The first real RPG I played was Ultima 3. The box art with the demon in fire was excellent. The box was solid with a nice glossy finish. The goodness didn't end on the outside. Inside the box you had a players manual, a wizard spell book, a priest spell book and the beautiful cloth map. Denis Loubet did the cover illustrations as well as much of the artwork inside the player's manual. I think those images really helped bring the world of Ultima alive in my imagination. Which, considering the simple 8bit graphics was a good thing.
I was lucky, I actually owned the boxed game when I was a kid. I remember the stiff carboard box from SSI. Here's the spell list. That site also has the full docs if you go to the root URL and search for Phantasie you'll find it. I forgot how brutal these old RPGs can be. As far as I can tell you can't ressurect your dead characters except with a high level wizard. I've taken to using Vice 64's quick snapshot function after every battle. Now that's cheating!
You can play it on an emulator now days. I don't think most of the old RPGs would work well on a system without a keyboard. Nevermind, I just booted it up and now I remember it's mostly joystick driven. Of course there is the problem that the spells just had a number and you needed to look them up in the manual to see what they did. I had to look up the manual online to figure out that my level one Wizard had Spell #5. Ah now those were the days eh?
Notice how the Core 2 Duo comes in at 44 FPS higher than the top end Athlon FX 57 from the article you linked? And that even the lower end E6600 comes in higher than the FX62 - despite costing less than half as much?
No. Apple uses Intel, Nvidia and ATI. For example the lowest end iMac has an Intel integrated video chip, the mid range uses ATI x1600 and the top end 24" model uses Nvidia 7300GT with a 7600GT as an upgrade. The Mac Pro offers Nvidia 7300 GT as standard, upgradeable to an ATI x1900 or a Nvidia Quadro FX 4500. The MacBook's and Minis use Intel, the MacBook Pro's use ATI.
"It's in the domain of 4 megabytes of L2 compared to to the best AM2's 2 megs of L2. Of COURSE it's going to be "faster"."
Uh no. L2 cache is not the only thing that makes one chip faster than the other. In fact a lot of people have been taking the lower end 2MB L2 cache Core 2 Duos and overclocking them to higher than 3GHz. Performance is excellent and better than Athlon FX. As for the 64bit thing. Check out this article:
While 64bit performance is nothing special, in most cases it isn't bad. In fact in most of the benchmarks the Core 2 Duo x6800 beats out the Athlon FX.
The true test for the Core 2 architecture will be in multi core / multi chip mother boards. Will servers with 8 or 16 cores (2 or 4 slot) total underperform because of the memory architecture? It's here that AMD really has the better design with Opteron and hypertransport. Right now for a desktop computer Core 2 Duo is the best.
Some older games do cost a similar amount to new releases. I just checked at gogamer.com and Age of Empires 2 Gold lists for $27.95. Compare this to Age of Mythology at $29.95 and the cheapest (import edition) version of Age of Empires 3 at $36.90. Even Age of Empires Gold still sells for $14.95 - a respectable amount for an almost 10 year old game. This isn't just online, these prices are a bit cheaper than what I've seen at my local GameStop. Other games such as Warcraft 2 and 3, Diablo 2, the original Sims etc. still sell at pricing higher than your average old game. Why? Supply and demand. These are truly classics and sell well for years because of that fact. You should also note that most of these games have very low system requirements by todays standards. So someone stuck with a 5 year old Dell with onboard video can still enjoy a game of Age of Empires 2. What's even better is that these old games STILL have active communities of players! I recently purchased the Quake 4 special edition at a discount price. Try finding an online game of Quake 4 - the pickings are slim. On a whim I installed the included version of Quake 2 and opened Gamespy Arcade. What do you know! There are 10 times as many people playing Quake 2 as their are playing Quake 4. So these older games retain value by being:
1. damn good games 2. having low system requirements (hence appeal to someone without the greatest hardware) 3. still having active online communties
Not every game fills these criteria and consequently not every game is worth even a fraction of full price even 6 months after release. You are right that a game shouldn't lose it's value immediately just because it's a bit old - my point is that in general the BEST ones - the real classics don't. They have a longer shelf life. I'm also talking about games with a broad appeal. Now niche games have a different problem, they don't appeal to as many players and they may also represent a "risk purchase" for those interested because they are innovative in some measure. This isn't a bad thing, but niche developers need to realize that an entry point of $20 (or even $15 depending on the type of game) is much more comfortable for a risky purchase. I think a lot of them do, certainly in the puzzle game space. I would imagine that games like Bookworm and Bejeweled have done will with this model especially given the reduced cost of development versus something like Doom 3 (which honestly never should have been sold at $50 - that sucker should have been considered a tech demo bundle for video cards only). It should be noted that Bookworm and Bejewelled STILL sell at the $20 price, whereas you can probably find Doom 3 in a bargain bin by now. You could easily argue that a good selling indie game will hold it's price steady for longer than a mediocre big publisher's game. It's also difficult to find reviews of indie/niche games which means 9 times out of 10 I'm flying blind on the purchase. Hopefully there is a demo, but demos can be deceptive. I purchased Oasis based on a review in Computer Games magazine. It's a great game and well worth the $20. I may never have heard of it if I hadn't seen the review. I would love to see more reviews of indie/niche games but I also do realize that the big media may not be interested in reviewing the little guys. Now some games - no matter how classic they once were - just don't hold their value. Should you really pay $9.95 for Might and Magic 1??? I have fond memories of the game, but is it really still worth $10? Honestly, I think games like this are better suited to a GameTap setup then being sold for $10 online. The same goes for the early Ultimas and action games like Karateka or Bruce Lee on the Apple 2/Commodore 64. Fun stuff to download and play for an hour, but hardly worth $10 today.
"Except with games, it's not due only to the time since release, but also due to used game sales"
Not true in the USA for PC games as they are not sold used by major retailers. Also I've noticed that the price of an older game depends on how much people are still willing to pay for it. Classics like Diablo 2 and Age of Empires 2 have never hit the bargain bin $5 price. Typically they are sold in packages with their expansions for $15-$30. Some old games retain their value in the market much longer than others and are priced according to this demand.
If you think COH/COV is a grind fest try out a Korean designed MMO sometime. Seriously checkout Hero Online, it's free and holy cow is it a grind.
COH was my first MMO, played it for about a year, got my level 50 and then moved to WoW. Played WoW for about a year then bought CoV. I have a love/hate relationship with CoH/CoV, I totally understand what you mean about it being a grind. The game really has almost nothing to it but combat. I think the combat is pretty entertaining but doing mission after mission can be taxing. What I do like about it is that it works well in small doses. I usually play with a friend for an hour or two a night. From logon to mission your are playing in a couple minutes versus the high end of WoW which is very time consuming. Lately the server population seems to have dried up, especially at the high level (my villain is 41). So the social aspects of the game have pretty much disappeared. CoH was a much livlier place during the first year with tons of players and much more social activity (player run things like costume contests were common). Without the player base you are just left with the mechanics of the game. Normally I think it would be surprising to see the developer building the Marvel MMO seeing as it stands to be in direct competition with CoH/CoV but I see it as a sign that Cryptic is aware of CoH's decline. In terms of CoH being slow to level though, you can easily do levels 1-20 in a week which at least gives you a lot of powers and a good idea if you want to keep playing that class. Now once you hit 30 the grind really kicks in and 40-50 is just plain brutal. I think I'm doing about 1 bar of XP every 2 hours at level 41. Just be glad they reduced the debt to less than half of what it used to be. My hero had maxed out debt at lvl 49 - something like a million points. At this point I'm just waiting for something new. I don't have any desire to go back to WoW. I think MMO developers are waiting on releases because of the Burning Crusade.
Well it's a combination of flash media and hard drive. The biggest advantage is in power usage for laptop environments. Check out this article about Samsung's hybrid. I'm not sure if this would help much in terms of max transfer speed (I doubt it, same bus anyway), but the seek times should be much better for anything that's cached. Most drop in ATA flash drives I've looked at have seek times in the microseconds not milliseconds.
Those were controlled tests typically in remote areas. They weren't all detonated at the same time. While not globe ending they did have serious health consquences for generations of people located near the blasts. Now, 200+ nukes launched at the same time between India and Pakistan would cause some immediate localized damage. The greater issue would be the resulting health crisis as fall out spread away from the region of conflict. You could see huge issues with poisoned water supplies and food sources leading to famine and ultimately conflict with other nations in the region. Globe ending? Perhaps not. Damaging enough to wreck the global economy and cause significant impact to millions if not billions of people, I would certainly say it's possible.
Well in terms of raw capacity hard drives have been improving at a ridiculous rate. In terms of data transfer speeds, you should see some neat stuff happening with hybrid drives in the near future. The basic problem though is in the case of multiple accesses to the same device your sustained rates go to shit. I don't really know how you get around this issue.
Virtualizing your IT server infrastructure into fewer servers with more cores has a lot of benefits. One is less power usage overall, the other is better utilizing the total processing power. Not to mention things like better disaster recovery since the OS is no longer tied to specific hardware.
"In order to move data in between individual cores and into memory, the company plans to use an on-chip interconnect fabric and stacked SRAM (static RAM) chips attached directly to the bottom of the chip, he said."
"Greenland wasn't given that name as some sort of horrible joke. It used to be GREEN."
The Southern (non-glacial) portion of Greenland still is green, at least during the Summer. Here's some pics showing outdoor shots featuring some green. As for the name though, Wikipedia notes:
"Greenland was also called Gruntland ("Ground-land") on early maps. Whether Green is an erroneous transcription of Grunt ("Ground"), which refers to shallow bays, or vice versa, is not known."
Anyway, at the point when Greenland was named Greenland it still had a huge ass glacier sitting on it. The ice sheet is over 100,000 years old.
"The only thing wrong with the American democracy is that it relies on Americans to run it."
I think you neglect one of the main reasons why even if you got everyone to go vote the democrats and republicans would still win. Money. There is a huge amount of money (tax payer dollars) that get passed around in terms of business contracts. You can say votes aren't "bought" but that's really only partially true. Local labor unions and local businesses will align themselves with certain politicians or a party to help insure that they get contracts. This happens all the time. The companies and unions also do voter education for their staff. I've had to sit through political meetings at workplaces myself. I've had to meet the candidate the company is endorsing and listen to why it's good for the business if we vote for him. Of course the biggest corporations grease the palms of both the democrats and the republicans. An alternative party candidate would need to do more than just get the indvidual voter to the polls, they would need to play ball with business. Of course this often has the effect of negating some of what they stand for. As Gore noted regarding attempts to get environmental policies through congress, it was essentially impossible even as the vice president. Save the planet sounds great but when it costs American businesses huge amounts of money, the concept goes out the window.
"Exactly.. they sell you something then insist you're not allowed to do as you please with it, which is direct impediment of the individual right to personal property in the civilized world."
What they sell you is a license. In the RIAA's case, a license to listen to a song with certain restrictions. This is the same for music, video, software etc. You are not buying the music, movie etc. You are buying a restricted usage license for that song, movie, program etc. As a purchaser you are granted certain rights. This allows the RIAA to sell other licenses with different rights to different people. For example a license to use the music in a movie, or a license for use in public places. I'm not saying this is right, just that these whole industries are structured around selling licensing not property. The only property you own when you buy a CD is the physical CD, you don't own the contents of that CD.
Well the name TRON itself comes from the TRON (trace on) debugging command in BASIC. Which makes sense in that the TRON program in the movie was supposed to monitor the actions of other programs (including the MCP).
Sure so long as a gay person or black person did it. That's the prevailing attitude. BTW Al really is geeky so it's the same deal. Also nerds have been taking back the "n" word rendering it useless as an insult.
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The first real RPG I played was Ultima 3. The box art with the demon in fire was excellent. The box was solid with a nice glossy finish. The goodness didn't end on the outside. Inside the box you had a players manual, a wizard spell book, a priest spell book and the beautiful cloth map.
Denis Loubet did the cover illustrations as well as much of the artwork inside the player's manual. I think those images really helped bring the world of Ultima alive in my imagination. Which, considering the simple 8bit graphics was a good thing.
I was lucky, I actually owned the boxed game when I was a kid. I remember the stiff carboard box from SSI. Here's the spell list. That site also has the full docs if you go to the root URL and search for Phantasie you'll find it.
I forgot how brutal these old RPGs can be. As far as I can tell you can't ressurect your dead characters except with a high level wizard. I've taken to using Vice 64's quick snapshot function after every battle. Now that's cheating!
The latest Quake 4 patch is multithreaded and benchmarks show a huge improvement with MP enabled.
"two quad-core processors can be cost-justified under certain circumstances, two graphics cards really can't be."
I think there are folks in the video game and computer animation industries (TV and film) who would disagree with you.
They've released Atari 2600 compilations for consoles and Windows. You can usually find them pretty cheap for example here.
Now for Commodore 64 - nothing on the legal side I guess, but this site has been around forever:
ftp://arnold.c64.org/pub/games/
You can play it on an emulator now days. I don't think most of the old RPGs would work well on a system without a keyboard.
Nevermind, I just booted it up and now I remember it's mostly joystick driven. Of course there is the problem that the spells just had a number and you needed to look them up in the manual to see what they did. I had to look up the manual online to figure out that my level one Wizard had Spell #5.
Ah now those were the days eh?
Hahahahha. You're trolling right?
Here is the FEAR benchmark you listed only updated for Core 2 Duo and Athlon FX62.
Notice how the Core 2 Duo comes in at 44 FPS higher than the top end Athlon FX 57 from the article you linked? And that even the lower end E6600 comes in higher than the FX62 - despite costing less than half as much?
No. Apple uses Intel, Nvidia and ATI. For example the lowest end iMac has an Intel integrated video chip, the mid range uses ATI x1600 and the top end 24" model uses Nvidia 7300GT with a 7600GT as an upgrade.
The Mac Pro offers Nvidia 7300 GT as standard, upgradeable to an ATI x1900 or a Nvidia Quadro FX 4500.
The MacBook's and Minis use Intel, the MacBook Pro's use ATI.
"It's in the domain of 4 megabytes of L2 compared to to the best AM2's 2 megs of L2. Of
COURSE it's going to be "faster"."
Uh no. L2 cache is not the only thing that makes one chip faster than the other. In fact a lot of people have been taking the lower end 2MB L2 cache Core 2 Duos and overclocking them to higher than 3GHz. Performance is excellent and better than Athlon FX.
As for the 64bit thing. Check out this article:
Conroe and EM64T: Is There a Problem?
While 64bit performance is nothing special, in most cases it isn't bad. In fact in most of the benchmarks the Core 2 Duo x6800 beats out the Athlon FX.
The true test for the Core 2 architecture will be in multi core / multi chip mother boards. Will servers with 8 or 16 cores (2 or 4 slot) total underperform because of the memory architecture? It's here that AMD really has the better design with Opteron and hypertransport. Right now for a desktop computer Core 2 Duo is the best.
Actually if you use RAID level 10 you get speed and mirroring. You'll lose 50% capacity (same as a normal mirror) and need 4 drives to implement.
Some older games do cost a similar amount to new releases. I just checked at gogamer.com and Age of Empires 2 Gold lists for $27.95. Compare this to Age of Mythology at $29.95 and the cheapest (import edition) version of Age of Empires 3 at $36.90. Even Age of Empires Gold still sells for $14.95 - a respectable amount for an almost 10 year old game. This isn't just online, these prices are a bit cheaper than what I've seen at my local GameStop. Other games such as Warcraft 2 and 3, Diablo 2, the original Sims etc. still sell at pricing higher than your average old game.
Why? Supply and demand. These are truly classics and sell well for years because of that fact. You should also note that most of these games have very low system requirements by todays standards. So someone stuck with a 5 year old Dell with onboard video can still enjoy a game of Age of Empires 2.
What's even better is that these old games STILL have active communities of players! I recently purchased the Quake 4 special edition at a discount price. Try finding an online game of Quake 4 - the pickings are slim. On a whim I installed the included version of Quake 2 and opened Gamespy Arcade. What do you know! There are 10 times as many people playing Quake 2 as their are playing Quake 4.
So these older games retain value by being:
1. damn good games
2. having low system requirements (hence appeal to someone without the greatest hardware)
3. still having active online communties
Not every game fills these criteria and consequently not every game is worth even a fraction of full price even 6 months after release. You are right that a game shouldn't lose it's value immediately just because it's a bit old - my point is that in general the BEST ones - the real classics don't. They have a longer shelf life.
I'm also talking about games with a broad appeal. Now niche games have a different problem, they don't appeal to as many players and they may also represent a "risk purchase" for those interested because they are innovative in some measure. This isn't a bad thing, but niche developers need to realize that an entry point of $20 (or even $15 depending on the type of game) is much more comfortable for a risky purchase. I think a lot of them do, certainly in the puzzle game space. I would imagine that games like Bookworm and Bejeweled have done will with this model especially given the reduced cost of development versus something like Doom 3 (which honestly never should have been sold at $50 - that sucker should have been considered a tech demo bundle for video cards only). It should be noted that Bookworm and Bejewelled STILL sell at the $20 price, whereas you can probably find Doom 3 in a bargain bin by now. You could easily argue that a good selling indie game will hold it's price steady for longer than a mediocre big publisher's game.
It's also difficult to find reviews of indie/niche games which means 9 times out of 10 I'm flying blind on the purchase. Hopefully there is a demo, but demos can be deceptive.
I purchased Oasis based on a review in Computer Games magazine. It's a great game and well worth the $20. I may never have heard of it if I hadn't seen the review. I would love to see more reviews of indie/niche games but I also do realize that the big media may not be interested in reviewing the little guys.
Now some games - no matter how classic they once were - just don't hold their value. Should you really pay $9.95 for Might and Magic 1??? I have fond memories of the game, but is it really still worth $10? Honestly, I think games like this are better suited to a GameTap setup then being sold for $10 online. The same goes for the early Ultimas and action games like Karateka or Bruce Lee on the Apple 2/Commodore 64. Fun stuff to download and play for an hour, but hardly worth $10 today.
"Except with games, it's not due only to the time since release, but also due to used game sales"
Not true in the USA for PC games as they are not sold used by major retailers.
Also I've noticed that the price of an older game depends on how much people are still willing to pay for it. Classics like Diablo 2 and Age of Empires 2 have never hit the bargain bin $5 price. Typically they are sold in packages with their expansions for $15-$30.
Some old games retain their value in the market much longer than others and are priced according to this demand.
If you think COH/COV is a grind fest try out a Korean designed MMO sometime. Seriously checkout Hero Online, it's free and holy cow is it a grind.
COH was my first MMO, played it for about a year, got my level 50 and then moved to WoW. Played WoW for about a year then bought CoV.
I have a love/hate relationship with CoH/CoV, I totally understand what you mean about it being a grind. The game really has almost nothing to it but combat. I think the combat is pretty entertaining but doing mission after mission can be taxing. What I do like about it is that it works well in small doses. I usually play with a friend for an hour or two a night. From logon to mission your are playing in a couple minutes versus the high end of WoW which is very time consuming.
Lately the server population seems to have dried up, especially at the high level (my villain is 41). So the social aspects of the game have pretty much disappeared. CoH was a much livlier place during the first year with tons of players and much more social activity (player run things like costume contests were common). Without the player base you are just left with the mechanics of the game.
Normally I think it would be surprising to see the developer building the Marvel MMO seeing as it stands to be in direct competition with CoH/CoV but I see it as a sign that Cryptic is aware of CoH's decline.
In terms of CoH being slow to level though, you can easily do levels 1-20 in a week which at least gives you a lot of powers and a good idea if you want to keep playing that class. Now once you hit 30 the grind really kicks in and 40-50 is just plain brutal. I think I'm doing about 1 bar of XP every 2 hours at level 41. Just be glad they reduced the debt to less than half of what it used to be. My hero had maxed out debt at lvl 49 - something like a million points.
At this point I'm just waiting for something new. I don't have any desire to go back to WoW. I think MMO developers are waiting on releases because of the Burning Crusade.
Well it's a combination of flash media and hard drive. The biggest advantage is in power usage for laptop environments. Check out this article about Samsung's hybrid.
I'm not sure if this would help much in terms of max transfer speed (I doubt it, same bus anyway), but the seek times should be much better for anything that's cached. Most drop in ATA flash drives I've looked at have seek times in the microseconds not milliseconds.
Those were controlled tests typically in remote areas. They weren't all detonated at the same time. While not globe ending they did have serious health consquences for generations of people located near the blasts.
Now, 200+ nukes launched at the same time between India and Pakistan would cause some immediate localized damage. The greater issue would be the resulting health crisis as fall out spread away from the region of conflict. You could see huge issues with poisoned water supplies and food sources leading to famine and ultimately conflict with other nations in the region.
Globe ending? Perhaps not. Damaging enough to wreck the global economy and cause significant impact to millions if not billions of people, I would certainly say it's possible.
Well in terms of raw capacity hard drives have been improving at a ridiculous rate. In terms of data transfer speeds, you should see some neat stuff happening with hybrid drives in the near future.
The basic problem though is in the case of multiple accesses to the same device your sustained rates go to shit. I don't really know how you get around this issue.
Virtualizing your IT server infrastructure into fewer servers with more cores has a lot of benefits. One is less power usage overall, the other is better utilizing the total processing power. Not to mention things like better disaster recovery since the OS is no longer tied to specific hardware.
From the FA:
"In order to move data in between individual cores and into memory, the company plans to use an on-chip interconnect fabric and stacked SRAM (static RAM) chips attached directly to the bottom of the chip, he said."
"Greenland wasn't given that name as some sort of horrible joke. It used to be GREEN."
The Southern (non-glacial) portion of Greenland still is green, at least during the Summer. Here's some pics showing outdoor shots featuring some green.
As for the name though, Wikipedia notes:
"Greenland was also called Gruntland ("Ground-land") on early maps. Whether Green is an erroneous transcription of Grunt ("Ground"), which refers to shallow bays, or vice versa, is not known."
Anyway, at the point when Greenland was named Greenland it still had a huge ass glacier sitting on it. The ice sheet is over 100,000 years old.
"The only thing wrong with the American democracy is that it relies on Americans to run it."
I think you neglect one of the main reasons why even if you got everyone to go vote the democrats and republicans would still win. Money. There is a huge amount of money (tax payer dollars) that get passed around in terms of business contracts. You can say votes aren't "bought" but that's really only partially true. Local labor unions and local businesses will align themselves with certain politicians or a party to help insure that they get contracts. This happens all the time.
The companies and unions also do voter education for their staff. I've had to sit through political meetings at workplaces myself. I've had to meet the candidate the company is endorsing and listen to why it's good for the business if we vote for him.
Of course the biggest corporations grease the palms of both the democrats and the republicans.
An alternative party candidate would need to do more than just get the indvidual voter to the polls, they would need to play ball with business. Of course this often has the effect of negating some of what they stand for. As Gore noted regarding attempts to get environmental policies through congress, it was essentially impossible even as the vice president. Save the planet sounds great but when it costs American businesses huge amounts of money, the concept goes out the window.
"Exactly.. they sell you something then insist you're not allowed to do as you please with it, which is direct impediment of the individual right to personal property in the civilized world."
What they sell you is a license. In the RIAA's case, a license to listen to a song with certain restrictions.
This is the same for music, video, software etc. You are not buying the music, movie etc. You are buying a restricted usage license for that song, movie, program etc. As a purchaser you are granted certain rights.
This allows the RIAA to sell other licenses with different rights to different people. For example a license to use the music in a movie, or a license for use in public places.
I'm not saying this is right, just that these whole industries are structured around selling licensing not property. The only property you own when you buy a CD is the physical CD, you don't own the contents of that CD.
And George Lucas says he wrote all 6 movies back in the 70s. Your point is?
Well the name TRON itself comes from the TRON (trace on) debugging command in BASIC. Which makes sense in that the TRON program in the movie was supposed to monitor the actions of other programs (including the MCP).
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window"
I always assumed he meant this in terms of dropping out of a GUI to a text prompt.
Sure so long as a gay person or black person did it. That's the prevailing attitude.
BTW Al really is geeky so it's the same deal. Also nerds have been taking back the "n" word rendering it useless as an insult.