Quite honestly, Prince of Persia isn't as highly anticipated as Spore, GTA IV or a whole bunch of other games. Regardless of critical reception, it's a sequel, of a sequel, of a sequel that's gone on long enough they're re-using the original-original name. =P
Ubisoft may have put in a AAA effort (well, AA, since it's the Assassin's Creed engine already developed, right?), but it doesn't come across to me as an AAA title.
Now if they'd go DRM free on all their games for an entire quarter, or even a full year, then they'd have a real measure of the difference.
Instead they pick one game that isn't likely to appeal to the PC gamer segment (single-player strongly-console-like game in particular).
I'm not sure when the reviewers and manufacturers will get the popularity of netbooks. There are a minimum set of features (which almost all of them have) but after that there are only three important points: price, size / weight and battery life.
The review sites seem to spend so much time worrying about the bells and whistles that they're accustomed to with bigger laptops, but these come at a compromise of the most important aspects.
By my definition, this makes Richard Garriott the most sane man on the planet, literally by escaping it for a short time.
For years, I've been baffled by the rat race millionaires and billionaires who seem to do nothing with their copious amounts of cash than collect more of it. It isn't sane IMHO unless you do something big and spectacular with that amount of excess. At most, some of them retire and give a portion to charity (not bad per se, but even then watch them coldly calculate how they dole it out).
Richard Garriott isn't super rich on a gigantic scale compared to some, but he's always done stuff that others may define as eccentric. Seriously tho, he's more sane than the rest of that upper margin.
Seriously, if Publishers want no used games sold in place of new ones, they could simply insist that they sell them only with distributors of new games. If they all did this, Gamestop / EB would have to make the choice to stop acting like crummy pawnshops.
Sooner or later it won't matter anyway, digital distribution and all. Frankly, as a customer, I'm tired of lame selection of new games on the shelf while the used shelves are full of overpriced resales.
Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper-- these were all truly amazing games for their time, although if you speak with Peter Molyneux, he will say of his own games (these included) that he wished he could have made them more 'complete'.
PowerMonger is easily on my list of best games of all time, although the versions many saw (Sega Genesis port? ugh) weren't as impressive as the Amiga original. I only wish it could be remade, since the low resolution it was locked into is hard to tolerate now.
I've also spoken with Peter Molyneux directly on several occasions at E3. He's charming and charismatic, his love for games comes across strongly and it shows as he's quick to excitedly talking about them.
Whatever people feel like complaining about as far as overhype is concerned, if people like Peter Molyneux didn't do what they did, we'd have a lot less exciting games in the first place and a lot more corporate-pushed boredom.
But hey, this is the Slashdot crowd right? Always eager to roast someone.
At this point, considering the approach, I strongly suspect that Microsoft is less interested in purchasing Yahoo! as they are in just removing Yahoo! from the field.
This sort of corporate business makes me weep for our entire culture. =/
I tried switching to Ubuntu this year too and my results were different.
I was entirely unproductive in achieving any entertainment with games. WINE was a lot of work to get things playing and even then they didn't quite play correctly. Steam was a pain in the arse, so was WoW. I didn't even bother trying once Age of Conan came along.
On other applications, things were generally fine, I've kept Ubuntu running on basically a glorified Gmail + browsing box. I've also got a Mythbuntu PVR running. I still use BSD and Linux in server situations.
But for desktop, for me at least, if it's inconvenient for games, regardless over whether Microsoft is an evil empire or not.. it's just a no go as a Desktop OS. Games are what separate it, otherwise it's just a browser box and I can do that without a desktop at all.
Maybe other folks get more mileage out of Gimp vs Photoshop, though I doubt that too unfortunately, My take on Linux after all these years is still that the desktop experience unfortunately lacks.
Wishful thinking isn't cutting it. I wish it would.. er, okay now that's just going in circles.
I'm glad this was filed under entertainment, but it seems a bunch have been fooled into thinking it was meant to be scientific. Maybe that was the true IQ test?
Anyone that worries too much about the cost a good GPU adds to the price of a PC, doesn't remember much what it was like when Intel was the only serious player in the CPU market.
This kind of future, to me, spells higher bang for the buck.
I've always had the impression that Steve Jobs has a great disdain for games and the games industry.
I don't know if it was backlash from his short stint at Atari or what, but he's never once treated games as any sort of priority for Apple. I really doubt that even their earlier systems would have much for games if it wasn't for Woz.
Jobs' comments when asked are usually to the effect that games are just a sideproduct, something that comes along, as if they were automatically lesser than other software and that they'll just pop up on their own, without much API or hardware support for them.
Sure they'll jump on it as a potential source of extra revenue and popularity for the iPhone, I'm sure hardware designed for videos and web should be able to play something.
But I'm gonna take a Gabe Newell stance on this one: I don't think Apple understands games and the games industry at all.
I still find it so odd that much of the media tries so hard to categorize everything as Left or Right, Liberal or Conservative, Democrat or Republican. It's like the U.S. situation of two party politics is trying to infect the rest of the world.
The world just isn't about two shades of grey, that's just some kind of fantasyland.
Motorola still sells more RAZR handsets than the iPhone. The problems are with the executives inability to turn unit sales and revenue into net profit, plus a perceived (likely accurate) lack of vision for the future of all of the pies they have their fingers dipped into.
As soon as losses were reported this year, the stock started its downward spiral. Although frankly, this also reflects modern business that caters to stock more than sustainability (or the comfort of resting on your past success), where any company is only as good as their latest quarter.
It's certainly not the first time a tech company was mismanaged into the ground despite a healthy position in the market.
This is just silly, the claim was that the Apple II was the first mass-market personal computer envisioned not as a business or hobbyist computer. That's the supposed revolution. Then the claim migrates into a contradictory first small business computer. Then it's a debate over which computer can count their simultaneous unveilings at the same hobby computer faire as their release, when neither made it to real honest-to-goodness store shelves before the TRS-80 anyway.
Now it's discount a host of other computers that actually sold mass-market, by opinion of their lack of serious business capabilities. That's not a winning argument either, I'm not even going to start.
There are so many disclaimers to the original claim, it's absurd.
Three computers were sold in 1977, only ONE of them sold quantities that could be considered even close to mass-market and a host of other computers followed and sold much better. None of them were the first microcomputers. How this is supposedly a revolution from one single company is an awfully big stretch.
You developed software in the 80's, I get it. The difference is you're searching to cement some sort of revolutionary relevance on the heels of someone who tried to do the same thing by claiming they invented the GUI and PC. Of course they had an impact, they're still here aren't they?
Let me save you another reply: There was lots good going for the Apple II without making things up.
This jumping back and forth with counter-claim first stuff is silly, debatable into infinity so long as people keep coming up with more secondary rhetoric "firsts" that depend less and less on facts or evidence. First it's the GUI first, debunked, then it just keeps going because the fan fuel won't let it stop.
If you want to celebrate the Apple II, celebrate it like it was, the longevity of Apple with a business model of higher profit margins and the good 'ole underdog story of the small company that outlasted the bigwigs.
Just please stop with the claims that it was more popular / revolutionary in segment A, segment B, etc. etc. That's the kind of fan-glazing that the article above was written for.
I bought an iPhone but not before looking carefully at the alternatives at hand, even Windows Mobile devices when I do not care for Windows Mobile. But, at least *I* had the strength of will to look at them. You are taking a lazy path that eventually leads to lack of intellectual rigor in other areas of your life. Frankly, the iPhone's WiFi makes it the most viable choice for a phone if I wanted to browse with my phone. I don't have a strong need for that personally, but it's Apple's most tempting product to me since the Newton.
It's easy to make assumptions on one sentence or two, isn't it? Feel free to throw more insults on the fire, I'm not bashing Apple or even their general user base, it's that segment of nutcases that creep me out.
the Apple II actually shipped earlier in June compared to the PET's October Cute rewriting, but check your facts, both units were at the West Coast Computer Faire in June, but which one actually shipped to retail first, or even pre-ordered customers? Apple was backordered for months, I should know, my parents gave up on their order. How selling a tiny handful becomes "widely accepted" is a gross exaggeration that only keeps going on the backs of fans who never saw these machines firsthand.
Commodore introduced the Vic-20 in 1980 but it was relatively underpowered. Relative, sure. But it sold a million units within the first year, something Apple didn't do for the first 6 years.
I'm not saying the Apple II didn't do well, it had a better profit margin and who was left standing after the 80's, right? But you cannot have your cake too. It was not the first personal computer, nor the most popular, nor even some secondary word-wrapping claim like "first accepted". It just wasn't. Small business? That's a pretty tiny window and strongly competed with by Texas Instruments / Tandy at the time and also a squashed market once IBM came into it.
That was answered in my original post: "The first personal computer widely accepted by individuals and small businesses was the Apple II." That statement is just rhetoric though, because it's not consistent with the facts.
The Apple II sold only moderately until the IIe, which wasn't until 1983. Between the three computers launched in 1977, the TRS-80 sold in significantly larger numbers than the Apple II, was less than half the cost and was actually sold in retail stores across North America. By the time the Apple II was in stores, the Vic 20 had been the first computer to sell a million units.
So it was neither the first to sell, nor the first to sell well. How is that the first to be widely accepted exactly?
What it had was longevity, eventually selling 5 million across a score of different models well into the 90's. Even by summing them up like that across two decades their sales were dwarfed by the C=64's 30+ million.
Feel free to call me a zealot for sticking to the actual stats. Have I stated a single preference for a favoured system? Nope, just going by what was commonplace then and statistical now.
The difference was that Apple saw the computer as being for the ordinary person, not just the hobbyist or the corporation. If you really want to throw that label around, put it on Commodore, because the PET was marketed as a "home" computer and certainly came before the Apple II. Even once they did ship, Apple still sold through hobby newsletters for a few years before they could get their machines in stores. If you weren't in a hobby club, you had no clue what an Apple was, but every RadioShack was pimping the TRS-80.
It's hardly history worth debating though, more of a footnote, because none of them gained mass market in serious quantities until the Atari 400 and Vic 20.
These make-believe imaginings that Apple invented some kind of revolution for ordinary people are an absurd fairytale. Leave that to the Mac if you like, but that's pretty silly too if you think about it. Sticking to the facts is better than these captured-the-imagination latitudes.
So tell me - why did all those hobbyist companies never get anywhere, but Apple succeeded, if they were doing the exact same thing as Apple? Hell, even Microsoft succeeded by being different to those guys. Sorry, I don't see this magical difference from their peers at Commodore, Texas Instruments, Sinclair, etc.. All of those companies did better at the time than Apple. If you want to make a claim, it would be outlasting them. As for Microsoft being any different back then? I'm not sure that selling BASIC really qualifies for the category.
I didn't realize that Think Differently was such a powerful slogan that it affects history.
The Apple II was not perfection or a wonderous machine by any stretch, any of us that used one can tell you that. What was so greatly unique about it that the PET or TRS-80 or homebuilt machine didn't have? Was it the delightfully quaint monochrome screen, or the problematic floppy drives? Perhaps it was the quirky BASIC? I know, I know, it's because they kept churning them out well into the 90's.
Somewhere within the cute stories of the little company started in a garage, you got brainwashed into thinking that being moderately successful made Apple into a god.
That'd be a hoot, let's fill every encyclopedia with "they did things differently". Real solid historical stuff.
Why would reviewing a product, for the pros or cons, be taken personally or as trolling though?
I don't see cries of sacrilege when I post a gripe that SoundBlaster hasn't made suitable Linux drivers for my X-Fi card, or that I give a thumbs down to Belkin keyboards. The very concept that stating likes / dislikes of Apple products should be conceived as trolling rather proves the point that this stuff is taken way too seriously.
Joe: I can't stand it when soldiers march. Fred: I like to march up and down the street. Joe: Didn't I just say that was annoying? Fred: But it proves that marching isn't annoying because I'm not a soldier!
Congrats for taking the side example and trying to make it the point. And then use um, Steve Balmer to make your point? Guess who you just resembled?
Slashdot Mirror
Quite honestly, Prince of Persia isn't as highly anticipated as Spore, GTA IV or a whole bunch of other games. Regardless of critical reception, it's a sequel, of a sequel, of a sequel that's gone on long enough they're re-using the original-original name. =P
Ubisoft may have put in a AAA effort (well, AA, since it's the Assassin's Creed engine already developed, right?), but it doesn't come across to me as an AAA title.
Now if they'd go DRM free on all their games for an entire quarter, or even a full year, then they'd have a real measure of the difference.
Instead they pick one game that isn't likely to appeal to the PC gamer segment (single-player strongly-console-like game in particular).
I'm not sure when the reviewers and manufacturers will get the popularity of netbooks. There are a minimum set of features (which almost all of them have) but after that there are only three important points: price, size / weight and battery life.
The review sites seem to spend so much time worrying about the bells and whistles that they're accustomed to with bigger laptops, but these come at a compromise of the most important aspects.
By my definition, this makes Richard Garriott the most sane man on the planet, literally by escaping it for a short time.
For years, I've been baffled by the rat race millionaires and billionaires who seem to do nothing with their copious amounts of cash than collect more of it. It isn't sane IMHO unless you do something big and spectacular with that amount of excess. At most, some of them retire and give a portion to charity (not bad per se, but even then watch them coldly calculate how they dole it out).
Richard Garriott isn't super rich on a gigantic scale compared to some, but he's always done stuff that others may define as eccentric. Seriously tho, he's more sane than the rest of that upper margin.
Kudos to him.
Seriously, if Publishers want no used games sold in place of new ones, they could simply insist that they sell them only with distributors of new games. If they all did this, Gamestop / EB would have to make the choice to stop acting like crummy pawnshops.
Sooner or later it won't matter anyway, digital distribution and all. Frankly, as a customer, I'm tired of lame selection of new games on the shelf while the used shelves are full of overpriced resales.
I enjoyed Black & White. Fable was okay.
Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper-- these were all truly amazing games for their time, although if you speak with Peter Molyneux, he will say of his own games (these included) that he wished he could have made them more 'complete'.
PowerMonger is easily on my list of best games of all time, although the versions many saw (Sega Genesis port? ugh) weren't as impressive as the Amiga original. I only wish it could be remade, since the low resolution it was locked into is hard to tolerate now.
I've also spoken with Peter Molyneux directly on several occasions at E3. He's charming and charismatic, his love for games comes across strongly and it shows as he's quick to excitedly talking about them.
Whatever people feel like complaining about as far as overhype is concerned, if people like Peter Molyneux didn't do what they did, we'd have a lot less exciting games in the first place and a lot more corporate-pushed boredom.
But hey, this is the Slashdot crowd right? Always eager to roast someone.
Smaller = better to a whole lot of folks. If I'm going small, 13" is too big.
Different markets.
I prefer the earlier 7" models.
At this point, considering the approach, I strongly suspect that Microsoft is less interested in purchasing Yahoo! as they are in just removing Yahoo! from the field.
This sort of corporate business makes me weep for our entire culture. =/
I guess they can do more than just throw chairs around.
Either way, if they do, it still amounts to a temper-tantrum.
When consoles have the games I want, then I'll play more on the consoles I own. Meanwhile, they collect dust while I play the MMORPGs of my choice.
A PS2? Are you in an 8 year time warp or something?
I tried switching to Ubuntu this year too and my results were different.
I was entirely unproductive in achieving any entertainment with games. WINE was a lot of work to get things playing and even then they didn't quite play correctly. Steam was a pain in the arse, so was WoW. I didn't even bother trying once Age of Conan came along.
On other applications, things were generally fine, I've kept Ubuntu running on basically a glorified Gmail + browsing box. I've also got a Mythbuntu PVR running. I still use BSD and Linux in server situations.
But for desktop, for me at least, if it's inconvenient for games, regardless over whether Microsoft is an evil empire or not.. it's just a no go as a Desktop OS. Games are what separate it, otherwise it's just a browser box and I can do that without a desktop at all.
Maybe other folks get more mileage out of Gimp vs Photoshop, though I doubt that too unfortunately, My take on Linux after all these years is still that the desktop experience unfortunately lacks.
Wishful thinking isn't cutting it. I wish it would.. er, okay now that's just going in circles.
I'm glad this was filed under entertainment, but it seems a bunch have been fooled into thinking it was meant to be scientific. Maybe that was the true IQ test?
I'm all for it.
The more competition the better.
Anyone that worries too much about the cost a good GPU adds to the price of a PC, doesn't remember much what it was like when Intel was the only serious player in the CPU market.
This kind of future, to me, spells higher bang for the buck.
"Yay my theory has internal consistency." =P
I've always had the impression that Steve Jobs has a great disdain for games and the games industry.
I don't know if it was backlash from his short stint at Atari or what, but he's never once treated games as any sort of priority for Apple. I really doubt that even their earlier systems would have much for games if it wasn't for Woz.
Jobs' comments when asked are usually to the effect that games are just a sideproduct, something that comes along, as if they were automatically lesser than other software and that they'll just pop up on their own, without much API or hardware support for them.
Sure they'll jump on it as a potential source of extra revenue and popularity for the iPhone, I'm sure hardware designed for videos and web should be able to play something.
But I'm gonna take a Gabe Newell stance on this one: I don't think Apple understands games and the games industry at all.
~shrug~
I still find it so odd that much of the media tries so hard to categorize everything as Left or Right, Liberal or Conservative, Democrat or Republican. It's like the U.S. situation of two party politics is trying to infect the rest of the world.
The world just isn't about two shades of grey, that's just some kind of fantasyland.
Motorola still sells more RAZR handsets than the iPhone. The problems are with the executives inability to turn unit sales and revenue into net profit, plus a perceived (likely accurate) lack of vision for the future of all of the pies they have their fingers dipped into.
As soon as losses were reported this year, the stock started its downward spiral. Although frankly, this also reflects modern business that caters to stock more than sustainability (or the comfort of resting on your past success), where any company is only as good as their latest quarter.
It's certainly not the first time a tech company was mismanaged into the ground despite a healthy position in the market.
This is just silly, the claim was that the Apple II was the first mass-market personal computer envisioned not as a business or hobbyist computer. That's the supposed revolution. Then the claim migrates into a contradictory first small business computer. Then it's a debate over which computer can count their simultaneous unveilings at the same hobby computer faire as their release, when neither made it to real honest-to-goodness store shelves before the TRS-80 anyway.
Now it's discount a host of other computers that actually sold mass-market, by opinion of their lack of serious business capabilities. That's not a winning argument either, I'm not even going to start.
There are so many disclaimers to the original claim, it's absurd.
Three computers were sold in 1977, only ONE of them sold quantities that could be considered even close to mass-market and a host of other computers followed and sold much better. None of them were the first microcomputers. How this is supposedly a revolution from one single company is an awfully big stretch.
You developed software in the 80's, I get it. The difference is you're searching to cement some sort of revolutionary relevance on the heels of someone who tried to do the same thing by claiming they invented the GUI and PC. Of course they had an impact, they're still here aren't they?
Let me save you another reply: There was lots good going for the Apple II without making things up.
This jumping back and forth with counter-claim first stuff is silly, debatable into infinity so long as people keep coming up with more secondary rhetoric "firsts" that depend less and less on facts or evidence. First it's the GUI first, debunked, then it just keeps going because the fan fuel won't let it stop.
If you want to celebrate the Apple II, celebrate it like it was, the longevity of Apple with a business model of higher profit margins and the good 'ole underdog story of the small company that outlasted the bigwigs.
Just please stop with the claims that it was more popular / revolutionary in segment A, segment B, etc. etc. That's the kind of fan-glazing that the article above was written for.
It's easy to make assumptions on one sentence or two, isn't it? Feel free to throw more insults on the fire, I'm not bashing Apple or even their general user base, it's that segment of nutcases that creep me out.
I'm not saying the Apple II didn't do well, it had a better profit margin and who was left standing after the 80's, right? But you cannot have your cake too. It was not the first personal computer, nor the most popular, nor even some secondary word-wrapping claim like "first accepted". It just wasn't. Small business? That's a pretty tiny window and strongly competed with by Texas Instruments / Tandy at the time and also a squashed market once IBM came into it.
The Apple II sold only moderately until the IIe, which wasn't until 1983. Between the three computers launched in 1977, the TRS-80 sold in significantly larger numbers than the Apple II, was less than half the cost and was actually sold in retail stores across North America. By the time the Apple II was in stores, the Vic 20 had been the first computer to sell a million units.
So it was neither the first to sell, nor the first to sell well. How is that the first to be widely accepted exactly?
What it had was longevity, eventually selling 5 million across a score of different models well into the 90's. Even by summing them up like that across two decades their sales were dwarfed by the C=64's 30+ million.
Feel free to call me a zealot for sticking to the actual stats. Have I stated a single preference for a favoured system? Nope, just going by what was commonplace then and statistical now.
It's hardly history worth debating though, more of a footnote, because none of them gained mass market in serious quantities until the Atari 400 and Vic 20.
These make-believe imaginings that Apple invented some kind of revolution for ordinary people are an absurd fairytale. Leave that to the Mac if you like, but that's pretty silly too if you think about it. Sticking to the facts is better than these captured-the-imagination latitudes. So tell me - why did all those hobbyist companies never get anywhere, but Apple succeeded, if they were doing the exact same thing as Apple? Hell, even Microsoft succeeded by being different to those guys. Sorry, I don't see this magical difference from their peers at Commodore, Texas Instruments, Sinclair, etc.. All of those companies did better at the time than Apple. If you want to make a claim, it would be outlasting them. As for Microsoft being any different back then? I'm not sure that selling BASIC really qualifies for the category.
I didn't realize that Think Differently was such a powerful slogan that it affects history.
The Apple II was not perfection or a wonderous machine by any stretch, any of us that used one can tell you that. What was so greatly unique about it that the PET or TRS-80 or homebuilt machine didn't have? Was it the delightfully quaint monochrome screen, or the problematic floppy drives? Perhaps it was the quirky BASIC? I know, I know, it's because they kept churning them out well into the 90's.
Somewhere within the cute stories of the little company started in a garage, you got brainwashed into thinking that being moderately successful made Apple into a god.
That'd be a hoot, let's fill every encyclopedia with "they did things differently". Real solid historical stuff.
Why would reviewing a product, for the pros or cons, be taken personally or as trolling though?
I don't see cries of sacrilege when I post a gripe that SoundBlaster hasn't made suitable Linux drivers for my X-Fi card, or that I give a thumbs down to Belkin keyboards. The very concept that stating likes / dislikes of Apple products should be conceived as trolling rather proves the point that this stuff is taken way too seriously.
*facepalm*
Joe: I can't stand it when soldiers march.
Fred: I like to march up and down the street.
Joe: Didn't I just say that was annoying?
Fred: But it proves that marching isn't annoying because I'm not a soldier!
Congrats for taking the side example and trying to make it the point. And then use um, Steve Balmer to make your point? Guess who you just resembled?