After 10 pages of extensive advertising, I see some problems, besides the about.com revenue stream.
Needs a much stronger outline form. I'm not the best writer in the world but that is a rambling article.
The handhelds are basically useless in this discussion, unless you talk about integration with the platforms. And I'm sure the market will accomidate whatever is popular.
The market has already seemed to have pushed the revolution out of the running as the 'next console'. But as long as they continue to make money on the hardware and the software, I'm sure they will continue to sell. It just won't be the 'it' console, which is okay with Nintendo.
It's not clear the market has the room for another console entry such as the ybox or ps3 or revolution, especialy if people keep making sequels for all the old generation machines.
I don't believe online will make/break this generations release, still. However, the download part might seriously help some platforms.
The consolidated control preferences and user details within the ybox series might seriously help them, as people are generally lazy. heh
Halo 3 is not the 'killer app' it used to be. Halo 2 didn't sell more xboxes.
The Revolution is not getting nearly the developer support that the PS3 or the ybox.
The PS3 will have exclusive titles that people will be willing to buy one for. And they are promising on release now, but we'll see.
I don't think the sony rootkit problem has much to do with their games division, really. And I doubt it will bankrupt them.
Backwards compatibility is still questionable on all three systems. Xbox 360 has 200 some titles they've announced, but how well they work and the requirements for a hard drive make it somewhat questionable. The others are questionable entirely. I think this will influence buyers, as it did when the PS2 came out.
The use of the multiple cores on the ybox and ps3 might be a total success on some software titles and a total bomb on others, it's an unknown and dependant upon the developers.
The prices of the hardware are pies in the sky, it's what they'd like to get near. And it's not completely clear if microsoft can drop the price of hardware, though they have the deepest pockets to do so. They won't let it get dreamcasted. (*sob*)
The launch of the ybox is not looking good currently, due to the restricted inventory and lack of revolutionary single platform games. However, microsoft will throw money to make it 'good', I'm sure.
I'm not without bias, but damn, you could at least pretend for a bit.
Anyway, I'm not convinced either way, it's still wait and see. With this subject matter, you'd be better off getting a random games.slashdot.org reader to come up with a comparison between the machines and the possible outcomes. Plus, you might not have to deal with 10 pages of ads.
Unfortunately, no, it doesn't feel like old school Quake at all. I remember when the id system was released in QuakeWorld, and I signed up, played once, and then went back to netQuake because I was on a T3 and had an unbelievable ping. And the differences between an LPB and HPB were HUGE. ah good times... *sniff*
Heh it's not a failure if they planned to do that from the start. The xbox had budgeted $5 bil in losses, but were sure they were going to make it a profit by the 2nd year. wait no, 4th. no wait, now. no wait... nevermind, about this xbox 360, huh? It's only a loss leader for the first year, really!
SUCCESSES:
5. VIRAL MARKETING: Check
4. THE HARD DRIVE: Not the standard in all machines, which is major key to the original xbox. This might lead to a failure of the system.
3. XBOX LIVE: Check, all your box are belong to us! More invasive than before, even.
2. NORTH AMERICAN MARKET PENETRATION: Check, maybe, if the supply chain holds up.
1. THE ACQUISITION OF BUNGIE: Check, sorta, they are still there but without any radical or life changing games in the pipeline. Time to ressurect Marathon? FAILURES:
5. THE "DUKE" CONTROLLER: The new controller is a lot different. Until I actually use it...
4. THE ACQUISITION OF RARE: This is going into the success column, I think, cause the new games they are working on.
3. THE CANCELLATION OF TRUE FANTASY LIVE ONLINE: Check, still not there. I'm sure they'll be working on MMO's for xbox 360 though. Hard drive required.
2. NO ASIAN MARKET PENETRATION: Without a massive games lineup change, I don't see this happening.
1. LACK OF GENRE VARIETY: On launch, the differences between xbox 360 games and previous gen games is so small, I think this is a major failure.
We'll see how the launch goes. Not much time left though...
That is such a fluff marketing peice about backwards compatibility. Basically 'Yeah we're working on it, wait two weeks!' And there's no way they can test all these games to make sure it works back to front. (I have a friend who used to test xbox games, it would take at least a week per game, and even then, it was sometimes a week per build!) I'm sure this will get modded down by the xbox fan boys but it's true. And you'll notice it requires a hard drive, which is something that we were told earlier in the week we wouldn't need. Good times.
The more actual details I learn about it, the more sour the taste in my mouth is. I also don't understand why a publisher would want to get locked into only develping for the xbox 360. I'm sure the exclusive titles like Halo, or the PS2's GTA series, yeah that helps sell boxes. But for the developer, they actually sell less over the short term. So yeah, it costs less to develop, and if they have a hit, I'm sure they could port it to another platform. But if they just develop it crossplatform to start with, you don't have the extended development time, and you hit all systems possible to get the widest distribution.
I'm still waiting for some serious gameplay footage to become available for some of these games. I've only seen the rendered stuff, a few non-textured videos of Perfect Dark: Zero, and a little gameplay of PGR3. I'm just not seeing where this is going.
I'd rather see them take their time, admit they are behind schedule, and lose the 'jump' they'll get on Sony. Because otherwise we end up with great dreamcast hardware, two good games to play (soul calibur and Armada), and a praying that it doesn't break cause we can't buy a new one.
The people who lose are the people who want to play old xbox games on their xbox 360. My understanding is that you need the hard drive (and an xbox live connection) to play older xbox games. Or has this fact changed in the past two weeks?
She does state she doesn't have any contact to that division at all, so I don't really see what the big deal is about this review. There are lots of employees that are critical of products of their own employer produced. In fact, today's User Friendly comments on that very phenomenon.
As far as the game itself, yeah, it sounds like pretty standard slapdash game producing. The commercials are the type I hate, with all FMV and no game play. Show me what the game looks like! But yeah, mirroring of characters seemed pretty obvious from even the commercial. Seems a shame to use 'imperfects' when there are a ton of villians already out there to use from the marvel universe. `8r/
I seem to recall a news article back in the day that said that Microsoft was going to risk five billion dollars on it's entry into the marketplace, but I can't find it anymore. However, I did find this article about how they expected to get into the black in 2004. I wonder if investors will examine that when they only just now were profitable in Q4 of last year for the original xbox. And that's just for that quarter, not recouping the losses before that.
I think that microsoft expects nintendo and sony to just disappear after they take over the marketplace. They are trying to apply the same PC monopoly idea. However, it's not like that, the market is entirely different. There's room for multiple platforms at the top. So it's going to be interesting. Short term, the consumer should win due to the price wars. But long term, we might end up losing if it's just one company there.
Can we resubmit these to get it routed to a technical person? Or possibly make requests on the Forums to get the real answers? This is just useless, but exactly what you'd expect out of blizzard. At least on the forums, you sometimes get a real answer of 'yeah, that's a bug, I don't see it getting fixed anytime soon, so stop doing it.'
This is just a way to take a very complex 'flow' program and convert it to a massive group of computers doing it instead of just one. In this case, they took quake and made it so you can spread users across multiple computers, but it's designed for intranet use.
So, an ISP could take a popular multiplayer game, setup some grid servers, and a couple proxy servers, and then get 100 people to join the game. This is not exactly the same as making it massively multiplayer because the world is still the same size, and I'm unsure if the client could handle all the actors being on the screen at the same time. This is more just showing off the load sharing capabilities rather than a true gaming invention.
Ideally, we want something similar to the Unreal 2 idea, where you have people getting passed from server to server to server, and the place is massive. That way, people go to the interesting places and gather. And it would have to run across the internet. This thing only runs on an intranet (see bottom question). A little disappointing.
Anyway, giving links to some of these applications just further confuses people. I have a ton of friends asking me how to do this, and without a central set of servers already setup, no one can really try it out. Which would have been ideal for IBM to show it off.
I love the concept! Back in the day, we tested a couple 64 player matches, and WOW was it insane. What was kind of neat is that we made 'no fire' zones, so people could just go and chill.
Now, to find my quake 2 install directory.. hrm.. (You need Quake 2 to play this, obviously) (And yes, same GoNINzo from GameSpy. heh)
I have to say that it really has helped the lives of mangband and tomenet. You don't need to be a fancy c programmer to add abilities to the games, plus you can make some of the changes live, which is really nice. Kind of neat, I just wish that some of the debugging tools were a little cleaner to work with.
If the poster read the fuming article, they would have noticed that this was a bug, not on purpose. One of the local fox stations accidently got flagged as 'Content protection', maybe because the guy is using an antennae...
How can we expect readers of slashdot to RTFA if we can't get anyone writing the summary to do so. heh
Anyway, the old software, 3.x, does not support the broadcast flag, I'll continue to use it until I'm forced to switch to MythTV or GBPVR cause of all the advertising. (Which Tivo is letting run rampant, IMHO.)
Yeah, they are doing the first step of dropping the install default, and then they plan to drop the code entirely so they don't have to update it everytime they make a change.
I would think they would lead forward with their 'best game' to get the market saturation meter ticking. I'd agree that it's way too soon after Halo 2 launched, and if they did release a follow up now, it wouldn't be really new, it'd be a rehash. The 'launch failure' was said just because the mislabeled launch dates and the pre order packs that seem to offer it. These people put their money down already to get it reserved and such.
I thought they were going to show a few games at the Xbox360 special, but that was not to happen. I would think they would show some in-game action instead of all the cut scenese they showed. I don't think they would play it that close to the vest if they had a real ready-to-go title. I know they're trying to get a jump on the ps3, but if they had a bad launch, you end up dooming the platform.
You can disable SSL 2.0 right now. Go to Tools | Options | Advanced | Security and you can turn it off. I think they might just be turning it off by default now instead of having it default to on. Yes, it might break a few sites, but those might have some questionable security anyway if they havn't updated since 1996.
You can do the same thing in IE by going to Tools | Options | Advanced | Security. What is kind of amusing is that TLS 1.0 seems to be off for me. Not that I use it but still... heh
Anyway, if you're worried about it breaking a site you *must* use, try disabling it.
There is WAY more information than just the Halo 3 launch failure. (Though I'm guessing it will be called Halo 360 for less confusion.) I'm doubting many titles will be ready for launch, it seems very rushed so far. Even the MTV half-hour 'commercial' a couple months ago didn't seem to have any nearly finished games. The version of perfect dark they were playing didn't seem to be skinned. I would think we would see at least one finished game being played by now. The best they can do is show halo 2 being played on it.
I think the Halo 3 delay might be very damaging to the launch. How do deal with the pre-orders, for one. The series is very popular, and it would be much better as a group. However, if they are going to use it to combat the PS3, I'm not entirely sure they'll have the market base they need by then. I'm guessing they'll try to fill in that gap with the Quake 4 launch, but without a keyboard and mouse, what's the point.
I'm going to go with the Penny Arcade review name so far: Xbox Three Shitty.
I just beat the game this morning, it was pretty fun, IMHO. I love the 'powers' you trigger, cause they make things easy when things get really hard. heh I just wish I had an option to reset my guy's skill trees.
I'd vote that the best game for character development is Jade Empire right now. Everyone has their own story, and it branches based on your reactions. It makes the game so much more intereting and keeps you going forward so you can find out the guy's wife or why this guy left the order, etc.
To me, that's proof that character development makes a huge difference.
Those 'rooms' won't be going away, they will still need generator power. The lighting portion is a tiny fraction of what is done in there normally. Things like fire alarms, emergency response systems, and phones are not going away.
It really depends on the life of the bulb. If it's super long on the order of years, then it's worth it. But it's a standard bulb life, it's better to stick with normal response equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, I'm not convinced either way, it's still wait and see. With this subject matter, you'd be better off getting a random games.slashdot.org reader to come up with a comparison between the machines and the possible outcomes. Plus, you might not have to deal with 10 pages of ads.
Unfortunately, no, it doesn't feel like old school Quake at all. I remember when the id system was released in QuakeWorld, and I signed up, played once, and then went back to netQuake because I was on a T3 and had an unbelievable ping. And the differences between an LPB and HPB were HUGE. ah good times... *sniff*
Heh it's not a failure if they planned to do that from the start. The xbox had budgeted $5 bil in losses, but were sure they were going to make it a profit by the 2nd year. wait no, 4th. no wait, now. no wait... nevermind, about this xbox 360, huh? It's only a loss leader for the first year, really!
SUCCESSES:
5. VIRAL MARKETING: Check
4. THE HARD DRIVE: Not the standard in all machines, which is major key to the original xbox. This might lead to a failure of the system.
3. XBOX LIVE: Check, all your box are belong to us! More invasive than before, even.
2. NORTH AMERICAN MARKET PENETRATION: Check, maybe, if the supply chain holds up.
1. THE ACQUISITION OF BUNGIE: Check, sorta, they are still there but without any radical or life changing games in the pipeline. Time to ressurect Marathon?
FAILURES:
5. THE "DUKE" CONTROLLER: The new controller is a lot different. Until I actually use it...
4. THE ACQUISITION OF RARE: This is going into the success column, I think, cause the new games they are working on.
3. THE CANCELLATION OF TRUE FANTASY LIVE ONLINE: Check, still not there. I'm sure they'll be working on MMO's for xbox 360 though. Hard drive required.
2. NO ASIAN MARKET PENETRATION: Without a massive games lineup change, I don't see this happening.
1. LACK OF GENRE VARIETY: On launch, the differences between xbox 360 games and previous gen games is so small, I think this is a major failure.
We'll see how the launch goes. Not much time left though...
Man... I miss Signal 11's take on topics. It's too bad, ya know? F'ing karma...
I lived in a house of geeks. Yes, we liked armada. We rocked that game multiplayer. `8r) It was a lot of fun.
The more actual details I learn about it, the more sour the taste in my mouth is. I also don't understand why a publisher would want to get locked into only develping for the xbox 360. I'm sure the exclusive titles like Halo, or the PS2's GTA series, yeah that helps sell boxes. But for the developer, they actually sell less over the short term. So yeah, it costs less to develop, and if they have a hit, I'm sure they could port it to another platform. But if they just develop it crossplatform to start with, you don't have the extended development time, and you hit all systems possible to get the widest distribution.
I'm still waiting for some serious gameplay footage to become available for some of these games. I've only seen the rendered stuff, a few non-textured videos of Perfect Dark: Zero, and a little gameplay of PGR3. I'm just not seeing where this is going.
I'd rather see them take their time, admit they are behind schedule, and lose the 'jump' they'll get on Sony. Because otherwise we end up with great dreamcast hardware, two good games to play (soul calibur and Armada), and a praying that it doesn't break cause we can't buy a new one.
The people who lose are the people who want to play old xbox games on their xbox 360. My understanding is that you need the hard drive (and an xbox live connection) to play older xbox games. Or has this fact changed in the past two weeks?
As far as the game itself, yeah, it sounds like pretty standard slapdash game producing. The commercials are the type I hate, with all FMV and no game play. Show me what the game looks like! But yeah, mirroring of characters seemed pretty obvious from even the commercial. Seems a shame to use 'imperfects' when there are a ton of villians already out there to use from the marvel universe. `8r/
I think that microsoft expects nintendo and sony to just disappear after they take over the marketplace. They are trying to apply the same PC monopoly idea. However, it's not like that, the market is entirely different. There's room for multiple platforms at the top. So it's going to be interesting. Short term, the consumer should win due to the price wars. But long term, we might end up losing if it's just one company there.
Can we resubmit these to get it routed to a technical person? Or possibly make requests on the Forums to get the real answers? This is just useless, but exactly what you'd expect out of blizzard. At least on the forums, you sometimes get a real answer of 'yeah, that's a bug, I don't see it getting fixed anytime soon, so stop doing it.'
Yeah, I ran the gamespy irc server that was part of 3dnet. We actually had the biggest node on that system. heh The world is entirely too small.
So, an ISP could take a popular multiplayer game, setup some grid servers, and a couple proxy servers, and then get 100 people to join the game. This is not exactly the same as making it massively multiplayer because the world is still the same size, and I'm unsure if the client could handle all the actors being on the screen at the same time. This is more just showing off the load sharing capabilities rather than a true gaming invention.
Ideally, we want something similar to the Unreal 2 idea, where you have people getting passed from server to server to server, and the place is massive. That way, people go to the interesting places and gather. And it would have to run across the internet. This thing only runs on an intranet (see bottom question). A little disappointing.
Anyway, giving links to some of these applications just further confuses people. I have a ton of friends asking me how to do this, and without a central set of servers already setup, no one can really try it out. Which would have been ideal for IBM to show it off.
Now, to find my quake 2 install directory.. hrm.. (You need Quake 2 to play this, obviously) (And yes, same GoNINzo from GameSpy. heh)
I have to say that it really has helped the lives of mangband and tomenet. You don't need to be a fancy c programmer to add abilities to the games, plus you can make some of the changes live, which is really nice. Kind of neat, I just wish that some of the debugging tools were a little cleaner to work with.
How can we expect readers of slashdot to RTFA if we can't get anyone writing the summary to do so. heh
Anyway, the old software, 3.x, does not support the broadcast flag, I'll continue to use it until I'm forced to switch to MythTV or GBPVR cause of all the advertising. (Which Tivo is letting run rampant, IMHO.)
The weapons look incredible, glad to see someone doing something good with the HL2 engine finally. (And keeping it free.)
Yeah, they are doing the first step of dropping the install default, and then they plan to drop the code entirely so they don't have to update it everytime they make a change.
I thought they were going to show a few games at the Xbox360 special, but that was not to happen. I would think they would show some in-game action instead of all the cut scenese they showed. I don't think they would play it that close to the vest if they had a real ready-to-go title. I know they're trying to get a jump on the ps3, but if they had a bad launch, you end up dooming the platform.
Just because you disagree with my opinion doesn't mean I'm wrong.
You can do the same thing in IE by going to Tools | Options | Advanced | Security. What is kind of amusing is that TLS 1.0 seems to be off for me. Not that I use it but still... heh
Anyway, if you're worried about it breaking a site you *must* use, try disabling it.
I think the Halo 3 delay might be very damaging to the launch. How do deal with the pre-orders, for one. The series is very popular, and it would be much better as a group. However, if they are going to use it to combat the PS3, I'm not entirely sure they'll have the market base they need by then. I'm guessing they'll try to fill in that gap with the Quake 4 launch, but without a keyboard and mouse, what's the point.
I'm going to go with the Penny Arcade review name so far: Xbox Three Shitty.
I just beat the game this morning, it was pretty fun, IMHO. I love the 'powers' you trigger, cause they make things easy when things get really hard. heh I just wish I had an option to reset my guy's skill trees.
I'd vote that the best game for character development is Jade Empire right now. Everyone has their own story, and it branches based on your reactions. It makes the game so much more intereting and keeps you going forward so you can find out the guy's wife or why this guy left the order, etc. To me, that's proof that character development makes a huge difference.
It really depends on the life of the bulb. If it's super long on the order of years, then it's worth it. But it's a standard bulb life, it's better to stick with normal response equipment.