I'm suprised people are still blah blahing about how the 360 and the PS3's price are accceptable when the Wii is clearly demolishing both of them.
Sure for some people the 360 isn't too much but it's at that point where people really have to think about it before they'll get it.
The Wii on the other hand is almost cheap enough to be an impulse buy. If the 360 can pull off some real japanese RPG's to get some actual sales in japan it might not bust. The PS3 though is doomed though if their exclusve titles don't save it.
Almost no one goes to the store to specifically buy (or not buy) a game from EA or any other developer.
No offense but that's obviously false. A few companies like Blizzard and Bioware can get a lot of people to show up to buy a game just because they made it. People give them the benefit of the doubt.
I'll agree EA never had such a status to "lose" though.
There is a lot of alternative sources of energy, such as solar energy, tidal waves, geothermal, etc. An investment of that scale would benefit any of them tremendously.
This is why enviromentalists get ignored. Among those energy sources tidal and geothermal in no way can ever be tapped far enough to serve as a replacement for our current -still quickly growing- energy needs. If we had viable launch capability solar sat's could be built for power but we both know how likely developing that is.
Beyond that though only fission and fusion will work. This isn't some sort of choice we can make. We either figure this out or use fission. You can't just take human civilization and hit the sleep button to go into lower power mode or some nonsense.
Twelve billion is chump change compared to the payoff here.
If what you said were true about ANY culture it would be wrong. It's not a "mistake" to force well established "notions" of freedom (specifically freedom) on another culture that has it's own notions of such. Cultures are not free to just do whatever they feel like just because the majority agrees.
Your attempt to be "culturally open" in this example ignores the fact that someone who likes to chew gum isn't doing anything wrong and is having his right to do so taken away simply because other people might spit it out on a sidewalk. If that society agrees that spitting gum on the sidewalk is just too unacceptable the only proper way to stop it is too inflict an extreme harsh penalty on the act of spitting gum.
I find this merger kind of odd. The CCP angle for selling EvE as a board game makes good sense. White Wolf does indeed seem to have a theme going for it that fits in with EvE's lore (which sadly for me means it just sucks).
What I don't get though is the reverse. CCP has experience with building an MMO true but in terms of building good game clients CCP has only ever touched the space genre. I'll fully agree CCP has great artistic vision going on but rendering space takes a few less polygons than rendering some grass.
I personally doubt they have the technical know-how to create the software that would be required for one of White Wolf's games without a significant learning period. It's too much of an apples and oranges thing.
The brand name doesn't mean much. Probably the only people who buy a console on brand are the early adopters. People who get a console at release with no real way of knowing whether or not it's going to flop.
Unlike other industries though these people don't give any kind of indication of whether or not things will go well. Most of the great games that will really sell consoles are halfway into development by the time release comes out and they'll be released even if the initial sales are bad. If those games are good enough the second wave will show up and make or break the console. It's always been this way and it always will be. The only thing questionable this time is whether or not good games can overcome the huge price barrier of the PS3.
How do you know he wasn't using the word "peaked" more literally? He probably wouldn't be the first apple fan to pitch a tent over upcoming products I bet!
All the money we are going to spend on militarizing space could have been spent exploring space. But we're afraid that somebody else (who exactly?) will go and militarize space first, leaving us vulnerable.
Considering NASA's complete incompetence in creating technology to explore space with over the last few decades I'd have to say your argument is falling on deaf ears here. If the US wants to militarize space they are going to have to figure out how to get up there a bit more cheaply. Achieving that would advance exploration of space far more than anything NASA is trying to do.
There are other obvious problems with this new season's shows. Apparently they got tired of spending so much money on computer graphics, so almost all of the new shows are set in a muddy field, with some tents and some junk. It's turned into a freaking soap opera about mommies and babies. Fuck that shit, I want to see some nuclear explosions in space!
You mean it got even worse? I stopped watching the show pretty quickly because I was disgusted by them constantly doing stupid stuff like that. It seemed apparent from the start to me that the sci fi aspects of the show were going to be mostly plot devices and they'd avoid battlestars real subject matter. The whole "human" psylon thing to avoid the cost of fancy robot graphics was the clincher in the end for me.
It's getting a bit tiresome listening to these kinds of things. X will happen some mindbogglingly long time from now and "oh my god the horror". Every single one of the models of prediction seem to completely ignore the possibility of what humans will learn and do in such a massive time frame.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that even a thousand years from now (let alone 100,000) we will probably be to the point where parents wouldn't dare let their precious children be born stupid and ugly. Even tossing aside the touchy issue of genetics a lot of normal medical science will probably fix a lot of genetic "problems" that people have by anticipating the problems cause and altering it somehow. Plastic surgeons will probably advance their craft so far that the form of a human will have almost nothing to do with his genetic code anymore.
The industry is stagnating. 99% of games released these days are rehashes of old games that don't even bother to try and add a new twist or anything. Why would any gamer want to buy the same game they already own but with a different title?
I'm going to say this is pretty much BS from where I'm sitting. It might be true for certain genres like FPS's and whatever genre console action games fit into. But for the rest of us I think we're starving for a bit of "rehasing" and "same ol same ol". I'm interested in RPG's myself mostly and I would love if they'd just take a bunch of old games and completely copy them then release with a bunch of fancy graphics that you seem to hate.
Im starving here with practically nothing to play but japanese style RPG's for consoles. Those are ok but they get boring pretty fast. We're coming up on the biggest season of the year and theres only ONE real rpg coming out (nwn2) and that's IT.
I can only imagine how the poor adventure gamers feel at this point.
That, and everything is either humungous (40"+) or small (20" LCD screens). I can't put the first set in my house, and I can't view the smaller ones. I'm sure they're out there, but where's the 27"-32" screens?
This has been my problem as well. The truth is you can probably find any size of HDTV you want but if you are shopping for something inbetween $300 and $4000 you are going to get poor value for your money.
People quote cheap HDTV's but they are usually talking about tiny 17" inch sets that nobody really wants.
I can maybe afford a PS3 and games but I can't afford a PS3 and a 800 dollar HDTV set on top of it.
PC Gaming is dead though apparently. People are getting tired of spending a massive 200~300 dollars a year to keep their PC's in the mid level range required to play all games!
Great. So now even the exploration of space has been redefined as a national security issue. Cue fat budgets for space lasers, Son of Star Wars and other such nonsense, in case Al-Qaeda acquire a space shuttle from North Korea. (Or something.)
It's probably always been a "security" issue in the eyes of many govt offices. We went to the moon in 1969 and yet here we are in 2006 and we're using ancient technology like the space shuttle.
I wouldn't be suprised if the military hasn't been pulling the wool (wool being Nasa in this case) over everyone's eyes for a while now.
Because not two months ago, he wanted to shut down the ISS missions because they were estimated to cost $200M.
Anyone truely interested in the exploration of space should be desperate to see NASA shut down. I don't like him either but it's hardly a useful dig to complain about closing down the orbiting money toilet known as ISS. The fact is every penny Nasa gets should be spent on research and engineering to replace the shuttle with something far cheaper to launch.
Where do people get the idea that something like international laws actually exist? If a country decides to do something they'll just rewrite their own laws to allow it. If someone decides to ignore the UN or what not then it's not "illegal".
The only real question is whether or not they can actually back up such a claim in a way that will make other countries go along with it.
The article is just some blogger listing a bunch of reasons why the iPod is better than the Zune. Maybe if it were someone who's an authority on the subject it might be worth reading but after wasting my time I got the distinct impression that it's probably just a mac fan. Now that doesn't make his argument incorrect but it's not really worth a discussion.
Google uses the flash player too so I'm suprised so many people are dissing on YouTube. Im the first person to jump on myspace hate or microsoft hate but this one doesn't make any sense to me.
Quicktime/WMP/etc are all horrible from what I've seen. Half the time some codec I apparently don't have screws up everything for quicktime. WMP is a lost cause. Don't even get me started on Real.
Google's setup is good but the size of their videos is pathetically small compared to YouTube. So I find myself wondering if everyone thinks YouTube is so horrible what service is supposed to do the job of video hosting better?
In general the main cause is the bigger search engines are still not even trying to copy the big selling points of google.
Their front pages are still a big abortion of pictures and junk. Google is simple "box + logo".
Their results are trying to coppy google but the no.1 thing the google results page sells is TRUST. Most people trust google that all adds are going to be labeled clearly and they will not be inserted into the results!
MSN/Yahoo/etc already missed the boat on this issue. If anyone is going to compete with Google it's going to have to be someone new at this point probably. Unless of course someone thinks up a new must have feature.
"Wrong! Canada (member of the G8, so technically a major industrial nation, even though a little over a tenth the size of the US) is increasing in size faster."
It says "major" industrial nation. Clearly Canada is excluded.
Square-Enix doesn't need to release all their products on the PS3. FF13 isn't going to float the PS3 all by itself.
But this is about perceptions. Japanese game Dev's "know" FF13 is going to come out for the PS3. They also "know" FF13 is going to be a hit. Since they "know" it's going to be a hit they also "know" a lot of PS3 will have been sold.
Thus they decided to develop on the PS3 as soon as they had hardware they could start working with. It's already a done deal which is why Sony is acting so arrogant. They already know they've got the goods.
[quote]the vast majority of console gamers play sports games, racing games, and fighting games[/quote]
I'm not sure I'd agree that the fighting genre is bigger than the RPG genre when you count western and eastern gamers but there's no doubt the sports genre outsells them. You overlooked an important fact though. All the sports games are made for every console.
The only companies playing favorites in a big genre are the RPG makers. Thus RPG games sell consoles. Therefore as long as FF13 is coming out on the PS3 Sony has a huge advantage that the Xbox can't match without it's own exclusive titles.
It used to be about the platform games but platformers just don't push out enough units these days.
Which consoles win or fail has been all about what a select few game companies decide to do really. Square releases ff13 for sony. Bunch of companies assume fanbois will buy PS3 to play FF13. They have to plan 1.5 years ahead before a RPG game even finishes so they all decide to avoid risks and also release on the PS3.
Bam a bunch of good console RPG's come out for PS3 and everyone buys the console because said games aren't on the 360.
It's like a self fufilling prophecy really.
Compared to all the money MS spends on other stuff you'd think they'd bother to at least spend 20 million on making a few good RPGs at a total loss just to sell the console.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm suprised people are still blah blahing about how the 360 and the PS3's price are accceptable when the Wii is clearly demolishing both of them.
Sure for some people the 360 isn't too much but it's at that point where people really have to think about it before they'll get it.
The Wii on the other hand is almost cheap enough to be an impulse buy. If the 360 can pull off some real japanese RPG's to get some actual sales in japan it might not bust. The PS3 though is doomed though if their exclusve titles don't save it.
No offense but that's obviously false. A few companies like Blizzard and Bioware can get a lot of people to show up to buy a game just because they made it. People give them the benefit of the doubt.
I'll agree EA never had such a status to "lose" though.
This is why enviromentalists get ignored. Among those energy sources tidal and geothermal in no way can ever be tapped far enough to serve as a replacement for our current -still quickly growing- energy needs. If we had viable launch capability solar sat's could be built for power but we both know how likely developing that is.
Beyond that though only fission and fusion will work. This isn't some sort of choice we can make. We either figure this out or use fission. You can't just take human civilization and hit the sleep button to go into lower power mode or some nonsense.
Twelve billion is chump change compared to the payoff here.
If what you said were true about ANY culture it would be wrong. It's not a "mistake" to force well established "notions" of freedom (specifically freedom) on another culture that has it's own notions of such. Cultures are not free to just do whatever they feel like just because the majority agrees.
Your attempt to be "culturally open" in this example ignores the fact that someone who likes to chew gum isn't doing anything wrong and is having his right to do so taken away simply because other people might spit it out on a sidewalk. If that society agrees that spitting gum on the sidewalk is just too unacceptable the only proper way to stop it is too inflict an extreme harsh penalty on the act of spitting gum.
For further reading see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majoritarianism
I find this merger kind of odd. The CCP angle for selling EvE as a board game makes good sense. White Wolf does indeed seem to have a theme going for it that fits in with EvE's lore (which sadly for me means it just sucks).
What I don't get though is the reverse. CCP has experience with building an MMO true but in terms of building good game clients CCP has only ever touched the space genre. I'll fully agree CCP has great artistic vision going on but rendering space takes a few less polygons than rendering some grass.
I personally doubt they have the technical know-how to create the software that would be required for one of White Wolf's games without a significant learning period. It's too much of an apples and oranges thing.
All two of them eh?
Perhaps the irony of whining about energy usage/wastage while running a nice fat energy sucking CPU to post on slashdot hadn't occured to you eh?
The brand name doesn't mean much. Probably the only people who buy a console on brand are the early adopters. People who get a console at release with no real way of knowing whether or not it's going to flop.
Unlike other industries though these people don't give any kind of indication of whether or not things will go well. Most of the great games that will really sell consoles are halfway into development by the time release comes out and they'll be released even if the initial sales are bad. If those games are good enough the second wave will show up and make or break the console. It's always been this way and it always will be. The only thing questionable this time is whether or not good games can overcome the huge price barrier of the PS3.
How do you know he wasn't using the word "peaked" more literally? He probably wouldn't be the first apple fan to pitch a tent over upcoming products I bet!
Considering NASA's complete incompetence in creating technology to explore space with over the last few decades I'd have to say your argument is falling on deaf ears here. If the US wants to militarize space they are going to have to figure out how to get up there a bit more cheaply. Achieving that would advance exploration of space far more than anything NASA is trying to do.
You mean it got even worse? I stopped watching the show pretty quickly because I was disgusted by them constantly doing stupid stuff like that. It seemed apparent from the start to me that the sci fi aspects of the show were going to be mostly plot devices and they'd avoid battlestars real subject matter. The whole "human" psylon thing to avoid the cost of fancy robot graphics was the clincher in the end for me.
It's getting a bit tiresome listening to these kinds of things. X will happen some mindbogglingly long time from now and "oh my god the horror". Every single one of the models of prediction seem to completely ignore the possibility of what humans will learn and do in such a massive time frame.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that even a thousand years from now (let alone 100,000) we will probably be to the point where parents wouldn't dare let their precious children be born stupid and ugly. Even tossing aside the touchy issue of genetics a lot of normal medical science will probably fix a lot of genetic "problems" that people have by anticipating the problems cause and altering it somehow. Plastic surgeons will probably advance their craft so far that the form of a human will have almost nothing to do with his genetic code anymore.
I'm going to say this is pretty much BS from where I'm sitting. It might be true for certain genres like FPS's and whatever genre console action games fit into. But for the rest of us I think we're starving for a bit of "rehasing" and "same ol same ol". I'm interested in RPG's myself mostly and I would love if they'd just take a bunch of old games and completely copy them then release with a bunch of fancy graphics that you seem to hate.
Im starving here with practically nothing to play but japanese style RPG's for consoles. Those are ok but they get boring pretty fast. We're coming up on the biggest season of the year and theres only ONE real rpg coming out (nwn2) and that's IT.
I can only imagine how the poor adventure gamers feel at this point.
This has been my problem as well. The truth is you can probably find any size of HDTV you want but if you are shopping for something inbetween $300 and $4000 you are going to get poor value for your money.
People quote cheap HDTV's but they are usually talking about tiny 17" inch sets that nobody really wants.
I can maybe afford a PS3 and games but I can't afford a PS3 and a 800 dollar HDTV set on top of it.
PC Gaming is dead though apparently. People are getting tired of spending a massive 200~300 dollars a year to keep their PC's in the mid level range required to play all games!
It's probably always been a "security" issue in the eyes of many govt offices. We went to the moon in 1969 and yet here we are in 2006 and we're using ancient technology like the space shuttle.
I wouldn't be suprised if the military hasn't been pulling the wool (wool being Nasa in this case) over everyone's eyes for a while now.
Anyone truely interested in the exploration of space should be desperate to see NASA shut down. I don't like him either but it's hardly a useful dig to complain about closing down the orbiting money toilet known as ISS. The fact is every penny Nasa gets should be spent on research and engineering to replace the shuttle with something far cheaper to launch.
Where do people get the idea that something like international laws actually exist? If a country decides to do something they'll just rewrite their own laws to allow it. If someone decides to ignore the UN or what not then it's not "illegal".
The only real question is whether or not they can actually back up such a claim in a way that will make other countries go along with it.
The article is just some blogger listing a bunch of reasons why the iPod is better than the Zune. Maybe if it were someone who's an authority on the subject it might be worth reading but after wasting my time I got the distinct impression that it's probably just a mac fan. Now that doesn't make his argument incorrect but it's not really worth a discussion.
Google uses the flash player too so I'm suprised so many people are dissing on YouTube. Im the first person to jump on myspace hate or microsoft hate but this one doesn't make any sense to me.
Quicktime/WMP/etc are all horrible from what I've seen. Half the time some codec I apparently don't have screws up everything for quicktime. WMP is a lost cause. Don't even get me started on Real.
Google's setup is good but the size of their videos is pathetically small compared to YouTube. So I find myself wondering if everyone thinks YouTube is so horrible what service is supposed to do the job of video hosting better?
In general the main cause is the bigger search engines are still not even trying to copy the big selling points of google.
Their front pages are still a big abortion of pictures and junk. Google is simple "box + logo".
Their results are trying to coppy google but the no.1 thing the google results page sells is TRUST. Most people trust google that all adds are going to be labeled clearly and they will not be inserted into the results!
MSN/Yahoo/etc already missed the boat on this issue. If anyone is going to compete with Google it's going to have to be someone new at this point probably. Unless of course someone thinks up a new must have feature.
"Wrong! Canada (member of the G8, so technically a major industrial nation, even though a little over a tenth the size of the US) is increasing in size faster."
It says "major" industrial nation. Clearly Canada is excluded.
Square-Enix doesn't need to release all their products on the PS3. FF13 isn't going to float the PS3 all by itself.
But this is about perceptions. Japanese game Dev's "know" FF13 is going to come out for the PS3. They also "know" FF13 is going to be a hit. Since they "know" it's going to be a hit they also "know" a lot of PS3 will have been sold.
Thus they decided to develop on the PS3 as soon as they had hardware they could start working with. It's already a done deal which is why Sony is acting so arrogant. They already know they've got the goods.
[quote]the vast majority of console gamers play sports games, racing games, and fighting games[/quote]
I'm not sure I'd agree that the fighting genre is bigger than the RPG genre when you count western and eastern gamers but there's no doubt the sports genre outsells them. You overlooked an important fact though. All the sports games are made for every console.
The only companies playing favorites in a big genre are the RPG makers. Thus RPG games sell consoles. Therefore as long as FF13 is coming out on the PS3 Sony has a huge advantage that the Xbox can't match without it's own exclusive titles.
It used to be about the platform games but platformers just don't push out enough units these days.
Reality is Final Fantasy is PS3's mario for now.
Which consoles win or fail has been all about what a select few game companies decide to do really. Square releases ff13 for sony. Bunch of companies assume fanbois will buy PS3 to play FF13. They have to plan 1.5 years ahead before a RPG game even finishes so they all decide to avoid risks and also release on the PS3.
Bam a bunch of good console RPG's come out for PS3 and everyone buys the console because said games aren't on the 360.
It's like a self fufilling prophecy really.
Compared to all the money MS spends on other stuff you'd think they'd bother to at least spend 20 million on making a few good RPGs at a total loss just to sell the console.
MDK is a bioware game. Not sure where you got that it was a Shiny game. Perhaps they published it?