You run the risk of having consumers turn to the Xbox360 instead because 3 months after Christmas is a long time to wait for a console.
I don't think Nintendo much cares if consumers turn to the 360, as long as they also buy a Wii. At current pricing, a Wii60 is not much more expensive than a PS3 and gives you all of the benefits of a hardcore gaming machine (360 or PS3) and casual machine (Wii). I have both, and everybody I know with a Wii also has a 360 (though not everybody I know with a 360 has a Wii yet). I don't know anybody with an interest in the PS3.
BB refused to refund or exchange for a different title. All they would do is let him exchange it for the same title that would surely have the same bugs. He wound up just leaving the store in disgust.
How's that Best Buy's problem? They have a clearly-stated policy concerning returns of opened media, specifically that once you open it you can only exchange it for the same item. If your friend didn't read or understand that policy, it's his problem and not Best Buy's
A buggy game does not constitute an exception to the above policy. If your friend was not happy with the state of the game, he should contact the publisher directly and ask for a refund or a fixed version.
I'm not arguing whether Best Buy's policy is right or wrong. The fact of the matter is that this is almost universal policy in retail when it comes to opened media. Your friend would've had just as much of a problem trying to return a buggy game to Target, Wal*Mart, Circuit City, CompUSA, or nearly anywhere else (CostCo might be an exception to that).
I hope they hold it together, but if they don't, there's Sonic.net which is like Speakeasy without the marketing budget.
You mean to say that Sonic.net is staffed by a bunch of fuck-ups who wouldn't know customer service if it bit them on the ass?
I guess I should qualify my hate for Speakeasy. Many years ago (in the 2000-2003 timeframe, before I bought a house out of DSL range) I was a DSL subscriber. I first set up with Concentric, who then became XO and then dropped consumer DSL. While I was grandfathered in, I decided to switch providers in order ensure proper support. At the time I had heard very good things about Speakeasy, so I switched over. When I did so, they said my existing 1.5/384 loop qualified for their $60/mo service (or whatever it was at the time, maybe it was $90/mo?), so I filled out the paperwork and pulled the trigger on the switch. That was my first mistake.
Screw up #1: Speakeasy didn't get me entered into their billing system correctly, which meant I was amassing a backlog of charges and didn't even know about it.
Screw up #2: I had a straight-up ADSL line, not a RADSL or whatever sort of line they were expecting in their cheap 1.5/384 plan. When they finally sorted out the billing problem, I got hit with a $750 bill for a 3-month backlog. $750 on a $90/mo plan? It turns out that I wasn't on their $90/mo plan, but on a $250/mo 1.5/384 ADSL plan because of the line Concentric had set up (BTW, the exact same loop with Concentric/XO was $90/mo, not $250/mo).
Screw up #3: By the time all of this came to light, Speakeasy had conveniently changed their plans and prices such that I could no longer get the 1.5/384 line I wanted at the $90/mo price.
After much negotiating (as in, weeks of phone calls and escalations), I finally got the backlog charges cancelled in exchange for switching to a more expensive SDSL plan (768/768 for ~$150/mo, I think). All was going well for several months until I started having periodic outages that could only be solved by power-cycling the modem multiple times. I called tech support every time this happened, which was once or twice a week at that point. Finally, ~9 months into having the problem and at 12 months + a couple days (important: in other words, the end of the modem warranty period), Speakeasy tech support finally gave in to what I had been saying for months and suggested I replace the modem. Of course at that point the modem was out of warranty and they wanted $200 for a new SDSL modem.
Screw up #4: Part of this was my fault for not pressing the bad modem angle harder, but SE tech support continually insisted that the problem was with the loop while Covad and Verizon techs (ie, the guys who own the loop) kept telling me and SE that the problem was not on their end.
Due to the fact that I had documentation of this problem going back for months (that is, before the end of the warranty period), I was able to get them to replace the modem for free but not until after multiple phone calls and escalations.
Since that time, I bought a house outside of DSL range and moved to Comcast cable internet. Aside from a physical issue early on in my subscription (water damage on the line at the street), I've never had a problem at all. I may not be able to run a server out of my home on Comcast's network as I could on Speakeasy's, but with the money I'm saving I can afford to pay a hosting company to do that for me. As well, the reliability has been excellent and tech support doesn't dick around -- if they can't fix the problem in 5 minutes, they send out a tech for free.
When I'm home, I have no desire to play a portable system since I can play a more powerful, more immersive game on my TV.
That's where Sony screwed up with the PSP. Handhelds can never be as powerful or as immersive as the current consoles (that is, a PSP is about as powerful as a Playstation 1. When there's a PSP that's as powerful as a Playstation 3, the Playstation 5 will be available). You don't get people to play handhelds by taking a console game and just porting it over. I played GTA:LCS on PS2, and there's no way I'd play that on a portable. You need quick, stop/start gameplay that's easy to pick up and put back down again. The DS is killing the PSP because Nintendo "gets it" and Sony doesn't. Take the Warioware series of games, for example. They consist of short 5-second minigames strung back to back for a ~5 minute playing experience. I loved the first two on the GBA, and Touched on the DS was excellent as well. I never bothered to pick up the Gamecube title because the gameplay just didn't make sense.
Oddly enough, the Wii seems to be moving towards the portable style of gameplay. You can pick up Wii Sports, play a 5-minute game of tennis or a round of boxing, put it down, and walk away. Arguably the best games on the system (not counting Zelda, since that was essentially a GC game ported to Wii) have been of the same mold: Rayman Raving Rabbids and Warioware Smooth Moves really show off what you can do with the WiiMote in short bursts of mini-game madness that's easy to jump right into and easy to walk away from. As much as I enjoy a good game of Dead Rising or Gears of War on my 360, I find myself going to the Wii when I've got 15 minutes to spare.
Well, that doesn't work on people like me that work MUCH better if they're programming something for a reason. While I hate to admit it, I don't have the personality of "I'm going to do this just for the hell of it" - I need a reason to make my life easier, etc
Reading a book wouuldn't help in your case either. My suggestion? Every computer science student at one point or another has had the desire to build a game. Go download Visual C# Express and XNA Game Studio Express for free and learn C# while scratching that itch at the same time. While the XNA bits won't necessarily be directly applicable to getting a job outside of game development, you can use the full.NET framework for Windows games (XNA on Xbox 360 uses a more limited version of the Compact.NET Framework). Could there be a more fun way to learn C# than by building a game?
* Never having to drive. Play, sleep, work, chat, whatever during the trip.
I'm not sure I'd put that in the "benefit" column. I enjoy driving. What I fear most when people start talking about future transportation technology is that almost everybody assumes that driving is a chore and nobody should have to do it anymore. While it would be great to get the people who don't like driving off the road (the people who eat, read, do their makeup, change clothes, etc all while driving), if the solution involves removing my own ability to drive then I'm against it.
Note that I didn't say anything about what I would drive. Electric, hybrid, magnetic, petrol, whatever, I'm fine with it as long as I'm allowed to stay in control of my personal vehicle.
Solution Sucks Because- UAC is so friggin' annoying with the popups that people will either shut it off or get in the habit of blindly clicking "OK," which means they are likely to give malware carte blanche to do damn near anything.
Are you even using Vista? I only got a single UAC notification yesterday, and that was because I have Visual Studio 2005 marked to run as admin per Microsoft's recommendations (hopefully they can fix that soon). I even upgraded my video driver last night and didn't have any UAC prompts to wade through. What exactly are you doing that you're getting UAC prompts all the time?
Solution Sucks Because- One infected email can cause your whole inbox to go bye-bye.
It's a bug. Yes, it's a bad bug, and Microsoft is fixing it and there are work-arounds (not pretty work-arounds, but it's possible). Honestly, most people who use OneCare are never going to run into this problem because either they use web mail somewhere (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc), or their ISP-provided mail already goes through a virus filter on the server meaning that they'd never get a virus in their inbox to prompt OneCare to kill their PST. And even if they did get a virus in their mail that was not caught by server-side or client-side protections, they only have to delete the offending mail to keep OneCare from eating their mail file.
Great job, guys! The five years it took you to get this stuff perfect was really worth it!
OneCare has only been around for about 2 years, and is not part of Vista. UAC, Vista, and 5 years have nothing to do with this OneCare story.
False, I routinely pick up cars that still have people in it. It's rather hilarious.
Cars with live people in them are funnier than those with dead people. When you pick up a car with a live person, they floor the gas trying to get away. Dead people just flop around. (to get dead people in your car, find a car you want to pick up and kick it around a few times. That should kill the occupants, hopefully without discharging them from the vehicle)
Also, I haven't figured out why cars bleed in the game, but they do.
I don't know, I wish they would do what XBMC does and play any video format instead of just DRM WMV.
Just to clarify, the WMV files don't have to have DRM, though it's true that the 360 can only play WMV files (for the moment? Who knows if Microsoft will ever release a video codec pack?). In the meantime, you can transcode your videos and stream that to the 360 instead. It's not a perfect solution, but it is a solution.
I've been looking to upgrade my media streamer capabilities and the original XBOX can run Xbox Media Center (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/). I wonder if this means that a 360 version with HD streaming might be forthcoming? I hope so. I've been avoiding getting one because how locked down it is.
You do realize that the 360 can act as a Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center 2005 and Vista, right? Also, the 360 can stream music and (with the Fall 06 patch) videos from any "compatible" UPnP media server (technically only Windows Media Connect and WMP11 are supported, but there are apps to do the same on OS X and Linux since all the MSFT apps are really doing is acting as a UPnP media server). Yes, there are codec limitations, but you can transcode on the fly easily enough if you have a powerful enough server.
It just seems weird to me that your killer app is media streaming, but you won't buy a 360 that does that out of the box (or close enough, with the Update). Similarly, if you wanted to develop homebrew games the 360 can already do that with XNA. It has some growing to do still, but expect big things from XNA in the coming months/years. Why would you wait until there's a hack to do that when you could build supported homebrew games already?
Yes they make money on sales - 360 costs about what it sells for now, xbox1 was always a looser(financialy also..:P) - sales they make money on are games, add ons (controlers etc) and live stuff.
That's "loser". And the original Xbox was expected to lose money. It was a mostly-off-the-shelf console built quite quickly (approximately a year from initial design to ship, compared to the 360 that was in design for 3+ years before shipping) in an attempt to break into the market following the Sony-style loss-leader method.
The 360, on the other hand, was designed as a purpose-built console, with contracts in place to allow Microsoft to own the IP of the chips, thus allowing them the opportunity to farm out chip manufacture to lower cost partners, or even consolidate chips at a later date. While it's unclear whether or not the 360 is currently breaking even or making a profit on console sales, it's safe to say that this will happen eventually, and probably sooner than later.
The 360 is [i]already[/i] compromised in its chief money making area, new games, you can play illigal copies with hacked DVD roms, this should have been the primary area of security, but as normal what security is left only hurts the law abiding people (no multie region dvd player, no linux, no arbitary homebrew etc).
Except that hacked consoles are detectable on Live and can be blocked from participating in online gameplay as well as access to the Marketplace (no updates for games, no demos or trailers, no XBLA access, etc). Xbox 360's biggest draw is the pervasive support of Xbox Live. Halo 2 is still selling very well today, over two years later, due to its Live support. Games like Gears of War or Crackdown are fun in single player but are even better when you can team up with a friend and play co-op. Some small percentage of people may be willing to trade off Live support in order to get free games. The bread-and-butter core market isn't going to go there.
Aesthetic sense, "good taste", whatever you want to call it, is something which you either have intrinsically or you do not. Most people do not and will not no matter whose "set of guiding principles" are employed.
That's not necessarily true. With the help of a few rules and theories, you can learn to make aesthetically pleasing (though not necessarily groundbreaking) designs. Even something as simple as color theory and using a tool to select a complementary color pallete is enough for most design-challenged people to make something that isn't eye-gougingly bad.
Just look at the average geek's wardrobe LOL, if it was like math or language we'd all have it down by HS graduation, wouldn't we?
That's more indicative of a lack of caring (or even outright hostility towards "fitting in") rather than that design skills are unlearnable. If that were the case, mildly color blind people would be screwed.
So, you're saying that in order to use a markup language whose primary design goal was to be easy for human beings to work with, I should invest in buying and learning at tool? Never mind that I have never even seen a decent XML editor.
No, I'm saying that you should rarely have to edit XML directly yourself. For the times that you do, use a nice programmer's editor like PSPad or Visual Studio that will automatically add close tags (cut your typing in half!). The rest of the time, you should be generating your XML programmatically from some other data source.
In fact, the best compromise is probably simply not to write code in XML, but pick one of the better alternative formats and convert to XML after editing.
Since when is XML "code"? Writing an XSL/T to apply to an XML file may be code-like, but in general XML should be a data format that you pass around between applications, not something you "code" yourself.
There's one reason I like JSON way more than XML, and its name is RSI.
If you're getting RSI from XML, you're not doing it right. Use a tool! Anyway, the real reason to use JSON instead of XML is cross-site security restrictions. You can't make an XmlHTTPRequest call from one domain to another, but you can add a <script/> tag with a src pointing somewhere else.
I have read elsewhere rumblings that the complete hardware setup in the Wii is ready to support DVD playback
Duh? The Wii has a DVD drive. It can read DVDs. It can also play movies (which you can do right now if you load them up in the right format on an SD card). Thus I would say it's pretty obvious that everything is in place to be able to play DVDs. I'd guess the only thing missing is MPEG2 decoder software and a nice interface. The former requires licensing fees that could increase the price of the Wii (see the original Xbox with its special dongle to enable DVD playback since Microsoft didn't want to roll the cost of licensing into the base price). The latter just requires time, whether that's from a third-party building the software or from Nintendo doing it in-house.
That the Wii will eventually get DVD playback is a no-brainer, and there's no reason why you should have to buy a new Wii to do so (though who knows what Nintendo will do?).
Hunted around and managed to get drivers for most things, but the nvidia driver refuses to work...
Don't blame HP for that one. Blame nVidia's insistence that OEMs support mobile chipsets with their own "official" drivers (which the likes of HP/Compaq and Dell never keep up to date, of course). The thing is, mobile chipsets are generally no different from their desktop counterparts when it comes to drivers. For nVidia drivers, check out LaptopVideo2Go.com. For ATi, try DH Mod tool. In either case, the "problem" is that the inf for the drivers don't contain the right information to detect mobile chipsets, even though the drivers will work just fine on them. The "fix" is to hack the inf so that the installers will allow you to apply the drivers to your mobile card.
So far I've yet to be blown away by any next-gen games, and here I sit with a Wii, and a 360, and really no games out there asking me to buy them. I have twilight princess and dead rising, respectively.
Well, that might be your problem. Twilight Princess is very much a last-gen game in terms of everything but the Wiimote control (it spent years in development on the GC before a last-minute switch to Wii), and Dead Rising has... problems with non-HDTVs that can severely hamper your enjoyment of the game. Neither is a graphical powerhouse (though Dead Rising is deceptive -- the non-cut-scene graphics aren't stunning like Gears of War, but then you realize you can have a thousand zombies on screen along with all of the breakable environment bits without any slowdown). I definitely enjoyed both (I actually enjoyed Dead Rising more than TP, since I got bored with TP about a 3rd of the way into the game), but I wouldn't really hold up either as the pinnacle of next gen game design for either console.
For the 360, I recommend you pick up Gears of War, Viva Pinata, and Oblivion (if you haven't played it on PC, of course). Those three games are some of the most graphically impressive (even on an SDTV), and the gameplay is diverse enough (stop-and-pop shooter, pokemon-like Sims game, open-ended action/rpg) to satisfy different gaming desires. If you're into racing, I'd also recommend you keep an eye out for Forza 2 in the next couple months (I think the release date is May something?), which should blow away anything Gran Turismo has to offer on the PS3.
For the Wii, there's really only one choice, and it's not about graphics. Since the Wii is all about the Wiimote, any representative game will have to do something innovative with it. I've been told Rayman: Raving Rabbids is excellent in that respect, but I haven't gotten around to picking that up because I already have the definitive Wii game -- Warioware: Smooth Moves. This is the game that will show you what is possible with the Wiimote (some obvious methods are obvious, others seem completely nuts, but all work beautifully). The game is a series of 5-second minigames, so that may not float your boat. I enjoy it because I can play for a couple minutes and then go do something else. But you must own this game if only to satisfy yourself that yes, somebody out there understands the Wiimote and can do great and innovative things with it.
Also, interviews with MSFT and Sony reps are boring. They don't make video games, they just sell hardware.
Last I checked, both Sony and Microsoft had in-house game development divisions. While you're right that the rep who is doing the interview doesn't make games, that rep doesn't sell hardware either. They're just spokespeople (sometimes bad like Kutaragi, sometimes good like Reggie, and sometimes neutral like Peter Moore).
... lack of killer system selling game or games. It has to be said if the games were there even the high price would not be such a barrier of there really was a killer app that made people throw their financial reason to the wind.
It's very rare to have a system-seller game at launch. Out of all of the various different console launches over the years, I can only think of two such cases -- the SNES launch with Super Mario World, and the Xbox launch with Halo.
With that in mind, it must be possible to survive a launch without a system-selling game or there wouldn't be any consoles anymore. Sony kept the PS2 alive for the first year through excellent backwards compatibility, but they screwed that up on the PS3 due to the change in peripheral interface (because people want to play Guitar Hero and DDR). A system-seller will eventually come and people will buy the PS3, but they've got a huge task ahead of them -- a system-seller game for a $600 console needs to be substantially better than what it would take to sell a $100-200 or even a $400 console. At $600, the customer needs to be able to answer yes to the question, "Would I pay $660 to play X?" Resistance doesn't pass that test, nor does Madden or any game out yet. Gran Turismo might answer that question for some, as will MGS4 for others, but until there's a massive price drop I think Sony's going to find it much harder to get a true system-seller (even from franchises that are proven system-sellers in the past)
Another example of piss-poor game journalism. I can care less about emotional attachment. When it comes to gaming, artificial intelligence is grossly inferior to human intelligence.
Your jibe would make sense if the article was about single-player vs. multiplayer. It wasn't. His main focus was on Mario Kart 64 (recently released on Wii's Virtual Console). The core gameplay in MK64 was local multiplayer, and the author explicitly said that he'd rather play local multiplayer with friends than online multiplayer with random people (or even friends, for that matter).
That said, you don't always need awesome AI to have a fun experience. For example, there's the obvious example of puzzle games. Do you enjoy Tetris less when playing single player? However, there are also less obvious examples. For instance, look at racing games. In particular, let's compare the Gran Turismo series (GT4) and Forza Motorsport. GT4 has no online multiplayer and has horribly bad AI (bumper car, stick-to-the-line-at-all-costs AI). Forza has much better AI (they'll brake and adjust lines to avoid hitting you or other AI cars), but it also has online multiplayer. Guess what? Real people play Forza online just like GT's inferior AI plays -- first-turn pile-ups, bumping and crashing, using other drivers as turning aids, etc. Forza's AI plays more like an ideal driver, even though it's nowhere near perfect. Is GT's terrible AI better than Forza's because it (accidentally) plays more like a real person? Unless I'm racing with a group of people I know, I'd much rather prefer to play against Forza's AI instead, warts and all.
For what it's worth, I work for a company which has just released a game that, as of this date, does not work at all optimally under one major graphics card manufacturer's Vista drivers.
I see you work for Stardock. Are you saying that GC2:DA doesn't work well under Vista? And does that apply to the original GC2 as well? I'll confess that I haven't yet fired up GC2 since upgrading my laptop to Vista last weekend (though it ran like a champ under XP, laptop has an ATI x300 w/ dedicated 128MB VRAM). Should I be worried? Or did ATI get it right and nVidia screwed up (I somehow doubt that's the case, though...)? I'll very likely pick up Dark Avatar some time in the next few months, assuming it works well in Vista with an ATI card.
(PS: "pick up" means "purchase via Stardock's online store." I applaud Stardock's stance on DRM-less games, and show that with my dollars.)
a couple of months ago that predicted FPS games would suffer due to the DRM?
What does this have to do with DRM? It's driver issues, plain and simple. As is always the case, don't use the WHQL-certified drivers provided by Windows Update. You'll always find newer, better drivers by visiting nVidia or ATI's web sites directly.
And a subsequent astroturfing article attempting to convince us otherwise?
I assume you're referring to this article. How is that astroturfing? The response was done on the Vista team blog, which is a Microsoft property and is in no way trying to pass itself off as an unrelated third party. Whether or not you believe what they say has nothing to do with the response being astroturf.
Second, it's true that none of the current 360 games run natively in 1080p, but most of them can currently be scaled to 1080p by the hardware scaler... which is something the PS3 can't do for its games that run lower than 1080p.
Actually, all Xbox 360 games can currently be scaled to 1080p by the hardware scaler. That's the beauty of a hardware scaler -- you tell it you want 1080p (or 720p, or 1080i, or whatever), and that's what you get every time. While scaling is not the same as natively rendering in 1080p with high resolution textures, it's still better than trusting your TV to upscale properly. The 360's hardware scaler works upon the digital image prior to sending it to the TV. Your TV has to work with an analog signal (because the 360 doesn't do HDMI/DVI). Your TV's scaler in general won't do as well as the 360's scaler, and some TVs can introduce lag when scaling images that's not present when given a signal in their native resolution.
After being spoiled by the 360's scaler for over a year, I was somewhat disappointed with my Wii. With the 360, I've set it to 720p and I don't have to worry about anything else, whether a game supports that resolution or is widescreen or not (the 360 will appropriately side-box original Xbox 480i/p 4:3 games so I don't have adjust my set). The Wii acts more like the original Xbox, where I have to visually determine if a game is 16:9 or 4:3 and shrink or stretch the set's mode appropriately. From what I hear, the PS3 is the same way. Ugh. Hopefully the next generation of consoles (5 years from now) will all have hardware scalers.
Slashdot Mirror
1 year and 5 months is not "nearly two years". Give it a couple more months before you start using that line. The 360 shipped in mid-November of 2005.
I don't think Nintendo much cares if consumers turn to the 360, as long as they also buy a Wii. At current pricing, a Wii60 is not much more expensive than a PS3 and gives you all of the benefits of a hardcore gaming machine (360 or PS3) and casual machine (Wii). I have both, and everybody I know with a Wii also has a 360 (though not everybody I know with a 360 has a Wii yet). I don't know anybody with an interest in the PS3.
How's that Best Buy's problem? They have a clearly-stated policy concerning returns of opened media, specifically that once you open it you can only exchange it for the same item. If your friend didn't read or understand that policy, it's his problem and not Best Buy's
A buggy game does not constitute an exception to the above policy. If your friend was not happy with the state of the game, he should contact the publisher directly and ask for a refund or a fixed version.
I'm not arguing whether Best Buy's policy is right or wrong. The fact of the matter is that this is almost universal policy in retail when it comes to opened media. Your friend would've had just as much of a problem trying to return a buggy game to Target, Wal*Mart, Circuit City, CompUSA, or nearly anywhere else (CostCo might be an exception to that).
You mean to say that Sonic.net is staffed by a bunch of fuck-ups who wouldn't know customer service if it bit them on the ass?
I guess I should qualify my hate for Speakeasy. Many years ago (in the 2000-2003 timeframe, before I bought a house out of DSL range) I was a DSL subscriber. I first set up with Concentric, who then became XO and then dropped consumer DSL. While I was grandfathered in, I decided to switch providers in order ensure proper support. At the time I had heard very good things about Speakeasy, so I switched over. When I did so, they said my existing 1.5/384 loop qualified for their $60/mo service (or whatever it was at the time, maybe it was $90/mo?), so I filled out the paperwork and pulled the trigger on the switch. That was my first mistake.
- Screw up #1: Speakeasy didn't get me entered into their billing system correctly, which meant I was amassing a backlog of charges and didn't even know about it.
- Screw up #2: I had a straight-up ADSL line, not a RADSL or whatever sort of line they were expecting in their cheap 1.5/384 plan. When they finally sorted out the billing problem, I got hit with a $750 bill for a 3-month backlog. $750 on a $90/mo plan? It turns out that I wasn't on their $90/mo plan, but on a $250/mo 1.5/384 ADSL plan because of the line Concentric had set up (BTW, the exact same loop with Concentric/XO was $90/mo, not $250/mo).
- Screw up #3: By the time all of this came to light, Speakeasy had conveniently changed their plans and prices such that I could no longer get the 1.5/384 line I wanted at the $90/mo price.
After much negotiating (as in, weeks of phone calls and escalations), I finally got the backlog charges cancelled in exchange for switching to a more expensive SDSL plan (768/768 for ~$150/mo, I think). All was going well for several months until I started having periodic outages that could only be solved by power-cycling the modem multiple times. I called tech support every time this happened, which was once or twice a week at that point. Finally, ~9 months into having the problem and at 12 months + a couple days (important: in other words, the end of the modem warranty period), Speakeasy tech support finally gave in to what I had been saying for months and suggested I replace the modem. Of course at that point the modem was out of warranty and they wanted $200 for a new SDSL modem.- Screw up #4: Part of this was my fault for not pressing the bad modem angle harder, but SE tech support continually insisted that the problem was with the loop while Covad and Verizon techs (ie, the guys who own the loop) kept telling me and SE that the problem was not on their end.
Due to the fact that I had documentation of this problem going back for months (that is, before the end of the warranty period), I was able to get them to replace the modem for free but not until after multiple phone calls and escalations.Since that time, I bought a house outside of DSL range and moved to Comcast cable internet. Aside from a physical issue early on in my subscription (water damage on the line at the street), I've never had a problem at all. I may not be able to run a server out of my home on Comcast's network as I could on Speakeasy's, but with the money I'm saving I can afford to pay a hosting company to do that for me. As well, the reliability has been excellent and tech support doesn't dick around -- if they can't fix the problem in 5 minutes, they send out a tech for free.
That's where Sony screwed up with the PSP. Handhelds can never be as powerful or as immersive as the current consoles (that is, a PSP is about as powerful as a Playstation 1. When there's a PSP that's as powerful as a Playstation 3, the Playstation 5 will be available). You don't get people to play handhelds by taking a console game and just porting it over. I played GTA:LCS on PS2, and there's no way I'd play that on a portable. You need quick, stop/start gameplay that's easy to pick up and put back down again. The DS is killing the PSP because Nintendo "gets it" and Sony doesn't. Take the Warioware series of games, for example. They consist of short 5-second minigames strung back to back for a ~5 minute playing experience. I loved the first two on the GBA, and Touched on the DS was excellent as well. I never bothered to pick up the Gamecube title because the gameplay just didn't make sense.
Oddly enough, the Wii seems to be moving towards the portable style of gameplay. You can pick up Wii Sports, play a 5-minute game of tennis or a round of boxing, put it down, and walk away. Arguably the best games on the system (not counting Zelda, since that was essentially a GC game ported to Wii) have been of the same mold: Rayman Raving Rabbids and Warioware Smooth Moves really show off what you can do with the WiiMote in short bursts of mini-game madness that's easy to jump right into and easy to walk away from. As much as I enjoy a good game of Dead Rising or Gears of War on my 360, I find myself going to the Wii when I've got 15 minutes to spare.
Reading a book wouuldn't help in your case either. My suggestion? Every computer science student at one point or another has had the desire to build a game. Go download Visual C# Express and XNA Game Studio Express for free and learn C# while scratching that itch at the same time. While the XNA bits won't necessarily be directly applicable to getting a job outside of game development, you can use the full .NET framework for Windows games (XNA on Xbox 360 uses a more limited version of the Compact .NET Framework). Could there be a more fun way to learn C# than by building a game?
I'm not sure I'd put that in the "benefit" column. I enjoy driving. What I fear most when people start talking about future transportation technology is that almost everybody assumes that driving is a chore and nobody should have to do it anymore. While it would be great to get the people who don't like driving off the road (the people who eat, read, do their makeup, change clothes, etc all while driving), if the solution involves removing my own ability to drive then I'm against it.
Note that I didn't say anything about what I would drive. Electric, hybrid, magnetic, petrol, whatever, I'm fine with it as long as I'm allowed to stay in control of my personal vehicle.
Good luck playing the multiplayer-focused ET: QW when your Xbox Live account gets banned due to hacked firmware.
Are you even using Vista? I only got a single UAC notification yesterday, and that was because I have Visual Studio 2005 marked to run as admin per Microsoft's recommendations (hopefully they can fix that soon). I even upgraded my video driver last night and didn't have any UAC prompts to wade through. What exactly are you doing that you're getting UAC prompts all the time?
It's a bug. Yes, it's a bad bug, and Microsoft is fixing it and there are work-arounds (not pretty work-arounds, but it's possible). Honestly, most people who use OneCare are never going to run into this problem because either they use web mail somewhere (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc), or their ISP-provided mail already goes through a virus filter on the server meaning that they'd never get a virus in their inbox to prompt OneCare to kill their PST. And even if they did get a virus in their mail that was not caught by server-side or client-side protections, they only have to delete the offending mail to keep OneCare from eating their mail file.
OneCare has only been around for about 2 years, and is not part of Vista. UAC, Vista, and 5 years have nothing to do with this OneCare story.
Cars with live people in them are funnier than those with dead people. When you pick up a car with a live person, they floor the gas trying to get away. Dead people just flop around. (to get dead people in your car, find a car you want to pick up and kick it around a few times. That should kill the occupants, hopefully without discharging them from the vehicle)
Also, I haven't figured out why cars bleed in the game, but they do.
Just to clarify, the WMV files don't have to have DRM, though it's true that the 360 can only play WMV files (for the moment? Who knows if Microsoft will ever release a video codec pack?). In the meantime, you can transcode your videos and stream that to the 360 instead. It's not a perfect solution, but it is a solution.
You do realize that the 360 can act as a Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center 2005 and Vista, right? Also, the 360 can stream music and (with the Fall 06 patch) videos from any "compatible" UPnP media server (technically only Windows Media Connect and WMP11 are supported, but there are apps to do the same on OS X and Linux since all the MSFT apps are really doing is acting as a UPnP media server). Yes, there are codec limitations, but you can transcode on the fly easily enough if you have a powerful enough server.
It just seems weird to me that your killer app is media streaming, but you won't buy a 360 that does that out of the box (or close enough, with the Update). Similarly, if you wanted to develop homebrew games the 360 can already do that with XNA. It has some growing to do still, but expect big things from XNA in the coming months/years. Why would you wait until there's a hack to do that when you could build supported homebrew games already?
That's "loser". And the original Xbox was expected to lose money. It was a mostly-off-the-shelf console built quite quickly (approximately a year from initial design to ship, compared to the 360 that was in design for 3+ years before shipping) in an attempt to break into the market following the Sony-style loss-leader method.
The 360, on the other hand, was designed as a purpose-built console, with contracts in place to allow Microsoft to own the IP of the chips, thus allowing them the opportunity to farm out chip manufacture to lower cost partners, or even consolidate chips at a later date. While it's unclear whether or not the 360 is currently breaking even or making a profit on console sales, it's safe to say that this will happen eventually, and probably sooner than later.
Except that hacked consoles are detectable on Live and can be blocked from participating in online gameplay as well as access to the Marketplace (no updates for games, no demos or trailers, no XBLA access, etc). Xbox 360's biggest draw is the pervasive support of Xbox Live. Halo 2 is still selling very well today, over two years later, due to its Live support. Games like Gears of War or Crackdown are fun in single player but are even better when you can team up with a friend and play co-op. Some small percentage of people may be willing to trade off Live support in order to get free games. The bread-and-butter core market isn't going to go there.
That's not necessarily true. With the help of a few rules and theories, you can learn to make aesthetically pleasing (though not necessarily groundbreaking) designs. Even something as simple as color theory and using a tool to select a complementary color pallete is enough for most design-challenged people to make something that isn't eye-gougingly bad.
That's more indicative of a lack of caring (or even outright hostility towards "fitting in") rather than that design skills are unlearnable. If that were the case, mildly color blind people would be screwed.
Oddly enough, I also check-in READMEs, SETUPs, images, doc files, etc. None of those are code, and neither is my XML configuration file (for example).
No, I'm saying that you should rarely have to edit XML directly yourself. For the times that you do, use a nice programmer's editor like PSPad or Visual Studio that will automatically add close tags (cut your typing in half!). The rest of the time, you should be generating your XML programmatically from some other data source.
Since when is XML "code"? Writing an XSL/T to apply to an XML file may be code-like, but in general XML should be a data format that you pass around between applications, not something you "code" yourself.
If you're getting RSI from XML, you're not doing it right. Use a tool! Anyway, the real reason to use JSON instead of XML is cross-site security restrictions. You can't make an XmlHTTPRequest call from one domain to another, but you can add a <script /> tag with a src pointing somewhere else.
Duh? The Wii has a DVD drive. It can read DVDs. It can also play movies (which you can do right now if you load them up in the right format on an SD card). Thus I would say it's pretty obvious that everything is in place to be able to play DVDs. I'd guess the only thing missing is MPEG2 decoder software and a nice interface. The former requires licensing fees that could increase the price of the Wii (see the original Xbox with its special dongle to enable DVD playback since Microsoft didn't want to roll the cost of licensing into the base price). The latter just requires time, whether that's from a third-party building the software or from Nintendo doing it in-house.
That the Wii will eventually get DVD playback is a no-brainer, and there's no reason why you should have to buy a new Wii to do so (though who knows what Nintendo will do?).
Don't blame HP for that one. Blame nVidia's insistence that OEMs support mobile chipsets with their own "official" drivers (which the likes of HP/Compaq and Dell never keep up to date, of course). The thing is, mobile chipsets are generally no different from their desktop counterparts when it comes to drivers. For nVidia drivers, check out LaptopVideo2Go.com. For ATi, try DH Mod tool. In either case, the "problem" is that the inf for the drivers don't contain the right information to detect mobile chipsets, even though the drivers will work just fine on them. The "fix" is to hack the inf so that the installers will allow you to apply the drivers to your mobile card.
Well, that might be your problem. Twilight Princess is very much a last-gen game in terms of everything but the Wiimote control (it spent years in development on the GC before a last-minute switch to Wii), and Dead Rising has ... problems with non-HDTVs that can severely hamper your enjoyment of the game. Neither is a graphical powerhouse (though Dead Rising is deceptive -- the non-cut-scene graphics aren't stunning like Gears of War, but then you realize you can have a thousand zombies on screen along with all of the breakable environment bits without any slowdown). I definitely enjoyed both (I actually enjoyed Dead Rising more than TP, since I got bored with TP about a 3rd of the way into the game), but I wouldn't really hold up either as the pinnacle of next gen game design for either console.
For the 360, I recommend you pick up Gears of War, Viva Pinata, and Oblivion (if you haven't played it on PC, of course). Those three games are some of the most graphically impressive (even on an SDTV), and the gameplay is diverse enough (stop-and-pop shooter, pokemon-like Sims game, open-ended action/rpg) to satisfy different gaming desires. If you're into racing, I'd also recommend you keep an eye out for Forza 2 in the next couple months (I think the release date is May something?), which should blow away anything Gran Turismo has to offer on the PS3.
For the Wii, there's really only one choice, and it's not about graphics. Since the Wii is all about the Wiimote, any representative game will have to do something innovative with it. I've been told Rayman: Raving Rabbids is excellent in that respect, but I haven't gotten around to picking that up because I already have the definitive Wii game -- Warioware: Smooth Moves. This is the game that will show you what is possible with the Wiimote (some obvious methods are obvious, others seem completely nuts, but all work beautifully). The game is a series of 5-second minigames, so that may not float your boat. I enjoy it because I can play for a couple minutes and then go do something else. But you must own this game if only to satisfy yourself that yes, somebody out there understands the Wiimote and can do great and innovative things with it.
Last I checked, both Sony and Microsoft had in-house game development divisions. While you're right that the rep who is doing the interview doesn't make games, that rep doesn't sell hardware either. They're just spokespeople (sometimes bad like Kutaragi, sometimes good like Reggie, and sometimes neutral like Peter Moore).
It's very rare to have a system-seller game at launch. Out of all of the various different console launches over the years, I can only think of two such cases -- the SNES launch with Super Mario World, and the Xbox launch with Halo.
With that in mind, it must be possible to survive a launch without a system-selling game or there wouldn't be any consoles anymore. Sony kept the PS2 alive for the first year through excellent backwards compatibility, but they screwed that up on the PS3 due to the change in peripheral interface (because people want to play Guitar Hero and DDR). A system-seller will eventually come and people will buy the PS3, but they've got a huge task ahead of them -- a system-seller game for a $600 console needs to be substantially better than what it would take to sell a $100-200 or even a $400 console. At $600, the customer needs to be able to answer yes to the question, "Would I pay $660 to play X?" Resistance doesn't pass that test, nor does Madden or any game out yet. Gran Turismo might answer that question for some, as will MGS4 for others, but until there's a massive price drop I think Sony's going to find it much harder to get a true system-seller (even from franchises that are proven system-sellers in the past)
Your jibe would make sense if the article was about single-player vs. multiplayer. It wasn't. His main focus was on Mario Kart 64 (recently released on Wii's Virtual Console). The core gameplay in MK64 was local multiplayer, and the author explicitly said that he'd rather play local multiplayer with friends than online multiplayer with random people (or even friends, for that matter).
That said, you don't always need awesome AI to have a fun experience. For example, there's the obvious example of puzzle games. Do you enjoy Tetris less when playing single player? However, there are also less obvious examples. For instance, look at racing games. In particular, let's compare the Gran Turismo series (GT4) and Forza Motorsport. GT4 has no online multiplayer and has horribly bad AI (bumper car, stick-to-the-line-at-all-costs AI). Forza has much better AI (they'll brake and adjust lines to avoid hitting you or other AI cars), but it also has online multiplayer. Guess what? Real people play Forza online just like GT's inferior AI plays -- first-turn pile-ups, bumping and crashing, using other drivers as turning aids, etc. Forza's AI plays more like an ideal driver, even though it's nowhere near perfect. Is GT's terrible AI better than Forza's because it (accidentally) plays more like a real person? Unless I'm racing with a group of people I know, I'd much rather prefer to play against Forza's AI instead, warts and all.
I see you work for Stardock. Are you saying that GC2:DA doesn't work well under Vista? And does that apply to the original GC2 as well? I'll confess that I haven't yet fired up GC2 since upgrading my laptop to Vista last weekend (though it ran like a champ under XP, laptop has an ATI x300 w/ dedicated 128MB VRAM). Should I be worried? Or did ATI get it right and nVidia screwed up (I somehow doubt that's the case, though ...)? I'll very likely pick up Dark Avatar some time in the next few months, assuming it works well in Vista with an ATI card.
(PS: "pick up" means "purchase via Stardock's online store." I applaud Stardock's stance on DRM-less games, and show that with my dollars.)
What does this have to do with DRM? It's driver issues, plain and simple. As is always the case, don't use the WHQL-certified drivers provided by Windows Update. You'll always find newer, better drivers by visiting nVidia or ATI's web sites directly.
I assume you're referring to this article. How is that astroturfing? The response was done on the Vista team blog, which is a Microsoft property and is in no way trying to pass itself off as an unrelated third party. Whether or not you believe what they say has nothing to do with the response being astroturf.
Actually, all Xbox 360 games can currently be scaled to 1080p by the hardware scaler. That's the beauty of a hardware scaler -- you tell it you want 1080p (or 720p, or 1080i, or whatever), and that's what you get every time. While scaling is not the same as natively rendering in 1080p with high resolution textures, it's still better than trusting your TV to upscale properly. The 360's hardware scaler works upon the digital image prior to sending it to the TV. Your TV has to work with an analog signal (because the 360 doesn't do HDMI/DVI). Your TV's scaler in general won't do as well as the 360's scaler, and some TVs can introduce lag when scaling images that's not present when given a signal in their native resolution.
After being spoiled by the 360's scaler for over a year, I was somewhat disappointed with my Wii. With the 360, I've set it to 720p and I don't have to worry about anything else, whether a game supports that resolution or is widescreen or not (the 360 will appropriately side-box original Xbox 480i/p 4:3 games so I don't have adjust my set). The Wii acts more like the original Xbox, where I have to visually determine if a game is 16:9 or 4:3 and shrink or stretch the set's mode appropriately. From what I hear, the PS3 is the same way. Ugh. Hopefully the next generation of consoles (5 years from now) will all have hardware scalers.