I've tried... Halo on the XBox was enough to make me want to toss the thing. Great game, horrid controls. And anybody who thinks 480i looks as good as a moderate PC gaming system could probably stand to visit an eye doctor. I got to the point where I could play well, but I just didn't like playing an FPS without a mouse and keyboard. My gamecube and dreamcast get quite a bit of use for other types of games, though...
I am staying off the hamster wheel for now. I'll step on again when the jump to the next tier isn't so large-- like in six months or so. The nice thing about playing old PC games is that they get FAR cheaper than console games ever do. I bought Max Payne for $4.95, two years ago. Console gaming makes up for the cheap hardware with high-priced games and add-ons pretty quickly. The Gamecube cost a whopping $90, but the ten games I have for it were more like $500. Toss in four controllers, two memory cards, a 480p cable and the link cables for Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles (we won't add the GBAs), and it gets mighty close to my $700 gaming PC with a stack of last years' games.
The difference is not as large as you think-- there's probably only two hundred dollars between my PC with 20 games and my 'cube with 10.
But I'm obviously not a one-or-the-other person. Consoles cannot replace PC gaming, and PCs don't replace consoles.
If you liked Halo: Cute Kitten Grenades, I highly recommend you try out the often-overlooked No One Lives Forever 2, which includes the Angry Kitty Feline Proximity Mine.
I nearly laughed myself to death on that one. It's really in there. You can really send an explosive robot kitten to lure guards to pet it, and then watch them all blow up.
That aside, the gamecube has its share of oddball titles. But at least we don't have Halo: Curry Restaurant Simulator like the PS2, right?
You're just old. So am I. And you're not even complaining properly-- 8-bit NES games? Where's your love for the 2600? Or Pong? Vectrex? Or the arcade industry that existed back before hardware-affordable-for-the-home was created?
*real* classics have vector displays and analog sound hardware. But I love the NES, the lucasarts adventures, Tron on the intellivision, Great Giana Sisters for the C64, the Amiga version of Lemmings and Shadow of the Beast, Mario Kart, Wolf3D, 4-player arcade Gauntlet, Tempest, Rez, Ocarina of Time, Half-life, NOLF 2, BF1942 and the rest, no matter when they're from.
God grant me the strength to take the path this gentleman has opted for. I was doing pretty well for a couple of years, but BF1942 found its way onto my system and I ended up getting all upgradey and spendy and time-wastey with the shiny new games again.
I'm holding off on D3 and HL2 until the hardware to play them is more affordable. The gut-punch with the price isn't the $50 game, it's the extra $600 I need to play them properly. If I need a proc, mobo, ram, and a video card to play it, I'm going to try to sit on my gaming urge for a while and make do with C&C:Generals, BF1942, and the other previous-generation games that turned out great. NOLF 2, Max Payne, etc...
Now, if only I could find a copy of System Shock 2...
I'd be curious to know how they're going to maintain the WAN without it being a radio beacon for the enemy to spot. Frequency hopping would help a little, but I'm sure a creative engineer could work around that.
I have never laughed so hard. The translation was "technically accurate" but got the nuance all wrong, and made it look like you were on an urgent hunt for some oceangoing man-love.
Toss in raising a kitten, the interminable forklift job, great graphics, bizarrely detailed convenience stores (look! I can buy sardines!), and a great realtime fight system-- and you have the love-it/hate-it game that is Shenmue. Parts of it were brilliant, and parts of it were bad enough to make grown men call out for sailors.
I have no idea. At least one of the other games they mention in their "from the makers of" section is already a flash game on their site. I particularly enjoyed discovering that if you burninate a peasant and they run back into their hut, the hut catches on fire.
I'm guessing they'll make it, but it will be a flash game that looks like a mid-80s era EGA King's Quest title, except with short pants and burnination.
Which is why if you're going to play it, you should invite a bunch of friends over and drink beer. The game is about as important as the catching of real fish.
In fact, skip the fishing and the videogames altogether. Friends and Beer.
Seriously. CGA was all about "how can we pick the least appealing colors possible." Four colors in the graphic mode, and they where Cyan, Magenta, White, and Black. There was a second mode with yellow, red, green, and black-- I have never figured out why the first set was the more popular. I'm not sure I ever saw a game using the second mode. I only learned of its existence when I googled to check my memory of the awful CGA palette.
But yeah, Peasant's Quest has to be at *least* EGA. I see more than purple there. I am hoping it's as hilarious as it looks...
I kinda liked the game right up until that forklift part. You could ignore all the myriad sidequests for the most part, although I was raising the kitten because it was on my way to and from everywhere.
But the forklift work scene? Gahh. If you quit when you get there, the game's not half-bad. I pity the fool who spent hours "working" in that warehouse just to get to the end.
Man, that's like some sort of bizarre, dark geek action flick. Perpetrator breaks in, beats geek with hammer (see his other posts for more details) and steals all his valuables.
The helpless geek can do nothing until his calculator is stolen, which is CROSSING THE LINE for a true nerd. Enraged and empowered by having a reason to fight, the geek fights back, killing the calculator-kidnapper, but in a horrible twist, discovers he has shot the very thing he was trying to save.
Fortunately, due to the heroic engineering efforts of TI, the calculator pulls through, leaving the geek and his arithmetical love to live happily ever after.
Interesting... I never noticed that! Of course, I don't think I've ever bought a PC magazine, just because the internet provides a pretty thorough coverage of that particular topic for me.
I'll keep my eyes open next time I'm somewhere that carries them.
I seem to have gotten way off on a tangent here-- but you make very good points. As I tried to point out in my initial post, the main reason I don't like this idea is a "gut feeling," and not being an economist, I don't know the real reasons why this isn't good.
Anyway, to pull myself back from this whole "centralized pricing" thing, which is not what I meant to suggest at all-- I think what I dislike about the concept of "what the seller is willing to take and the buyer is willing to give" is that it is usually phrased as "the maximum the customer is willing to pay," rather than "the minimum the company is willing to accept." The original poster was much more even-handed in his description, and I was reacting as much to previous descriptions of this concept as I was to his post, unfairly to him.
In fact, centralized pricing is completely the opposite of what I'm after, and some thought and the helpful posters have pointed out how circular it is trying to determine the cost of things based on the cost of other things. I'll leave the economics to the economists.
I'm still muttering about getting branded flamebait for what I thought were reasonable questions in a couple of other posts, though... go slashdot!
I'm not sure how that was flamebait, but I'll try to rephrase the question more politely:
Since gasoline prices are determined largely by OPEC, a centralized, price-setting organization-- how does the consumer have any input into what the price ends up being? As evidenced by the recent significant price increases for gasoline in the US, people do not buy less fuel, even when the price is up significantly.
Explain to me how the buyer has any influence in the decision to apply a "reasonable" price to gasoline under the current system.
In most parts of the US, there is a certain minimum amount of fuel that people have to buy each week just to get to their job and the grocery store. If you have mass transit (lucky you!) or are willing to bike (I do the 20-mile commute by bike when the weather is nice) you can avoid some of it-- but even assuming the most fuel-efficient car available, you still have to buy some quantity of gas all the time. How much you buy doesn't depend at all on how much it costs. Gas goes way up? You keep buying.
Perhaps I misunderstand what the original poster was suggesting, but the idea of "charge consumers the maximum they are willing to pay" doesn't strike me as terribly fair either. There are some things that the maximum they are willing to pay is however much it costs until they simply can't afford it. Health insurance, gasoline, etc... I'm sure you've bitched about the prices-- but do you ever exercise your capitalistic right to simply not buy the overpriced product? Of course not-- you can't. (Unless you've got handy mass transit, which is beyond rare in the US)
I'm not suggesting any sort of central fixed price system, only that if a company is found to be charging far more (say, triple) than it actually costs to make, sell, and deliver their product, then they should be in trouble.
That concept pisses me off, whether it's the basis of a pure capitalism or not. Maybe it's the hard-wired instinct for "fairness" that we share with monkeys, or maybe it's the impossibiity of implementing such an idealized system. Or maybe it's because my idea of "what I'm willing to pay" is cost of stuff + cost of labor + reasonable profit. Anything more than that is gouging, and anything less is most likely subsidized by the gouging.
Who knows? I still don't like it. Why *can't* we all pay the same reasonable price? Why is artificial price differentiation and illusory competition through rebranding and repackaging of identical products a good thing for anyone but the companies succeeding in the gouging end of the spectrum?
Maybe there's a good reason I'm not an economist. On the other hand, maybe there's a good reason this doesn't work perfectly now-- people hate it, and some of them even bother to shop around to find the lowest price.
Yep-- lifetime tivo subs for direcTV series 1 tivos used to be available, but aren't anymore. So, if your series 1 gets hosed and you replace it, you will lose your lifetime service. (It no longer exists.)
This would be a little different if they had stated what would happen in these circumstances-- if they will transfer the lifetime to the new unit, there's no issue at all.
How is this possible? Don't they have multiple locations, or failover boxes? Invincible robot warriors protecting their connection to the 'net?
Yahoo's search is also down, but for all I know, google is still their backend.
Once upon a time, we had altavista.com, hotbot.com, excite.com, askjeeves.com, and roughly 10 billion others. I think there's a lesson here-- as kickass as google is, my web use is paralyzed when they go down. I hope like hell their IPO doesn't make them suck.
Man, 30 *pounds* per game? Ouch. The whole "same price, different currency" thing that goes on in England is criminal. The expensive ones run $35 here.
Of course, it's hard to beat "free," but remember-- if you don't buy the games you like, they will quit making the games you like. Remember that the GBA has no region-lock, and try buying grey-market from somewhere where the pricing is less awful.
You need a GBA, if you don't already have one. (and I suspect you do, if you're that addicted to the 2D platformers) It's the last vestige of 2D gaming, and more than a few of the games are truly great. If you don't like playing on a tiny screen, get a cheap-o used gamecube (I think they're like $70) and a gameboy player, which plugs into the bottom of it. Then you can enjoy a steady stream of new 2D content, at least until the "scourge of 3D" moves into handheld territory in the next generation. Which, of course, will push you into cell-phone gaming-- but that's still at least a year or two away.
I'll second this from personal experience-- now that my prescription is strong enough, I see the same difficulty focusing on blue light that you describe when wearing my glasses. Like the original poster said, it's just because the light gets "bent" differently depending on the frequency. I can focus on the blue, but then the rest goes out of focus, or vice versa.
And again, the same as the parent poster said-- it's only noticeable now because my vision is tack-sharp with my glasses on. My last pair was four years old, and I hadn't realized I needed stronger lenses.
On that movie list, seven of ten are sci-fi/fantasy, if you're willing to count the Sixth Sense. I was on the fence about that one, but I think it will do.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried... Halo on the XBox was enough to make me want to toss the thing. Great game, horrid controls. And anybody who thinks 480i looks as good as a moderate PC gaming system could probably stand to visit an eye doctor. I got to the point where I could play well, but I just didn't like playing an FPS without a mouse and keyboard. My gamecube and dreamcast get quite a bit of use for other types of games, though...
I am staying off the hamster wheel for now. I'll step on again when the jump to the next tier isn't so large-- like in six months or so. The nice thing about playing old PC games is that they get FAR cheaper than console games ever do. I bought Max Payne for $4.95, two years ago. Console gaming makes up for the cheap hardware with high-priced games and add-ons pretty quickly. The Gamecube cost a whopping $90, but the ten games I have for it were more like $500. Toss in four controllers, two memory cards, a 480p cable and the link cables for Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles (we won't add the GBAs), and it gets mighty close to my $700 gaming PC with a stack of last years' games.
The difference is not as large as you think-- there's probably only two hundred dollars between my PC with 20 games and my 'cube with 10.
But I'm obviously not a one-or-the-other person. Consoles cannot replace PC gaming, and PCs don't replace consoles.
If you liked Halo: Cute Kitten Grenades, I highly recommend you try out the often-overlooked No One Lives Forever 2, which includes the Angry Kitty Feline Proximity Mine.
I nearly laughed myself to death on that one. It's really in there. You can really send an explosive robot kitten to lure guards to pet it, and then watch them all blow up.
That aside, the gamecube has its share of oddball titles. But at least we don't have Halo: Curry Restaurant Simulator like the PS2, right?
You're just old. So am I. And you're not even complaining properly-- 8-bit NES games? Where's your love for the 2600? Or Pong? Vectrex? Or the arcade industry that existed back before hardware-affordable-for-the-home was created?
*real* classics have vector displays and analog sound hardware. But I love the NES, the lucasarts adventures, Tron on the intellivision, Great Giana Sisters for the C64, the Amiga version of Lemmings and Shadow of the Beast, Mario Kart, Wolf3D, 4-player arcade Gauntlet, Tempest, Rez, Ocarina of Time, Half-life, NOLF 2, BF1942 and the rest, no matter when they're from.
God grant me the strength to take the path this gentleman has opted for. I was doing pretty well for a couple of years, but BF1942 found its way onto my system and I ended up getting all upgradey and spendy and time-wastey with the shiny new games again.
I'm holding off on D3 and HL2 until the hardware to play them is more affordable. The gut-punch with the price isn't the $50 game, it's the extra $600 I need to play them properly. If I need a proc, mobo, ram, and a video card to play it, I'm going to try to sit on my gaming urge for a while and make do with C&C:Generals, BF1942, and the other previous-generation games that turned out great. NOLF 2, Max Payne, etc...
Now, if only I could find a copy of System Shock 2...
I'd be curious to know how they're going to maintain the WAN without it being a radio beacon for the enemy to spot. Frequency hopping would help a little, but I'm sure a creative engineer could work around that.
It's like a portable target beacon for missiles!
I have never laughed so hard. The translation was "technically accurate" but got the nuance all wrong, and made it look like you were on an urgent hunt for some oceangoing man-love.
Toss in raising a kitten, the interminable forklift job, great graphics, bizarrely detailed convenience stores (look! I can buy sardines!), and a great realtime fight system-- and you have the love-it/hate-it game that is Shenmue. Parts of it were brilliant, and parts of it were bad enough to make grown men call out for sailors.
I have no idea. At least one of the other games they mention in their "from the makers of" section is already a flash game on their site. I particularly enjoyed discovering that if you burninate a peasant and they run back into their hut, the hut catches on fire.
I'm guessing they'll make it, but it will be a flash game that looks like a mid-80s era EGA King's Quest title, except with short pants and burnination.
Whoops! I stand corrrected! Since I looked last, it's already been released!
Which is why if you're going to play it, you should invite a bunch of friends over and drink beer. The game is about as important as the catching of real fish.
In fact, skip the fishing and the videogames altogether. Friends and Beer.
Seriously. CGA was all about "how can we pick the least appealing colors possible." Four colors in the graphic mode, and they where Cyan, Magenta, White, and Black. There was a second mode with yellow, red, green, and black-- I have never figured out why the first set was the more popular. I'm not sure I ever saw a game using the second mode. I only learned of its existence when I googled to check my memory of the awful CGA palette.
But yeah, Peasant's Quest has to be at *least* EGA. I see more than purple there. I am hoping it's as hilarious as it looks...
I kinda liked the game right up until that forklift part. You could ignore all the myriad sidequests for the most part, although I was raising the kitten because it was on my way to and from everywhere.
But the forklift work scene? Gahh. If you quit when you get there, the game's not half-bad. I pity the fool who spent hours "working" in that warehouse just to get to the end.
Man, that's like some sort of bizarre, dark geek action flick. Perpetrator breaks in, beats geek with hammer (see his other posts for more details) and steals all his valuables.
The helpless geek can do nothing until his calculator is stolen, which is CROSSING THE LINE for a true nerd. Enraged and empowered by having a reason to fight, the geek fights back, killing the calculator-kidnapper, but in a horrible twist, discovers he has shot the very thing he was trying to save.
Fortunately, due to the heroic engineering efforts of TI, the calculator pulls through, leaving the geek and his arithmetical love to live happily ever after.
Interesting... I never noticed that! Of course, I don't think I've ever bought a PC magazine, just because the internet provides a pretty thorough coverage of that particular topic for me.
I'll keep my eyes open next time I'm somewhere that carries them.
New for nerds, from the future.
I seem to have gotten way off on a tangent here-- but you make very good points. As I tried to point out in my initial post, the main reason I don't like this idea is a "gut feeling," and not being an economist, I don't know the real reasons why this isn't good.
Anyway, to pull myself back from this whole "centralized pricing" thing, which is not what I meant to suggest at all-- I think what I dislike about the concept of "what the seller is willing to take and the buyer is willing to give" is that it is usually phrased as "the maximum the customer is willing to pay," rather than "the minimum the company is willing to accept." The original poster was much more even-handed in his description, and I was reacting as much to previous descriptions of this concept as I was to his post, unfairly to him.
In fact, centralized pricing is completely the opposite of what I'm after, and some thought and the helpful posters have pointed out how circular it is trying to determine the cost of things based on the cost of other things. I'll leave the economics to the economists.
I'm still muttering about getting branded flamebait for what I thought were reasonable questions in a couple of other posts, though... go slashdot!
I'm not sure how that was flamebait, but I'll try to rephrase the question more politely:
Since gasoline prices are determined largely by OPEC, a centralized, price-setting organization-- how does the consumer have any input into what the price ends up being? As evidenced by the recent significant price increases for gasoline in the US, people do not buy less fuel, even when the price is up significantly.
Is that better?
Explain to me how the buyer has any influence in the decision to apply a "reasonable" price to gasoline under the current system.
In most parts of the US, there is a certain minimum amount of fuel that people have to buy each week just to get to their job and the grocery store. If you have mass transit (lucky you!) or are willing to bike (I do the 20-mile commute by bike when the weather is nice) you can avoid some of it-- but even assuming the most fuel-efficient car available, you still have to buy some quantity of gas all the time. How much you buy doesn't depend at all on how much it costs. Gas goes way up? You keep buying.
Perhaps I misunderstand what the original poster was suggesting, but the idea of "charge consumers the maximum they are willing to pay" doesn't strike me as terribly fair either. There are some things that the maximum they are willing to pay is however much it costs until they simply can't afford it. Health insurance, gasoline, etc... I'm sure you've bitched about the prices-- but do you ever exercise your capitalistic right to simply not buy the overpriced product? Of course not-- you can't. (Unless you've got handy mass transit, which is beyond rare in the US)
I'm not suggesting any sort of central fixed price system, only that if a company is found to be charging far more (say, triple) than it actually costs to make, sell, and deliver their product, then they should be in trouble.
That concept pisses me off, whether it's the basis of a pure capitalism or not. Maybe it's the hard-wired instinct for "fairness" that we share with monkeys, or maybe it's the impossibiity of implementing such an idealized system. Or maybe it's because my idea of "what I'm willing to pay" is cost of stuff + cost of labor + reasonable profit. Anything more than that is gouging, and anything less is most likely subsidized by the gouging.
Who knows? I still don't like it. Why *can't* we all pay the same reasonable price? Why is artificial price differentiation and illusory competition through rebranding and repackaging of identical products a good thing for anyone but the companies succeeding in the gouging end of the spectrum?
Maybe there's a good reason I'm not an economist. On the other hand, maybe there's a good reason this doesn't work perfectly now-- people hate it, and some of them even bother to shop around to find the lowest price.
Yep-- lifetime tivo subs for direcTV series 1 tivos used to be available, but aren't anymore. So, if your series 1 gets hosed and you replace it, you will lose your lifetime service. (It no longer exists.)
This would be a little different if they had stated what would happen in these circumstances-- if they will transfer the lifetime to the new unit, there's no issue at all.
Quake II didn't require hardware 3D acceleration-- I played it on a Pentium 133MHz MMX laptop, in software.
How is this possible? Don't they have multiple locations, or failover boxes? Invincible robot warriors protecting their connection to the 'net?
Yahoo's search is also down, but for all I know, google is still their backend.
Once upon a time, we had altavista.com, hotbot.com, excite.com, askjeeves.com, and roughly 10 billion others. I think there's a lesson here-- as kickass as google is, my web use is paralyzed when they go down. I hope like hell their IPO doesn't make them suck.
Man, 30 *pounds* per game? Ouch. The whole "same price, different currency" thing that goes on in England is criminal. The expensive ones run $35 here.
Of course, it's hard to beat "free," but remember-- if you don't buy the games you like, they will quit making the games you like. Remember that the GBA has no region-lock, and try buying grey-market from somewhere where the pricing is less awful.
You need a GBA, if you don't already have one. (and I suspect you do, if you're that addicted to the 2D platformers) It's the last vestige of 2D gaming, and more than a few of the games are truly great. If you don't like playing on a tiny screen, get a cheap-o used gamecube (I think they're like $70) and a gameboy player, which plugs into the bottom of it. Then you can enjoy a steady stream of new 2D content, at least until the "scourge of 3D" moves into handheld territory in the next generation. Which, of course, will push you into cell-phone gaming-- but that's still at least a year or two away.
I'll second this from personal experience-- now that my prescription is strong enough, I see the same difficulty focusing on blue light that you describe when wearing my glasses. Like the original poster said, it's just because the light gets "bent" differently depending on the frequency. I can focus on the blue, but then the rest goes out of focus, or vice versa.
And again, the same as the parent poster said-- it's only noticeable now because my vision is tack-sharp with my glasses on. My last pair was four years old, and I hadn't realized I needed stronger lenses.
On that movie list, seven of ten are sci-fi/fantasy, if you're willing to count the Sixth Sense. I was on the fence about that one, but I think it will do.