while it is true that they needed an infusion of cash, its not a stretch to imagine a world where that cash came from another source. Someplace like Apple for instance (to make it mac exclusive, or at least mac first) or perhaps another gaming company.
In which scenario Halo never woudld've sold nearly as well as it actually did, there never would've been a Halo 2 or 3, and Bungie would've died a year later than they would've without the cash infusion. Like it or not, the Microsoft purchase and Xbox focus were the best things that could've happened to Bungie at the time, and are the reason that Bungie can return to a semi-independent status. It looks like they'll have a similar kind of relationship as Ensemble does with Microsoft, where they're technically independent but nobody can name any non-Microsoft-published properties from them.
Re:I've never got the point of wireless synching..
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ZOMG New Zunes
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· Score: 1
My question is WHO would have a WiFi hotspot in their garage?
If you have a house with an attached garage and an existing wireless network, there's a very good chance that you already have wi-fi coverage in your garage. I know I do, without having to do anything special to extend the network out to my garage specifically.
Re:I've never got the point of wireless synching..
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ZOMG New Zunes
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You have your player in a dock connected to a stereo in another room (but not connected to a computer). With wifi syncing, you can sync it without removing it from that dock.
Or you're like me and you have your player in a dock in your car, and you never use the player outside of the car. Right now I rarely add new music to my Zune because it's a pain in the butt to bring it inside. I do have to remember to hook it up to my PC once a month to renew the DRM licenses, at which point I may put some more music on it, but that's it. If I could wirelessly sync to the device while it's sitting in my car in my garage, I'd put so much more music on it and I'd never have to worry about songs expiring on me while I'm out on the road.
Or maybe you can do it all, because you have what I like to call "realistic expectations"...
Your "realistic expectations" come from realizing that you have to make trade-offs. If you want massive battles on wide-open plains, you're going to have to give up some of the polygons in your models, some of the blur and bloom post-processing effects, etc. On the other hand, if you don't find yourself making those trade-offs then you didn't dream big enough in the first place. You start with, "I want photo-realistic rendering of massive battles with thousands of participants on fields many kilometers wide," and end with lower-polygon models, tens or hundreds of participants, on fields that are technically a couple kilometers wide but with massive hills, trees, or bunkers to obscure sight-lines to reduce draw distance.
By the 'Original TF' do they mean Teamfortress for Quakeworld or the much worse Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life?
TFC wasn't so bad, once you got over the fact that heavies could shoot and walk at the same time. My biggest disappointment with TFC was the lack of a proper canalzon. canalzn2 tried, but it just couldn't match the feel of the original.
You said, "Obviously an upscaled 1080p image will not be quite as good as a natively-rendered 1080p image, but if you're playing the game rather than counting pixels you're never going to notice." This is similar to the Nintendo argument for not supporting high-definition games on the Wii.
Almost, but not quite. By using upscaling, the 360 can output whatever format your TV uses as its native format. For example, my TV is a 720p DLP and doesn't like it when fed images in other formats (it upscales poorly). Using my Xbox 360, I can set it to 720p and skip the in-set scaling. With my Wii, or even with a PS3, I'm stuck using whatever format the console gives me. With the Wii, I'm stuck with my TV's shitty 480p -> 720p conversion. With a PS3 (which I haven't purchased yet), if a game only supports 480p and 1080i/p I'll be stuck either using my TV's 1080i downconversion to 720p or its 480p upconversion to 720p.
When given the choice, I want output in my TV's native resolution regardless of the source. That's why I bought an upconverting DVD player even though DVDs are only 480p.
best was team fortress regular on quake levels with grapple, sounds weird but was EXTREMELY fun
No way! The real best was playing plain vanilla TF (not the MegaTF crap or other variants) on the Holy Hand Grenade server. 24/7 Canalzon, where the canalzon map author (ramirez) would frequently play with us. Team Fortress on the Canalzon map pioneered the "territories" game concept that went on to feature prominently in many other games, from Tribes to UT to Halo. Respect your roots.
Canalzon was the only way to play TF, IMHO. The 2fort and 4fort maps were okay, but it was still just CTF. Hunt the Prez was boring, and had horrible, eye-scarring textures. Canalzon required skill and tactics. We'd setup a medic in the command center (only accessible by members of the same team, or enemies who snuck in behind someone on your own team) to watch the board and direct pairs of scouts and heavies, soldiers, or demos to go pick up or protect specific territories. That's another game concept that others have borrowed and nobody has yet done quite right (Tribes and BF2 had/have commander views). Canalzon was way ahead of its time.
Gears of War and BioShock are both displayed at a native 1920 x 1080 in progressive scan on my cousin's 360 Elite. The lighting in both games is amazing, as are the visuals, and the gameplay.
The Xbox 360 will display every game at whatever output you choose. On your cousin's elite, he's apparently set it to 1080p. That doesn't mean that games change how they render. It just means that when the framebuffer passes through the on-board scaler chip prior to heading out the the TV, the image is upscaled to 1080p rather than 720p or whatever else you may choose. The two games you mentioned, Gears and Bioshock, actually render internally at 720p (or more precisely, 1280x720, since designations like "720p" don't make sense until the output is heading to a TV). Bungie made the decision to render at 1152x640 using a two-pass method (actually a two-buffer method) to render low-dynamic range and high-dynamic range lighting. The two buffers are then merged for the final picture. There's actually a Powerpoint on Bungie's HDR lighting method floating around the internets somewhere, if you feel like investigating why they did this. Anyway, the end result is mostly the same -- the 360's hardware scaler chip is quite good, and only the OCD pixel counters will ever notice that the game is natively rendered at 640p rather than 720p or 1080p.
The real problem is Halo's graphics engine, which has been too demanding of the graphics card/processor since Halo 1. They're not going to admit that their graphics engine is slow or that the 360's graphics card can't crunch through double-bufferred 1080p using an engine that is maintained at Microsoft.
History lesson: The graphics engine from Halo 1 was not re-used for Halo 2. It was re-used for Stubbs the Zombie (a game built by an ex-Bungie guy who which licensed the Halo 1 engine). The Halo 2 engine was all new. I haven't heard specifically whether or not the Halo 3 engine was again a new engine or if it was based on the Halo 2 engine, so for now I'll assume the latter.
As for not being able to handle double-buffered 1920x1080 resolutions, there are currently exactly two games on the Xbox 360 that render in 1080p -- Virtua Tennis 3 and some basketball game (NBA Street Homecourt, I think). It's also good to keep in mind that Microsoft has all but said that 720p is the sweet spot for Xbox 360 (HD movies and trailers on the marketplace are all encoded at 720p rather than 1080p, for example). The hardware scaler is capable enough to convert the image to your TV's native resolution without compromising image quality. Obviously an upscaled 1080p image will not be quite as good as a natively-rendered 1080p image, but if you're playing the game rather than counting pixels you're never going to notice.
It goes to show that third-party developers have a better handle on getting the most out of the 360's PC hardware than Microsoft.
How many enemies and physics-affected items are on-screen at one time in Gears or Bioshock? How large are the areas? Now compare that to Halo 3, where you can have 30+ enemies on-screen at one time, with hundreds of items strewn about being affected by physics, on maps with draw distances measured in kilometers. Making a game is all about trade-offs. If you're going for small-scale battles in confined areas (think Doom 3), you can optimize for graphics because you'll have more free GPU and CPU time. If you're going for large-scale battles in wide-open areas, you're probably going to sacrifice some visual quality in order to get the gameplay right. You can't do it all, and if you can then it means you weren't ambitious enough.
If you want a job in computer science that's not one of the TWO types you can get with an undergraduate degree (code monkey and eventually code monkey manager), you get a graduate degree. If you get an MS, you're more likely to get to manage code monkeys, but you can also do research, which means working on harder and more interesting problems than implementing Business Logic Abomination #1138. If you get a PhD, you can monkey, manage monkeys, do research and also teach computer science.
While you're somewhat correct that it's difficult to get a research position with only a BS, I've known people who've done it. I would disagree that you're more likely to get a management position with a master degree, unless it's an MBA (and especially an MBA you got going to school nights while working a real job during the day). If you want to manage code monkeys, get your BS, get a code monkey position, and work your way up to managing them. Just having an MS in CS is not going to guarantee you a management position right out of school, especially since people want to see work experience for management hires (either managing other teams, or spending 3-7 years as an indivual code monkey yourself). I'd definitely disagree about getting your PhD, at least in CS. Once you've done that, you've just pigeon-holed yourself. You can get a job as a researcher or as a teacher/professor, but nobody's going to hire you as a code monkey (you're over-qualified and will want too much money) or a manager (you don't have any experience).
I'd also like to add that code written by grad students and researchers is often very, very bad. Researchers spend so much time on esoteric problems that they forget how to do the very basic bits -- structuring code efficiently, checking error and bound conditions, commenting, formatting for readability, looking for the simplest possible solution rather than the "most elegant", etc. While I'd rather read a white paper written by researchers with an MS or PhD, I'd rather read code written by someone with "only" a BS but with actual work experience.
It's not about money, and it's not about learning theory, though those are nice benefits. It's about networking with lots of smart people and having tons of interesting options.
I'd argue that you're more likely to build a more useful professional network on the job than in school. It's great that you know professor so-and-so, but I'd rather use my professional contacts to get me a job making $100K+ a year rather than getting a research position paying $30k or less. As long as you keep yourself from being stereotyped (the deployment guy, the database guy, the Perl guy, etc), you can keep your options open just as easily (if not more so) in the work force as in school, and the people you meet on the job are much more likely to have a direct effect on your future work options than meeting some professors or grad students at school.
Very few Americans require anything more than a BS to get a job with a Computer Engineering or Computer Science degree. On the other hand, it's easier for a non-citizen to get a job if they have a MS from a domestic school. As well, it's generally easier for them to get into shool than get into a job (the job comes after being here a few years and getting that MS), and gives a nice ~2 year jump on the whole green card process. If they somehow fail to find a job after getting the MS, there's always the option to continue on with a PhD while looking for something that will actually pay the bills.
The goal of college for 90% of Americans is to get a better job. Therefore 90% of Americans aren't going to spend any more time than necessary in school, and if they do go for higher degrees it's usually for something that will increase their pay. A BS in CE doesn't get paid much less than a MS in CE, but a BS in CE with an MBA who's promoted into management does get paid quite a bit more.
I use a recliner myself, but oddly enough it seems to work just as well for PC games as it does for console games. Hell, it even works fine for watching TV or movies, or even reading a book. The chair has never once made any indication that it prefers me to play console games. Somehow I doubt that your couch is any different in this regard.
How exactly do you use a mouse and keyboard from a recliner, while still reclining? Also, since we were talking specifically about gaming, watching TV and movies or reading a book don't really matter.
Obviously PCs can output to the same exact sound system your console does, and the same exact TV your console does.
Only if you have the right output equipment. S/PDIF is starting to become standard on many motherboards, but you have to have the right set of cables to convert from mini-jack to RCA, and your software has to play nice with digital output (DRM-aware apps will often refuse to play through digital outputs, for example). With a console like Xbox or Xbox 360, this is all built-in and you don't even have to think about it. Plug the cables in, flip the bit in the dash that indicates you have the correct capabilities, and go.
But of course, a high quality 24-30 inch monitor provides a much better experience than a TV with its painfully low resolution. Blurry and jagged 50 inches isn't quite as nice as smooth and sharp 30 inches.
A 50" HDTV at 720p has approximately the same resolution as many 19" and 20" LCD monitors (1280x720 vs. 1280x1024). 1080p is 1920x1080. Obviously SDTV (480i) or EDTV (480p) will be nasty, but in terms of Halo it's not a problem -- the Xbox 360 plays Halo 1, 2, and 3, and will upscale them to whatever output you choose (720p, 1080i, 1080p). Halo 3 natively renders at 720p and halo 1 and 2 natively render at 480p, but the hardware scaler chip in the 360 is quite capable. A little bit of searching online should turn up comparison screenshots of Halo 1 and 2 running on Xbox and on 360, showing how the 360's upscaling and FSAA increase the games' visual quality.
And why do you hunch over your keyboard and mouse? And how is that the fault of PC gaming as a whole? Nobody is forcing you to be uncomfortable while you play, most people seem to prefer being comfortable actually.
That was a bit of hyperbole, but the point I was getting at was that you can either sit at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, or you can lounge on a couch. Lounging, by definition, is more comfortable than sitting, so why not lounge? Some researchers at Microsoft are playing with ways to make mice and keyboards usable without a desk (check out the Soap mouse, but we have a long way to go before you will comfortably be able to use a mouse and keyboard while lounging on a couch without some sort of lap desk thingy (which have never worked all that well for me).
So taking into account the lockout chip business model that pervades the console market, how can a smaller developer reach gamers?
This is a question that Microsoft at least is taking very seriously. XBLA has been a great tool for introducing smaller, independent developers to the masses without requiring massive amounts of money (an XBLA title may cost upwards of $50-100K, which is very cheap compared to the multiple millions spent on many titles these days). For example, Ninja Bee now has several games on XBLA (Outpost Kaloki, Cloning Clyde, Band of Bugs, and Eets), a situation that would've been next to impossible on earlier consoles. Microsoft is also developing XNA for hobbyist/enthusiast game development, and the upcoming 2.0 version will finally add networking support for games on Xbox 360. Once that's in place, they just need a good way for non-developers to be able to play the games (right now it requires a $100/year subscription to run your games on the console).
Nintendo and Sony both have areas where they could expand support for independent developers (Wii Virtual Console, Playstation store), but they're nowhere near as far along with that as Microsoft is.
And if the dependency on kb/mouse is disappearing due to the use of Xbox 360 controllers with PCs (and the use of PlayStation controllers with PCs through EMS USB2 adapters before it), do you predict this will change soon?
Honestly, I see it going the other way around -- PCs will be relegated to hardcore gaming only, mainly simulations like Flight Sim, "professional" competition-type games, and grind-fest MMOGs. Every now and then you get some company that has the bright idea of turning a PC into a console (see the Phantom), but it generally never works out.
The other alternative is that game developers will continue porting games from consoles to PC, with the console-style control scheme intact. For example, Red Octane and Activision will be bringing Guitar Hero 3 to PC and Mac and will use the console-style USB guitars (most likely it'll be the same guitar as what's shipped for the Xbox 360). The problem with this approach is that PC players hate it when game companies port like that. See the outrage around Oblivion's "console interface", for example. The thing is, if you're targetting a 10-foot experience you want the "clunky" console-like UI for readability at a distance. Anyway, it's my belief that PC gamers who complain about console ports rather than being grateful that they got anything at all are the ones who will kill PC games. Why should Ubi, EA, 2K, or others bother shipping on the PC when they'd have to invest in significant UI redesign or suffer internet complaints?
Consoles of the era tended to be 480i (SDTV) too, not 480p (EDTV). A lot of PS2 games ran in 640x240 as a way of doing 480i with less frame buffer VRAM, and GameCube dropped the component (and progressive) output after the first couple production runs.
But Halo 1 and 2 ran in 480p, which is what we were talking about. As well, almost every Xbox game supported 480p (there were a very few that didn't, such as Hitman 2, Kung Fu Chaos, and Manhunt). Gamecube removing component support was just stupid on Nintendo's part -- they only sold the component cable through their store, which is only accessible online unless you happen to live in the Redmond, WA, area. Because the cable was difficult to get, very few people bought one (I bought one). Because very few people bought the cable (because they didn't know it existed), Nintendo decided that nobody wanted component video support and cut that to reduce build costs. They used those same numbers to justify not supporting HD resolutions with the Wii, or shipping it with component cables (they did wise up and start shipping Wii component cables to actual stores, though). If they had shipped the component cable to stores, their numbers would've been much different. Also, even many later Gamecube games still supported progressive scan even after Nintendo stopped building consoles with that output.
Is there a specific reason why more games and launchers for Windows don't have a mode for 10 feet and a USB gamepad, especially now that Windows XP Media Center Edition has been out for years?
The number of people who not only have gamepads but also have their PCs hooked to their TVs is very small. The gamepad population has changed a bit since you can use Xbox 360 controllers on a PC just by plugging them in (or using a wireless adapter for the wireless controllers), but those people still aren't connecting their PCs to their TVs. If I had to guess, I would say that more people don't because PC interfaces are still too tied to kb/mouse, and kb/mouse doesn't work well from a couch.
Sure, the writers at bungie might have made the story more involved and interesting, but there is no denying that the base plot is still about killing aliens before they can fuck your shit up, which is exactly the same as Doom. iD just had a developer write their story, rather than a team of writers.
Well, shit. If you want to break it down like that, every FPS has had the same story as Doom. You could probably even break down any game at all that way.
Half-life: Scientists inadvertently brought aliens to fuck up the world, kill them.
System Shock 2: Experimental faster-than-light travel inadvertently turned everybody on your ship into monsters to fuck up the world, kill them.
Bioshock: Captialists inadvertently turned everybody into mindless aggressive zombies to fuck up the world, kill them.
Final Fantasy: Feminine male antagonist is trying to fuck up the world, kill him. With chocobos.
What gameplay value do the the shields really provide? Longer one-on-one fights, more defensive play? Is it any different than what was provided with Tribes's free movement and health packs? We even had shields...
The shields (or any recharging health system like in Gears of War or the recent Call of Duty games) gives you the ability to keep playing without having to scrounge around for health. There were many times while playing more conventional games (Quake 2, Half-life, Doom 3, etc) where I would often get into situations where health/armor are low and there's no way to replenish them. In those games I'd end up either going into Quicksave mode (make it through a pack of enemies, quick save, go on to die several times before making it through next pack, quicksave, repeat ad nauseum). With a recharging health system, I can take cover, regain my health, and focus on tactics rather than just trying to make it through the next encounter alive.
It's been a while since I played Tribes, and to be honest I never really got into it all that much (I much preferred the original TeamFortress, and to a lesser extent TFC), so I don't recall the exact health mechanics of the game.
Tribes again, and Tribes 2 *note: Tribes 2, with land vehicles, came out the same year as Halo 1, the original Tribes predating it by three years*
BTW: Who doesn't miss grenade timing in TF? (yes, the Quake one)
I'll grant you that. Vehicles were one of my favorite parts of Tribes, and I can't believe I forgot about that:). I do recall the Tribes 1 vehicles being a bit hard to maneuver (never played Tribes 2). Halo got the feel just right on the first try. Using a console controller may have helped make that possible.
Wait, what the... ok, we're talking about the single player experience now.
Yes. Halo is unique in that it has both a well-designed (although typically short) single player experience as well as a good multiplayer experience. That's a pretty rare combination if you take away the Half-life mods that made it actually fun to play MP (Counter-Strike, TFC).
Good story, are you saying it's comparable in quality to Half-life's?
IMHO, it's much better than Half-life's, in terms of setting up a background for the world and being consistent within that background across multiple games and other media (books, comics). Half-life set the bar for story-driven FPS. Halo reset it several rungs higher. The only games I consider having a better story would be Deus Ex (the first one, not the second one) and Looking Glass/Irrational games (System Shock 1/2, Thief 1/2 (not so much 3), Bioshock).
You have to be mistaken, you couldn't play Halo 1 online? Holy crap, are you serious? I couldn't believe you. I had to look that up, I couldn't remember. Why was this game hyped THEN?
Xbox Live, Xbox's networking component, didn't ship until 2002, a year after Halo and the console shipped. They never went back and did a Halo 1.5, so it wasn't until Halo 2 that online multiplayer was available. That said, Halo 1 did have split-screen support in the grand tradition of Goldeneye, and it did allow multi-box LAN play (up to 16 players, with any number of boxes or players per boxes, from 4 boxes with 4 players each to 16 boxes with 1 player each).
You just made the logistics of networking XBoxen and their associated TV's sound way, way, way too easy.
Obviously it depends on the setting. If you had to lug around a big CRT, of course it sucked. If you had a setup of multiple TVs already (think college dorms, or work conference rooms), you just needed a hub or switch with enough ports for the number of consoles, and enough cables to hook them up. No need to assign IPs or anything. It actually worked very well, and many people still prefer LAN play to online play.
Citation needed. I distinctly remember shield regeneration from Faceball 2000 a decade earlier.
If it did, I don't see any reference to it on the wikipedia page or this 1up page. The 1up page does list several landmarks for the game, but not regenerating shields.
Didn't PCs have SDTV output at the time?
Sure. Some TVs even had VGA inputs at the time, or through the use of a converter box you could translate VGA to YPrPb component. It was still a hassle to setup, the composite/s-video SDTV output was 480i rather than 480p (progressive scan really does make a difference), and you're still tied to a keyboard and mouse. A PC with incidental TV support is not the same as a console designed around the "10 foot experience". That's why I don't understand the infatuation with UT3 on PS3 having kb/mouse support. Unless you're sitting in front of a desk, a kb/mouse setup just doesn't work.
More of a genius than Trent Reznor (Quake; Halo 2)?
IMHO? Absolutely, emphatically, yes! But then I've never been much of a fan of NIN or Trent's music. I do appreciate his views on digital music sharing, though. Marty O'Donnell is more in the league of John Williams than Trent Reznor, as far as I'm concerned. Though Bungie did bring in Steve Vai and other contemporary artists for the Halo 2 soundtrack. If you haven't heard Steve Vai's Mjolnir Mix you really should check it out.
Pretty much. They didn't have much better on consoles when it came out.
You're assuming console players don't also play PC games. Maybe I'm unique, but I don't think so. Prior to playing Halo, I played plenty of FPS games on PC, from Wolf3d to Quake 3 (around the time of Halo 1's launch) and everything in between. I've backed off a lot on PC gaming since, but I've played a few more recent PC games (Far Cry, for example). What's to like about Halo?
Unique (at the time) gameplay mechanics
Shields that recharge if you take a break from the action, which lets you focus on tactics rather than finding health and armor pickups. Pretty much everybody's copied this mechanic now, but Halo did it first. (I'm sure you can dig up some obscure title that actually did it first, but Halo was the first popular game to use this approach)
The ability to carry only two weapons at a time (plus grenades), so you had to think about what to bring since you couldn't keep your entire arsenal in a belt pocket. Do you pickup the sniper rifle and rocket launcher, leaving yourself open to close attacks? Or do you grab a shotgun and assault rifle, leaving yourself vulnerable to vehicles? That mechanic allowed for some interesting scenarios.
Grenades thrown via a separate button. To be fair, TF1 did this first, but Halo did it better.
Well-implemented and -integrated vehicular combat.
A compelling and interesting story. Half-life did that first, but the story is different from Half-life. It's okay to like both.
A fun console experience. Relaxing on a couch in front of a 50" HDTV with a 5.1 surround sound speaker setup beats being hunched over a keyboard and mouse in front of a 20" monitor with 2-channel stereo any day
A great multiplayer experience. Halo 1 allowed you to network consoles together and play with your friends locally. Halo 2 finally took that experience online. Of course PC games have done this before, and better (though Halo 2/3's party system and hopper matching mechanism is one of the best out there), but when you put this together with the last point (couch, HDTV, surround sound) it is very compelling.
Did I mention an excellent story? Bungie are masters of storytelling
A great musical score. Marty O'Donnell is a musical genius
I totally understand that Halo, or FPS games on consoles in general, may not be to some people's tastes. That's fine, we all have our opinions. I'm just listing some reasons why I enjoy Halo.
Wait, what? Doom's story is exactly this: "A gate to hell opens on Mars and demons appear. Kill them". And Halo's story: "Humans are at war against the Covenant, a conglomeration of several alien races following a religious prophecy that requires them to activate and fire the different halos spread around the galaxy/universe. Firing those halos will kill all sentient life in the galaxy, but they don't know it. The installations were setup by the Forerunners to destroy the Flood, a parasitic alien race that consumes all life forms. You are Master Chief Petty Officer Spartan 117, and you're thrown into the mix." Depending on the game, either you're trying to get off of a halo installation after crash landing and in the process learn about the Flood and what the halo installations do (Halo 1), stopping the Covenant from activating the rest of the installations and destroying all life in the galaxy while finding out why the Covenant are fighting the humans (Forerunner technology on Earth that can activate all of the halo installations) and at the same time converting a portion of the Covenant (the Elites) to the humans' side (Halo 2), or finishing that fight (Halo 3 -- Halo 2 stopped halfway through). Sure sounds the same as "kill the demons from hell, on Mars" to me.
Say what you will about the graphics, physics, multiplayer, fanboys, or whatever else, but I don't think anybody familiar with Bungie's work can say that they don't write a compelling and interesting story with a rich history and fully-populated world. See Marathon, for example.
Now, a machine that is a year old can't run the latest OS. Hmmm.
I'd just like to say that my 2+ year old laptop runs Vista perfectly fine. I upgraded it from 1GB to 2GB of RAM (very cheap and easy to do, and I had done that well before Vista shipped), and I've seen no performance degradation between Vista and XP. Even better, XP had problems with sleeping on my laptop (had to resort to hibernating all the time), but Vista solved that problem such that I no longer have problems putting the laptop to sleep or waking it.
Perhaps I'm unusual, but so far my experiences with Vista have been neutral-to-positive. I still have one machine hanging around running XP for testing purposes (and it's also still running IE6!), but I've upgraded everything else to Vista and haven't looked back.
Yeah, I call shennanigans on Sony's "marketing machine" being the Dreamcast's downfall. As we can plainly see, Sony's "marketing machine" sucks. The PS2 just had tons of mindshare momentum coming off the PS1, a good performance-per-dollar factor, large library of PS1 games it was (mostly) compatible with, and some good exclusive games.
People hadn't yet fully seen how arrogant Sony can be (they were just coming off the successful PS1, and though they promised the world with the PS2 just like they did with the PS3, nobody knew yet that they couldn't deliver). Sega didn't have the money to compete against Sony in terms of marketing dollars, and they were not as successful in getting third-party developers on the Dreamcast platform (the EA sports games were notably missing). Things are different this time around because:
We've already been through one round of Sony's lies. The PS2 never really lived up to the claims that it could render Toy Story in real time, so we took what they said about the PS3 with a huge grain of salt.
Microsoft replaced Sega in the console wars, and they have more than enough money to meet Sony blow for blow in a marketing war.
EA has all of their sports games on Xbox, and this time around the 360 is the premier console while the PS3 gets the shitty ports (rather than the other way around last time).
Sony's burned too many bridges and they have very strong competition this time around, with the Microsoft juggernaut out of the gates early with Xbox 360 and the breakout success of the Wii. Sony will need a miracle if they want the PS3 to become something other than another 3DO.
It didn't work out very well for the PS2 for quite a while. Games were a bit slow at the start. It took quite a while. The best thing Sony had with the PS2 was the huge demand. Coming off the PS1 (which took Sony from not in the market to #1 by far), developers wanted to be on the PS2. They were willing to put up with the tough times until tools got better and middleware started to appear. I've read things by developers that said that was a HUGE screw-up on Sony's part. If they had tried to pull that with a new console (say the PS2 was their first video game console) they may have failed.
The (lack of) PS2 developer tools was a case of Sony not seeing the forest for the trees. They had shipped some decent developer tools for the PS1 early in its life cycle, but after 6 years or so on the market every developer had either built their own specialized set of tools or moved to middleware that provided more functionality "out of the box" than the Sony tools. Upon seeing that nobody was using the PS1 tools any longer, Sony decided not to invest in tools for the PS2. That was a mistake, because there was nothing to bootstrap PS2 development. They tried to apply the end-game state of the PS1 to the start of the PS2 without realizing that it takes time to build up a proper library of specialized developer tools. Apparently they failed at this again with the PS3.
The PS3 may end up doing quite well, and may turn out to be the most powerful. But if it does, it will take quite a while to hit it's stride the way the PS2 did.
Unlike the PS2, the PS3 doesn't have a year on the market to itself. The Xbox and Gamecube shipped a year after the PS2, giving developers time to work on their tools before fighting strong competition (the Sony marketing machine had already killed the Dreamcast). This time around, the 360 was out for a year before the PS3 and Wii shipped, which means that "another year until really good games make it to the PS3" is really two years into the "next generation". Sony was banking on momentum from the PS2 without realizing that they had killed a lot of that with their arrogant attitudes (show of hands for people who got a second job in order to buy a PS3? There ya go, Kutaragi).
Just using a nice round number for DVDs of 5 GB (I know 360 may be less than this), so Lost Odyssey might take up 20 GB of space.
The Xbox 360 uses a dual-layer DVD9 format, or 9GB. Assuming each Lost Odyssey disk fully fills that space (unlikely), that's 45GB of space, which is also pushing the Blu-Ray format limit. Obviously some of that is duplicated data across each disk that wouldn't contribute to the full amount on a Blu-Ray release.
If we're using that much space in art assets of large RPGs this year, what about 2 years from now?
This seems like an issue unique to JRPGs. Oblivion was able to fit within the bounds of DVD9 by using procedural techniques to cut down on the number of art assets (SpeedTree, for example). Two Worlds fit onto a single DVD9 as well. At the same time, JRPG players are used to swapping disks, since they've been doing it since Final Fantasy VII. It's just part of playing a JRPG. If you want to avoid multi-disk madness, avoid JRPGs. No other games have had problems with the DVD9 size limit so far.
You'd have to be insane or a moron to wear something like that to an airport.
I initially parsed that as, "insane or a Mormon to wear something like that." I hadn't heard of any Mormons starting up terrorist cells, but I guess you just never know with any religion.
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In which scenario Halo never woudld've sold nearly as well as it actually did, there never would've been a Halo 2 or 3, and Bungie would've died a year later than they would've without the cash infusion. Like it or not, the Microsoft purchase and Xbox focus were the best things that could've happened to Bungie at the time, and are the reason that Bungie can return to a semi-independent status. It looks like they'll have a similar kind of relationship as Ensemble does with Microsoft, where they're technically independent but nobody can name any non-Microsoft-published properties from them.
If you have a house with an attached garage and an existing wireless network, there's a very good chance that you already have wi-fi coverage in your garage. I know I do, without having to do anything special to extend the network out to my garage specifically.
Or you're like me and you have your player in a dock in your car, and you never use the player outside of the car. Right now I rarely add new music to my Zune because it's a pain in the butt to bring it inside. I do have to remember to hook it up to my PC once a month to renew the DRM licenses, at which point I may put some more music on it, but that's it. If I could wirelessly sync to the device while it's sitting in my car in my garage, I'd put so much more music on it and I'd never have to worry about songs expiring on me while I'm out on the road.
That would be it. I read it a couple days ago but was too lazy to dig up the link.
Your "realistic expectations" come from realizing that you have to make trade-offs. If you want massive battles on wide-open plains, you're going to have to give up some of the polygons in your models, some of the blur and bloom post-processing effects, etc. On the other hand, if you don't find yourself making those trade-offs then you didn't dream big enough in the first place. You start with, "I want photo-realistic rendering of massive battles with thousands of participants on fields many kilometers wide," and end with lower-polygon models, tens or hundreds of participants, on fields that are technically a couple kilometers wide but with massive hills, trees, or bunkers to obscure sight-lines to reduce draw distance.
TFC wasn't so bad, once you got over the fact that heavies could shoot and walk at the same time. My biggest disappointment with TFC was the lack of a proper canalzon. canalzn2 tried, but it just couldn't match the feel of the original.
Almost, but not quite. By using upscaling, the 360 can output whatever format your TV uses as its native format. For example, my TV is a 720p DLP and doesn't like it when fed images in other formats (it upscales poorly). Using my Xbox 360, I can set it to 720p and skip the in-set scaling. With my Wii, or even with a PS3, I'm stuck using whatever format the console gives me. With the Wii, I'm stuck with my TV's shitty 480p -> 720p conversion. With a PS3 (which I haven't purchased yet), if a game only supports 480p and 1080i/p I'll be stuck either using my TV's 1080i downconversion to 720p or its 480p upconversion to 720p.
When given the choice, I want output in my TV's native resolution regardless of the source. That's why I bought an upconverting DVD player even though DVDs are only 480p.
No way! The real best was playing plain vanilla TF (not the MegaTF crap or other variants) on the Holy Hand Grenade server. 24/7 Canalzon, where the canalzon map author (ramirez) would frequently play with us. Team Fortress on the Canalzon map pioneered the "territories" game concept that went on to feature prominently in many other games, from Tribes to UT to Halo. Respect your roots.
Canalzon was the only way to play TF, IMHO. The 2fort and 4fort maps were okay, but it was still just CTF. Hunt the Prez was boring, and had horrible, eye-scarring textures. Canalzon required skill and tactics. We'd setup a medic in the command center (only accessible by members of the same team, or enemies who snuck in behind someone on your own team) to watch the board and direct pairs of scouts and heavies, soldiers, or demos to go pick up or protect specific territories. That's another game concept that others have borrowed and nobody has yet done quite right (Tribes and BF2 had/have commander views). Canalzon was way ahead of its time.
The Xbox 360 will display every game at whatever output you choose. On your cousin's elite, he's apparently set it to 1080p. That doesn't mean that games change how they render. It just means that when the framebuffer passes through the on-board scaler chip prior to heading out the the TV, the image is upscaled to 1080p rather than 720p or whatever else you may choose. The two games you mentioned, Gears and Bioshock, actually render internally at 720p (or more precisely, 1280x720, since designations like "720p" don't make sense until the output is heading to a TV). Bungie made the decision to render at 1152x640 using a two-pass method (actually a two-buffer method) to render low-dynamic range and high-dynamic range lighting. The two buffers are then merged for the final picture. There's actually a Powerpoint on Bungie's HDR lighting method floating around the internets somewhere, if you feel like investigating why they did this. Anyway, the end result is mostly the same -- the 360's hardware scaler chip is quite good, and only the OCD pixel counters will ever notice that the game is natively rendered at 640p rather than 720p or 1080p.
History lesson: The graphics engine from Halo 1 was not re-used for Halo 2. It was re-used for Stubbs the Zombie (a game built by an ex-Bungie guy who which licensed the Halo 1 engine). The Halo 2 engine was all new. I haven't heard specifically whether or not the Halo 3 engine was again a new engine or if it was based on the Halo 2 engine, so for now I'll assume the latter.
As for not being able to handle double-buffered 1920x1080 resolutions, there are currently exactly two games on the Xbox 360 that render in 1080p -- Virtua Tennis 3 and some basketball game (NBA Street Homecourt, I think). It's also good to keep in mind that Microsoft has all but said that 720p is the sweet spot for Xbox 360 (HD movies and trailers on the marketplace are all encoded at 720p rather than 1080p, for example). The hardware scaler is capable enough to convert the image to your TV's native resolution without compromising image quality. Obviously an upscaled 1080p image will not be quite as good as a natively-rendered 1080p image, but if you're playing the game rather than counting pixels you're never going to notice.
How many enemies and physics-affected items are on-screen at one time in Gears or Bioshock? How large are the areas? Now compare that to Halo 3, where you can have 30+ enemies on-screen at one time, with hundreds of items strewn about being affected by physics, on maps with draw distances measured in kilometers. Making a game is all about trade-offs. If you're going for small-scale battles in confined areas (think Doom 3), you can optimize for graphics because you'll have more free GPU and CPU time. If you're going for large-scale battles in wide-open areas, you're probably going to sacrifice some visual quality in order to get the gameplay right. You can't do it all, and if you can then it means you weren't ambitious enough.
While you're somewhat correct that it's difficult to get a research position with only a BS, I've known people who've done it. I would disagree that you're more likely to get a management position with a master degree, unless it's an MBA (and especially an MBA you got going to school nights while working a real job during the day). If you want to manage code monkeys, get your BS, get a code monkey position, and work your way up to managing them. Just having an MS in CS is not going to guarantee you a management position right out of school, especially since people want to see work experience for management hires (either managing other teams, or spending 3-7 years as an indivual code monkey yourself). I'd definitely disagree about getting your PhD, at least in CS. Once you've done that, you've just pigeon-holed yourself. You can get a job as a researcher or as a teacher/professor, but nobody's going to hire you as a code monkey (you're over-qualified and will want too much money) or a manager (you don't have any experience).
I'd also like to add that code written by grad students and researchers is often very, very bad. Researchers spend so much time on esoteric problems that they forget how to do the very basic bits -- structuring code efficiently, checking error and bound conditions, commenting, formatting for readability, looking for the simplest possible solution rather than the "most elegant", etc. While I'd rather read a white paper written by researchers with an MS or PhD, I'd rather read code written by someone with "only" a BS but with actual work experience.
I'd argue that you're more likely to build a more useful professional network on the job than in school. It's great that you know professor so-and-so, but I'd rather use my professional contacts to get me a job making $100K+ a year rather than getting a research position paying $30k or less. As long as you keep yourself from being stereotyped (the deployment guy, the database guy, the Perl guy, etc), you can keep your options open just as easily (if not more so) in the work force as in school, and the people you meet on the job are much more likely to have a direct effect on your future work options than meeting some professors or grad students at school.
Very few Americans require anything more than a BS to get a job with a Computer Engineering or Computer Science degree. On the other hand, it's easier for a non-citizen to get a job if they have a MS from a domestic school. As well, it's generally easier for them to get into shool than get into a job (the job comes after being here a few years and getting that MS), and gives a nice ~2 year jump on the whole green card process. If they somehow fail to find a job after getting the MS, there's always the option to continue on with a PhD while looking for something that will actually pay the bills.
The goal of college for 90% of Americans is to get a better job. Therefore 90% of Americans aren't going to spend any more time than necessary in school, and if they do go for higher degrees it's usually for something that will increase their pay. A BS in CE doesn't get paid much less than a MS in CE, but a BS in CE with an MBA who's promoted into management does get paid quite a bit more.
How exactly do you use a mouse and keyboard from a recliner, while still reclining? Also, since we were talking specifically about gaming, watching TV and movies or reading a book don't really matter.
Only if you have the right output equipment. S/PDIF is starting to become standard on many motherboards, but you have to have the right set of cables to convert from mini-jack to RCA, and your software has to play nice with digital output (DRM-aware apps will often refuse to play through digital outputs, for example). With a console like Xbox or Xbox 360, this is all built-in and you don't even have to think about it. Plug the cables in, flip the bit in the dash that indicates you have the correct capabilities, and go.
A 50" HDTV at 720p has approximately the same resolution as many 19" and 20" LCD monitors (1280x720 vs. 1280x1024). 1080p is 1920x1080. Obviously SDTV (480i) or EDTV (480p) will be nasty, but in terms of Halo it's not a problem -- the Xbox 360 plays Halo 1, 2, and 3, and will upscale them to whatever output you choose (720p, 1080i, 1080p). Halo 3 natively renders at 720p and halo 1 and 2 natively render at 480p, but the hardware scaler chip in the 360 is quite capable. A little bit of searching online should turn up comparison screenshots of Halo 1 and 2 running on Xbox and on 360, showing how the 360's upscaling and FSAA increase the games' visual quality.
That was a bit of hyperbole, but the point I was getting at was that you can either sit at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, or you can lounge on a couch. Lounging, by definition, is more comfortable than sitting, so why not lounge? Some researchers at Microsoft are playing with ways to make mice and keyboards usable without a desk (check out the Soap mouse, but we have a long way to go before you will comfortably be able to use a mouse and keyboard while lounging on a couch without some sort of lap desk thingy (which have never worked all that well for me).
This is a question that Microsoft at least is taking very seriously. XBLA has been a great tool for introducing smaller, independent developers to the masses without requiring massive amounts of money (an XBLA title may cost upwards of $50-100K, which is very cheap compared to the multiple millions spent on many titles these days). For example, Ninja Bee now has several games on XBLA (Outpost Kaloki, Cloning Clyde, Band of Bugs, and Eets), a situation that would've been next to impossible on earlier consoles. Microsoft is also developing XNA for hobbyist/enthusiast game development, and the upcoming 2.0 version will finally add networking support for games on Xbox 360. Once that's in place, they just need a good way for non-developers to be able to play the games (right now it requires a $100/year subscription to run your games on the console).
Nintendo and Sony both have areas where they could expand support for independent developers (Wii Virtual Console, Playstation store), but they're nowhere near as far along with that as Microsoft is.
Honestly, I see it going the other way around -- PCs will be relegated to hardcore gaming only, mainly simulations like Flight Sim, "professional" competition-type games, and grind-fest MMOGs. Every now and then you get some company that has the bright idea of turning a PC into a console (see the Phantom), but it generally never works out.
The other alternative is that game developers will continue porting games from consoles to PC, with the console-style control scheme intact. For example, Red Octane and Activision will be bringing Guitar Hero 3 to PC and Mac and will use the console-style USB guitars (most likely it'll be the same guitar as what's shipped for the Xbox 360). The problem with this approach is that PC players hate it when game companies port like that. See the outrage around Oblivion's "console interface", for example. The thing is, if you're targetting a 10-foot experience you want the "clunky" console-like UI for readability at a distance. Anyway, it's my belief that PC gamers who complain about console ports rather than being grateful that they got anything at all are the ones who will kill PC games. Why should Ubi, EA, 2K, or others bother shipping on the PC when they'd have to invest in significant UI redesign or suffer internet complaints?
But Halo 1 and 2 ran in 480p, which is what we were talking about. As well, almost every Xbox game supported 480p (there were a very few that didn't, such as Hitman 2, Kung Fu Chaos, and Manhunt). Gamecube removing component support was just stupid on Nintendo's part -- they only sold the component cable through their store, which is only accessible online unless you happen to live in the Redmond, WA, area. Because the cable was difficult to get, very few people bought one (I bought one). Because very few people bought the cable (because they didn't know it existed), Nintendo decided that nobody wanted component video support and cut that to reduce build costs. They used those same numbers to justify not supporting HD resolutions with the Wii, or shipping it with component cables (they did wise up and start shipping Wii component cables to actual stores, though). If they had shipped the component cable to stores, their numbers would've been much different. Also, even many later Gamecube games still supported progressive scan even after Nintendo stopped building consoles with that output.
The number of people who not only have gamepads but also have their PCs hooked to their TVs is very small. The gamepad population has changed a bit since you can use Xbox 360 controllers on a PC just by plugging them in (or using a wireless adapter for the wireless controllers), but those people still aren't connecting their PCs to their TVs. If I had to guess, I would say that more people don't because PC interfaces are still too tied to kb/mouse, and kb/mouse doesn't work well from a couch.
Well, shit. If you want to break it down like that, every FPS has had the same story as Doom. You could probably even break down any game at all that way.
The shields (or any recharging health system like in Gears of War or the recent Call of Duty games) gives you the ability to keep playing without having to scrounge around for health. There were many times while playing more conventional games (Quake 2, Half-life, Doom 3, etc) where I would often get into situations where health/armor are low and there's no way to replenish them. In those games I'd end up either going into Quicksave mode (make it through a pack of enemies, quick save, go on to die several times before making it through next pack, quicksave, repeat ad nauseum). With a recharging health system, I can take cover, regain my health, and focus on tactics rather than just trying to make it through the next encounter alive.
It's been a while since I played Tribes, and to be honest I never really got into it all that much (I much preferred the original TeamFortress, and to a lesser extent TFC), so I don't recall the exact health mechanics of the game.
I'll grant you that. Vehicles were one of my favorite parts of Tribes, and I can't believe I forgot about that :). I do recall the Tribes 1 vehicles being a bit hard to maneuver (never played Tribes 2). Halo got the feel just right on the first try. Using a console controller may have helped make that possible.
Yes. Halo is unique in that it has both a well-designed (although typically short) single player experience as well as a good multiplayer experience. That's a pretty rare combination if you take away the Half-life mods that made it actually fun to play MP (Counter-Strike, TFC).
IMHO, it's much better than Half-life's, in terms of setting up a background for the world and being consistent within that background across multiple games and other media (books, comics). Half-life set the bar for story-driven FPS. Halo reset it several rungs higher. The only games I consider having a better story would be Deus Ex (the first one, not the second one) and Looking Glass/Irrational games (System Shock 1/2, Thief 1/2 (not so much 3), Bioshock).
Xbox Live, Xbox's networking component, didn't ship until 2002, a year after Halo and the console shipped. They never went back and did a Halo 1.5, so it wasn't until Halo 2 that online multiplayer was available. That said, Halo 1 did have split-screen support in the grand tradition of Goldeneye, and it did allow multi-box LAN play (up to 16 players, with any number of boxes or players per boxes, from 4 boxes with 4 players each to 16 boxes with 1 player each).
Obviously it depends on the setting. If you had to lug around a big CRT, of course it sucked. If you had a setup of multiple TVs already (think college dorms, or work conference rooms), you just needed a hub or switch with enough ports for the number of consoles, and enough cables to hook them up. No need to assign IPs or anything. It actually worked very well, and many people still prefer LAN play to online play.
If it did, I don't see any reference to it on the wikipedia page or this 1up page. The 1up page does list several landmarks for the game, but not regenerating shields.
Sure. Some TVs even had VGA inputs at the time, or through the use of a converter box you could translate VGA to YPrPb component. It was still a hassle to setup, the composite/s-video SDTV output was 480i rather than 480p (progressive scan really does make a difference), and you're still tied to a keyboard and mouse. A PC with incidental TV support is not the same as a console designed around the "10 foot experience". That's why I don't understand the infatuation with UT3 on PS3 having kb/mouse support. Unless you're sitting in front of a desk, a kb/mouse setup just doesn't work.
IMHO? Absolutely, emphatically, yes! But then I've never been much of a fan of NIN or Trent's music. I do appreciate his views on digital music sharing, though. Marty O'Donnell is more in the league of John Williams than Trent Reznor, as far as I'm concerned. Though Bungie did bring in Steve Vai and other contemporary artists for the Halo 2 soundtrack. If you haven't heard Steve Vai's Mjolnir Mix you really should check it out.
You're assuming console players don't also play PC games. Maybe I'm unique, but I don't think so. Prior to playing Halo, I played plenty of FPS games on PC, from Wolf3d to Quake 3 (around the time of Halo 1's launch) and everything in between. I've backed off a lot on PC gaming since, but I've played a few more recent PC games (Far Cry, for example). What's to like about Halo?
- Unique (at the time) gameplay mechanics
- Shields that recharge if you take a break from the action, which lets you focus on tactics rather than finding health and armor pickups. Pretty much everybody's copied this mechanic now, but Halo did it first. (I'm sure you can dig up some obscure title that actually did it first, but Halo was the first popular game to use this approach)
- The ability to carry only two weapons at a time (plus grenades), so you had to think about what to bring since you couldn't keep your entire arsenal in a belt pocket. Do you pickup the sniper rifle and rocket launcher, leaving yourself open to close attacks? Or do you grab a shotgun and assault rifle, leaving yourself vulnerable to vehicles? That mechanic allowed for some interesting scenarios.
- Grenades thrown via a separate button. To be fair, TF1 did this first, but Halo did it better.
- Well-implemented and -integrated vehicular combat.
- A compelling and interesting story. Half-life did that first, but the story is different from Half-life. It's okay to like both.
- A fun console experience. Relaxing on a couch in front of a 50" HDTV with a 5.1 surround sound speaker setup beats being hunched over a keyboard and mouse in front of a 20" monitor with 2-channel stereo any day
- A great multiplayer experience. Halo 1 allowed you to network consoles together and play with your friends locally. Halo 2 finally took that experience online. Of course PC games have done this before, and better (though Halo 2/3's party system and hopper matching mechanism is one of the best out there), but when you put this together with the last point (couch, HDTV, surround sound) it is very compelling.
- Did I mention an excellent story? Bungie are masters of storytelling
- A great musical score. Marty O'Donnell is a musical genius
I totally understand that Halo, or FPS games on consoles in general, may not be to some people's tastes. That's fine, we all have our opinions. I'm just listing some reasons why I enjoy Halo.Wait, what? Doom's story is exactly this: "A gate to hell opens on Mars and demons appear. Kill them". And Halo's story: "Humans are at war against the Covenant, a conglomeration of several alien races following a religious prophecy that requires them to activate and fire the different halos spread around the galaxy/universe. Firing those halos will kill all sentient life in the galaxy, but they don't know it. The installations were setup by the Forerunners to destroy the Flood, a parasitic alien race that consumes all life forms. You are Master Chief Petty Officer Spartan 117, and you're thrown into the mix." Depending on the game, either you're trying to get off of a halo installation after crash landing and in the process learn about the Flood and what the halo installations do (Halo 1), stopping the Covenant from activating the rest of the installations and destroying all life in the galaxy while finding out why the Covenant are fighting the humans (Forerunner technology on Earth that can activate all of the halo installations) and at the same time converting a portion of the Covenant (the Elites) to the humans' side (Halo 2), or finishing that fight (Halo 3 -- Halo 2 stopped halfway through). Sure sounds the same as "kill the demons from hell, on Mars" to me.
Say what you will about the graphics, physics, multiplayer, fanboys, or whatever else, but I don't think anybody familiar with Bungie's work can say that they don't write a compelling and interesting story with a rich history and fully-populated world. See Marathon, for example.
I'd just like to say that my 2+ year old laptop runs Vista perfectly fine. I upgraded it from 1GB to 2GB of RAM (very cheap and easy to do, and I had done that well before Vista shipped), and I've seen no performance degradation between Vista and XP. Even better, XP had problems with sleeping on my laptop (had to resort to hibernating all the time), but Vista solved that problem such that I no longer have problems putting the laptop to sleep or waking it.
Perhaps I'm unusual, but so far my experiences with Vista have been neutral-to-positive. I still have one machine hanging around running XP for testing purposes (and it's also still running IE6!), but I've upgraded everything else to Vista and haven't looked back.
People hadn't yet fully seen how arrogant Sony can be (they were just coming off the successful PS1, and though they promised the world with the PS2 just like they did with the PS3, nobody knew yet that they couldn't deliver). Sega didn't have the money to compete against Sony in terms of marketing dollars, and they were not as successful in getting third-party developers on the Dreamcast platform (the EA sports games were notably missing). Things are different this time around because:
- We've already been through one round of Sony's lies. The PS2 never really lived up to the claims that it could render Toy Story in real time, so we took what they said about the PS3 with a huge grain of salt.
- Microsoft replaced Sega in the console wars, and they have more than enough money to meet Sony blow for blow in a marketing war.
- EA has all of their sports games on Xbox, and this time around the 360 is the premier console while the PS3 gets the shitty ports (rather than the other way around last time).
Sony's burned too many bridges and they have very strong competition this time around, with the Microsoft juggernaut out of the gates early with Xbox 360 and the breakout success of the Wii. Sony will need a miracle if they want the PS3 to become something other than another 3DO.The (lack of) PS2 developer tools was a case of Sony not seeing the forest for the trees. They had shipped some decent developer tools for the PS1 early in its life cycle, but after 6 years or so on the market every developer had either built their own specialized set of tools or moved to middleware that provided more functionality "out of the box" than the Sony tools. Upon seeing that nobody was using the PS1 tools any longer, Sony decided not to invest in tools for the PS2. That was a mistake, because there was nothing to bootstrap PS2 development. They tried to apply the end-game state of the PS1 to the start of the PS2 without realizing that it takes time to build up a proper library of specialized developer tools. Apparently they failed at this again with the PS3.
Unlike the PS2, the PS3 doesn't have a year on the market to itself. The Xbox and Gamecube shipped a year after the PS2, giving developers time to work on their tools before fighting strong competition (the Sony marketing machine had already killed the Dreamcast). This time around, the 360 was out for a year before the PS3 and Wii shipped, which means that "another year until really good games make it to the PS3" is really two years into the "next generation". Sony was banking on momentum from the PS2 without realizing that they had killed a lot of that with their arrogant attitudes (show of hands for people who got a second job in order to buy a PS3? There ya go, Kutaragi).
BTW, my math was wrong. I assumed 5 disks rather than 4, where 4 DVD9 disks would be 36GB, not 45GB.
The Xbox 360 uses a dual-layer DVD9 format, or 9GB. Assuming each Lost Odyssey disk fully fills that space (unlikely), that's 45GB of space, which is also pushing the Blu-Ray format limit. Obviously some of that is duplicated data across each disk that wouldn't contribute to the full amount on a Blu-Ray release.
This seems like an issue unique to JRPGs. Oblivion was able to fit within the bounds of DVD9 by using procedural techniques to cut down on the number of art assets (SpeedTree, for example). Two Worlds fit onto a single DVD9 as well. At the same time, JRPG players are used to swapping disks, since they've been doing it since Final Fantasy VII. It's just part of playing a JRPG. If you want to avoid multi-disk madness, avoid JRPGs. No other games have had problems with the DVD9 size limit so far.
I initially parsed that as, "insane or a Mormon to wear something like that." I hadn't heard of any Mormons starting up terrorist cells, but I guess you just never know with any religion.