Huh? What's the difference between this playstation and the last one? This scenario is exactly like when the PS2 was introduced: nothing really ground-breaking, better graphics, new media options, better controllers... and people still bought the PS2. I see no reason the PS3 won't do just as well.
As much as I love the work PA does... they're not always right. In fact, they've been pretty dead wrong many times in the past. They thought the PS2 was a flop, but were hyped about the Dreamcast. They think "insult to a once-proud franchise" after playing the demo, yet it's one of only a few games that has gotten a perfect score from Famitsu, and every actual report is highly positive. There are many other instances; just go back and read through the archives. They get it wrong a lot. But what's great about PA is that even if you're in disagreement, they can still be funny.
Because as we know it takes years of fitness training for, say, an orchestra conductor to manage to wave his baton continuously for the hour or three (depending on the performance really, some operas are rather lengthy) of a performance.
You may think you're joking, but I invite you to conduct a 3-hour concert sometime. It is anything but trivial, untiring movement. Yes, you get used to it, but it does a lot of stamina. Just because you see a guy with grey hair up there doesn't mean he wouldn't be able to conduct hours after your arm is in a sling.
That said, the motion used for Zelda is more likely to be a wrist-flicking type motion than a full-on swing, although perhaps it will be configurable. Either way, this could lead to RSI if they're not careful. Jury's still out on whether this all works.
I wonder when exactly the Airlines forgot they needed to obey the Constitution.
Gee, I dunno, maybe when The Airlines quit being a branch of the government?
Apparently you haven't actually read the details. I flew over the weekend right when this was happening. It is not the airlines, but the wonderful DoHS who has made this rule. It's on all the fliers. "Mandate from the DHS for immediate implementation."
Eh. I wouldn't worry about it. I'm guessing that any invisibility technology isn't going to be perfectly invisible. For instance, a missile outputs quite a bit of energy to move. Will your invisibility technology cloak heat? What sort of energy output is required for that? And will it not be vulnerable to forms of detection itself?
We're talking about invisibility to the human eye, or so at least the article implies. Unaided human eyes aren't going to be doing missile detection and interception.
Nintendo have veered to the left slightly and concentrated on making the gaming experience better
Actually, it seems like they've focused on making the gaming experience different. Whether this is better or not has yet to be determined. Despite the hype, most of the E3 reviews were cautiously optimistic at best: Red Steel uses canned moved, FPS control of Metroid wasn't as expected, Zelda wasn't very intuitive, Sonic is hard to control. Super Mario Galaxy was apparently great, but that's not really the sort of new gameplay they're trying to get across, either.
So, it's different. As Super Mario Sunshine shows, different doesn't mean better. There's potential here: I want to see it work just as much as the next guy, and probably for the same reasons. But it's still got a long ways to go to be better.
When people say "binary files" they mean this as opposed to "text files", a seperation that stems from the ability to open a file for in "binary" or "textfile" modus in several APIs. Has to do with, amongst others, interpretation of control codes such as ^Z.
Uh, only in DOS (Windows). In the rest of the universe, the OS does not handle files with text or "binary" differently.
You fail to see the point of what they're saying. They're saying a binary file, with a header and fixed data structures, are alot easier to read & parse than an XML file, which consists of structures of variable length, needs to be interpreted, etc etc etc. This is a problem with XML.
Don't post when you're ignorant of the topic at hand. First off: I hate XML, so I can't believe I'm defending it here, but compare:
Write a single XML parser library
Use library to parse every file format you've got into easily-accessible data
Or this:
Engineer a separate format and file structure for every app you've got
Write and debug separate parser for each one
The latter would be chosen by poor/newbie/student programmers, because they can "just do it" and "not have to do all that other stuff", i.e. learn an XML library, understand XML and why to use a platform-independent open format... not just monkey out code to get it done.
The former would be chosen by a good, experienced programmer who understands that spending 30 minutes figuring out an XML library now will equate to hours of saved debugging and hundreds of extra lines of code.
There are a few 2D PS2 games, or at least 2D-style games, that are worth checking out. Of course, you will not see these getting 9.0+ reviews for the most part, and you will see people whining about how hard they are. Because they're oldschool, 2D games, and they are hard.
Some of these may push the limits slightly of a 2D game... Disgaea lets you spin the battlefield, Viewtiful Joe is really rendered in 3D, etc. But they're essentially 2D playing fields. And there are probably a few more I've forgotten. (I'm also not including things like DDR which don't really matter in the conventinal sense of 2D.)
Super Paper Mario has me excited in this regard. Damn nifty.
Finally, I have to mention God of War just because while it's entirely not a 2D game, it is one of the very few 3D games that has that "spark" present in 2D games. If you haven't played it, do so.
Um I don't know why this still gets tossed around, but accelerometers are for positioning, not tilt. That is what inclinometers are for. (Yes, you can use 6 accelerometers for tilt, but you only need 3 for position.) Sony has stated repeatedly that you get 6dof, which is translation and rotation on all axes. They also specifically state X, Y, and Z, just so you could be sure.
To prove to yourself you can do positional motion detection with an accelerometer, think about an old-style ball mouse. There is no "bar" or the like... all you have is a ball which triggers two axes inside, which are in a way simple accelerometers. (Actually they possibly measure velocity, but assume for the sake of argument you get from this acceleration.) If you know your starting velocity (just assume it's zero), you can easily track your current velocity given the acceleration input. Knowing your velocity, you can track your position. Simple calculus (if that).
What you don't get, of course, is absolute positioning. That is, with a mouse, you can "pick up" the mouse and set it down without moving the cursor, and there is no way for the system to detect the absolute position of the mouse itself. However this does not stop it in any way from being a position-based pointing device.
Similarly, the PS3 controller does the same sort of calculations, just in 3 dimensions, so you could easily use it to drag and drop objects in 3D.
Yeah, 20GB, that would never fly today. Apple ditched the 20G iPod ages ago, and would never think of selling 1-4GB ones. It's pretty clear that 60G is where it's at, given the 50G+ capacity of Blu-Ray you'll need a 60G drive to get all the games you own on there at once. It's not like they'd read off the disc and merely cache some data and savegames or anything.
i.e. forum whiners. Who don't amount to a significant marketshare in the first place, or have significant money to spend in the first place. If they did, then when various geeky projects came out, they'd be super successful, because there was a large buying crowd to fund them.
I'm a "hardcore gamer", and $600, while double the price of the $300 PS2, is easily affordable. People whining about Sony may think they're representative of the entire population, but most people I talk to haven't even heard of E3. I showed a few people various PS3 demos and then said "but the PS3 is going to be $600". The response? "Well, that's not too bad really. Look at that!"
Step back a minute and think about it. A few weeks ago, Nintendo announced the name "Wii". Everyone was doom and gloom for Nintendo, nothing but lamenting,...but they were the talk of the town.
This week, Sony says "$500"! And everyone is doom and gloom. But they're the talk of the town.
From a marketing perspective, it's far better for people to be passionate in either direction (love or hate) about something than for them to be indifferent about it.
Yeah, I got the 4e books out of curiosity and wow it is more organized than 3e. The rules are very similar, with (as you said) some welcome stat additions (separate HP, Will, and FP for instance). They've also folded Psi into advantages, which is... interesting, at least. Definitely a bit less confusing, with the downside that it's not quite as focused as before.
The very idea that anyone (or a significant number of people) would want to use a browser based office suite is just... stupid. There is really no polite way to put it. Not only is the technology for it just not there, but the whole idea is just dumb.
Just because it's stupid doesn't mean it's not true.
I would contend that a word processor is stupid. Why would someone use that when they could produce beautiful output with a typesetter, or just use plain text? What about an operating system that requires a reboot for changing system settings?
Silent Hill is another great example of this where you do little else than kill stuff and find items to view the next non-interactive cut scene.
Uh which Silent Hill did you play? SH1-3 at very least have very few cutscenes, not a lot of dialog (as there's almost no one to talk to!), and really very little killing: you don't get anything for killing a monster, and you're more likely to get hurt.
Instead, you get a very creepy interactive atmosphere... there's a door. What's behind it? If you go through, will it still be there when you turn around? Will you even be in the same world? As you progress, and the sanity of the world itself degrades, what will be left? That's what Silent Hill is about.
Also (up until 4, at least, from what I've heard), another bit of gameplay is solving riddles, from easy to very difficult (the Shakespeare puzzle on hard mode in SH3, for example).
Sounds like you heard about the movie then assumed the game was the same way.
The Gord said it, thus it is true! And you know what... some guy at EBGames once told me that EA fired all its programmers and replaced them with monkeys. I thought this was insane at first, then it dawned on me, he works at a game store, it must be true!
Except Gord isn't an idiot, and he goes on to make a good case for his speculation. It's pretty simple math; read the article. If Sony lost $100 on each of the 1000000 consoles it sold at launch, it would be pretty damn hard for SCE to sweep a $100mil loss under the carpet. According to wikipedia they sold around 10 million in about 2 years; how do you hide a $1 billion production loss? You don't; billion-dollar losses are more Microsoft's area.
I think we already see how the dominance in this generation is going to play out (unless Sony prices themselves out of the market); Nintendo's not claiming it (by design) and Microsoft can't reach it (by ineptitude)
However, they're still important... having 3 competing consoles last generation was the best thing for customers everywhere; just remember the pre-E3 price wars. Competition keeps companies on their toes.
I have 3 PS2s. All work. 2 are old-style "large" PS2 with FFXI HDDs. 1 is a slim, for portability... take the PS2 and DDR gear to friends houses, for instance. I can't see any reason to get rid of any of them when the PS3 comes out.
A lot of other people will probably have their own reasons... even if the PS3 is PS2-compat, you can use the second PS2 for a networked multiplayer stuff you're used to, or whatever.
Since the price of the PS2 will likely drop to $99 or less, there's a certain saturation point for sellback, too... if everyone is selling and no one is buying (since they either already have a PS3 or PS2), then you will get almost nothing for trading it in, thus slowing trade-ins.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, in fact, check this funny article in Salon that outlines why you shouldn't buy Sony's next console:
Except the article isn't talking about the PS3... it's talking about the PS2. But the arguments are all the same all over again.
As much as I love the work PA does... they're not always right. In fact, they've been pretty dead wrong many times in the past. They thought the PS2 was a flop, but were hyped about the Dreamcast. They think "insult to a once-proud franchise" after playing the demo, yet it's one of only a few games that has gotten a perfect score from Famitsu, and every actual report is highly positive. There are many other instances; just go back and read through the archives. They get it wrong a lot. But what's great about PA is that even if you're in disagreement, they can still be funny.
You may think you're joking, but I invite you to conduct a 3-hour concert sometime. It is anything but trivial, untiring movement. Yes, you get used to it, but it does a lot of stamina. Just because you see a guy with grey hair up there doesn't mean he wouldn't be able to conduct hours after your arm is in a sling.
That said, the motion used for Zelda is more likely to be a wrist-flicking type motion than a full-on swing, although perhaps it will be configurable. Either way, this could lead to RSI if they're not careful. Jury's still out on whether this all works.
Apparently you haven't actually read the details. I flew over the weekend right when this was happening. It is not the airlines, but the wonderful DoHS who has made this rule. It's on all the fliers. "Mandate from the DHS for immediate implementation."
Eh. I wouldn't worry about it. I'm guessing that any invisibility technology isn't going to be perfectly invisible. For instance, a missile outputs quite a bit of energy to move. Will your invisibility technology cloak heat? What sort of energy output is required for that? And will it not be vulnerable to forms of detection itself?
We're talking about invisibility to the human eye, or so at least the article implies. Unaided human eyes aren't going to be doing missile detection and interception.
Actually, it seems like they've focused on making the gaming experience different. Whether this is better or not has yet to be determined. Despite the hype, most of the E3 reviews were cautiously optimistic at best: Red Steel uses canned moved, FPS control of Metroid wasn't as expected, Zelda wasn't very intuitive, Sonic is hard to control. Super Mario Galaxy was apparently great, but that's not really the sort of new gameplay they're trying to get across, either.
So, it's different. As Super Mario Sunshine shows, different doesn't mean better. There's potential here: I want to see it work just as much as the next guy, and probably for the same reasons. But it's still got a long ways to go to be better.
In other words, they're committing a "not cutting us in on the goods"-class crime.
Uh, only in DOS (Windows). In the rest of the universe, the OS does not handle files with text or "binary" differently.
Don't post when you're ignorant of the topic at hand. First off: I hate XML, so I can't believe I'm defending it here, but compare:
Or this:
The latter would be chosen by poor/newbie/student programmers, because they can "just do it" and "not have to do all that other stuff", i.e. learn an XML library, understand XML and why to use a platform-independent open format... not just monkey out code to get it done.
The former would be chosen by a good, experienced programmer who understands that spending 30 minutes figuring out an XML library now will equate to hours of saved debugging and hundreds of extra lines of code.
Yeah, and Nintendo (or Microsoft) would neeever build a hype campaign...
There are a few 2D PS2 games, or at least 2D-style games, that are worth checking out. Of course, you will not see these getting 9.0+ reviews for the most part, and you will see people whining about how hard they are. Because they're oldschool, 2D games, and they are hard.
Some of these may push the limits slightly of a 2D game... Disgaea lets you spin the battlefield, Viewtiful Joe is really rendered in 3D, etc. But they're essentially 2D playing fields. And there are probably a few more I've forgotten. (I'm also not including things like DDR which don't really matter in the conventinal sense of 2D.)
Super Paper Mario has me excited in this regard. Damn nifty.
Finally, I have to mention God of War just because while it's entirely not a 2D game, it is one of the very few 3D games that has that "spark" present in 2D games. If you haven't played it, do so.
...some people like Russian Roulette.
To prove to yourself you can do positional motion detection with an accelerometer, think about an old-style ball mouse. There is no "bar" or the like... all you have is a ball which triggers two axes inside, which are in a way simple accelerometers. (Actually they possibly measure velocity, but assume for the sake of argument you get from this acceleration.) If you know your starting velocity (just assume it's zero), you can easily track your current velocity given the acceleration input. Knowing your velocity, you can track your position. Simple calculus (if that).
What you don't get, of course, is absolute positioning. That is, with a mouse, you can "pick up" the mouse and set it down without moving the cursor, and there is no way for the system to detect the absolute position of the mouse itself. However this does not stop it in any way from being a position-based pointing device.
Similarly, the PS3 controller does the same sort of calculations, just in 3 dimensions, so you could easily use it to drag and drop objects in 3D.
Yeah, 20GB, that would never fly today. Apple ditched the 20G iPod ages ago, and would never think of selling 1-4GB ones. It's pretty clear that 60G is where it's at, given the 50G+ capacity of Blu-Ray you'll need a 60G drive to get all the games you own on there at once. It's not like they'd read off the disc and merely cache some data and savegames or anything.
i.e. forum whiners. Who don't amount to a significant marketshare in the first place, or have significant money to spend in the first place. If they did, then when various geeky projects came out, they'd be super successful, because there was a large buying crowd to fund them.
I'm a "hardcore gamer", and $600, while double the price of the $300 PS2, is easily affordable. People whining about Sony may think they're representative of the entire population, but most people I talk to haven't even heard of E3. I showed a few people various PS3 demos and then said "but the PS3 is going to be $600". The response? "Well, that's not too bad really. Look at that!"
Step back a minute and think about it. A few weeks ago, Nintendo announced the name "Wii". Everyone was doom and gloom for Nintendo, nothing but lamenting, ...but they were the talk of the town.
This week, Sony says "$500"! And everyone is doom and gloom. But they're the talk of the town.
From a marketing perspective, it's far better for people to be passionate in either direction (love or hate) about something than for them to be indifferent about it.
Yeah, I got the 4e books out of curiosity and wow it is more organized than 3e. The rules are very similar, with (as you said) some welcome stat additions (separate HP, Will, and FP for instance). They've also folded Psi into advantages, which is ... interesting, at least. Definitely a bit less confusing, with the downside that it's not quite as focused as before.
Just because it's stupid doesn't mean it's not true.
I would contend that a word processor is stupid. Why would someone use that when they could produce beautiful output with a typesetter, or just use plain text? What about an operating system that requires a reboot for changing system settings?
Sometimes people want stupid things.
But that doesn't mean they're not stupid things.
That's because they started thinking of them as consumers and not what they are: customers.
The problem is hollywood has no idea what "interesting" means.
I think they already made that and called it "Mario Sunshine".
Uh which Silent Hill did you play? SH1-3 at very least have very few cutscenes, not a lot of dialog (as there's almost no one to talk to!), and really very little killing: you don't get anything for killing a monster, and you're more likely to get hurt.
Instead, you get a very creepy interactive atmosphere... there's a door. What's behind it? If you go through, will it still be there when you turn around? Will you even be in the same world? As you progress, and the sanity of the world itself degrades, what will be left? That's what Silent Hill is about.
Also (up until 4, at least, from what I've heard), another bit of gameplay is solving riddles, from easy to very difficult (the Shakespeare puzzle on hard mode in SH3, for example).
Sounds like you heard about the movie then assumed the game was the same way.
Except Gord isn't an idiot, and he goes on to make a good case for his speculation. It's pretty simple math; read the article. If Sony lost $100 on each of the 1000000 consoles it sold at launch, it would be pretty damn hard for SCE to sweep a $100mil loss under the carpet. According to wikipedia they sold around 10 million in about 2 years; how do you hide a $1 billion production loss? You don't; billion-dollar losses are more Microsoft's area.
The PS2 sold just shy of a million on opening weekend . Just in Japan. And 10,000,000 in 13 months.
I think we already see how the dominance in this generation is going to play out (unless Sony prices themselves out of the market); Nintendo's not claiming it (by design) and Microsoft can't reach it (by ineptitude)
However, they're still important... having 3 competing consoles last generation was the best thing for customers everywhere; just remember the pre-E3 price wars. Competition keeps companies on their toes.
A lot of other people will probably have their own reasons... even if the PS3 is PS2-compat, you can use the second PS2 for a networked multiplayer stuff you're used to, or whatever.
Since the price of the PS2 will likely drop to $99 or less, there's a certain saturation point for sellback, too... if everyone is selling and no one is buying (since they either already have a PS3 or PS2), then you will get almost nothing for trading it in, thus slowing trade-ins.
Right, this observed effect was considered overwhelming evidence of spontaneous generation.
I don't think you're reading carefully enough.