"In the works". I'm not buying a system just to wait a year or two to play a game that might end up being cancelled.
Just like all those people who bought an Xbob 360 last year right?
MMOs, downloadable content, tournaments and "Xbox Live style games" are developer decisions. Sony doesn't make anything on that. Music, radio and video are unproven due to current broadband limitations. VOIP will be free since they're using Xfire.
You are way off base. Did you even read the articles around? Xfire is the developer's choice, but community support will be standard (friends lists, chat, in game messaging). Yes your id appears in Xfire as well as in the regular PNP suite.
Hey, MS bashing AND "more space != better games" in the same paragraph! Good job there troll, now go show me a game that takes up more than 9.4 GB (a dual layered DVD) compressed.
What about the future? By your logic games will never need to be more than 9.4GB..sounds familiar, where have I heard that before? Quit defending MS's lack of will - they failed gamers by omitting next-gen storage.
Half a million units is not flooding the market.
Maybe so, but 10 million certainly is. US != Worldwide market.
Yes, because we all know Sony Centers are an excellent source of the market's future adoption rate of HDTVs.
No they certainly are not, but fucking come off it! Your staunch stand against all the prior posts is now becoming silly - are people going to stop buying HDTVs?
Ok, so its a box set to recieve, forward and transmit information. How is that different from a router?
By that logic your mobile phone is a router. But it's not is it? Fucking ridiculous.
Could everyone please read the article? The number of replies being posted is stupendous..so many.
"Oh - and it's all free, too. The only place you'll be asked to fork over a penny is when you purchase something in the PlayStation Store."
"So, once you add friends, what can you do with them? Obviously enough, you can check their status and see if they're online; you can see if you have any new messages from them, and send them messages. Sending emails through the system uses the same peculiar text messaging style keypad that users of the PSP will be familiar with, which seems a bit painful at first but rapidly becomes a much faster way of entering text than the on-screen keyboards used by other system"
Please take of the fucking blinkers! slashdot?! you ate my balls with the xbox360 fellatio!
I really appreciated this about the 'cube. It's like Nintendo saying "well if you want to play these imports, we'll let you, but it's at your own risk!". The people who want to play the imports, can, and legally (depending on regional laws), and regular players are none the wiser. No mistake, I would prefer no region locking from a practical and library standpoint.
This all said, region locking is meant to protect regional publishers ability to make profit, and hence release more games with localalisation. However, this did not seem to help in Australia, where GameCube titles are absolutely pitiful in selection, and sweet fuck all outside of big N first party releases.
"General public's conception" is your perception, as revealed by your later statement "Whether or not this cable is required to play a BD-Rom game titles is unknown by me".
The image constraint token that you previously worried about has been ditched/postponed, possibly due to negative consumer feedback, relating to the fears that you mentioned.
In 2003 Steorn undertook a project to develop more efficient micro generators. Early into this project the company developed certain generator configurations that appeared to be over 100% efficient.
Has anyone seen Primer? When reading the above I immediately thought of this film. A couple of guys are playing with magnetic fields in their garage and accidentally discover a positive gain energy source. Later it is discovered that the generator is actually a temporal shifting device (read: time machine), but a "realistic" one (you can only travel back to when the device was turned on). This story correlates heavily with the film's plot.
"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy."
One of the characters in the film, Abe, describes the machine operation using a small diagram. The dialog is disjointed and overlapping , but the situation is the same as above:
"All right? We start the machine with the Weeble at the A end.
-It travels forward-- -You got to write this down.
-There's nothing to write down. -I'll write it down.
It travels forward normally towards the B end.
When it gets there,the feed runs down parabolically...until it shouId stop, but it curves back around towards the A end.
When it gets back to the A end....Curve that around. The WeebIe...has experienced a total of two minutes, and again it curves--
-Back around. It curves parabolically. -Right.
It comes back around and it does this about 567 times.
When it finaIIy exits on the B end...it's traveled an odd number of forward and backward trips.
What is so special about 567? Why is it about 567? Why isn't it exact?
-This is not empiricaI. -Here, give me that.
I don't know why it's not exact. There's some sort of probabiIity there.
Every time it hits the B end there's a chance...a small chance it won't curve back around towards the A end.
And for some reason, it takes about 567 trips before it finally does.
It does have to exit, or else we wouldn't be abIe to see it afterwards.
Okay, let's take a look at this.
Twenty-two hours, 26 minutes.
-26 minutes. -Even.
Enter at the B end. Exit at the B end.
-I just want you to see it the way I saw it. -I am trying, okay?
Everything we're putting in that box comes ungrounded. And I don't mean grounded to the earth, I mean not tethered. We're blocking whatever keeps it moving forward, so they fIip-fIop. Inside the box, it's like a street, and both ends are cul-de-sacs. This isn't frame dragging or wormhole matching. It's basic mechanics and heat. -This is not mechanics and heat.
-We can publish. -Yeah, we can publish.
No, I mean we can really pubIish.
Aaron, the Weeble's stupid. It can't move.
Even if we were to put the Weeble in at point B...it's still going to bounce back and forth until it's kicked out at the B end. But if it were smart...it couId enter at the B end and exit at the A end before it flips back.
-You're talking about making a bigger one.
Freaking. Awesome. Film. Fingers crossed this energy source is real.
Portables are a completely different market to next-gen game systems. Much like the idea that people will purchase 360/PS3 + Wii, people purchase a PSP and a DS/GBA.
No YOUR analysis is stupid. It's fair to say that DVD was an appropriate format for the last five years. You're suggesting that I forgoe cinematic quality film in a game to compensate for a lack of storage space. Why the fuck would you want a "cutting edge" system that is compromised from the get-go? Next-gen means next gen storage too, sucker.
Consistently the consoles with larger storage and dual use (ie. plays something other than games) edge out the other consoles. After that it comes down to game library.
Good for Sony on sneaking in the Blu-Ray - it makes the console more expensive, but it puts an end to this stupid format war. Just like they snuck in DVD to households, every home with a PS3 will be purchasing Blu-Ray films. HDDVD is a DOA product.
Developers name lack of next-gen game storage on 360 number one problem.
I'm not against government regulation on industry, when economic power is being abused. But this is not an abuse of anything on the part of the game companies. It is the shirking of responsibility, both on the part of parents, and on the part of industry. And if parents were doing their due dilligence as parents, they would be insisting the industry take responsibility for properly classifying their product.
Rockstar's initial insistence that the porno games were a user modification was irresponsible. When they owned up it was a terrible blow to the industry, and for gamers. These guys denied their involvement, and blamed their community. PR at it's worst. Parents are certainly guilty of shirking responsibility, buying mature content games for their immature children. This dilutes the ratings system as it adds a layer of irrelevence. But then there is the flipside of responsible parents who pay attention to ratings and guidelines, then later discover the game has far more graphic depictions of violence and gore then that which was disclosed on the packaging (See: Oblivion). This is why games should be thoroughly reviewed, and people paid to do it. Sure, some games have over 100 hours of gameplay, but the reviewers are paid to do nothing but. It's a sweet job. The fact that this act is being pushed reflects that parents are showing due diligence, lobbying their members and insisting that the industry take responsibility.
User mods should not be included in discussion of game ratings. It's about direct visible content, right? My DVD remixer that removes clothing from characters in Disney films is due out next week...
Therefore, requiring the board to play through all the games it rates to completion would likely do one thing: force it out of business. This is not an agency you can dictate to regarding their operations. It is a private organization.
Precisely for this reason the ESRB, as it stands, is inadequate to guarantee consumers, beauracrats, game developers and publishers are all catered for. The role of the ESRB should be a government body, with independent reviewers, for ALL consumer media (film, literature, games) released through legitimate retail channels (virtual or physical) that are governed by US law. Having a piece of media rated would be heavily subsidised by taxpayers, as it is in their interest. This is not about censorship, it's about a set standard of guidelines for what the recommended age for consumption. ie: Anthropomorphic cats in hats: 1+, Boobs and beheadings - 18+.
You're basically talking about creating a new and massive government bureacracy for one thing - to rate video games. This is how you want your tax dollars spent? Because the ESRB is not going to spend this money, nor do they have to.
Nor should they. Take a look at the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification. The only problem with their system is a lack of R18+ classification for videogames. This saw the banning from retail of Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, and Rockstar's Manhunt. The reluctance to provide an 18+ rating is constantly subject to debate and lobbying. It certainly seems to mimmick the US system "Oh games are for kids! Why would there be an R18+ game?" Certainly the.au system is not perfect but it is an indication that it can work. Also hidden hackable boobies should be exempt.
GTA Vice City, to pick but one example, was more than 100 hours long if you played the "entire" thing through (including side missions). Multiply that by the number of games that come out every week and you tell me how many people would need to be on the ESRB payroll.
If it's in everyone's interest for fair and just ratings applied to media, it should be a government institution. It costs what it costs. No, it's not a slippery slope towards restricting freedom of expression, as it's all about everyone involved cooperating and seeing the mutual benefits of fair and just ratings. In Australia, if a sales clerk sells an MA15+ game to a 12 year old, by individual state law it is treated with the same impact as selling an MA15+ film to the same person. Each state has different penalties, and while it is not equivalent to selling cigarettes the classifications are respected by sales clerks. Majority of videogame sales occur in EBGames and similar stores. For more info on classification pricing: OFLC Classification Pricing Now if they can just allow R18+ games, I can have my murder simulators and play them too...
Pfft. The previous poster was correct. Have you even read the article you linked? You cannot magically cull polygons. The original Prey began life using Ken Silverman's Build engine, and that had portals too. The whole "Portal Technology" gimmick has been discussed to death.
"the Cell can't decode MPEG4 at HD resolutions and do other stuff at the same time."
It's more than capable.
"The PS3 is also not going to do half of the promised "interactive" features of a standard Blu-ray player."
Why not? It's more than capable.
"Blu-ray is necessary for all the old-school MPEG2 videos you'll see on PS3 RPGs."
I guess that all the main memory will be used by "old school PCM audio" because the cell isn't powerful enough to decode perceptual acoustic audio and compressed wavelet video at the same time as calculating collions and physical reactions, computing game logic, pathfinding and AI, and generating 3D scenes.
So you are arguing that because "Enchant Arm" is being released for the 360, that the HD video can be encoded using an MPEG4-alike, but if it were released for PS3 the video would need to be in MPEG2, because the PS3 GPU isn't powerful enough. Fucking ridiculous.
Well not you... not too many 12-17 year olds... but then they weren't the ones paying $400US for the just launched Xbox360, Xbox, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, etc... hardcore gamers, high disposable income folk, tech enthusiasts.. these are the people that drive a launch. Prolly see heaps of PS3's under the tree at Xmas 2007 tho. I can see it now:
"Dad: well what about this Xbox360? It's cheaper!" "Kid: nah that doesn't play high def movies, if we get the PS3 we get a bluray player too!" OR "Kid: nah that doesn't even have motion sensing controllers! we want a Wii!"
To someone with gaming experience and knowledge of systems the ads are immediately recognisable as being pre-rendered shots. Out of curiousity I sought the game (PS2 COD2:Big Red One) out in Australian EB's, and guess what? No in-game shots on the box either. I hate pre-rendered ads/packaging/etc. I also note that most multi-platform releases use the same high-quality PC/Xbox screenshots for all platform packaging, regardless of the system. This is unrepresentative of the actual product, and irritating. Reminds me of the old ads for games avilable on spectrum, trs80, and commodore64 - they show the tasty graphics, but no way you get that on the 64!
KMFDM did the soundtrack for this game back in 1996/7. As it didn't/hasn't seen release I hope the work put in will still be used. They kick so much ass, and IMHO their musical style withstands the forces of time, at least for ten years;-).
From "The History of Prey" http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/pre y/histo ry.htm "Soundtrack
A big surprise in the area of music occurred in Nov 1997. It was announced that KMFDM was to compose the music for the game, and they did deliver:
In my last update, I told you that we were expecting some new KMFDM material. Well, it came (4 theme tracks), and boy, does it rock! The whole team, in shifts, filed into my office, we closed the door, cranked up my stereo and let it rip. By the end of the CDR, our jaws were hanging open-this is some of the best stuff I've ever heard from KMFDM (that's what Sascha promised us, and it looks like they're delivering).
While it'll be some time before you can hear their tunes (though those of you "lucky" enough to brave the mayhem of E3 will get a short aural peek), I thought I'd fill you in a bit on how they're working on the music.
Our approach is simple-build the body of music out of a small collection of recognizable themes. KMFDM and I have been working together on designing the various Prey themes. Of course, there will be the main game theme, plus themes to represent each of the species of the Trocara (as well as the Keepers), and some other themes to represent other key characters in the game.
I put together some emotional descriptions of the various themes (like, how are you supposed to feel when you hear the Keeper's theme, for example), plus relevant backstories. From there, the band has been working on different approaches-one great idea that Sascha and Tim had was to attribute a certain beat speed to each of the Trocaran species. The latest CDR that they sent has rough versions of four themes, and it was cool to close our eyes and listen-we could really visualize the Trocaran species through their music.
We then put together our comments and thoughts on the themes to sent back to them for revision. Right now, they've gathered together (some members of the band live overseas) in Seattle for a month of studio work, laying down tracks for us and for their next album."
G-Darius originally appeared on the PlayStation, later ported to Windows. This features the said ability to catch enemy fighter craft and add their attack to your arsenal. Downloaded this from the underdogs last month and still haven't finished it. Highly entertaining.
From The Underdogs: The game's best innovation is the addition of "capture balls" - a new kind of weapon you can shoot (with limited ammo) to capture enemy ships. Captured ships can be used as a weapon (with its firepower added to yours), a bomb, a shield, or a Super Laser. Depending on the kind of ship you capture, the captured ship can homing missiles, fireballs, lasers, or other weapons.
It may be frame limited to an fps - game time isn't based around a timer and deltas, hence it's locked to 24fps or something with a set timestep each frame.
From the Rockstar Games GTA download site: If you experience choppy or jerky gameplay, try turning the frame limiter off by pressing 'F8'. You may need to then increase your resolution to slow the game down, but it should play smoothly.
You would be referring to "Kimba the White Lion". A very old anime character. Disney has been accused of ripping it off, which it denies, but anyone with half a neuron can see they did. There are massive parallels in both films. Hell, even the name "Simba" is a ripoff.
The broadband pricing situation in Australia is awful. We are constantly spammed with advertisments promoting broadband, carrying the promise that you will pay equal charges by switching to broadband from dialup. By the looks of things this equation would work out if you only use the internet to check mail, and read web pages. Forget downloading movies, music, programs, etc, as 500MB, or even 4GB, a month, is nothing on broadband. Each meg over the quota is another 8 cents. What exactly is the point of switching to this so-called "affordable" broadband if the only thing you can afford is to read your mail at lightning speeds? After your 500MB, a tariff of 8 cents per meg is incurred. Broadband is great, but the current situation in Australia _IS_ a monopoly. All the providers are content to charge the same prices, and none are offering packages similar to those that existed two years ago - they are all currently charging traffic per MB. It's like these service providers just don't "get" it, and the situation is just getting worse, much like a lot of things in.au.
I pay $24.95 a month for an unlimited 56K connection from Spin.net.au. I have my machine on permanently. It automagically reconnects and it is "always on". Last month I clocked 10 gigs of downstream traffic. The trickle effect seems to work quite nicely, and $760 worth of traffic for free isn't bad either.
Regarding Telstra, Australia's primary telco, this company has a monopoly of broadband internet rates, as they provide a mass of lines to other ISP's. It is extremely expensive for high speed net access at the moment - $50 a month gets you 256Kb access with 500 MB "free". After this each MB is another $0.08.
I pay $24.95 a month for an unlimited 56K connection from Spin.net.au. I have my machine on permanently, the current phone call has lasted 6 days, downloading. It automagically reconnects and it is "always on". Last month I clocked 10 gigs of downstream traffic. This months looks set to be around 12.
The trickle effect seems to work quite nicely, and $760 worth of traffic for free isn't bad either.
I have a very strong feeling that this "new" browser is a bunch of ActiveX stuff joined together, with an IE control window embedded so as to call it a browser.
The "assistant" that can read pages for you, and sits around on top of the application - sounds like the MS Agents that can be linked into windows apps.
All media players? An ActiveX based sidebar, using Media Player controls - all services available to Windows media player now in your application.
And as for the 6X speedup - anyone here who has turned off all plugins, java, and images (or even just using lynx) will know how quick pages load when it is just HTML.
Just what technical feats are going on? Why did this win?
The only difference at the moment is we have so bloody many that the time it takes for a recent illegal immagrant to get completely through the system can be between 6 months and 2 years.
This is bullshit. The number of "illegal immigrants" entering Australia is miniscule compared to that of European countries, and the US. The Australian government likes to have the public believe that it takes 18 months to determine that a 10 year old child is not a terrorist. Phillip Ruddock, the minister of "immigration" (Read: border protection) likes to suggest that people arriving illegally by boat are potential terrorists, and hence should be locked up, while visa overstayers are just fine. If you were a terrorist wouldn't you just FLY?
The Australian governments policy on refugees in racist and discriminatory in the worst possible ways. If you are a refugee from say, Afghanistan, and you arrive on Australian shores in a beat up boat with hundreds of others, expect to be placed in a detention centre - situated in the beautiful desert of Woomera, which was an area used for nuclear bomb testing and military practice in the 1950s. Why? Because the governments believes you may have a bomb and want to kill people. And expect to stay there indefinately - most ppl in detention have no idea how long they will be in there. Because of this, psychiatric analysts from the United Nations have deemed that the experience is worse than that of a prisoner. They at least know why they are there and when they will get out.
Not to mention that it is not just men, but women and children are treated to this as well. There is a high suicide attempt rate among the youth population in these centres.
Don't even get me started on the current state of affairs for the indigenous population, let me just use the UN's words - "Third World conditions".
Slashdot Mirror
Day-Us Ex.
Silly.
Just like all those people who bought an Xbob 360 last year right?
MMOs, downloadable content, tournaments and "Xbox Live style games" are developer decisions. Sony doesn't make anything on that. Music, radio and video are unproven due to current broadband limitations. VOIP will be free since they're using Xfire.
You are way off base. Did you even read the articles around? Xfire is the developer's choice, but community support will be standard (friends lists, chat, in game messaging). Yes your id appears in Xfire as well as in the regular PNP suite.
Hey, MS bashing AND "more space != better games" in the same paragraph! Good job there troll, now go show me a game that takes up more than 9.4 GB (a dual layered DVD) compressed.
What about the future? By your logic games will never need to be more than 9.4GB..sounds familiar, where have I heard that before? Quit defending MS's lack of will - they failed gamers by omitting next-gen storage.
Half a million units is not flooding the market.
Maybe so, but 10 million certainly is. US != Worldwide market.
Yes, because we all know Sony Centers are an excellent source of the market's future adoption rate of HDTVs.
No they certainly are not, but fucking come off it! Your staunch stand against all the prior posts is now becoming silly - are people going to stop buying HDTVs?
Ok, so its a box set to recieve, forward and transmit information. How is that different from a router?
By that logic your mobile phone is a router. But it's not is it? Fucking ridiculous.
PS3Linux is the kernel. Absolute.
"Oh - and it's all free, too. The only place you'll be asked to fork over a penny is when you purchase something in the PlayStation Store."
"So, once you add friends, what can you do with them? Obviously enough, you can check their status and see if they're online; you can see if you have any new messages from them, and send them messages. Sending emails through the system uses the same peculiar text messaging style keypad that users of the PSP will be familiar with, which seems a bit painful at first but rapidly becomes a much faster way of entering text than the on-screen keyboards used by other system"
Please take of the fucking blinkers! slashdot?! you ate my balls with the xbox360 fellatio!
..like it is on the gamecube:
u cts_id=1964
f ication.html
SoftMod = buy a disc
http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=81&prod
HardMod = jump a trace or install a switch and two wires
http://www.superufo.com/review_html/Gamecube_Modi
I really appreciated this about the 'cube. It's like Nintendo saying "well if you want to play these imports, we'll let you, but it's at your own risk!". The people who want to play the imports, can, and legally (depending on regional laws), and regular players are none the wiser. No mistake, I would prefer no region locking from a practical and library standpoint.
This all said, region locking is meant to protect regional publishers ability to make profit, and hence release more games with localalisation. However, this did not seem to help in Australia, where GameCube titles are absolutely pitiful in selection, and sweet fuck all outside of big N first party releases.
"General public's conception" is your perception, as revealed by your later statement "Whether or not this cable is required to play a BD-Rom game titles is unknown by me".
= 17211
http://gear.ign.com/articles/709/709653p1.html
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid
The image constraint token that you previously worried about has been ditched/postponed, possibly due to negative consumer feedback, relating to the fears that you mentioned.
In 2003 Steorn undertook a project to develop more efficient micro generators. Early into this project the company developed certain generator configurations that appeared to be over 100% efficient.
Has anyone seen Primer ? When reading the above I immediately thought of this film. A couple of guys are playing with magnetic fields in their garage and accidentally discover a positive gain energy source. Later it is discovered that the generator is actually a temporal shifting device (read: time machine), but a "realistic" one (you can only travel back to when the device was turned on). This story correlates heavily with the film's plot.
"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy."
One of the characters in the film, Abe, describes the machine operation using a small diagram. The dialog is disjointed and overlapping , but the situation is the same as above:
"All right? We start the machine with the Weeble at the A end.
-It travels forward--
-You got to write this down.
-There's nothing to write down.
-I'll write it down.
It travels forward normally towards the B end.
When it gets there,the feed runs down parabolically...until it shouId stop, but it curves back around towards the A end.
When it gets back to the A end....Curve that around. The WeebIe...has experienced a total of two minutes, and again it curves--
-Back around. It curves parabolically.
-Right.
It comes back around and it does this about 567 times.
When it finaIIy exits on the B end...it's traveled an odd number of forward and backward trips.
What is so special about 567?
Why is it about 567? Why isn't it exact?
-This is not empiricaI.
-Here, give me that.
I don't know why it's not exact. There's some sort of probabiIity there.
Every time it hits the B end there's a chance...a small chance it won't curve back around towards the A end.
And for some reason, it takes about 567 trips before it finally does.
It does have to exit, or else we wouldn't be abIe to see it afterwards.
Okay, let's take a look at this.
Twenty-two hours, 26 minutes.
-26 minutes.
-Even.
Enter at the B end. Exit at the B end.
-I just want you to see it the way I saw it.
-I am trying, okay?
Everything we're putting in that box comes ungrounded. And I don't mean grounded to the earth, I mean not tethered. We're blocking whatever keeps it moving forward, so they fIip-fIop. Inside the box, it's like a street, and both ends are cul-de-sacs. This isn't frame dragging or wormhole matching. It's basic mechanics and heat.
-This is not mechanics and heat.
-We can publish.
-Yeah, we can publish.
No, I mean we can really pubIish.
Aaron, the Weeble's stupid. It can't move.
Even if we were to put the Weeble in at point B...it's still going to bounce back and forth until it's kicked out at the B end. But if it were smart...it couId enter at the B end and exit at the A end before it flips back.
-You're talking about making a bigger one.
Freaking. Awesome. Film. Fingers crossed this energy source is real.
Your sig spells tianamen wrong:
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tianamen
same results as US
Portables are a completely different market to next-gen game systems. Much like the idea that people will purchase 360/PS3 + Wii, people purchase a PSP and a DS/GBA.
Well, if the number of gamers who watch DVDs on their PS2 (or even watch DVDs at all) is any indication, it's a pretty low number.
WTF?
Yeah cos when I'm not playing games I like to pick flowers. Stop being a 360 apologist.
No YOUR analysis is stupid. It's fair to say that DVD was an appropriate format for the last five years. You're suggesting that I forgoe cinematic quality film in a game to compensate for a lack of storage space. Why the fuck would you want a "cutting edge" system that is compromised from the get-go? Next-gen means next gen storage too, sucker.
. htm
http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2005-08-17
Analysis:
NES, SMS - carts
SNES, Genesis - carts
N64, Saturn, Playstation - carts, CD's
Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube - GDROM, DVD, MiniDVD
Wii, Xbox360, PS3 - DVD, Blu-Ray
Consistently the consoles with larger storage and dual use (ie. plays something other than games) edge out the other consoles. After that it comes down to game library.
Good for Sony on sneaking in the Blu-Ray - it makes the console more expensive, but it puts an end to this stupid format war. Just like they snuck in DVD to households, every home with a PS3 will be purchasing Blu-Ray films. HDDVD is a DOA product.
Developers name lack of next-gen game storage on 360 number one problem.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/674/674175p1.html
Have fun with your SegaCD^h^h^h^h^h^hN64^h^h^hXbox360!
I'm not against government regulation on industry, when economic power is being abused. But this is not an abuse of anything on the part of the game companies. It is the shirking of responsibility, both on the part of parents, and on the part of industry. And if parents were doing their due dilligence as parents, they would be insisting the industry take responsibility for properly classifying their product.
Rockstar's initial insistence that the porno games were a user modification was irresponsible. When they owned up it was a terrible blow to the industry, and for gamers. These guys denied their involvement, and blamed their community. PR at it's worst. Parents are certainly guilty of shirking responsibility, buying mature content games for their immature children. This dilutes the ratings system as it adds a layer of irrelevence. But then there is the flipside of responsible parents who pay attention to ratings and guidelines, then later discover the game has far more graphic depictions of violence and gore then that which was disclosed on the packaging (See: Oblivion). This is why games should be thoroughly reviewed, and people paid to do it. Sure, some games have over 100 hours of gameplay, but the reviewers are paid to do nothing but. It's a sweet job. The fact that this act is being pushed reflects that parents are showing due diligence, lobbying their members and insisting that the industry take responsibility.
User mods should not be included in discussion of game ratings. It's about direct visible content, right? My DVD remixer that removes clothing from characters in Disney films is due out next week...
Therefore, requiring the board to play through all the games it rates to completion would likely do one thing: force it out of business. This is not an agency you can dictate to regarding their operations. It is a private organization.
.au system is not perfect but it is an indication that it can work. Also hidden hackable boobies should be exempt.
Precisely for this reason the ESRB, as it stands, is inadequate to guarantee consumers, beauracrats, game developers and publishers are all catered for. The role of the ESRB should be a government body, with independent reviewers, for ALL consumer media (film, literature, games) released through legitimate retail channels (virtual or physical) that are governed by US law. Having a piece of media rated would be heavily subsidised by taxpayers, as it is in their interest. This is not about censorship, it's about a set standard of guidelines for what the recommended age for consumption. ie: Anthropomorphic cats in hats: 1+, Boobs and beheadings - 18+.
You're basically talking about creating a new and massive government bureacracy for one thing - to rate video games. This is how you want your tax dollars spent? Because the ESRB is not going to spend this money, nor do they have to.
Nor should they. Take a look at the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification. The only problem with their system is a lack of R18+ classification for videogames. This saw the banning from retail of Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, and Rockstar's Manhunt. The reluctance to provide an 18+ rating is constantly subject to debate and lobbying. It certainly seems to mimmick the US system "Oh games are for kids! Why would there be an R18+ game?" Certainly the
GTA Vice City, to pick but one example, was more than 100 hours long if you played the "entire" thing through (including side missions). Multiply that by the number of games that come out every week and you tell me how many people would need to be on the ESRB payroll.
If it's in everyone's interest for fair and just ratings applied to media, it should be a government institution. It costs what it costs. No, it's not a slippery slope towards restricting freedom of expression, as it's all about everyone involved cooperating and seeing the mutual benefits of fair and just ratings. In Australia, if a sales clerk sells an MA15+ game to a 12 year old, by individual state law it is treated with the same impact as selling an MA15+ film to the same person. Each state has different penalties, and while it is not equivalent to selling cigarettes the classifications are respected by sales clerks. Majority of videogame sales occur in EBGames and similar stores. For more info on classification pricing: OFLC Classification Pricing Now if they can just allow R18+ games, I can have my murder simulators and play them too...
Pfft. The previous poster was correct. Have you even read the article you linked? You cannot magically cull polygons. The original Prey began life using Ken Silverman's Build engine, and that had portals too. The whole "Portal Technology" gimmick has been discussed to death.
"the Cell can't decode MPEG4 at HD resolutions and do other stuff at the same time."
It's more than capable.
"The PS3 is also not going to do half of the promised "interactive" features of a standard Blu-ray player."
Why not? It's more than capable.
"Blu-ray is necessary for all the old-school MPEG2 videos you'll see on PS3 RPGs."
I guess that all the main memory will be used by "old school PCM audio" because the cell isn't powerful enough to decode perceptual acoustic audio and compressed wavelet video at the same time as calculating collions and physical reactions, computing game logic, pathfinding and AI, and generating 3D scenes.
So you are arguing that because "Enchant Arm" is being released for the 360, that the HD video can be encoded using an MPEG4-alike, but if it were released for PS3 the video would need to be in MPEG2, because the PS3 GPU isn't powerful enough. Fucking ridiculous.
Just who is going to buy this thing?
Well not you... not too many 12-17 year olds... but then they weren't the ones paying $400US for the just launched Xbox360, Xbox, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, etc... hardcore gamers, high disposable income folk, tech enthusiasts.. these are the people that drive a launch. Prolly see heaps of PS3's under the tree at Xmas 2007 tho. I can see it now:
"Dad: well what about this Xbox360? It's cheaper!"
"Kid: nah that doesn't play high def movies, if we get the PS3 we get a bluray player too!"
OR
"Kid: nah that doesn't even have motion sensing controllers! we want a Wii!"
hehe
To someone with gaming experience and knowledge of systems the ads are immediately recognisable as being pre-rendered shots. Out of curiousity I sought the game (PS2 COD2:Big Red One) out in Australian EB's, and guess what? No in-game shots on the box either. I hate pre-rendered ads/packaging/etc. I also note that most multi-platform releases use the same high-quality PC/Xbox screenshots for all platform packaging, regardless of the system. This is unrepresentative of the actual product, and irritating. Reminds me of the old ads for games avilable on spectrum, trs80, and commodore64 - they show the tasty graphics, but no way you get that on the 64!
KMFDM did the soundtrack for this game back in 1996/7. As it didn't/hasn't seen release I hope the work put in will still be used. They kick so much ass, and IMHO their musical style withstands the forces of time, at least for ten years ;-).
e y/histo ry.htm
From "The History of Prey"
http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/pr
"Soundtrack
A big surprise in the area of music occurred in Nov 1997. It was announced that KMFDM was to compose the music for the game, and they did deliver:
In my last update, I told you that we were expecting some new KMFDM material. Well, it came (4 theme tracks), and boy, does it rock! The whole team, in shifts, filed into my office, we closed the door, cranked up my stereo and let it rip. By the end of the CDR, our jaws were hanging open-this is some of the best stuff I've ever heard from KMFDM (that's what Sascha promised us, and it looks like they're delivering).
While it'll be some time before you can hear their tunes (though those of you "lucky" enough to brave the mayhem of E3 will get a short aural peek), I thought I'd fill you in a bit on how they're working on the music.
Our approach is simple-build the body of music out of a small collection of recognizable themes. KMFDM and I have been working together on designing the various Prey themes. Of course, there will be the main game theme, plus themes to represent each of the species of the Trocara (as well as the Keepers), and some other themes to represent other key characters in the game.
I put together some emotional descriptions of the various themes (like, how are you supposed to feel when you hear the Keeper's theme, for example), plus relevant backstories. From there, the band has been working on different approaches-one great idea that Sascha and Tim had was to attribute a certain beat speed to each of the Trocaran species. The latest CDR that they sent has rough versions of four themes, and it was cool to close our eyes and listen-we could really visualize the Trocaran species through their music.
We then put together our comments and thoughts on the themes to sent back to them for revision. Right now, they've gathered together (some members of the band live overseas) in Seattle for a month of studio work, laying down tracks for us and for their next album."
Here's hoping...
G-Darius originally appeared on the PlayStation, later ported to Windows. This features the said ability to catch enemy fighter craft and add their attack to your arsenal. Downloaded this from the underdogs last month and still haven't finished it. Highly entertaining.
From The Underdogs:
The game's best innovation is the addition of "capture balls" - a new kind of weapon you can shoot (with limited ammo) to capture enemy ships. Captured ships can be used as a weapon (with its firepower added to yours), a bomb, a shield, or a Super Laser. Depending on the kind of ship you capture, the captured ship can homing missiles, fireballs, lasers, or other weapons.
It may be frame limited to an fps - game time isn't based around a timer and deltas, hence it's locked to 24fps or something with a set timestep each frame.
From the Rockstar Games GTA download site:
If you experience choppy or jerky gameplay, try turning the frame limiter off by pressing 'F8'. You may need to then increase your resolution to slow the game down, but it should play smoothly.
Yeap there's the problem...
You would be referring to "Kimba the White Lion". A very old anime character. Disney has been accused of ripping it off, which it denies, but anyone with half a neuron can see they did. There are massive parallels in both films. Hell, even the name "Simba" is a ripoff.
More info on it here.
The broadband pricing situation in Australia is awful. We are constantly spammed with advertisments promoting broadband, carrying the promise that you will pay equal charges by switching to broadband from dialup. By the looks of things this equation would work out if you only use the internet to check mail, and read web pages. Forget downloading movies, music, programs, etc, as 500MB, or even 4GB, a month, is nothing on broadband. Each meg over the quota is another 8 cents. What exactly is the point of switching to this so-called "affordable" broadband if the only thing you can afford is to read your mail at lightning speeds? After your 500MB, a tariff of 8 cents per meg is incurred. Broadband is great, but the current situation in Australia _IS_ a monopoly. All the providers are content to charge the same prices, and none are offering packages similar to those that existed two years ago - they are all currently charging traffic per MB. It's like these service providers just don't "get" it, and the situation is just getting worse, much like a lot of things in .au.
I pay $24.95 a month for an unlimited 56K connection from Spin.net.au. I have my machine on permanently. It automagically reconnects and it is "always on". Last month I clocked 10 gigs of downstream traffic. The trickle effect seems to work quite nicely, and $760 worth of traffic for free isn't bad either.
My form of civil disobedience.
Regarding Telstra, Australia's primary telco, this company has a monopoly of broadband internet rates, as they provide a mass of lines to other ISP's. It is extremely expensive for high speed net access at the moment - $50 a month gets you 256Kb access with 500 MB "free". After this each MB is another $0.08.
I pay $24.95 a month for an unlimited 56K connection from Spin.net.au. I have my machine on permanently, the current phone call has lasted 6 days, downloading. It automagically reconnects and it is "always on". Last month I clocked 10 gigs of downstream traffic. This months looks set to be around 12.
The trickle effect seems to work quite nicely, and $760 worth of traffic for free isn't bad either.
A form of civil disobedience.
I have a very strong feeling that this "new" browser is a bunch of ActiveX stuff joined together, with an IE control window embedded so as to call it a browser.
The "assistant" that can read pages for you, and sits around on top of the application - sounds like the MS Agents that can be linked into windows apps.
All media players? An ActiveX based sidebar, using Media Player controls - all services available to Windows media player now in your application.
And as for the 6X speedup - anyone here who has turned off all plugins, java, and images (or even just using lynx) will know how quick pages load when it is just HTML.
Just what technical feats are going on? Why did this win?
The only difference at the moment is we have so bloody many that the time it takes for a recent illegal immagrant to get completely through the system can be between 6 months and 2 years.
This is bullshit. The number of "illegal immigrants" entering Australia is miniscule compared to that of European countries, and the US. The Australian government likes to have the public believe that it takes 18 months to determine that a 10 year old child is not a terrorist. Phillip Ruddock, the minister of "immigration" (Read: border protection) likes to suggest that people arriving illegally by boat are potential terrorists, and hence should be locked up, while visa overstayers are just fine. If you were a terrorist wouldn't you just FLY?
The Australian governments policy on refugees in racist and discriminatory in the worst possible ways. If you are a refugee from say, Afghanistan, and you arrive on Australian shores in a beat up boat with hundreds of others, expect to be placed in a detention centre - situated in the beautiful desert of Woomera, which was an area used for nuclear bomb testing and military practice in the 1950s. Why? Because the governments believes you may have a bomb and want to kill people. And expect to stay there indefinately - most ppl in detention have no idea how long they will be in there. Because of this, psychiatric analysts from the United Nations have deemed that the experience is worse than that of a prisoner. They at least know why they are there and when they will get out.
Not to mention that it is not just men, but women and children are treated to this as well. There is a high suicide attempt rate among the youth population in these centres.
Don't even get me started on the current state of affairs for the indigenous population, let me just use the UN's words - "Third World conditions".