That's the biggest argument for not changing it, as I see it. When these artists created the work, the law said they would own copyright for 50 years. That was seen as 'good enough' to make them do it at the time.
Refusing to grant them more now is not going to 'unmake' it then.
Do you get the Casual achievement when you complete the level on Hardcore, or do you need to go back and play the game on the easy setting to get the extra points?
I'm honestly in no rush to get the game, as I already had two games with the machine when I bought it a little over a month ago, got a third last week, and a fourth (Oblivion, so that should take me a fair while!) shipped this morning.
But most people I know with the game are going straight in on Hardcore, and if they get two achievements per level rather than one, then that might go some way to explaining why the numbers are so high.
Blade Storm is a new Dynasty Warriors style game, and so likely to appeal to the Japanese, but Fatal Inertia is the latest attempt to do a WipEout clone. Those tend to mainly appeal to the European (and to a lesser extent US) market, where there are a whole bunch of 360s. So I can understand the multiplatform decision, and I don't think it'll gain Microsoft much foothold in Japan either.
Ah, fair enough then. I try to avoid ending up with too many stinkers, but when I traded in my XBox 1 and armfuls of games for my 360, I think I got more for the stuff than I would have through eBay.
It's been pretty much confirmed that a US console in the UK gets the US lineup, so I'd say it looks pretty likely.
I'd still want to hear from someone who was successful first, however. Not least because I'd want to know for sure that the Japanese service will accept a non-Japanese credit card to buy the games.
With XBox Live, you can just buy the points cards, so it's not a problem on that platform; I don't know how it works on the Wii yet.
As someone who has had the misfortune to work on a VAX, I can certainly confirm they drove me to violence more than once. Yuck.
Sure, they had their fans, and it all makes a certain logical sense once you're used to it, but from a UNIX background, they couldn't be more contrary if they tried.
Ah, I think I've failed to explain things properly again.
The 360 has a video scaler between the actual graphic display and the video output. Most games in the machine run at 1280x720, although the new dash is 1920x1080 I believe, and it's now an option for new games to run at 1920x1080 if they happen to be able to get away with it - most Live Arcade titles aren't throwing around anything like the graphic data that Gears Of War does, for instance. Then the video scaler turns that image into the resolution the machine is set to output, which could be 480i if you've not got a fancy TV, 720p, the 1360x768 I use to avoid a second round of scaling on my LCD panel, 1080p or whatever.
Conversely, the PS3 asks developers to include the different resolutions by hand. This means that they can pick appropriate bitmap fonts to avoid things like the headache 480i owners have when playing Dead Rising on the 360, sensibly-sized HUD info and so on. But it also means that if your game is only capable of 720p and not 1080i, TVs that only take the latter are reduced to playing at 480p, which is a bit of a kick in the teeth for people who bought CRT HDTVs.
Just a few updates for you; since both machines are moving targets they're not really 'corrections' exactly.
1) 1080p: Firstly, the 360 now does this since the fall dash update, so that's sorted. Secondly, the PS3 hasn't got a seperate scaler hardware in it, so it is up to the individual game to render at the resolution you want. Which means that games like Motorstorm, Assassin's Creed, Devil May Cry 3 and anything else that is only running 720p will require your display to cope with the change. Conversely, Resistance: Fall Of Man is only 852x480 or 1920x1080, and those of us with 720p screens have to play in standard-def.
2) H.264 is ok if you're streaming from Vista or Windows Media centre. Just not from the dash yet. Since the 360 is smoothly decoding 1920x1080 H.264 streams without skipped frames from the HD-DVD player already, it's probably just a dash update to do it there. If Microsoft want to, so I'm not holding my breath, I admit.
3) Personally, I think HD-DVD will beat Blu-Ray, but if it doesn't, Microsoft can just release another add-on drive.
I have to say that the poor formatting makes that look rather like a cut-and-paste job anyway, so I've probably just been trolled. Oh well.
Re:A review review: this review sucks
on
NY Times Review of PS3
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· Score: 4, Informative
The HDMI cable complaint is completely relevant. Sony have just spent the last year or more trying to persuade people that "only 1080p is True HD", "The next generation starts when we say it starts" and so on, hyping the fact that the PS3 is all about HD.
Then when you buy one you find that
a) it only comes with the same rubbish composite cable that the PS2 came with
b) Motorstorm and Devil May Cry 4 only run at 720p, in order to keep the framerate up
c) there is no internal scaler, so those of us with 720p TVs that can't take a 1080p signal can't even play the sole launch gem Resistance: Fall Of Man at 720p, and have to resort to standard def.
Added together, that's a pretty damning failure in their HD strategy.
No, it's just that they're trumpeting how wonderful dropping a laptop could be toward saving us from being submitted to any more of Joly's dire attempts at humour ever, ever again.
To be fair, I hit a similar problem with the new Nano - in order to get the box size down to that gorgeous tiny thing, there is no install CD in the package; you've got to go download the whole of iTunes and the iPod Updater from the Apple site before you can do a thing. Given that it was my not tech-heavy Grandfather with a dial-up connection, it sat on a shelf until we could get him a CD with it all on.
Sony's format had technical advantages over the other one, but cost a lot more, and took a long time to produce media that fully exploited the theoretical format (at first, the tapes were just too short).
Meanwhile, BluRay can in theory do 50Gb vs. HD-DVD's 30Gb, while in practice only holding 25Gb or less at the moment. Also, BluRay players are twice the price of HD-DVD players (Samsung's is $1000 or £950, vs. Toshiba's HD-DVD player at $500/£425).
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion looks bloody gorgeous, causes powerful PCs to faint, seems to take the average person north of 100 hours to get through all of, and is generally pretty packed with content whichever way you choose to measure that.
Yet there's a couple of gig spare space on the single DVD9.
So I'm not convinced it's a terminal crippling of the 360 yet.
Hell, if the announced PS3 online infrastructure sounded as good as the one I currently experience with my Live Silver account, I'd be more impressed, but Sony seem to think that including a web browser means never having to say "here is a way to compare high-scores with your friends, send them voice messages or check their progress with achievements".
Also, lets be honest about Sony's ability to build the things here.
If you can only afford the list price for the console and want Sony to release enough of them to supply demand, then _no-one_ would be getting a PS3 for Christmas.
Microsoft claim that you'll be able to use the $200 HD-DVD add-on drive as an external USB2 HD-DVD ROM for the PC. It turns up if you plug it in now, but the drivers aren't there yet, so we'll see.
Really? I could have sworn I played around with procedural textures in Bryce. But that was at least 8 years ago, when one of the mags had version 3 on a coverdisk.
Everything you say is reasonable, but you're arguing that the wholesale price of tunes should come down, not that it is anything other than 70 cents in the US currently. It's the latter that is the source of the argument.
That 5 cent sale from China is not an RIAA sale, what with the second A being for America. The RIAA itself (well, its members) have negotiated with Apple to sell tracks for 99 cents, and some of the Microsoft-based vendors for 79 cents. So they themselves are saying they should cost that much to buy in the US.
No, this is a financial and legal agreement. The question of how this affects any possible sequel is bound to come up, just as the question of ports to hardware that doesn't currently exist, Film rights and God only knows what else. Lawyers don't just ignore these things.
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That's the biggest argument for not changing it, as I see it. When these artists created the work, the law said they would own copyright for 50 years. That was seen as 'good enough' to make them do it at the time.
Refusing to grant them more now is not going to 'unmake' it then.
Do you get the Casual achievement when you complete the level on Hardcore, or do you need to go back and play the game on the easy setting to get the extra points?
I'm honestly in no rush to get the game, as I already had two games with the machine when I bought it a little over a month ago, got a third last week, and a fourth (Oblivion, so that should take me a fair while!) shipped this morning.
But most people I know with the game are going straight in on Hardcore, and if they get two achievements per level rather than one, then that might go some way to explaining why the numbers are so high.
Blade Storm is a new Dynasty Warriors style game, and so likely to appeal to the Japanese, but Fatal Inertia is the latest attempt to do a WipEout clone. Those tend to mainly appeal to the European (and to a lesser extent US) market, where there are a whole bunch of 360s. So I can understand the multiplatform decision, and I don't think it'll gain Microsoft much foothold in Japan either.
Ah, fair enough then. I try to avoid ending up with too many stinkers, but when I traded in my XBox 1 and armfuls of games for my 360, I think I got more for the stuff than I would have through eBay.
It's been pretty much confirmed that a US console in the UK gets the US lineup, so I'd say it looks pretty likely.
I'd still want to hear from someone who was successful first, however. Not least because I'd want to know for sure that the Japanese service will accept a non-Japanese credit card to buy the games.
With XBox Live, you can just buy the points cards, so it's not a problem on that platform; I don't know how it works on the Wii yet.
There's no other way to sell used games? That's sad. Hopefully, one day your country will have its very own branch of eBay, however.
As someone who has had the misfortune to work on a VAX, I can certainly confirm they drove me to violence more than once. Yuck.
Sure, they had their fans, and it all makes a certain logical sense once you're used to it, but from a UNIX background, they couldn't be more contrary if they tried.
Ah, I think I've failed to explain things properly again.
The 360 has a video scaler between the actual graphic display and the video output. Most games in the machine run at 1280x720, although the new dash is 1920x1080 I believe, and it's now an option for new games to run at 1920x1080 if they happen to be able to get away with it - most Live Arcade titles aren't throwing around anything like the graphic data that Gears Of War does, for instance. Then the video scaler turns that image into the resolution the machine is set to output, which could be 480i if you've not got a fancy TV, 720p, the 1360x768 I use to avoid a second round of scaling on my LCD panel, 1080p or whatever.
Conversely, the PS3 asks developers to include the different resolutions by hand. This means that they can pick appropriate bitmap fonts to avoid things like the headache 480i owners have when playing Dead Rising on the 360, sensibly-sized HUD info and so on. But it also means that if your game is only capable of 720p and not 1080i, TVs that only take the latter are reduced to playing at 480p, which is a bit of a kick in the teeth for people who bought CRT HDTVs.
Thanks for that - the guy I spoke to had it backwards.
Although the fact that it's yet another game on the 720p pile is its own concern...
Just a few updates for you; since both machines are moving targets they're not really 'corrections' exactly.
1) 1080p: Firstly, the 360 now does this since the fall dash update, so that's sorted. Secondly, the PS3 hasn't got a seperate scaler hardware in it, so it is up to the individual game to render at the resolution you want. Which means that games like Motorstorm, Assassin's Creed, Devil May Cry 3 and anything else that is only running 720p will require your display to cope with the change. Conversely, Resistance: Fall Of Man is only 852x480 or 1920x1080, and those of us with 720p screens have to play in standard-def.
2) H.264 is ok if you're streaming from Vista or Windows Media centre. Just not from the dash yet. Since the 360 is smoothly decoding 1920x1080 H.264 streams without skipped frames from the HD-DVD player already, it's probably just a dash update to do it there. If Microsoft want to, so I'm not holding my breath, I admit.
3) Personally, I think HD-DVD will beat Blu-Ray, but if it doesn't, Microsoft can just release another add-on drive.
I have to say that the poor formatting makes that look rather like a cut-and-paste job anyway, so I've probably just been trolled. Oh well.
The HDMI cable complaint is completely relevant. Sony have just spent the last year or more trying to persuade people that "only 1080p is True HD", "The next generation starts when we say it starts" and so on, hyping the fact that the PS3 is all about HD.
Then when you buy one you find that
a) it only comes with the same rubbish composite cable that the PS2 came with
b) Motorstorm and Devil May Cry 4 only run at 720p, in order to keep the framerate up
c) there is no internal scaler, so those of us with 720p TVs that can't take a 1080p signal can't even play the sole launch gem Resistance: Fall Of Man at 720p, and have to resort to standard def.
Added together, that's a pretty damning failure in their HD strategy.
No, it's just that they're trumpeting how wonderful dropping a laptop could be toward saving us from being submitted to any more of Joly's dire attempts at humour ever, ever again.
To be fair, I hit a similar problem with the new Nano - in order to get the box size down to that gorgeous tiny thing, there is no install CD in the package; you've got to go download the whole of iTunes and the iPod Updater from the Apple site before you can do a thing. Given that it was my not tech-heavy Grandfather with a dial-up connection, it sat on a shelf until we could get him a CD with it all on.
You might not read the AVS Forums, but most of the serious home theater nerds either do, or follow one of the blogs that reported the post.
In short, if you didn't hear, you probably don't particularly give a shit.
"Both cost the same" REALLY?
The cheapest standalone Blu-Ray player is $1000, or £950 if you're in the UK like me.
The cheapest standalone HD-DVD player is $500 or £430
The XBox 360 add-on is $200, or £130. The cheapest PS3 is $500, or will be £425 when it eventually turns up here next year.
That's quite extraordinarily wrong.
Sony's format had technical advantages over the other one, but cost a lot more, and took a long time to produce media that fully exploited the theoretical format (at first, the tapes were just too short).
Meanwhile, BluRay can in theory do 50Gb vs. HD-DVD's 30Gb, while in practice only holding 25Gb or less at the moment. Also, BluRay players are twice the price of HD-DVD players (Samsung's is $1000 or £950, vs. Toshiba's HD-DVD player at $500/£425).
Do you think history might repeat itself?
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion looks bloody gorgeous, causes powerful PCs to faint, seems to take the average person north of 100 hours to get through all of, and is generally pretty packed with content whichever way you choose to measure that.
Yet there's a couple of gig spare space on the single DVD9.
So I'm not convinced it's a terminal crippling of the 360 yet.
Hell, if the announced PS3 online infrastructure sounded as good as the one I currently experience with my Live Silver account, I'd be more impressed, but Sony seem to think that including a web browser means never having to say "here is a way to compare high-scores with your friends, send them voice messages or check their progress with achievements".
I _think_ they mean that it wants to be an iPod killer, but with slightly daft grammar.
Also, lets be honest about Sony's ability to build the things here.
If you can only afford the list price for the console and want Sony to release enough of them to supply demand, then _no-one_ would be getting a PS3 for Christmas.
Mind you, I live in Europe, so that seems normal.
Microsoft claim that you'll be able to use the $200 HD-DVD add-on drive as an external USB2 HD-DVD ROM for the PC. It turns up if you plug it in now, but the drivers aren't there yet, so we'll see.
Really? I could have sworn I played around with procedural textures in Bryce. But that was at least 8 years ago, when one of the mags had version 3 on a coverdisk.
Everything you say is reasonable, but you're arguing that the wholesale price of tunes should come down, not that it is anything other than 70 cents in the US currently. It's the latter that is the source of the argument.
That 5 cent sale from China is not an RIAA sale, what with the second A being for America. The RIAA itself (well, its members) have negotiated with Apple to sell tracks for 99 cents, and some of the Microsoft-based vendors for 79 cents. So they themselves are saying they should cost that much to buy in the US.
No, this is a financial and legal agreement. The question of how this affects any possible sequel is bound to come up, just as the question of ports to hardware that doesn't currently exist, Film rights and God only knows what else. Lawyers don't just ignore these things.