I've used Usenet as my primary source for game reviews since I first discovered the thing back in college. Yeah, you still have the fanboys, the flamewars, spammers and trolls but once you filter those out you're left with opinions from folks who have actually played the game through to completion - something that most reviewers don't (can't) do.
How many times have you played a game where the first few levels are reall fun, then suddenly the thing gets so difficult you end up tossing the game into the closet - never to play it again? Most reviews will only be based off of a handful of hours or levels of a game - mainly because that's all the time the reviewers are going to have.
Oftentimes, it's a handful of posts that will convince me to buy - or not buy - a game. I bought Roller Coaster Tycoon solely based on a hilarious post by a player about his experience creating a roller coaster, only to have the cars fly off the tracks, soar the through, and explode when they hit the ground. Despite this, the ride passed the "test" phase, and was still very popular among his virtual danger-seeking patrons - many of whom ended up flying to a firey doom. He ended up creating a little garden next to the ride as a memorial to the dead riders.
One of the biggest problems I have with reviews is trying to figure out the underlying biases the reviwer already has. As mentioned by another poster, if you give a FPS fan Max Payne 2 for a review, you're going to get a review that's going to be biased towards a good rating, in general.
Likewise, if you gave someone who hates RPGs FFXI to review, it's going to get a horrible rating, unless it's a phenomenal game.
With friends, you already know them a lot better - and they also know you. So if you ask a friend about whether you'll like a game or not, you can be fairly sure that the answer they give you will be pretty accurate. It's not fool-proof, a friend of mine and I like RPGs a lot, but our opinions on FFVIII are very different. Still, it's a lot better than trying to look at the reviews in magazines or online websites to determine if the game is worth your money.
Well, most of the bad experiences I had at my school resulted from having the engineering placement center run by University bearuacrats who were interacting with companies' HR departments.
The result was buzz-word bingo to the extreme. "Looking for people to interact in an exciting environment dedicated to customer expectations" would be a typical description for a job wanting a BS/CS with a 3.0...
The other result was that you had to hammer your resume's content to fit with the format the placement center found "acceptable" - this meant putting my GPA and school first and not my work experience which ended up on the form's 3rd page. Grrr.
Because most companies were told by the placement center to *require* a 3.0 or higher, I often ended up getting calls by the placement center explaining they had to override their computer systems to schedule me at the companies' request.
See if they're still looking for people with 5+ years of C programming experience to do "application qualification" which translates into "Find out if MS Office works under MS Windows NT, write a report about it, and only get paid $25k/year - but you do get benefits...after 6 months!" This was being offered to undergrads with a EE/CE/CS degree.
This, not the "stick the intern in the wall" job, was what got them booted from campus for terminal stupidity/cluelessness.
Kind of hard not to get booted after telling the placement center of a nationally acclaimed university that their students weren't worth interviewing due to lack of skills... It also didn't help with said students giving the company an unamious negative view of their campus visit.
Except that Thousand Arms wasn't a very good game.
The only point to dating or giving gifts to the girls was so you could raise their "heart level" (how much they like you) so you could forge a more powerful sword that combined the girl's ability with yours. For example, if you use a certain girl to forge a sword when her heart level was at 3, you'd gain the ability to cast "heal".
An interesting concept, but the spells you gained just weren't worth the hassle.
In addition, the whole dating session was a series of multiple choice questions in which you had to choose the right answer for the girl you were dating - even if it went against what your character was really like. Yes, the game rewarded you for lying to women so you could "take them to the forge" (your character was supposed to be a novice blacksmith. Freud would have had a field day.)
If that's what the dating sim genre is really like, Japanese gamers can keep it.
I remember looking for intern/co-op positions through my school's placement center.
One year, a major computer hardware company came to campus looking ONLY for Ph.D students willing to do 3 month intern positions at minimum wage. Uh.... Turns out their HR department was a bit overzealous.
Another firm was an IT contracting company. They came to campus looking for new grads with a bachelors in computer science or engineering, and 5 years IT experience... After the representative told the several people that they were wasting his time because they didn't have enough experience, he was escorted off campus and told never to return.
I also recall a major financial institution wanted to hire CS students with 3 years of programming experience for the summer to - and I'm not making this up - *STAND INSIDE THE WALLS TO MAKE SURE THE NETWORK CABLES DIDN"T COME LOOSE OR BREAK*. The job was located in New York City, paid $5/hr, no assisted living, and you were *required* to live within 10 miles of the office. Oh yes, and you were also required to wear a suit at all times (though I have no idea how you were supposed to keep it clean standing inside crawlspaces all day long...)
This company, too, was kicked off campus and told never to return.
Yeah, I saw a posting like that back in '94 when I was looking for a summer job in college.
One listing wanted a Ph.D in CS, EE or CE, 10 years of Java programming, and a handful of other PC-related packages. Pay was $6/hr (less than what I was making at the University as an entry level sys-admin)
The actual job was nothing more than data-entry on an old 386 for some guy's personal project.
Seems to me that if you simply print the online FAQ, and staple it together, you've got a document that provides you with the portability you describe, while still costing less than the fluff-filled $20 guides you see in stores.
Considering the cost of paper/ink, and the average length of a FAQ you're still below the $2 range - especially if you print duplex, and only those areas/chapters you need.
Granted, it won't be in color, and the maps (if any) won't look as nice, but does that really matter? If the author of the FAQ is a halfway decent writer, it shouldn't be too hard to find your way around.
I thought many guides were already written by the game's developers or staff?
The guides most definitely are being produced with cooperation of the game companies, since they tend to hit the shelves weeks, if not months, before the game itself is available. Personally, I think this is a horrible practice. The guides should be based on the product that's on the shelf, not some late beta version... I'm sure many remember the infamous "Outpost" whose guide described features that didn't even exist in the game!
As it stands now, most guides are just reformatted versions of the game's manual, and/or in-game database.
Seriously, though, guides have been worth buying ever since the game publishers/authors themselves got involved with the production of the guides.
Back in the day, you'd get a bunch of basic information in the guide, regarding things like stats for the units and things like that. Nowadays, you *have* to buy the guide, which is really just a glorified version of what the manual was supposed to be in the first place.
Guides shouldn't be required to play the game, but should instead reveal secrets, easter eggs, and discuss the various formulas used by the game. This would include a rough description of how the AI works, for instance. Most players of the game won't care about these details, just as most guides really shouldn't be marketted to everyone.
Then there's the practice of publishing the guide weeks, or months, before the game goes gold. Yeah, I'm sure I'm getting accurate information from a guide that was based off of beta version #4...
About the only area that game guides could excell at would be as art books. But even in this realm, they tend to fall short compared to the game-based artbooks you see published in Japan.
Meanwhile, FAQs just give you the facts with none of the pretentiousness and uselessness the guides have. Yeah, they're not as pretty, but they contain much more information than 99.9% of any guide out there.
Finally while it's true that you may have problems finding FAQs for less popular games, there's also the GameFaqs forums, usenet, or other message boards where you can find some help with the game. So far, I've only had this problem twice - once for a game that was very very new, and one was pretty obscure. In either case, there was no game guide published, but the boards helped a little.
Even then, VMWare + OS is cheaper than getting a second PC (or a 3rd, 4th, 5th...)
At my company, we simply bought the MSDN, made images of the major OS's we need to support, and put them onto a server where you could download them as needed.
Otherwise, I'd need at least a painstakingly partitioned multi-boot system to access the 5 or 6 OS's I'm supposed to be testing. It's much easier to just have a directory of VMWare images...
What I don't understand is this statement of theirs:
"About 85% of the people we send notices to go away and we never see them again."
Towards the end of the article, there's another quote from the company saying they're just a detective agency and openly admit they have NO LEGAL AUTHORITY.
Now, at best they could turn their findings over to their record company clients who then have their lawyers send out cease&desist letters, but that's not what is said above.
I know the article was published about the UK, so laws are different there but isn't sending someone an accusation a bit like libel or slander?
The phantom is just that - a phantom. A piece of vaporware that'll never materialize. In fact, they've already missed several major trade shows where they claimed they'd be unveiling more information.
Furthermore, the Phantom's claims are just ludicrious. It was clear from their marketting drivel that they're talking about distributing old PC and/or emulated games (ie. MAME.) Sounds like a good idea, until you stop to think about the copyright issues... Many of those companies don't exist anymore, yet something is still holding the copyright. Unless Phantom's workforce is 80% lawyers, I don't see how they can legally charge for these games.
DISCover seems like another boondoggle. Why would anyone want to play PC games on a TV screen? Most PC games want at least 800x600 - which is over 2x what your standard TV screen is capable of. Sure, if you've got a HDTV you can get better resolutions, but even then, I have to wonder just how good even 2 year old games will look on such a setup...
Sorry, but the "lots of different hardware combinations' excuse just doesn't hold much water anymore.
Sure, I've come across games within the past few years that had actual hardware related issues (one game's installer would freak out if it detected an AMD CPU for some reason) but most of the bugs I see in games are due to poor design and testing.
The fact that an item disappears from your inventory has nothing to do with what video card or driver version you're running, for instance.
That doesn't sound like a "patch", it sounds like a "re-release."
So tell me, then, how do you find out about these "patches"? Calling the developer? Mailing your disc back to them so they can send you a replacement?
Again, that doesn't sound like a patch, nor do I think that 99% of the owners are going to know about it. After all, who bothers filling out those registration cards anyways?
And what does the company do about all the defective copies in warehouses and on store shelves?
Do not underestimate brand recognition, cross-marketting and other strategies that have nothing to do with the actual product being sold.
Lots of people know about Tomb Raider and The Matrix from the movies, and so will buy the game.
Also, I've only seen Ikaruga in one store near me - it's not even in all the other stores in that chain either. Hardcore shooters haven't been doing well in the gaming market since...well, the SNES really. Casual and non-gamers aren't likely to buy these sorts of titles - especially for full price.
As for Zelda, I've heard it called a kiddie game, due to the graphical style. I know it's not neccessarily a kiddie game, but you have to admit it DOES look a bit juvenile.
Having lots of casual and non-gamers in the market is a good thing though, since their numbers encourage the companies to release stuff like Ikaruga in the first place.
MTV is to music (and music videos) what SFC hopes to become for sci-fi.
They're doing a good job of it right now, with such shows like "Scare Tactics" (which is facing a lawsuit), "Crossing Over" and "Dream Team".
"Children Of Dune" was OK (though I still hated the costumes!) but I fear that will be the last production worthy of a science-fiction channel that SFC will ever do... Since then, what have they given us? Garbage, garbage, garbage.
It's not as easy as you might think - especially if your audience is made up of people whose most complicated board game, until now, was Monopoloy, which they last played at age 10.
I did the same thing. I don't even remember their real names... Named the thief "Blick", and the mysterious green-haired girl "Lum". Don't remember what I named the others...
My roommate was playing FFVI again recentally, and I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from saying "It's Blick!";)
What in the world does any of that have to do with the fact that the commercials exist for 2 reasons: 1: To get you to buy stuff. 2: Brand recognition.
While they can accomplish #2 easily, 99.99% of all commercials I see utterly fail to accomplish #1.
You could show me a billion award winning golfball commercials, and while I might remember each and every second of each and every ad, I guarantee that I'm not going to go out and buy golfballs because I don't golf.
Even if it is a product that I would consider buying, most ads are so awful they turn my stomach. An example of this is the horrid-beyond-words ad campaign for the DVD release of Star Wars Episode 2, which featured the tagline "Yoda man" while showing Yoda fighting with his light saber.
Meanwhile, the other ads, of which I have no interest in, continue run again and again and again. What was cute, amusing or at least tolerable the first time you saw it quickly becomes tired, boring, and repulsive. I don't think companies would want "repulsive" associated with them or their product...
You've apparentally never tried Tivo or other DVR product...
Skipping/fast forwarding through ads means a one hour show now only takes 40 minutes.
Recording the show means you don't have to rush home to watch your favorite show that's on day X at time Y. Who cares? It'll be there when YOU - not the networks - want to watch it.
In short, you only see what you want to see, when you want to see it.
Like the original poster, I will watch an occasional ad - not the whole set. Even then, after I've seen the ad once or twice (max) I'll just skip it like all the other ads I already skip over.
Most of the time, I blow through a show without watching a single commercial. If anything, advertisers are going to need to get a lot more creative with their ads if they want people to bother watching them.
I don't think Replay is dead, but their new owners have announced that future versions of ReplayTV will have the commercial auto-skip feature removed, as well as the ability to upload a program to another ReplayTV unit over the network.
IMHO, ReplayTV just lobotimized themselves. Those were the only features that made them competitive with Tivo.
Do yourself a favor, buy a Tivo, opt-out of the collection stuff if you want, and be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
As SCO has shown us, when you can't make money by producing useful products, you can always make money by suing people.
The article that Inifium is annoyed at is over a year old now. Wasn't Infium's Phantom supposed to have already hit the market by now?
If anything, HardOCP's article should act as a warning to investors that infinium is just a scam.
Does that also include usenet?
I've used Usenet as my primary source for game reviews since I first discovered the thing back in college. Yeah, you still have the fanboys, the flamewars, spammers and trolls but once you filter those out you're left with opinions from folks who have actually played the game through to completion - something that most reviewers don't (can't) do.
How many times have you played a game where the first few levels are reall fun, then suddenly the thing gets so difficult you end up tossing the game into the closet - never to play it again? Most reviews will only be based off of a handful of hours or levels of a game - mainly because that's all the time the reviewers are going to have.
Oftentimes, it's a handful of posts that will convince me to buy - or not buy - a game. I bought Roller Coaster Tycoon solely based on a hilarious post by a player about his experience creating a roller coaster, only to have the cars fly off the tracks, soar the through, and explode when they hit the ground. Despite this, the ride passed the "test" phase, and was still very popular among his virtual danger-seeking patrons - many of whom ended up flying to a firey doom. He ended up creating a little garden next to the ride as a memorial to the dead riders.
One of the biggest problems I have with reviews is trying to figure out the underlying biases the reviwer already has. As mentioned by another poster, if you give a FPS fan Max Payne 2 for a review, you're going to get a review that's going to be biased towards a good rating, in general.
Likewise, if you gave someone who hates RPGs FFXI to review, it's going to get a horrible rating, unless it's a phenomenal game.
With friends, you already know them a lot better - and they also know you. So if you ask a friend about whether you'll like a game or not, you can be fairly sure that the answer they give you will be pretty accurate. It's not fool-proof, a friend of mine and I like RPGs a lot, but our opinions on FFVIII are very different. Still, it's a lot better than trying to look at the reviews in magazines or online websites to determine if the game is worth your money.
Well, most of the bad experiences I had at my school resulted from having the engineering placement center run by University bearuacrats who were interacting with companies' HR departments.
The result was buzz-word bingo to the extreme. "Looking for people to interact in an exciting environment dedicated to customer expectations" would be a typical description for a job wanting a BS/CS with a 3.0...
The other result was that you had to hammer your resume's content to fit with the format the placement center found "acceptable" - this meant putting my GPA and school first and not my work experience which ended up on the form's 3rd page. Grrr.
Because most companies were told by the placement center to *require* a 3.0 or higher, I often ended up getting calls by the placement center explaining they had to override their computer systems to schedule me at the companies' request.
See if they're still looking for people with 5+ years of C programming experience to do "application qualification" which translates into "Find out if MS Office works under MS Windows NT, write a report about it, and only get paid $25k/year - but you do get benefits...after 6 months!" This was being offered to undergrads with a EE/CE/CS degree.
This, not the "stick the intern in the wall" job, was what got them booted from campus for terminal stupidity/cluelessness.
Kind of hard not to get booted after telling the placement center of a nationally acclaimed university that their students weren't worth interviewing due to lack of skills... It also didn't help with said students giving the company an unamious negative view of their campus visit.
Except that Thousand Arms wasn't a very good game.
The only point to dating or giving gifts to the girls was so you could raise their "heart level" (how much they like you) so you could forge a more powerful sword that combined the girl's ability with yours. For example, if you use a certain girl to forge a sword when her heart level was at 3, you'd gain the ability to cast "heal".
An interesting concept, but the spells you gained just weren't worth the hassle.
In addition, the whole dating session was a series of multiple choice questions in which you had to choose the right answer for the girl you were dating - even if it went against what your character was really like. Yes, the game rewarded you for lying to women so you could "take them to the forge" (your character was supposed to be a novice blacksmith. Freud would have had a field day.)
If that's what the dating sim genre is really like, Japanese gamers can keep it.
I remember looking for intern/co-op positions through my school's placement center.
One year, a major computer hardware company came to campus looking ONLY for Ph.D students willing to do 3 month intern positions at minimum wage. Uh.... Turns out their HR department was a bit overzealous.
Another firm was an IT contracting company. They came to campus looking for new grads with a bachelors in computer science or engineering, and 5 years IT experience... After the representative told the several people that they were wasting his time because they didn't have enough experience, he was escorted off campus and told never to return.
I also recall a major financial institution wanted to hire CS students with 3 years of programming experience for the summer to - and I'm not making this up - *STAND INSIDE THE WALLS TO MAKE SURE THE NETWORK CABLES DIDN"T COME LOOSE OR BREAK*. The job was located in New York City, paid $5/hr, no assisted living, and you were *required* to live within 10 miles of the office. Oh yes, and you were also required to wear a suit at all times (though I have no idea how you were supposed to keep it clean standing inside crawlspaces all day long...)
This company, too, was kicked off campus and told never to return.
Yeah, I saw a posting like that back in '94 when I was looking for a summer job in college.
One listing wanted a Ph.D in CS, EE or CE, 10 years of Java programming, and a handful of other PC-related packages. Pay was $6/hr (less than what I was making at the University as an entry level sys-admin)
The actual job was nothing more than data-entry on an old 386 for some guy's personal project.
Depends on the contract, if any, between the two.
Seems to me that if you simply print the online FAQ, and staple it together, you've got a document that provides you with the portability you describe, while still costing less than the fluff-filled $20 guides you see in stores.
Considering the cost of paper/ink, and the average length of a FAQ you're still below the $2 range - especially if you print duplex, and only those areas/chapters you need.
Granted, it won't be in color, and the maps (if any) won't look as nice, but does that really matter? If the author of the FAQ is a halfway decent writer, it shouldn't be too hard to find your way around.
I thought many guides were already written by the game's developers or staff?
The guides most definitely are being produced with cooperation of the game companies, since they tend to hit the shelves weeks, if not months, before the game itself is available. Personally, I think this is a horrible practice. The guides should be based on the product that's on the shelf, not some late beta version... I'm sure many remember the infamous "Outpost" whose guide described features that didn't even exist in the game!
As it stands now, most guides are just reformatted versions of the game's manual, and/or in-game database.
Guides have more information than FAQs??
I wish! That'd make them worth buying!
Seriously, though, guides have been worth buying ever since the game publishers/authors themselves got involved with the production of the guides.
Back in the day, you'd get a bunch of basic information in the guide, regarding things like stats for the units and things like that. Nowadays, you *have* to buy the guide, which is really just a glorified version of what the manual was supposed to be in the first place.
Guides shouldn't be required to play the game, but should instead reveal secrets, easter eggs, and discuss the various formulas used by the game. This would include a rough description of how the AI works, for instance. Most players of the game won't care about these details, just as most guides really shouldn't be marketted to everyone.
Then there's the practice of publishing the guide weeks, or months, before the game goes gold. Yeah, I'm sure I'm getting accurate information from a guide that was based off of beta version #4...
About the only area that game guides could excell at would be as art books. But even in this realm, they tend to fall short compared to the game-based artbooks you see published in Japan.
Meanwhile, FAQs just give you the facts with none of the pretentiousness and uselessness the guides have. Yeah, they're not as pretty, but they contain much more information than 99.9% of any guide out there.
Finally while it's true that you may have problems finding FAQs for less popular games, there's also the GameFaqs forums, usenet, or other message boards where you can find some help with the game. So far, I've only had this problem twice - once for a game that was very very new, and one was pretty obscure. In either case, there was no game guide published, but the boards helped a little.
VMWare sells site liscenses.
Even then, VMWare + OS is cheaper than getting a second PC (or a 3rd, 4th, 5th...)
At my company, we simply bought the MSDN, made images of the major OS's we need to support, and put them onto a server where you could download them as needed.
Otherwise, I'd need at least a painstakingly partitioned multi-boot system to access the 5 or 6 OS's I'm supposed to be testing. It's much easier to just have a directory of VMWare images...
What I don't understand is this statement of theirs:
"About 85% of the people we send notices to go away and we never see them again."
Towards the end of the article, there's another quote from the company saying they're just a detective agency and openly admit they have NO LEGAL AUTHORITY.
Now, at best they could turn their findings over to their record company clients who then have their lawyers send out cease&desist letters, but that's not what is said above.
I know the article was published about the UK, so laws are different there but isn't sending someone an accusation a bit like libel or slander?
The phantom is just that - a phantom. A piece of vaporware that'll never materialize. In fact, they've already missed several major trade shows where they claimed they'd be unveiling more information.
Furthermore, the Phantom's claims are just ludicrious. It was clear from their marketting drivel that they're talking about distributing old PC and/or emulated games (ie. MAME.) Sounds like a good idea, until you stop to think about the copyright issues... Many of those companies don't exist anymore, yet something is still holding the copyright. Unless Phantom's workforce is 80% lawyers, I don't see how they can legally charge for these games.
DISCover seems like another boondoggle. Why would anyone want to play PC games on a TV screen? Most PC games want at least 800x600 - which is over 2x what your standard TV screen is capable of. Sure, if you've got a HDTV you can get better resolutions, but even then, I have to wonder just how good even 2 year old games will look on such a setup...
Sorry, but the "lots of different hardware combinations' excuse just doesn't hold much water anymore.
Sure, I've come across games within the past few years that had actual hardware related issues (one game's installer would freak out if it detected an AMD CPU for some reason) but most of the bugs I see in games are due to poor design and testing.
The fact that an item disappears from your inventory has nothing to do with what video card or driver version you're running, for instance.
That doesn't sound like a "patch", it sounds like a "re-release."
So tell me, then, how do you find out about these "patches"? Calling the developer? Mailing your disc back to them so they can send you a replacement?
Again, that doesn't sound like a patch, nor do I think that 99% of the owners are going to know about it. After all, who bothers filling out those registration cards anyways?
And what does the company do about all the defective copies in warehouses and on store shelves?
Do not underestimate brand recognition, cross-marketting and other strategies that have nothing to do with the actual product being sold.
Lots of people know about Tomb Raider and The Matrix from the movies, and so will buy the game.
Also, I've only seen Ikaruga in one store near me - it's not even in all the other stores in that chain either. Hardcore shooters haven't been doing well in the gaming market since...well, the SNES really. Casual and non-gamers aren't likely to buy these sorts of titles - especially for full price.
As for Zelda, I've heard it called a kiddie game, due to the graphical style. I know it's not neccessarily a kiddie game, but you have to admit it DOES look a bit juvenile.
Having lots of casual and non-gamers in the market is a good thing though, since their numbers encourage the companies to release stuff like Ikaruga in the first place.
SFC doesn't hate sci-fi.
They're just following MTV's recipe.
MTV is to music (and music videos) what SFC hopes to become for sci-fi.
They're doing a good job of it right now, with such shows like "Scare Tactics" (which is facing a lawsuit), "Crossing Over" and "Dream Team".
"Children Of Dune" was OK (though I still hated the costumes!) but I fear that will be the last production worthy of a science-fiction channel that SFC will ever do... Since then, what have they given us? Garbage, garbage, garbage.
It's not as easy as you might think - especially if your audience is made up of people whose most complicated board game, until now, was Monopoloy, which they last played at age 10.
I did the same thing. I don't even remember their real names... Named the thief "Blick", and the mysterious green-haired girl "Lum". Don't remember what I named the others...
;)
My roommate was playing FFVI again recentally, and I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from saying "It's Blick!"
What in the world does any of that have to do with the fact that the commercials exist for 2 reasons: 1: To get you to buy stuff. 2: Brand recognition.
While they can accomplish #2 easily, 99.99% of all commercials I see utterly fail to accomplish #1.
You could show me a billion award winning golfball commercials, and while I might remember each and every second of each and every ad, I guarantee that I'm not going to go out and buy golfballs because I don't golf.
Even if it is a product that I would consider buying, most ads are so awful they turn my stomach. An example of this is the horrid-beyond-words ad campaign for the DVD release of Star Wars Episode 2, which featured the tagline "Yoda man" while showing Yoda fighting with his light saber.
Meanwhile, the other ads, of which I have no interest in, continue run again and again and again. What was cute, amusing or at least tolerable the first time you saw it quickly becomes tired, boring, and repulsive. I don't think companies would want "repulsive" associated with them or their product...
You've apparentally never tried Tivo or other DVR product...
Skipping/fast forwarding through ads means a one hour show now only takes 40 minutes.
Recording the show means you don't have to rush home to watch your favorite show that's on day X at time Y. Who cares? It'll be there when YOU - not the networks - want to watch it.
In short, you only see what you want to see, when you want to see it.
That's NOT what he said...
Like the original poster, I will watch an occasional ad - not the whole set. Even then, after I've seen the ad once or twice (max) I'll just skip it like all the other ads I already skip over.
Most of the time, I blow through a show without watching a single commercial. If anything, advertisers are going to need to get a lot more creative with their ads if they want people to bother watching them.
I don't think Replay is dead, but their new owners have announced that future versions of ReplayTV will have the commercial auto-skip feature removed, as well as the ability to upload a program to another ReplayTV unit over the network.
IMHO, ReplayTV just lobotimized themselves. Those were the only features that made them competitive with Tivo.
Do yourself a favor, buy a Tivo, opt-out of the collection stuff if you want, and be happy.