"This creative product is lost forever. Many of our greatest performers took years to catch on before their careers took off. In today's world, those performers are being cut before they have a chance to delight fans and realize their own dreams"
Err, did I just miss something? This is all their own fault, or concentrating entirely on the teen market and dropping any acts that don't sell at least 1.5 million with their debut. Them not nurturing talent is hardly filesharer's fault.
Their whole bloody argument is that filesharers aren't buying lots of albums (debatable, I know). So what does that have to do with the idea that bands not selling lots of albums aren't around any more?
I can't believe you're referencing TMNT2 rather than Time Bandits. Still, you could have referenced his role as Cal's hired heavy in Titanic, for maximum embarrassment points (oops).
David Warner rules! One of the greatest 'its that guy' actors of all time.
Serves you right for being able to do anything at home right before going snowboarding:(
OK, I'm just jealous because I won't be seeing powder for another 18 months or so. But then I'm still at the point where I'm far too busy paying attention to the slopes to listen to tunes at the same time, so it doesn't technically matter anyway.
I might as well, but these bundles aren't aimed at us. Nintendo's market with these packs is the NES-obsessed collector or retro-fan; the game-per-cart method allows them to go to town on the packaging, which is an important part of why they are doing this. Its not really aimed at those that just want to play a bunch of old games.
Firstly, let's not forget that EVERY game gets mixed reviews - Stuart Campbell thinks its still great, for one.
Secondly, its not nostalgia if you didn't play it first time round.
Thirdly, do people really expect every old game to be good? I merely hope that the ones that were great still are, and that seems a lot to ask sometimes.
But this game was a PS1 title, under 10 years old. Is that even old enough to be 'retro'? Is it considered irredeemably nostalgic to buy a DVD of SE7EN or Heat now?
Yeah, Wizball was relatively sensible gameplay under its mad exterior.
Shoot stuff. Stuff drops ink, with different colours from different enemies. Pick up the ink. Once you've got enough of any one colour, you can use it to fill one of the background colours of a level (there were three, I think, per level to do). But the level with the right colour isn't necessarily the level where you need to use it, so you have to switch back and forth between them by diving through the wells.
Great game, I thought, though because there were stacks of powerups to pick up, the game was most difficult by far early on, and cleaning up the last few levels was really simple.
The problem, however, is that its basically a wrapper for the fact that Microsoft apps have gone with the design decision of always having a seperate window and seperate instance for each document open in an app.
Whether its Tabbed Browsing in Firefox or multiple files open in PFE, your 3rd party apps already support grouping all your documents in a particular program under the one taskbar item. This is really Microsoft's way of doing the same for their apps that need loads of seperate windows, without the flexibility of manually running (for example) three Firefox windows with a couple of tabs in each for seperate groups of pages.
Really? Sounds cool - I'm always up for some highscore/laptime gaming. Thanks!
Just after I posted I remembered the thing about Spidey being a secret Tony Hawk character, but I didn't realise there would be gameplay connections still.
While I find ATRAC to be the nicest sounding compressed format by a long, long margin (speaking as an owner of several minidisc players), I will agree that there is a big, big problem with this; Sony's SonicStage software which you have to use for it is the most horrible DRM-heavy piece of rubbish I've ever had to deal with for this sort of thing.
iPod or iRiver for me, and just put up with the fact that I can't get quite as much on in a lossless format.
Since the game involves neither skateboards nor memorising streams of button combinations to pull high-scoring tricks, what does it have to do with the Tony Hawk games? Writing 'a catchy, replayable game' without using the strange reference would have been less weird.
The problem with Driver 3 (that 3 in the middle of the word thing was mildly cool when wip3out did it, but that was the last time) isn't that its a crap game from start to finish. If it was simply rubbish, there wouldn't be all this discussion.
The really galling thing is that there is a rather funky game under there, but the rush-job coding has made it a horribly depressing job to find. Its buggy, the framerate is erratic, and the pop-up in some sections is unforgiveable - try jumping onto an empty rooftop only to find that you're only then close enough to see the four gun-toting goons ready to kill you, for instance. The dodgy framerate makes the car handling rather uneasy as well.
So the 3 is for a game that is really a good idea, just horribly unfinished and badly executed. For a 2 or 1, the best implementation in the world wouldn't save a bad game design.
As someone with an Edge subscription already, its a touch weird seeing the Making Of articles appear a couple of weeks after reading them on paper. I sort of wish they wouldn't do it, as without the gorgeous artwork it just looks wrong.
Still, I understand its a nightmare for you US people to get hold of the mag, so for you lot its better than nothing.
I'm not saying that students shouldn't be able to have a box that nice, merely that listing it as a minimum, when so many people have boxes well below that spec and so don't really need to upgrade to do their work is a blatant abuse of power to promote buying a new Dell or Apple unnecessarily.
P.S. the game stores the textures for it in real memory as well - otherwise the game wouldn't run at all on my poor 'little' 64Mb card, when total texture data for a level is far above that.
Since when did Farcry's texture memory requirements affect how much memory was needed to do college work?
The original poster's point was that the specs read like someone's idea of what made a nice machine, not what should be regarded as the minimum to get a connection working.
I thoroughly agree that 1Gb of memory is a Nice Thing to have when your UT2K4 map is being slow, but if you're just writing essays its overkill.
Unfortunately, that is pretty much exactly what these watermarks are.
Undetectable my arse; these are very large black spots on several frames of the print, in different braille-style configurations for each print sent out. Very, very annoying when you're watching the film; I find them so irritating that I rarely bother going to the cinema since they started this. I'd rather wait for the DVD, as the picture quality is better.
I don't know about the VERY beginning; I kinda missed his early R&S stuff. But you're right that as soon as Warp got him he became part and parcel of the whole Designers Republic, "Artificial Intelligence" club. Its an image, sure enough - I remember hunting ravenously for anything in the mystical purple sleeves at that time.
But I've no problem with that, really; if no-one got promotion, I wouldn't hear about them. Its up to me to decide if I actually like what I hear, though, which is why I don't believe this whole anonymous peer-to-peer thing really helps bands that much; unless you actually hear about a band, probably through more traditional channels, you're not going to even try listening to them.
So in your first paragraph your problem is that there isn't enough innovation in music.
And in the second, you're blaming the fact that they don't make music in exactly the same way they did 30 years ago, before Punk killed that horrible junk.
You think $20 for shipping was bad? The shipping to the UK costs as much as the stick itself.
Fortunately, I got an opportunity to try one first, and hated it anyway - the stick is far too stiff. I much prefer my Hori Soul Calibur II stick (note that its a completely different beast to that nightmare of a crap thing the US multi-platform SCII stick was).
Basically, pretty much all US sticks are too stiff for playing fighters with; you need Japanese sticks to get the best feel.
Firstly, there is non-NFL licensed Gridiron to be developed; college football, or just games without a license. I know no-one who would even consider buying the EA FIFA-licensed 'soccer' (as you Americans so quaintly refer to it) game when the unlicensed ISS Pro Evolution is ten times better.
But more generally, good game coding is good game coding. I don't think, even if all non-EA Gridiron games are cancelled for the next four years, that the teams are incapable of working on other games, and the basics of the engines are pretty similiar from one team sport to the next - Rugby games are practically identical apart from some model and rule changes.
Madden is already the biggest selling NFL title. Even assuming that this manages to persuade every single current purchaser of a non-EA NFL game to switch, and furthermore that none of those customers currently buy the EA game as well, that can't be close to $250M a year.
The top selling PS2 game of an average month (from NPD released stats, not including the big December) seems to only take in about $20M, and both EB and EA will want at least some slice of that too.
Slashdot Mirror
"This creative product is lost forever. Many of our greatest performers took years to catch on before their careers took off. In today's world, those performers are being cut before they have a chance to delight fans and realize their own dreams"
Err, did I just miss something? This is all their own fault, or concentrating entirely on the teen market and dropping any acts that don't sell at least 1.5 million with their debut. Them not nurturing talent is hardly filesharer's fault.
Their whole bloody argument is that filesharers aren't buying lots of albums (debatable, I know). So what does that have to do with the idea that bands not selling lots of albums aren't around any more?
"Don't touch it, its EVIL!"
I can't believe you're referencing TMNT2 rather than Time Bandits. Still, you could have referenced his role as Cal's hired heavy in Titanic, for maximum embarrassment points (oops).
David Warner rules! One of the greatest 'its that guy' actors of all time.
Serves you right for being able to do anything at home right before going snowboarding :(
OK, I'm just jealous because I won't be seeing powder for another 18 months or so. But then I'm still at the point where I'm far too busy paying attention to the slopes to listen to tunes at the same time, so it doesn't technically matter anyway.
I might as well, but these bundles aren't aimed at us. Nintendo's market with these packs is the NES-obsessed collector or retro-fan; the game-per-cart method allows them to go to town on the packaging, which is an important part of why they are doing this. Its not really aimed at those that just want to play a bunch of old games.
Firstly, let's not forget that EVERY game gets mixed reviews - Stuart Campbell thinks its still great, for one.
Secondly, its not nostalgia if you didn't play it first time round.
Thirdly, do people really expect every old game to be good? I merely hope that the ones that were great still are, and that seems a lot to ask sometimes.
But this game was a PS1 title, under 10 years old. Is that even old enough to be 'retro'? Is it considered irredeemably nostalgic to buy a DVD of SE7EN or Heat now?
Yeah, Wizball was relatively sensible gameplay under its mad exterior.
Shoot stuff. Stuff drops ink, with different colours from different enemies. Pick up the ink. Once you've got enough of any one colour, you can use it to fill one of the background colours of a level (there were three, I think, per level to do). But the level with the right colour isn't necessarily the level where you need to use it, so you have to switch back and forth between them by diving through the wells.
Great game, I thought, though because there were stacks of powerups to pick up, the game was most difficult by far early on, and cleaning up the last few levels was really simple.
I don't find it really annoying per se.
The problem, however, is that its basically a wrapper for the fact that Microsoft apps have gone with the design decision of always having a seperate window and seperate instance for each document open in an app.
Whether its Tabbed Browsing in Firefox or multiple files open in PFE, your 3rd party apps already support grouping all your documents in a particular program under the one taskbar item. This is really Microsoft's way of doing the same for their apps that need loads of seperate windows, without the flexibility of manually running (for example) three Firefox windows with a couple of tabs in each for seperate groups of pages.
Hell, I'd settle for being able to use my spare 16Mb memory stick rather than forking over 20 for an 8Mb PS2 memory card, while you're at it.
Really? Sounds cool - I'm always up for some highscore/laptime gaming. Thanks!
Just after I posted I remembered the thing about Spidey being a secret Tony Hawk character, but I didn't realise there would be gameplay connections still.
While I find ATRAC to be the nicest sounding compressed format by a long, long margin (speaking as an owner of several minidisc players), I will agree that there is a big, big problem with this; Sony's SonicStage software which you have to use for it is the most horrible DRM-heavy piece of rubbish I've ever had to deal with for this sort of thing.
iPod or iRiver for me, and just put up with the fact that I can't get quite as much on in a lossless format.
Since the game involves neither skateboards nor memorising streams of button combinations to pull high-scoring tricks, what does it have to do with the Tony Hawk games? Writing 'a catchy, replayable game' without using the strange reference would have been less weird.
I used to think that, too, until I started getting both text and voice spam to my mobile phone recently. Its a nightmare.
On the other hand, 1/1 is also a fraction. I claim the TV as prior art.
The problem with Driver 3 (that 3 in the middle of the word thing was mildly cool when wip3out did it, but that was the last time) isn't that its a crap game from start to finish. If it was simply rubbish, there wouldn't be all this discussion.
The really galling thing is that there is a rather funky game under there, but the rush-job coding has made it a horribly depressing job to find. Its buggy, the framerate is erratic, and the pop-up in some sections is unforgiveable - try jumping onto an empty rooftop only to find that you're only then close enough to see the four gun-toting goons ready to kill you, for instance. The dodgy framerate makes the car handling rather uneasy as well.
So the 3 is for a game that is really a good idea, just horribly unfinished and badly executed. For a 2 or 1, the best implementation in the world wouldn't save a bad game design.
Is this to happen every single month, now?
As someone with an Edge subscription already, its a touch weird seeing the Making Of articles appear a couple of weeks after reading them on paper. I sort of wish they wouldn't do it, as without the gorgeous artwork it just looks wrong.
Still, I understand its a nightmare for you US people to get hold of the mag, so for you lot its better than nothing.
I'm not saying that students shouldn't be able to have a box that nice, merely that listing it as a minimum, when so many people have boxes well below that spec and so don't really need to upgrade to do their work is a blatant abuse of power to promote buying a new Dell or Apple unnecessarily.
P.S. the game stores the textures for it in real memory as well - otherwise the game wouldn't run at all on my poor 'little' 64Mb card, when total texture data for a level is far above that.
Not only that, but when writing text messages
1 tap = a
1 long tap = 2
double tap = b
triple tap = c
quad tap = á
This appears to cover just about everything in the entire patent.
Since when did Farcry's texture memory requirements affect how much memory was needed to do college work?
The original poster's point was that the specs read like someone's idea of what made a nice machine, not what should be regarded as the minimum to get a connection working.
I thoroughly agree that 1Gb of memory is a Nice Thing to have when your UT2K4 map is being slow, but if you're just writing essays its overkill.
Unfortunately, that is pretty much exactly what these watermarks are.
Undetectable my arse; these are very large black spots on several frames of the print, in different braille-style configurations for each print sent out. Very, very annoying when you're watching the film; I find them so irritating that I rarely bother going to the cinema since they started this. I'd rather wait for the DVD, as the picture quality is better.
"Is the money from Microsoft really worth destroying his reputation?"
(Looks at cheque. Looks at any estimate of the current value of his reputation, after all the detailed postings about his complete incompetency)
Yes, absolutely. If everyone is going to think you're an idiot, you might as well look like a rich one.
I don't know about the VERY beginning; I kinda missed his early R&S stuff. But you're right that as soon as Warp got him he became part and parcel of the whole Designers Republic, "Artificial Intelligence" club. Its an image, sure enough - I remember hunting ravenously for anything in the mystical purple sleeves at that time.
But I've no problem with that, really; if no-one got promotion, I wouldn't hear about them. Its up to me to decide if I actually like what I hear, though, which is why I don't believe this whole anonymous peer-to-peer thing really helps bands that much; unless you actually hear about a band, probably through more traditional channels, you're not going to even try listening to them.
So in your first paragraph your problem is that there isn't enough innovation in music.
And in the second, you're blaming the fact that they don't make music in exactly the same way they did 30 years ago, before Punk killed that horrible junk.
Which is it?
You think $20 for shipping was bad? The shipping to the UK costs as much as the stick itself.
Fortunately, I got an opportunity to try one first, and hated it anyway - the stick is far too stiff. I much prefer my Hori Soul Calibur II stick (note that its a completely different beast to that nightmare of a crap thing the US multi-platform SCII stick was).
Basically, pretty much all US sticks are too stiff for playing fighters with; you need Japanese sticks to get the best feel.
The thing is, it doesn't really.
Firstly, there is non-NFL licensed Gridiron to be developed; college football, or just games without a license. I know no-one who would even consider buying the EA FIFA-licensed 'soccer' (as you Americans so quaintly refer to it) game when the unlicensed ISS Pro Evolution is ten times better.
But more generally, good game coding is good game coding. I don't think, even if all non-EA Gridiron games are cancelled for the next four years, that the teams are incapable of working on other games, and the basics of the engines are pretty similiar from one team sport to the next - Rugby games are practically identical apart from some model and rule changes.
Can this really be profitable?
Madden is already the biggest selling NFL title. Even assuming that this manages to persuade every single current purchaser of a non-EA NFL game to switch, and furthermore that none of those customers currently buy the EA game as well, that can't be close to $250M a year.
The top selling PS2 game of an average month (from NPD released stats, not including the big December) seems to only take in about $20M, and both EB and EA will want at least some slice of that too.