The European market frequently gets anal rapings from everybody on almost eveyrthing. The ps2 was £299 at launch. that be £310.96 after inflation and that'd be $703.55 CND. Just compare gas it's $0.93CND/liter here while it's ~$3.00CND/liter.
Consoles are often 20%-40% more and often due to import taxes, regional faxes, vat taxes, import tarrifs, etc.. which often are not transparent.
Actually no they weren't. If you remember, when Sony and Microsoft were in the arena of 75 million polys or more, Nintendo was laughed at when they said the gamecube could only push about 12 million. The difference was Nintendo was counting an in-game situation, with the full 8 layer texturing that the gamecube naturally allowed. So while the PS2's poly count was supposedly 6 times higher than Nintendo's, Nintendo was considered to be a close 2nd to the X-box in terms of graphical power, with the PS2 being 3rd or 4th in most books (4th if you believe the Dreamcast had better graphics than the PS2).
So no, not everybody else was using the same lie, just those who care about hype.
In graphics the dreamcats put out less polys at a higher quality (better textured and less jaggies). PS2 could make up for it with more polys so the argument is there. GC look better then both indeed even with less polys. Although Xbox beat them both. I'll not argue any of that. But the numbers hype games use the smae "idealized" approach when calculating ad material. The GC and Xbox were newer so it was expected. While the DC was a good machine from a badly managed company. I'd say MGS3/FFXII/Shadow of the collosus/Gods of War etc.. prove that likely the DC would have lost out in the long run as people mastered the complicated PS2 artchitecture but the point is moot because the Dc wentt tits up.
But if you are among the 'core, then you have to understand that Sony is pure fucking evil.
If ya think sony is pure evil... you may want to go back to history class. Or english and find out what the word evil is. Sony has been dumb, has been over aggresive, has been a hype machine and under achiever but "evil" is a stretch. Or did I miss the news story where Cell chips are made from African Orphan brains?
Before a few days ago, Zonk was rabidly anti-PS3. I mean rabidly. Any story about sony beign dumb or Ps3 being bad was on the games section. I don't think zonk is a fanboy.
Although I have a PS3 and think it's worht the money. The Cell isn't that special. It's a parreleism monster for very specific functions. If you have a problem that can be solved this way then it's awesome. The rest of us have a video game machien that plays blu-ray movies.
in canada the price of the 20gb PS3($599) is close to the launch price of the PS2 after adjusting for inflation ($526.33). Part of the price difference in the Us is a weak US dollar compared to the Yen(JP)/Yaun(CN). They pay for parts and labour in yen.
You forget that everybody else was using the same lie. X machine can push X polys *. Look at the advertising from sega that mentioned it's specs or xbox. It's all "ideal" numbers. Intel / AMD / IBM / Apple is guity of this when specifying specs. They give highly idealized numbers.
* only unlit, unshaded, untextured, and for 3s on tues feb 6, 2001
The GP said "And it still made everything else in the RPG market look like garbage". I merely pointed out it's sales put it squarely in the "meh" catagory. It's sales were good, the critical reception was good but it's did not blow away the compeition for either sales or critical reception and "meh" is the word to describe this "not amazing, didn't suck" catagory. It means most people didn't care.
lol. no compared to other RPG's it's "meh". the GP said it blew away the copitition. not in sales. It was a 5-10% better then KOTOR and less then all the other RPGS.
Fable may have sold more lately. but you do know that games have high initial sales then a really small volume after. I doubt they sold 500k recently. I cross compared some of those titles with info from various soruces online and they're a few months older but close. I somehow doubt the sales for fable are 40% off or that they sold 1 mil in the last few months. So "meh" is the world. It didn't set the world on fire, it didn't suck. Was fun and well put together with some neat features but nothing more. KOTOR with less character and less bugs.
You can skip all the cut scenes and a "objective" is listed on the maps so you don't miss anythign critical if you skip them all. I know I dispised long unskipable cutscenes. Especially ones that end in a hard boss battle. That annoyed me about Xenogears.
Characters atack every 2-3 seconds or so don't they? That's not too horrible... most RPGs have some internal timer that determines when your next attack is. In Guild Wars it's between 1.33 and 2.5 seconds or something, depending on your weapon. In Baldur's Gate there was an internal 'round' of combat that lasted 6 seconds or so, since DND is kinda turn-based
Once you get some speed licences and haste it's an attack every 0.5s with quick weapons like the zodiac spear.
RPGs stopped being interesting to me when I grew up and became a busy adult who wants to maximize his ever-decreasing free time allocated to video games. Nowadays it's mostly arcade-ish and FPS-ish games for me, where the emphasis on gameplay is put to the maximum, with little to no time wasted on staring at pretty pictures or developing a story. Some great games manage to do all of those without sacrificing gameplay, but Japanese RPGs are basically the complete opposite of that idea.
You have games like tales of symphonia which give you more to do when playing the rpg part. It's subjective. I found the gambits in this game and the munchkining potential to be the most fun. Trackign down rare monsters, making rare gear, one hitting bosses, being 99 2/3 of the way through the game, taking out the optional bosses. But indeed some people would rather jump into a war 3 DOTA game get their Video games in 1h doses of pure gameplay or a quick CS:source match. To each their own.
Not that much of that, though. Certainly nothing like IX. Also, while the voice acting was generally quite good (except for Vaan), the body motions were often over-exaggerated, overly dramatic. Kytes is a glaring example of this.
Still better them the random emoting of FFX. The flailing really got on my nerves in FFX.
Although not stictly FF, one of my favorite villians was delita in FF: tactics. He turned from a tragic figure into a villian in a natural and understandable way (although some of the nuance was lost in the piss poor translation). You could understand his hate and sympathize. He was smart and just like any other character, not some all powerful monster (sephiroth). He was a man who was oppressed and betrayed by the system and the player sint he system. So he sets out to change the system and be a player.
I detect a pretty heavy PC style RPG bias in all the replies so far. The FF crowd enjoy "Role playing" as is reading a book and imagining themselves in that role. Most of the replies come from the pc RPG tradition where your just a walking bunch of stats and take losts of fetch and return quests. The JRPD tradition has you being a slim empheminate walking bunch of stats that has to go on a quest on rails. Both of the styles have their weaknesses. FFXII I found to be a fairly open game for a JRPG. You could start munchkining very early and be insanely powerful. The "automated" combat basically stopped me from having to "press O" a million times a session just to get our of a dungueon.
Apparently you guys are int he minority since it sold insanely well. Perhaps only because of the name but it was fun. Well done. And pretty. You can't even criticize an emo love story. It was all byzantine politics. This one knocked FFVI off the #1 spot for me for FF games.
I'd argue games teahc you a lot. You learn hwo to use search engines (FAQs/cheats), you learn about viruses *sic* (cracks/hacks), you learn real world economics (MMORPG phishing and gold devaluation due to farming), They learn about biology (GTA hot coffee, Gods of war, hentai games), about physics (gravity gun HL2), They learn about languages (1337). over all a very round education.
I can't imagine gates doing anymore then make the US gov all use windows and make MS monopoly law proof. ohh wait they already are in the US because everyone who would convict him is his father golfing buddies. That'd rank about 1000 less then either cthulu or bush cheney anyways. Cthulu would just start consuming people in washington which is problably a benevolent act for humanity while buch-cheney are bent on lining their friends pockets and removign all your civil liberties and pandering to a segment of the populace who would insist on everyone living according to their belief system. In the grand scheme I suppose cthulu is the best vote.
Depends on where you are. Easily replaceable minion C is just as you say. KPI's, high demand for performance, and competition. When you get up to middle management you start hitting the stuff the GP saw. Lazy people in both sectors who "illusion" of working hard is more important then doing anything. Pass the buck, hide the problems, move on before the shit hits the fan. It's all about how secure peopel are. The more security the less productivity you can get away with. The lower on the ladder, the more abuse. Gov jobs just set the threshhold for incompitance lower ont he ladder.
I think you have ti the other way around. They'd like the ignorant sheep around and the intelligent trouble makers out. so anyone who isn't related to someone important and has a GPA > X gets to fight the good fight in Iran/Iraq/N korea/Canada while the sheep can rest safely at home.
You save $100,000 on lower engine dev costs and customization costs then spend it by havign to produce better art assets due to HD and enviromental interactivity. No thye can't just texture the ouside of a vase etc..
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The European market frequently gets anal rapings from everybody on almost eveyrthing. The ps2 was £299 at launch. that be £310.96 after inflation and that'd be $703.55 CND. Just compare gas it's $0.93CND/liter here while it's ~$3.00CND/liter.
Consoles are often 20%-40% more and often due to import taxes, regional faxes, vat taxes, import tarrifs, etc.. which often are not transparent.
Actually no they weren't. If you remember, when Sony and Microsoft were in the arena of 75 million polys or more, Nintendo was laughed at when they said the gamecube could only push about 12 million. The difference was Nintendo was counting an in-game situation, with the full 8 layer texturing that the gamecube naturally allowed. So while the PS2's poly count was supposedly 6 times higher than Nintendo's, Nintendo was considered to be a close 2nd to the X-box in terms of graphical power, with the PS2 being 3rd or 4th in most books (4th if you believe the Dreamcast had better graphics than the PS2).
So no, not everybody else was using the same lie, just those who care about hype.
In graphics the dreamcats put out less polys at a higher quality (better textured and less jaggies). PS2 could make up for it with more polys so the argument is there. GC look better then both indeed even with less polys. Although Xbox beat them both. I'll not argue any of that. But the numbers hype games use the smae "idealized" approach when calculating ad material. The GC and Xbox were newer so it was expected. While the DC was a good machine from a badly managed company. I'd say MGS3/FFXII/Shadow of the collosus/Gods of War etc.. prove that likely the DC would have lost out in the long run as people mastered the complicated PS2 artchitecture but the point is moot because the Dc wentt tits up.
But if you are among the 'core, then you have to understand that Sony is pure fucking evil.
If ya think sony is pure evil... you may want to go back to history class. Or english and find out what the word evil is. Sony has been dumb, has been over aggresive, has been a hype machine and under achiever but "evil" is a stretch. Or did I miss the news story where Cell chips are made from African Orphan brains?
Before a few days ago, Zonk was rabidly anti-PS3. I mean rabidly. Any story about sony beign dumb or Ps3 being bad was on the games section. I don't think zonk is a fanboy.
Although I have a PS3 and think it's worht the money. The Cell isn't that special. It's a parreleism monster for very specific functions. If you have a problem that can be solved this way then it's awesome. The rest of us have a video game machien that plays blu-ray movies.
As an added note:
in canada the price of the 20gb PS3($599) is close to the launch price of the PS2 after adjusting for inflation ($526.33). Part of the price difference in the Us is a weak US dollar compared to the Yen(JP)/Yaun(CN). They pay for parts and labour in yen.
You forget that everybody else was using the same lie. X machine can push X polys *. Look at the advertising from sega that mentioned it's specs or xbox. It's all "ideal" numbers. Intel / AMD / IBM / Apple is guity of this when specifying specs. They give highly idealized numbers.
* only unlit, unshaded, untextured, and for 3s on tues feb 6, 2001
The GP said "And it still made everything else in the RPG market look like garbage". I merely pointed out it's sales put it squarely in the "meh" catagory. It's sales were good, the critical reception was good but it's did not blow away the compeition for either sales or critical reception and "meh" is the word to describe this "not amazing, didn't suck" catagory. It means most people didn't care.
lol. no compared to other RPG's it's "meh". the GP said it blew away the copitition. not in sales. It was a 5-10% better then KOTOR and less then all the other RPGS.
The press release is most likely refering to units "sold" to retailers. I can beleive that.
The data points I have
from here
fable - 1.5 mil
FFXII - ~3.75
FFX - 5 mil +
FFx-2 - 3 mil
Oblivion - 3 mil +
morrowind - 4 mil +
Kindom HEarts - ~5 mil
KH 2 - ~3 mil
KOTOR - 1.3 mil
DQVII - 4.50 mil
WOW - 8 mil
Fable may have sold more lately. but you do know that games have high initial sales then a really small volume after. I doubt they sold 500k recently. I cross compared some of those titles with info from various soruces online and they're a few months older but close. I somehow doubt the sales for fable are 40% off or that they sold 1 mil in the last few months. So "meh" is the world. It didn't set the world on fire, it didn't suck. Was fun and well put together with some neat features but nothing more. KOTOR with less character and less bugs.
Fable was hit and miss. It was basically KOTOR with less character. It's sales basically showed what people thought of it. Which was "meh".
You can skip all the cut scenes and a "objective" is listed on the maps so you don't miss anythign critical if you skip them all. I know I dispised long unskipable cutscenes. Especially ones that end in a hard boss battle. That annoyed me about Xenogears.
Characters atack every 2-3 seconds or so don't they? That's not too horrible... most RPGs have some internal timer that determines when your next attack is. In Guild Wars it's between 1.33 and 2.5 seconds or something, depending on your weapon. In Baldur's Gate there was an internal 'round' of combat that lasted 6 seconds or so, since DND is kinda turn-based
Once you get some speed licences and haste it's an attack every 0.5s with quick weapons like the zodiac spear.
RPGs stopped being interesting to me when I grew up and became a busy adult who wants to maximize his ever-decreasing free time allocated to video games. Nowadays it's mostly arcade-ish and FPS-ish games for me, where the emphasis on gameplay is put to the maximum, with little to no time wasted on staring at pretty pictures or developing a story. Some great games manage to do all of those without sacrificing gameplay, but Japanese RPGs are basically the complete opposite of that idea.
You have games like tales of symphonia which give you more to do when playing the rpg part. It's subjective. I found the gambits in this game and the munchkining potential to be the most fun. Trackign down rare monsters, making rare gear, one hitting bosses, being 99 2/3 of the way through the game, taking out the optional bosses. But indeed some people would rather jump into a war 3 DOTA game get their Video games in 1h doses of pure gameplay or a quick CS:source match. To each their own.
Not that much of that, though. Certainly nothing like IX. Also, while the voice acting was generally quite good (except for Vaan), the body motions were often over-exaggerated, overly dramatic. Kytes is a glaring example of this.
Still better them the random emoting of FFX. The flailing really got on my nerves in FFX.
Although not stictly FF, one of my favorite villians was delita in FF: tactics. He turned from a tragic figure into a villian in a natural and understandable way (although some of the nuance was lost in the piss poor translation). You could understand his hate and sympathize. He was smart and just like any other character, not some all powerful monster (sephiroth). He was a man who was oppressed and betrayed by the system and the player sint he system. So he sets out to change the system and be a player.
I detect a pretty heavy PC style RPG bias in all the replies so far. The FF crowd enjoy "Role playing" as is reading a book and imagining themselves in that role. Most of the replies come from the pc RPG tradition where your just a walking bunch of stats and take losts of fetch and return quests. The JRPD tradition has you being a slim empheminate walking bunch of stats that has to go on a quest on rails. Both of the styles have their weaknesses. FFXII I found to be a fairly open game for a JRPG. You could start munchkining very early and be insanely powerful. The "automated" combat basically stopped me from having to "press O" a million times a session just to get our of a dungueon.
Apparently you guys are int he minority since it sold insanely well. Perhaps only because of the name but it was fun. Well done. And pretty. You can't even criticize an emo love story. It was all byzantine politics. This one knocked FFVI off the #1 spot for me for FF games.
They might use a heuristic. If X stock rises > 100% over 30min stop trade for 5h. that might actually eliminate most profitable pump and dumps.
I'd argue games teahc you a lot. You learn hwo to use search engines (FAQs/cheats), you learn about viruses *sic* (cracks/hacks), you learn real world economics (MMORPG phishing and gold devaluation due to farming), They learn about biology (GTA hot coffee, Gods of war, hentai games), about physics (gravity gun HL2), They learn about languages (1337). over all a very round education.
Ohh They forgot to tell you. They redefined "go fight the good fight" to be torture and rape at the hands of a foreign power. doubleplus good.
I can't imagine gates doing anymore then make the US gov all use windows and make MS monopoly law proof. ohh wait they already are in the US because everyone who would convict him is his father golfing buddies. That'd rank about 1000 less then either cthulu or bush cheney anyways. Cthulu would just start consuming people in washington which is problably a benevolent act for humanity while buch-cheney are bent on lining their friends pockets and removign all your civil liberties and pandering to a segment of the populace who would insist on everyone living according to their belief system. In the grand scheme I suppose cthulu is the best vote.
Depends on where you are. Easily replaceable minion C is just as you say. KPI's, high demand for performance, and competition. When you get up to middle management you start hitting the stuff the GP saw. Lazy people in both sectors who "illusion" of working hard is more important then doing anything. Pass the buck, hide the problems, move on before the shit hits the fan. It's all about how secure peopel are. The more security the less productivity you can get away with. The lower on the ladder, the more abuse. Gov jobs just set the threshhold for incompitance lower ont he ladder.
I think you have ti the other way around. They'd like the ignorant sheep around and the intelligent trouble makers out. so anyone who isn't related to someone important and has a GPA > X gets to fight the good fight in Iran/Iraq/N korea/Canada while the sheep can rest safely at home.
You save $100,000 on lower engine dev costs and customization costs then spend it by havign to produce better art assets due to HD and enviromental interactivity. No thye can't just texture the ouside of a vase etc..