when I had left a copy of Katamari Damancy on the passenger seat! Why doesn't anyone ever mention that these kids might have bought Need for Speed because they were already into car racing - why is it always the other way around?
I'd rather have a Core Duo laptop right not than a single core Turion. Of course we'll have to see how it breaks down later this year when we see a dual core mobile processor from AMD. Of course the Turion is 64 bit, but if you are a Windows desktop user that doesn't count for much at this point in time.
In particular Jobs was talking about the descendants of the Pentium M - the Core series of processor, which offer excellent performance at lower power consumption. Which is evidenced by the usage of the Core processor in both of Apple's current Intel based products. The Pentium M came expanded on the Pentium 3's design, rather than going for the "more GHz is better" approach that the Pentium 4 did. It is more efficient than a Pentium 4 of the same clock speed and uses less power.
Well when CoH first launched, there were even less map types, villain types and no "outdoor door missions". So they did add some variety in, as well as adding the trials and new zones/villains. The biggest problem I have with CoV is that at the start you get missions with a little added flavor in terms of cut scenes and a little mission unique architecture (the last Snake bad guy, the completion of the Ghost Widow story arch) but this stops pretty quickly. I don't think I've seen anything like that since I was about level 10, and my character is at level 32 now. I haven't had time to do the strike forces so I don't know if they are any more interesting than the ones in CoH. Right now for me, CoV is suffering from the "every door mission" syndrome is pretty much the same problem, with a heist thrown in once in awhile to mix things up.
Check out the FAQ. They expect the ship crew complement to be consistent with the series. I wonder how they are going to pull that off. Ground combat is supposed to be real time.
Some PocketPC PDA applications do this too. They generate the serial number based on the device ID. So if you try to install it on a different PDA, the serial won't work. Depending on the company, they MIGHT issue you another serial number if you get a new PDA, or they may require you to purchase a new copy for that PDA.
Something Awful did a hilarious (or offensive) piece on just this topic. Of course it's not really any more offensive than anything else on Something Awful.
The level 50-60 dungeon raids are pretty fun the first few times. I consider them worth doing, as the content is good and you can complete them in about 1.5-2.5 hours (as long as there isn't a major fuckup). The problem is that if you are looking for certain items, you'll need to run them many, many times. Which is totally not worth it. It's annoying and irritating and the reason I stopped playing. Even at lvl 40, you could run through some fun dungeons. Scarlet Monestary is pretty fun. I couldn't really care less about the item drops, I just like exploring the dungeons and seeing what they look like.
"After playing EVE online for many months i more or less came to the conclusion that the game pretty much consisted of time-sinks"
I came to this conclusion after playing the two week trial. It seemed like a pretty interesting game, but I could tell that there was no way I would have the time or drive to put into it. Good thing I had a console system setup next to my computer so I had something to do during the long travel time.
Uh, only two servers have completed the war effort so far. The more general problem has being occuring since the 1.9 patch and has nothing to do with people flooding in to see the world event. Also, no one is going to create a new level one character in order to experience the new content. The new AQ content is strictly for high end level 60 raiding guilds. In the time it took you to lvl up to 60, get geared up, apply and join a raiding guild - the gates would be open on your server. Supposedly the gates will open on all servers two months after the patch, even if the war effort is not completed. The queues, lag and general bugginess all started to become a problem on my server (Doomhammer) shortly after the 1.9 patch. It may be that players who were only logging on for scheduled guild high end raids (Molten Core etc.) were now logging on to help with the war effort. This could account for the higher number of concurrent players, the increased server load, queues, disconnects and other fun. Doomhammer got so bad that a number of my guildies all rolled new characters on a low population server, so that they would have something to do when Doomhammer was being crapped out.
"To liken this fight to masturbating with a cheese grater is to underestimate the joys of genital shredding, and it was at this point that opinions and criticisms of the expansion began to bubble to the surface like poisonous gas in a swamp of negativity."
"But complete disregard for personal hygiene and diet for a game?"
Yep. That's a problem. The question is, how common is that? What percentage of players end up like that? I mean look at how destructive alcohol can be. Yet it's still legal. For some people alcohol completely destroys their lives, their health and frequently their family as well. I don't think the majority of MMO players end up destitute and sickly.
I hear your point, but I don't think everyone that plays WoW ends up being a high end raider. I play MMOs about 2 hours a night on average, with longer periods on the weekend. I don't watch TV at all and I only watch a couple movies a month. I do read books and probably spend almost the same amount of time reading as I do playing. The high end raids don't particularly interest me. I find them kind of annoying and way to time consuming in relation to the rewards. After having been level 60 for awhile on WoW I thought it was time to move up to high end raiding, a few ZG runs kind of made me feel that this type of play isn't just for me. I switched games to another MMO where I can have fun as a casual player again. I'm sure when I hit whatever point in the game the time sinks hit hard, I'll move on again. I love exploring the vast worlds in MMOs, I hate repetitive grinding of the same content.
I guess some people really love the high end game. The organization required, the epic battles. I really don't care to do the same content over and over. I mean I can see doing a dungeon maybe 5 times. To get 6 out of 8 of my tier 0 blue set items I've had to do about 70 raids. I swear I could do UBRS blindfolded. I think ultimately, the most fun I've had with dungeons in the game is running Dire Maul with a close knit group of 5 friends. I wish there was more content like that in the game. It might keep me playing. As for now I'm pretty bored with the whole thing.
"Many of the items in the war effort have greatly increased in price, when beforehand they had nearly bottomed out."
Yep, because bastards like me see nothing wrong with a little war profiteering. I made about 150G just off a stacks a cloth I had sitting in the bank. I tried the item turn ins, but hoping for a blue instead of a crappy green wasn't worth it to me.
Considering in the higher end instances you can expect a number of player deaths during each run, I think perma-death would make them virtually impossible. It is possible to have no deaths, but having good gear helps a lot. Those first runs with mostly green gear? I would sure hate to be a healer on those raids. I think if they went with a hardcore server they would have to adjust the raids and probably some of the quests.
Until HD is common in homes you're right - the average gamer is not going to notice that big a difference. Same grainy interlaced display. If you look at the Xbox 360 on a standard TV it really doesn't look that much better - but on an HDTV it looks very nice and crisp. Maybe someday I'll be able to afford an HDTV - but not at the current pricing levels.
"e.g. is a "white men can't dance" joke unshowable?"
No, but a "black men can't read" joke is. It's ok to sterotype and make fun of white people no matter what. If you are black you can make fun of black people and stereotypes as well as whites. If you are white you cannot. It's not just that way for blacks, pretty much the same thing for any minority in the US. This is called being politically correct.
I agree with your point about the acting. Part of which I think comes from them attempting to mimic the acting styles of the old series (Kirk, Spock, McCoy etc.). Thanks to the wonders of technology, the special effects are in general significantly better than the original series.
The one I overclocked was my Celeron 300a. Which as far I as know still works. It hasn't actually been in a motherboard since I upgraded to the P3 850Mhz. I find actual CPU failure to rarely be the cause of system failure. At work I don't think I've seen a CPU failure in 5 years. Usually the motherboard blows up. But yeah, we don't overclock at work either.
Nah, this is Slashdot - I'll be modded down into oblivion. Apparently people really enjoy the dozens of pointless "analysis" articles we've been seeing and I anticipate we will continue to see until well after the Revolution and PS3 hit the market. Honestly, I don't really understand why people care about projected number of sales on these systems. I have an Xbox, a PS2 and a GameCube. The GC gets more play than the others. How can that be? It's the poorest selling of the three, doesn't that mean it sucks?
The point is don't expect MS Word to run twice as fast. I'm sure apps like Photoshop and Final Cut will take advantage of two processors but I doubt a lot of commonly used non pro apps will. I'd like to see a benchmark break this down and show multithreaded performance in an application on a Core Duo versus a single G5 iMac.
Xbox 360 will drop in price to $35.32 to combat Sony's release of the PS/3 which will incidentally be marketed in the $1.2 million price range. Sony's initial stock of 5 PS/3s for the holiday season 2009 will sell out. The resulting influx of $6 million will exceed all money ever made selling anything Xbox related for any Xbox system ever that was or is to be. In an effort to get more non-gamers playing Nintendo will release the Revolution in a buy one get one free special pack marketed witht eh slogan "one for you, one for Grandma". It will come with an updated Robby the robot. Corporations such as McDonalds will take advantage of the low cost robotics and replace their entire work force with Robbys. The Revolution controller will be shown to be a cheap ploy by Nintendo to transition to teledildonics. The CEO of Nintendo will be compelled to commit suicide after a horrifying cosplay scandal involving a certain stain on a sailor moon outfit. The successor will distance Nintendo from video gaming and return the business to it's hana futa card making roots - stating that they want Nintendo's finanacial profile to be more in line with Sony and Microsoft, since profitability is no longer a sign of success. The Internet, having proven to be a fad, will achieve sentience and then blow itself up by detonating large nuclear devices in every major backbone location across the world. This will have no real impact on Microsoft's Xbox Live, as we all know that nobody really plays on Live anyway. There will however be "the scream heard round the world" as millions of World of Warcraft players are instantly denied their chance to earn phat lewt. PC gaming will rise from it's current dead status to achieve undeath with titles like Sims 3: Get a Life! shambling about Wal Mart screaming "braaaaaaainnsssss".
Slashdot Mirror
when I had left a copy of Katamari Damancy on the passenger seat!
Why doesn't anyone ever mention that these kids might have bought Need for Speed because they were already into car racing - why is it always the other way around?
I'd rather have a Core Duo laptop right not than a single core Turion. Of course we'll have to see how it breaks down later this year when we see a dual core mobile processor from AMD.
Of course the Turion is 64 bit, but if you are a Windows desktop user that doesn't count for much at this point in time.
In particular Jobs was talking about the descendants of the Pentium M - the Core series of processor, which offer excellent performance at lower power consumption. Which is evidenced by the usage of the Core processor in both of Apple's current Intel based products.
The Pentium M came expanded on the Pentium 3's design, rather than going for the "more GHz is better" approach that the Pentium 4 did. It is more efficient than a Pentium 4 of the same clock speed and uses less power.
Well when CoH first launched, there were even less map types, villain types and no "outdoor door missions". So they did add some variety in, as well as adding the trials and new zones/villains.
The biggest problem I have with CoV is that at the start you get missions with a little added flavor in terms of cut scenes and a little mission unique architecture (the last Snake bad guy, the completion of the Ghost Widow story arch) but this stops pretty quickly. I don't think I've seen anything like that since I was about level 10, and my character is at level 32 now. I haven't had time to do the strike forces so I don't know if they are any more interesting than the ones in CoH. Right now for me, CoV is suffering from the "every door mission" syndrome is pretty much the same problem, with a heist thrown in once in awhile to mix things up.
Check out the FAQ. They expect the ship crew complement to be consistent with the series. I wonder how they are going to pull that off.
Ground combat is supposed to be real time.
Some PocketPC PDA applications do this too. They generate the serial number based on the device ID. So if you try to install it on a different PDA, the serial won't work.
Depending on the company, they MIGHT issue you another serial number if you get a new PDA, or they may require you to purchase a new copy for that PDA.
Something Awful did a hilarious (or offensive) piece on just this topic.
Of course it's not really any more offensive than anything else on Something Awful.
The level 50-60 dungeon raids are pretty fun the first few times. I consider them worth doing, as the content is good and you can complete them in about 1.5-2.5 hours (as long as there isn't a major fuckup). The problem is that if you are looking for certain items, you'll need to run them many, many times. Which is totally not worth it. It's annoying and irritating and the reason I stopped playing.
Even at lvl 40, you could run through some fun dungeons. Scarlet Monestary is pretty fun.
I couldn't really care less about the item drops, I just like exploring the dungeons and seeing what they look like.
"After playing EVE online for many months i more or less came to the conclusion that the game pretty much consisted of time-sinks"
I came to this conclusion after playing the two week trial. It seemed like a pretty interesting game, but I could tell that there was no way I would have the time or drive to put into it.
Good thing I had a console system setup next to my computer so I had something to do during the long travel time.
Uh, only two servers have completed the war effort so far. The more general problem has being occuring since the 1.9 patch and has nothing to do with people flooding in to see the world event. Also, no one is going to create a new level one character in order to experience the new content. The new AQ content is strictly for high end level 60 raiding guilds. In the time it took you to lvl up to 60, get geared up, apply and join a raiding guild - the gates would be open on your server. Supposedly the gates will open on all servers two months after the patch, even if the war effort is not completed.
The queues, lag and general bugginess all started to become a problem on my server (Doomhammer) shortly after the 1.9 patch. It may be that players who were only logging on for scheduled guild high end raids (Molten Core etc.) were now logging on to help with the war effort. This could account for the higher number of concurrent players, the increased server load, queues, disconnects and other fun. Doomhammer got so bad that a number of my guildies all rolled new characters on a low population server, so that they would have something to do when Doomhammer was being crapped out.
"To liken this fight to masturbating with a cheese grater is to underestimate the joys of genital shredding, and it was at this point that opinions and criticisms of the expansion began to bubble to the surface like poisonous gas in a swamp of negativity."
Sounds great! Where can I sign up?
"But complete disregard for personal hygiene and diet for a game?"
Yep. That's a problem. The question is, how common is that? What percentage of players end up like that?
I mean look at how destructive alcohol can be. Yet it's still legal. For some people alcohol completely destroys their lives, their health and frequently their family as well.
I don't think the majority of MMO players end up destitute and sickly.
I hear your point, but I don't think everyone that plays WoW ends up being a high end raider.
I play MMOs about 2 hours a night on average, with longer periods on the weekend. I don't watch TV at all and I only watch a couple movies a month. I do read books and probably spend almost the same amount of time reading as I do playing.
The high end raids don't particularly interest me. I find them kind of annoying and way to time consuming in relation to the rewards. After having been level 60 for awhile on WoW I thought it was time to move up to high end raiding, a few ZG runs kind of made me feel that this type of play isn't just for me. I switched games to another MMO where I can have fun as a casual player again. I'm sure when I hit whatever point in the game the time sinks hit hard, I'll move on again.
I love exploring the vast worlds in MMOs, I hate repetitive grinding of the same content.
I guess some people really love the high end game. The organization required, the epic battles. I really don't care to do the same content over and over. I mean I can see doing a dungeon maybe 5 times. To get 6 out of 8 of my tier 0 blue set items I've had to do about 70 raids. I swear I could do UBRS blindfolded.
I think ultimately, the most fun I've had with dungeons in the game is running Dire Maul with a close knit group of 5 friends. I wish there was more content like that in the game. It might keep me playing. As for now I'm pretty bored with the whole thing.
"Many of the items in the war effort have greatly increased in price, when beforehand they had nearly bottomed out."
Yep, because bastards like me see nothing wrong with a little war profiteering. I made about 150G just off a stacks a cloth I had sitting in the bank.
I tried the item turn ins, but hoping for a blue instead of a crappy green wasn't worth it to me.
Considering in the higher end instances you can expect a number of player deaths during each run, I think perma-death would make them virtually impossible.
It is possible to have no deaths, but having good gear helps a lot. Those first runs with mostly green gear?
I would sure hate to be a healer on those raids.
I think if they went with a hardcore server they would have to adjust the raids and probably some of the quests.
Until HD is common in homes you're right - the average gamer is not going to notice that big a difference. Same grainy interlaced display.
If you look at the Xbox 360 on a standard TV it really doesn't look that much better - but on an HDTV it looks very nice and crisp.
Maybe someday I'll be able to afford an HDTV - but not at the current pricing levels.
"e.g. is a "white men can't dance" joke unshowable?"
No, but a "black men can't read" joke is. It's ok to sterotype and make fun of white people no matter what. If you are black you can make fun of black people and stereotypes as well as whites. If you are white you cannot.
It's not just that way for blacks, pretty much the same thing for any minority in the US.
This is called being politically correct.
"well. So who cares if somebody Chinese plays a character who is incidentally Japanese?"
I don't care, you don't care. But take a look at Japanese - Chinese relations over the years and you might get an idea of why it's a problem.
I agree with your point about the acting. Part of which I think comes from them attempting to mimic the acting styles of the old series (Kirk, Spock, McCoy etc.).
Thanks to the wonders of technology, the special effects are in general significantly better than the original series.
The one I overclocked was my Celeron 300a. Which as far I as know still works. It hasn't actually been in a motherboard since I upgraded to the P3 850Mhz.
I find actual CPU failure to rarely be the cause of system failure. At work I don't think I've seen a CPU failure in 5 years. Usually the motherboard blows up. But yeah, we don't overclock at work either.
Nah, this is Slashdot - I'll be modded down into oblivion. Apparently people really enjoy the dozens of pointless "analysis" articles we've been seeing and I anticipate we will continue to see until well after the Revolution and PS3 hit the market.
Honestly, I don't really understand why people care about projected number of sales on these systems. I have an Xbox, a PS2 and a GameCube. The GC gets more play than the others. How can that be? It's the poorest selling of the three, doesn't that mean it sucks?
The point is don't expect MS Word to run twice as fast.
I'm sure apps like Photoshop and Final Cut will take advantage of two processors but I doubt a lot of commonly used non pro apps will.
I'd like to see a benchmark break this down and show multithreaded performance in an application on a Core Duo versus a single G5 iMac.
I hate people like that.
I've had like 1 blue world drop in the entire time I've played the game (one lvl 60, alt at lvl 43).
Hi I'm an industry analyst. My prediction are:
Xbox 360 will drop in price to $35.32 to combat Sony's release of the PS/3 which will incidentally be marketed in the $1.2 million price range. Sony's initial stock of 5 PS/3s for the holiday season 2009 will sell out. The resulting influx of $6 million will exceed all money ever made selling anything Xbox related for any Xbox system ever that was or is to be.
In an effort to get more non-gamers playing Nintendo will release the Revolution in a buy one get one free special pack marketed witht eh slogan "one for you, one for Grandma". It will come with an updated Robby the robot. Corporations such as McDonalds will take advantage of the low cost robotics and replace their entire work force with Robbys. The Revolution controller will be shown to be a cheap ploy by Nintendo to transition to teledildonics.
The CEO of Nintendo will be compelled to commit suicide after a horrifying cosplay scandal involving a certain stain on a sailor moon outfit. The successor will distance Nintendo from video gaming and return the business to it's hana futa card making roots - stating that they want Nintendo's finanacial profile to be more in line with Sony and Microsoft, since profitability is no longer a sign of success.
The Internet, having proven to be a fad, will achieve sentience and then blow itself up by detonating large nuclear devices in every major backbone location across the world. This will have no real impact on Microsoft's Xbox Live, as we all know that nobody really plays on Live anyway. There will however be "the scream heard round the world" as millions of World of Warcraft players are instantly denied their chance to earn phat lewt.
PC gaming will rise from it's current dead status to achieve undeath with titles like Sims 3: Get a Life! shambling about Wal Mart screaming "braaaaaaainnsssss".
Please adjust your stock portfolios accordingly.