Combine that with the fact that the PS3 is outselling the 360 in Japan, and it just doubled the 360's sales for last week (less than a month after the Halo 3 release) and even beat the Wii, and I'd say it's too early to put a death knell in the PS3 for this holiday season. You still have UT3 and Haze coming out, along with many other games on the horizon. Price cuts and game releases are both what hte consumer has asked for and what Sony is giving them. To write the console off this early is crazy According to media create the Japaneses sales of the PS3 was 17k last week, the 360 3k. Thats almost 7 times as much.
"3/5 or 7/10" I could understand, or "3/5 or 5/10", since going from a ten-point scale to a five-point scale is going to cause you to lose resolution. But how do you get from 3/5 to 8/10 ? my excuse could be that most 10 point systems seem to be 5 point systems that add 5 to them. Even the most wretched game rarely get less then 5/10. While 5 point systems more frequently give 2/5 or even 1/5. However the truth was sloppy math.
Logistics. Someone holding a press pass acts as proxy for the wider population. The press pass is just a convienient way to manage the number of people you have a deal with, and hopefully a gaurantee of some measure of professionalism in their interaction (as opposed to say, the "Don't tase me bro" guy). press protection is not given based on how many people you may represent. Freedom of the press is to ensure free dissemination of ideas and the "don't tase me bro" guy is just as valid of an opinion as Anderson Cooper or Rush Limbaugh. There is no guarantee that a person working for mass media represents an opinion any greater then his own nor is he likely to be more literate about any particular topic aside for English language for print journalists and make-up and diction for TV journalists. Many bloggers have a better grasp of specialty issues then mass media journalists.
This is why we have grade adjustment, or weighting. You adjust a score based on the "current level" - a weighting compared to peers. Should Half-life be reviewed now, it would score badly in graphics, animation and possibly sound. Game reviewers should look to creating a standardised weighting system that has regular reviews. I took a high level genetics course once. I checked my results online and on the final I got 14%. I was crushed. I thought I had failed it for sure. I went in and check the stats sheet and found the top mark was 20%, the lowest mark was 5% and my 14% gave me a 7/9 int he course. some professors are just sadistic.
The unfortunate thing is that many sites/mags aren't trustworthy. It's one thing to give Halo 3 a 5/5 when you point out some flaws and weaknesses but say that the game is fun and a real blast in multiplayer. But I've seen many reviews of games (other games, I haven't read much on Halo 3) where reviews just pass over that kind of stuff because it seems that not what people want to hear. I agree with Halo 3. It had very poor graphic sin the cut scenes. It was visually blah, fun single player but short, and multiplayer is fun but not all that new. If I was a game review site it would be a solid 3/5 or 8/10. Fun, short, good multi-player, and remarkable mostly for it's hype and sales.
Without having to compete with this system-seller during Christmas, I'm thinking that Nintendo's sales are going to be even higher than their recently increased projections.../runs off to fondle his stock certificates If they can ramp up production. Wii's sell fairly quickly now. by Christmas they may be even more scarce. Conversely they might hit a saturation point soon and decline in sales to 360/Ps3 levels eventually. I have one and am not a huge fan. My Ps3 and a borrowed 36 get a lot more play due to the lack of many quality solo games.
I agree with rbarreira... I'm thinking Konami has finally acknowledged the PS3's dismal sales and is working on conversion to the 360 platform as well. This was supposed to be the "must have" PS3 game for the holiday season and now it's being pushed back to early summer here in the States. To me, that just sounds like it has "multi-platform launch" written all over it.../quote>
They would announce it if it were so. Unless there was any ulterior motive not to build cross platform hype. As well the PS3 has been dismal in the US but in the japan it doubles or triples the sales of 360 in any given month. MGS is as big in japan as the US so the jury is out on how well it would suit them to go cross-platform. I don't doubt MGS4 will get to the 360 eventually but I think sony did manage to bribe konami to keep it temporarily single platform. This delays seems to be in line with almost all the delayed PS3 games. Mostly extra time to get performance issues under control.
Well DRM is a pretty hefty mountain to climb. How do you:
1- Protect media with lock 2- ensure customer can open lock with key to use 3- ensure customer can't copy content with the same key
Given enough time clever customers will always find your keys and always figure a way to copy your media. Isn't it better to stop trying and just offer products not licenses. The alternate route is to simply make copying hard enough to deter most people (console games + mod chips) or dial home to get some nifty extra features (MMORPG's).
How will they handle things like allowing players to be force users, or KOTOR's signature "Good and Evil" system? Assuming this is a KOTOR MMO, of course. I enjoyed KOTOR and KOTOR 2 but I always felt the alignment system wasn't good vs evil but good and jerk. I always felt their evil options weren't that natural. You usually got:
1- don't accept a reward: +2 light side 0 credits 2- accept reward: 0 light side 1000 credits 3- Eat his children and take his credits: 1000 credits +2 dark side +3 hp
Also blizzard does not have a name like Star Wars in the title. Yeah War Craft is an household name and so is Star Craft but it does not compete with Star Wars. On that note I wonder if blizzard strikes back with a Star Craft MMOG? Star wars fans don't necessarily overlap MMORPG fans. Warcraft fans were likely diablo fans which have a significant overlap. Star trek would have enough greater overlap because both MMORPG fans and Star trek fans apparently suffer from obsessive compulsive disorders.
1. Nobody buys the MMO, as everybody wants to play a Jedi. Game fails
2. People buy the MMO, because they think they can become Jedi. They find out that they have to be hardcore to become Jedi
2a) Casual gamers quit, game fails b/c revenue from hardcores isn't enough to keep it open
2b) Casual gamers complain until Lucasarts forces Bioware to let everybody become Jedi Or you make every PC a jedi and make different types of jedi and make normal people NPC's or cannon fodder. Almost everyone wants to be a bad ass jedi so let them. You make your money fulfilling peoples wishes not ignoring it or making it hard.
I mean, we've all seen how well the Final Fantasy movies have done in the US but, Advent Children is probably the best Video Game movie I've seen in my entire life! Advent children should have been what the final fantasy movies should have been. I really wished they would have. Square pictures might have survived and we might have gotten more films out of it. Likely if they made it 100% fan service like advent children but a bit longer (and with blood.. you don't' get stabbed and not bleed) and they would have been a smash hit. people like bad ass sword fights, lots of explosions and so on. Maybe throw in a bit more back story so non FFVII fans would get the story. I think that was one of their biggest fears was that non FF fans wouldn't get it. They fucked it because not only did they make a story that non ff fans didn't care about, FF fans also didn't care about it.
You mean Bioware is actually making a sequel to one of it's games without porting it to a substantially worse company? I actually wonder if new Bioware owner EA will affect this at all though... Bioware is a developer, they don't decide which studio a sequel goes to. Lucas Arts did. Even then Obsidian didn't cock up KOTOR2 by themselves, what happened is for one reason or another lucasarts chose oblivion (likely cheaper) but pressured them to release before it was ready. Bioware didn't give in to such pressure in the past. this may be different now that they're EA Bioware.
The responsibility for Knights of the Old Republic 2 being unfinished lies squarely on LucasArts' shoulders, not Obsidian's. The publisher did push it out too early. Bioware is known not to bow to publisher pressure and has a "when it's done" mentality... not as hardcore as Blizzards but still very prominent trend.
No, this is exactly what Nyquist's theorem says: A digital, thus time-discrete and value-discrete recording can only ever approximate the original. The approximation error only becomes irrelevant at some point because after that point it only concerns errors the human ear cannot hear anyway. Analog is also an approximation. The data vinyl represents is analog but it's an approximation and given enough storage space you could simulate every pit groove defect and molecule in a vinyl record digitally making both virtually the same.
... but a resurgance in vinyl would be a good thing. For DJ's like myself, it never left. I can still usually buy the latest dance and hip hop on vinyl, and software like Serato Scratch and Traktor Scratch allow one to manipulate mp3's just like vinyl through the use of a special interface and timecoded records. Buying pop is a CD only affair. Sucks, but record companies make the bulk of their money from CD sales.
Sure, most of your top-40 DJ's use CD's, and that's not a bad thing, but DJ purists still prefer vinyl. These days it's more a cultural quirk of DJ's then actual technological limitation. The primary reason vinyl is popular with the DJ's here is that you can manipulate/spin with it and people won't take you seriously as a DJ until you do. You can now spin with digital formats in exactly the same manner. So your left only with the cultural inertia.
Whilst that is true, the problem is that a typical CD recording available today will be overcompressed whereas a typical vinyl recording won't be. This would change if vinyl were the principle medium. Thus invalidating that claim to superiority.
Also note that one of the pro vinyl arguments are they impeded digitization thus piracy. this sort of kills the mobility argument too. If it's hard to digitize, it's hard to throw on your MP# player and only the studios win.
Many modern turntables actually use a laser instead of a needle. I think I might be delving into pedantry but lasers will wear media as well. Just significantly slower.
It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove sure it can, just invent an encoding scheme with a bitrate high enough. CD Audio isn't but you can imagine another format might.
Who still plays warcraft 3? There are still tens of thousands of games being played by a hundred of thousand or more people each evening. The online player base eclipses almost every game you can find on the Xbox live system. With the exception of the FPS of the month, a few MMORPG and counter strike there are few more popular games.
I've gotta disagree, as someone that really dislikes the MS Juggernaut(tm) that the 360 is just a repackaged PC. It -is- a multi-core PPC based box, after all, using a custom video chip that may be based on but not completely copied from a PC design. As far as gaming systems go - and I have all three of the current generation's machines, I really have a lot of respect for what Microsoft's done with the 360. Sony reached too far too fast and too arrogantly, the Wii has great potential and innovation but really -is- hampered by hardware limitations, but the 360 seems to have struck a decent balance. the xbox was a repackaged low en PC, the 360 is a nifty non-PC but all the games fit the same mold. So whiel the new machine isn't a PC-clone, all the games look like dumbed down PC titles. They don't' seem particularly console. This is changing.
Even at 'only' $250, it's that or a Wii. And the Wii is a stable platform, whereas your cutting edge premium card is going to look overpriced and behind the curve tomorrow - ask all the people who just ordered $400 8800 GTS cards how that feels.
Come on, own up: who's buying these console-priced cards, and why? It's a question of what you enjoy. My rig is a year old and runs all the latest game at "medium" settings very well. FPS are the only ones that require savagely expensive systems. Zelda/Wii sports/Resident evil 4 have provided less fun then warcraft 3. I spend more time in oblivion then in those 3 as well. The wii is a social console. It's great for company sort of ho hum solo. If it's not your then it isn't that valuable to you at any price.
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They would announce it if it were so. Unless there was any ulterior motive not to build cross platform hype. As well the PS3 has been dismal in the US but in the japan it doubles or triples the sales of 360 in any given month. MGS is as big in japan as the US so the jury is out on how well it would suit them to go cross-platform. I don't doubt MGS4 will get to the 360 eventually but I think sony did manage to bribe konami to keep it temporarily single platform. This delays seems to be in line with almost all the delayed PS3 games. Mostly extra time to get performance issues under control.
You mean they only managed to sell 1/40th of one before this?
Well DRM is a pretty hefty mountain to climb. How do you:
1- Protect media with lock
2- ensure customer can open lock with key to use
3- ensure customer can't copy content with the same key
Given enough time clever customers will always find your keys and always figure a way to copy your media. Isn't it better to stop trying and just offer products not licenses. The alternate route is to simply make copying hard enough to deter most people (console games + mod chips) or dial home to get some nifty extra features (MMORPG's).
1- don't accept a reward: +2 light side 0 credits
2- accept reward: 0 light side 1000 credits
3- Eat his children and take his credits: 1000 credits +2 dark side +3 hp
I felt they could have nuanced it a bit.
2. People buy the MMO, because they think they can become Jedi. They find out that they have to be hardcore to become Jedi
2a) Casual gamers quit, game fails b/c revenue from hardcores isn't enough to keep it open
2b) Casual gamers complain until Lucasarts forces Bioware to let everybody become Jedi Or you make every PC a jedi and make different types of jedi and make normal people NPC's or cannon fodder. Almost everyone wants to be a bad ass jedi so let them. You make your money fulfilling peoples wishes not ignoring it or making it hard.
... but a resurgance in vinyl would be a good thing. For DJ's like myself, it never left. I can still usually buy the latest dance and hip hop on vinyl, and software like Serato Scratch and Traktor Scratch allow one to manipulate mp3's just like vinyl through the use of a special interface and timecoded records. Buying pop is a CD only affair. Sucks, but record companies make the bulk of their money from CD sales.Sure, most of your top-40 DJ's use CD's, and that's not a bad thing, but DJ purists still prefer vinyl. These days it's more a cultural quirk of DJ's then actual technological limitation. The primary reason vinyl is popular with the DJ's here is that you can manipulate/spin with it and people won't take you seriously as a DJ until you do. You can now spin with digital formats in exactly the same manner. So your left only with the cultural inertia.
Also note that one of the pro vinyl arguments are they impeded digitization thus piracy. this sort of kills the mobility argument too. If it's hard to digitize, it's hard to throw on your MP# player and only the studios win.
Come on, own up: who's buying these console-priced cards, and why? It's a question of what you enjoy. My rig is a year old and runs all the latest game at "medium" settings very well. FPS are the only ones that require savagely expensive systems. Zelda/Wii sports/Resident evil 4 have provided less fun then warcraft 3. I spend more time in oblivion then in those 3 as well. The wii is a social console. It's great for company sort of ho hum solo. If it's not your then it isn't that valuable to you at any price.
My cell phone (motorola Q) is better in every respect except screen size then my first computer (486 dx)
Phone
CPU: PXA272 312 MHz
memory: 64 mb
Drive: 64 mb built in flash 1gb mini-SD card
First comp
CPU: 486 dx 33mhz
Memory: 8 mb ram
drive: 350 mb HD
It's not a huge leap to assume todays desktop will be tomorrows mobile device 20 years down the line.