Well, to give IBM its due I can kind of see the point of it all. As things stand there are plenty of discs out there that come packed with enforced trailers for other movies, just like VHS tapes did (although we could fast-forward those, thank God). Putting in a disc released 10 years ago and seeing a trailer for some ancient piece of junk is considerably less useful to the studio, and no more useful to me, than seeing a trailer for a brand new piece of junk.
The "enforced" bit is really the only annoying one.
This just happened to me for the first time last week. The "Home Delivery Network" didn't even offer driving 90 minutes each way to go pick it up; I had to take a day off work. Then another, because they didn't bother the first time.
Needless to say, I won't be getting anything delivered to home from Amazon ever again.
Wheras to this non-fan I know KISS did the song for Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, and that's it. I don't remember 70s music much, as I was born in them. I've been told that they're famous, and wore amusing costumes, but I genuinely couldn't tell you of another tune. Have they even released a bad record in the last decade, let alone a good one? He's squarely filed in the niche called "retro".
Also, you can only buy my right to vote in a particular country. For $1 million, I'd happily move to Canada. And then, once I've naturalised, vote there.
Hey, you're the American, I'm certainly not going to tell you how you should feel about your own nation. But over here in the UK we (certainly I) never quite grasped why people in the US got quite so upset at the public suggestion that their administration could do anything wrong.
Maybe it's a side-effect of us still having an actual Royal Family (who most people aren't even that deferent to anyway), but we just don't have that attitude toward our political leaders, and find it all rather alien.
Plus, probably thanks to being (a) too young to have paid attention at the time, and (b) not having UK troops anywhere near the damn thing, I regard the stand-up battle between two sets of troops that took place in Vietnam somewhat differently to the random bombing of ostensibly peace-keeping troops in Iraq. If Penn were proudly showing off some IEDs purely designed to kill and maim innocent people who weren't actively trying to kill the owner I'd be pretty damn annoyed with him, too.
Lindh is a fucking treasonous cunt. Fonda was an stupid moron whose attempts to remind the American nation that the "gooks" were actually native citizens of the country they were blowing the shit out of and human beings were incredibly naive and exploited. But I certainly grant you that she's not exactly in the same game, let alone the same league as Felt.
If you've got the time and money though, and don't end up doing anything stupid, then reminding the more hawkish elements in the US Government that Iran is a soverign nation that (unlike our best pals the Saudis) haven't been caught with loads of their citizens acting as insurgents in Iraq might actually not be that bad an idea.
If it wasn't the presence of Lindh on the list, I'd have thought that was the grandparent's point - all Fonda and the Wiretap leaker did was stand up and point out that Government policy was unethical, just like this leaker has done.
Ahh, I didn't think of that, just trying to get it working under WMP. Ideally, I'd want an executable that will run straight from my iPod, so I don't need to install anything. But the only way that springs to mind for that is running it from a Knoppix CD, and then I've not got the ability to place the file on another one.
Does your HDTV not have a VGA input? Does your laptop not have a DVI output (I'm assuming you can at least afford a DVI-HDMI dongle; they're only a couple of quid)?
My rather more expensive problem is not having a laptop of my own, just my wife's work one which they aren't too keen on my filling with codec packs. So I'll be using the 360 and DVD player to get my video files to the HDTV for now.
"Wii minus the wiimote would be a nice thing though."
Yes, it's called a Gamecube, and should be in the second-hand section of your local games store for a pittance. Worth every one of the small number of pennies it'll cost you, as long as you pick up Metroid Prime, Pikmin, Mario Sunshine, Ikaruga, F-Zero GX, Super Monkey Ball and/or Resident Evil 4 at the same time.
I still love my Cube, and have no real need to pick up a Wii until they're readily available and a bit cheaper - I've got a 360 as well for when I want graphical sheen and online stuff.
I've got one as well, and while I use DVD+RW instead of a flash drive (it doesn't like my iPod as a drive), I find the framerate can be a bit stuttery. Transcode360 and the 360 media centre gives much nicer-looking results.
When it works - Transcode360 is flaky and annoying on Vista. Which is why I'm looking forward to the 360 playing divx/xvid natively.
I'm a little bit miffed after spending 800 points on it, then the additional money on both expansions, yes. Although all of it has been worth every penny really; it's a brilliant game made even better by those extras.
But I thought I'd try out a Ranked Match for the very first time, last night - not a single opponent. So widening the pool of opposition sounds like a great idea.
Here in the UK, it's £15, rather than £6 for the 360 version. Which is only 2.5 times. Oops.
Still, my main point is that I've spent the points for both 360 games already, so that's gone. When deciding which of the two games to get in physical versions, Catan is definitely the more sensible option - Carcassonne is improved by getting the console to deal with all the rule-following stuff, while Catan is hindered by the lack of local multiplayer.
Still, I'm sure I'll end up with Carcassonne at some point.
The problem I have as a 360 owner with both games on there is that there are obvious reasons to go spend money on the 'real' version of Catan - the computer one won't let you play multiplayer with a single machine. But Carcassonne runs just fine gathered around the telly, and totting up the scores is rather tedious thanks to farms and the like so getting the XBox to do it for you is handy. So I'm not sure I can be bothered to spend three times the money on the board version as well.
Probably the most notable internet version is the one on XBox Live Arcade. It's certainly through being able to play that one for a mere £6 or whatever that has got me hooked enough to spend £25 on the 'real thing' for tactile niceness and local multiplayer (the 360 game is one per machine, to avoid the whole issue of hiding each others' cards).
That's not what it's saying at all, though. There's a world of difference between being found the loser at the end of the game, and spending the last hour of it twiddling your thumbs while the rest of the players continue to duke it out.
But then, some people prefer to play Counter-Strike than Team Fortress, so go figure.
Some games do sensibly realise this. The default save routines that you get for 'free' in the SDK offer the choice, and it's these that you're seeing - not every dev wants to write their own instead.
I thought UT3 was back until after Christmas, or at least moved into a very uncertain "we'd love to have it done before Christmas, but who really knows if we'll manage that?" zone. But hey, there's Haze, still.
Really, it's not a question of either medium's abilities, but one of perceived audience. As has been described elsewhere, passing both fancypants SACD and DVD-A stereo recordings and indeed 96/24 recordings from vinyl through a 44.1/16 filter produces a sound that A/B testing can't tell the difference from. Hell, I discovered this myself years ago when I started recording 12" singles to CD.
But if CD can sound as good as an overpriced SACD, why doesn't it? Because the engineer is told not to. There is a perception that they won't be told to for the vinyl pressing, because Vinyl Nerds don't just rip the disc to their iPod and play it back in the car.
It's something of a generalization, before you get too carried away. But there are indeed many titles where the US rights are owned by a BluRay-exclusive company, but the European or Japanese rights are with a HD-DVD one. Fantastic Four, Total Recall, Terminator 2, Equilibrium all spring to mind as popular ones to send to our US friends.
The point, the real point here is CDs are horribly mastered these days. If you could grab the high-quality SACD or DVD-A stream and convert that to PCM 44.1/16, that sounds as good, to every ear that has been tested.
Little correction - actually, despite pulling this on the PC release, the 360 version has no region locking whatsoever. Many other games do, but The Orange Box isn't one of them.
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Well, to give IBM its due I can kind of see the point of it all. As things stand there are plenty of discs out there that come packed with enforced trailers for other movies, just like VHS tapes did (although we could fast-forward those, thank God). Putting in a disc released 10 years ago and seeing a trailer for some ancient piece of junk is considerably less useful to the studio, and no more useful to me, than seeing a trailer for a brand new piece of junk.
The "enforced" bit is really the only annoying one.
If I remember Patent 101 correctly, your patent is specifically limited to the claims you make.
So this one only covers Digital Versatile Discs. Not HD-DVD, not BluRay, not any theoretical third HD media format.
Hands up, everyone who wants to go out and buy a whole new DVD player, because you don't already have one in the house? Really?
This just happened to me for the first time last week. The "Home Delivery Network" didn't even offer driving 90 minutes each way to go pick it up; I had to take a day off work. Then another, because they didn't bother the first time.
Needless to say, I won't be getting anything delivered to home from Amazon ever again.
Wheras to this non-fan I know KISS did the song for Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, and that's it. I don't remember 70s music much, as I was born in them. I've been told that they're famous, and wore amusing costumes, but I genuinely couldn't tell you of another tune. Have they even released a bad record in the last decade, let alone a good one? He's squarely filed in the niche called "retro".
Also, you can only buy my right to vote in a particular country. For $1 million, I'd happily move to Canada. And then, once I've naturalised, vote there.
Hey, you're the American, I'm certainly not going to tell you how you should feel about your own nation. But over here in the UK we (certainly I) never quite grasped why people in the US got quite so upset at the public suggestion that their administration could do anything wrong.
Maybe it's a side-effect of us still having an actual Royal Family (who most people aren't even that deferent to anyway), but we just don't have that attitude toward our political leaders, and find it all rather alien.
Plus, probably thanks to being (a) too young to have paid attention at the time, and (b) not having UK troops anywhere near the damn thing, I regard the stand-up battle between two sets of troops that took place in Vietnam somewhat differently to the random bombing of ostensibly peace-keeping troops in Iraq. If Penn were proudly showing off some IEDs purely designed to kill and maim innocent people who weren't actively trying to kill the owner I'd be pretty damn annoyed with him, too.
Lindh is a fucking treasonous cunt. Fonda was an stupid moron whose attempts to remind the American nation that the "gooks" were actually native citizens of the country they were blowing the shit out of and human beings were incredibly naive and exploited. But I certainly grant you that she's not exactly in the same game, let alone the same league as Felt.
If you've got the time and money though, and don't end up doing anything stupid, then reminding the more hawkish elements in the US Government that Iran is a soverign nation that (unlike our best pals the Saudis) haven't been caught with loads of their citizens acting as insurgents in Iraq might actually not be that bad an idea.
If it wasn't the presence of Lindh on the list, I'd have thought that was the grandparent's point - all Fonda and the Wiretap leaker did was stand up and point out that Government policy was unethical, just like this leaker has done.
Ahh, I didn't think of that, just trying to get it working under WMP. Ideally, I'd want an executable that will run straight from my iPod, so I don't need to install anything. But the only way that springs to mind for that is running it from a Knoppix CD, and then I've not got the ability to place the file on another one.
Does your HDTV not have a VGA input? Does your laptop not have a DVI output (I'm assuming you can at least afford a DVI-HDMI dongle; they're only a couple of quid)?
My rather more expensive problem is not having a laptop of my own, just my wife's work one which they aren't too keen on my filling with codec packs. So I'll be using the 360 and DVD player to get my video files to the HDTV for now.
"Wii minus the wiimote would be a nice thing though."
Yes, it's called a Gamecube, and should be in the second-hand section of your local games store for a pittance. Worth every one of the small number of pennies it'll cost you, as long as you pick up Metroid Prime, Pikmin, Mario Sunshine, Ikaruga, F-Zero GX, Super Monkey Ball and/or Resident Evil 4 at the same time.
I still love my Cube, and have no real need to pick up a Wii until they're readily available and a bit cheaper - I've got a 360 as well for when I want graphical sheen and online stuff.
I've got one as well, and while I use DVD+RW instead of a flash drive (it doesn't like my iPod as a drive), I find the framerate can be a bit stuttery. Transcode360 and the 360 media centre gives much nicer-looking results.
When it works - Transcode360 is flaky and annoying on Vista. Which is why I'm looking forward to the 360 playing divx/xvid natively.
.avi containers will hold ac3, yes - the problem is that .m4v containers won't. And that's what the 360 is looking to find an H.264 video stream in.
I'm a little bit miffed after spending 800 points on it, then the additional money on both expansions, yes. Although all of it has been worth every penny really; it's a brilliant game made even better by those extras.
But I thought I'd try out a Ranked Match for the very first time, last night - not a single opponent. So widening the pool of opposition sounds like a great idea.
Here in the UK, it's £15, rather than £6 for the 360 version. Which is only 2.5 times. Oops.
Still, my main point is that I've spent the points for both 360 games already, so that's gone. When deciding which of the two games to get in physical versions, Catan is definitely the more sensible option - Carcassonne is improved by getting the console to deal with all the rule-following stuff, while Catan is hindered by the lack of local multiplayer.
Still, I'm sure I'll end up with Carcassonne at some point.
The problem I have as a 360 owner with both games on there is that there are obvious reasons to go spend money on the 'real' version of Catan - the computer one won't let you play multiplayer with a single machine. But Carcassonne runs just fine gathered around the telly, and totting up the scores is rather tedious thanks to farms and the like so getting the XBox to do it for you is handy. So I'm not sure I can be bothered to spend three times the money on the board version as well.
Probably the most notable internet version is the one on XBox Live Arcade. It's certainly through being able to play that one for a mere £6 or whatever that has got me hooked enough to spend £25 on the 'real thing' for tactile niceness and local multiplayer (the 360 game is one per machine, to avoid the whole issue of hiding each others' cards).
That's not what it's saying at all, though. There's a world of difference between being found the loser at the end of the game, and spending the last hour of it twiddling your thumbs while the rest of the players continue to duke it out.
But then, some people prefer to play Counter-Strike than Team Fortress, so go figure.
Some games do sensibly realise this. The default save routines that you get for 'free' in the SDK offer the choice, and it's these that you're seeing - not every dev wants to write their own instead.
I thought UT3 was back until after Christmas, or at least moved into a very uncertain "we'd love to have it done before Christmas, but who really knows if we'll manage that?" zone. But hey, there's Haze, still.
Really, it's not a question of either medium's abilities, but one of perceived audience. As has been described elsewhere, passing both fancypants SACD and DVD-A stereo recordings and indeed 96/24 recordings from vinyl through a 44.1/16 filter produces a sound that A/B testing can't tell the difference from. Hell, I discovered this myself years ago when I started recording 12" singles to CD.
But if CD can sound as good as an overpriced SACD, why doesn't it? Because the engineer is told not to. There is a perception that they won't be told to for the vinyl pressing, because Vinyl Nerds don't just rip the disc to their iPod and play it back in the car.
It's something of a generalization, before you get too carried away. But there are indeed many titles where the US rights are owned by a BluRay-exclusive company, but the European or Japanese rights are with a HD-DVD one. Fantastic Four, Total Recall, Terminator 2, Equilibrium all spring to mind as popular ones to send to our US friends.
The point, the real point here is CDs are horribly mastered these days. If you could grab the high-quality SACD or DVD-A stream and convert that to PCM 44.1/16, that sounds as good, to every ear that has been tested.
Yeah, but I'd be constantly confusing him with Tom Robinson if he hadn't used a made-up surname.
It took long enough to keep Andy Bell from Erasure and Andy Bell from Ride seperate.
Little correction - actually, despite pulling this on the PC release, the 360 version has no region locking whatsoever. Many other games do, but The Orange Box isn't one of them.