The "porn drives the technology" argument was irrelevant to the HD wars anyway. Nobody wants to see their porn in HD, unless they have a fetish for bad skin and razor burn.
The model doesn't need changing. The current model is that a disk holds enough content based on the amount of time people are willing to sit on their fat asses. You're going to take a break to stretch your legs or go to the bathroom. You may as well change a disk while you're at it. Content that lasts over 4 hours is so uncommon as to be irrelevant to the issue.
I don't see a real compelling reason for something to be able to play 8 hours of uninterrupted content for the home market. Those that need that kind of play time are a insignificant minority. The only reason for increased capacity would be when the move comes to the next higher resolution format, which will involve new hardware anyway.
Y, the absolute worst. Nothing like losing your entire program when you fat-fingered the return key. Plus, the reset key on those early machines didn't have the stiff spring that later keyboards had, so there was nothing to stop you.
Adding insult to injury was the fact that the keyboards were also of rather low quality; the spacebar on half of our schools computers' was knocked loose, and a lot of the keys wouldn't reliably work.
Like I said, in certain, well-defined situations, I'm sure the Roomba does a decent job. We live in a small place (1500 sq. ft), hardwood floors, with a dog & cat, but I'd never get a a Roomba. Why? Because it's a narrow townhouse with 3 floors (500 sq. feet per floor). I'd either have to buy one Roomba for each floor, or ferry it from floor to floor to have it do it's job. Additionally, the bulk of the time I spend vacuuming the place is doing the stairs - no help from Roomba there. Then there's the handful of area rugs that attract pet hair like mad and need many passes of a full-sized vac to get clean - again, something a small battery-powered vac like the Roomba would have absolutely no chance to get clean. Let's not forget the dust-bunny farms that are cultivated under couches and in odd corners that a Roomba wouldn't be able to reach. A simple dining room table with four chairs around it presents a forest of legs that would prevent entry by the intrepid disk; even if it could make it, when I vacuum there, you pretty much need to lift up the chairs and vacuum the feet of the chairs to get at the hair that adheres to them. Finally, many of the areas we vacuum (closets, bathrooms) have doors that we keep closed when we're not there, so we'd need to open all those doors to let it in to do the job.
It takes about 40 minutes to vacuum the house each week; the parts that the Roomba would be capable of cleaning accounts for about 10 minutes of that task. I can see it being useful for people with large houses that occupy mostly one floor, with a layout of furniture that doesn't present to many problems (like your typical spread in "Architectural Digest"). It's not a slam against the smarts of the Roomba, but too much of vacuuming involves actually moving chairs or reaching around with the accessory hose, something a little disk just can't do.
The article goes to great lengths to bash the American consumer, yet where does it speak to an alternative? Vaguely mentioning "the Japanese" hardly counts. If American expectations of robots are absurdly high, Japanese expectations are equally absurdly low. It seems the only stories you ever hear about Japanese robots, other than Asimo, are essentially attempts to make animatronic puppets that resemble people or pets so closely until they finally achieve "uncanny valley" levels of creepiness. Yet these "robots" offer no real functionality. If we want to make generalizations, we may as well say the Japanese are obsessed with creating the appearance of robots, without actually fulfilling any other purpose other than "Kawaii!!!"
Case in point: He brings up the Aibo. Of course the market rejected it - who has $2000 to spend on a battery-powered dog whose novelty wears off after about 6 hours, unless you're a programmer who wants to use them for competitions or hacking. And cheap knock-offs costing $40 or less quickly showed up and sold well, demonstrating that there was a market for trivial fluff, as long as it was priced right.
And then there's the Roomba. Sure, it works in certain well-defined environments to remove minor debris; but we're talking about a device that takes over for a task that most of us only spend an hour/week doing, if that, and only for a single floor. This isn't to say that the Roomba is a failure, or that vacuum-cleaning robots are a dead end. It's a decent start, and there's no reason that a fully functional vacuum robot that does as good a job as a person with a full size vac isn't in the near future, but for now, unless you're Stephen Hawking, a Roomba is more about entertainment than cleaning a house.
And that's what it really boils down to: people will embrace robots when they fulfill some useful purpose that is worth the price you'll pay for them, the hassle factor in dealing with them, and the real estate they take up in your closet when you're not using them. We will get there - the recent Urban Challenge for autonomous cars reported hear earlier is a stepping stone - but stop putting the cart before the horse and demanding some hypothetical consumer buy a lot of novelty garbage just to get an industry a jump start.
95% of consumers out there don't even know what an upscaling DVD player is, let alone whether they even own one. I've never met a single person who wasn't a techie or avphile who knew or cared what upscaling was.
My Netflix queue has around 100 movies in it. 7 are available in Blu-Ray. 9 are available in HDDVD. 95% are movies from the last 3 years. At this rate, it will take a many pay-per-view downloads of the HD latest releases that I want to see to justify the cost of a $200 player. So, yeah, there isn't much content available in HD yet, unless you're interested in seeing useless dreck like "Click" or "Hitch" in HD.
This seems reasonable given that online we see a non-negligible number of people proudly proclaiming they haven't had a problem while a non-negligible number of others say they've gone through several of them.
Yes, because those without problems are clearly as likely to post that they have fine XBoxes as people who have been plagued with problems.
My 360 was periodically overheating (not a full red ring, but a partial ring that forced me to shut it off for a while). The problem was solved by moving my 360 out of my cozy entertainment center and putting it around the corner, free standing by itself.
It seems pretty clear to me that the problem is with the spec of the 360s. We see over & over again people bitching that "I'm on my [n::n > 4]th 360!!" - it should be obvious to these guys that perhaps the problem is with the way they're using their 360s, and not a manufacturing quality issue. Maybe after their third failure they'd figure out that they need to keep the thing a little cooler.
This doesn't absolve MS from failing to account in their specification for the fact that many people are using their 360s in hot/poorly ventilated environments; they should have realized that there would be people who had been running their previous-gen systems in environments that were already at the borderline, heat-wise, for those systems. But it's also stupid as a customer to keep doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different result.
Where do you see it weighs 500 pounds? That seems a little excessive for a life-sized figure made of mostly-hollow plastic lego bricks. Maybe 50 pounds.
And that $2700 "shipping" charge is "shipping and handling". Given that the set comes pre-assembled (well, in 3 parts), I'm guessing that $150 is shipping and $2550 is what they're paying someone to put together the kit, although you'd think that would be included in the price of the item. I never understood this logic anyway. Why not just charge $30,000 and say "Free Shipping".
...ah, now this I can't agree with. Uber skilled folks aside, everyone does tend to peak controller wise at about the same level with a keyboard and mouse...
I was only putting it forth as a possibility, not really pushing it. But I know from my own experience that I've never felt as confident using the controller as I have with the keyboard/mouse. Our social group contains players that have all been playing Halo for 3 years or more, yet there is clearly a great difference in controller aptitude, as evidenced in low-strategy games like "Slayer". The best player in our group routinely scores 10x the number of kills as the worst player when we play against each other. I rank about 3rd in our group, and I know that my issues all have to do with aiming control. I never felt that was an issue when I was playing games like Team Fortress Classic or Counterstrike on the PC. Of course, when we get really slaughtered online by other players in team games, it's usually due to better teamwork on their part, but frequently it's because they have an uncommonly good player that scores almost all the kills for those teams. This happens frequently enough that I can't include these modest superstars in the ranks of the Uber.
I'm not really following your argument. To me it is equivalent to saying (forgive the painfully lame baseball analogy): "it's okay if everyone has to use a nice glazed ham when batting because everyone else has to use a ham too! Besides, the fact that everyone in the field is using a bra to catch the ball evens it out."
Maybe we just come from different planets, because your analogy seems to illustrate my point clearly - playing baseball with bras and hams would make perfect sense, if that's what the rules of the game were. Just because something is easier (mouse & keyboard), doesn't mean that's what you should use. I'm sure it would be easier to get home runs if the bat were larger, or more strikeouts if the ball were smaller, but the rules are what they are. Ideally you want to balance the rules of a sport or game such that it is easy enough for novices to muddle about in, but difficult enough such that mastery is not trivial. It's quite possible (although I doubt this was a consideration in the design of console shooters) that the difficulty curve of mouse/keyboard control is such that you don't get a good distribution of skill levels - everyone "masters" it too quickly and you you're left with a group where everyone who's played the game for a month or two is pretty much equal in skill, barring the superstar-savants that play professionally.
The fact that consoles use a common controller (more or less), not to mention common computing hardware, is what makes them so much more appealing from a competitive standpoint than the PC domain, where someone might have an ultra-high rez display, or mouse with extra features, or cheats. There are sports where the design of the equipment is a big part of the competition (auto racing, for example), but it's not appropriate for a mass-market online game where 95% of the players are going to be using the equipment that came with the system they bought. Introducing an alternative control scheme into a competitive online game like Halo would just complicate things, unless the game chose to segregate players into groups based on the controller they were using.
You still haven't answered my question as to why you'd want to buy the XBox to play XBox-only games, but you won't because Halo is XBox only.
Of course FPS's control better with a mouse than they do with a controller. Who cares? My car has better handling than a motorcycle; it doesn't mean riding a motorcycle is less fun. Everyone on a given platform is using the same controller, so it all evens out. Sure, using a controller is harder at first. You probably don't remember, but using a mouse was hard too - I still have friends that play FPS games on the PC using only keyboard, no mouse, because they believe the control is more "precise".
Frankly, I'll take a little slop in my controller over aimbots any day. Plus, I find the controller gives a more "realistic" feeling when playing simply because I can't be superhumanly accurate with my aiming like you can with a mouse. I rarely feel panicked when playing an FPS on the PC - it's just too easy. On a console, it's more immersive experience.
I don't understand your argument. You're saying that you would buy an XBox to play some games that only exist on it, but you won't because there exists a game that only runs on the XBox? It makes perfect sense why Halo exists only for the XBox - why would they want to fragment their multiplayer fan base by releasing on multiple platforms. Years ago Bungie determined that Halo was more of a "sport" than a video game, and has been driving development of it since then with the primary focus being towards balancing multiplayer. It's not practical to have multiplayer title be cross-platform, Shadowrun notwithstanding.
Plus, the ROI for console and console game sales is far greater than PC game sales. Why should Bungie/MS waste time & resources doing joint development, jeopardizing the release date of the 360 title, just for a marginal ROI that would be seen on sales of the PC version? Face it - PC game sales levels don't justify the kinds of budgets that A-list console titles pull down. PC gaming still has a place, but that place is niche gaming, independent gaming, and strategy wargaming.
Finally, why would you want to buy the PC version? PCs are just a money pit when it comes to keeping a gaming rig current. You can easily spend the cost of a 360 on video cards alone each year just to maintain a machine that will play the latest & greatest FPS titles at maximum fidelity. It's not worth a company's time to produce massively expensive titles for a tiny fraction of the game-playing public.
The article does raise an important question: Just what are we preserving with instellar colonization? Assume that no magical FTL technologies come to pass, but we are able to produce ships that are ultimately capable of travelling interstellar distances without breaking our economic bank; assume that they're relatively slow (maybe.05 C).
It would still be possible to colonize the galaxy, but it would have to be done with self-replicating robotic probes that would prepare colony sites for habitation before human arrival. Additionally, don't think "generation ships", think "seed ships". The colonization probes could contained fertilized ova that would be incubated upon arrival, and raised by robotic "nannies". It sounds far-fetched, but creating an AI capable of raising a child is at least conceivably possible, compared to the sky-pie of FTL drives or generation ships.
The entire culture of Earth could be made available to these new colony worlds, but there would be no direct contact between us, ever. Certainly light-speed transmissions could be made to monitor progress, but these worlds wouldn't be "colonies" at all - they'd all be "New Earths", and their societies would develop on their own. The only thing we'd be "preserving" is the idea of human DNA - there would be no real continuity between our culture and theirs.
It's probably worth doing, but it makes you think about what's the "point". We'd be preserving our memory in these other worlds (hopefully, if they bothered to archive what we had sent/were transmitting), as we'd be preserving theirs. But the same could be accomplished by creating true AI robots; a case could be made that these AI robots would be truer descendents of humanity than humans raised in isolation from Earth - at least the robots would have had some experience in being on Earth, and might ultimately send emmisaries back to Earth as well.
The teletext version of Oregon Trail was around a long time before the PET hit the scene, and I remember the Apple version of that game being pretty much a direct translation of the teletext version, with the addition of a graphical map and using a "Duck Hunt" style shooting section instead of the "Type POW" tecnique. Seems unlikely that the microcomputer version of Oregon Trail was ripping off Trail West; more likely that TW drew its inspiration from the original just as the official OT did.
Count me among those old-timers who played the teletype version of this game (complete with the acoustic modem couplers). I think I played a revision to your version, though, around 1978. At that point, the maintainers had gotten wise to your cheap "wert" trick, and the words you needed to type to shoot your gun were randomly chosen each time the gun needed firing. "Pow" and "bang" were definitely two of them; I think there were a few more, like "wham" or "fire".
The trailer's exciting to Fallout fans because it is in line with the intro movies from the first two Fallout games ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=WkBNKa2KXZE , http://youtube.com/watch?v=e3PXiV95kwA ). There's a lot of fear in the fan community that Bethesda will "ruin" the franchise; this trailer is Bethesda's way of saying that they're on the same page as the fans. Whether or not they follow through on the promise is another matter.
Also, the trailer is just plain good from a production/drama standpoint. It's a teaser trailer, which, pretty much by definition, is not meant to show you an MTV-style montage of game footage (those trailers are the most boring to me), but just let you know, "The game exists, we're working on it, here's something to let you know how excited we are about the movie." Compare this to teaser trailers from movies like "Strange Days" that featured nothing but an extreme closeup of Ralph Fiennes talking for 2 minutes.
Actually, what got me wondering was the $995 cash advance to WU. But it was pretty obvious that they were avoiding some kind of threshold (real or imagined).
You failed to mention one that's better than all the others: use the credit card number to wire money to a remote location using Western Union. Four years ago someone used my number to wire $995 to the Indonesia. My card company ate the charges, but I was shocked to learn that Western Union will wire money with card numbers given over the phone with no identity verification. It was unclear whether the criminals had my 3 digit "security code" (HAH!) or not.
Why on earth would you compare the utility of these two vehicles? They fill completely different niches. Why not compare the Explorer to a Subaru Forester, which is faster, gets better gas mileage, handles better, is more reliable, has more features, and costs less (both new and used)? It's slightly smaller than the explorer, but if you were even considering a Prius, you seemed to already be open to the idea of a smaller car. The Forester is a far better compromise.
If monitors are dirt cheap, just buy one yourself and bring it in. You'll have it for the next job where you need a second monitor. I get tired of hearing my peers bitch about how the company is "too cheap" to buy them something they need that would make them so productive. Usually these guys bitching about the company not spending an extra $150 on an external monitor think nothing of buying $400 video cards for their gaming rigs at home. If the cost is trivial, and the productivity gain is so great, just invest in yourself and buy the item. Those huge productivity gains you get can be used to justify your next raise.
FYI, in my career, I've purchased my own ergonomic office chair, keyboard, mouse, a monitor, and external SCSI drives - all of which I ultimately took with me when I went on to other jobs.
You're one of the few to mention paper RPG's, so I feel compelled to reply:
The experience between playing paper RPGs & CRPGs is about as different as two experiences can be; I'm amazed to this day that people consider the CRPG to be an "evolution" of the paper RPG. The fact that "level grind" exists is probably the best illustration of this.
In paper RPGs, the level grind simply doesn't exist. Why? Consider the hours you spend playing a typical paper RPG, compared to the hours in a computer RPG. How many combat encounters could you fit into a typical 4 or 5 hour session? With paper ones, 10 would probably be the max, and it wouldn't be surprising to have only 1 per hour typically. With CRPGs, it's more like one every 5 minutes (in a Baldur's Gate type game) or one every 10 seconds (for Diablo).
Yet the number of hours you spend playing both games might be the same (you could make a case that the paper game might take 2 or 3 times longer to go from zero to hero, but maybe not if you're talking about a one hundred hour game like Oblivion).
This difference is the foundation of the level grind. In the paper world, most monsters you'll probably only fight once, with a few "filler species" (like orcs, etc.) that you may have a dozen encounters with. It's not really possible for it to become boring. In a CRPG, you're going to face the same foe many, many times, with each encounter pretty much being a dupe of the last one. To add insult to injury, going up in levels usually means that the monster just gets tougher as you do, with no real tactical differences to the fight (but possible new graphics for the same damage spells).
I think the big reason why paper RPGs are more fun when you're a noob is the fact that you have more freedom of options in them. In a CRPG, you're pretty much stuck with "attack with weapon" "attack with spell" "heal with spell or potion" mechanic. Want to light the roof on fire to drive the orcs out of the farmhouse? Maybe you'll set up an ambush with deadfall in order to accomodate for the inherent weakness of your characters relative to the ogre. These are all non-starters in the CRPG world, and because this, low level combat (and ultimately all combat) becomes either boring, or a Sudoku-like exercise of managing stats & power-ups (like you find in the tactical RPGs).
It's ultimately a question of fun. Is it fun to do the same thing over & over? For some it is. Maybe in the paper RPGs you played, this was also the case, and you view the CRPGs as an improvement because they eliminated all the boring "bookkeeping." For me, the CRPGs are invariably a disappointment, because I'm always feeling like "why can't I solve this problem a different way," which was always the fun part of the paper games. Sure, you level up & get more damaging spells, etc., but you also get more options: maybe I can use a watchdog spell, or a rope trick, or create a clever illusion to trick the monsters. Maybe I can hide in shadows & silently follow the guard back to guardhouse & steal his keys, or learn of an alternate entrance. Maybe I can cure a disease that is plaguing a village and enlist their aid in a plan that requires many folks ("Sew old woman, sew like the wind!").
But CRPGs try to superficially copy the "level up" mechanic, without giving you these options, and the result is just a mechanical tedium. It's like Eric Wolpaw said in his brilliant defense of Majesty: "If you don't get a thrill from watching stat bars rise, then it might be time to start considering a new hobby altogether."
Hybrids sound good, but really their efficiency is almost entirely based on their weight
Completely untrue. Compare, for example, the Toyota Yaris to the Toyota Prius:
Yaris: 2288 pounds, MPG: 34/40, with "real world" mpg being about 36.
Prius: 2932 pounds, MPG: 51/60, with "real world" mpg being about 45.
36 mpg is great gas mileage for a ICE car, but it's far short of 45. That's not saying that you shouldn't buy a smaller car if you can. My 1996 Maxima got, at most, 29 mpg (24 mpg mixed driving) when I first bought it, and it weighs only 80 pounds more than Prius. Sure, it's zippier, but did I really need that power? No; my next car will be small & efficient, possibly a hybrid.
Given that the Prius is almost 700 pounds, and 33% heavier than the Yaris, and gets 25% greater gas mileage, I'd say that weight is not really the most important aspect in its efficiency.
Halo's always had the mute feature as byproduct of being a Live title. However, it wasa little cumbersome to use in the heat of battle. The feature talked about here is just a refinement of the already existing feature, allowing you to mute people with a minimum of effort.
I do think that a player being notified they've been put in the STFU list is mandatory, though.
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The "porn drives the technology" argument was irrelevant to the HD wars anyway. Nobody wants to see their porn in HD, unless they have a fetish for bad skin and razor burn.
-BbT
The model doesn't need changing. The current model is that a disk holds enough content based on the amount of time people are willing to sit on their fat asses. You're going to take a break to stretch your legs or go to the bathroom. You may as well change a disk while you're at it. Content that lasts over 4 hours is so uncommon as to be irrelevant to the issue.
I don't see a real compelling reason for something to be able to play 8 hours of uninterrupted content for the home market. Those that need that kind of play time are a insignificant minority. The only reason for increased capacity would be when the move comes to the next higher resolution format, which will involve new hardware anyway.
-BbT
Y, the absolute worst. Nothing like losing your entire program when you fat-fingered the return key. Plus, the reset key on those early machines didn't have the stiff spring that later keyboards had, so there was nothing to stop you.
Adding insult to injury was the fact that the keyboards were also of rather low quality; the spacebar on half of our schools computers' was knocked loose, and a lot of the keys wouldn't reliably work.
-BbT
Like I said, in certain, well-defined situations, I'm sure the Roomba does a decent job. We live in a small place (1500 sq. ft), hardwood floors, with a dog & cat, but I'd never get a a Roomba. Why? Because it's a narrow townhouse with 3 floors (500 sq. feet per floor). I'd either have to buy one Roomba for each floor, or ferry it from floor to floor to have it do it's job. Additionally, the bulk of the time I spend vacuuming the place is doing the stairs - no help from Roomba there. Then there's the handful of area rugs that attract pet hair like mad and need many passes of a full-sized vac to get clean - again, something a small battery-powered vac like the Roomba would have absolutely no chance to get clean. Let's not forget the dust-bunny farms that are cultivated under couches and in odd corners that a Roomba wouldn't be able to reach. A simple dining room table with four chairs around it presents a forest of legs that would prevent entry by the intrepid disk; even if it could make it, when I vacuum there, you pretty much need to lift up the chairs and vacuum the feet of the chairs to get at the hair that adheres to them. Finally, many of the areas we vacuum (closets, bathrooms) have doors that we keep closed when we're not there, so we'd need to open all those doors to let it in to do the job.
It takes about 40 minutes to vacuum the house each week; the parts that the Roomba would be capable of cleaning accounts for about 10 minutes of that task. I can see it being useful for people with large houses that occupy mostly one floor, with a layout of furniture that doesn't present to many problems (like your typical spread in "Architectural Digest"). It's not a slam against the smarts of the Roomba, but too much of vacuuming involves actually moving chairs or reaching around with the accessory hose, something a little disk just can't do.
-BbT
The article goes to great lengths to bash the American consumer, yet where does it speak to an alternative? Vaguely mentioning "the Japanese" hardly counts. If American expectations of robots are absurdly high, Japanese expectations are equally absurdly low. It seems the only stories you ever hear about Japanese robots, other than Asimo, are essentially attempts to make animatronic puppets that resemble people or pets so closely until they finally achieve "uncanny valley" levels of creepiness. Yet these "robots" offer no real functionality. If we want to make generalizations, we may as well say the Japanese are obsessed with creating the appearance of robots, without actually fulfilling any other purpose other than "Kawaii!!!"
Case in point: He brings up the Aibo. Of course the market rejected it - who has $2000 to spend on a battery-powered dog whose novelty wears off after about 6 hours, unless you're a programmer who wants to use them for competitions or hacking. And cheap knock-offs costing $40 or less quickly showed up and sold well, demonstrating that there was a market for trivial fluff, as long as it was priced right.
And then there's the Roomba. Sure, it works in certain well-defined environments to remove minor debris; but we're talking about a device that takes over for a task that most of us only spend an hour/week doing, if that, and only for a single floor. This isn't to say that the Roomba is a failure, or that vacuum-cleaning robots are a dead end. It's a decent start, and there's no reason that a fully functional vacuum robot that does as good a job as a person with a full size vac isn't in the near future, but for now, unless you're Stephen Hawking, a Roomba is more about entertainment than cleaning a house.
And that's what it really boils down to: people will embrace robots when they fulfill some useful purpose that is worth the price you'll pay for them, the hassle factor in dealing with them, and the real estate they take up in your closet when you're not using them. We will get there - the recent Urban Challenge for autonomous cars reported hear earlier is a stepping stone - but stop putting the cart before the horse and demanding some hypothetical consumer buy a lot of novelty garbage just to get an industry a jump start.
-BbT
95% of consumers out there don't even know what an upscaling DVD player is, let alone whether they even own one. I've never met a single person who wasn't a techie or avphile who knew or cared what upscaling was.
-BbT
My Netflix queue has around 100 movies in it. 7 are available in Blu-Ray. 9 are available in HDDVD. 95% are movies from the last 3 years. At this rate, it will take a many pay-per-view downloads of the HD latest releases that I want to see to justify the cost of a $200 player. So, yeah, there isn't much content available in HD yet, unless you're interested in seeing useless dreck like "Click" or "Hitch" in HD.
-BbT
This seems reasonable given that online we see a non-negligible number of people proudly proclaiming they haven't had a problem while a non-negligible number of others say they've gone through several of them.
Yes, because those without problems are clearly as likely to post that they have fine XBoxes as people who have been plagued with problems.
My 360 was periodically overheating (not a full red ring, but a partial ring that forced me to shut it off for a while). The problem was solved by moving my 360 out of my cozy entertainment center and putting it around the corner, free standing by itself.
It seems pretty clear to me that the problem is with the spec of the 360s. We see over & over again people bitching that "I'm on my [n::n > 4]th 360!!" - it should be obvious to these guys that perhaps the problem is with the way they're using their 360s, and not a manufacturing quality issue. Maybe after their third failure they'd figure out that they need to keep the thing a little cooler.
This doesn't absolve MS from failing to account in their specification for the fact that many people are using their 360s in hot/poorly ventilated environments; they should have realized that there would be people who had been running their previous-gen systems in environments that were already at the borderline, heat-wise, for those systems. But it's also stupid as a customer to keep doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different result.
-BbT
Where do you see it weighs 500 pounds? That seems a little excessive for a life-sized figure made of mostly-hollow plastic lego bricks. Maybe 50 pounds.
And that $2700 "shipping" charge is "shipping and handling". Given that the set comes pre-assembled (well, in 3 parts), I'm guessing that $150 is shipping and $2550 is what they're paying someone to put together the kit, although you'd think that would be included in the price of the item. I never understood this logic anyway. Why not just charge $30,000 and say "Free Shipping".
-BbT
I was only putting it forth as a possibility, not really pushing it. But I know from my own experience that I've never felt as confident using the controller as I have with the keyboard/mouse. Our social group contains players that have all been playing Halo for 3 years or more, yet there is clearly a great difference in controller aptitude, as evidenced in low-strategy games like "Slayer". The best player in our group routinely scores 10x the number of kills as the worst player when we play against each other. I rank about 3rd in our group, and I know that my issues all have to do with aiming control. I never felt that was an issue when I was playing games like Team Fortress Classic or Counterstrike on the PC. Of course, when we get really slaughtered online by other players in team games, it's usually due to better teamwork on their part, but frequently it's because they have an uncommonly good player that scores almost all the kills for those teams. This happens frequently enough that I can't include these modest superstars in the ranks of the Uber.
-BbT
Maybe we just come from different planets, because your analogy seems to illustrate my point clearly - playing baseball with bras and hams would make perfect sense, if that's what the rules of the game were. Just because something is easier (mouse & keyboard), doesn't mean that's what you should use. I'm sure it would be easier to get home runs if the bat were larger, or more strikeouts if the ball were smaller, but the rules are what they are. Ideally you want to balance the rules of a sport or game such that it is easy enough for novices to muddle about in, but difficult enough such that mastery is not trivial. It's quite possible (although I doubt this was a consideration in the design of console shooters) that the difficulty curve of mouse/keyboard control is such that you don't get a good distribution of skill levels - everyone "masters" it too quickly and you you're left with a group where everyone who's played the game for a month or two is pretty much equal in skill, barring the superstar-savants that play professionally.
The fact that consoles use a common controller (more or less), not to mention common computing hardware, is what makes them so much more appealing from a competitive standpoint than the PC domain, where someone might have an ultra-high rez display, or mouse with extra features, or cheats. There are sports where the design of the equipment is a big part of the competition (auto racing, for example), but it's not appropriate for a mass-market online game where 95% of the players are going to be using the equipment that came with the system they bought. Introducing an alternative control scheme into a competitive online game like Halo would just complicate things, unless the game chose to segregate players into groups based on the controller they were using.
-BbT
You still haven't answered my question as to why you'd want to buy the XBox to play XBox-only games, but you won't because Halo is XBox only.
Of course FPS's control better with a mouse than they do with a controller. Who cares? My car has better handling than a motorcycle; it doesn't mean riding a motorcycle is less fun. Everyone on a given platform is using the same controller, so it all evens out. Sure, using a controller is harder at first. You probably don't remember, but using a mouse was hard too - I still have friends that play FPS games on the PC using only keyboard, no mouse, because they believe the control is more "precise".
Frankly, I'll take a little slop in my controller over aimbots any day. Plus, I find the controller gives a more "realistic" feeling when playing simply because I can't be superhumanly accurate with my aiming like you can with a mouse. I rarely feel panicked when playing an FPS on the PC - it's just too easy. On a console, it's more immersive experience.
-BbT
I don't understand your argument. You're saying that you would buy an XBox to play some games that only exist on it, but you won't because there exists a game that only runs on the XBox? It makes perfect sense why Halo exists only for the XBox - why would they want to fragment their multiplayer fan base by releasing on multiple platforms. Years ago Bungie determined that Halo was more of a "sport" than a video game, and has been driving development of it since then with the primary focus being towards balancing multiplayer. It's not practical to have multiplayer title be cross-platform, Shadowrun notwithstanding.
Plus, the ROI for console and console game sales is far greater than PC game sales. Why should Bungie/MS waste time & resources doing joint development, jeopardizing the release date of the 360 title, just for a marginal ROI that would be seen on sales of the PC version? Face it - PC game sales levels don't justify the kinds of budgets that A-list console titles pull down. PC gaming still has a place, but that place is niche gaming, independent gaming, and strategy wargaming.
Finally, why would you want to buy the PC version? PCs are just a money pit when it comes to keeping a gaming rig current. You can easily spend the cost of a 360 on video cards alone each year just to maintain a machine that will play the latest & greatest FPS titles at maximum fidelity. It's not worth a company's time to produce massively expensive titles for a tiny fraction of the game-playing public.
-BbT
The article does raise an important question: Just what are we preserving with instellar colonization? Assume that no magical FTL technologies come to pass, but we are able to produce ships that are ultimately capable of travelling interstellar distances without breaking our economic bank; assume that they're relatively slow (maybe .05 C).
It would still be possible to colonize the galaxy, but it would have to be done with self-replicating robotic probes that would prepare colony sites for habitation before human arrival. Additionally, don't think "generation ships", think "seed ships". The colonization probes could contained fertilized ova that would be incubated upon arrival, and raised by robotic "nannies". It sounds far-fetched, but creating an AI capable of raising a child is at least conceivably possible, compared to the sky-pie of FTL drives or generation ships.
The entire culture of Earth could be made available to these new colony worlds, but there would be no direct contact between us, ever. Certainly light-speed transmissions could be made to monitor progress, but these worlds wouldn't be "colonies" at all - they'd all be "New Earths", and their societies would develop on their own. The only thing we'd be "preserving" is the idea of human DNA - there would be no real continuity between our culture and theirs.
It's probably worth doing, but it makes you think about what's the "point". We'd be preserving our memory in these other worlds (hopefully, if they bothered to archive what we had sent/were transmitting), as we'd be preserving theirs. But the same could be accomplished by creating true AI robots; a case could be made that these AI robots would be truer descendents of humanity than humans raised in isolation from Earth - at least the robots would have had some experience in being on Earth, and might ultimately send emmisaries back to Earth as well.
-BbT
The teletext version of Oregon Trail was around a long time before the PET hit the scene, and I remember the Apple version of that game being pretty much a direct translation of the teletext version, with the addition of a graphical map and using a "Duck Hunt" style shooting section instead of the "Type POW" tecnique. Seems unlikely that the microcomputer version of Oregon Trail was ripping off Trail West; more likely that TW drew its inspiration from the original just as the official OT did.
-BbT
Count me among those old-timers who played the teletype version of this game (complete with the acoustic modem couplers). I think I played a revision to your version, though, around 1978. At that point, the maintainers had gotten wise to your cheap "wert" trick, and the words you needed to type to shoot your gun were randomly chosen each time the gun needed firing. "Pow" and "bang" were definitely two of them; I think there were a few more, like "wham" or "fire".
-BbT
The trailer's exciting to Fallout fans because it is in line with the intro movies from the first two Fallout games ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=WkBNKa2KXZE , http://youtube.com/watch?v=e3PXiV95kwA ). There's a lot of fear in the fan community that Bethesda will "ruin" the franchise; this trailer is Bethesda's way of saying that they're on the same page as the fans. Whether or not they follow through on the promise is another matter.
Also, the trailer is just plain good from a production/drama standpoint. It's a teaser trailer, which, pretty much by definition, is not meant to show you an MTV-style montage of game footage (those trailers are the most boring to me), but just let you know, "The game exists, we're working on it, here's something to let you know how excited we are about the movie." Compare this to teaser trailers from movies like "Strange Days" that featured nothing but an extreme closeup of Ralph Fiennes talking for 2 minutes.
-BbT
Actually, what got me wondering was the $995 cash advance to WU. But it was pretty obvious that they were avoiding some kind of threshold (real or imagined).
-BbT
You failed to mention one that's better than all the others: use the credit card number to wire money to a remote location using Western Union. Four years ago someone used my number to wire $995 to the Indonesia. My card company ate the charges, but I was shocked to learn that Western Union will wire money with card numbers given over the phone with no identity verification. It was unclear whether the criminals had my 3 digit "security code" (HAH!) or not.
-BbT
Why on earth would you compare the utility of these two vehicles? They fill completely different niches. Why not compare the Explorer to a Subaru Forester, which is faster, gets better gas mileage, handles better, is more reliable, has more features, and costs less (both new and used)? It's slightly smaller than the explorer, but if you were even considering a Prius, you seemed to already be open to the idea of a smaller car. The Forester is a far better compromise.
-BbT
If monitors are dirt cheap, just buy one yourself and bring it in. You'll have it for the next job where you need a second monitor. I get tired of hearing my peers bitch about how the company is "too cheap" to buy them something they need that would make them so productive. Usually these guys bitching about the company not spending an extra $150 on an external monitor think nothing of buying $400 video cards for their gaming rigs at home. If the cost is trivial, and the productivity gain is so great, just invest in yourself and buy the item. Those huge productivity gains you get can be used to justify your next raise.
FYI, in my career, I've purchased my own ergonomic office chair, keyboard, mouse, a monitor, and external SCSI drives - all of which I ultimately took with me when I went on to other jobs.
-BbT
Credential fraud's not my goddamn problem. Understand, Monkey Boy?
-BbT
You're one of the few to mention paper RPG's, so I feel compelled to reply:
The experience between playing paper RPGs & CRPGs is about as different as two experiences can be; I'm amazed to this day that people consider the CRPG to be an "evolution" of the paper RPG. The fact that "level grind" exists is probably the best illustration of this.
In paper RPGs, the level grind simply doesn't exist. Why? Consider the hours you spend playing a typical paper RPG, compared to the hours in a computer RPG. How many combat encounters could you fit into a typical 4 or 5 hour session? With paper ones, 10 would probably be the max, and it wouldn't be surprising to have only 1 per hour typically. With CRPGs, it's more like one every 5 minutes (in a Baldur's Gate type game) or one every 10 seconds (for Diablo).
Yet the number of hours you spend playing both games might be the same (you could make a case that the paper game might take 2 or 3 times longer to go from zero to hero, but maybe not if you're talking about a one hundred hour game like Oblivion).
This difference is the foundation of the level grind. In the paper world, most monsters you'll probably only fight once, with a few "filler species" (like orcs, etc.) that you may have a dozen encounters with. It's not really possible for it to become boring. In a CRPG, you're going to face the same foe many, many times, with each encounter pretty much being a dupe of the last one. To add insult to injury, going up in levels usually means that the monster just gets tougher as you do, with no real tactical differences to the fight (but possible new graphics for the same damage spells).
I think the big reason why paper RPGs are more fun when you're a noob is the fact that you have more freedom of options in them. In a CRPG, you're pretty much stuck with "attack with weapon" "attack with spell" "heal with spell or potion" mechanic. Want to light the roof on fire to drive the orcs out of the farmhouse? Maybe you'll set up an ambush with deadfall in order to accomodate for the inherent weakness of your characters relative to the ogre. These are all non-starters in the CRPG world, and because this, low level combat (and ultimately all combat) becomes either boring, or a Sudoku-like exercise of managing stats & power-ups (like you find in the tactical RPGs).
It's ultimately a question of fun. Is it fun to do the same thing over & over? For some it is. Maybe in the paper RPGs you played, this was also the case, and you view the CRPGs as an improvement because they eliminated all the boring "bookkeeping." For me, the CRPGs are invariably a disappointment, because I'm always feeling like "why can't I solve this problem a different way," which was always the fun part of the paper games. Sure, you level up & get more damaging spells, etc., but you also get more options: maybe I can use a watchdog spell, or a rope trick, or create a clever illusion to trick the monsters. Maybe I can hide in shadows & silently follow the guard back to guardhouse & steal his keys, or learn of an alternate entrance. Maybe I can cure a disease that is plaguing a village and enlist their aid in a plan that requires many folks ("Sew old woman, sew like the wind!").
But CRPGs try to superficially copy the "level up" mechanic, without giving you these options, and the result is just a mechanical tedium. It's like Eric Wolpaw said in his brilliant defense of Majesty: "If you don't get a thrill from watching stat bars rise, then it might be time to start considering a new hobby altogether."
-BbT
Hybrids sound good, but really their efficiency is almost entirely based on their weight
Completely untrue. Compare, for example, the Toyota Yaris to the Toyota Prius:
Yaris: 2288 pounds, MPG: 34/40, with "real world" mpg being about 36.
Prius: 2932 pounds, MPG: 51/60, with "real world" mpg being about 45.
36 mpg is great gas mileage for a ICE car, but it's far short of 45. That's not saying that you shouldn't buy a smaller car if you can. My 1996 Maxima got, at most, 29 mpg (24 mpg mixed driving) when I first bought it, and it weighs only 80 pounds more than Prius. Sure, it's zippier, but did I really need that power? No; my next car will be small & efficient, possibly a hybrid.
Given that the Prius is almost 700 pounds, and 33% heavier than the Yaris, and gets 25% greater gas mileage, I'd say that weight is not really the most important aspect in its efficiency.
-BbT
Halo's always had the mute feature as byproduct of being a Live title. However, it wasa little cumbersome to use in the heat of battle. The feature talked about here is just a refinement of the already existing feature, allowing you to mute people with a minimum of effort.
I do think that a player being notified they've been put in the STFU list is mandatory, though.
-BbT