'On an entirely unrelated note, why is a union of 2 commited lovers, whatever their sex, a threat to "the oldest and most sacred institution in America", whereas a 2 minute drive-thru ceremony in Las Vegas isn't?'
Well, the first is apparently a threat to "the oldest and most sacred institution in America", while the banning of it is merely a threat to the 'equality' and 'seperation of church and state' clauses of the Constition, and so relatively unimportant.
I've frankly no idea where you got that from at all. Still innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt here, at least as long as we stop Blunkett getting his own way.
Err, thats got nothing to do with DRM, and everything to do with them being completely different machines. Admittedly there are copy protection schemes on pretty much all consoles, but I think the first stage would be finding a hole to even put a NES cart in, or cutting the edge off the disc to get a CD in a Gamecube.
The NGage games could come on standard MMC cards just fine, as the machine can read these. Its only because they don't want you storing multiple games on one big card that stops you from doing so.
And by the way - my NES games play just fine on my Dreamcast, thanks. Emulators are great.
oops - sorry. Its the most expensive (so the 400) property in the London edition. I couldn't remember what it gets called in the standard US edition, despite the fact that we've got one around somewhere.
You think that's messed up? On the "playable" demo, there was no opportunity to remap controls at all.
It just saw I had a controller connected, and assigned the Z-axis to accellerator/brake. Despite the fact that my controller has them as two seperate axes. I was left trying to play the thing with accelerate being take my foot off the pedal, and the neutral point as half accelerating. Flooring the accelerator was actually brake. Ouch. I couldn't even try keyboard controls, as it thought I had my foot hard on the accelerator when I wasn't touching it.
"You have to turn off the N-Gage, and take out the cover and battery in order to CHANGE GAMES."
Actually, the grandparent poster was on a relevant line to this talking about the DRM on the games. They are actually just plain ol' Symbian games that (as unscrupulous crackers have done) can be played on any Symbian phone once you've got them in an unencrypted format.
If that were the case as standard, then you could easily fit several games on one large MMC card and choose between them without even a reset. The fragility of the games is because they have to come on the standard MMC cards, and they just happen to be horribly fragile as a medium.
So its really a fault of whoever designed MMC, and let it become the standard for Symbian generally (which would still be partly Nokia, then, come to think of it).
Like many a geek, I can highly recommend playing the new Lord Of The Rings Monopoly instead, if time (or indeed an enjoyable evening) is a concern.
It replaces the '1' on one of the dice with the Eye Of Sauron, and every time it appears on a roll you move the Ring along one property. Once it reaches Mount Doom (previously known as Mayfair), the game ends, and whoever is the richest at that point wins. So far, on four-player games, that is only just about enough time for one player to go bankrupt, so no-one ends up sitting around for 3 hours waiting for the increasingly obvious conclusion, and everyone has fun.
Its the first 'novelty' Monopoly board that I've actually thought really worth buying to supplement a standard set.
Its not exclusive any more, no. It was going to be, and then they changed their mind; probably after seeing just how much Ubisoft got reamed over PoP at Christmas. I-Ninja is a good fit for the Cube, as the PS2 usually sees quirky stuff like that perform badly, while Cube owners seem to appreciate the weird more.
Contrary to several other replies, NTSC to PAL isn't even a minor issue; anyone with enough savvy to be playing with import machines is unlikely to have one of the few PAL TVs old enough to not also cope with NTSC just fine.
The GameCube has Freeloader to play import titles, and both PS2 and XBox can be chipped as long as you know someone with the right equiment (or pay a company to do so).
You're welcome to set up such a site, but you'll be up against the likes of Goblin, AnotherWorld, videogameimports and so on, as well as the fact that most people who know what they are doing will just go straight to DVDBoxOffice, PlayAsia or whatever and just import directly.
I recommend going to the NTSC-UK side if any Europeans want further info; importing is great.
Note that the saving problem is only on Japanese titles running on a PAL Cube. So as long as you're only importing US/Canadian titles you'll be fine.
If you do go for an imported Cube, however, I recommend getting an Japanese one that has had the region switch installed for maximum compatibility. Also, for both types of import Cube, you can use the transformer from your PAL machine, rather than a stepdown, which is nice.
And once we've all got bandwidth coming out of our frickin' ears thanks to a 100Mb connection to our home, who exactly is going to be prepared to spend 10s of billions on that part of the spectrum?
Because its not the TV companies (who will use the network). Nor 4G phones, as there are bound to be plenty of spare wi-fi sites around once no-one cares about how much bandwidth is being stolen by them.
The bubble seems to have burst on the 'selling your spectrum' bonanza, as it was only mobile phone companies doing this, and half of them are broke after getting carried away with 3G licenses and overvalued mergers.
Firstly, companies really do see a boost because their cars are featured in the hot games, just as they do if they are in popular films. Being the drive of choice in, say, Gran Tourismo does at least as much for your credibility with some sections of the market as Tom Cruise chasing the bad guys in it for others. My dream car is the Ferrari F355 Spider, despite its replacement, the F360, being faster, because its so wonderful to drive in F355 Challenge. And if its good for Yuji Naka its good enough for me.
However, the ability to damage the cars is generally considered by gamers to be a good thing; it discourages cheap wallriding drivers, and also looks really cool if you're in a silly mood. So being able to damage cars means the game you're in is more likely to be the trendy one. Ford's GT40 gets far more good publicity from Project Gotham 2 than it does from Ford Racing 2, for instance, because more people play the former.
"Sony Computer Entertainment America spokesman Ryan Bowling says Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini demanded exorbitant licensing fees - but that's why they aren't in Gran Turismo."
Curiously, not only are the first two in PGR2, but can be damaged as well. I guess its all in the priorities, and GT seems more interested in making sure there is yet another variation of the Evo 7 than anything that might handle differently. The third game's overemphasis on boring box saloons that happen to have very large rally engines in them completely ruined it for me.
Why else would I be shooting them? This isn't just about Good and Evil, but decent characterisation generally. Well crafted characters make a plot-based game better, without a shadow of a doubt.
But when your job is to shoot everything that moves, there's a lot to be said for "because they're evil" as a motivating factor. Mind you, I'm normally prepared to settle for "because you'll get a high score". Its why so many classic shmups involve Aliens; there isn't as much need to question why they need shooting, as they are just "the baddies". Intense moral dilemmas have their place, but vertical scrollers aren't it.
'A bunch of whining cry-babies yelling "Aimbot! Cheater!" every time I killed them.'
Actually, that is my single biggest problem with PC FPS games these days. Not that some people cheat, but that the assumption is that nearly everyone is. This not only increases the number of real cheats (hey, if "they" are cheating, "we" better level the playing field seems to be the argument), but means that there is a general atmosphere of distrust. I just don't take my online gaming seriously enough to be po-faced, and places less prone to this paranoid atmosphere (XBox Live, bzflag, Armagetron and so on) are a lot more fun to frequent.
It might be a problem on some games, but I've been playing Midtown Madness 3 and Project Gotham 2 against US people from here in the UK, while chatting with them over the voice feature (probably the most important part of the whole exercise, in any case) without any big problems.
What on Earth are you doing, man? If you want to play Capcom-style fighters on your PC, get a Dreamcast Arcade Stick and one of the latest DC-USB convertors. Its pretty much the same components as you'd find on a Naomi cabinet, and ideal for the job. I can't stand playing fighting games on a pad, to be honest.
Alternatively, the Hori Soul Calibur II stick through a GC-USB box works almost as well (its just that defining the L and R buttons without it picking up the analogue axes as well is occasionally glitchy in Mame32; fine once you've done so, though).
"It works like a dream, the only problem being that you have to either not use the trigger buttons or set them to digital - no PC games/emulators seem to support analog buttons. Which is a shame as I love driving games..."
Really? My Gamecube to USB adaptor (the bizarrely named Joybox 13) maps the analogue L/R buttons to slider axes, and so work as full-analogue accellerator and brake on my PC driving games. Mind you, I've also got my PS2 Logitech Driving Force installed as a force-feedback wheel and pedals, so its a bit pointless.
"Who here actually liked Mario 64 over say Super Mario World?"
Err, that'll be me, Bob.
Its an unfortunate one to call, though, since the mention of Sonic (which you did, admittedly do), Pac Man, Defender, Battlezone, Centipede, Worms, GTA and Sensible Soccer all get very definite agreement on the "turning something 2D into 3D can break it" point.
As I understood it, you're not supposed to have a screener if you've not signed the "I promise not to do naughty things with it" form. I don't see why that should stop you voting for whatever you like.
Personally, I'd rather people weren't allowed to vote for anything they hadn't actually seen in 35mm. How in God's Name you're supposed to be able to vote for best Sound off the back of a VHS tape I'll never know.
This certainly matches what I've heard, yes. A friend was going to get a 50" cheap from work to wall mount, until they saw the 9" bolts that had to go through breezeblock to hold it, and didn't dare try with a partition wall.
"If my 20" LCD monitor can do 1600x1200 why is it that a 61" can't do 4 times the resolution?"
Because the difficulty with building a monitor, and number of duff ones they have to bin due to too many dead subpixels, goes up with the number of pixels rather than the size of the screen per se.
1600x1200x4x4 (assuming you want 3 times res in each direction, to give the same dpi as you're used to) is over 92 million subpixels. So you need an error rate of around 10^-9 just to get a fully working screen. 1600x1200 monitors are scarily expensive as it is; ones with 16 times as many would just be obscene.
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'On an entirely unrelated note, why is a union of 2 commited lovers, whatever their sex, a threat to "the oldest and most sacred institution in America", whereas a 2 minute drive-thru ceremony in Las Vegas isn't?'
Well, the first is apparently a threat to "the oldest and most sacred institution in America", while the banning of it is merely a threat to the 'equality' and 'seperation of church and state' clauses of the Constition, and so relatively unimportant.
I've frankly no idea where you got that from at all. Still innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt here, at least as long as we stop Blunkett getting his own way.
Sure, after you.
Disclaimer: Ceasing to orders of someone who turns out to be a traitor is good.
Dear God, man. Humorously reveal the secret methods of Paranoia GMs if you must, but I think you'll find Humph to be of rather sterner stuff. Shush!
Err, thats got nothing to do with DRM, and everything to do with them being completely different machines. Admittedly there are copy protection schemes on pretty much all consoles, but I think the first stage would be finding a hole to even put a NES cart in, or cutting the edge off the disc to get a CD in a Gamecube.
The NGage games could come on standard MMC cards just fine, as the machine can read these. Its only because they don't want you storing multiple games on one big card that stops you from doing so.
And by the way - my NES games play just fine on my Dreamcast, thanks. Emulators are great.
oops - sorry. Its the most expensive (so the 400) property in the London edition. I couldn't remember what it gets called in the standard US edition, despite the fact that we've got one around somewhere.
You think that's messed up? On the "playable" demo, there was no opportunity to remap controls at all.
It just saw I had a controller connected, and assigned the Z-axis to accellerator/brake. Despite the fact that my controller has them as two seperate axes. I was left trying to play the thing with accelerate being take my foot off the pedal, and the neutral point as half accelerating. Flooring the accelerator was actually brake. Ouch. I couldn't even try keyboard controls, as it thought I had my foot hard on the accelerator when I wasn't touching it.
"You have to turn off the N-Gage, and take out the cover and battery in order to CHANGE GAMES."
Actually, the grandparent poster was on a relevant line to this talking about the DRM on the games. They are actually just plain ol' Symbian games that (as unscrupulous crackers have done) can be played on any Symbian phone once you've got them in an unencrypted format.
If that were the case as standard, then you could easily fit several games on one large MMC card and choose between them without even a reset. The fragility of the games is because they have to come on the standard MMC cards, and they just happen to be horribly fragile as a medium.
So its really a fault of whoever designed MMC, and let it become the standard for Symbian generally (which would still be partly Nokia, then, come to think of it).
Like many a geek, I can highly recommend playing the new Lord Of The Rings Monopoly instead, if time (or indeed an enjoyable evening) is a concern.
It replaces the '1' on one of the dice with the Eye Of Sauron, and every time it appears on a roll you move the Ring along one property. Once it reaches Mount Doom (previously known as Mayfair), the game ends, and whoever is the richest at that point wins. So far, on four-player games, that is only just about enough time for one player to go bankrupt, so no-one ends up sitting around for 3 hours waiting for the increasingly obvious conclusion, and everyone has fun.
Its the first 'novelty' Monopoly board that I've actually thought really worth buying to supplement a standard set.
Its not exclusive any more, no. It was going to be, and then they changed their mind; probably after seeing just how much Ubisoft got reamed over PoP at Christmas. I-Ninja is a good fit for the Cube, as the PS2 usually sees quirky stuff like that perform badly, while Cube owners seem to appreciate the weird more.
Contrary to several other replies, NTSC to PAL isn't even a minor issue; anyone with enough savvy to be playing with import machines is unlikely to have one of the few PAL TVs old enough to not also cope with NTSC just fine.
The GameCube has Freeloader to play import titles, and both PS2 and XBox can be chipped as long as you know someone with the right equiment (or pay a company to do so).
You're welcome to set up such a site, but you'll be up against the likes of Goblin, AnotherWorld, videogameimports and so on, as well as the fact that most people who know what they are doing will just go straight to DVDBoxOffice, PlayAsia or whatever and just import directly.
I recommend going to the NTSC-UK side if any Europeans want further info; importing is great.
Note that the saving problem is only on Japanese titles running on a PAL Cube. So as long as you're only importing US/Canadian titles you'll be fine.
If you do go for an imported Cube, however, I recommend getting an Japanese one that has had the region switch installed for maximum compatibility. Also, for both types of import Cube, you can use the transformer from your PAL machine, rather than a stepdown, which is nice.
Right.
And once we've all got bandwidth coming out of our frickin' ears thanks to a 100Mb connection to our home, who exactly is going to be prepared to spend 10s of billions on that part of the spectrum?
Because its not the TV companies (who will use the network). Nor 4G phones, as there are bound to be plenty of spare wi-fi sites around once no-one cares about how much bandwidth is being stolen by them.
The bubble seems to have burst on the 'selling your spectrum' bonanza, as it was only mobile phone companies doing this, and half of them are broke after getting carried away with 3G licenses and overvalued mergers.
Its actually a two-step process.
Firstly, companies really do see a boost because their cars are featured in the hot games, just as they do if they are in popular films. Being the drive of choice in, say, Gran Tourismo does at least as much for your credibility with some sections of the market as Tom Cruise chasing the bad guys in it for others. My dream car is the Ferrari F355 Spider, despite its replacement, the F360, being faster, because its so wonderful to drive in F355 Challenge. And if its good for Yuji Naka its good enough for me.
However, the ability to damage the cars is generally considered by gamers to be a good thing; it discourages cheap wallriding drivers, and also looks really cool if you're in a silly mood. So being able to damage cars means the game you're in is more likely to be the trendy one. Ford's GT40 gets far more good publicity from Project Gotham 2 than it does from Ford Racing 2, for instance, because more people play the former.
"Sony Computer Entertainment America spokesman Ryan Bowling says Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini demanded exorbitant licensing fees - but that's why they aren't in Gran Turismo."
Curiously, not only are the first two in PGR2, but can be damaged as well. I guess its all in the priorities, and GT seems more interested in making sure there is yet another variation of the Evo 7 than anything that might handle differently. The third game's overemphasis on boring box saloons that happen to have very large rally engines in them completely ruined it for me.
Bitter? Never.
Why else would I be shooting them? This isn't just about Good and Evil, but decent characterisation generally. Well crafted characters make a plot-based game better, without a shadow of a doubt.
But when your job is to shoot everything that moves, there's a lot to be said for "because they're evil" as a motivating factor. Mind you, I'm normally prepared to settle for "because you'll get a high score". Its why so many classic shmups involve Aliens; there isn't as much need to question why they need shooting, as they are just "the baddies". Intense moral dilemmas have their place, but vertical scrollers aren't it.
'A bunch of whining cry-babies yelling "Aimbot! Cheater!" every time I killed them.'
Actually, that is my single biggest problem with PC FPS games these days. Not that some people cheat, but that the assumption is that nearly everyone is. This not only increases the number of real cheats (hey, if "they" are cheating, "we" better level the playing field seems to be the argument), but means that there is a general atmosphere of distrust. I just don't take my online gaming seriously enough to be po-faced, and places less prone to this paranoid atmosphere (XBox Live, bzflag, Armagetron and so on) are a lot more fun to frequent.
Err, this is EA. King of the Mainstream. There's as much chance of this being 2D as there is of the next Medal Of Honour game being a shmup.
It might be a problem on some games, but I've been playing Midtown Madness 3 and Project Gotham 2 against US people from here in the UK, while chatting with them over the voice feature (probably the most important part of the whole exercise, in any case) without any big problems.
What on Earth are you doing, man? If you want to play Capcom-style fighters on your PC, get a Dreamcast Arcade Stick and one of the latest DC-USB convertors. Its pretty much the same components as you'd find on a Naomi cabinet, and ideal for the job. I can't stand playing fighting games on a pad, to be honest.
Alternatively, the Hori Soul Calibur II stick through a GC-USB box works almost as well (its just that defining the L and R buttons without it picking up the analogue axes as well is occasionally glitchy in Mame32; fine once you've done so, though).
"It works like a dream, the only problem being that you have to either not use the trigger buttons or set them to digital - no PC games/emulators seem to support analog buttons. Which is a shame as I love driving games..."
Really? My Gamecube to USB adaptor (the bizarrely named Joybox 13) maps the analogue L/R buttons to slider axes, and so work as full-analogue accellerator and brake on my PC driving games. Mind you, I've also got my PS2 Logitech Driving Force installed as a force-feedback wheel and pedals, so its a bit pointless.
"Who here actually liked Mario 64 over say Super Mario World?"
Err, that'll be me, Bob.
Its an unfortunate one to call, though, since the mention of Sonic (which you did, admittedly do), Pac Man, Defender, Battlezone, Centipede, Worms, GTA and Sensible Soccer all get very definite agreement on the "turning something 2D into 3D can break it" point.
As I understood it, you're not supposed to have a screener if you've not signed the "I promise not to do naughty things with it" form. I don't see why that should stop you voting for whatever you like.
Personally, I'd rather people weren't allowed to vote for anything they hadn't actually seen in 35mm. How in God's Name you're supposed to be able to vote for best Sound off the back of a VHS tape I'll never know.
This certainly matches what I've heard, yes. A friend was going to get a 50" cheap from work to wall mount, until they saw the 9" bolts that had to go through breezeblock to hold it, and didn't dare try with a partition wall.
"If my 20" LCD monitor can do 1600x1200 why is it that a 61" can't do 4 times the resolution?"
Because the difficulty with building a monitor, and number of duff ones they have to bin due to too many dead subpixels, goes up with the number of pixels rather than the size of the screen per se.
1600x1200x4x4 (assuming you want 3 times res in each direction, to give the same dpi as you're used to) is over 92 million subpixels. So you need an error rate of around 10^-9 just to get a fully working screen. 1600x1200 monitors are scarily expensive as it is; ones with 16 times as many would just be obscene.