Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Frankly, I'm glad you don't work for us. The fact that you would consider "rewriting" code that works well just because it was written by someone external to your company doesn't speak well for your sense of business priorities or usage of time. Remember a few stories back Sony got in trouble for you are proposing as the best alternative? Yeah it's not a very good idea. It may cause a endless litany of trouble. Remember Rambus, how they "seemed" to give away a lot of designs at a conference which was then implemented and then litigated? there is numerous cases of this. It often goes unnoticed but when it is noticed it's trouble. I'm sure many people are guilty of borrowing small code snippets but 200 lines might be pushing it. a 10 line function maybe just borrowing an algorithm and any resemblance merely coincidental but 200 lines would be noticed and more likely litigated successfully.
You realize that they are writing this emulator without having access to any of the specs for the CPU or GPU that were in the original xbox. It's not as simple are writing a 1:1 emulator simply because they don't have access to all the information to do that, they're effectively reverse engineering the original xbox to make sure that each game works. Because the emulation isn't perfect they don't have as large of a percentage of games, and they individually test each one. The fact that two years after release they're still updating the backwards compatibility list and still working on the emulator is pretty impressive in of itself. The choices of CPU/GPU more or less justifies my comment. As well 2 years and ~40%, it started out at ~30% with marginal improvements. Event hat 30% was iffy. Nintendo showed they were serious about BC (or unconcerned with performance) by using an extended GC chipsets for the wii. Sony included the hardware in their machines and wrote a CPU emu.
It is nice to see them continue support for Xbox titles, I am enjoying going through the games I missed first time around. Especially seeing as Sony seem to have given up on backwards compatibility. On the flip side, they do still sell the PS2 and you can't say the same for the Xbox. PS3 has 1 version / 5 versions without backwards compatibility (BC), 2 of the remaining have ~80% BC, the other 2 have 90+% BC.
360 has 1 version / 4 versions without BC, the remaining 3 have ~40% BC.
Wii is ~99% BC with GC titles.
I don't see Sony being against BC but they did trim it to reduce the price. MS has paid lip service to BC but isn't really that into it.
Why was parent modded off-topic? The game is mentioned in the summary and is probably one of the factors behind the big increase in PS3 sales. I've not picked up my copy yet (too many other things to finish off first - Persona 3, Mass Effect and Crysis at the top of the list), but it does look astoundingly good. Consoles like text editors, OS's, and flavors of linux are very very very contentious. People enjoy self organizing into little tribes and tossing mods around. The GP was sort of raving without much significant content. Thus people modded him down. It wasn't that off topic and it was un-deserved.
So far in this generation, no system has managed to establish a similar position on games. The PS3 is notoriously short of titles and most PS3s, my own included, are still mostly used as shiny and expensive PS2s. None of the franchises that helped Sony out so much last time have hit the machine yet. The Wii is an absolute desert for quality titles outside of a tiny number of Nintendo's own franchise games. In Japan, at least, its monthly sales lead has evaporated as the PS3 makes a fightback. The 360 is probably the best placed on games, due to its greater age, but it hardly has what I would call a commanding lead. MS have done a good job of attracting a more balanced line-up and, in Forza 2, have almost neutralised the advantage held by Sony with one of their "big" games (Gran Turismo), but they've still got a long way to go in some markets and in throwing off their image as the "fps" console. I'm about 50/50. Half the time I'm playing R&T, COD 4, or even Dynasty warriors: Gundam. The other half of the time I'm working my way through the backlog of ps2 games I bought and didn't play. There were just so many gems I never got to( Odin's sphere, God of war 1 +2, Dragon Quest 8, etc..). I agree the Wii is as thin as the PS3, it takes a while to produce good games. The Wii is coasting on demoes at parties and semi-legitimate hype. I want to pick up fire emblem and maybe Metroid or Mario Galaxy. But so far I've been deeply disappointed in several facets of my Wii (VC games likened strictly to machine, clumsiness of pointer response in most games, tact on feel of controls in many games, poor graphics on HDTV's, first one was defective). I'm hoping it gets to be a 3 way race because I'm not really that into the wii control set up. Any multi platform will go to my ps3 and my wii is mostly just in case my favorite franchises go wii only and for some good party games. I'm also Thinking about picking up a 360 for mass effect.
original
There is a quantitative difference between gaming hobbyists. Gamers. and Casual gamers. NDP did a study, found "Gamers" still represent more money even though there are more casual gamers.
That evaluates to 14% of the actual money spent. As I've said, heavy gamers are a small part of the market in terms of total money spent. Comparing the "Mass Market Gamers" (which I guess is NPD's term for casual gamers) to the heavies gives the following picture: 2%x13 games = 26 for the heavies (I'm not going to normalize this); 15%x2 games = 30 for the casuals. So the casuals buy more games than the heavies according to this study; and that doesn't even include "casual kids." Actually heavy gamers, avid gamers and "mass market gamers" would be the gaming hobbyists I was refering to. The casual ones are the secondary gamers and casual kids. which are abotu 30% numerically but far lower economically. If you was you who singled out "heavy gamers" to represent hobbyists, not I nor NDP.
Secondary gamers make up 22% and casual kids 8%. Anyone who spends ~10 hours a week on something can be reasonably be called a hobbyist in that something. But we're diving into meaning semantics soon.
Yeah, really. Did you even read that link? The attach rate for the Wii and PS3 are about equal, and both are about half the 360's attach rate; which makes sense, because the 360 was on the market twice as long, and thus gamers had twice as much time to buy games. As I've said, the Wii's attach rate suggests that most casual gamers will buy quite a bunch of games. Did you read it? the 360's rate makes sense as it been out twice as long however the wii's is artificially higher due to wii play being included in those numbers as it is a $5 addition to a controller purchase. Online games were not included which is noted to hurt the 360 and Ps3 more. Unless VC purchases were huge it suggests the wii demographic isn't as inclined to buy games at least slightly less so then Ps3 owners. In perspective of launch titles the wii has had 4 major highly rated first/second party titles released by that time while the Ps3 had 1 highly rated consoel exclusive (reistance).
There is a lot more that could be inferred with more data but it does suggests the obvious, casual gamers don't buy as much.
It's good to see the 360, Ps3, and wii doing well because as a heavy gamer it's good to see this. The Ps3 is experiencing a slight resurgence in japan and NA, and the 360 is still strong in it's main market (NA). The wii broke out everywhere but I'm saying a lot of the games aren't geared to the traditional gaming market.
such as world of warcraft or the madden football sequels or civilization. How much value could a hollywood writer add to the storyline?
Or consider games such as halo 3, crysis or the grand theft auto series where the storyline is important. But it is the design of the game that is ultimately more important and provides a framework within which the writers work. In other words, the value-added of a hollywood writer in this case seems limited.
In each of the above examples, I see the involvement of sit-com and action-movie writers as a big negative. The story line in games can be silly at times... but never as stupid or lame as in the vast majority of tv shows and movies out of hollywood. A lot of games could really use a dialog rewrite. some of the dialog is terrible. Off the top of my head Marvel Ultimate alliance could. Of course some movies Movies Could as well.
The reason I have no sympathy for striking writers (aside from the fact that I don't think BOOK authors have unions and I don't want to hear a bunch of starving artists cry about being starving artists while the rest of us have REAL jobs for a living) is that there are very few writers who deserve to have their jobs. Much less negotiate stronger contracts.
Line them all up Pink Floyd style and let's have all of them shot. I sort of agree most Hollywood stuff is dreck but writers are the lowest on the Hollywood totem. Good ones can make extremely good entertainment (Canon O'Brian penned arguably the best Simpson's episodes. After he left it's been down hill.) Having a union evens out the wages so it's not multi-millions for popular ones and pittance for others. It enables people who can tell stories to be employed. I personally think that no matter what you do around 80% or more of everything is crap. So by enabling more people to make a living as a writer it helps promote a larger population of good writers.
That is something that most people don't get. It does not have to be bashing of a culture to discuss the attributes that a culture had 500 years ago, that don't match with the ones we have today.
The funny part is that most of the people that would consider it bashing, don't realize that in another 500 years, morals will likely change again, and things that are just taken for granted today, will be considered horrific at that time. We may find the idea that people were allowed to breed out of control even though we have the technology to prevent it. We may find that the idea of people having to trade their time just to get enough to eat to be horrific. Or, we may find that, much like the Indians trading land for beads, we will find it horrific that people could sell and hoard ideas for money. Of course, we might also find it horrific that ANY ideas could be used without someone getting paid for them. Never mind 500 years, people outside of the US find the indefinite imprisonment or people without a trial horrific. Heck people inside the US do too.
What part of "The lacking playtime was mentioned in pretty much all reviews." did you not understand? Maybe it took you 7 hours to finish the game. Maybe it took you 10 hours. It doesn't really matter; it's still too short a game. 15h two shy of how long it took me and my Gf's brother to finish Halo 3.
Have you even played Mario 64? The game is entirely open. You enter a level, and you're free to go wherever you want. The whole level is open to you. There's no comparison to something like R&C, where you follow a narrow path. None at all. Yes indeed i have. The levels are 1 way to a first goal and multiple ways to extra goals. Ratchet and blank is similar. However it doesn't seem you've played much of R&T or at all. Exploration is a large part of the game. The number of levels in mario 64 is greater, the size of the levels in R&T f is generally greater.
I'm not sure if you're lying or if you're not remembering this correctly. Here's a link to an article about the study. To quote:
"Heavy gamers make up only 3% of the gaming population"
Obviously each "heavy gamer" buys way more games than the other market segments, but even taking this into account, heavy gamers are a small part of the market in terms of total money spent. here is the press release for the actual report. That ~2% out spends other market segments. 7:1 to "avid gamers". they did not list a stat in the free release about "casual" gamers. It's safe to assume it is less then avid gamers.
Too bad for your sister, but the Wii's attach rate suggests that most casual gamers will buy quite a bunch of games. Really?
That alone speaks VOLUMES about wisdom, humility, and more.
Sorry, but history in the US is so full of shit, and it's tragic that this is NOT being taught to inspire respect, humility, and more in modern US citizens who will have to deal with the morass we and our so-called leaders have gotten this country into time after time. China really ought to have. From about 1 ad to 1200 ad China had the economic and military might to conquer large portions of the world but were always too introspective. They viewed anything outside of china as barbarian lands hardly worth the effort to visit. It was arrogance more then humility and wisdom. the greatest downfall of China was the isolationist policies enacted by one of the emperors to curb the power of the merchant class. Had he been less successful china might have been a merchant empire as well as Europe.
Ps. I'm proudly Chinese, this isn't china bashing.
That is why they are dressed as characters from your childhood in order to make you spend more money on games.
Unfortunately, the rules of life dictate that unless you have enough money to buy the store along with the games, they will be repulsed by you. We men are really sad pathetic drones, so easily controlled by the queen bees. Or in this case, Princess Peach. gosh such misogyny.
The lacking playtime was mentioned in pretty much all reviews. And I did play it; i just didn't finish it. I don't own it (I'm not going to pay full price for a six-hours-game), a friend of mine does. So your speculating and spreading mis information. The game is short. But no shorter then it's peers. Many games have been getting shorter. Ala Halo 3. However this may nto be a bad thing because halo 3 and HS simply lacked the filler you find in other similar games like halo 1.
I also didn't buy Halo 3 (in my opinion, it's a pretty crappy FPS compared to stuff like CoD4), but in its defense, people mainly buy that for the online component, which does provide dozens of hours of entertainment, and which HS does not have. It really depends if you're an online gamer or not. My GF's brother bought it and I finished it with him. He just wanted to finish the story. He never played it again.
I'm guessing you mean "extremely open" as in "more than one path," not as in "I see that sky scraper over there, so I can go there." I want the second.
Yeah, that's what I thought. But in my opinion, "more than one way around" does not a non-linear game make.
That is a silly complaint. You want a different game genre. Platformers aren't necessarily sand box games. If you played it for a few stages in you'd hit section where it almost is a sandbox games. the levels are huge. Not many platformers are as open as you implied you want. In fact off the top of my head I can't think of one. Crash bandicoot? no. Mario 64? no. Mario Galaxy? no. Sonic? no. Ico? maybe. I think you really want GTA or crackdown.
I don't quite understand the distinction between "people who play Wii sports" and "gamers." Aren't people who play Wii Sports - and even buy a console for the privilege - gamers by definition? I'm not entirely sure what your point is: Are you saying that people who previously owned other consoles can't appreciate Wii Sports?
There is a quantitative difference between gaming hobbyists. Gamers. and Casual gamers. NDP did a study, found "Gamers" still represent more money even though there are mroe casual gamers. It really comes down to how much time people play and how much money they spend. For instance my sister will play wii sports but nothing else. Not mario party not nintendogs, nothing. she is a casual gamer. Her purchases won't exceed wii sports and perhaps a sequel or a clone.
Jack Thompson is one of the best things ever to happen to Penny Arcade, the ERSB, Gaming Journalism, and communist pedophiles who make snuff films. He makes such a spectacular punching bag that we need to keep him around. Be warned, the guy who ends up taking his place might have a clue, and then we'd be fucked. There is room for many nut cases in the US. The fact no one has shown up seems to show he won't be replaced.
A nutjob (soon to be former) lawyer is much less of a threat than a couple of busybody senators trying to shore up their concerned soccer mom support. Of course it's not either or, it's both right now. And after there will just be one.
See, I think these games actually show that graphics alone can't make a game. HS was a "decent brawler", but it was only a decent brawler, and it was over after 6 hours. It didn't really offer anything other than great graphics and incredible cut-scenes.
I'll say that GoW did combine innovation and graphics, so I won't argue with this one; but R&C? Really? In my opinion, it's not an awesome platformer. It's an average, linear shooter and a crappy platformer. Its gameplay just can't keep up with its graphics.
You really didn't play HS did you? Every who bounds about the 6h figure is actually quoting from 1 source. The game is longer then that, a bit shorter then halo 3 but much longer then 6h. R&T is extremely open. Linear shooter does not describe it. Each level is about 1/2 hidden secrets and every other level has 2 or more ways around or has goals that you can per sue as you please. Did you actually play it or did you just read a review?
I think that's kind of the point: Most of these games don't sell really well, yet devs keep on making them because even though they don't sell well, it's still less risk than innovating with gameplay and risking a total bomb.
As for the "gameplay before graphics" games: Wii Sports. I think that game alone shows that games (and even consoles) can sell on gameplay alone. Wii sports does sell wii's. To non gamers. The idea that major franchises will move there is the reason gamers go there.
Sure its not "bricking" but its a Mac equivalent to a Blue Screen of Death, which although Windows is re-installable because your BIOS isn't broken it sure is a pain to do so. Computers with working hardware and a BIOS can never be truly "bricked" but they can come very close to being as useful as one. Incidentally since XP came around the only time I get BSODs are
1- when I dick around with drivers to get old hardware to work
2- Hardware failure (mostly bad ram)
3- when I dick around with a core Windows.ini
I mean yeah... "only" 800 deaths is kind of callous. I'm not sure what the whole aim of that was. "Ten's of thousands died from the blast, but only a measly 800 died directly as an effect of radiation after surviving the attack."
A lot about this study doesn't really add up. If you're using death as the only symptom of something dangerous then your observations are definitely going to be flawed. All in all these studies don't make a whole lot of sense in there conclusions. It really ought to have been 4 million Japaneses soldiers instead.
perhaps, but doesn't this sound exactly like the 'average' relational database with expensive writes and cheap reads. Most our database info changes rarely, and any decent DB should make it easy to store some tables on one storage mechanism and other tables on another that's perhaps more suited to the data or write ratio.
I was under the impression that the number of writes possible had improved greatly in recent years, but am not sure if it's still a limiting factor.
Looking it up I found citations of guarantees of at least 100,000 write per block (for block 0) to estimates that some flash disk could last for years under rigorous conditions. I couldn't find concrete data, and a few referenced a estimated lifespan of 20 years for the wear level controller. Hard to say. I have worn out cheap usb drives, but these flashdisks may be a different breed.
I did hear a story where someone took a flash drive, mounted as a swap partition and wore it out within days.
I have to wonder if there isn't more of a market for Flash disk systems in servers rather than laptops.
As flash drives get bigger, shouldn't they present an ideal storage for databases with their extremely fast random reads? The drives can be small, have low power consumption and price is less of an issue in the server market.
What's holding the take up of these drives in the server market? Is it just that they are untested? Is availability of large flash chips still a problem? Does flash still suffer from burnout after x writes and if so isn't that an issue for these laptops? Basically because "read" is fast but "write" is slow and limited in the number of times you can write. So the average lifespan of a normal flashdisk is a couple years of use as a data transfer/storage medium or about a day as a swap disk. The technology progresses but that is a limiting factor thus far. So you can boot in 30s but writing 900 meg webserver log files may take some time.
HEY NOW! DOOM3 had no more story than DOOM and that's ok. I don't think ANYONE expects more from the DOOM series. ehhe, the complaint was that doom 3 wasn't very gameplay focused not story:D. I liked it but it did depend heavily on the "pop something out of dark places" mechanic a bit too much. Most people call it a tech demo since story is required nowadays.
Back in the 80s, if you decide your character should have a spinning kick instead of his current attack, sure that takes an hour or two at most. Nowadays if you decide your character should have a spinning kick, often you're throwing out a few weeks of work. Iteration time is just plain faster with low graphics situations. You might claim that developers should do a low-graphic version of their game first, iterate on it, and then put in the graphics, but that's not always an option. First of all, most publishers have deliverables, most game media want screenshots, and what are you going to do with all your artists in the mean time--fire them? Secondly, design and art need to work together; you'll see a lot of talks at GDC about using lighting cues to indicate to players what direction they need to go. There are some things you can design without art, and some things you can't. Redoing a kick would be a matter of repositioning the wire frame movement associated with that attack. so it was annoying to do before (redo 14 frames of character animation) and just as annoying now now (adjust 14 movements on the wire frame, recheck for clipping). More often gameplay adjustments are done to values not animations. So the same adjustment wouldn't be "straight kick to spinning kick" but "straight kick animation, single target for 100 dmg" to "straight kick animation, 10 unit AOE, 50 dmg". See how drastic the game play changed from dibalo LOD 1.07 to diablo LOD 1.11. all done with a very minimum of new art assets (actually none). Modern MMORPG follow the same pattern, tweak gameplay without extra art assets.
The second big issue is funding. Most games nowadays are sequels, spinoffs to popular franchises, or licence titles. It's very hard to get funding for a new IP, unless you're a studio with a hardcore following already (and let's face it, stuff like Mass Effect is in some ways just Bioware Game #7--it's still selling off of name brand recognition). Budgets are high enough that companies don't like to take risks, so innovation is discouraged by many publishers. True, but they didn't like to take risks before either. Today we have God of war, Devil may cry, and heavenly sword all mimicking each other. Before you had Galaga, space invaders, and gyruss. Sequels have always been popular (Kings quest, Galaga/Galaxian, pac man ). Thats hardly a new thing.
I mean, don't get me wrong--the average quality of a game now is higher than 20 years ago. The best games now are higher quality than the best games 20 years ago. But on the other hand, the average number of genres popularized per year was much higher 20 years ago. The average game 20 years ago was easier to pick up and play and be having fun within ten minutes. While I don't agree with the nostalgic crowd per-se, their argument is not without some merit. This is true, but as a medium matures it becomes harder and harder to create truly new things in it. As they say there are really only 17 plots in movies/television/books/stories. It's all in the execution. The average number of new genres of novels per year isn't too high. the average number per year of new genres of movies is also unsurprisingly low. Although I'm not a huge wii fan, they are thus far the masters of pick up and play and have fun for 5-20 min. I'm just the sort of gamer who demands more then 20 min.
Except for being luke-warm on Depechme Mode and Duran Duran I agree with all of your choices as examples of good music. (Loved the Cyndi Lauper reference BTW. She's pretty underrated.) I agree there was some great stuff in the 80s. But the 60s were amazing. At the time you had the double-threat of a counter-culture movement that wanted to explore other cultures and influences while also wanting to say something meaningful. This combination lead to an amount of experimentation and depth that produced some of the best modern music so far. Just because nostalgia skews things doesn't mean we should overcompensate when evaluating what stuff is worthwhile. It's just common sense that by some chance of cultural influences that some eras create better quality things in certain areas than others. There was also a statistically significant bulge in 15-30 years olds in the 60's which tend to be the most creative. so it may actually be a correlation to the number of 15-30 years olds. the 80's was likely the thinnest time for that while the 90's and 00's hit the echo boom bulge.
Numerically it's difficult to tell. You need to pick a criteria, then you need to evaluate the all songs. The ones a person remembers is tainted by personal musical tastes and sales as a benchmark is extremely relative But there was good music in even the generally underrated 80's. i personally assert that it's about a 80% rule. 80% dreck to 20% good stuff, in almost every age, for almost any medium.
In my play list is about 100 songs from 1960's, about 80 from the 70's, about 100 form the 80's, about 200 form the 90's, and about 100 from the 00's. I don't claim the 90's had a drastic increase in song quality but I was a teen in the 90's and that music shaped my musical tastes. I no longer have time to consume music like i did before so it's fewer songs in the 00's.
When I say 'lots' I'm not saying 'all', and as we can see you're not the first one to misread my post. I love game with cool graphics and I'm always looking forward to change my video card to support the new features as the games are released.
So, I'm not saying that graphics sux but, again, that SOME game houses forget the game play/histories/etc and only focus on graphics. I'm not generalizing. Aside form the obvious tech demoes which ones do you mean? Got an example? I can't think of a best seller which fits this criteria although some people point to DEFCON. I think it's a minority. Almost any best seller has gameplay and graphics.
"Lots" implies numerically significant or a majority.
6 hours of game play does not make a decent brawler. Heavenly Sword is little more than a pretty tech demo. You obvious haven't played it. 6h was a number a reviewer threw out, but skipping every cut scene and every optional pat and playing the game perfectly to kill everything first try in the shortest time 6h might be about right. It took me personally 15h over 3 weeks, which places it with most other brawler games. It lacks that filler many games have (ala Halo, back track through the level again).
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I'm glad you don't work for us. The fact that you would consider "rewriting" code that works well just because it was written by someone external to your company doesn't speak well for your sense of business priorities or usage of time. Remember a few stories back Sony got in trouble for you are proposing as the best alternative? Yeah it's not a very good idea. It may cause a endless litany of trouble. Remember Rambus, how they "seemed" to give away a lot of designs at a conference which was then implemented and then litigated? there is numerous cases of this. It often goes unnoticed but when it is noticed it's trouble. I'm sure many people are guilty of borrowing small code snippets but 200 lines might be pushing it. a 10 line function maybe just borrowing an algorithm and any resemblance merely coincidental but 200 lines would be noticed and more likely litigated successfully.
You realize that they are writing this emulator without having access to any of the specs for the CPU or GPU that were in the original xbox. It's not as simple are writing a 1:1 emulator simply because they don't have access to all the information to do that, they're effectively reverse engineering the original xbox to make sure that each game works. Because the emulation isn't perfect they don't have as large of a percentage of games, and they individually test each one. The fact that two years after release they're still updating the backwards compatibility list and still working on the emulator is pretty impressive in of itself. The choices of CPU/GPU more or less justifies my comment. As well 2 years and ~40%, it started out at ~30% with marginal improvements. Event hat 30% was iffy. Nintendo showed they were serious about BC (or unconcerned with performance) by using an extended GC chipsets for the wii. Sony included the hardware in their machines and wrote a CPU emu.
360 has 1 version / 4 versions without BC, the remaining 3 have ~40% BC.
Wii is ~99% BC with GC titles.
I don't see Sony being against BC but they did trim it to reduce the price. MS has paid lip service to BC but isn't really that into it.
Comcast: Would give the IP without a court order, offer to enable electronic wiretaps, and give full logs of everything that IP did.
Apple: Would require a court order to give IP. Negotiate a weak compromise. Hand over the IP on a sleek and stylish apple brand flash drive.
Microsoft:
Secondary gamers make up 22% and casual kids 8%. Anyone who spends ~10 hours a week on something can be reasonably be called a hobbyist in that something. But we're diving into meaning semantics soon. Yeah, really. Did you even read that link? The attach rate for the Wii and PS3 are about equal, and both are about half the 360's attach rate; which makes sense, because the 360 was on the market twice as long, and thus gamers had twice as much time to buy games. As I've said, the Wii's attach rate suggests that most casual gamers will buy quite a bunch of games. Did you read it? the 360's rate makes sense as it been out twice as long however the wii's is artificially higher due to wii play being included in those numbers as it is a $5 addition to a controller purchase. Online games were not included which is noted to hurt the 360 and Ps3 more. Unless VC purchases were huge it suggests the wii demographic isn't as inclined to buy games at least slightly less so then Ps3 owners. In perspective of launch titles the wii has had 4 major highly rated first/second party titles released by that time while the Ps3 had 1 highly rated consoel exclusive (reistance).
There is a lot more that could be inferred with more data but it does suggests the obvious, casual gamers don't buy as much.
It's good to see the 360, Ps3, and wii doing well because as a heavy gamer it's good to see this. The Ps3 is experiencing a slight resurgence in japan and NA, and the 360 is still strong in it's main market (NA). The wii broke out everywhere but I'm saying a lot of the games aren't geared to the traditional gaming market.
Or consider games such as halo 3, crysis or the grand theft auto series where the storyline is important. But it is the design of the game that is ultimately more important and provides a framework within which the writers work. In other words, the value-added of a hollywood writer in this case seems limited.
In each of the above examples, I see the involvement of sit-com and action-movie writers as a big negative. The story line in games can be silly at times
Line them all up Pink Floyd style and let's have all of them shot. I sort of agree most Hollywood stuff is dreck but writers are the lowest on the Hollywood totem. Good ones can make extremely good entertainment (Canon O'Brian penned arguably the best Simpson's episodes. After he left it's been down hill.) Having a union evens out the wages so it's not multi-millions for popular ones and pittance for others. It enables people who can tell stories to be employed. I personally think that no matter what you do around 80% or more of everything is crap. So by enabling more people to make a living as a writer it helps promote a larger population of good writers.
The funny part is that most of the people that would consider it bashing, don't realize that in another 500 years, morals will likely change again, and things that are just taken for granted today, will be considered horrific at that time. We may find the idea that people were allowed to breed out of control even though we have the technology to prevent it. We may find that the idea of people having to trade their time just to get enough to eat to be horrific. Or, we may find that, much like the Indians trading land for beads, we will find it horrific that people could sell and hoard ideas for money. Of course, we might also find it horrific that ANY ideas could be used without someone getting paid for them. Never mind 500 years, people outside of the US find the indefinite imprisonment or people without a trial horrific. Heck people inside the US do too.
"Heavy gamers make up only 3% of the gaming population"
Obviously each "heavy gamer" buys way more games than the other market segments, but even taking this into account, heavy gamers are a small part of the market in terms of total money spent. here is the press release for the actual report. That ~2% out spends other market segments. 7:1 to "avid gamers". they did not list a stat in the free release about "casual" gamers. It's safe to assume it is less then avid gamers. Too bad for your sister, but the Wii's attach rate suggests that most casual gamers will buy quite a bunch of games. Really?
Sorry, but history in the US is so full of shit, and it's tragic that this is NOT being taught to inspire respect, humility, and more in modern US citizens who will have to deal with the morass we and our so-called leaders have gotten this country into time after time. China really ought to have. From about 1 ad to 1200 ad China had the economic and military might to conquer large portions of the world but were always too introspective. They viewed anything outside of china as barbarian lands hardly worth the effort to visit. It was arrogance more then humility and wisdom. the greatest downfall of China was the isolationist policies enacted by one of the emperors to curb the power of the merchant class. Had he been less successful china might have been a merchant empire as well as Europe.
Ps. I'm proudly Chinese, this isn't china bashing.
Unfortunately, the rules of life dictate that unless you have enough money to buy the store along with the games, they will be repulsed by you.
We men are really sad pathetic drones, so easily controlled by the queen bees. Or in this case, Princess Peach. gosh such misogyny.
Yeah, that's what I thought. But in my opinion, "more than one way around" does not a non-linear game make. That is a silly complaint. You want a different game genre. Platformers aren't necessarily sand box games. If you played it for a few stages in you'd hit section where it almost is a sandbox games. the levels are huge. Not many platformers are as open as you implied you want. In fact off the top of my head I can't think of one. Crash bandicoot? no. Mario 64? no. Mario Galaxy? no. Sonic? no. Ico? maybe. I think you really want GTA or crackdown. I don't quite understand the distinction between "people who play Wii sports" and "gamers." Aren't people who play Wii Sports - and even buy a console for the privilege - gamers by definition? I'm not entirely sure what your point is: Are you saying that people who previously owned other consoles can't appreciate Wii Sports?
There is a quantitative difference between gaming hobbyists. Gamers. and Casual gamers. NDP did a study, found "Gamers" still represent more money even though there are mroe casual gamers. It really comes down to how much time people play and how much money they spend. For instance my sister will play wii sports but nothing else. Not mario party not nintendogs, nothing. she is a casual gamer. Her purchases won't exceed wii sports and perhaps a sequel or a clone.
I'll say that GoW did combine innovation and graphics, so I won't argue with this one; but R&C? Really? In my opinion, it's not an awesome platformer. It's an average, linear shooter and a crappy platformer. Its gameplay just can't keep up with its graphics. You really didn't play HS did you? Every who bounds about the 6h figure is actually quoting from 1 source. The game is longer then that, a bit shorter then halo 3 but much longer then 6h. R&T is extremely open. Linear shooter does not describe it. Each level is about 1/2 hidden secrets and every other level has 2 or more ways around or has goals that you can per sue as you please. Did you actually play it or did you just read a review? I think that's kind of the point: Most of these games don't sell really well, yet devs keep on making them because even though they don't sell well, it's still less risk than innovating with gameplay and risking a total bomb.
As for the "gameplay before graphics" games: Wii Sports. I think that game alone shows that games (and even consoles) can sell on gameplay alone. Wii sports does sell wii's. To non gamers. The idea that major franchises will move there is the reason gamers go there.
1- when I dick around with drivers to get old hardware to work
2- Hardware failure (mostly bad ram)
3- when I dick around with a core Windows
Other then that I haven't got a BSOD.
A lot about this study doesn't really add up. If you're using death as the only symptom of something dangerous then your observations are definitely going to be flawed. All in all these studies don't make a whole lot of sense in there conclusions. It really ought to have been 4 million Japaneses soldiers instead.
I was under the impression that the number of writes possible had improved greatly in recent years, but am not sure if it's still a limiting factor.
Looking it up I found citations of guarantees of at least 100,000 write per block (for block 0) to estimates that some flash disk could last for years under rigorous conditions. I couldn't find concrete data, and a few referenced a estimated lifespan of 20 years for the wear level controller. Hard to say. I have worn out cheap usb drives, but these flashdisks may be a different breed.
I did hear a story where someone took a flash drive, mounted as a swap partition and wore it out within days.
As flash drives get bigger, shouldn't they present an ideal storage for databases with their extremely fast random reads? The drives can be small, have low power consumption and price is less of an issue in the server market.
What's holding the take up of these drives in the server market? Is it just that they are untested? Is availability of large flash chips still a problem? Does flash still suffer from burnout after x writes and if so isn't that an issue for these laptops? Basically because "read" is fast but "write" is slow and limited in the number of times you can write. So the average lifespan of a normal flashdisk is a couple years of use as a data transfer/storage medium or about a day as a swap disk. The technology progresses but that is a limiting factor thus far. So you can boot in 30s but writing 900 meg webserver log files may take some time.
Numerically it's difficult to tell. You need to pick a criteria, then you need to evaluate the all songs. The ones a person remembers is tainted by personal musical tastes and sales as a benchmark is extremely relative But there was good music in even the generally underrated 80's. i personally assert that it's about a 80% rule. 80% dreck to 20% good stuff, in almost every age, for almost any medium.
In my play list is about 100 songs from 1960's, about 80 from the 70's, about 100 form the 80's, about 200 form the 90's, and about 100 from the 00's. I don't claim the 90's had a drastic increase in song quality but I was a teen in the 90's and that music shaped my musical tastes. I no longer have time to consume music like i did before so it's fewer songs in the 00's.
So, I'm not saying that graphics sux but, again, that SOME game houses forget the game play/histories/etc and only focus on graphics. I'm not generalizing. Aside form the obvious tech demoes which ones do you mean? Got an example? I can't think of a best seller which fits this criteria although some people point to DEFCON. I think it's a minority. Almost any best seller has gameplay and graphics.
"Lots" implies numerically significant or a majority.
Heavenly Sword is little more than a pretty tech demo. You obvious haven't played it. 6h was a number a reviewer threw out, but skipping every cut scene and every optional pat and playing the game perfectly to kill everything first try in the shortest time 6h might be about right. It took me personally 15h over 3 weeks, which places it with most other brawler games. It lacks that filler many games have (ala Halo, back track through the level again).