While you're definitely on the mark with regards to games getting horribly delayed for no good reason in the EU, it is getting slightly better. Some notable GBA titles recently have been released in the EU first or almost at the exact same time. The only one that comes to mind is Advance Wars 2, but I know it's not a one-time thing.
Also, the EU got a better version of Metroid Prime, with voice feedback warnings, patched bugs, vocal story narration, and a cranked up difficulty level. You can read the GameFAQs FAQ about it here (Open in a new window, 3rd question in Section 4)
And to correct you a bit - the reason Animal Crossing didn't come to the EU wasn't a matter of the usual silly reasons games don't make it to the EU - Nintendo really didn't want to localize the game for the EU market. It took long enough to convert all the text in the game to English - converting it to Spanish, French, and German, *and* accounting for holidays/events that don't exist in some of the destination countries (Thanksgiving? 4th Of July?) would have made it a huge pain.
It was equally ridiculous to expect an Australian release for that game.
Xbox Live online gaming service has set a new standard for online gaming with more than 1.4 million members around the world.
It's a pretty low standard if you believe that. Microsoft seems to be giving preferential treatment to some games over others with regards to Live.
Originally with DDR Ultramix, DLC was supposed to be made available on a monthly schedule, and the first songpack was available at launch. The next one came three months later - apparently Microsoft requires a 30-day period to approve content before uploading it. The reasoning for this "approval" process baffles me, but even allowing for that, a 30 day period is outrageously long.
Anyway, packs 2-5 came out more or less on schedule, but the 6th one was delayed for several months because Microsoft just plain forgot about it. Konami's Hawaii studio had to harrass them several times before it finally went up at the end of the summer.
Enter Ultramix 2 - a lot of Canadian people were looking forward to it because they weren't able to get DLC for Ultramix, since it wasn't officially released in Canada due to licensing restrictions.
Songpack 7 was due out at launch, along with a DLC item unlocking two additional characters. The game launched in mid-November - SP7 was three weeks late, the characters are nowhere to be found (despite the DLC being finished), and Canadians are still in the dark. SP8 was due in early January, and Konami Hawaii tells us that it's been approved for 3 weeks now and still isn't up on the servers. Plus, the online rankings system is intermittently broken, and Microsoft has no idea why.
So, if this is the new standard, then it shouldn't be exceptionally hard to beat.
I see it has analog and DVI inputs. Can you switch between them? IE, having inputs on both? It'd be sweet if I could have the DVI on my desktop and switch to analog for a laptop.
Everyone's got the wrong headline...
on
Sony PSP Sales Way Up
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· Score: 4, Informative
Sony has not sold 800K units. Sony has shipped 800K units.
They aren't "sold" until they're in the hands of consumers.
When I saw this article, I reminded myself that our tax refund is coming soon, so I decided to look in on the prices of LCD displays. I've got a 21" CRT that's been doing great for a while, but I can feel my vision starting to have problems, and so I've decided that I need to upgrade soon. The lower power usage would be nice too.
Anyway, I'm not a heavy gamer, but I do play some, so I don't want a ghosting monitor, which means I need a high-speed panel. Also, I'm very used to my huge screen real estate, so I'm not gonna be happy with anything less than a 19". Having a USB hub would also be very nice, as it'd help reduce some of my desk clutter.
Needless to say, shopping for these requirements has proven to be troublesome. Response time isn't shown upfront, nor is there generally a way to weed out monitors based on it, so shopping for a monitor that meets my basic needs alone is rather difficult, let alone finding one that has consistently good reviews and any other nice perks like a TV tuner or dual inputs.
It seems to me that manufacturers are still focusing on the coolness factor as priority #1. The most revolutionary changes I've seen in LCD displays in the last year come in the form of blue LEDs and "sleek" bezels...
In addition to the already stated points about how there wasn't really anything to buy for the GameCube this Christmas aside from Metroid Prime 2 (which had a very hard time against the overwhelming hype over GTA:SA and Halo 2), you can really blame the retailers. They've long since relegated the GameCube to 3rd place, and they'll only market it as an afterthought.
Next time you see an ad on TV for Walmart's electronics section, note what logos you see in the background. It's always the Xbox and the PS2. Walk into an EB or a GameStop, and the GameCube section is always in the back (not really a smart move from a merchandising perspective). Up until recently, the GameCube was always neck-and-neck with the Xbox, but just like how the media loves to see a hero fall, the game retailer executives love to see a new player take an old one down. They were happy to see Sega fall, and they helped.
What's interesting is that the GameCube's underwhelming performance is contributing more to the "Nintendo is doomed!" naysayers, and yet the hot holiday item this year was the Nintendo DS...
It will protect your boards from being targeted by the Google component of the worm. However, if your boards are running on a shared server, and someone else has a vulnerable version of phpBB installed on their space, you could still be vulnerable. The worm is designed to poke around once it manages to lodge itself inside a host.
Ordinarily, you could just blame those infected in this manner for not using proper permissions on their board installs, but with the amount of custom modifications many people have installed on their boards, it'd be no surprise if 90% of the people that think they're safe actually aren't. Make sure your files aren't writeable, folks.
And it came at least a year and a half before Wing Commander III.
Wing Commander IV, on the other hand, introduced the quasi-era of DVD games. I still have that game, sitting in a sleeve in a drawer somewhere. WC4 was one of two games that "ushered in" the "era" of DVD games, the other being Incoming.
Of course, we must also realize that the popularity of the PS1 compared to the N64 was probably due to this 'feature'...
And the fact that N64 games were $10-$20 more expensive on average, and the N64 featured almost *no* RPGs from start to finish...That was just coincidence, eh?
Face it - the PS1 had a rough start, sure, but it was the games that sold the system, starting with FF7 in particular.
I've never imagined moving around with a mouse in ffxi - it's always been the keyboard numpad or wasd for my laptop. Better yet, you can play ffxi on ps2 where you can use the controller (a lot better than keyboard in moving around and activating macros). Of course, hanging around japanese players is always cooler too ^^. Anyways, just some ranting and backing up of ffxi.
Or, do one better, and spend $10 on a PSX controller adapter for your PC. I bought one from Radio Shack and it works like a dream.
The CE link is obviously broken. I'm not sure if the orders are cancelled because IMG's store is barfing, or because of shifty tactics on VU's part, though I'd definitely lean against VU based on past history.
Perhaps it's just me, but I think it would have been useful and rather painless to include the word "Centrino" somewhere in that article so that people who aren't intimately familiar with OpenBSD would know what we were talking about without having to guess (or read 2/3s of the thing before they actually see the word "wireless").
When I saw that the domains were just copycat, I was surprised they didn't register "iloveeevees.com" and "ilovebeedrills.com". I mean, who says you have to promote *one* product on a website? Surely they might be able to generate an extra sale or two from a Pokemon fanatic...:P
That info is way off. It says that the Basic Set wasn't sold until 1990, but I got a Basic Set, and had my NES for at least three years before getting the Super NES when it launched in 1991.
It seems that this is more of just a well-timed announcement to try to steal some of the wind from Nintendo's sails. Everyone knows the PSP is going to be expensive, and the Nintendo DS having a lower-than-expected MSRP of $149 has surprised a lot of people.
I would not at all be surprised if it was just "finished enough" for an announcement. Sony has done this before.
I can understand why this would piss you off (as it pisses me off too), but since Live connects players in a peering fashion, you're only going to be able to play a game against other people as long as they're willing to play it. You can't even play some of the lesser-known titles at launch day because 95% of Live is dominated by the Clancy-shooter-du-jour.
Your cable modem rate would be much higher or may never have come about were it not for the phone companies offering DSL (and vice versa). Both competitors in that situation were willing to absorb large capital costs in order to make sure the other guy didn't get a jump on them.
In metropolitan areas? Sure.
In urban and less, the presence of one often means that the other will decline to offer service in the area. In the city I live in, the cable company has a really good ISP service (good by US standards, of course). The ILEC has a single DSLAM in the worst part of town, and refuses to roll out service anywhere else here. To contrast, a city of similar size elsewhere in our state has *six* wired DSLAMs in the county.
Competition is great. When the businesses actually care enough to compete.
I can't WAIT for World Of Warcraft to come out in China. I'm no racist, but I'm absolutely sick of the Chinese players farming for money to sell on the web that are plaguing Final Fantasy XI right now. I hope they decide to move on to bigger and better things and leave our servers alone.
Oh, and what's with the cable length for the GC controller? With the other consoles, I can lie on my bed and play games, but with the Gamecube, I have to be sat right on the edge of the bed, or else I risk pulling the whole thing onto the floor.
Why don't you just say "Xbox"? Because that's what you mean. The cable lengths on the GC and PSX controllers are the same. I even went in my living room just now to double-check.
Slashdot Mirror
While you're definitely on the mark with regards to games getting horribly delayed for no good reason in the EU, it is getting slightly better. Some notable GBA titles recently have been released in the EU first or almost at the exact same time. The only one that comes to mind is Advance Wars 2, but I know it's not a one-time thing. Also, the EU got a better version of Metroid Prime, with voice feedback warnings, patched bugs, vocal story narration, and a cranked up difficulty level. You can read the GameFAQs FAQ about it here (Open in a new window, 3rd question in Section 4)
And to correct you a bit - the reason Animal Crossing didn't come to the EU wasn't a matter of the usual silly reasons games don't make it to the EU - Nintendo really didn't want to localize the game for the EU market. It took long enough to convert all the text in the game to English - converting it to Spanish, French, and German, *and* accounting for holidays/events that don't exist in some of the destination countries (Thanksgiving? 4th Of July?) would have made it a huge pain.
It was equally ridiculous to expect an Australian release for that game.
Xbox Live online gaming service has set a new standard for online gaming with more than 1.4 million members around the world.
It's a pretty low standard if you believe that. Microsoft seems to be giving preferential treatment to some games over others with regards to Live.
Originally with DDR Ultramix, DLC was supposed to be made available on a monthly schedule, and the first songpack was available at launch. The next one came three months later - apparently Microsoft requires a 30-day period to approve content before uploading it. The reasoning for this "approval" process baffles me, but even allowing for that, a 30 day period is outrageously long.
Anyway, packs 2-5 came out more or less on schedule, but the 6th one was delayed for several months because Microsoft just plain forgot about it. Konami's Hawaii studio had to harrass them several times before it finally went up at the end of the summer.
Enter Ultramix 2 - a lot of Canadian people were looking forward to it because they weren't able to get DLC for Ultramix, since it wasn't officially released in Canada due to licensing restrictions.
Songpack 7 was due out at launch, along with a DLC item unlocking two additional characters. The game launched in mid-November - SP7 was three weeks late, the characters are nowhere to be found (despite the DLC being finished), and Canadians are still in the dark. SP8 was due in early January, and Konami Hawaii tells us that it's been approved for 3 weeks now and still isn't up on the servers. Plus, the online rankings system is intermittently broken, and Microsoft has no idea why.
So, if this is the new standard, then it shouldn't be exceptionally hard to beat.
I see it has analog and DVI inputs. Can you switch between them? IE, having inputs on both? It'd be sweet if I could have the DVI on my desktop and switch to analog for a laptop.
Sony has not sold 800K units. Sony has shipped 800K units.
They aren't "sold" until they're in the hands of consumers.
When I saw this article, I reminded myself that our tax refund is coming soon, so I decided to look in on the prices of LCD displays. I've got a 21" CRT that's been doing great for a while, but I can feel my vision starting to have problems, and so I've decided that I need to upgrade soon. The lower power usage would be nice too.
Anyway, I'm not a heavy gamer, but I do play some, so I don't want a ghosting monitor, which means I need a high-speed panel. Also, I'm very used to my huge screen real estate, so I'm not gonna be happy with anything less than a 19". Having a USB hub would also be very nice, as it'd help reduce some of my desk clutter.
Needless to say, shopping for these requirements has proven to be troublesome. Response time isn't shown upfront, nor is there generally a way to weed out monitors based on it, so shopping for a monitor that meets my basic needs alone is rather difficult, let alone finding one that has consistently good reviews and any other nice perks like a TV tuner or dual inputs.
It seems to me that manufacturers are still focusing on the coolness factor as priority #1. The most revolutionary changes I've seen in LCD displays in the last year come in the form of blue LEDs and "sleek" bezels...
In addition to the already stated points about how there wasn't really anything to buy for the GameCube this Christmas aside from Metroid Prime 2 (which had a very hard time against the overwhelming hype over GTA:SA and Halo 2), you can really blame the retailers. They've long since relegated the GameCube to 3rd place, and they'll only market it as an afterthought.
Next time you see an ad on TV for Walmart's electronics section, note what logos you see in the background. It's always the Xbox and the PS2. Walk into an EB or a GameStop, and the GameCube section is always in the back (not really a smart move from a merchandising perspective). Up until recently, the GameCube was always neck-and-neck with the Xbox, but just like how the media loves to see a hero fall, the game retailer executives love to see a new player take an old one down. They were happy to see Sega fall, and they helped.
What's interesting is that the GameCube's underwhelming performance is contributing more to the "Nintendo is doomed!" naysayers, and yet the hot holiday item this year was the Nintendo DS...
Yes and no.
It will protect your boards from being targeted by the Google component of the worm. However, if your boards are running on a shared server, and someone else has a vulnerable version of phpBB installed on their space, you could still be vulnerable. The worm is designed to poke around once it manages to lodge itself inside a host.
Ordinarily, you could just blame those infected in this manner for not using proper permissions on their board installs, but with the amount of custom modifications many people have installed on their boards, it'd be no surprise if 90% of the people that think they're safe actually aren't. Make sure your files aren't writeable, folks.
And it came at least a year and a half before Wing Commander III.
Wing Commander IV, on the other hand, introduced the quasi-era of DVD games. I still have that game, sitting in a sleeve in a drawer somewhere. WC4 was one of two games that "ushered in" the "era" of DVD games, the other being Incoming.
I think we can safely say the PSP sports graphics and games equal or greater than what the Nintendo DS offers.
Can we? Have you played all the PSP games?
Of course, we must also realize that the popularity of the PS1 compared to the N64 was probably due to this 'feature'...
And the fact that N64 games were $10-$20 more expensive on average, and the N64 featured almost *no* RPGs from start to finish...That was just coincidence, eh?
Face it - the PS1 had a rough start, sure, but it was the games that sold the system, starting with FF7 in particular.
I've never imagined moving around with a mouse in ffxi - it's always been the keyboard numpad or wasd for my laptop. Better yet, you can play ffxi on ps2 where you can use the controller (a lot better than keyboard in moving around and activating macros). Of course, hanging around japanese players is always cooler too ^^. Anyways, just some ranting and backing up of ffxi.
Or, do one better, and spend $10 on a PSX controller adapter for your PC. I bought one from Radio Shack and it works like a dream.
This is hardly proof, but looking at IMG's web store, compare the links:
World Of Warcraft
World Of Warcraft Collector's Edition
The CE link is obviously broken. I'm not sure if the orders are cancelled because IMG's store is barfing, or because of shifty tactics on VU's part, though I'd definitely lean against VU based on past history.
Perhaps it's just me, but I think it would have been useful and rather painless to include the word "Centrino" somewhere in that article so that people who aren't intimately familiar with OpenBSD would know what we were talking about without having to guess (or read 2/3s of the thing before they actually see the word "wireless").
And hopefully that means that the number of gilsellers in FFXI will go down on November 24th!
Hard to imagine that I could load that article in 800x600 and *NOT* see a single word of it without scrolling down...
When I saw that the domains were just copycat, I was surprised they didn't register "iloveeevees.com" and "ilovebeedrills.com". I mean, who says you have to promote *one* product on a website? Surely they might be able to generate an extra sale or two from a Pokemon fanatic... :P
That info is way off. It says that the Basic Set wasn't sold until 1990, but I got a Basic Set, and had my NES for at least three years before getting the Super NES when it launched in 1991.
So, we mod people up now for mentioning a mirror that doesn't yet exist?
It seems that this is more of just a well-timed announcement to try to steal some of the wind from Nintendo's sails. Everyone knows the PSP is going to be expensive, and the Nintendo DS having a lower-than-expected MSRP of $149 has surprised a lot of people.
I would not at all be surprised if it was just "finished enough" for an announcement. Sony has done this before.
Since it also runs GBA software...How does "now" work for you?
I can understand why this would piss you off (as it pisses me off too), but since Live connects players in a peering fashion, you're only going to be able to play a game against other people as long as they're willing to play it. You can't even play some of the lesser-known titles at launch day because 95% of Live is dominated by the Clancy-shooter-du-jour.
Should I also blame Microsoft for my new grape-juice-flavored CRT? :P
Your cable modem rate would be much higher or may never have come about were it not for the phone companies offering DSL (and vice versa). Both competitors in that situation were willing to absorb large capital costs in order to make sure the other guy didn't get a jump on them.
In metropolitan areas? Sure.
In urban and less, the presence of one often means that the other will decline to offer service in the area. In the city I live in, the cable company has a really good ISP service (good by US standards, of course). The ILEC has a single DSLAM in the worst part of town, and refuses to roll out service anywhere else here. To contrast, a city of similar size elsewhere in our state has *six* wired DSLAMs in the county.
Competition is great. When the businesses actually care enough to compete.
I can't WAIT for World Of Warcraft to come out in China. I'm no racist, but I'm absolutely sick of the Chinese players farming for money to sell on the web that are plaguing Final Fantasy XI right now. I hope they decide to move on to bigger and better things and leave our servers alone.
Oh, and what's with the cable length for the GC controller? With the other consoles, I can lie on my bed and play games, but with the Gamecube, I have to be sat right on the edge of the bed, or else I risk pulling the whole thing onto the floor.
Why don't you just say "Xbox"? Because that's what you mean. The cable lengths on the GC and PSX controllers are the same. I even went in my living room just now to double-check.