Unfortunately, under the existing driver, any time my rogue applied poison in WoW, I had a full half-second freeze. Which means that, last december, I got an nVidia card.
Since I only upgrade graphics cards every couple of years, it might be a while before this matters -- especially because, until the "complete freeze on certain texturing operations" bug is documented and acknowledged and someone who had it before tells me it's fixed, I'm not about to buy an ATI card on the off chance that it might work.
Compare arcade steering to the steering of, say, an actual large object... Or compare it to what actually happens if you're riding an animal and you pull on the reins. It ought to react well, over time, to a gentle nudge, and not reward wild twisting and yanking.
In short, imagine driving an actual car, at freeway speeds, by yanking the wheel sharply (say, 90 degree turn of the wheel) every time you want to shift lanes. Would that work?
No.
But if you made a game where the controls reacted too much like an actual steering wheel, people would bash them as unresponsive or inclined to overrespond, because they expect a simplified interface.
Someone pointed me at a gameplay video which makes me think the game's fine, it's just that the controls are too realistic -- which is to say, they respond just fine, but gradually, and overreaction and overcompensation produce garbage. Makes sense to me.
Professional musicians have a cargo-cult approach to legalities. I would NEVER, not in a million years, make a decision based on something a musician told me about the law. I've heard that same thing from dozens of musicians, NONE OF WHOM EVER WENT TO COURT.
Old wives' tale, so far as I know. Never seen it from a credible source, and the only people I've seen do it were the sorts of people who believe crazy legal theories and then get very sad.
I asked my lawyer once, he told me it was stupid and accomplished nothing.
I think it's quite possible to get used to analog stick aiming enough not to hate it in games that were built for it, but it seems to me that the pointing devices will always win.
The comparison here isn't K/M vs. wiimote, but wiimote vs. analog stick, and I think the wiimote wins hands down.
What do you think "kiddie" means? Why do you think Mario is a "kiddie game"?
C. S. Lewis once observed that, as a ten year old, he would have been horribly embarassed had anyone found out that he read fairy tales. As an adult, he outgrew such childish things -- such as the fear of being seen to be childish. He read fairy tales openly, because he no longer worried that people would look down on him.
I've never seen anyone over about twenty-five worrying about whether games are "kiddie games". By thirty, people are enjoying Mario games because they're fun.
No, my comparison is fair -- it's the comparison that, for a game programmer, determines whether there'll still be a job to come in to a month after the project is released.
These people are, in the end, trying to earn a living. Actual sales matter. What percentage of first-party sales your game can reach doesn't matter as much as whether you can make a game that justifies its development costs by recovering them does.
Nintendo produced the best games so far. Other companies do fine when they produce decent games -- but even a mediocre game for Wii can sell better than an excellent game for PS3, making it an easy target.
I dunno. I went PS3 in the PS360 debate, simply because the hardware's more impressive, I want to play with Linux on Cell, and I don't really want to send my box in three times a year for repairs.... Of course, I may be atypical.
Exactly, there's a lot of people who just plain missed the boat on this. Well, the great thing is, enough people didn't to make the platform stay viable until they catch up.
You know, it's one thing to get caught with your pants down.
What you describe is more like getting caught with your pants down, then sitting on a block of lard while carefully and diligently sewing your pants tightly around your ankles.
Frankly, though, I don't really believe you. I am more inclined to believe the developers who are doing exactly what they did with the DS: Experimenting a bit and getting serious about the system. All the "real" HD in the world won't make up for the fact that no one who's played Metroid Prime 3 can stand the tedium of aiming with an analog stick anymore.
... to take Wii profits and use them to produce better 360 and PS3 games. Or so say the folks over on a PS3 forum I hang out on.
Frankly, I think it'll take the third parties a while to get the hang of the system. There's a widespread belief that third parties can't succeed on Nintendo platforms -- which may have been partially true, but some of that is just that Nintendo polishes games to a mirror-like finish before shipping them, and most companies can't outdo them.
Still, there's plenty of awesome 3rd-party games on the DS, and more to come. I expect that, by the end of this year, we'll be starting to see some better-produced third party games on the Wii, although Cruisin' looks like utter ass still. But the fact that Nintendo's putting out games that look pretty decent suggests that it's possible, and if sales keep being utterly phenomenal, I suspect we'll see an initial flood of "well, sorry, uhm, here's our wii game, we developed it in two months" titles, followed by some serious titles that people put real time into. Just compare things like RE4 Wii (which is pretty good, despite being a mere port) to some of the early shovelware... I think it'll happen.
I'm not surprised that the early games are pretty mediocre. To be honest, if you look at the titles that came out for, say, the PS2, there's a whole mountain of utter crap there, with the good titles buried in the heap. We tend to think of it as getting a lot of great games, and it did, but percentage-wise, it's no better than anything else, and worse than many.
I don't even think the 360 has a chance now. If the Wii can sell more consoles in 9 months than the 360 can sell in a year and a half, the 360's toast. The Wii, not the 360, is getting the large market of Japanese developers -- who are disproportionately relevant to American sales, even though the Japanese market is smaller.
The 360, I think, can reasonably hope for a comfortable and clearly successful second place. I don't think it can hope to come out on top this year; the only reason it has any chance of even staying reasonably close is that Nintendo simply can't possibly meet demand until sometime in 2008.
That said, I'm glad I got a 60. I get the version that has EE and has better compatibility with PS2 games, and I upgraded to a 120GB drive by early January of this year.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, AMD!
Unfortunately, under the existing driver, any time my rogue applied poison in WoW, I had a full half-second freeze. Which means that, last december, I got an nVidia card.
Since I only upgrade graphics cards every couple of years, it might be a while before this matters -- especially because, until the "complete freeze on certain texturing operations" bug is documented and acknowledged and someone who had it before tells me it's fixed, I'm not about to buy an ATI card on the off chance that it might work.
Yes, because spamhaus has been accumulating evidence ever since, so at this point, they can list e360 forever. :)
I don't think they'll ever do another non-phone.
Which makes me sad, too. The T|X is okay, but it shouldn't be the best they can do.
It is sorta ridiculous, but it makes sense if you're used to arguing over what's "realistic" in D&D! :)
Compare arcade steering to the steering of, say, an actual large object... Or compare it to what actually happens if you're riding an animal and you pull on the reins. It ought to react well, over time, to a gentle nudge, and not reward wild twisting and yanking.
In short, imagine driving an actual car, at freeway speeds, by yanking the wheel sharply (say, 90 degree turn of the wheel) every time you want to shift lanes. Would that work?
No.
But if you made a game where the controls reacted too much like an actual steering wheel, people would bash them as unresponsive or inclined to overrespond, because they expect a simplified interface.
Someone pointed me at a gameplay video which makes me think the game's fine, it's just that the controls are too realistic -- which is to say, they respond just fine, but gradually, and overreaction and overcompensation produce garbage. Makes sense to me.
I think $500 would make more sense than $600.
I also think a publicity stunt with a decapitated goat is very unlikely.
I just don't think I trust attempts to predict Sony's future actions based on a rational evaluation of expected outcomes.
I have a vague notion that it was the other way around in Western culture about 200 years ago. I could be wrong.
Always keep a copy of your work before sending one off to the publisher. :)
Professional musicians have a cargo-cult approach to legalities. I would NEVER, not in a million years, make a decision based on something a musician told me about the law. I've heard that same thing from dozens of musicians, NONE OF WHOM EVER WENT TO COURT.
Told by whom?
Hint: The answer is almost certainly not "a lawyer". I am quite confident it is not "a competent lawyer".
STOP POSTING RUMORS AS LEGAL ADVICE!
Find me a court case referring to such a thing, or an actual law, and I'll believe you. Otherwise, it's just a waste of a stamp.
Old wives' tale, so far as I know. Never seen it from a credible source, and the only people I've seen do it were the sorts of people who believe crazy legal theories and then get very sad.
I asked my lawyer once, he told me it was stupid and accomplished nothing.
I think it's quite possible to get used to analog stick aiming enough not to hate it in games that were built for it, but it seems to me that the pointing devices will always win.
The comparison here isn't K/M vs. wiimote, but wiimote vs. analog stick, and I think the wiimote wins hands down.
So, since at least SOME slashdot comments contain SOME infringing material, your post should be deleted?
I don't think so.
What do you think "kiddie" means? Why do you think Mario is a "kiddie game"?
C. S. Lewis once observed that, as a ten year old, he would have been horribly embarassed had anyone found out that he read fairy tales. As an adult, he outgrew such childish things -- such as the fear of being seen to be childish. He read fairy tales openly, because he no longer worried that people would look down on him.
I've never seen anyone over about twenty-five worrying about whether games are "kiddie games". By thirty, people are enjoying Mario games because they're fun.
No, my comparison is fair -- it's the comparison that, for a game programmer, determines whether there'll still be a job to come in to a month after the project is released.
These people are, in the end, trying to earn a living. Actual sales matter. What percentage of first-party sales your game can reach doesn't matter as much as whether you can make a game that justifies its development costs by recovering them does.
Nintendo produced the best games so far. Other companies do fine when they produce decent games -- but even a mediocre game for Wii can sell better than an excellent game for PS3, making it an easy target.
I dunno. I went PS3 in the PS360 debate, simply because the hardware's more impressive, I want to play with Linux on Cell, and I don't really want to send my box in three times a year for repairs. ... Of course, I may be atypical.
Probably a good choice.
Bioshock looks really neat, but I can't stand aiming with an analog stick, and I won't buy SecuROM games anymore.
So I'll probably never see it.
Exactly, there's a lot of people who just plain missed the boat on this. Well, the great thing is, enough people didn't to make the platform stay viable until they catch up.
You know, it's one thing to get caught with your pants down.
What you describe is more like getting caught with your pants down, then sitting on a block of lard while carefully and diligently sewing your pants tightly around your ankles.
Frankly, though, I don't really believe you. I am more inclined to believe the developers who are doing exactly what they did with the DS: Experimenting a bit and getting serious about the system. All the "real" HD in the world won't make up for the fact that no one who's played Metroid Prime 3 can stand the tedium of aiming with an analog stick anymore.
... to take Wii profits and use them to produce better 360 and PS3 games. Or so say the folks over on a PS3 forum I hang out on.
Frankly, I think it'll take the third parties a while to get the hang of the system. There's a widespread belief that third parties can't succeed on Nintendo platforms -- which may have been partially true, but some of that is just that Nintendo polishes games to a mirror-like finish before shipping them, and most companies can't outdo them.
Still, there's plenty of awesome 3rd-party games on the DS, and more to come. I expect that, by the end of this year, we'll be starting to see some better-produced third party games on the Wii, although Cruisin' looks like utter ass still. But the fact that Nintendo's putting out games that look pretty decent suggests that it's possible, and if sales keep being utterly phenomenal, I suspect we'll see an initial flood of "well, sorry, uhm, here's our wii game, we developed it in two months" titles, followed by some serious titles that people put real time into. Just compare things like RE4 Wii (which is pretty good, despite being a mere port) to some of the early shovelware... I think it'll happen.
I'm not surprised that the early games are pretty mediocre. To be honest, if you look at the titles that came out for, say, the PS2, there's a whole mountain of utter crap there, with the good titles buried in the heap. We tend to think of it as getting a lot of great games, and it did, but percentage-wise, it's no better than anything else, and worse than many.
I don't even think the 360 has a chance now. If the Wii can sell more consoles in 9 months than the 360 can sell in a year and a half, the 360's toast. The Wii, not the 360, is getting the large market of Japanese developers -- who are disproportionately relevant to American sales, even though the Japanese market is smaller.
The 360, I think, can reasonably hope for a comfortable and clearly successful second place. I don't think it can hope to come out on top this year; the only reason it has any chance of even staying reasonably close is that Nintendo simply can't possibly meet demand until sometime in 2008.
Er, yeah, they would.
That said, I'm glad I got a 60. I get the version that has EE and has better compatibility with PS2 games, and I upgraded to a 120GB drive by early January of this year.