Creative hasn't innovated since it entered the PCI sound card market by buying out Ensoniq over a decade ago and selling their products with the Creative label on them. They exchange finger-pointing with motherboard chipset developers when hardware compatibility problems arise, instead of working together to improve their products. Their drivers are *horrible* bloated messes that cause system instability.
Creative survives through two broad things: Acquisition and marketing. They buy or force any serious competitors out of the market. They market products through brand placement in games and game packaging. They strong-arm developers into including EAX support in their games so that gamers can be more easily convinced to buy their products, exactly the way 3dfx did with Glide.
Creative is coasting along on brand name recognition. Ensoniq's PCI sound cards threatened this and Creative bought them out. Aureal threatened this with their 3D sound hardware and Creative litigated them into bankruptcy. nVidia's SoundStorm eroded this with its hardware OpenAL support and real-time AC3 encoding, and Creative put an end to it from multiple directions (e.g., buying out Sensaura, and "adopting" OpenAL and filling it with EAX hooks).
Now on-board sound has evolved to the point where it is for all intents and purposes on-par with most PCI sound cards, so most users have no need for an add-on card. Creative's competitors in the PCI sound card add-on market are now maturing with cards that support the real-time AC3/DTS encoding first introduced by nVidia - something Creative has tried to ignore because they can't buy out Dolby and don't want to pay royalties (they even went so far as to use a retarded proprietary triple-SPDIF connection for 5.1 digital connections between their cards and their Creative-branded speakers).
I haven't bought a Creative product this millennium and I don't regret it one bit. I still watch the market though because things are starting to get interesting.
A government can arrest you, imprison you, and even kill you. Governments all around the world are waging wars, rounding people up, and torturing them. What business can do that?
My post was meant as a smartass remark, but I think your explanation is probably the right one. Technically, though, it's still only 3 axes (X, Y, Z); "rotational axes" in your comment refers to rotation around X/Y/Z, while "regular axes" refers to linear movement along X/Y/Z.
What's suspicious is the summary says "linear movement" along 6 axes. This could be construed to mean rotation movement is not tracked.
The Genesis version of Shadowrun was made by a developer called BlueSky and was published by SEGA, so it should be feasible to re-publish unless Microsoft has control over titles produced before they acquired the rights to the franchise.
At any rate, it would be make-or-break for me for any Genesis collection.
Oh well, at least it has Phantasy Star 4, which they didn't manage to port to the GBA to go with the first 3 for some reason (they could have at least released it on its own cart).
Or maybe this can't happen in the U.S. at all. Maybe there's some quiet deal where large ISPs can simply back their data up on blade servers in Langley...
More likely the gov't intercepts and archives them independently, and doesn't grant even the ISPs access. If it happened in the U.S., some gov't employee would be reading those 12GB of unread emails right now and saying to himself "oh man, john137@hotmail.com is going to be realllly pissed when he finds out they shipped his Viagra to the wrong address!"
More likely MS will start hiring old people to sit at the doors of all their offices so that nobody will dare file an antitrust lawsuit against them (think of the old people that would end up out on the street!)
I'd quit trying to squeeze money out of both ends of the entertainment industry by buying off lawmakers in a feeble to sustain my viability as a middle-man dealing in an obsolete medium, and I'd get a real job.
A related aspect of modern games frustrates me even more: hand-holding. It seems like the vast majority of new games (especially console games) force you to play through a less-than-fully-interactive tutorial section of the game before letting you get to the meat of it. To make things worse, immersion is often broken when in-game characters tell you to "press the square button" to do something.
The best games are those which throw you into the midst of things and let you figure out how to play (if the game is too complex to be learned in this fashion - especially if it's a console game - then the control scheme is probably overly-complex). Usually this means that the beginning areas of the game are a bit more forgiving (think of the early levels of the original Starcraft/Warcraft, Fallout, or Doom games). Killing rats for the first 30 minutes is fine, but having to read/listen to a whole bunch of instructions on how to play, followed by being allowed only a single action before again being given instruction is annoying. I've found it particularly hard to immerse myself in Japanese tactical RPGs for this reason - the only ones I have ever enjoyed are Shining Force 1 and 2 on the Sega Genesis.
I know what you mean. I'm trying to set up a cluster of web servers on every subatomic particle in my body, and while I haven't run out of IPv6 addresses yet, I'm also not getting any thinner these days...
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Creative hasn't innovated since it entered the PCI sound card market by buying out Ensoniq over a decade ago and selling their products with the Creative label on them. They exchange finger-pointing with motherboard chipset developers when hardware compatibility problems arise, instead of working together to improve their products. Their drivers are *horrible* bloated messes that cause system instability.
Creative survives through two broad things: Acquisition and marketing. They buy or force any serious competitors out of the market. They market products through brand placement in games and game packaging. They strong-arm developers into including EAX support in their games so that gamers can be more easily convinced to buy their products, exactly the way 3dfx did with Glide.
Creative is coasting along on brand name recognition. Ensoniq's PCI sound cards threatened this and Creative bought them out. Aureal threatened this with their 3D sound hardware and Creative litigated them into bankruptcy. nVidia's SoundStorm eroded this with its hardware OpenAL support and real-time AC3 encoding, and Creative put an end to it from multiple directions (e.g., buying out Sensaura, and "adopting" OpenAL and filling it with EAX hooks).
Now on-board sound has evolved to the point where it is for all intents and purposes on-par with most PCI sound cards, so most users have no need for an add-on card. Creative's competitors in the PCI sound card add-on market are now maturing with cards that support the real-time AC3/DTS encoding first introduced by nVidia - something Creative has tried to ignore because they can't buy out Dolby and don't want to pay royalties (they even went so far as to use a retarded proprietary triple-SPDIF connection for 5.1 digital connections between their cards and their Creative-branded speakers).
I haven't bought a Creative product this millennium and I don't regret it one bit. I still watch the market though because things are starting to get interesting.
Hence the phrase "defective by design"
http://defectivebydesign.org/
De Beers.
Why the heck didn't they use Gatorade instead of water?
I think we should start calling it BetaRay, as it looks like Sony is fumbling yet another proprietary audio/video storage medium.
My favorite parody is the one by MADtv:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F7TMlrDXtw
Woot! I was already boycotting Sony and didn't even know it.
My post was meant as a smartass remark, but I think your explanation is probably the right one. Technically, though, it's still only 3 axes (X, Y, Z); "rotational axes" in your comment refers to rotation around X/Y/Z, while "regular axes" refers to linear movement along X/Y/Z.
What's suspicious is the summary says "linear movement" along 6 axes. This could be construed to mean rotation movement is not tracked.
Linear motion along six axes? Height, Depth, Width, Time and what are the other two?
The next expert mind will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and get it early!
http://www.mobygames.com/game/genesis/shadowrun
The Genesis version of Shadowrun was made by a developer called BlueSky and was published by SEGA, so it should be feasible to re-publish unless Microsoft has control over titles produced before they acquired the rights to the franchise.
At any rate, it would be make-or-break for me for any Genesis collection.
Oh well, at least it has Phantasy Star 4, which they didn't manage to port to the GBA to go with the first 3 for some reason (they could have at least released it on its own cart).
My God, it's full of stars!
More likely the gov't intercepts and archives them independently, and doesn't grant even the ISPs access. If it happened in the U.S., some gov't employee would be reading those 12GB of unread emails right now and saying to himself "oh man, john137@hotmail.com is going to be realllly pissed when he finds out they shipped his Viagra to the wrong address!"
Screenshots or it didn't happen.
If it's only using 10% of a 400mbps link, that would be 40mbps. How is that faster than a 100mbit ethernet link?
Our shields are dropping!
Where's the override? THE OVERRIDE?!
I heard the pre-launch details were a little thin.
More likely MS will start hiring old people to sit at the doors of all their offices so that nobody will dare file an antitrust lawsuit against them (think of the old people that would end up out on the street!)
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/82/82ntexxon.phtml
I'd quit trying to squeeze money out of both ends of the entertainment industry by buying off lawmakers in a feeble to sustain my viability as a middle-man dealing in an obsolete medium, and I'd get a real job.
He's just getting started!
I would have rolled my eyes if anyone else had posted that
Finally, we will be able to expand ourselves beyond our meager 2D existence and explore this new, third dimension that we have discovered!
Onion may have no basic taste, but it certainly does have a flavor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavour).
A related aspect of modern games frustrates me even more: hand-holding. It seems like the vast majority of new games (especially console games) force you to play through a less-than-fully-interactive tutorial section of the game before letting you get to the meat of it. To make things worse, immersion is often broken when in-game characters tell you to "press the square button" to do something.
The best games are those which throw you into the midst of things and let you figure out how to play (if the game is too complex to be learned in this fashion - especially if it's a console game - then the control scheme is probably overly-complex). Usually this means that the beginning areas of the game are a bit more forgiving (think of the early levels of the original Starcraft/Warcraft, Fallout, or Doom games). Killing rats for the first 30 minutes is fine, but having to read/listen to a whole bunch of instructions on how to play, followed by being allowed only a single action before again being given instruction is annoying. I've found it particularly hard to immerse myself in Japanese tactical RPGs for this reason - the only ones I have ever enjoyed are Shining Force 1 and 2 on the Sega Genesis.
I know what you mean. I'm trying to set up a cluster of web servers on every subatomic particle in my body, and while I haven't run out of IPv6 addresses yet, I'm also not getting any thinner these days...