Sorry, but you're wrong on a number of points there.
From Sony's presentation at the recent PS3 announcement:
Loaned Dev Tool Delivery Schedule Apr - DEH-R103X Cell Final RSX Final BD-Drive Proto Controller Proto
May/Jun - DEH-R104X (Final) Cell Final RSX Final BD-Drive Final Controller Final
So, the final dev kit is most likely going out before June (the slide shows it on a timeline somewhere between May and June), the final Cell and RSX are in the earlier releases of the devkit and there is a Blu Ray drive in the final dev kit (a no-brainer, really - I'm amazed you thought it wasn't necessary).
They also set out a timeline for dev tools, which again shows Jun as the date for the final 1.0 version, but most major tools being ready by the April dev kit release (the only exception being network code, which might be a more likely culprit for those looking for a conspiracy theory to explain the 'delay' of the release...)
"We've been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years, but I never thought I'd see the final face-off in my lifetime. And I never dreamed, that it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friend."
Not in a way that was compatible with use of the HD for games. The Linux kit was effectively the PS2's version of the Net Yaroze rather than something that was expected to be of interest to the vast majority of console owners.
Final Fantasy XI was a single game which ended up being bundled with a hard drive, and it was a long way down the pike - over two years. In this case common functionality that's at the core of Sony's plan for PS3 depends on it from day one. Hence the slide at their presentation titled "HDD is required!" (their exclamation mark, not mine...)
Wrong! They have said that the hard drive is required and that developers are to assume that it is present.
While the wording does leave the loophole that it may be required for any meaningful use of the system but not present in the pack (like a memory card with the PS2), that would be a difficult thing to push to retail. It was bad enough when the Xbox 360 came out with the HD-less core pack which nobody wanted.
Sound quality? That's an area where Apple have traditionally been among the worst performers, but then who needs sound quality when you have spiffy marketing?
Oh, well if the majority of people in an ESPN poll believed it, then it must have been true.
Which of those questionable penalties would you say were actually bad calls? The blatant and unnecessary pushing off in the endzone directly in front of an official? No question about that one in my mind. The hold that prevented Hasselbeck from becoming extremely closely acquainted with the ground before he threw the ball? Seemed cut and dry to me. Would these calls always be made? Probably not, but you've got to be prepared for them to go against you, and you've got to be able to come back from them. The Seahawks failed miserably to do this.
As for the Roethlisberger TD, that was by no means a clear call either way. I've seen frame-by-frame analysis since the game that claims to show the ball crossing the plane - not at the end of the play when he's already down and pushes the ball forwards, which seems to be what most people are complaining about, but in the initial lunge before he's pushed back. The decision not to overturn the call was 100% correct, and would have been 100% correct whichever way the call had gone - there was clearly not incontrovertible evidence to make the call either way. Even if it hadn't been called a touchdown, the Steelers had another down and were planning to use it - I have very little doubt that they'd have scored anyway had the decision gone against them.
Now, if you want a game where the refs did seem overly involved in attempting to determine the result, how about the Steelers against the Colts, where the league actually took the rare step of admitting one of the calls was actually wrong?
Disclaimer: I am a fan of neither the Steelers nor the Seahawks, but the one team that beat them both in the regular season.:)
The refereeing wasn't as bad as a lot of people seem to think (not saying it was good in all cases, but some of the decisions people complain about were actually perfectly reasonable). The losing team lost fair and square - they had their chances through the game and they threw them away. The winning team took advantage of some of their chances, and they won. Sour grapes after the game aren't going to change that.
Of course, the real losers were those people who were looking forward to a good game, because the way both teams played that was far from what we got...
Thanks for the correction. Since you're so up on these things, can you show me where Nintendo confirmed they were going to have a >20GB hard drive in the Revolution? Perhaps you can tell me why you think you know better than Satoru Iwata, who has made it pretty clear in interviews that Nintendo is not aiming to equal the power of XBox 360? Explain why I've seen unhappy Nintendo fans describing Revolution as 'Gamecube 1.5' after the announcement? Tell me what you mean by 'real world' code and what possible connection you think it has to the very specialist application of gaming? Let us know why boosting screen resolution by a factor of four is irrelevant? Detail why exactly the 20GB drive is so crippling when there's actually very little that needs to reside on it permanently?
That's the most willfully ass-backward analogy I've seen in a long while. Nintendo's the one producing the less technologically advanced solution. A better way to look at it is that Microsoft have made an Uzi, Sony are working on an AK-47, and Nintendo are putting the finishing touches to a Nerf Chinese repeating crossbow. I know which has the latest and greatest technology, but I'm sure there's fun to be had with the crossbow that I won't get elsewhere as well.
I disagree. Filters are generally very easy to work around for people who have their mind set on swearing. Does your script catch varying case? Random punctuation (A.S.S.H.A.T and the like)? Meaningless markup (defeats almost every message board swearing filter I've ever come across)? Illiteracy (the sort of arshole who sets out to swear on a family-friendly board generally can't rite so good anyway...)? L33t? Transposition of letters (quite a common one on a few boards I frequent)? Some people will see the filter as a challenge, and will be more set on swearing than if they were allowed to. And ultimately it does tend to cause problems for the users who don't want to swear, in my experience, because it will never be perfectly tuned, and for these primitive filters, the more special cases you put in, the more likely it is to cause problems.
And I believe 'poopake' is the more common spelling.:)
The worst I've seen was the site of an NFL team (to protect the guilty I shall reveal only that the team's name begins with a 'J' and ends with an 'acksonville Jaguars') which, in a wildly flawed attempt to stop people saying 'ass' ended up banning the words 'pass' (quite important in a football game, I'm told), 'grass' (a slightly old-fashioned surface on which to play it) and 'class' (shown by too few of the fans at times). Still, at least it prevented those dirty immoral Christian types telling us about what they got up to at 'mass'...
Not far behind are Sega's video game Phantasy Star Online (for banning 'shoes', 'sophomore', and 'Hell Raygun' - the name of a weapon in the game) and Apple (for seeing 'Nigel' as a word too offensive to inscribe on the back of an iPod).
Muhammad, peace be upon him, definitely wasn't bisexual. He had been married over 9 times!
Much as I might think the original post was logically flawed and offensive (and it was), your rebuttal isn't much better on the logic front. How does being married prevent someone from being bisexual? I could see the logic if he were being accused of homosexuality, but there's nothing to stop a bisexual getting half their fun within wedlock.:)
Because all of my emails consist entirely of pre-selected statements that I've been given, and none of the people I communicate with have developed an appreciation of how my writing style changes when I'm being sarcastic.
And, in the case of a good review, why they thought it. And that's why numerical scores will always be the bane of good videogame journalism.
But there's no such thing as a 'definitive' review - you see games getting a wide range of scores because of the personal preference of the reviewer. As always, the best thing you can do is find a reviewer whose personal tastes match yours.
That's moving away from the point I was making, though. There are games that get a lot of acclaim (critically and popularly) that you may not rate as highly. I know there are for me - Halo and Panzer Dragoon Saga probably being the biggest names among them. That doesn't mean that those games don't belong in a list of good games. Nor does it mean that games I prefer to them should be ranked more highly. I'll bow to popular opinion and accept that these are good games that I did not like personally.
In this case, a game which had better reviews than one that the original poster enjoyed made it into the top-30 list. That doesn't invalidate the list in any way. Even if the 'worse' game according to the average review score had made it in it wouldn't invalidate it - it's all a matter of personal preference anyway.
And like it or not, Nintendogs was almost certainly a more important game than Gun this year. It spurred huge hardware sales because it appealed to a different demographic than more traditional games.
Checking on gamerankings.com, Gun received an average of 80% or so in reviews across all platforms (the shoddy XBox 360 port being about 5 percentage points below that). Nintendogs received an average of 85%.
Just because you don't like a game (and I personally have no intention of buying Nintendogs) doesn't mean it's not good.
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From Sony's presentation at the recent PS3 announcement:
So, the final dev kit is most likely going out before June (the slide shows it on a timeline somewhere between May and June), the final Cell and RSX are in the earlier releases of the devkit and there is a Blu Ray drive in the final dev kit (a no-brainer, really - I'm amazed you thought it wasn't necessary).
They also set out a timeline for dev tools, which again shows Jun as the date for the final 1.0 version, but most major tools being ready by the April dev kit release (the only exception being network code, which might be a more likely culprit for those looking for a conspiracy theory to explain the 'delay' of the release...)
"We've been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years, but I never thought I'd see the final face-off in my lifetime. And I never dreamed, that it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friend."
Short answer: no.
You'd expect to see the games running on near-final hardware at the last big show before the console's release. Expect real playable hardware at E3.
Not in a way that was compatible with use of the HD for games. The Linux kit was effectively the PS2's version of the Net Yaroze rather than something that was expected to be of interest to the vast majority of console owners.
Final Fantasy XI was a single game which ended up being bundled with a hard drive, and it was a long way down the pike - over two years. In this case common functionality that's at the core of Sony's plan for PS3 depends on it from day one. Hence the slide at their presentation titled "HDD is required!" (their exclamation mark, not mine...)
Sony officially released a Linux kit for PS2. I'd say that counts as a fairly hefty precedent...
Wrong! They have said that the hard drive is required and that developers are to assume that it is present.
While the wording does leave the loophole that it may be required for any meaningful use of the system but not present in the pack (like a memory card with the PS2), that would be a difficult thing to push to retail. It was bad enough when the Xbox 360 came out with the HD-less core pack which nobody wanted.
Sound quality? That's an area where Apple have traditionally been among the worst performers, but then who needs sound quality when you have spiffy marketing?
Speak for yourself. As most of the time, I'm importing a Canadian unit.
Oh, well if the majority of people in an ESPN poll believed it, then it must have been true.
:)
Which of those questionable penalties would you say were actually bad calls? The blatant and unnecessary pushing off in the endzone directly in front of an official? No question about that one in my mind. The hold that prevented Hasselbeck from becoming extremely closely acquainted with the ground before he threw the ball? Seemed cut and dry to me. Would these calls always be made? Probably not, but you've got to be prepared for them to go against you, and you've got to be able to come back from them. The Seahawks failed miserably to do this.
As for the Roethlisberger TD, that was by no means a clear call either way. I've seen frame-by-frame analysis since the game that claims to show the ball crossing the plane - not at the end of the play when he's already down and pushes the ball forwards, which seems to be what most people are complaining about, but in the initial lunge before he's pushed back. The decision not to overturn the call was 100% correct, and would have been 100% correct whichever way the call had gone - there was clearly not incontrovertible evidence to make the call either way. Even if it hadn't been called a touchdown, the Steelers had another down and were planning to use it - I have very little doubt that they'd have scored anyway had the decision gone against them.
Now, if you want a game where the refs did seem overly involved in attempting to determine the result, how about the Steelers against the Colts, where the league actually took the rare step of admitting one of the calls was actually wrong?
Disclaimer: I am a fan of neither the Steelers nor the Seahawks, but the one team that beat them both in the regular season.
The refereeing wasn't as bad as a lot of people seem to think (not saying it was good in all cases, but some of the decisions people complain about were actually perfectly reasonable). The losing team lost fair and square - they had their chances through the game and they threw them away. The winning team took advantage of some of their chances, and they won. Sour grapes after the game aren't going to change that.
Of course, the real losers were those people who were looking forward to a good game, because the way both teams played that was far from what we got...
Thanks for the correction. Since you're so up on these things, can you show me where Nintendo confirmed they were going to have a >20GB hard drive in the Revolution? Perhaps you can tell me why you think you know better than Satoru Iwata, who has made it pretty clear in interviews that Nintendo is not aiming to equal the power of XBox 360? Explain why I've seen unhappy Nintendo fans describing Revolution as 'Gamecube 1.5' after the announcement? Tell me what you mean by 'real world' code and what possible connection you think it has to the very specialist application of gaming? Let us know why boosting screen resolution by a factor of four is irrelevant? Detail why exactly the 20GB drive is so crippling when there's actually very little that needs to reside on it permanently?
Thought not.
Which is great. Because they'll copy it and make it better. And Sony will copy that and make it better. It's almost like... competition.
That's the most willfully ass-backward analogy I've seen in a long while. Nintendo's the one producing the less technologically advanced solution. A better way to look at it is that Microsoft have made an Uzi, Sony are working on an AK-47, and Nintendo are putting the finishing touches to a Nerf Chinese repeating crossbow. I know which has the latest and greatest technology, but I'm sure there's fun to be had with the crossbow that I won't get elsewhere as well.
I disagree. Filters are generally very easy to work around for people who have their mind set on swearing. Does your script catch varying case? Random punctuation (A.S.S.H.A.T and the like)? Meaningless markup (defeats almost every message board swearing filter I've ever come across)? Illiteracy (the sort of arshole who sets out to swear on a family-friendly board generally can't rite so good anyway...)? L33t? Transposition of letters (quite a common one on a few boards I frequent)? Some people will see the filter as a challenge, and will be more set on swearing than if they were allowed to. And ultimately it does tend to cause problems for the users who don't want to swear, in my experience, because it will never be perfectly tuned, and for these primitive filters, the more special cases you put in, the more likely it is to cause problems.
:)
And I believe 'poopake' is the more common spelling.
Although as even a British nerd such as myself could tell you, 'cornerback' and 'defensive back' aren't interchangeable. :)
Time to get a backup server in Denmark...
Ah yes, good old Randall Gay. Wonder if his friends call him Randy Gay? :\ (Though that might be a bit of a Britishism...)
The worst I've seen was the site of an NFL team (to protect the guilty I shall reveal only that the team's name begins with a 'J' and ends with an 'acksonville Jaguars') which, in a wildly flawed attempt to stop people saying 'ass' ended up banning the words 'pass' (quite important in a football game, I'm told), 'grass' (a slightly old-fashioned surface on which to play it) and 'class' (shown by too few of the fans at times). Still, at least it prevented those dirty immoral Christian types telling us about what they got up to at 'mass'...
Not far behind are Sega's video game Phantasy Star Online (for banning 'shoes', 'sophomore', and 'Hell Raygun' - the name of a weapon in the game) and Apple (for seeing 'Nigel' as a word too offensive to inscribe on the back of an iPod).
Much as I might think the original post was logically flawed and offensive (and it was), your rebuttal isn't much better on the logic front. How does being married prevent someone from being bisexual? I could see the logic if he were being accused of homosexuality, but there's nothing to stop a bisexual getting half their fun within wedlock. :)
Because all of my emails consist entirely of pre-selected statements that I've been given, and none of the people I communicate with have developed an appreciation of how my writing style changes when I'm being sarcastic.
I'll pass on that until they can produce one with a lifelike voice.
And, in the case of a good review, why they thought it. And that's why numerical scores will always be the bane of good videogame journalism.
But there's no such thing as a 'definitive' review - you see games getting a wide range of scores because of the personal preference of the reviewer. As always, the best thing you can do is find a reviewer whose personal tastes match yours.
That's moving away from the point I was making, though. There are games that get a lot of acclaim (critically and popularly) that you may not rate as highly. I know there are for me - Halo and Panzer Dragoon Saga probably being the biggest names among them. That doesn't mean that those games don't belong in a list of good games. Nor does it mean that games I prefer to them should be ranked more highly. I'll bow to popular opinion and accept that these are good games that I did not like personally.
In this case, a game which had better reviews than one that the original poster enjoyed made it into the top-30 list. That doesn't invalidate the list in any way. Even if the 'worse' game according to the average review score had made it in it wouldn't invalidate it - it's all a matter of personal preference anyway.
And like it or not, Nintendogs was almost certainly a more important game than Gun this year. It spurred huge hardware sales because it appealed to a different demographic than more traditional games.
Checking on gamerankings.com, Gun received an average of 80% or so in reviews across all platforms (the shoddy XBox 360 port being about 5 percentage points below that). Nintendogs received an average of 85%.
Just because you don't like a game (and I personally have no intention of buying Nintendogs) doesn't mean it's not good.
What's wrong with "asshats"?