I'm a one man shop, and I could stand to go to just one language.
That seems backwards to me. In a one-man shop, I'd use whatever I want because only I have to deal with it. In a multi-person shop, or a multi-group shop, some standardization is worthwhile. However, it should be localized and organic. Meaning, let each group or team decide what they want to use for each project, and let them make that decision on their own based on the project's goal. Within a project, however, things need to be standardized to some extent to keep everybody productive. If you and I are both working on modules for the same application, it's going to be a huge mess if you decide to work in Python and I decide to work in C.
Managed environments like Java or.NET make the question somewhat moot, since multiple languages can be targetted to the same runtime. Even then, it can still get painful if you're working in Visual Basic.NET and I'm writing my code in C#, even though the languages interact just fine.
The key here is, "Everything in moderation." Standardize to make your job easier when interacting with other developers on the same project. Don't standardize just to say you standardized (well, unless you're trying to bump your internal visibility for purposes of artificially inflating your annual review score, in which case you should just be shot -- why not do something useful to increase your visibility instead?).
I have my friends over for some Burnout, Mario Kart, or F-Zero, believe you me, I am NOT going to be telling them that I'm coming up behind them for a pass. I am going to be doing my absolute best to slam them into oncoming traffic, or at least give them a good knock on my way by.
I haven't read TFA, but I would assume that they are talking about really realistic racing games, such as a Formula-1 game.
Well, the article talks about Project: Gotham Racing 3 on the Xbox 360. It's certainly not a "simulation" racer at the level of Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsports, or FIA GT-R, but it's much less arcadey than Burnout or Mario Kart. The whole goal in PGR3 is to race "with style", which generally implies cleanliness (hitting walls stop your Kudos build-up, for example). Thus it's considered bad to use other people as brakes online, or to intentionally spin them out. Maybe it's going a little overboard to broadcast each pass you want to take, but that is the general "feel". Personally, I'll apologize if I accidentally knock you out (a little rubbin' is fine, but if you spin out or hit a wall because of something I accidentally did, I'll throw a quick, "Sorry d00d"). If I'm so much faster than you that the only way I'm not going to pass is if you're an ass and keep blocking, I'll throw out a, "I'm coming up on your left/right" as a bit of a warning. Then if you do block (once is fine, more than once is not), you're fair game for a hit.
I would feel more gratified playing single player if you can't actually interact with the other drivers and actively go out of your way to screw them over.
You're not really the target audience of a multiplayer simulation racing game, then. The people who like those games (myself included) tend to be racing enthusiasts. We watch ALMS or SCCA Speed World Challenge races on TV. We may even race in amateur leagues like the SCCA, or at least get out for some lapping at the local track ocassionally. As real racing has rules, we want our online racing to have rules, too. Unfortunately there's no way to black flag a player, or penalize him with a stop-and-go, so you're really getting into a gentleman's agreement to race cleanly or suffer the feedback. I know, you're thinking, "Bad feedback, ooo! I'm scared!" When that's all you can do, however, you do what you can. And the more bad feedback you get, the more likely you're only going to be matched with other bad feedback players. Maybe that's good for you, as if you enjoy slamming into people you'd probably much rather play with other people who feel the same. ("you" being the all-inclusive generic "you" and not you in particular, though your stated preferences make you fit this category)
"Geometry Wars is basically Robotron crossed with the famous Macintosh game Crystal Quest, with vector graphics"... and funny you bring up Smash TV as it is also on Xbox 360 arcade and also experiencing a nice revival.
Soon you'll be able to verify if that comparison is apt, since Robotron 2084 is currently available on 360's Live Arcade and Crystal Quest is coming soon.
1. when i opened up ie7, ciadeamon started indexing my harddrive for no reason. I had to go to services and disable it. I don't know if it is related, but I had no other programs (other than speedswitch xp) running. It was slowing my computer down to a crawl since laptop harddrives are pretty slow as it is.
I assume you mean "cidaemon", or Indexing Services. I have that disabled and IE7 didn't enable it on me. Maybe your machine just incorrectly decided it was idle and started indexing because you had never turned it off? Then again, I have the service set to "Disabled" rather than "Manual". If you have it as "Manual", applications can still start it.
2. somehow i manged to make the file, edit, view etc... menu disappear. In ie6 and firefox I could move the file/edit/view etc.. menu right next to the location bar, but now for somereason they don't let you do it. If you're a ie develpor, i'm not sure how to report this, so just ask me what to do and i'll try. It still shows up when i press alt+f (for file), but then disappears . This isn't a prpoblem for me, I actually like it because less space is taken up, but for 'n00bs' i suppose that would be a huge problem.
Right-click the toolbar with the Home and RSS buttons, and choose "Classic Menu". That'll give you back your File/Edit/View menu. It'll still be underneath the back/forward buttons and address bar, though.
4. where are the live bookmarks?
Feeds? Click the circled-star icon to the left of the tabs to open the "Favorites Center", and click on Feeds. You can add new feeds through the RSS button on the toolbar on the right (using the new "standard" RSS icon!).
5. they haven't improved the search (ctrl+f). I couldn't find any option for 'find as you type' or a simple hotkey like '.' to start searching the page. The same old invasive interface is there. I did enable the 'search pane' but have no clue what that does because it requires me to restart ie (which i will do when i'm done typing this up).
There's only so much they can fix/change in so much time. For example, they may not have changed the Find In Page functionality yet, but they did implement better text zooming (zooms pixel-based layouts, and can zoom by percentages using ctrl-scrollwheel as well as by small/medium/large). Give them time. Personally, I'd rather have a nice find in page than print preview, but that's because I almost never print.
1. ram usage is not too much
Keep using it. I've found that it's a bit more memory-intensive than IE6, but perhaps that's just because I now a higher average number of sites open at any given time thanks to tabs.
I have a long memory, and I still haven't forgiven Take Two for releasing BC3K before it was finished way back when in order to cut their losses (at the expense of consumers who bought a literally unplayable mess).
While it may have been better for Take Two to just kill BC3K outright (and thus teach Smartey Man Derek Smart a lesson), I can't help but think you got what you deserved for trusting in Mr. Smart. IIRC, it took Derek another 2-3 years before BC3K was available in a playable state, and that's just not acceptable. Maybe 3D Realms can get away with taking forever on games like Duke Nukem For(n)ever, but small developers like Derek Smart just don't have that luxury. Take Two had a bad set of choices -- kill the game, or release what's available. Waiting for the game to become playable was never an option.
Now look at the first one to be released after Firaxis paired up with Take 2: Civ 4 was so buggy that it was unplayable with ATI cards (ie half the market). Even for nvidia owners there were graphics glitches, random crashes to desktop, memory leaks, and all other manner of nastiness.
Odd. Pre-patch CIV played just fine on my ATI X300-based laptop. No graphical glitches, no crashes to the desktop, and no bluescreens. The only bugs I noticed were benign (gold trading glitch), and wile the end game did slow down due to excessive memory usage it was still playable enough to finish. In fact, the only problem I ever had with the game was that my laptop would get really hot after a 3-4 hour play session, making it uncomfortable to hold:). Post-patch, the end-game memory utilization seems to be better. Beyond that, since I didn't have any problems to begin with, it wasn't really a huge deal for me. Maybe I'm in the minority, I still have to disagree that CIV was unplayable out of the box.
Take 2 has become a huge publisher by pursuing profit at the expense of consumers. Don't expect them to change what seems to be working well for their wallets. It almost seems that Firaxis as the content creators fell down to the level of Take 2, their unfortunate choice of publisher. Given how much enjoyment I've received from previous Firaxis titles, I'm willing to give them a chance to make this game what it should be -- but I really wish they'd taken the high road to begin with.
I say good riddance to Take 2; I hope the company collapses. If not, I hope the current losses prompt the ouster of top management and a new approach to game publishing and customer service.
How many big publishers are left? Given the choice between Take Two releasing games that may need a patch or two or everything being published by EA, I'd take the former. Sure, Take Two could go away and we'd still have UbiSoft and Activision, but how long before those publishers die or get absorbed by the EA juggernaut? That's not to say that Take Two can't or shouldn't change, but to wish them gone is short-sighted at best and disastrous at worst.
Seeing their 4 billion loss on xbox 1, I wouldn't bet on it.
You don't think they learned a thing or two from Xbox 1? For example, Microsoft didn't have the rights to fabricate the Xbox 1 CPU or GPU themselves (this also hurt them with backwards compatibility, because they couldn't build an Xbox-on-a-chip like Sony did with the PSOne and PSTwo (where the PSOne was the miniaturized PS1 and also embedded in the PS2 for BC, and the PSTwo is the miniaturized PS2 that will most likely be the source of BC in PS3)). Now they do for 360, which means that future consolidation onto a single chip may eventually be possible. They're now in control of their own supply chain, rather than relying on off-the-shelf parts that aren't even publicly available after a year (I wonder what it cost to keep Intel making 733MHz Celerons in 2005, or to get 10GB drives from Seagate and WD). The Xbox used off-the-shelf parts because the whole goal was to get it to market as quickly as possible. The 360 uses custom-designed parts for which Microsoft owns the IP (yes, IBM built the CPU, but they did so at Microsoft's request and licensed the rights to Microsoft as part of the deal; this is illustrated best by looking at the chips in the Xbox and Xbox 360 -- in the original Xbox, the chips were marked with Intel and nVidia, while the 360 chips are marked with Microsoft). Microsoft never claimed that the Xbox 1 would ever be profitable without relying on software and accessory sales. They've suggested the 360 should be profitable on its own (ie, not counting attach rate or accessories) in a year or two.
Comparing HED's Q2 FY05 to Q2 FY06 is not really fair, either, without taking a closer look at the circumstances. In Q2 FY05, there was no new console but there was Halo 2. In fact, it has been claimed (not necessarily by Microsoft) that Halo 2 was the sole reason HED was profitable in that quarter. Fast-forward a year later, and now you have a brand new console with all of the cost around launching and marketing that, and you don't even have a blockbuster game like Halo 2 to bring in the cash. PGR3, PDZ, and Kameo have done decently well, but they sold nowhere near the level of Halo 2 (in part because we're talking about 20 million Xbox owners vs. 1.5 million 360 owners worldwide).
is there any technical reason the original xbox live can't support an arcade? seems like an artificial marketing trick - to take a new software feature and artificially make it exclusive to expensive new hardware platform - but NOT a next gen feature (eg hd graphics, 3d controller), just a software trick to drive upgrades.
Nope. No technical reason at all. It'd be awesome if they built an arcade for Xbox 1. Oh, wait. That happened. The 360's arcade is a killer app because it's on each and every Xbox 360 sold. The Xbox 1 Live Arcade required a DVD, and that DVD was almost impossible to find. You could order one online for the price of shipping, but it took 6-8 weeks to deliver, at which point you've totally forgotten about the arcade again. The prices were occassionally higher than they should've been. For example, Zuma and Bejewelled were both $15 on the original Arcade, but are $10 each on the 360 Arcade. Finally, there was no Geometry Wars.
Bankshot Billiards 2 is the most expensive Arcade game on Xbox Live and comes in at an even $12.00 US.
Sure, if by $12.00USD you really meant 1200 Microsoft Points. At 80 points per $1USD, that's actually $15.00USD. Not a big difference, but it is the only game on XBLA that's over $10USD. Everything else runs for $5-$10. Unfortunately, Bankshot seems to be rather popular (whether that's artificial from giving it away free in the Xbox Live Gold starter kit or genuine, I don't know). Hopefully its popularity will not cause the average price of XBLA games to increase. I think it will all revolve around SFII in a couple months. Street Figher will sell well regardless of what it costs, so if it ships at 1200 Points that will just add legitimacy to the higher price point. Then you can say goodbye to any good new games at 400 Points.
I suspect that the Gamerscore thing is one of the few elements that Microsoft has come up with that will be ripped off by Nintendo and Sony. It is such a simple idea, so easy to implement, but its implications are huge.
The whole concept is predicated on a unified online system like Xbox Live. While Nintendo may have something out there like this for the Revolution (prompted by their need to cheaply sell old games online), Sony has said over and over that they're not going to do anything like Live. Without this, GamerScore is meaningless.
Games could have unlockable content based on gamer scores acheived in other games. Think of this as an extension of the Pokemon 2 cartrige strategy; in order to play 100% of a game, you are forced to play other games.
I wouldn't expect this to happen. You might see some cross-talk (get this achievement in that game, get this new thing in this other game), but that's something we've already seen before. For example, NFS:MW gives you a credit boost if you have NFS:U2 saves on your hard drive, and Gran Turismo 4 lets you carry over a certain amount of credits if you have a previous Gran Turismo 3 profile.
- It is probable that some games may get an additional shelf life simply by awarding gamer points if the game is played after a certain date, using the time / date features of the console.
Don't count on time-based unlockables, unless it's "play the game this long". System date/time is easily changed.
- Matchmaking services will likley utilize the gamerscore to avoid Newbie Stomping.
You can't assume that a gamer with a 3000 score is better than a gamer with a 1000 score when they may be playing completely different games. For example, a gamer who only plays Geometry Wars but is really awesome at it and has all 200 available points is in a completely different class than a gamer who played through King Kong and the EA Sports titles, getting cheap and easy points. However, Microsoft has already considered this problem, and developed the TrueSkill system. You have a TrueSkill value for each game you play, so the only way to prove you're good is to play the game. You can't pump up your stats in Madden and the go wreck a high-level PGR3 race.
- The data from gamerscores might be used to target in game advertising. If a player is known to like first person shooters, he may be seeing more ads for action movies.
Probably not in-game, but I could see this being used on the dashboard. If I play very few sports games, I don't really care that there are new gamer tiles available for NBA 06. However, if I play a lot of racing games, I really do want to know when there's a demo for Forza 2.
The one thing I see as being absolutely necessary to happen is for Microsoft to become more involved in deciding how many points and how fast they should be given out. If it becomes too easy to get points from playing 'crapware' titles like "Barbies pony adventure", the hardcore audience will probably start to complain quite loudly about it.
The hardcore have already been complaining for a while, now (with good reason when you look at some of the "achievements" in something like Madden -- you get 10 points just for clicking the right thumbstick). It's too late to do anything about the current games, but hopefully Microsoft is listening and will have more strict requirements for future titles. Then again, you can always see what achievements another player has, so while he may have a 3000 point gamerscore, you can tell whether it's truly valid or if he just padded it with "cheap" achievements. It's a balancing act between giving the developers some freedom and not pissing off the hardcore gamers.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've never seen an episode of Initial D and I detest drifters. Heel and toe downshifting and trail-braking are both valid, legitimate maneuvers used in all forms of racing (you know, even NASCAR drivers heel/toe, though they really don't turn so much to need trail-braking). It also just so happens that both of those techniques require throttle and brakes to be discrete inputs. I don't mind drive-by-wire so much (the throttle on my car is drive-by-wire), but I do need my throttle and brakes to be able to respond simultaneously. That can't happen if they're mapped to opposite ends of the same axis. There's no way you can have z+ input at the same time you have z-.
After long periods of rain the sun comes out and the rain is gone but any oil or gas that has dripped onto the road the whole time it has been raining sticks there. The day after a long time of rain can be almost as bad as in the rain for braking. Maybe you live around shitty drivers or maybe overly cautious ones but there can be reasoning for it.
That's backwards. The roads are much worse right at the start of a rain (road oil, dirt, leaves, etc just getting lifted up but not washed away yet), not so much at the end of a rain. But anyway, today it was more like, "Hey it's raining raining rainin... oh, wait it stopped. There's the sun. Oooo! Brakes!"
However, there are times when one might heel and toe downshift without using the brake at all. The brake is most often the reason for it, but it is not actually part of it.
A downshift without using the brake wouldn't be heel and toe, now, would it?:) You need the brake to heel and toe, or you're just rev-matching. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and there are many times where you simply don't need to heel and toe when you're downshifting. For example, every day on my drive to work, there's an interchange ramp between two freeways. If traffic is light, I can zoom down the ramp, heel-toe down from fourth to second, trail brake into the decreasing radius turn, touch the apex, and run out to redline in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. If there is traffic, I'll just rev-match downshift instead, and while I still try to follow the line I generally won't hang out the back or power out of it.
Trail braking simply means easing off the brake while turning. In fact, it's far safer to do on public roads at road speed than it is on a track at racing speed. I highly recommend it as it keeps the car, and thus the passengers in the car, more settled than doing all the braking in a straight line and then creeping around the corner at constant speed.
I do that (it pisses me off when a car ahead of me slows to 5mph to take a turn that could've been done at 15mph or 20mph), but I was thinking of the more extreme uses, like inducing oversteer on turn-in. I'll occassionally hang out the rear end at a few known, safe places while driving around on public roads, but in general that's not a good thing to do.
Judging by the retard that tried to drive me off the road trying to get to his exit yesterday, or the dumb bitch in an SUV who tried to drive me off the road because she didn't check for traffic before changing lanes a couple weeks ago, or the idiots doing 45mph in a 60mph zone, or the sickos who have to slow down to look for dead bodies when they come upon an hours-old wreck site, I'd have to say no. Emphatically, without qualification, no! People just don't know how to drive! Never have, never will.
Maybe it's just where I live. We get a lot of rain, but nobody really knows how to drive in it. They slow down way too much, or they continue to drive way too fast. But the best was this morning. We had a break after several weeks of constant rain. The sun actually came out. What did people do? They slowed down! Apparently two weeks of driving in the rain made them forget how to drive when it's dry and sunny! Idiots!
we are experimenting with a single two-axis controller, one axis controlling acceleration and braking in the up-down direction, and the other controlling steering in the left-right direction.
Ack! Please, no! I hate it when games put acceleration and braking on the same axis. Please don't do that to real cars. If I can't hit the brake and throttle at the same time, how am I supposed to heel-and-toe downshift (don't tell me to drive an automatic, or a sequential manual) or trail-brake (okay, not on public roads:)? Throttle and brake are independent inputs, and should be treated as such.
Of course, games companies don't start work on their next project before the current one hits retail. And they can have a two month vacation just for shipping. I'm sure a lot of developers reading this would like to live in your universe.
Keep in mind that I was referring to primadonna Bungie, the darling of Microsoft's game studios. If they don't want to start working on Halo 3 until Halo 2 is out the door, I'm sure they won't. If they want to take 2 months of vacation time after a 3 year ship cycle, I'm sure they will. It definitely helps to have blockbuster games and a wealthy parent. They're certainly no EA, pumping out the same game every 9 months, or an indie developer working nights and weekends.
That said, even if they did immediately start in on Halo 3 after Halo 2, we're still only talking about a year (maybe a little more, assuming they rolled onto H3 before H2 shipped). Given their past track record of Halo games, there's no way H3 will take only a year. And that's assuming that there even will be an H3. Yes, H2 had a cliffhanger, and everybody wants H3, and they'd be fools not to do it, but so far Bungie has said that they're not doing another Halo game (whether true or not, that's what they said around the H2 ship) yet. While they've said they are currently working on another game, they've not said that it's H3. If we see something at E3 this year, the game is probably still at least a year away. If there's nothing at E3, expect even longer than that. As much as I'd love H3 now, or to compete with the PS3 when it launches, I'd rather wait it out and let Bungie do an awesome job. Maybe they'll actually finish the story this time...
Where's HALO 3 Bill? Huh? There, buddy, where's the Master Chief upon whose shoulders your gaming empire reigns?
Do you think Bungie are a bunch of miracle workers? Halo 2 was just barely a year old at 360 launch (11/9/2004, compared to 11/22/2005). Consider that after Halo 2 I'm sure the guys took a nice long vacation, so scratch two months off of possible working time, and that the game would've needed to be completed by the beginning of November, so scratch of another month. So, Halo 3 designed and developed with high quality in 9 months (call it February to October)? I think not. Halo 2 took 3 years, and Halo 1 took much longer than that. Maybe Bungie should've held onto Halo 2 for one more year and shipped it on 360 (complete with a real ending!), but that would have causedother problems.
There's a reason Halo 2 isn't on PCs yet. Because Gates nigh-Lucasian empire of videogaming goodness would topple without console sales of Halo 2.
First, the usage of the word "yet" is incorrect. Halo 2 will not ever be on the PC (well, except perhaps under emulation in a couple years). Halo 1 only made its way back to PC and Mac because that's where it started. Halo 2 was designed exclusively for the Xbox from the ground up, with no plans to ever port it to PC.
Americans have been demanding XBox role-playing games since the inception of the big black box. We haven't been heard. Where are the epic Square-style RPGs that will tie me up for hours. What, I get a shitty port of Elder Scrolls and a buggy Star Wars game? Now, Knights was AWEsome, but had its little burps now and again.
Well, there were two Knights games, and Jade Empire. As for epic Square-style RPGs, that really would've entailed getting Square (because they're the only ones who do that well). It's well-known that Square was in Sony's back pocket for quite some time, and that they generally only really support one console at a time (Crystal Chronicles and portable games aside). But Square is coming to the 360 (albeit with an aging FFXI), and ex-Square developers are also working on 360 games. Also, Bioware's upcoming game Mass Effect looks like it'll be pretty sweet.
As for launch titles, I'll agree that they are mostly weak (though I'm really digging on PGR3 and Kameo right now). However, you completely overlooked the Live Arcade. Geometry Wars has been hailed as one of the best launch games on the platform (yes, it is a little sad that the best launch title for a $400 console is a $5 old-school-style shooter of infinite difficulty), and there are several old arcade favorites like Gauntlet and Joust, puzzle games, and card games if those are more your style.
Keep in mind, though, that these are launch titles. They're games that had at most of year of development time. They're barely stretching the capabilities of the platform because it hasn't been around long enough to truly be learned. They have bugs or missing features or jaggies where we were promised none. And yet, they don't speak at all to the quality or type of games we'll see on the 360 a year from now. The Xbox launch library was a fluke with Halo. Every other console has had a horrible launch line-up, with the possible exceptions of the Dreamcast (Soul Calibur) and SNES (Mario World).
Car makers used to have a saying "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday". Everybody knew that the cars winning the races weren't the cars you could buy but people assume that if their race cars are better than the competitors race cars, then their regular cars are better than the competitors regular cars too.
Actually, it used to be that the cars were the same. "Stock car" racing is named such because it used to be the racing of stock (as in, righ off the showroom floor) cars. It's obviously not that today, where only the shell is similar to (but still not the same as) the cars you can actually buy.
That said, there are still race series where the cars really are (mostly) stock. Some safety additions are required, like bolt-in rollcages and multi-point harnesses, but aside from that you're running stock in a class like Showroom Stock. The categories may not contain the newest cars, but you could theoretically go buy a used car, bolt in a roll cage and harness, and compete.
So why not do something intelligent and implement it as a SQLite database?
Feel free to travel back in time and suggest they do that. The registry has been around for over a decade. SQLite has not. The registry works (yes, maybe it can get corrupted, but I haven't had that happen in years), and there's other stuff Microsoft can and should focus on besides re-writing the registry.
Well bear in mind that turning on/changing discs in a console is an operation which encouraged falls (ie. bending down to get the game/put it in). If over the course of months/years it got knocked over several times I wouldn't be suprised.i>
Now I'm just being obstinant, but here goes: Why would you need to bend down to access your game console? It should be up in a well-ventilated entertainment center, not down on the shag. Besides, once you've knocked it over once (twice if you're stubborn), you'd learn and move the console to its horizontal orientation.
Do you ground your kids when they trip while carrying a glass?
And that translates into knocking over a vertical PS2 how? But depending on circumstances, yes I might punish the kid. For example, if the kid is running with the glass and trips, I might (running around and playing is fine, but they shouldn't be carrying a glass while doing so, and it shouldn't be done where electronics are present). There's more punishment available than grounding, you know (put the kid in a corner for 5 minutes, take away TV for a day, banish him to go play outside, etc).
Wouldn't you learn after the first time to keep your PS2 horizontal? Besides, well-trained kids and pets will not go about knocking over video game consoles. With pets, it's very simple to train them. With kids, you can punish them (ground them, make them pay for a replacement console out of their allowance or lawn-mowing/snow-shovelling job if they break it, sell the still-working console and all of their games on Craigslist for $10 and refuse to buy them another one because they've proven they can't be trusted with sensitive electronics, etc). If you can't control your kids and/or pets, you probably shouldn't have either.
hazem, We'd like to inform you that due to your excellent driving record we can reduce 15% off of your car insurance.
Insurance companies can get that now, without invading your privacy by tracking everything you do. A lack of speeding tickets, accidents, DUI, etc on your driving record implies you're a good driver (maybe you're good at not getting caught and not getting in accidents, but that amounts to the same thing as far as insurance companies should be concerned). And since your driving record only goes back three years (some infractions last forever, but insurance only cares about the last three years), you can get back to good driver status just by staying out of trouble. This system is already in place, and works.
Hazem, Due to records and video of you buying and installing energy efficient applicances, windows, and other materials, we'd like to offer you a discount on your utilities bill.
Wouldn't you already have a "discount" by buying energy efficient gear (you use less, so you pay less)? And if a utility company wanted to give you such a discount (ha! like they'd do that. They'll do anything in their power to get you to use more, so they can charge you more), they can offer a program where you provide proof of purchase voluntarily, and they give you a discount. If you go out and buy an energy efficient refrigerator and don't submit for the discount, you don't get the discount. Simple, and your privacy is not infringed.
Hazem, due to your heroics of saving that girl from being ran over, which was thankfully caught on video, we'd like to offer you the key to city!
Ooo! The key to the city! Can I exchange that for my privacy, instead?
Um, yeah, I can see how paying $450 for a machine that plays Wik and heats my living room is a great buy.
It's only $400 (premium system, or a core + hard drive) + $6.25 (Wik is 400 points, but the minimum amount of points you can buy is 500 for $6.25). I'm also assuming you already have or want a 360 for other reasons (like Geometry Wars). If that's not the case, then of course it's not a good deal.
Besides, my comment was intended to point out how Microsoft's Live Arcade is opening up new venues to independent developers. That's cool, and I don't really see how you can spin it to be a bad thing (I'm sure you can, I just don't see how).
Aside from being released almost three years ago (hey, it's 2006!), ET doesn't exactly qualify as an "independent" game. It was published by Activision, and would've been commercial if all the factors had lined up properly.
Just for clarification, "independent" != "free". The games on the list may have demos available, but most (if not all) of them will cost you $10-$20 for the full version. That's still better than $50-$60 you'll pay for a commercial game, but it's definitely not free.
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That seems backwards to me. In a one-man shop, I'd use whatever I want because only I have to deal with it. In a multi-person shop, or a multi-group shop, some standardization is worthwhile. However, it should be localized and organic. Meaning, let each group or team decide what they want to use for each project, and let them make that decision on their own based on the project's goal. Within a project, however, things need to be standardized to some extent to keep everybody productive. If you and I are both working on modules for the same application, it's going to be a huge mess if you decide to work in Python and I decide to work in C.
Managed environments like Java or .NET make the question somewhat moot, since multiple languages can be targetted to the same runtime. Even then, it can still get painful if you're working in Visual Basic .NET and I'm writing my code in C#, even though the languages interact just fine.
The key here is, "Everything in moderation." Standardize to make your job easier when interacting with other developers on the same project. Don't standardize just to say you standardized (well, unless you're trying to bump your internal visibility for purposes of artificially inflating your annual review score, in which case you should just be shot -- why not do something useful to increase your visibility instead?).
Well, the article talks about Project: Gotham Racing 3 on the Xbox 360. It's certainly not a "simulation" racer at the level of Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsports, or FIA GT-R, but it's much less arcadey than Burnout or Mario Kart. The whole goal in PGR3 is to race "with style", which generally implies cleanliness (hitting walls stop your Kudos build-up, for example). Thus it's considered bad to use other people as brakes online, or to intentionally spin them out. Maybe it's going a little overboard to broadcast each pass you want to take, but that is the general "feel". Personally, I'll apologize if I accidentally knock you out (a little rubbin' is fine, but if you spin out or hit a wall because of something I accidentally did, I'll throw a quick, "Sorry d00d"). If I'm so much faster than you that the only way I'm not going to pass is if you're an ass and keep blocking, I'll throw out a, "I'm coming up on your left/right" as a bit of a warning. Then if you do block (once is fine, more than once is not), you're fair game for a hit.
You're not really the target audience of a multiplayer simulation racing game, then. The people who like those games (myself included) tend to be racing enthusiasts. We watch ALMS or SCCA Speed World Challenge races on TV. We may even race in amateur leagues like the SCCA, or at least get out for some lapping at the local track ocassionally. As real racing has rules, we want our online racing to have rules, too. Unfortunately there's no way to black flag a player, or penalize him with a stop-and-go, so you're really getting into a gentleman's agreement to race cleanly or suffer the feedback. I know, you're thinking, "Bad feedback, ooo! I'm scared!" When that's all you can do, however, you do what you can. And the more bad feedback you get, the more likely you're only going to be matched with other bad feedback players. Maybe that's good for you, as if you enjoy slamming into people you'd probably much rather play with other people who feel the same. ("you" being the all-inclusive generic "you" and not you in particular, though your stated preferences make you fit this category)
Soon you'll be able to verify if that comparison is apt, since Robotron 2084 is currently available on 360's Live Arcade and Crystal Quest is coming soon.
I assume you mean "cidaemon", or Indexing Services. I have that disabled and IE7 didn't enable it on me. Maybe your machine just incorrectly decided it was idle and started indexing because you had never turned it off? Then again, I have the service set to "Disabled" rather than "Manual". If you have it as "Manual", applications can still start it.
Right-click the toolbar with the Home and RSS buttons, and choose "Classic Menu". That'll give you back your File/Edit/View menu. It'll still be underneath the back/forward buttons and address bar, though.
Feeds? Click the circled-star icon to the left of the tabs to open the "Favorites Center", and click on Feeds. You can add new feeds through the RSS button on the toolbar on the right (using the new "standard" RSS icon!).
There's only so much they can fix/change in so much time. For example, they may not have changed the Find In Page functionality yet, but they did implement better text zooming (zooms pixel-based layouts, and can zoom by percentages using ctrl-scrollwheel as well as by small/medium/large). Give them time. Personally, I'd rather have a nice find in page than print preview, but that's because I almost never print.
Keep using it. I've found that it's a bit more memory-intensive than IE6, but perhaps that's just because I now a higher average number of sites open at any given time thanks to tabs.
While it may have been better for Take Two to just kill BC3K outright (and thus teach Smartey Man Derek Smart a lesson), I can't help but think you got what you deserved for trusting in Mr. Smart. IIRC, it took Derek another 2-3 years before BC3K was available in a playable state, and that's just not acceptable. Maybe 3D Realms can get away with taking forever on games like Duke Nukem For(n)ever, but small developers like Derek Smart just don't have that luxury. Take Two had a bad set of choices -- kill the game, or release what's available. Waiting for the game to become playable was never an option.
Odd. Pre-patch CIV played just fine on my ATI X300-based laptop. No graphical glitches, no crashes to the desktop, and no bluescreens. The only bugs I noticed were benign (gold trading glitch), and wile the end game did slow down due to excessive memory usage it was still playable enough to finish. In fact, the only problem I ever had with the game was that my laptop would get really hot after a 3-4 hour play session, making it uncomfortable to hold :). Post-patch, the end-game memory utilization seems to be better. Beyond that, since I didn't have any problems to begin with, it wasn't really a huge deal for me. Maybe I'm in the minority, I still have to disagree that CIV was unplayable out of the box.
How many big publishers are left? Given the choice between Take Two releasing games that may need a patch or two or everything being published by EA, I'd take the former. Sure, Take Two could go away and we'd still have UbiSoft and Activision, but how long before those publishers die or get absorbed by the EA juggernaut? That's not to say that Take Two can't or shouldn't change, but to wish them gone is short-sighted at best and disastrous at worst.
You don't think they learned a thing or two from Xbox 1? For example, Microsoft didn't have the rights to fabricate the Xbox 1 CPU or GPU themselves (this also hurt them with backwards compatibility, because they couldn't build an Xbox-on-a-chip like Sony did with the PSOne and PSTwo (where the PSOne was the miniaturized PS1 and also embedded in the PS2 for BC, and the PSTwo is the miniaturized PS2 that will most likely be the source of BC in PS3)). Now they do for 360, which means that future consolidation onto a single chip may eventually be possible. They're now in control of their own supply chain, rather than relying on off-the-shelf parts that aren't even publicly available after a year (I wonder what it cost to keep Intel making 733MHz Celerons in 2005, or to get 10GB drives from Seagate and WD). The Xbox used off-the-shelf parts because the whole goal was to get it to market as quickly as possible. The 360 uses custom-designed parts for which Microsoft owns the IP (yes, IBM built the CPU, but they did so at Microsoft's request and licensed the rights to Microsoft as part of the deal; this is illustrated best by looking at the chips in the Xbox and Xbox 360 -- in the original Xbox, the chips were marked with Intel and nVidia, while the 360 chips are marked with Microsoft). Microsoft never claimed that the Xbox 1 would ever be profitable without relying on software and accessory sales. They've suggested the 360 should be profitable on its own (ie, not counting attach rate or accessories) in a year or two.
Comparing HED's Q2 FY05 to Q2 FY06 is not really fair, either, without taking a closer look at the circumstances. In Q2 FY05, there was no new console but there was Halo 2. In fact, it has been claimed (not necessarily by Microsoft) that Halo 2 was the sole reason HED was profitable in that quarter. Fast-forward a year later, and now you have a brand new console with all of the cost around launching and marketing that, and you don't even have a blockbuster game like Halo 2 to bring in the cash. PGR3, PDZ, and Kameo have done decently well, but they sold nowhere near the level of Halo 2 (in part because we're talking about 20 million Xbox owners vs. 1.5 million 360 owners worldwide).
And if only there was some way to enforce [2] those ratings ...
(I'd link something for PS2, but I couldn't find anything appropriate.)
Nope. No technical reason at all. It'd be awesome if they built an arcade for Xbox 1. Oh, wait. That happened. The 360's arcade is a killer app because it's on each and every Xbox 360 sold. The Xbox 1 Live Arcade required a DVD, and that DVD was almost impossible to find. You could order one online for the price of shipping, but it took 6-8 weeks to deliver, at which point you've totally forgotten about the arcade again. The prices were occassionally higher than they should've been. For example, Zuma and Bejewelled were both $15 on the original Arcade, but are $10 each on the 360 Arcade. Finally, there was no Geometry Wars.
Sure, if by $12.00USD you really meant 1200 Microsoft Points. At 80 points per $1USD, that's actually $15.00USD. Not a big difference, but it is the only game on XBLA that's over $10USD. Everything else runs for $5-$10. Unfortunately, Bankshot seems to be rather popular (whether that's artificial from giving it away free in the Xbox Live Gold starter kit or genuine, I don't know). Hopefully its popularity will not cause the average price of XBLA games to increase. I think it will all revolve around SFII in a couple months. Street Figher will sell well regardless of what it costs, so if it ships at 1200 Points that will just add legitimacy to the higher price point. Then you can say goodbye to any good new games at 400 Points.
The whole concept is predicated on a unified online system like Xbox Live. While Nintendo may have something out there like this for the Revolution (prompted by their need to cheaply sell old games online), Sony has said over and over that they're not going to do anything like Live. Without this, GamerScore is meaningless.
I wouldn't expect this to happen. You might see some cross-talk (get this achievement in that game, get this new thing in this other game), but that's something we've already seen before. For example, NFS:MW gives you a credit boost if you have NFS:U2 saves on your hard drive, and Gran Turismo 4 lets you carry over a certain amount of credits if you have a previous Gran Turismo 3 profile.
Don't count on time-based unlockables, unless it's "play the game this long". System date/time is easily changed.
You can't assume that a gamer with a 3000 score is better than a gamer with a 1000 score when they may be playing completely different games. For example, a gamer who only plays Geometry Wars but is really awesome at it and has all 200 available points is in a completely different class than a gamer who played through King Kong and the EA Sports titles, getting cheap and easy points. However, Microsoft has already considered this problem, and developed the TrueSkill system. You have a TrueSkill value for each game you play, so the only way to prove you're good is to play the game. You can't pump up your stats in Madden and the go wreck a high-level PGR3 race.
Probably not in-game, but I could see this being used on the dashboard. If I play very few sports games, I don't really care that there are new gamer tiles available for NBA 06. However, if I play a lot of racing games, I really do want to know when there's a demo for Forza 2.
The hardcore have already been complaining for a while, now (with good reason when you look at some of the "achievements" in something like Madden -- you get 10 points just for clicking the right thumbstick). It's too late to do anything about the current games, but hopefully Microsoft is listening and will have more strict requirements for future titles. Then again, you can always see what achievements another player has, so while he may have a 3000 point gamerscore, you can tell whether it's truly valid or if he just padded it with "cheap" achievements. It's a balancing act between giving the developers some freedom and not pissing off the hardcore gamers.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've never seen an episode of Initial D and I detest drifters. Heel and toe downshifting and trail-braking are both valid, legitimate maneuvers used in all forms of racing (you know, even NASCAR drivers heel/toe, though they really don't turn so much to need trail-braking). It also just so happens that both of those techniques require throttle and brakes to be discrete inputs. I don't mind drive-by-wire so much (the throttle on my car is drive-by-wire), but I do need my throttle and brakes to be able to respond simultaneously. That can't happen if they're mapped to opposite ends of the same axis. There's no way you can have z+ input at the same time you have z-.
That's backwards. The roads are much worse right at the start of a rain (road oil, dirt, leaves, etc just getting lifted up but not washed away yet), not so much at the end of a rain. But anyway, today it was more like, "Hey it's raining raining rainin... oh, wait it stopped. There's the sun. Oooo! Brakes!"
A downshift without using the brake wouldn't be heel and toe, now, would it? :) You need the brake to heel and toe, or you're just rev-matching. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and there are many times where you simply don't need to heel and toe when you're downshifting. For example, every day on my drive to work, there's an interchange ramp between two freeways. If traffic is light, I can zoom down the ramp, heel-toe down from fourth to second, trail brake into the decreasing radius turn, touch the apex, and run out to redline in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. If there is traffic, I'll just rev-match downshift instead, and while I still try to follow the line I generally won't hang out the back or power out of it.
I do that (it pisses me off when a car ahead of me slows to 5mph to take a turn that could've been done at 15mph or 20mph), but I was thinking of the more extreme uses, like inducing oversteer on turn-in. I'll occassionally hang out the rear end at a few known, safe places while driving around on public roads, but in general that's not a good thing to do.
Judging by the retard that tried to drive me off the road trying to get to his exit yesterday, or the dumb bitch in an SUV who tried to drive me off the road because she didn't check for traffic before changing lanes a couple weeks ago, or the idiots doing 45mph in a 60mph zone, or the sickos who have to slow down to look for dead bodies when they come upon an hours-old wreck site, I'd have to say no. Emphatically, without qualification, no! People just don't know how to drive! Never have, never will.
Maybe it's just where I live. We get a lot of rain, but nobody really knows how to drive in it. They slow down way too much, or they continue to drive way too fast. But the best was this morning. We had a break after several weeks of constant rain. The sun actually came out. What did people do? They slowed down! Apparently two weeks of driving in the rain made them forget how to drive when it's dry and sunny! Idiots!
Ack! Please, no! I hate it when games put acceleration and braking on the same axis. Please don't do that to real cars. If I can't hit the brake and throttle at the same time, how am I supposed to heel-and-toe downshift (don't tell me to drive an automatic, or a sequential manual) or trail-brake (okay, not on public roads :)? Throttle and brake are independent inputs, and should be treated as such.
Keep in mind that I was referring to primadonna Bungie, the darling of Microsoft's game studios. If they don't want to start working on Halo 3 until Halo 2 is out the door, I'm sure they won't. If they want to take 2 months of vacation time after a 3 year ship cycle, I'm sure they will. It definitely helps to have blockbuster games and a wealthy parent. They're certainly no EA, pumping out the same game every 9 months, or an indie developer working nights and weekends.
That said, even if they did immediately start in on Halo 3 after Halo 2, we're still only talking about a year (maybe a little more, assuming they rolled onto H3 before H2 shipped). Given their past track record of Halo games, there's no way H3 will take only a year. And that's assuming that there even will be an H3. Yes, H2 had a cliffhanger, and everybody wants H3, and they'd be fools not to do it, but so far Bungie has said that they're not doing another Halo game (whether true or not, that's what they said around the H2 ship) yet. While they've said they are currently working on another game, they've not said that it's H3. If we see something at E3 this year, the game is probably still at least a year away. If there's nothing at E3, expect even longer than that. As much as I'd love H3 now, or to compete with the PS3 when it launches, I'd rather wait it out and let Bungie do an awesome job. Maybe they'll actually finish the story this time ...
Do you think Bungie are a bunch of miracle workers? Halo 2 was just barely a year old at 360 launch (11/9/2004, compared to 11/22/2005). Consider that after Halo 2 I'm sure the guys took a nice long vacation, so scratch two months off of possible working time, and that the game would've needed to be completed by the beginning of November, so scratch of another month. So, Halo 3 designed and developed with high quality in 9 months (call it February to October)? I think not. Halo 2 took 3 years, and Halo 1 took much longer than that. Maybe Bungie should've held onto Halo 2 for one more year and shipped it on 360 (complete with a real ending!), but that would have causedother problems.
First, the usage of the word "yet" is incorrect. Halo 2 will not ever be on the PC (well, except perhaps under emulation in a couple years). Halo 1 only made its way back to PC and Mac because that's where it started. Halo 2 was designed exclusively for the Xbox from the ground up, with no plans to ever port it to PC.
Well, there were two Knights games, and Jade Empire. As for epic Square-style RPGs, that really would've entailed getting Square (because they're the only ones who do that well). It's well-known that Square was in Sony's back pocket for quite some time, and that they generally only really support one console at a time (Crystal Chronicles and portable games aside). But Square is coming to the 360 (albeit with an aging FFXI), and ex-Square developers are also working on 360 games. Also, Bioware's upcoming game Mass Effect looks like it'll be pretty sweet.
As for launch titles, I'll agree that they are mostly weak (though I'm really digging on PGR3 and Kameo right now). However, you completely overlooked the Live Arcade. Geometry Wars has been hailed as one of the best launch games on the platform (yes, it is a little sad that the best launch title for a $400 console is a $5 old-school-style shooter of infinite difficulty), and there are several old arcade favorites like Gauntlet and Joust, puzzle games, and card games if those are more your style.
Keep in mind, though, that these are launch titles. They're games that had at most of year of development time. They're barely stretching the capabilities of the platform because it hasn't been around long enough to truly be learned. They have bugs or missing features or jaggies where we were promised none. And yet, they don't speak at all to the quality or type of games we'll see on the 360 a year from now. The Xbox launch library was a fluke with Halo. Every other console has had a horrible launch line-up, with the possible exceptions of the Dreamcast (Soul Calibur) and SNES (Mario World).
Actually, it used to be that the cars were the same. "Stock car" racing is named such because it used to be the racing of stock (as in, righ off the showroom floor) cars. It's obviously not that today, where only the shell is similar to (but still not the same as) the cars you can actually buy.
That said, there are still race series where the cars really are (mostly) stock. Some safety additions are required, like bolt-in rollcages and multi-point harnesses, but aside from that you're running stock in a class like Showroom Stock. The categories may not contain the newest cars, but you could theoretically go buy a used car, bolt in a roll cage and harness, and compete.
Feel free to travel back in time and suggest they do that. The registry has been around for over a decade. SQLite has not. The registry works (yes, maybe it can get corrupted, but I haven't had that happen in years), and there's other stuff Microsoft can and should focus on besides re-writing the registry.
Now I'm just being obstinant, but here goes: Why would you need to bend down to access your game console? It should be up in a well-ventilated entertainment center, not down on the shag. Besides, once you've knocked it over once (twice if you're stubborn), you'd learn and move the console to its horizontal orientation.
And that translates into knocking over a vertical PS2 how? But depending on circumstances, yes I might punish the kid. For example, if the kid is running with the glass and trips, I might (running around and playing is fine, but they shouldn't be carrying a glass while doing so, and it shouldn't be done where electronics are present). There's more punishment available than grounding, you know (put the kid in a corner for 5 minutes, take away TV for a day, banish him to go play outside, etc).
Wouldn't you learn after the first time to keep your PS2 horizontal? Besides, well-trained kids and pets will not go about knocking over video game consoles. With pets, it's very simple to train them. With kids, you can punish them (ground them, make them pay for a replacement console out of their allowance or lawn-mowing/snow-shovelling job if they break it, sell the still-working console and all of their games on Craigslist for $10 and refuse to buy them another one because they've proven they can't be trusted with sensitive electronics, etc). If you can't control your kids and/or pets, you probably shouldn't have either.
Insurance companies can get that now, without invading your privacy by tracking everything you do. A lack of speeding tickets, accidents, DUI, etc on your driving record implies you're a good driver (maybe you're good at not getting caught and not getting in accidents, but that amounts to the same thing as far as insurance companies should be concerned). And since your driving record only goes back three years (some infractions last forever, but insurance only cares about the last three years), you can get back to good driver status just by staying out of trouble. This system is already in place, and works.
Wouldn't you already have a "discount" by buying energy efficient gear (you use less, so you pay less)? And if a utility company wanted to give you such a discount (ha! like they'd do that. They'll do anything in their power to get you to use more, so they can charge you more), they can offer a program where you provide proof of purchase voluntarily, and they give you a discount. If you go out and buy an energy efficient refrigerator and don't submit for the discount, you don't get the discount. Simple, and your privacy is not infringed.
Ooo! The key to the city! Can I exchange that for my privacy, instead?
It's only $400 (premium system, or a core + hard drive) + $6.25 (Wik is 400 points, but the minimum amount of points you can buy is 500 for $6.25). I'm also assuming you already have or want a 360 for other reasons (like Geometry Wars). If that's not the case, then of course it's not a good deal.
Besides, my comment was intended to point out how Microsoft's Live Arcade is opening up new venues to independent developers. That's cool, and I don't really see how you can spin it to be a bad thing (I'm sure you can, I just don't see how).
Aside from being released almost three years ago (hey, it's 2006!), ET doesn't exactly qualify as an "independent" game. It was published by Activision, and would've been commercial if all the factors had lined up properly.
Just for clarification, "independent" != "free". The games on the list may have demos available, but most (if not all) of them will cost you $10-$20 for the full version. That's still better than $50-$60 you'll pay for a commercial game, but it's definitely not free.