only have 128MB of RAM, but at that point I don't think you should be using Firefox or Windows XP anyway.
The Javascript performance in both are pretty good, but Chrome's is slightly better. On Celtic Kane's Javascript speed test, Firefox 3 usually gets around 380ms and Chrome gets around 80-100 less.
Google Chrome lacks some of the polish and features that Firefox does (no built-in RSS reader is noticeable), but I really like the responsiveness and speed. For now I'll stick with Chrome and see what Firefox 3.1 and the new Chrome has to offer.
It's amazing what putting effort into making a distinguished soundtrack can do. Katamari Damacy was well worth listening to over and over. Long after the thrill of rolling over objects with a giant ball left me, it was still awesome just to hear the unique tracks that ranged from jazz to pop to electronica.
Also, I don't know if this was engineered, but I just really like hearing the chaos in TF2. It feels more lifelike to hear guns shooting and people yelling and gadgets beeping all at once. It certainly feels better than a bunch of lifeless avatars silently shooting at each other (like in most other shooters). I believe Call of Duty attempts this too with random gunshots in the background, but not as successfully.
I don't know what the solution is, but...
on
Should IT Unionize?
·
· Score: 1
I'm deathly afraid that I'll be carrying a Blackberry, being on call, and working 60 hour weeks without compensation when I graduate.
During my first internship I'd occasionally ask my coworkers how their weekend went. Often they'd say that they either spent Saturday or Sunday at work. I thought they were crazy. And then I started being pressured to work past my 9 to 5 schedule. I'd get chewed out because I left a problem unresolved when I went home at 5. I'd be the only person in the office that left after 8 hours of work. I never worked weekends. And yet my coworkers were always talking about how much they believed in this project. They believed in it so much that they were willing to do all this overtime. I was the pariah because I wanted to do something besides work!
Is this really my fate when I get to the workplace?
While I'd agree that more similar hardware would be good, do we really want "one console?" What if that one console forces an Xbox live-style subscription service? Then I don't have a choice. What about competition? They can charge whatever for their combined box because there's no alternative for that demographic. PC gaming? Too difficult (not true, but that's the general thought). The Wii2? Nintendo's focus isn't on the 360 and PS3 crowd anymore. If this happens, Sony/Microsoft can push whatever intrusive DRM and accessory forcing strategies they want, because there's no alternative.
What about developers? If there's no competition, sure it's easy development, but it also means that there's no competition for dev kits. They could make it so that only the EAs and Activisions of the world could afford dev kits, and that's simply the price to pay if you want to develop a game for the Xboxstation4.
I personally don't care if it's costing Microsoft and Sony billions to compete, because at least they're COMPETING. It would cost some people a hobby if they decided to collude.
The problem with that article (and many like it) is it compares PCs to ALL consoles and ALL portables, as opposed to the 360, PS3, Wii, DS, and PSP. Even when this is done, I doubt it's the biggest and that's fine. But if, as the parent of my first post suggests, that there have been 10 years worth of articles predicting that PC gaming is dying, maybe it isn't? Maybe it's up there with 2008 is the year of the Linux desktop and Apple is dying?
My main point about cracks was that many PC gamers aren't as worried about DRM as you might be led to believe. And sure, popping a disk into a console is easier than troubleshooting the myriad of PC issues. But there's a reason my friends and I are willing to troubleshoot for an hour or so at the beginning of every LAN--because we really enjoy PC games that much. DRM is just another issue to fix. If that's too much trouble for you, fine, today's consoles are pretty fun too.
I'm skeptical about the idea of PC gaming "dwindling." Right now I'm looking forward to Left 4 Dead, Diablo III, Starcraft II, Mirror's Edge, Spore, Dragon Age... If AAA titles really are becoming more scarce I'm not seeing it. Gears of War 2 not coming out for the PC does not pain me too much. Gears of War 1 PC came out long after people moved on. It's their own fault it didn't sell well. If it was going to be the same with Gears of War 2, then maybe they should just save their money instead.
When EA releases C&C games as freeware, they really mean it. Back during the "12th anniversary" celebration, they released the Command and Conquer Gold. It's still free a year later.
C&C Gold and RA look about the same graphicswise, and they both require a little bit of configuration on modern machines to run smoothly (to run with sound and arrow keys working properly), but it's worth it.
You know what I think the major factor that is killing PC gaming is? FUD.
I take that back, I don't think PC gaming is dying at all. Nevertheless, there can't be a single story on any major tech or gaming news website that has anything to do with a PC game without there being comments about why PC games are dying.
You'd be surprised to find that many gamers don't care about DRM. Why? Because it's easily cracked. You can find No-CD cracks, SecuROM cracks, Starforce cracks, cracks that let you play LAN games on one CD key--at worst finding a crack requires perseverance, and at best it's a couple of clicks. There are even guides on how to crack SecuROM yourself, if you're interested. It's pretty easy when you have control over your system, unlike the 360 or PS3. I find it ironic that people bitch about DRM on the PC and decide that a completely closed system is a better idea. REALLY?
I have a 360, a DS, and a PC. I'm not a fanboy of any in particular, but my pet peeve is people who spread FUD about PC gaming.
On my pc now I play emulators, old games (thank you dosbox) and small, independent games. It's sad, but I'm probably going to play only the console version of Fallout III.
Scott McCloud is a comic book artist who authored "Zot!" He also wrote several comic books about comic books as a medium, the most famous of which being "Understanding Comics."
Curiously, he was born Scott McLeod, and the Highlander's last name was MacLeod, and he was Scottish. However, Scott McCloud was born in 1960, and the Highlander film was released in 1986, so if it's anything more than coincidence, the Highlander was named after the cartoonist.
But then again, isn't the possibility of a revival in the popularity of fighting games a good thing? Despite the pace and relative simplicity of Soul Calibur IV, it's the first "traditional" fighting game I've been able to get friends to willingly play in a long time.
Let these simplified fighters get eaten up as gateway drugs, and hopefully a new crop of "hardcore" fighting game fans will result.
Much as I hate it, I'd rather spend the money on a Comcast Business connection than worry about whether or not I'm getting close to some artificial cap.
Apparently Comcast made quite the shrewd business move just now.
Actually, if you have a possibly prime number N, you don't need to divide by every number from 1 to N to check whether it's prime.
A simple test is to test every odd from 1 to the square root of N. If 2 doesn't divide evenly into the number, then no other even number will. Also, if something can cleanly be factored out, it's not prime.
Wikipedia also suggests storing a list of primes to test first--If N can divide by any of those primes it is composite.
There are much better algorithms out there, but those are a few easy ways to speed up a primality test.
Slashdot Mirror
My post may need to have been more precisely worded, but the reason I wrote the post was that you have written opinions on MMO's, classic gaming, and DRM when all this article is about is a single-player, new, console-only title. There is no subscription, because it's singleplayer. Interest in classic games is irrelevant because it doesn't pertain to the story. There is no SecuROM on a console game, because you can only run it on a console anyway. It appeared that you were damning all of modern gaming in a simple topic hyping up one particular 360 game.
Jerry made a comment about whether computers of the future would be like delicious cake. He then said that if he was right Bill should adjust his shorts (something like that). And then Bill wiggled. So I guess there you go, Windows Vista Delicious Cake edition confirmed.
I don't get all this immense overhype over new games or ceaseless whining because a game comes out on a console first or doesn't come out on the PC at all.
PC ports can come out months or a year after the console release, meaning most people who really wanted to play the game have already done so. The PC ports are also generally shoddy. The idea is "can we make this 360 program compile and run on a Windows machine" and they leave it at that.
Don't you people find gaming fun in maybe digging out some old titles and downloading a few new levels to play?
Yes I do, and so do many. However, I'm not going to say, "to hell with all gaming after 1995" just because my friends and I have fun with a few retro games at our LANs.
I don't get this online games thingie anyway. I play a lot of games and maybe it's an attention span thing but I *really* don't want to devote a fair proportion of my life to just *one* game like WoW or this new Star Wars game.
This Star Wars game isn't an MMO like World of Warcraft, so I don't quite know what you mean by this. There's a difference between paying 15 dollars a month to continue to play one game (WoW) and simply riding the hype train leading up to a game's release (this game). Riding the hype train can lead to cynicism due to broken promises, but it's fun while it lasts. Sometimes it's more fun than the actual game.
I don't mind taking my time finishing a game like HL2 because I've no reason to rush and I'm going to look pretty stupid as a fat middle-aged bloke going into my office and bragging to my workmates about how I'm so amazing for "getting past the tripods" before they did.
Yeah, you would. Good thing most gamers don't do that.
And then there's the endless copy-protection and DRM shit to contend with
I wouldn't know, I immediately install a crack for every game I buy after I buy it. They aren't hard to find. (=
It's very simple - a lot of games companies treat us like shit because far too many gamers have let them get away with it for far too long.
That's true, but I'm not sure what that has to do with this particular story.
Perhaps you should buy a couple of recently hyped games and see what the fuss is all about before passing judgement on this hobby and everyone who has it. Who knows, they might be more fun than you originally thought. (=
But if you're choosing a "profile, resolution, and quality," you could use Handbrake for free. It does all of those things. If you don't want to touch command line stuff, don't. Handbrake's GUI will generate it all for you. Plus it's open source.
I recently decided to reinstall Civ IV just to play a quick game. I came home from classes early in the afternoon, and the next thing I knew it was dark out. Every Civilization game since the first one I played (II) has been able to do this to me. It's crazy. No matter how much Sid Meier tinkers with the Civ formula, the result is always the same: once I click the icon, I kiss the rest of my day goodbye.
I don't think graphics are a problem. Yes, I know the graphics in Quake I, Diablo I, Red Alert I, and Half-Life I are "bad." But I love them nonetheless. Also, I have played NONE of those games before I was 17. I'm 19 now, so I haven't had too much time to get nostalgic over them.
The problem with really old games is CLUNKINESS. You know, how in the original Metroid Samus's beam gun only shoots two inches before the shot disappears? Or how Link's shield in the original Zelda only works against projectiles, and it's fickle at that? How about leaving games on all night because otherwise you need to start from the beginning?
I think everyone has a certain level of "clunk" that they are willing to tolerate. The things I listed above may be fine for others. Someone may get frustrated at my childhood favorites like Kirby Superstar, Sonic 2, or Civ II, for whatever reason.
I don't think there are really that many graphics whores out there. I do, however, think that there are people who are used to modern saving systems, matchmaking systems, control systems, etc. that make modern games feel more refined than their "classic" counterparts. Who knows, maybe in the future people won't understand why our online shooters had hitboxes, or why our online fighters lagged so much. Maybe it will seem weird that MMO's of today took cuts in detail to render large open spaces. Hell, maybe they will think it odd that we stored our games on discs instead of hard drives. As new generations come and go, the average level of tolerable clunkiness will move forward. Maybe someday Call of Duty 4 or World of Warcraft will be as old as some people would be willing to go.
And then old people will reminisce about the days when 360 and PS3 graphics were "next-gen."
I have both light-skinned and dark-skinned characters in Guild Wars. I'd say I regularly get called a noob regardless of skin color. )=
Things I anticipate doing once these 3 billion people are hooked up:
-Send the first goatse link
-Be the first to solicit cybersex
-and ask "a/s/l?"
-Degenerate various African languages into their equivalents of "AOLspeak."
-Accuse them of being teenage boys unless they "show pics"
-ATTN: Dear Sir/M, I am Mr. Johnathan Ashcroft. an Auditor of a BANK OF THE WASHINGTON, DC. (FCT). I have the courage to Crave indulgence for this important business believing that you will never let me down either now or in the future.
If you go by performance on the ACID tests, Webkit passes ACID1 and ACID2 (like all modern browsers including IE8 beta), and gets between 75-100 on ACID3, depending on whether it's Safari stable, Safari development, or Google Chrome. Firefox passes Acid1 and 2 and gets a 71/100 stable and an 85/100 development version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3
If we're basing engines purely on W3C standards support, there isn't enough difference to scrap either. Even getting a perfect on the Acid3 test won't imply complete compliance. Nobody's there yet. The best anybody can do is keep the rendering engines competing so they have a reason to improve.
I think there's some rose-colored glasses being donned, however. Even when I was a kid (very early 90's) I remember seeing plenty of Disney and movie tie-in games, sidescrolling beat-em ups, platformer mascot wannabes, tournament fighters, etc. Just because the genres have changed, the general idea has stayed the same: Successful genres will lead to clones and copycats. There used to be a lot of sci-fi and future-gladiator type shooters. That military style and squad-based shooters have become more popular only suggests a change in fashion, rather than a decline in innovation.
I was hoping for Jazzy $animal. I know what Jaunty means, but when hearing the sound of the word I think "jaundice." When I hear jazzy I think "awesome."
Have you ever considered that back in the 80's, people simply didn't have the technology to make affordable systems for handling today's 3d games? I'm willing to bet that if today's hardware was affordable commodity hardware in the 80's, you wouldn't be seeing ASCII. Good graphics have always been a selling point. It made the NES superior to Atari's consoles. It's what made Doom so popular (for the time, it was considered realistic), and the reason Myst devastated the adventure gaming genre.
Despite what you may think, we are not stuck in a world devoid of "clever" video games. Despite it's DRM, Spore certainly fits the bill. Mirror's Edge looks to be interesting, being a first person "runner" that makes you depend on your agility, not guns, to survive. Stardock's own Sins of a Solar Empire runs on modest hardware and provides an intriguing mix of RTS and Civilization in space. TellTale games has been reviving the adventure game genre with several of its own episodic series.
Heck, who said you had to stick with AAA titles? Try the shareware title "Hacker Evolution," a hacking sim that has you typing on a command line to steal money and gain unauthorized access to computers worldwide. There's stuff out there if you actually look.
An acquaintance gave me his stack of old Xbox 360 games. So downstairs, I have a stack of six modern-day military squad-based tactical shooters. PC is hardly the only platform that has clones. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, to a point.
Granted this is anecdotal, but on my home PC I've been using Google Chrome exclusively for a couple of days now and I really like it. It doesn't take several seconds to boot like Firefox has for a while now.
Performancewise, I compared my current Firefox window with ten tabs open (Slashdot, Kotaku, Penny Arcade, Google, Yahoo, CNN, Craigslist, Pokemon.com, Newegg, The Tech Report as test tabs) to Google Chrome with the same ten tabs. Firefox came out to 123MB, Chrome was 179 BUT Firefox was chugging as the 10 pages were loading (this was on an old single-core Athlon 64 with 512MB ram), while there was no slowdown whatsoever on Chrome on the same machine. Sure, don't use it if you only have 128MB of RAM, but at that point I don't think you should be using Firefox or Windows XP anyway.
The Javascript performance in both are pretty good, but Chrome's is slightly better. On Celtic Kane's Javascript speed test, Firefox 3 usually gets around 380ms and Chrome gets around 80-100 less.
http://celtickane.com/webdesign/jsspeed.php
Google Chrome lacks some of the polish and features that Firefox does (no built-in RSS reader is noticeable), but I really like the responsiveness and speed. For now I'll stick with Chrome and see what Firefox 3.1 and the new Chrome has to offer.
It's amazing what putting effort into making a distinguished soundtrack can do. Katamari Damacy was well worth listening to over and over. Long after the thrill of rolling over objects with a giant ball left me, it was still awesome just to hear the unique tracks that ranged from jazz to pop to electronica.
Also, I don't know if this was engineered, but I just really like hearing the chaos in TF2. It feels more lifelike to hear guns shooting and people yelling and gadgets beeping all at once. It certainly feels better than a bunch of lifeless avatars silently shooting at each other (like in most other shooters). I believe Call of Duty attempts this too with random gunshots in the background, but not as successfully.
I'm deathly afraid that I'll be carrying a Blackberry, being on call, and working 60 hour weeks without compensation when I graduate.
During my first internship I'd occasionally ask my coworkers how their weekend went. Often they'd say that they either spent Saturday or Sunday at work. I thought they were crazy. And then I started being pressured to work past my 9 to 5 schedule. I'd get chewed out because I left a problem unresolved when I went home at 5. I'd be the only person in the office that left after 8 hours of work. I never worked weekends. And yet my coworkers were always talking about how much they believed in this project. They believed in it so much that they were willing to do all this overtime. I was the pariah because I wanted to do something besides work!
Is this really my fate when I get to the workplace?
While I'd agree that more similar hardware would be good, do we really want "one console?" What if that one console forces an Xbox live-style subscription service? Then I don't have a choice. What about competition? They can charge whatever for their combined box because there's no alternative for that demographic. PC gaming? Too difficult (not true, but that's the general thought). The Wii2? Nintendo's focus isn't on the 360 and PS3 crowd anymore. If this happens, Sony/Microsoft can push whatever intrusive DRM and accessory forcing strategies they want, because there's no alternative.
What about developers? If there's no competition, sure it's easy development, but it also means that there's no competition for dev kits. They could make it so that only the EAs and Activisions of the world could afford dev kits, and that's simply the price to pay if you want to develop a game for the Xboxstation4.
I personally don't care if it's costing Microsoft and Sony billions to compete, because at least they're COMPETING. It would cost some people a hobby if they decided to collude.
The problem with that article (and many like it) is it compares PCs to ALL consoles and ALL portables, as opposed to the 360, PS3, Wii, DS, and PSP. Even when this is done, I doubt it's the biggest and that's fine. But if, as the parent of my first post suggests, that there have been 10 years worth of articles predicting that PC gaming is dying, maybe it isn't? Maybe it's up there with 2008 is the year of the Linux desktop and Apple is dying?
My main point about cracks was that many PC gamers aren't as worried about DRM as you might be led to believe. And sure, popping a disk into a console is easier than troubleshooting the myriad of PC issues. But there's a reason my friends and I are willing to troubleshoot for an hour or so at the beginning of every LAN--because we really enjoy PC games that much. DRM is just another issue to fix. If that's too much trouble for you, fine, today's consoles are pretty fun too.
I'm skeptical about the idea of PC gaming "dwindling." Right now I'm looking forward to Left 4 Dead, Diablo III, Starcraft II, Mirror's Edge, Spore, Dragon Age... If AAA titles really are becoming more scarce I'm not seeing it. Gears of War 2 not coming out for the PC does not pain me too much. Gears of War 1 PC came out long after people moved on. It's their own fault it didn't sell well. If it was going to be the same with Gears of War 2, then maybe they should just save their money instead.
When EA releases C&C games as freeware, they really mean it. Back during the "12th anniversary" celebration, they released the Command and Conquer Gold. It's still free a year later.
http://www.gamershell.com/news_41337.html
C&C Gold and RA look about the same graphicswise, and they both require a little bit of configuration on modern machines to run smoothly (to run with sound and arrow keys working properly), but it's worth it.
I take that back, I don't think PC gaming is dying at all. Nevertheless, there can't be a single story on any major tech or gaming news website that has anything to do with a PC game without there being comments about why PC games are dying.
You'd be surprised to find that many gamers don't care about DRM. Why? Because it's easily cracked. You can find No-CD cracks, SecuROM cracks, Starforce cracks, cracks that let you play LAN games on one CD key--at worst finding a crack requires perseverance, and at best it's a couple of clicks. There are even guides on how to crack SecuROM yourself, if you're interested. It's pretty easy when you have control over your system, unlike the 360 or PS3. I find it ironic that people bitch about DRM on the PC and decide that a completely closed system is a better idea. REALLY?
I have a 360, a DS, and a PC. I'm not a fanboy of any in particular, but my pet peeve is people who spread FUD about PC gaming.
On my pc now I play emulators, old games (thank you dosbox) and small, independent games. It's sad, but I'm probably going to play only the console version of Fallout III.
Okay.
Slashdot is now THE place to post anecdotes about penis size? =p
Scott McCloud is a comic book artist who authored "Zot!" He also wrote several comic books about comic books as a medium, the most famous of which being "Understanding Comics."
Curiously, he was born Scott McLeod, and the Highlander's last name was MacLeod, and he was Scottish. However, Scott McCloud was born in 1960, and the Highlander film was released in 1986, so if it's anything more than coincidence, the Highlander was named after the cartoonist.
But then again, isn't the possibility of a revival in the popularity of fighting games a good thing? Despite the pace and relative simplicity of Soul Calibur IV, it's the first "traditional" fighting game I've been able to get friends to willingly play in a long time.
Let these simplified fighters get eaten up as gateway drugs, and hopefully a new crop of "hardcore" fighting game fans will result.
Much as I hate it, I'd rather spend the money on a Comcast Business connection than worry about whether or not I'm getting close to some artificial cap.
Apparently Comcast made quite the shrewd business move just now.
Actually, if you have a possibly prime number N, you don't need to divide by every number from 1 to N to check whether it's prime.
A simple test is to test every odd from 1 to the square root of N. If 2 doesn't divide evenly into the number, then no other even number will. Also, if something can cleanly be factored out, it's not prime.
Wikipedia also suggests storing a list of primes to test first--If N can divide by any of those primes it is composite.
There are much better algorithms out there, but those are a few easy ways to speed up a primality test.