The problem is not Guns in Multiplayer - as you say, look at all those FPS games. The problem, as I see it, is that Gunfights don't map as well to a series of prebuilt animations in turn-based combat.
Everyone wants their MMO to basically be Everquest with a different tileset, and the camera doesn't suit the kind of long-range fighting that gun battles suggest. If I point at an enemy and click to shoot at it, I want to shoot at it, not have a bunch of stat monkeys decide whether my character is good enough to do so.
So the setup practically demands an FPS control instead of an RPG one, and then your nearest city descends into Lag Hell. Oops.
I, on the other hand, find that sort of thing really, really annoying in a game. I've actually ditched games in those situations, and gone to play something else.
The Getaway springs to mind - there's a bit where you have to kill an innocent British Telecom worker to steal his van. The character as I was playing him wouldn't do such a thing, but the GTA-style "freedom" the game offers has suddenly been reined in, and the game has decided that I'm not allowed to play any more, because I'm not doing things the way the designer has scripted it.
In games, you always have a choice. Even if the consequence of that choice is that the designer isn't going to let you play any more.
Except that, as a game, you'd quite likely seen Aeris die time after time already, and if you were upset at all, it was only because you'd wasted effort and had to reload again.
Killing her and not letting her come back, because that's what the story says, either didn't affect you very much, or if it did, it's the story doing that to you, not the gameplay.
I'd strongly recommend against using it for a conference room.
5% doesn't sound like much, but if there are ten people in the room, there's a 40% chance that at least one of them is going to get the almighty headache that accompanies staring at the rainbow effects for more than a minute or so.
If you have to go rear-projection, then Sony's 52" SXRD is very good value, and does 1920x1080, rather than the 1360x768 that the original questioner was worried about.
Incidentally, does anyone know the deal with returning box sets of DVDs if, several months after buying them, you discover that disc 6 of 7 doesn't play?
I've had this happen myself. It might be a pain in the backside to deal with it through the video store, but a swift call to the actual studio got a prompt response; they were happy to send a replacement disc by return of post.
Your 'problem' is that you're placing the washers in the bag. I had the same problem, until I realised that it all goes just fine if you throw the small items in with a fair bit of force.
The trick is to never buy anything that is both light and delicate.
PGR3 and Ridge Racer are the only titles that I'm interested in on the 360 that don't exist on the PC. And Oblivion is the only one that does, frankly - Battlefield 2 is better in the PC incarnation.
My PC isn't anywhere near as powerful as yours, however (I've still got a 9600 Pro in it), so I would buy Oblivion on the 360. Or at least, I would if I didn't go for the far cheaper option of buying Morrowind for a tenth of the price, and modding it until my poor little graphics card could barely cope.
The thing that will probably make me crumble is GT-R2, which is coming to the PC (the demo has just been released), but there's no way my machine is going to cope.
That's certainly one of the reasons I don't own one. I can't afford a HDTV right now (I can't afford to upgrade my TV at all; the current one is only two years old), and I don't see any point in buying a 360 until I can do it justice.
I thought that the XBox division lose a billion dollars every year, and always have? I'm sure I remember reading that last year. They've just had to write off a load of R&D money for the 360, we know they aren't making any profit on the physical hardware, and the sales figures for the original XBox have totally nosedived, so it's hardly surprising.
OK, UK Slashdot readers, here's the pitch. In order to buy a PS3, we'd like you to give us £150 now, and the remaining £275 when we actually have one in stock.
Breaking down the £425 cost into those numbers is about the dumbest thing they can do in the history of dumbness. Because you know what also costs £150? Yes, a Nintendo Wii. You know what costs £280 now (and knocking a fiver off before November isn't going to cause any pain)? Yes, an XBox 360 Premium pack.
The Wii + 360 plan has been mentioned by a few people who really like their games already. But when Sony themselves rub peoples' noses in it, they're really asking for trouble.
Katamari has a story - you're collecting things up to make new stars, after the King Of All Cosmos wrecked them. And then you've got the weird story about the kids going to see their Dad become an astronaut in the cutscenes.
You're right about the others, just as it's right to broaden this to virtually every sports or racing title.
On the other hand, my white PSP doesn't show nearly as many marks as my brother's black one. His black DS Lite is a fingerprint magnet, too. So you may well be just fine, and indeed better off with a while Lite.
Then you should speak to Quentin Tarantino and see if he wants to make you one. If he doesn't, then perhaps you should watch a film that more suits your sensibilities. If you won't respect the integrity of the artists, you don't deserve any respect yourself.
"Oh, and by the way, what does this say about DJ remixes?"
The studios will already rip you a new backside if you make your own remix of one of their records and then try to sell it for money. I think that remixing is a perfectly valid thing to do on an artistic level, but selling it for profit is illegal.
Even on the best players currently on show, the current BluRay discs don't look as good as the HD-DVDs on sale right now, because Sony have used poor, elderly masters to create MPEG2 encodes, rather than Warner and Universal's fresh masters and VC1 discs at higher bitrates.
So maybe the person buying the Toshiba wants some quality for their money. Or, hey, wants to own it now, rather than sometime next year when PS3 stock shortages clear.
Re:Al Queda, witches, devil worshippers, and gangs
on
Gangs on the Internet
·
· Score: 1
Does it make much difference if something was completely made-up out of thin air 50 or 100 years ago, or thousands of years ago?
Only if they then whine about how superior their religion is, because it's older and more traditional.
I've no problem with people having faith, only making demonstrably false claims. Christians striving to be good people, like their religion says they should be is a good thing. Fundamentalists telling me that I'm lying when I say that the fossil record doesn't support the idea of Man and Woman being brought to life at 9 AM on October the 23rd, 4004 BC is rather less good.
I'm sure that Microsoft can figure out how to get a good idea of what an honest person has spent at Apple's iTMS. But, without checking with Apple themselves, they're going to really struggle with any dishonest people, using either fake logs or other people's aac files.
At the very least, I usually try to "buy" Apple's free download of the week, because it's a nice free way to hear new music legally. Microsoft aren't going to be able to duplicate those without paying for them.
Oh, stuff it. You probably know you're making half the above up anyway, without bothering to actually read the fucking article.
Minter may not have finished and released a new game for a major format in years (rather than his pocket PC gems, which aren't a major format, and the 360's media player isn't really much of a game). But he's right. Sony's response to why we should hand over the equivalent cost of two X360 Cores for their machine is (i) Potential, and (ii) "customers would buy it even if we didn't release ANY games at launch".
Sorry, but you won't be getting Soil Association approval if you keep using Optrex on your factory-farmed newts.
Re:Al Queda, witches, devil worshippers, and gangs
on
Gangs on the Internet
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"long histories and complex traditions"? The Church of Satan dates back to April 30, 1966. That's oh so very long indeed.
While we're at it, every "pagan" I've ever met follows a fairly recently concocted hodgepodge of dozens of individual, mutually contradictory bits of pre-Christian religions, along with a healthy dose of made-up nonsense. "Wicca" dates back to the 1920s, at best.
Every file has its own hash, yes. However, because the encryption key is different for each customer (the whole point of DRM), every file has its OWN hash, and Microsoft doesn't know yours.
I don't know about the whole library, but if all of you could spoof the tracks that we get paid for each and every sale of a few million times, that would be great, yeah.
I'm terribly sorry, I must have missed the announcement that Apple had decided to let Microsoft have unrestricted to my personal data in their database to confirm whether I have bought a track from iTMS, just so they can sell a competing product.
What, you mean Microsoft are going to use some other, less reliable method to determine if we own the rights to a.m4p track? Ooh, goody. This isn't going to be easy to exploit and persuade MS to pay for 1000s of copies of tracks my fave bands make money on _at all_.
MSFT software may not be enforced, but this appears to be like the Napster rental scheme, where the software locks you out of your music once the subscription expires.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not Guns in Multiplayer - as you say, look at all those FPS games. The problem, as I see it, is that Gunfights don't map as well to a series of prebuilt animations in turn-based combat.
Everyone wants their MMO to basically be Everquest with a different tileset, and the camera doesn't suit the kind of long-range fighting that gun battles suggest. If I point at an enemy and click to shoot at it, I want to shoot at it, not have a bunch of stat monkeys decide whether my character is good enough to do so.
So the setup practically demands an FPS control instead of an RPG one, and then your nearest city descends into Lag Hell. Oops.
I, on the other hand, find that sort of thing really, really annoying in a game. I've actually ditched games in those situations, and gone to play something else.
The Getaway springs to mind - there's a bit where you have to kill an innocent British Telecom worker to steal his van. The character as I was playing him wouldn't do such a thing, but the GTA-style "freedom" the game offers has suddenly been reined in, and the game has decided that I'm not allowed to play any more, because I'm not doing things the way the designer has scripted it.
In games, you always have a choice. Even if the consequence of that choice is that the designer isn't going to let you play any more.
Except that, as a game, you'd quite likely seen Aeris die time after time already, and if you were upset at all, it was only because you'd wasted effort and had to reload again.
Killing her and not letting her come back, because that's what the story says, either didn't affect you very much, or if it did, it's the story doing that to you, not the gameplay.
I'd strongly recommend against using it for a conference room.
5% doesn't sound like much, but if there are ten people in the room, there's a 40% chance that at least one of them is going to get the almighty headache that accompanies staring at the rainbow effects for more than a minute or so.
If you have to go rear-projection, then Sony's 52" SXRD is very good value, and does 1920x1080, rather than the 1360x768 that the original questioner was worried about.
I've had this happen myself. It might be a pain in the backside to deal with it through the video store, but a swift call to the actual studio got a prompt response; they were happy to send a replacement disc by return of post.
Your 'problem' is that you're placing the washers in the bag. I had the same problem, until I realised that it all goes just fine if you throw the small items in with a fair bit of force.
The trick is to never buy anything that is both light and delicate.
PGR3 and Ridge Racer are the only titles that I'm interested in on the 360 that don't exist on the PC. And Oblivion is the only one that does, frankly - Battlefield 2 is better in the PC incarnation.
My PC isn't anywhere near as powerful as yours, however (I've still got a 9600 Pro in it), so I would buy Oblivion on the 360. Or at least, I would if I didn't go for the far cheaper option of buying Morrowind for a tenth of the price, and modding it until my poor little graphics card could barely cope.
The thing that will probably make me crumble is GT-R2, which is coming to the PC (the demo has just been released), but there's no way my machine is going to cope.
That's certainly one of the reasons I don't own one. I can't afford a HDTV right now (I can't afford to upgrade my TV at all; the current one is only two years old), and I don't see any point in buying a 360 until I can do it justice.
I thought that the XBox division lose a billion dollars every year, and always have? I'm sure I remember reading that last year. They've just had to write off a load of R&D money for the 360, we know they aren't making any profit on the physical hardware, and the sales figures for the original XBox have totally nosedived, so it's hardly surprising.
OK, UK Slashdot readers, here's the pitch. In order to buy a PS3, we'd like you to give us £150 now, and the remaining £275 when we actually have one in stock.
Breaking down the £425 cost into those numbers is about the dumbest thing they can do in the history of dumbness. Because you know what also costs £150? Yes, a Nintendo Wii. You know what costs £280 now (and knocking a fiver off before November isn't going to cause any pain)? Yes, an XBox 360 Premium pack.
The Wii + 360 plan has been mentioned by a few people who really like their games already. But when Sony themselves rub peoples' noses in it, they're really asking for trouble.
Katamari has a story - you're collecting things up to make new stars, after the King Of All Cosmos wrecked them. And then you've got the weird story about the kids going to see their Dad become an astronaut in the cutscenes.
You're right about the others, just as it's right to broaden this to virtually every sports or racing title.
On the other hand, my white PSP doesn't show nearly as many marks as my brother's black one. His black DS Lite is a fingerprint magnet, too. So you may well be just fine, and indeed better off with a while Lite.
Then you should speak to Quentin Tarantino and see if he wants to make you one. If he doesn't, then perhaps you should watch a film that more suits your sensibilities. If you won't respect the integrity of the artists, you don't deserve any respect yourself.
"Oh, and by the way, what does this say about DJ remixes?"
The studios will already rip you a new backside if you make your own remix of one of their records and then try to sell it for money. I think that remixing is a perfectly valid thing to do on an artistic level, but selling it for profit is illegal.
Even on the best players currently on show, the current BluRay discs don't look as good as the HD-DVDs on sale right now, because Sony have used poor, elderly masters to create MPEG2 encodes, rather than Warner and Universal's fresh masters and VC1 discs at higher bitrates.
So maybe the person buying the Toshiba wants some quality for their money. Or, hey, wants to own it now, rather than sometime next year when PS3 stock shortages clear.
Only if they then whine about how superior their religion is, because it's older and more traditional.
I've no problem with people having faith, only making demonstrably false claims. Christians striving to be good people, like their religion says they should be is a good thing. Fundamentalists telling me that I'm lying when I say that the fossil record doesn't support the idea of Man and Woman being brought to life at 9 AM on October the 23rd, 4004 BC is rather less good.
I'm sure that Microsoft can figure out how to get a good idea of what an honest person has spent at Apple's iTMS. But, without checking with Apple themselves, they're going to really struggle with any dishonest people, using either fake logs or other people's aac files.
At the very least, I usually try to "buy" Apple's free download of the week, because it's a nice free way to hear new music legally. Microsoft aren't going to be able to duplicate those without paying for them.
Where to start...
Oh, stuff it. You probably know you're making half the above up anyway, without bothering to actually read the fucking article.
Minter may not have finished and released a new game for a major format in years (rather than his pocket PC gems, which aren't a major format, and the 360's media player isn't really much of a game). But he's right. Sony's response to why we should hand over the equivalent cost of two X360 Cores for their machine is (i) Potential, and (ii) "customers would buy it even if we didn't release ANY games at launch".
Sounds like arrogance to me.
Sorry, but you won't be getting Soil Association approval if you keep using Optrex on your factory-farmed newts.
"long histories and complex traditions"? The Church of Satan dates back to April 30, 1966. That's oh so very long indeed.
While we're at it, every "pagan" I've ever met follows a fairly recently concocted hodgepodge of dozens of individual, mutually contradictory bits of pre-Christian religions, along with a healthy dose of made-up nonsense. "Wicca" dates back to the 1920s, at best.
So yeah, I look down on it.
Every file has its own hash, yes. However, because the encryption key is different for each customer (the whole point of DRM), every file has its OWN hash, and Microsoft doesn't know yours.
"First of all, no one wants to download WMV formatted songs from even if they are free. ;)"
That rather depends on whether your goal is a free WMV formatted song, or $0.79 of Microsoft's cash, wouldn't you say?
I don't know about the whole library, but if all of you could spoof the tracks that we get paid for each and every sale of a few million times, that would be great, yeah.
I'm terribly sorry, I must have missed the announcement that Apple had decided to let Microsoft have unrestricted to my personal data in their database to confirm whether I have bought a track from iTMS, just so they can sell a competing product.
.m4p track? Ooh, goody. This isn't going to be easy to exploit and persuade MS to pay for 1000s of copies of tracks my fave bands make money on _at all_.
What, you mean Microsoft are going to use some other, less reliable method to determine if we own the rights to a
MSFT software may not be enforced, but this appears to be like the Napster rental scheme, where the software locks you out of your music once the subscription expires.