Up at 5:30, to work by 6:30, out at 3:00, home by 3:15, games until say 5:30, dinner with the woman, watch a movie, read a bit... as long as I'm to bed by midnight or so, it's fine.
I usually sleep in a whole lot on the weekends to make up for less-than-stellar sleep habits during the week. (I never said it was healthy.)
Hobbies include guitar, computers and movies.
But really, it doesn't matter if you believe me or not. I'm not trying to make friends or impress on Slashdot. I'm here to talk gaming.
No. It was a Sony Trinitron 27" TV, circa 1996. As you know, they don't have hard on/off switches (no TVs do nowadays), so power is always flowing to them. Apparently the model had a history of causing fires (or so the insurance company's investigator told us). I only had 8 consoles hooked up at the time of the fire (which started on a completely different floor on the opposite end of the house).
Yeah. Believe it or not, I am a Perl programmer/systems enginner full-time and even have a live-in girlfriend (and have had for the past three years). I only get a few hours to game each day, which is why so many of the games on that list have not been completed (I'm waiting until retirement).
I never really had any systems as a kid, so when I started making money, I got the bug. I just got a package with 2 Atari Lynx, another PlayStation, another Super Nintendo and a bunch of games. (I now have 3 Sega Saturn, 4 Super Nintendo, 3 N64, 2 original PSX, 1 PSOne, 2 Dreamcast, 2 GameCubes, 3 GameBoy Advance SP, 1 GameBoy Advance, 2 Neo Geo Pocket Color, 1 GameGear, 2 Xbox, 1 PS2, 2 Sega Genesis, 2 Atari Lynx, 3 Atari 2600 and an original GameBoy. Just wait until I start with the TurboGrafx, 3DO, Intellivision, etc. And I still need to replace my original NES, which was destroyed in my house fire.)
Fact: SCII load times on Xbox are shorter than on GC (though not by much, and certainly nowhere near as long as the load times on PS2 - I have all three versions)
Fact: Xbox delivers a better looking picture than the GameCube version.
I'm not saying that Link isn't a great extra character (though he's kind of... cheap), or that the GameCube version isn't a great one. I'm simply saying that technologically speaking, the Xbox version is superior to the GameCube version.
There is absolutely no doubt that part of the Dreamcast's demise was lack of must-own titles at launch. Soul Calibur was basically it. NFL2K if you were into that sort of thing. Everything else came out way too late, and as I said, by that time, PS2 was mere months away and Sony had hyped it as a huge leap (which it wasn't).
The point is that the market has always been competetive, and Sega has always found a way to totally fail with their consoles. The consoles themselves have always been great (with the possible exception of the GameGear, one of which I own simply for nostalgia's sake), they've always *eventually* had relatively solid software. But at launch, hmmmm.
(This, incidentally, is why the Saturn failed so miserably in the United States. It had great fuckin' games, but they came out too late for people to justify the $399 expense. Sony's PlayStation launched at $299, which seems a hell of a lot cheaper to most people.)
Getting back to the original discussion, Xbox will definitely have its work cut out for it in its second generation, but I do not believe for a second that launching earlier than the competition is inherently bad. It is what Microsoft makes of it.
No, when the PS2 was released nobody knew about XBox and everybody was buying PS2s.
Please, stop. This is demonstrably false. Xbox was officially announced in March of 2000, specs and all. PlayStation 2 shipped in North America in October of 2000.
Of course I was talking about production prices, not retail prices.
What? Those matter how? The consumer doesn't care how much it costs the company to make the console. If price/performance matters, then the price is what the consumer pays and the performance is what the consumer sees. Anything that's behind the scenes is not even taken into consideration.
Neither Sony nor Microsoft have ever publicly disclosed how much each unit costs to produce. Surely the PS2 is cheaper for Sony than the Xbox is for Microsoft, but the Xbox includes a lot more. It doesn't really matter, however, because both sell at the exact same price.
Get real, dude. I'd be willing to be that fewer than 20% of the installed base of Xboxes are modded. The PS2 is even harder to hardware mod. Casual gamers don't mod consoles. Fucking nerds do. (Not that there's anything wrong with it. I whole-heartedly approve.)
Dreamcast died because Sega, seeing the upcoming PS2, assumed their standard crisis mode, which is to roll over onto their backs and put a big red X on their stomach with a sign saying "STAB HERE".
Dreamcast's must-own titles came too late, and by that time, people decided to wait for the PS2. Its much-hyped online ability was never fully realized because Sega got lazy.
Dreamcast was killed by mismanagement, not by being first to market.
It's counterintutitive, but it does make anecdotal sense.
No, it really doesn't. GameBoy got clobbered by the GameGear, right? NES got ownz0red by Sega Master System, right? PlayStation didn't stand a chance against the newer and better N64, right?
Even more recently, the PS2 is really getting thumped by Xbox, huh?
It doesn't at all make any anecdotal sense, because there are fewer than a handful of situations where it's been true, and those have all been due to horrible mismanagement (generally by - surprise - Sega!).
Also if XBox couldn't beat the PS2 with a 2-year technical advantage and huge losses, how do they expect to beat the PS3 being 1 year behind? When the PS3 comes out, it will be faster, have more games and be cheaper than XBox2.
By this reasoning, Xbox would have been smashing the PS2 for the last two years. If a console launches early with must-own titles, it will find a base. Developers are asking for more power from the consoles (so they can, you know, do cooler things, so suckers will buy their games and they'll make money), so any developer that wants to get a jump start on the market will start developing for the next generation leader. If that's Microsoft, then so be it.
In not-so-kind words, your argument really makes no sense when it's paired with reality.
Also MS made the mistake of choosing PC-components which is the reason why XBox will always have a worse price/performance ratio than the Playstation.
Yes, because at the same price, the PS2 performs so much better than the Xbox. That is, if you like long load times and graphics that are no better than Dreamcast's.
I'm not convinced you know anything about gaming or the industry. It's a travesty your comment got modded up, because there isn't a single accurate piece to it.
Disclaimer: I am a huge game nut, and own (and love) all three current home console platforms. (Up to date as of about a month ago - http://users.ign.com/collection/dham)
Xbox really has a lot going for it. It is indeed a bit weak on the exclusives, but its overall library is very strong. Everything that's come out on all three platforms is almost uniformly better on the Xbox (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Soul Calibur II, TimeSplitters 2, etc), and it's now got Grand Theft Auto Double Pack, which is spectacularly polished when compared to the PS2 versions of the games (the load times alone made it worth a re-purchase; the fact that the cars look amazing is just icing on an already delicious cake).
If you only have a GameCube, then I would think that GTA and Panzer Dragoon Orta would be compelling enough to warrant a purchase (but then again, I have nearly 40 Xbox games and two Xboxes). Knights of the Old Republic is also seen by many as a must-own title, but that really depends on your affinity for RPGs.
Where Xbox is really strong, I think, is when compared to PS2 from the standpoint of the casual gamer. The Xbox does not require a multitap (saving you ~$30), does not require an online adaptor (saving you ~$40) and does not require memory cards (which are running about $25 each for PS2 and Xbox). Casual gamers want to play titles like Prince of Persia, Soul Calibur II, TimeSplitters 2, Grand Theft Auto, etc - all of which the Xbox has, in far superior form than its PS2 counterparts.
Xbox will never have all the franchises we love and wax nostalgic over, mainly because those were all born on Nintendo, by Nintendo. The exclusives you mentioned are all great games (and I own all of them but Wind Waker). When we were growing up (I'm 22), Nintendo was the console. Microsoft can't compete with Samus.
I honestly feel that the Xbox and the GameCube work very well together. I bought a GameCube at $199, two at $149, and will probably pick up another one at $99. I use it to play the great exclusives it's got (Animal Crossing is my current addiction and Ikaruga is a beast). For everything else, I turn to Xbox, because its versions of the games are simply better than on the other consoles.
The point I'm really trying to make is that Microsoft cannot compete with Nintendo for gamers' hearts, and they know that. Don't look at Xbox as competition for GameCube, look at it as competition for PS2.
but nothing else has really taken great advantage of the ability for the two to connect.
I disagree. Animal Crossing is a surprisingly in-depth game and one of the cooler features it boasts is very cool GBA connection possibilities. Those that have both systems and the link cable are able to design textures on the go (instead of using the TV to do it and spending bells, the game's currency), travel in-game to a tropical island (which has coconuts and virtually unlimited money making potential) and download said island to the GameBoy wherein you can take it on the go and do various things with the inhabitant of the island). None of this is probably very "cool" to you if you don't play Animal Crossing, but something that has a lot wider appeal is the ability to send old NES games to your GameBoy Advance for playing them on the go. So instead of playing Fire Emblem or Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, I can swim in nostalgia by pulling the GBA SP out of my pocket and playing Excitebike or Soccer (or one of the many many other old NES games included with Animal Crossing as unlockables).
It might not be the "killer app" for the GBA-GC link, but it's an understatement to say that "nothing else has really taken great advantage" of the link.
And that's just one game that I'm intimately familiar with. Splinter Cell includes GBA link-up to view Sam's Palm display on the GBA. Sure, it's not a feature you're going to buy the GBA & Link cable for, but for those that have it, it's damn cool.
Bah. The only problem gang in GTA3 is the Mafia in St. Marks in Portland. The other ones might be a problem if you're on foot, but in a vehicle, no sweat. The Mafia's shotguns will shred your vehicle in nothing flat, but that's why you've got the Bulletproof Patriot from "Marked Man", right? RIGHT?
(GTA:VC is super-easy gang-wise and hardly merits mention.)
I whole-heartedly recommend Speakeasy. I've had them for, oh, six months now, after burning through the following broadband providers:
- Prestige Cable (12/99), later purchased by - Adelphia Cable (6/2000?), and then I moved and got - RoadRunner (2/2001), which then got switched (in my area) to - Cox (fuckit, who cares?), which sucked, and so I got - Verizon DSL (1/2002), and then my house burned down, so I was in a rental house with - Verizon DSL again (5/2003), which was awful
I ordered Speakeasy on their website. I'd run a promotion with them before and I quite appreciate their gaming servers, so I was happy to give them my business. It took exactly four days to get the DSL kit to me from date of order, and when I hooked it up that night, everything worked.
I've experienced exactly *zero* service outages. I'd love to say they were helpful, but I've never needed it. They called me a week or so after install to ask how everything was going and give me a customer satisfaction survey. I gave them the highest marks on everything and apologized that I couldn't offer any criticism from which they could improve.
I pay $80 a month and I have 1.5mbits down and 768kbits up, along with a bunch of email addresses, 2 static IPs, some web space, included dialup, etc. They have cheaper plans if you're interested.
I can't say enough good things about them. I'm extremely satisfied.
(I'm in Fairfax, VA, for those interested. Service quality here is awesome.)
I just read what he wrote again, and he didn't say "No woman can explain the difference between a Megabyte or a Gigabyte for the life of her." He was very specifically referring to his girlfriend.
Now, I know your comment was mostly in jest, but throwing around phrases like "it's pretty demeaning to assume gender has a hold on tech knowledge" pretty clearly indicates that you actually take some offense to his statement.
By saying what you said, you demonstrate your inability to read (or perhaps simply a lack of reading comprehension), wherein you are responding to something he didn't even say. You're doing a disservice to your cause, because you will now be written off as "another woman that doesn't listen", and you'll fight more posters in the future who look down on you.
If you want people to respect you, you need to earn it. One of the best ways to not do that is to imply someone is a bigot when there exists no evidence that agrees with your assertion.
There are plenty of people and posts that deserve your attention and work to set the record straight; his is not one of them.
As another poster mentioned, Ikaruga and Viewtiful Joe are both 2D games that are fun as hell (GC).
If you have a GBA, basically everything is 2D. I'd recommend Konami's Arcade Advanced ($10), which includes Yie Ar Kung-fu, Frogger, Scramble, Rush'n Attack, Time Pilot and something else I don't play and therefore can't remember. If you input the Konami code at the title screens, you get fun extras.
Well, I think everyone wants to see iTMS succeed, but the sharing limits do kinda suck. I've got five Macs, all at home, all for personal use. I've bought probably eighty tracks, including a few whole albums, since iTMS debuted in April. I only buy on two computers - my Power Mac dual 1.42 and my 15" 1GHz TiBook. As you may be aware, the TiBook's wireless reception sucks, so out in the living room I generally use the iBook. My fiance uses her iMac and I hop between the two Power Macs depending on what I'm doing. Streaming counts against your limit of three, and yet I have five. Now, I don't have crap old machines - iBook G3 800, Power Mac dual 800 and dual 1.42, PowerBook 1GHz and iMac G4 800. I've bought them all within the last 2.5 years. I've spent a lot of money on them, and I'm going to get a G5 in June or July. And I get punished for buying more Macs. I don't think I should get punished for buying more hardware. One more machine means more tedious registering-unregistering to listen to a song.
"You've spent that much on computers, you can't buy each song twice?" That's not the point. I give Apple a lot of money because I think they make great products and I want to support them (I'm on my third iPod because I'm a stupid upgrading idiot). If I spend all this money, they should make it more convenient for me to use their services, not less.
"Well, if you don't like it, don't use it." It's an annoyance. It doesn't ruin the service for me. I think it's a great service. And I understand that they have to have copying limits. But to say that their limits are "unrestrictive" just isn't true for all people. And those that are the most dedicated are the ones that get punished for it. I work around it, and for the most part, it's cool. But when I try to play a song and it pops up that annoying message, refusing to let me play... well, yeah, that kinda sucks.
Anyway, the compromise was a pretty good one, but maybe they should up the limit? Maybe they should allow unlimited streaming to Macs on the local network through iTunes? I don't know. I don't have all the answers. I just know that real people do run into the sharing limit problem, and it's not necessarily the ones that are trying to pirate the music. Apple could have done better.
See, I don't think this is actually totally correct either. It's a weird mix, a gray area... not black and white.
If you have a bike and I steal it, you are being deprived of your bike. A physical thing is being taken. That's obviously wrong (by most moral codes, anyway).
If you have a bike and I magically make a copy of it that works exactly as yours... I haven't deprived you of your bike, yet I've gotten one without paying for it (as you paid for yours). Is it morally wrong? I personally think it is, and I can see you being annoyed that you paid whereas I didn't. But I don't really think it's quite theft either, because I haven't actually stolen anything from you. And yet, I'm maybe depriving the bike industry of revenues (or maybe I wouldn't buy a bike anyway?)...
There are too many questions, unknowns... too much speculation, intellectual masturbation... it's not really theft, but it's not really harmless either.
It's my understanding that electricity doesn't work that way. Electricity needs to find ground; it will not shock you if it cannot. You can touch live wires so long as you are, say, wearing rubber boots and not in any way touching the ground. Standing barefoot on a damp basement floor, however...
So if the electricity is going down the chain to the dog (which it likely would not, since that's not the path of least resistance to the ground), the dog could only get shocked if the path was open. While urine would perhaps make this path more conducive (I can't honestly say I've stood in pee and shocked myself), it's higly unlikely any urination would be forced in the first place. Ergo, a path of lesser resistance would probably not be created.
So, in other words, it's humorous to those that know no better, but it sounds impossible to me.
(I am not an electrician, so someone here is perhaps more qualified to comment/correct me on this.)
How's the processor working out for you? I'd want to run XP Pro if I were going to buy a Windows notebook, and I'm skeptical of the Crusoe processors at lower MHz. They've always seemed rather slow to me. I was interested in buying one of these but wary of the processor. How do you like it?
Believe me, that's the first thing I tried. I keep all my music on the dual 1.42, and I got home that Monday and updated software, bought a few songs and tried it. Streaming over Rendezvous counts against you - i.e., sitting in my living room with my PowerBook, I had to register Ghoti Hook's version of "Just What I Needed" to play it, even though it was through Rendezvous streaming in iTunes.
If they removed this restriction, I'd have absolutely nothing to bitch about.
I do happen to have three iPods (love the little buggers), the newest being a 30GB model. That works great for me at work - I just have the dock connected to some speakers on my workstation and I'm good to go. But when I get home... audio in on my iBook? It's absurd. I love most of Apple's stuff but I can't believe they couldn't negotiate a little higher of a limit on the song copy (or, more simply, have it work over Rendezvous - what you, I and countless others agree would be an ideal solution).
Right now, the solution that's going through my mind is to buy an old G3 iMac on eBay (my girlfriend had an old one, but it got ruined in a house fire I had in December) and set it up to stream all the songs over the wireless network and play the songs through a secondary input on my stereo, but this is a bit of a pain to set up and doesn't solve the problem of steaming when I'm, say, laying outside in the hammock or upstairs (where my stereo isn't).
No small business. I work at a large company that pays me enough to buy the computers I want. And when I get home, I don't want to hassle with shit like this.
I have a number of PCs that I use for various things - P4 for gaming, dual Athlon for Linux development, etc. - and the reason they are delegated to specific tasks is because those are the only things the Macs don't do well. Everything else, I can just sit down and do my thing and I don't have to worry about it. But then there's this little "gotcha" and it makes my purchased songs basically a nuisance to listen to most of the time I'm at home. Wouldn't you be agitated if it happened to you?
I know I'm in the minority. Probably an extremely thin minority as well - not everyone can find uses for three desktops and two laptops, and that includes me sometimes. I mostly bought the iBook, for example, for its great wireless reception, so I can roam the house and still keep up with what's going on online and - yes - listen to music. My PowerBook is used mainly for everything else, including DV editing on the road (home movies, mainly - I'm converting all the old home videos to DVD), which the iBook is pretty slow at. The iMac is a play machine that the woman uses frequently (the bitch and the woman are two different people - you don't need to know details, but I don't refer to the decent one as "the bitch"), but I also use it pretty frequently - when I don't feel like hunting down a laptop, for a quick check on something, to play music in the bedroom, etc. The Dual 1.42 is my main machine, obviously, and I use the dual 800 now as a file repository (what a waste - I think I might give it to my dad or something). But the point isn't that I'm in the minority and what does Apple care about one guy? The point is that the restriction is absurd and, in my case, hinders my ability to do what I want (and what is perfectly legal, as far as I can tell).
Economically, Apple wouldn't miss me if I stopped buying Macs. But that doesn't justify the restriction. Apple says you can give the music to your friends, so long as it's only two of them. I don't even want to share! I just want to be able to listen to it in my home whenever I want without having to go through the hassle of unregistering a computer so I can register another. It's absurd that it doesn't work through Rendezvous.
The whole thing puts me in a pissy mood because I'm personally affected by it, and it's made worse the more I support the company financially. The more Macs I buy, the more of a hassle it becomes. If you had spent $16,000 on Macs over the last two years and this simple thing you wanted to do on them was made extremely inconvenient, wouldn't you feel like Apple had taken a big dump in your Wheaties?
Or if your computers are in 5 different rooms, take a portable that's registered into the room, or an iPod. C'mon, use yer noodle.
Because that's just so fucking convenient, right?
I happen to have a new 30GB iPod (just like the 10 and 5 that I had before it), and guess what? If you play a restricted song off the iPod via iTunes, you have to register it. If I put on headphones, I can't hear important things like the bitch yelling for me or the phone ringing.
I already described the ridiculousness of the problem: I have a portable that's registered but I'm doing something on the other, so I have to pull it out, unregister, then register on the other. That just reeks of convenience, doesn't it?
And quit crying 'cause there's no free lunch.
No shit. On hardware alone for my Macs, I've spent (I just added it up) about $16,300 in the past two years. (I guess that makes me look like someone who wants something for nothing, right?) That doesn't count the monitors (like a dumb asshole, I just bought a new 20" ACD too). I think I've bought my right to a pleasant music listening solution. This is what Apple sells. The hardware is nice, but I buy it because it works, it's hassle free (I write UNIX software for a living and I am sick to fucking death of dealing with the inanities) and it [generally] makes you feel like you got your money's worth. But then little shit like this pops up, it makes me think that Apple isn't doing enough to earn all the money I spend for them. It's kind of like their standard warranty; it's okay, but it's far from great.
I've purchased 44 tracks from iTMS. I have five macs, including 2 PowerMacs (dual 800 and a brand new dual 1.42), a PowerBook (1GHz 15" with SuperDrive), an iMac (15" 800MHz with SuperDrive) and an iBook (800MHz with combo). All of these computers spend most of their time in my house, with the only two ever leaving being the laptops.
I'm a loyal Apple customer, and I can tell you that the AAC restriction on "3 other" Macs (it's actually two other) really sucks. Do you have any idea what kind of an inconvenience it is to register and unregister computers as you see fit? So I have the iMac and one of the PowerMacs permanently registered, and I'm on the iBook but - hey - this song is registered on the PowerBook! So I have to pull it out, at which point I might as well just continue working there... it's absurdity. Apple considers a family license for their OS to be five users, so why not music?
I'm sorry, but I don't think I should be punished for buying more Macs.
If you burn to CD, it's great. But it sucks for guys like me that spend 95% of their music listening time in front of one of their computers.
The other restrictions, I don't care about. But this one really bugs me. You'd think they could at least enable playback for Rendezvous without registering the computer, but noooooooooooooooo. Which is convenient, because that's how I do most of my listening.
The service would be a total winner if it weren't for that. Yes, Apple has pissed in my Wheaties.
Slashdot Mirror
Up at 5:30, to work by 6:30, out at 3:00, home by 3:15, games until say 5:30, dinner with the woman, watch a movie, read a bit... as long as I'm to bed by midnight or so, it's fine.
I usually sleep in a whole lot on the weekends to make up for less-than-stellar sleep habits during the week. (I never said it was healthy.)
Hobbies include guitar, computers and movies.
But really, it doesn't matter if you believe me or not. I'm not trying to make friends or impress on Slashdot. I'm here to talk gaming.
No. It was a Sony Trinitron 27" TV, circa 1996. As you know, they don't have hard on/off switches (no TVs do nowadays), so power is always flowing to them. Apparently the model had a history of causing fires (or so the insurance company's investigator told us). I only had 8 consoles hooked up at the time of the fire (which started on a completely different floor on the opposite end of the house).
Yeah. Believe it or not, I am a Perl programmer/systems enginner full-time and even have a live-in girlfriend (and have had for the past three years). I only get a few hours to game each day, which is why so many of the games on that list have not been completed (I'm waiting until retirement).
I never really had any systems as a kid, so when I started making money, I got the bug. I just got a package with 2 Atari Lynx, another PlayStation, another Super Nintendo and a bunch of games. (I now have 3 Sega Saturn, 4 Super Nintendo, 3 N64, 2 original PSX, 1 PSOne, 2 Dreamcast, 2 GameCubes, 3 GameBoy Advance SP, 1 GameBoy Advance, 2 Neo Geo Pocket Color, 1 GameGear, 2 Xbox, 1 PS2, 2 Sega Genesis, 2 Atari Lynx, 3 Atari 2600 and an original GameBoy. Just wait until I start with the TurboGrafx, 3DO, Intellivision, etc. And I still need to replace my original NES, which was destroyed in my house fire.)
You're talking opinion, I'm talking fact.
Fact: SCII load times on Xbox are shorter than on GC (though not by much, and certainly nowhere near as long as the load times on PS2 - I have all three versions)
Fact: Xbox delivers a better looking picture than the GameCube version.
I'm not saying that Link isn't a great extra character (though he's kind of... cheap), or that the GameCube version isn't a great one. I'm simply saying that technologically speaking, the Xbox version is superior to the GameCube version.
Had a house fire, shit got burnt. :)
There is absolutely no doubt that part of the Dreamcast's demise was lack of must-own titles at launch. Soul Calibur was basically it. NFL2K if you were into that sort of thing. Everything else came out way too late, and as I said, by that time, PS2 was mere months away and Sony had hyped it as a huge leap (which it wasn't).
The point is that the market has always been competetive, and Sega has always found a way to totally fail with their consoles. The consoles themselves have always been great (with the possible exception of the GameGear, one of which I own simply for nostalgia's sake), they've always *eventually* had relatively solid software. But at launch, hmmmm.
(This, incidentally, is why the Saturn failed so miserably in the United States. It had great fuckin' games, but they came out too late for people to justify the $399 expense. Sony's PlayStation launched at $299, which seems a hell of a lot cheaper to most people.)
Getting back to the original discussion, Xbox will definitely have its work cut out for it in its second generation, but I do not believe for a second that launching earlier than the competition is inherently bad. It is what Microsoft makes of it.
No, when the PS2 was released nobody knew about XBox and everybody was buying PS2s.
Please, stop. This is demonstrably false. Xbox was officially announced in March of 2000, specs and all. PlayStation 2 shipped in North America in October of 2000.
Of course I was talking about production prices, not retail prices.
What? Those matter how? The consumer doesn't care how much it costs the company to make the console. If price/performance matters, then the price is what the consumer pays and the performance is what the consumer sees. Anything that's behind the scenes is not even taken into consideration.
Neither Sony nor Microsoft have ever publicly disclosed how much each unit costs to produce. Surely the PS2 is cheaper for Sony than the Xbox is for Microsoft, but the Xbox includes a lot more. It doesn't really matter, however, because both sell at the exact same price.
Get real, dude. I'd be willing to be that fewer than 20% of the installed base of Xboxes are modded. The PS2 is even harder to hardware mod. Casual gamers don't mod consoles. Fucking nerds do. (Not that there's anything wrong with it. I whole-heartedly approve.)
Dreamcast died because Sega, seeing the upcoming PS2, assumed their standard crisis mode, which is to roll over onto their backs and put a big red X on their stomach with a sign saying "STAB HERE".
Dreamcast's must-own titles came too late, and by that time, people decided to wait for the PS2. Its much-hyped online ability was never fully realized because Sega got lazy.
Dreamcast was killed by mismanagement, not by being first to market.
It's counterintutitive, but it does make anecdotal sense.
No, it really doesn't. GameBoy got clobbered by the GameGear, right? NES got ownz0red by Sega Master System, right? PlayStation didn't stand a chance against the newer and better N64, right?
Even more recently, the PS2 is really getting thumped by Xbox, huh?
It doesn't at all make any anecdotal sense, because there are fewer than a handful of situations where it's been true, and those have all been due to horrible mismanagement (generally by - surprise - Sega!).
Also if XBox couldn't beat the PS2 with a 2-year technical advantage and huge losses, how do they expect to beat the PS3 being 1 year behind? When the PS3 comes out, it will be faster, have more games and be cheaper than XBox2.
By this reasoning, Xbox would have been smashing the PS2 for the last two years. If a console launches early with must-own titles, it will find a base. Developers are asking for more power from the consoles (so they can, you know, do cooler things, so suckers will buy their games and they'll make money), so any developer that wants to get a jump start on the market will start developing for the next generation leader. If that's Microsoft, then so be it.
In not-so-kind words, your argument really makes no sense when it's paired with reality.
Also MS made the mistake of choosing PC-components which is the reason why XBox will always have a worse price/performance ratio than the Playstation.
Yes, because at the same price, the PS2 performs so much better than the Xbox. That is, if you like long load times and graphics that are no better than Dreamcast's.
I'm not convinced you know anything about gaming or the industry. It's a travesty your comment got modded up, because there isn't a single accurate piece to it.
Disclaimer: I am a huge game nut, and own (and love) all three current home console platforms. (Up to date as of about a month ago - http://users.ign.com/collection/dham)
Xbox really has a lot going for it. It is indeed a bit weak on the exclusives, but its overall library is very strong. Everything that's come out on all three platforms is almost uniformly better on the Xbox (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Soul Calibur II, TimeSplitters 2, etc), and it's now got Grand Theft Auto Double Pack, which is spectacularly polished when compared to the PS2 versions of the games (the load times alone made it worth a re-purchase; the fact that the cars look amazing is just icing on an already delicious cake).
If you only have a GameCube, then I would think that GTA and Panzer Dragoon Orta would be compelling enough to warrant a purchase (but then again, I have nearly 40 Xbox games and two Xboxes). Knights of the Old Republic is also seen by many as a must-own title, but that really depends on your affinity for RPGs.
Where Xbox is really strong, I think, is when compared to PS2 from the standpoint of the casual gamer. The Xbox does not require a multitap (saving you ~$30), does not require an online adaptor (saving you ~$40) and does not require memory cards (which are running about $25 each for PS2 and Xbox). Casual gamers want to play titles like Prince of Persia, Soul Calibur II, TimeSplitters 2, Grand Theft Auto, etc - all of which the Xbox has, in far superior form than its PS2 counterparts.
Xbox will never have all the franchises we love and wax nostalgic over, mainly because those were all born on Nintendo, by Nintendo. The exclusives you mentioned are all great games (and I own all of them but Wind Waker). When we were growing up (I'm 22), Nintendo was the console. Microsoft can't compete with Samus.
I honestly feel that the Xbox and the GameCube work very well together. I bought a GameCube at $199, two at $149, and will probably pick up another one at $99. I use it to play the great exclusives it's got (Animal Crossing is my current addiction and Ikaruga is a beast). For everything else, I turn to Xbox, because its versions of the games are simply better than on the other consoles.
The point I'm really trying to make is that Microsoft cannot compete with Nintendo for gamers' hearts, and they know that. Don't look at Xbox as competition for GameCube, look at it as competition for PS2.
And therefore, your idea is clearly re-fucking-tarded.
I disagree. Animal Crossing is a surprisingly in-depth game and one of the cooler features it boasts is very cool GBA connection possibilities. Those that have both systems and the link cable are able to design textures on the go (instead of using the TV to do it and spending bells, the game's currency), travel in-game to a tropical island (which has coconuts and virtually unlimited money making potential) and download said island to the GameBoy wherein you can take it on the go and do various things with the inhabitant of the island). None of this is probably very "cool" to you if you don't play Animal Crossing, but something that has a lot wider appeal is the ability to send old NES games to your GameBoy Advance for playing them on the go. So instead of playing Fire Emblem or Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, I can swim in nostalgia by pulling the GBA SP out of my pocket and playing Excitebike or Soccer (or one of the many many other old NES games included with Animal Crossing as unlockables).
It might not be the "killer app" for the GBA-GC link, but it's an understatement to say that "nothing else has really taken great advantage" of the link.
And that's just one game that I'm intimately familiar with. Splinter Cell includes GBA link-up to view Sam's Palm display on the GBA. Sure, it's not a feature you're going to buy the GBA & Link cable for, but for those that have it, it's damn cool.
Bah. The only problem gang in GTA3 is the Mafia in St. Marks in Portland. The other ones might be a problem if you're on foot, but in a vehicle, no sweat. The Mafia's shotguns will shred your vehicle in nothing flat, but that's why you've got the Bulletproof Patriot from "Marked Man", right? RIGHT?
(GTA:VC is super-easy gang-wise and hardly merits mention.)
I whole-heartedly recommend Speakeasy. I've had them for, oh, six months now, after burning through the following broadband providers:
- Prestige Cable (12/99), later purchased by
- Adelphia Cable (6/2000?), and then I moved and got
- RoadRunner (2/2001), which then got switched (in my area) to
- Cox (fuckit, who cares?), which sucked, and so I got
- Verizon DSL (1/2002), and then my house burned down, so I was in a rental house with
- Verizon DSL again (5/2003), which was awful
I ordered Speakeasy on their website. I'd run a promotion with them before and I quite appreciate their gaming servers, so I was happy to give them my business. It took exactly four days to get the DSL kit to me from date of order, and when I hooked it up that night, everything worked.
I've experienced exactly *zero* service outages. I'd love to say they were helpful, but I've never needed it. They called me a week or so after install to ask how everything was going and give me a customer satisfaction survey. I gave them the highest marks on everything and apologized that I couldn't offer any criticism from which they could improve.
I pay $80 a month and I have 1.5mbits down and 768kbits up, along with a bunch of email addresses, 2 static IPs, some web space, included dialup, etc. They have cheaper plans if you're interested.
I can't say enough good things about them. I'm extremely satisfied.
(I'm in Fairfax, VA, for those interested. Service quality here is awesome.)
I just read what he wrote again, and he didn't say "No woman can explain the difference between a Megabyte or a Gigabyte for the life of her." He was very specifically referring to his girlfriend.
Now, I know your comment was mostly in jest, but throwing around phrases like "it's pretty demeaning to assume gender has a hold on tech knowledge" pretty clearly indicates that you actually take some offense to his statement.
By saying what you said, you demonstrate your inability to read (or perhaps simply a lack of reading comprehension), wherein you are responding to something he didn't even say. You're doing a disservice to your cause, because you will now be written off as "another woman that doesn't listen", and you'll fight more posters in the future who look down on you.
If you want people to respect you, you need to earn it. One of the best ways to not do that is to imply someone is a bigot when there exists no evidence that agrees with your assertion.
There are plenty of people and posts that deserve your attention and work to set the record straight; his is not one of them.
Contra: Shattered Soldier. It rules.
As another poster mentioned, Ikaruga and Viewtiful Joe are both 2D games that are fun as hell (GC).
If you have a GBA, basically everything is 2D. I'd recommend Konami's Arcade Advanced ($10), which includes Yie Ar Kung-fu, Frogger, Scramble, Rush'n Attack, Time Pilot and something else I don't play and therefore can't remember. If you input the Konami code at the title screens, you get fun extras.
Well, I think everyone wants to see iTMS succeed, but the sharing limits do kinda suck. I've got five Macs, all at home, all for personal use. I've bought probably eighty tracks, including a few whole albums, since iTMS debuted in April. I only buy on two computers - my Power Mac dual 1.42 and my 15" 1GHz TiBook. As you may be aware, the TiBook's wireless reception sucks, so out in the living room I generally use the iBook. My fiance uses her iMac and I hop between the two Power Macs depending on what I'm doing. Streaming counts against your limit of three, and yet I have five. Now, I don't have crap old machines - iBook G3 800, Power Mac dual 800 and dual 1.42, PowerBook 1GHz and iMac G4 800. I've bought them all within the last 2.5 years. I've spent a lot of money on them, and I'm going to get a G5 in June or July. And I get punished for buying more Macs. I don't think I should get punished for buying more hardware. One more machine means more tedious registering-unregistering to listen to a song.
"You've spent that much on computers, you can't buy each song twice?" That's not the point. I give Apple a lot of money because I think they make great products and I want to support them (I'm on my third iPod because I'm a stupid upgrading idiot). If I spend all this money, they should make it more convenient for me to use their services, not less.
"Well, if you don't like it, don't use it." It's an annoyance. It doesn't ruin the service for me. I think it's a great service. And I understand that they have to have copying limits. But to say that their limits are "unrestrictive" just isn't true for all people. And those that are the most dedicated are the ones that get punished for it. I work around it, and for the most part, it's cool. But when I try to play a song and it pops up that annoying message, refusing to let me play... well, yeah, that kinda sucks.
Anyway, the compromise was a pretty good one, but maybe they should up the limit? Maybe they should allow unlimited streaming to Macs on the local network through iTunes? I don't know. I don't have all the answers. I just know that real people do run into the sharing limit problem, and it's not necessarily the ones that are trying to pirate the music. Apple could have done better.
See, I don't think this is actually totally correct either. It's a weird mix, a gray area... not black and white.
If you have a bike and I steal it, you are being deprived of your bike. A physical thing is being taken. That's obviously wrong (by most moral codes, anyway).
If you have a bike and I magically make a copy of it that works exactly as yours... I haven't deprived you of your bike, yet I've gotten one without paying for it (as you paid for yours). Is it morally wrong? I personally think it is, and I can see you being annoyed that you paid whereas I didn't. But I don't really think it's quite theft either, because I haven't actually stolen anything from you. And yet, I'm maybe depriving the bike industry of revenues (or maybe I wouldn't buy a bike anyway?)...
There are too many questions, unknowns... too much speculation, intellectual masturbation... it's not really theft, but it's not really harmless either.
As if the story were not unlikely enough...
It's my understanding that electricity doesn't work that way. Electricity needs to find ground; it will not shock you if it cannot. You can touch live wires so long as you are, say, wearing rubber boots and not in any way touching the ground. Standing barefoot on a damp basement floor, however...
So if the electricity is going down the chain to the dog (which it likely would not, since that's not the path of least resistance to the ground), the dog could only get shocked if the path was open. While urine would perhaps make this path more conducive (I can't honestly say I've stood in pee and shocked myself), it's higly unlikely any urination would be forced in the first place. Ergo, a path of lesser resistance would probably not be created.
So, in other words, it's humorous to those that know no better, but it sounds impossible to me.
(I am not an electrician, so someone here is perhaps more qualified to comment/correct me on this.)
How's the processor working out for you? I'd want to run XP Pro if I were going to buy a Windows notebook, and I'm skeptical of the Crusoe processors at lower MHz. They've always seemed rather slow to me. I was interested in buying one of these but wary of the processor. How do you like it?
Believe me, that's the first thing I tried. I keep all my music on the dual 1.42, and I got home that Monday and updated software, bought a few songs and tried it. Streaming over Rendezvous counts against you - i.e., sitting in my living room with my PowerBook, I had to register Ghoti Hook's version of "Just What I Needed" to play it, even though it was through Rendezvous streaming in iTunes.
If they removed this restriction, I'd have absolutely nothing to bitch about.
I do happen to have three iPods (love the little buggers), the newest being a 30GB model. That works great for me at work - I just have the dock connected to some speakers on my workstation and I'm good to go. But when I get home... audio in on my iBook? It's absurd. I love most of Apple's stuff but I can't believe they couldn't negotiate a little higher of a limit on the song copy (or, more simply, have it work over Rendezvous - what you, I and countless others agree would be an ideal solution).
Right now, the solution that's going through my mind is to buy an old G3 iMac on eBay (my girlfriend had an old one, but it got ruined in a house fire I had in December) and set it up to stream all the songs over the wireless network and play the songs through a secondary input on my stereo, but this is a bit of a pain to set up and doesn't solve the problem of steaming when I'm, say, laying outside in the hammock or upstairs (where my stereo isn't).
No small business. I work at a large company that pays me enough to buy the computers I want. And when I get home, I don't want to hassle with shit like this.
I have a number of PCs that I use for various things - P4 for gaming, dual Athlon for Linux development, etc. - and the reason they are delegated to specific tasks is because those are the only things the Macs don't do well. Everything else, I can just sit down and do my thing and I don't have to worry about it. But then there's this little "gotcha" and it makes my purchased songs basically a nuisance to listen to most of the time I'm at home. Wouldn't you be agitated if it happened to you?
I know I'm in the minority. Probably an extremely thin minority as well - not everyone can find uses for three desktops and two laptops, and that includes me sometimes. I mostly bought the iBook, for example, for its great wireless reception, so I can roam the house and still keep up with what's going on online and - yes - listen to music. My PowerBook is used mainly for everything else, including DV editing on the road (home movies, mainly - I'm converting all the old home videos to DVD), which the iBook is pretty slow at. The iMac is a play machine that the woman uses frequently (the bitch and the woman are two different people - you don't need to know details, but I don't refer to the decent one as "the bitch"), but I also use it pretty frequently - when I don't feel like hunting down a laptop, for a quick check on something, to play music in the bedroom, etc. The Dual 1.42 is my main machine, obviously, and I use the dual 800 now as a file repository (what a waste - I think I might give it to my dad or something). But the point isn't that I'm in the minority and what does Apple care about one guy? The point is that the restriction is absurd and, in my case, hinders my ability to do what I want (and what is perfectly legal, as far as I can tell).
Economically, Apple wouldn't miss me if I stopped buying Macs. But that doesn't justify the restriction. Apple says you can give the music to your friends, so long as it's only two of them. I don't even want to share! I just want to be able to listen to it in my home whenever I want without having to go through the hassle of unregistering a computer so I can register another. It's absurd that it doesn't work through Rendezvous.
The whole thing puts me in a pissy mood because I'm personally affected by it, and it's made worse the more I support the company financially. The more Macs I buy, the more of a hassle it becomes. If you had spent $16,000 on Macs over the last two years and this simple thing you wanted to do on them was made extremely inconvenient, wouldn't you feel like Apple had taken a big dump in your Wheaties?
Because that's just so fucking convenient, right?
I happen to have a new 30GB iPod (just like the 10 and 5 that I had before it), and guess what? If you play a restricted song off the iPod via iTunes, you have to register it. If I put on headphones, I can't hear important things like the bitch yelling for me or the phone ringing.
I already described the ridiculousness of the problem: I have a portable that's registered but I'm doing something on the other, so I have to pull it out, unregister, then register on the other. That just reeks of convenience, doesn't it?
No shit. On hardware alone for my Macs, I've spent (I just added it up) about $16,300 in the past two years. (I guess that makes me look like someone who wants something for nothing, right?) That doesn't count the monitors (like a dumb asshole, I just bought a new 20" ACD too). I think I've bought my right to a pleasant music listening solution. This is what Apple sells. The hardware is nice, but I buy it because it works, it's hassle free (I write UNIX software for a living and I am sick to fucking death of dealing with the inanities) and it [generally] makes you feel like you got your money's worth. But then little shit like this pops up, it makes me think that Apple isn't doing enough to earn all the money I spend for them. It's kind of like their standard warranty; it's okay, but it's far from great.
I've purchased 44 tracks from iTMS. I have five macs, including 2 PowerMacs (dual 800 and a brand new dual 1.42), a PowerBook (1GHz 15" with SuperDrive), an iMac (15" 800MHz with SuperDrive) and an iBook (800MHz with combo). All of these computers spend most of their time in my house, with the only two ever leaving being the laptops.
I'm a loyal Apple customer, and I can tell you that the AAC restriction on "3 other" Macs (it's actually two other) really sucks. Do you have any idea what kind of an inconvenience it is to register and unregister computers as you see fit? So I have the iMac and one of the PowerMacs permanently registered, and I'm on the iBook but - hey - this song is registered on the PowerBook! So I have to pull it out, at which point I might as well just continue working there... it's absurdity. Apple considers a family license for their OS to be five users, so why not music?
I'm sorry, but I don't think I should be punished for buying more Macs.
If you burn to CD, it's great. But it sucks for guys like me that spend 95% of their music listening time in front of one of their computers.
The other restrictions, I don't care about. But this one really bugs me. You'd think they could at least enable playback for Rendezvous without registering the computer, but noooooooooooooooo. Which is convenient, because that's how I do most of my listening.
The service would be a total winner if it weren't for that. Yes, Apple has pissed in my Wheaties.