Half the point of the MMORPG is growing your character. That's half the point of any RP game.
All of the point in a RP game is RP. If you don't find joy in roleplaying, you're just a lab-rat pulling on the lever which randomly rewards you with pleasure pills.
Levelling is meaningless. You get bigger numbers on your character, and fight pictures of monsters which require bigger numbers to fight, with a net change in the challenge of zero.
Roleplay is a fun pastime in which you and others collectively tell a story for each others' amusement. Levelling for the sake of levelling is an addictive (or rather, obsessive/compulsive) behavior which offers little to nothing in the way of real-life rewards.
Silly youngster. I played Quake back when it was called Rise of the Triad.
First of all, I'm probably older than you, whippersnapper.
Quake was a revolution over previous shooters in that the mouse-targeting 3D engine provided a fluid full range of movement.
Keyboard-driven "2.5D" deathmatch games like Doom, Marathon, etc., had a whole different feel to them. Playing quake after playing those games was such a dramatic difference it was like getting out of a wheelchair for the first time and then sprinting up and down stairs. I didn't even care for shooters until Quake came out.
With the old pencil-and-paper RPGs, the levelling concept makes sense. The combat is all storytelling and imagination, and levelling allows a mechanism for your character to "get good" at fighting dragons or facing other challeges.
But video games have a proud legacy of combat and action simulations. There's no need roll random numbers to determine whether your character managed to time his jump right to get across the chasm. The player tries to do it, and succeeds or fails. Plan your tactics just right, and you (along with your friends) might have a shot at defeating the big dragon.
I completely agree with you that a game engine in which you do things (rather than hit a button and have the computer randomly tell you whether you did things, based on how many things your character has done and/or attempted) would be much more fun.
If the gameplay is sufficiently fun, no "rewards" system is really even needed. Given a choice between doing something fun and getting no artificial rewards, and doing something tedius to get some numbers associated with my character to become higher, I'd rather go with the "have fun" option.
I enjoyed City of Heroes for a while, because I liked the genre, but it still ended up being "Everquest in tights." One oddity of CoH was that, like most MMORPGs, it gave no experience or rewards for defeating low-level opponents with a high-level character, so you ended up having hundreds of "heroes" in mighty-looking capes casually jogging by as old ladies getting mugged were screaming for help.
I now play World of Warcraft for the simple reason that most of my friends who play such games are playing WoW, and I would rather game with them than a bunch of strangers. There seem to be a lot of nice evolutionary touches, but it's still really just a new skin on the same old Nethack.
I'm still waiting to see what the "next big thing" in MMORPGs will be. I don't see much evidence that the answer is coming in 2005.
Then again, I'm one of those jerks who sits down at just about every single mouse-controled FPS deathmatch game, frags a few people, and says "meh... I played this game already, back when it was called Quake."
If they were still using MS-DOS and Win 3.1 by the time you got out in the work force, then you were probably going to school at a time long before people realized that Microsoft would usurp IBM's "800 pound gorilla" status and marginalize the Macintosh.
When the Macintosh came out in 1984, most business employees were still doing all of their computing on tty screens. The "IBM Compatables" (as DOS PC's were usually called back then) were popular toys with small-business owners, but hardly the center of the cubicle which it became in the 90s.
Teaching kids on Macs seemed like a reasonable idea at the time, because people still regarded the old Apple ][ as the computer most business people wished they could afford, and the Mac was seen as the New Hotness of its day.
Besides, using Macs probably prepared you to be a Windows XP user a lot better than usuing DOS 5.2 ever would have, so the reality is that they probably made the right call: Teach you how to understand the use of a GUI on the most advances system of the day.
Let's face it, Apple has always been the unofficial R&D department for Microsoft's operating systems. There seems little sign of that changing anytime soon.
a $799 eMac (where the "e" stands for "economy", I guess).
Actually, the e stands for "education."
The eMac was only ever intended to be a school computer. That's why it's really heavy, really sturdy, has a cheap-ish but rugged screen, and has the power button hidden on the back of it.
It just happened to turn out that a lot of consumers thought it would be a nifty machine for other situations where the LCD-based iMac was not really called for, and Apple decided, after the fact, to make it available.
I use one in my music studio with a MOTU DSP as my main record-to-HD system. I like that it's whisper-quiet thanks to the big slow-moving cooling fan yet still fast enough to run my multi-track recording software. Also, it fits nicely on top of my audio equipment rack.
Would I use it for a game PC? Nah. I know from seeing other people game with them that it can run a lot of games okay, but already I have a cheap home-brew PC for games.
It's all about the right tool for the job, as far as I'm concerned, and the eMac happens to fill a useful niche or two out there.
I should also add that I know somebody who has an eMac (which he bought for video editing... He uses an external firewire drive for higher-capacity storage) and he's been playing the very hottest of "this fall's hottest games" (World of Warcraft) on it and has been very pleased with the performance.
Are cell phones really not status symbols for many people already? Or do I live in a different world than you?
Yes. The parent poster lives in 2004 World. You live in 1974 World.
Mobile phones have not been status symbols since back when they were called cell phones.
Some guy answers a mobile phone in a public place, it's not like all the ladies are going to go, "oooo! He can afford a $200 gadget and a $40/month service contract! I wonder if he's a doctor or a CEO or something... I hope he's not already married!"
The next question was: How many of them could work without a hard drive?
It was right there in the freaking post. Care to answer it?
Would work? Most of them. Would match the feature set? None of them.
The final question was "Ever consider that the hard drive was never a compelling feature anyway?" keeping in mind that this question is referring to the hard drive in the context of the PS2 and not the XBox.
The Sony Hard Drive would have been a compelling feature had it ever been properly implemented. It's certainly a compelling feature of the X-Box, where it was.
Since it was not, PS2 game designers built their games around this shortcoming of the platform, resulting in it not being a compelling feature (because most PS2 games do not take advantage of it.)
The point which most people complain about is that the PS2 HD fiasco represented a missed opportunity. There's a lot of cool things which game designers could have done with a Sony PS2 HD.
Really? I had no idea X-Box sales were doing so well. I thought Sony was outselling them by a much larger ratio than that!
The X-Box really only ever had a shot at filling the gap in the market left by the Sega, and that's exactly what it did. Most of the people who owned Dreamcasts back in the day ended up going with the X-Box rather than the PS2.
But the Playstation is still the market leader, and most people expect that this will remain the case. That doesn't mean the X-Box is going away, any more than the popularity of Windows meaning that the Macintosh is going away.
I think the fact that you can't justify the unwieldy nature of the X-Box itself and have had to change the subject to the controller...
It seemed like a reasonable assumption that you were talking about the controller. How can something which just sits in your entertainment console be "unwieldy"? When would you ever "wield" the console itself? Are you complaining that it's big and heavy? That's kind of silly. It's a little bigger and heavier than a PS2, but it's still smaller and lighter than my stereo receiver, and gets moved about as frequently.
It's notable that the majority of people I know with an XBox already have a PS2 or even a GameCube
That only proves that you know different people than me. Of the half-dozen or so X-Box owners I know, only one of them also has a PS2 (and a GameCube, to be "complete"), and the X-Box was the first of the three they bought.
Mobile Fidelity doesn't do direct-to-disk recordings. They just buy and clean up existing tape masters of hit recordings.
Scheffield Labs is the company I was thinking of. They record everything directly to a wax two-track, in one of the best studios in the world.
(The engineers there are also leaders in the digital mastering industry, so you can't make a case for them simply being stubborn neo-luddites. They are just people who are brilliant at making great-sounding albums.)
Agreed, but most of the CD sound problems which we once assumed were from data loss have turned out to be the result of:
1. Poor D/A algorhythms in early CD players.
2. Hi-end audio having evolved over the years to compensate for the inherent sound problems of vinyl recordings. For decades, speakers were judged as "good" according to how well they reproduced the concert experience using an LP for the source info, so when CD's hit the scene, people played them back on those "good" speakers and said "augh! The digital sound is too bright and shrill! And the bass is so much less satisfying!"
The truth is that the CD sound is measurably closer to the sound of the original master than any consumer analog format available, but on a system tweaked for vinyl, then end product doesn't sound right.
These days, a $300 Rotel CD player hooked up to a modern power amp and speakers does as well as (or better than) a turntable which costs more than five times as much.
You can still do better than CD if you spend a small fortune on a "dream system", and play Mobile Fidelity direct-to-disk records which have not been played more than a couple dozen times, but otherwise the digital format has won.
It's kind of sad, though. The arcane wizardry involved in producing "hi-fi" sound in the pre-digital era was a heck of a lot of fun. Thank goodness the physical loudspeaker (or headphone speaker) has not yet been replaced with a device that sends the illusion of sound directly to your brain, or the entire home-audio hobby would simply evaporate into mundane gadget shopping.
Right there with you. In the days of US Steel, unions were needed for the sake of personal safety and survival. These days, they are just another revenue generator for the mafia.
Here is the core complaint from this "person" (no gender is ever identified):
Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy.
Is that a horrible policy for a company who abuses "Exempt" employee status to milk their workers for extra hours? Yes.
Is it their own damned fault if they don't choose option #2? Hell yes.
Once piece of data which is carefully omitted from this story is the programmer's salary. If he's making anything close to an accounting firm's BFOH, and gets to write game code instead of babysite AS400 systems, and gets to put several years at EA Sports on his resume, then he's got nothing to complain about. There are lots of fresh-faced college kids who would give up a left nut for the chance to be "exploited" like that.
Let's face it, the typical code-hacker who lands a straight 40-hour job usually goes home and writes code for side-projects and open source contributions all evening anyway. It's not like this guys lifting heavy things for 85 hours a week.
Bottom line: He's sitting in a chair doing exactly what he probably would do with all his waking hours, regardless of employment: staring at a cathode-ray tube. Boo-frikkin-hoo.
That said, I've thought for a long time that EA games are going downhill, and now we know why. Not only are they written by sleep-deprived zombies, but they are written by sleep-deprived zombies married to shrill nags who never stop complaining about how much time they spend at work.
Hey Spouse: Maybe theres another reason why the programmer you married is staying away from home so much.
Play it through a good pair of Carvers or something, and you will hear for yourself.
Also, don't discount "Private Investigations." I know it's tough to focus on the subtle pleasures of that song when you are coming down from the high of that jam at the end of "Telegraph Road", but Mark Knopfler has never played a more haunting accoustic guitar part than on that track. Play it loud enough to (on a good hi-fi system or headphones) to catch all the little string harmonics he's hitting throughout the song.
If I had an 80-Gig iPod, there are about two dozen or so albums I would keep as FLAC or AIFF files in the iPod, so I would no longer need to keep the CD's in the living room.
Most pop and jazz recordings sound like mush regardless of format. No ammount of equipment is going to make Louis Armstrong's "Hot Fives" sound like he's in the room, but I'll take that scratchy clay-78 sound of Satchmo's horn over a live performance by Kenny G himself any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
However, for that handful of audiophile gems, such as Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck, and "Love Over Gold" by Dire Straits, it would be nice to have some excess real estate on my iPod HD for lossless copies.
My understanding is that, essentially, the XBox as a platform is dying.
But does Necraft confirm it???
People who've bought XBoxes have generally found the usually mediocre games choices (there are, what, seven decent XBox titles?)
Of all the Sony-only and Nintendo-only games out there, there is only one which I wish my X-Box could play, GTA-SA. Beyond that, all the best (IMHO) games are available on the X-Box... and the last two titles of the DOA series can not be played on any other cosole.
together with the clumsiness of the system itself (who wants to either drag that thing over from a cupboard every day and set it up just to play a game when you can leave smaller, more elegant, boxes like the PS2, and to some extent the Gamecube, in plain sight without either uglifying your room)
I consider the PS2 Controller to be a tiny, cheap piece of crap. I had a calculator watch back in the 80s which had better buttons on it.
I may have bigger-than-average hands, but it's not like I'm an NBA star or something, and I find the original mega-massive X-Box controller to be perfect. I don't even like the "s" controller they switched to as a cost-cutting measure. I think the criticism of the X-Box controller is mostly coming from PS-2 fanbois who are simply not used to holding a controller that was designed for grown-up hands.
In other news, the circulation of clay tablets telling the saga of Gilgamesh continues to decline, and the practice of attaching messages to the legs of birds is showing no signs of revival.
Quest items are often instanced in WoW. If you had six guys doing the quest together, they could each loot their very own Flobotinum Sword of Bring This To The Innkeeper For Phat Exp, all off the same dead boss.
Yes, it kind of breaks the realism of the game, but it makes it much more feasible to group when questing. None of that "we do the same quest over and over together six times, taking turns getting the Flobotinum Sword until everybody has one."
If that's what you were doing, you probably should have stopped and checked the boss corpse. You could have saved yourselves a lot of time.
Some game maker is going to make a football game in which you can choose team colors and player numbers, and EA will sue them, insisting that (even though no NFL team logos are present), this new game let's you make a player who looks, from overhead, EXACTLY like Browns running back WIll Green!!!
If I was a social person, I wouldn't be playing a mmorpg in the first place;-)
If I were an anti-social person, I would go for the superior gameplay experience of a non-networked computer RPG.
The presense of ther players is the only advantage which an MMORPG offers. Shun the group dynamics, and you are simply wasting fifteen bucks a month on a game which is not particularilly interesting.
I used to have the attitude that "forced" party adventure is bad, because I might want to do stuff on off-peak hours, or I might just want to blow off some steam for a half-hour or something... but I can always fire up GTA on my console if I want a short, casual gaming experience. It's not as if my current MMORPG is the only recreation available to me.
People who play softball on the weekend don't complain that they gotta find eight other guys and a team to play against before they can have a full game.
Slashdot Mirror
Half the point of the MMORPG is growing your character. That's half the point of any RP game.
All of the point in a RP game is RP. If you don't find joy in roleplaying, you're just a lab-rat pulling on the lever which randomly rewards you with pleasure pills.
Levelling is meaningless. You get bigger numbers on your character, and fight pictures of monsters which require bigger numbers to fight, with a net change in the challenge of zero.
Roleplay is a fun pastime in which you and others collectively tell a story for each others' amusement. Levelling for the sake of levelling is an addictive (or rather, obsessive/compulsive) behavior which offers little to nothing in the way of real-life rewards.
Silly youngster. I played Quake back when it was called Rise of the Triad.
First of all, I'm probably older than you, whippersnapper.
Quake was a revolution over previous shooters in that the mouse-targeting 3D engine provided a fluid full range of movement.
Keyboard-driven "2.5D" deathmatch games like Doom, Marathon, etc., had a whole different feel to them. Playing quake after playing those games was such a dramatic difference it was like getting out of a wheelchair for the first time and then sprinting up and down stairs. I didn't even care for shooters until Quake came out.
With the old pencil-and-paper RPGs, the levelling concept makes sense. The combat is all storytelling and imagination, and levelling allows a mechanism for your character to "get good" at fighting dragons or facing other challeges.
But video games have a proud legacy of combat and action simulations. There's no need roll random numbers to determine whether your character managed to time his jump right to get across the chasm. The player tries to do it, and succeeds or fails. Plan your tactics just right, and you (along with your friends) might have a shot at defeating the big dragon.
I completely agree with you that a game engine in which you do things (rather than hit a button and have the computer randomly tell you whether you did things, based on how many things your character has done and/or attempted) would be much more fun.
If the gameplay is sufficiently fun, no "rewards" system is really even needed. Given a choice between doing something fun and getting no artificial rewards, and doing something tedius to get some numbers associated with my character to become higher, I'd rather go with the "have fun" option.
I enjoyed City of Heroes for a while, because I liked the genre, but it still ended up being "Everquest in tights." One oddity of CoH was that, like most MMORPGs, it gave no experience or rewards for defeating low-level opponents with a high-level character, so you ended up having hundreds of "heroes" in mighty-looking capes casually jogging by as old ladies getting mugged were screaming for help.
I now play World of Warcraft for the simple reason that most of my friends who play such games are playing WoW, and I would rather game with them than a bunch of strangers. There seem to be a lot of nice evolutionary touches, but it's still really just a new skin on the same old Nethack.
I'm still waiting to see what the "next big thing" in MMORPGs will be. I don't see much evidence that the answer is coming in 2005.
Then again, I'm one of those jerks who sits down at just about every single mouse-controled FPS deathmatch game, frags a few people, and says "meh... I played this game already, back when it was called Quake."
If they were still using MS-DOS and Win 3.1 by the time you got out in the work force, then you were probably going to school at a time long before people realized that Microsoft would usurp IBM's "800 pound gorilla" status and marginalize the Macintosh.
When the Macintosh came out in 1984, most business employees were still doing all of their computing on tty screens. The "IBM Compatables" (as DOS PC's were usually called back then) were popular toys with small-business owners, but hardly the center of the cubicle which it became in the 90s.
Teaching kids on Macs seemed like a reasonable idea at the time, because people still regarded the old Apple ][ as the computer most business people wished they could afford, and the Mac was seen as the New Hotness of its day.
Besides, using Macs probably prepared you to be a Windows XP user a lot better than usuing DOS 5.2 ever would have, so the reality is that they probably made the right call: Teach you how to understand the use of a GUI on the most advances system of the day.
Let's face it, Apple has always been the unofficial R&D department for Microsoft's operating systems. There seems little sign of that changing anytime soon.
a $799 eMac (where the "e" stands for "economy", I guess).
Actually, the e stands for "education."
The eMac was only ever intended to be a school computer. That's why it's really heavy, really sturdy, has a cheap-ish but rugged screen, and has the power button hidden on the back of it.
It just happened to turn out that a lot of consumers thought it would be a nifty machine for other situations where the LCD-based iMac was not really called for, and Apple decided, after the fact, to make it available.
I use one in my music studio with a MOTU DSP as my main record-to-HD system. I like that it's whisper-quiet thanks to the big slow-moving cooling fan yet still fast enough to run my multi-track recording software. Also, it fits nicely on top of my audio equipment rack.
Would I use it for a game PC? Nah. I know from seeing other people game with them that it can run a lot of games okay, but already I have a cheap home-brew PC for games.
It's all about the right tool for the job, as far as I'm concerned, and the eMac happens to fill a useful niche or two out there.
I should also add that I know somebody who has an eMac (which he bought for video editing... He uses an external firewire drive for higher-capacity storage) and he's been playing the very hottest of "this fall's hottest games" (World of Warcraft) on it and has been very pleased with the performance.
More Christmas music which sounds just like all other Christmas music.
This is what I would call an example of "a solution in search of a problem."
Are cell phones really not status symbols for many people already? Or do I live in a different world than you?
Yes. The parent poster lives in 2004 World. You live in 1974 World.
Mobile phones have not been status symbols since back when they were called cell phones.
Some guy answers a mobile phone in a public place, it's not like all the ladies are going to go, "oooo! He can afford a $200 gadget and a $40/month service contract! I wonder if he's a doctor or a CEO or something... I hope he's not already married!"
It's like George Carlin once said:
"If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you."
The next question was: How many of them could work without a hard drive?
It was right there in the freaking post. Care to answer it?
Would work? Most of them. Would match the feature set? None of them.
The final question was "Ever consider that the hard drive was never a compelling feature anyway?" keeping in mind that this question is referring to the hard drive in the context of the PS2 and not the XBox.
The Sony Hard Drive would have been a compelling feature had it ever been properly implemented. It's certainly a compelling feature of the X-Box, where it was.
Since it was not, PS2 game designers built their games around this shortcoming of the platform, resulting in it not being a compelling feature (because most PS2 games do not take advantage of it.)
The point which most people complain about is that the PS2 HD fiasco represented a missed opportunity. There's a lot of cool things which game designers could have done with a Sony PS2 HD.
How many games on the XBox took advantage of the hard drive that came standard?
Damn near all of them. Next question.
currently PS2 game sales outsell XBox 3-1.
Really? I had no idea X-Box sales were doing so well. I thought Sony was outselling them by a much larger ratio than that!
The X-Box really only ever had a shot at filling the gap in the market left by the Sega, and that's exactly what it did. Most of the people who owned Dreamcasts back in the day ended up going with the X-Box rather than the PS2.
But the Playstation is still the market leader, and most people expect that this will remain the case. That doesn't mean the X-Box is going away, any more than the popularity of Windows meaning that the Macintosh is going away.
I think the fact that you can't justify the unwieldy nature of the X-Box itself and have had to change the subject to the controller...
It seemed like a reasonable assumption that you were talking about the controller. How can something which just sits in your entertainment console be "unwieldy"? When would you ever "wield" the console itself? Are you complaining that it's big and heavy? That's kind of silly. It's a little bigger and heavier than a PS2, but it's still smaller and lighter than my stereo receiver, and gets moved about as frequently.
It's notable that the majority of people I know with an XBox already have a PS2 or even a GameCube
That only proves that you know different people than me. Of the half-dozen or so X-Box owners I know, only one of them also has a PS2 (and a GameCube, to be "complete"), and the X-Box was the first of the three they bought.
Oops... /g/Mobile Fidelity/s//Scheffield Labs/
Mobile Fidelity doesn't do direct-to-disk recordings. They just buy and clean up existing tape masters of hit recordings.
Scheffield Labs is the company I was thinking of. They record everything directly to a wax two-track, in one of the best studios in the world.
(The engineers there are also leaders in the digital mastering industry, so you can't make a case for them simply being stubborn neo-luddites. They are just people who are brilliant at making great-sounding albums.)
A CD is FAR from lossless.
Agreed, but most of the CD sound problems which we once assumed were from data loss have turned out to be the result of:
1. Poor D/A algorhythms in early CD players.
2. Hi-end audio having evolved over the years to compensate for the inherent sound problems of vinyl recordings. For decades, speakers were judged as "good" according to how well they reproduced the concert experience using an LP for the source info, so when CD's hit the scene, people played them back on those "good" speakers and said "augh! The digital sound is too bright and shrill! And the bass is so much less satisfying!"
The truth is that the CD sound is measurably closer to the sound of the original master than any consumer analog format available, but on a system tweaked for vinyl, then end product doesn't sound right.
These days, a $300 Rotel CD player hooked up to a modern power amp and speakers does as well as (or better than) a turntable which costs more than five times as much.
You can still do better than CD if you spend a small fortune on a "dream system", and play Mobile Fidelity direct-to-disk records which have not been played more than a couple dozen times, but otherwise the digital format has won.
It's kind of sad, though. The arcane wizardry involved in producing "hi-fi" sound in the pre-digital era was a heck of a lot of fun. Thank goodness the physical loudspeaker (or headphone speaker) has not yet been replaced with a device that sends the illusion of sound directly to your brain, or the entire home-audio hobby would simply evaporate into mundane gadget shopping.
Calling the Screen Actor's Guild a union is like Theresa Heinz Kerry calling herself an "African American":
Technically correct, but laughable to put it that way.
Right there with you. In the days of US Steel, unions were needed for the sake of personal safety and survival. These days, they are just another revenue generator for the mafia.
Here is the core complaint from this "person" (no gender is ever identified):
Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy.
Is that a horrible policy for a company who abuses "Exempt" employee status to milk their workers for extra hours? Yes.
Is it their own damned fault if they don't choose option #2? Hell yes.
Once piece of data which is carefully omitted from this story is the programmer's salary. If he's making anything close to an accounting firm's BFOH, and gets to write game code instead of babysite AS400 systems, and gets to put several years at EA Sports on his resume, then he's got nothing to complain about. There are lots of fresh-faced college kids who would give up a left nut for the chance to be "exploited" like that.
Let's face it, the typical code-hacker who lands a straight 40-hour job usually goes home and writes code for side-projects and open source contributions all evening anyway. It's not like this guys lifting heavy things for 85 hours a week.
Bottom line: He's sitting in a chair doing exactly what he probably would do with all his waking hours, regardless of employment: staring at a cathode-ray tube. Boo-frikkin-hoo.
That said, I've thought for a long time that EA games are going downhill, and now we know why. Not only are they written by sleep-deprived zombies, but they are written by sleep-deprived zombies married to shrill nags who never stop complaining about how much time they spend at work.
Hey Spouse: Maybe theres another reason why the programmer you married is staying away from home so much.
Play it through a good pair of Carvers or something, and you will hear for yourself.
Also, don't discount "Private Investigations." I know it's tough to focus on the subtle pleasures of that song when you are coming down from the high of that jam at the end of "Telegraph Road", but Mark Knopfler has never played a more haunting accoustic guitar part than on that track. Play it loud enough to (on a good hi-fi system or headphones) to catch all the little string harmonics he's hitting throughout the song.
If I had an 80-Gig iPod, there are about two dozen or so albums I would keep as FLAC or AIFF files in the iPod, so I would no longer need to keep the CD's in the living room.
Most pop and jazz recordings sound like mush regardless of format. No ammount of equipment is going to make Louis Armstrong's "Hot Fives" sound like he's in the room, but I'll take that scratchy clay-78 sound of Satchmo's horn over a live performance by Kenny G himself any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
However, for that handful of audiophile gems, such as Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck, and "Love Over Gold" by Dire Straits, it would be nice to have some excess real estate on my iPod HD for lossless copies.
My understanding is that, essentially, the XBox as a platform is dying.
But does Necraft confirm it???
People who've bought XBoxes have generally found the usually mediocre games choices (there are, what, seven decent XBox titles?)
Of all the Sony-only and Nintendo-only games out there, there is only one which I wish my X-Box could play, GTA-SA. Beyond that, all the best (IMHO) games are available on the X-Box... and the last two titles of the DOA series can not be played on any other cosole.
together with the clumsiness of the system itself (who wants to either drag that thing over from a cupboard every day and set it up just to play a game when you can leave smaller, more elegant, boxes like the PS2, and to some extent the Gamecube, in plain sight without either uglifying your room)
I consider the PS2 Controller to be a tiny, cheap piece of crap. I had a calculator watch back in the 80s which had better buttons on it.
I may have bigger-than-average hands, but it's not like I'm an NBA star or something, and I find the original mega-massive X-Box controller to be perfect. I don't even like the "s" controller they switched to as a cost-cutting measure. I think the criticism of the X-Box controller is mostly coming from PS-2 fanbois who are simply not used to holding a controller that was designed for grown-up hands.
let the customer test it and we'll just write off the bad units and dodge blame for any damage done.
Or, more accurately, write off the bad unites, and Ford blame for any damage done.
zing!
In other news, the circulation of clay tablets telling the saga of Gilgamesh continues to decline, and the practice of attaching messages to the legs of birds is showing no signs of revival.
Quest items are often instanced in WoW. If you had six guys doing the quest together, they could each loot their very own Flobotinum Sword of Bring This To The Innkeeper For Phat Exp, all off the same dead boss.
Yes, it kind of breaks the realism of the game, but it makes it much more feasible to group when questing. None of that "we do the same quest over and over together six times, taking turns getting the Flobotinum Sword until everybody has one."
If that's what you were doing, you probably should have stopped and checked the boss corpse. You could have saved yourselves a lot of time.
I'm waiting for the Sony/NCSoft style lawsuit...
Some game maker is going to make a football game in which you can choose team colors and player numbers, and EA will sue them, insisting that (even though no NFL team logos are present), this new game let's you make a player who looks, from overhead, EXACTLY like Browns running back WIll Green!!!
If I was a social person, I wouldn't be playing a mmorpg in the first place ;-)
If I were an anti-social person, I would go for the superior gameplay experience of a non-networked computer RPG.
The presense of ther players is the only advantage which an MMORPG offers. Shun the group dynamics, and you are simply wasting fifteen bucks a month on a game which is not particularilly interesting.
I used to have the attitude that "forced" party adventure is bad, because I might want to do stuff on off-peak hours, or I might just want to blow off some steam for a half-hour or something... but I can always fire up GTA on my console if I want a short, casual gaming experience. It's not as if my current MMORPG is the only recreation available to me.
People who play softball on the weekend don't complain that they gotta find eight other guys and a team to play against before they can have a full game.