Reread what I wrote. I didn't say that they want the title to fail. I said that they set the developer up to fail. I used to work for a game developer, and it was not unusual to find out one day "You're shipping next week" when we thought we had over a month of development time left. Arbitrarily moving the schedule up meant no early delivery bonuses... a weasely way to get around contract wording.
Likewise, it wouldn't be the first time a developer had royalties based on sales of a game at retail. But if a publisher decides not to ever release a game to retail, but cuts a deal to release the game exclusively through chains like Blockbuster... even if they sell 400,000 of them to Blockbuster, there are a grand total of ZERO sold at "retail".
I don't know what publisher you work for, and perhaps yours is better than the ones I've dealt with.
Why is this modded insightful? Insightful would be pointing out that NOWHERE did this say that these would be minimum, or even recommended specs. It said AVERAGE, and any OS should run like gangbusters on the average configuration.
Um, not to mention that "average" specifications does not mean MINIMUM or even RECOMMENDED. It's simply a "forward thinking statement." There will be some machines that are faster, and some that are slower, and Longhorn should run on all of them.
For what it's worth, these specs aren't unrealistic at all. I just bought a 250GB drive for $150. Moore's Law says that I should be able to get 1TB for the same price in two years (double the space at half the cost). I have a 3.0GHZ processor with Hyper-Threading (the precursor to Dual-Core, so 4GHZ isn't unreasonable. I have 2GB of RAM right now, so 4GB is doable as well.
As for the video, the X800 cards were just released, and the X800 Platinum has double the horsepower of the 9800XT. (In fact, at 1600x1200 and full AA/AF, most games are CPU limited at 3GHZ!) Video cards are on a 18 month cycle, so double that, and you're even better than MS is projecting.
This will all be more than Microsoft is suggesting for Average, so it doesn't sound that far-fetched to me.
Why abandon the dream? If you love it enough, you can find a way to make it work for you. In my case, I'm getting a Business Management degree with a game design certificate so that I can get into the production side of things, rather than the coding. In fact, I think that the production end needs more experienced coders to set realistic goals, and keep everything on the up-and-up.
Publishers are the most unscrupulous lot I've ever seen. They frequently sign developers with a great idea on with the promise of bonuses and royalties, then set the developer up to fail so that they never have to pay out those monies. If that doesn't work, they simply buy the company and nullify the contracts.
I'm disgusted that these tactics haven't been brought to the DOJ's attention, because it's fraud at a minimum, and racketeering at its worst.
This comment right here is why I love Nintendo's games. Everyone cried foul when Nintendo moved to cel-shading for the Zelda: The Wind Waker, saying that they wanted a more realistic Zelda. Some people are STILL saying that.
As it turns out, The Wind Waker is probably the most realistic Zelda game I've played. But that has more to do with creating a world with logical rules, and then living by those rules. You can practically feel the wind swirling around you, things in distance fade out of view, but are still there (you can see FOREVER). The game may look cartoony, but it's a "real" world. It feels real, things react exactly as you'd expect.
The problem with "photorealistic" games is that we know so much about what the real world is like, that anything that doesn't jive with our expectations is JARRING. We all immediately notice when a realistic human character doesn't look or move right. Developers have to become slaves to perfection as opposed to creating art. Complex physics, ultra-detailed textures, flawless motion capture... it's all required, and VERY expensive!
The new Zelda was free from those constraints. The only expectations they had to worry about was their own, and as a result, the world feels more realistic than anything I've played before, because I was able to suspend my disbelief and keep it suspended... a rare feat in gaming today.
The N-Gage isn't a console. It's a shitty cell phone and a shitty handheld. However, according to Nokia, they did sell out the initial shipment, but I think they were lying.
Again, launch is meaningless. It's almost a LAW that a console will sell it's allotment at launch. Period. Sega got a lot of units into the marketplace, but without software to make up the losses, they were doomed to failure AGAIN.
This is meaningless information. EVERY console sells out at launch... early adopters virtually guarantee that. Dreamcast failed because it was inbetween generations, something Sega always managed to do. Launching between the times when everyone is planning to buy a new console is just unwise.
Nintendo will launch precisely when Sony does specifically to avoid this mistake.
Everything I've read and seen says that Microsoft is ditching the hard drive so the unit can't be used as the Xbox has by the hacker community. When did this change?
The TI-84 Silver, on the other hand, has three times the memory of the TI-83 silver, so if programs are your thing, it might be worth it for that alone.
That said, the TI-83 Silver is what I have, and it's fantastic. I can't tell you how many times it has saved me when I've forgotten something critical on a quiz and had it at the touch of a button. I use it like a safety net... for things that I know I've learned, but can't seem to come up with immediately.
"The year calculators were added to the Calculus AP, we saw a statistically significant drop in scores. However, when I complain about these problems, I get called a technophobe."
That's what we call "anecdotal evidence". You have no proof that the calculators CAUSED the problems. Anything could have cause those drops. A little more information would prove your point.
Slashdotters... please don't use "facts" without sources. They're weak arguments, and just serve to undermine you.
As every good mathematician should? Sure, if you plan on being an engineer. Not all of us need all that. I'm taking Calculus now as a pre-requisite for a university business program, but once I get to the point where I can use Excel, all I really need to understand is what the numbers mean, not all the stuff going on behind the scenes. That's why the calculator is useful for me. It takes the grunt work out of it and gives me the big picture. I don't plan on being the guy that needs to see the nuts and bolts... I plan on managing those guys.
Valve IS focusing on that. They're making the eye-candy for those with the hardware to use it, but the Source engine dynamically scales down to very reasonable minimum hardware requirements.
Good point. Half Life 2 has the ability to scale for the hardware, and while a 3GH machine with a DX9-class video card would certainly make the game look better, Valve has said that the game will be absolutely playable with the minimum requirements.
It's a smart move, too. Half Life's popularity was in part due to the fantastic "after market mods', but even those would have failed had the game not been playable on just about every hardware configuration.
Apparently the poster isn't familiar with Origin's early Ultima and Wing Commander games. It was widely assumed that the $50 games would routinely end up costing between $500-$1000 to play, hardware prices being what they were back then.
"However, it is a proven fact that people rating pretty much anything (academic performance, produce quality, car safety) become wildly inconsistent when rating on a scale above 3-point-something."
I can't get over how entirely wrong this is. Proven Fact? Cite your source.
It's not the depth of the rating system that makes it inconsistent... it's an inconsistent set of values and the application of those values that causes the ratings systems to fall apart. In order for arbitrary numbers to work, you need to have a list of criteria for how to assign the numbers. Are we starting at a total of 100 or 10 and working BACKWARDS (essentially subtracting points for flaws)? This would cause most games to get a relatively high score. Do we start at the low end and add points for positives? You could end up with a lot of low rated games. How do you decide how many points each good or bad trait is worth? Ah, there's the catch.
You need to now have a list of those, and make sure that your reviews consistently evaluate those traits. Dock a point for a bad camera here, you need to dock it for every game with a bad camera. What if the game only has a half-assed camera, compared to the completely unusable camera in this other game? This is exactly where it all starts to fall apart. You can not be consistent when dealing with something as subjective as ART. It's not the number system that causes the problem. It's the HUMAN factor.
You also have to take into account that each REVIEWER is different. Many people absolutely hated the camera in Kingdom Hearts, but I never had a problem with it. I would rate the game higher, but the game is still widely accepted as brilliant.
FWIW, my site recently got some complaints about how we are GameCube biased. Note that we are a GameCube specific website. The specific complaint alledged that we gave "perfect 10" scores to F-Zero GX, Soul Calibur 2, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and Zelda: Wind Waker. (These are also the ONLY games to be given 10's at the time of that complaint)
The complaintant ignored the fact that we give MULTIPLE reviews for most games, and that a score of 10 is not PERFECT on our scale, because nothing can be perfect. The only game on that list to be given 10's from EVERY reviewer was Wind Waker.
He also ignored the reviewer slant... some reviewers just like certain types of games better than others. That's again why we have multiple reviews. We want people to find a reviewer who has tastes similar to theirs, because that's the best barometer for choosing what you'll like... find someone like YOU.
As someone who writes for a videogame website, we had this exact same debate. Numbers are ultimately meaningless and arbitrary, for all the reasons that the original poster said.
However, we use them anyway. Why? Because as much as we hate to admit it, there are a LOT of people out there who simply WON'T READ THE GODDAMNED REVIEW. In order to do most games justice, you have to write a great deal, and these Ritalin cases simply can't sit still long enough to read it all.
I experimented with this briefly, and the result was a flood of e-mails from people asking, "So, what did you THINK of the game?" No matter how plain I made my opinion, or how basic my vocabulary was, it was clear that they simply weren't READING the review.
We have our point ratings there basically as a way to shut those people up.
"Majora's Mask was released on the Nintendo 64. Isn't "Ocarina of Time: Master Quest" the game you are referring to?"
No, I'm referring to the fact that Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask were in development at NST (Nintendo Software Technology) at the same time, but only Ocarina was released (as a bonus disc) and Majora was subsequently canned. Months later, they resurrected the project, and released the game as part of the Zelda compilation disc for GameCube.
Note that Majora on GameCube has a sound bug that was never resolved. This was part of the reason it was canned to begin with, but it was later deemed non-critical.
Microsoft has a nasty habit of offering developers everything under the sun for an exclusive title published by Redmond, then dragging out the process for so long that it no longer fits in the schedule and it gets cancelled.
Something incredibly similar happened to Boss Game Studios and a phenomenal racing game they had scheduled for the LAUNCH of the Xbox. It was a follow-up to the critically acclaimed "World Driver Championship" on Nintendo 64, but it never got released despite being 98% finished.
The problem is that Microsoft had Project Gotham Racing scheduled for Launch as well. Microsoft pushed back "Racer X", and pushed it back, and pushed it back... all because they didn't want scheduling conflicts with other games like Midtown Madness and what not. Boss used the extra time to continue to tune and polish, even adding a few new features.
Eventually, the window of opportunity for what was a unique GT racer (including things like body kits... this was YEARS before The Fast and the Furious, and Need For Speed Underground), and Microsoft severed the publishing agreement. Despite having the game nearly complete, they couldn't get another publisher to pick it up, and the result was Boss ceasing operations.
Unfortunately, it looks like history is going to repeat itself. For some reason, publishers won't release nearly finished games, and I can't figure out why, since it would be nearly all profit... the development costs were already spent!
Now I can hear some of you saying that if the game was any good, this wouldn't happen. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is not always the case, and frequently couldn't be farther from the truth. This happens all over, and not just with the smaller development houses either. You just don't always hear about the cancellations. And when it happen inside major companies (first-parties like Nintendo, for example), sometimes those projects can be resurrected later (Majora's Mask on GameCube being a key example).
Who the fuck are these doctors, and how the hell do they figure that kids with ADHD are getting it because they play too many videogames?
I've known kids with ADHD, and they can't fucking sit still long enough to play a videogame. Hell, by definition, they don't have the attention span to play most games.
I think this just goes to prove my theory, that most scientists have their results in mind before they even start their "research", and unintentionally (or maybe even intentionally) steer the results in that direction.
Why does Nintendo get bashed so much? Because we all grew up with Nintendo, and we all loved Nintendo. We grew up, and our tastes changed, and Nintendo stayed Nintendo. Now that Nintendo no longer gives us EXACTLY what we want, it has to be Nintendo's problem, and not ours, right?
I always tell people, "Don't worry. Some day, you're going to get married, have kids of your own, and find that Nintendo is right there where you left them, waiting with open arms to entertain you and your family once again." When people discover the joy of playing games, even colorful, lighthearted ones, with their families, they'll realize that Nintendo was right all along.
Someone finally gets it right. This is absolutely fucking beautiful. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE needs to forward this to Lieberman and every other anti-violent-game advocate out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Reread what I wrote. I didn't say that they want the title to fail. I said that they set the developer up to fail. I used to work for a game developer, and it was not unusual to find out one day "You're shipping next week" when we thought we had over a month of development time left. Arbitrarily moving the schedule up meant no early delivery bonuses ... a weasely way to get around contract wording.
... even if they sell 400,000 of them to Blockbuster, there are a grand total of ZERO sold at "retail".
Likewise, it wouldn't be the first time a developer had royalties based on sales of a game at retail. But if a publisher decides not to ever release a game to retail, but cuts a deal to release the game exclusively through chains like Blockbuster
I don't know what publisher you work for, and perhaps yours is better than the ones I've dealt with.
Why is this modded insightful? Insightful would be pointing out that NOWHERE did this say that these would be minimum, or even recommended specs. It said AVERAGE, and any OS should run like gangbusters on the average configuration.
Um, not to mention that "average" specifications does not mean MINIMUM or even RECOMMENDED. It's simply a "forward thinking statement." There will be some machines that are faster, and some that are slower, and Longhorn should run on all of them.
For what it's worth, these specs aren't unrealistic at all. I just bought a 250GB drive for $150. Moore's Law says that I should be able to get 1TB for the same price in two years (double the space at half the cost). I have a 3.0GHZ processor with Hyper-Threading (the precursor to Dual-Core, so 4GHZ isn't unreasonable. I have 2GB of RAM right now, so 4GB is doable as well.
As for the video, the X800 cards were just released, and the X800 Platinum has double the horsepower of the 9800XT. (In fact, at 1600x1200 and full AA/AF, most games are CPU limited at 3GHZ!) Video cards are on a 18 month cycle, so double that, and you're even better than MS is projecting.
This will all be more than Microsoft is suggesting for Average, so it doesn't sound that far-fetched to me.
Why abandon the dream? If you love it enough, you can find a way to make it work for you. In my case, I'm getting a Business Management degree with a game design certificate so that I can get into the production side of things, rather than the coding. In fact, I think that the production end needs more experienced coders to set realistic goals, and keep everything on the up-and-up.
Publishers are the most unscrupulous lot I've ever seen. They frequently sign developers with a great idea on with the promise of bonuses and royalties, then set the developer up to fail so that they never have to pay out those monies. If that doesn't work, they simply buy the company and nullify the contracts.
I'm disgusted that these tactics haven't been brought to the DOJ's attention, because it's fraud at a minimum, and racketeering at its worst.
This comment right here is why I love Nintendo's games. Everyone cried foul when Nintendo moved to cel-shading for the Zelda: The Wind Waker, saying that they wanted a more realistic Zelda. Some people are STILL saying that.
... it's all required, and VERY expensive!
... a rare feat in gaming today.
As it turns out, The Wind Waker is probably the most realistic Zelda game I've played. But that has more to do with creating a world with logical rules, and then living by those rules. You can practically feel the wind swirling around you, things in distance fade out of view, but are still there (you can see FOREVER). The game may look cartoony, but it's a "real" world. It feels real, things react exactly as you'd expect.
The problem with "photorealistic" games is that we know so much about what the real world is like, that anything that doesn't jive with our expectations is JARRING. We all immediately notice when a realistic human character doesn't look or move right. Developers have to become slaves to perfection as opposed to creating art. Complex physics, ultra-detailed textures, flawless motion capture
The new Zelda was free from those constraints. The only expectations they had to worry about was their own, and as a result, the world feels more realistic than anything I've played before, because I was able to suspend my disbelief and keep it suspended
The N-Gage isn't a console. It's a shitty cell phone and a shitty handheld. However, according to Nokia, they did sell out the initial shipment, but I think they were lying.
Again, launch is meaningless. It's almost a LAW that a console will sell it's allotment at launch. Period. Sega got a lot of units into the marketplace, but without software to make up the losses, they were doomed to failure AGAIN.
This is meaningless information. EVERY console sells out at launch ... early adopters virtually guarantee that. Dreamcast failed because it was inbetween generations, something Sega always managed to do. Launching between the times when everyone is planning to buy a new console is just unwise.
Nintendo will launch precisely when Sony does specifically to avoid this mistake.
Everything I've read and seen says that Microsoft is ditching the hard drive so the unit can't be used as the Xbox has by the hacker community. When did this change?
For the SAME price, you can get a Ti-89 Titanium, which could eat your TI-86 and an 83+ and not even belch.
The TI-84 Silver, on the other hand, has three times the memory of the TI-83 silver, so if programs are your thing, it might be worth it for that alone.
... for things that I know I've learned, but can't seem to come up with immediately.
That said, the TI-83 Silver is what I have, and it's fantastic. I can't tell you how many times it has saved me when I've forgotten something critical on a quiz and had it at the touch of a button. I use it like a safety net
"The year calculators were added to the Calculus AP, we saw a statistically significant drop in scores. However, when I complain about these problems, I get called a technophobe."
... please don't use "facts" without sources. They're weak arguments, and just serve to undermine you.
That's what we call "anecdotal evidence". You have no proof that the calculators CAUSED the problems. Anything could have cause those drops. A little more information would prove your point.
Slashdotters
As every good mathematician should? Sure, if you plan on being an engineer. Not all of us need all that. I'm taking Calculus now as a pre-requisite for a university business program, but once I get to the point where I can use Excel, all I really need to understand is what the numbers mean, not all the stuff going on behind the scenes. That's why the calculator is useful for me. It takes the grunt work out of it and gives me the big picture. I don't plan on being the guy that needs to see the nuts and bolts ... I plan on managing those guys.
Valve IS focusing on that. They're making the eye-candy for those with the hardware to use it, but the Source engine dynamically scales down to very reasonable minimum hardware requirements.
Good point. Half Life 2 has the ability to scale for the hardware, and while a 3GH machine with a DX9-class video card would certainly make the game look better, Valve has said that the game will be absolutely playable with the minimum requirements.
It's a smart move, too. Half Life's popularity was in part due to the fantastic "after market mods', but even those would have failed had the game not been playable on just about every hardware configuration.
Apparently the poster isn't familiar with Origin's early Ultima and Wing Commander games. It was widely assumed that the $50 games would routinely end up costing between $500-$1000 to play, hardware prices being what they were back then.
"However, it is a proven fact that people rating pretty much anything (academic performance, produce quality, car safety) become wildly inconsistent when rating on a scale above 3-point-something."
... it's an inconsistent set of values and the application of those values that causes the ratings systems to fall apart. In order for arbitrary numbers to work, you need to have a list of criteria for how to assign the numbers. Are we starting at a total of 100 or 10 and working BACKWARDS (essentially subtracting points for flaws)? This would cause most games to get a relatively high score. Do we start at the low end and add points for positives? You could end up with a lot of low rated games. How do you decide how many points each good or bad trait is worth? Ah, there's the catch.
... some reviewers just like certain types of games better than others. That's again why we have multiple reviews. We want people to find a reviewer who has tastes similar to theirs, because that's the best barometer for choosing what you'll like ... find someone like YOU.
I can't get over how entirely wrong this is. Proven Fact? Cite your source.
It's not the depth of the rating system that makes it inconsistent
You need to now have a list of those, and make sure that your reviews consistently evaluate those traits. Dock a point for a bad camera here, you need to dock it for every game with a bad camera. What if the game only has a half-assed camera, compared to the completely unusable camera in this other game? This is exactly where it all starts to fall apart. You can not be consistent when dealing with something as subjective as ART. It's not the number system that causes the problem. It's the HUMAN factor.
You also have to take into account that each REVIEWER is different. Many people absolutely hated the camera in Kingdom Hearts, but I never had a problem with it. I would rate the game higher, but the game is still widely accepted as brilliant.
FWIW, my site recently got some complaints about how we are GameCube biased. Note that we are a GameCube specific website. The specific complaint alledged that we gave "perfect 10" scores to F-Zero GX, Soul Calibur 2, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and Zelda: Wind Waker. (These are also the ONLY games to be given 10's at the time of that complaint)
The complaintant ignored the fact that we give MULTIPLE reviews for most games, and that a score of 10 is not PERFECT on our scale, because nothing can be perfect. The only game on that list to be given 10's from EVERY reviewer was Wind Waker.
He also ignored the reviewer slant
As someone who writes for a videogame website, we had this exact same debate. Numbers are ultimately meaningless and arbitrary, for all the reasons that the original poster said.
However, we use them anyway. Why? Because as much as we hate to admit it, there are a LOT of people out there who simply WON'T READ THE GODDAMNED REVIEW. In order to do most games justice, you have to write a great deal, and these Ritalin cases simply can't sit still long enough to read it all.
I experimented with this briefly, and the result was a flood of e-mails from people asking, "So, what did you THINK of the game?" No matter how plain I made my opinion, or how basic my vocabulary was, it was clear that they simply weren't READING the review.
We have our point ratings there basically as a way to shut those people up.
I've got one of the Y.S. Tech TMD (Tip Magnetic Driving) fans on my CPU heatsink, and it's fantastic.
http://www.dansdata.com/tmdfan.htm
"Majora's Mask was released on the Nintendo 64. Isn't "Ocarina of Time: Master Quest" the game you are referring to?"
No, I'm referring to the fact that Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask were in development at NST (Nintendo Software Technology) at the same time, but only Ocarina was released (as a bonus disc) and Majora was subsequently canned. Months later, they resurrected the project, and released the game as part of the Zelda compilation disc for GameCube.
Note that Majora on GameCube has a sound bug that was never resolved. This was part of the reason it was canned to begin with, but it was later deemed non-critical.
Microsoft has a nasty habit of offering developers everything under the sun for an exclusive title published by Redmond, then dragging out the process for so long that it no longer fits in the schedule and it gets cancelled.
... all because they didn't want scheduling conflicts with other games like Midtown Madness and what not. Boss used the extra time to continue to tune and polish, even adding a few new features.
... this was YEARS before The Fast and the Furious, and Need For Speed Underground), and Microsoft severed the publishing agreement. Despite having the game nearly complete, they couldn't get another publisher to pick it up, and the result was Boss ceasing operations.
... the development costs were already spent!
Something incredibly similar happened to Boss Game Studios and a phenomenal racing game they had scheduled for the LAUNCH of the Xbox. It was a follow-up to the critically acclaimed "World Driver Championship" on Nintendo 64, but it never got released despite being 98% finished.
The problem is that Microsoft had Project Gotham Racing scheduled for Launch as well. Microsoft pushed back "Racer X", and pushed it back, and pushed it back
Eventually, the window of opportunity for what was a unique GT racer (including things like body kits
Unfortunately, it looks like history is going to repeat itself. For some reason, publishers won't release nearly finished games, and I can't figure out why, since it would be nearly all profit
Now I can hear some of you saying that if the game was any good, this wouldn't happen. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is not always the case, and frequently couldn't be farther from the truth. This happens all over, and not just with the smaller development houses either. You just don't always hear about the cancellations. And when it happen inside major companies (first-parties like Nintendo, for example), sometimes those projects can be resurrected later (Majora's Mask on GameCube being a key example).
Who the fuck are these doctors, and how the hell do they figure that kids with ADHD are getting it because they play too many videogames?
I've known kids with ADHD, and they can't fucking sit still long enough to play a videogame. Hell, by definition, they don't have the attention span to play most games.
I think this just goes to prove my theory, that most scientists have their results in mind before they even start their "research", and unintentionally (or maybe even intentionally) steer the results in that direction.
Why does Nintendo get bashed so much? Because we all grew up with Nintendo, and we all loved Nintendo. We grew up, and our tastes changed, and Nintendo stayed Nintendo. Now that Nintendo no longer gives us EXACTLY what we want, it has to be Nintendo's problem, and not ours, right?
I always tell people, "Don't worry. Some day, you're going to get married, have kids of your own, and find that Nintendo is right there where you left them, waiting with open arms to entertain you and your family once again." When people discover the joy of playing games, even colorful, lighthearted ones, with their families, they'll realize that Nintendo was right all along.
Someone finally gets it right. This is absolutely fucking beautiful. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE needs to forward this to Lieberman and every other anti-violent-game advocate out there.