It wasn't Zelda fans that objected to the style of Wind Waker, it was the graphics snobs. The 2D Zelda games are very cartoonish. The animation style in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask was also rather cartoonish, but the N64 just wasn't powerful enough to draw cell shaded graphics.
Graphically, Twilight Princess is completely out of place compared to the rest of the series.
2) They rely primarily on first party games. The entire profit of a first party game goes to Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft rely mainly on 3rd party games, of which they get around $8 per sale (and less on budget games).
Nintendo being massively profitable means they make really good games that sell a lot.
Actually, the value of the yen went up. It was the US Dollar that dropped. They invest their profits in the country they are earned in, but report results in yen. Without the dollar bombing, they actually would've had a rather successful quarter.
This part is a bit messy. It costs them supposedly $763 per console in the US and Japan, and they're selling for $600. So they lose $163 per console in the US and Japan. In GBP, they're selling for $757, so they're only losing about $6 per console.
Keep in mind that European retail prices usually include the tax, whereas US prices don't.
While I do agree there aren't many people who will buy 30+ games, I would think that a large portion of those people are the people buying a PS3 now. $600 (or more on eBay) for a console is a lot easier to justify if you plan on buying a lot of games for it.
Why isn't anyone discussing how his years of experience both managing a bank account the size of a small country's GDP and running a huge corporation would be beneficial/detrimental to him being a President? Seems to me like everyone here is arguing emotion. For example, "I don't like him" isn't a useful tidbit of information.
Well, take an honest look at Microsoft. They have had three major moneymakers - DOS, Windows, and Office.
DOS was bought from another company in a rather sleazy business deal. Once DOS got established, they blocked out the competition through illegal business practices.
Windows only got anywhere because they tied it with DOS. Windows wasn't better than the competition until after the competition was all driven out of business.
Office's success is largely from tying it to Windows.
Everything else Microsoft does loses money.
Microsoft got really lucky with a great contract from IBM for DOS, then abused the hell out of it for 15 years or so until the government slapped them on the wrist and said to stop. Since then, they've just been riding on the huge cash pile and lack of competition.
The FCC didn't mandate HDTV. They mandated digital broadcasts. Digital does not imply HD.
The reason? Analog broadcast TV takes up a huge chunk of very desirable radio spectrum space. Digital broadcasts can transmit more data in a smaller frequency range.
That system sold roughly 700K in its first two weeks. Considering the fact that the Gamecube is considerably more popular than the N64 was (thus generating more brand loyalty), going up to 1M would not be an unexpected boost.
I wouldn't consider the GameCube more popular. It never had a really good run. The N64 and PS1 were pretty close in sales for the first half of the generation until developers got sick of cartridges and left in mass. From there PS1 sales really took off and the N64 dropped off. The GameCube had an ok start, picked up a little steam when Mario, Zelda, and Metroid came out, then just began a slow death.
The DOS / Windows 3.x days were when MS was at its worst. DOS and Windows each had much better alternatives, but the licensing from MS made it financial suicide to ship a PC with anything else. If a computer manufacturer wanted to ship 1 computer with DOS and/or Windows on it, it had to pay licensing fees for *every* computer they made. There was no negotiating over those terms, it was take it or leave it. That didn't change until the government got involved, at which point all the other players had already been wiped out (well, Apple was still alive, but barely).
The magnetic platter surface certainly doesn't care about the sector size, but controller chips that make it work certainly prefer working in powers of 2 instead of 10.
It's *much* easier for the software running on the CPU to handle arbitrary bases than it is for the disk controller to do it.
You might argue that sector payload is what "counts" - to that I say you are making up an arbitrary distinction. If that were an acceptable argument, then one could say the same thing about networks - that it is the packet payload that counts and not the raw packet itself. After all, with the earlier MFM and RLL drives, the entire sector contents were exposed to the disk controller card on the system just like the entire packet contents are exposed to the network interface cards on current systems (presuming you don't have a tcp offload engine or the like, that is).
Well, at least on hard disks, any data outside of the payload isn't accessible or standardized in any way. The drive takes read and write requests in units of 512 byte sectors. That's the only unit of any meaning.
I don't know much about DVDs, but I do know CDs have odd sized sectors as well. At least with CDs, it was possible to read the raw sectors off. You would at least have a case there for non power of two measurements. That said, the sector size is a consequence of the intended payload size, so it's not like the power of 2 number is an accident.
which filesystems read/write powers-of-ten block sizes.
Here you are correct. But the reason has nothing to do with the nature of disks, but rather with the binary nature of RAM and the data types used to keep track of the data on disk.
Nope, that's entirely due to the fact that the minimum addressable unit of a disk drive is a power of two. It wouldn't make sense to allocate data in, say, 500 byte chunks if you can only read and write it in 512 byte chunks.
Another example was determining when teams are mathematically eliminated from playoffs. It sounds like a simple problem, but it isn't since a team could lose a game yet remain in the running because a different team lost its own game.
Why is that hard? I was wondering how baseball magic numbers were calculated recently, and it only took me about 2 minutes to figure it out.
Magic Number = Games in Season - Wins by First Place team - Losses by 2nd place team + 1
As long as that is above zero, the 2nd place team can still pass the first place team. It doesn't necessarily have to be the 1st and 2nd place teams, just substitute in the teams you care about. Use the lowest ranked qualifying team, and anyone ranked lower than them for a more general case.
Another area ripe for development is Physics. Sure, you can skid cars now, and occasionally you can knock bottles over, but can you punch holes into walls?
I think the problem there has more to do with the implications of doing it. If you punch through a wall, you need to ensure something is on the other side to see. You also need to take into account things like being able to shoot the enemies in the next room through the holes. Those things potentially could make the level design much more complicated. Also, you have to increase your memory requirements for tracking these holes, because you know there will be people running around punching holes in the walls all over just because they can. People would probably be more likely to remember where they put a fist sized hole than where they put bullet holes, so you'd need to keep them around a long time.
Does your character tip back further based on the weight of the item they're carrying?
My friends would often joke about what Link would do with the giant swords and iron boots when he wasn't using them. The consensus was Link has a magical ass cavity he sticks things in, since he really doesn't have anywhere else to put things. I can't see the game being more fun if he had to drag that giant sword and other large/heavy objects around all the time.
Also, ever play Eternal Darkness? As your health went down, your character would limp around. It was kinda cool, but it also had the effect increasing the difficulty when you were having a hard time. The combat was pretty easy in the game, so you didn't run into that scenario too often.
Do we even have hair that gets close to sitting on people's shoulders, rather than hovering six inches above it?
Hair is actually really hard to do. Clothing too. They take a lot of processing power. Bodies have a very small number of joints. Fabric and hair are flexible anywhere, making it a lot harder to model. They're also the kind of thing you're not going to notice 99% of the time while you're playing.
I think they're in the process of changing this, but at least for now, aren't patents awarded to the first to invent, not the first to file? If you were to file for your own patent, wouldn't the agreement demonstrate that you invented it first? It's not quite the same as invalidating their patent.
i think the hardware guys are doing the best with what they've got. And what they've got is Microsoft's buggy code to work with.
I'm sure that's true to an extent. I remember downloading the the then current DirectX SDK 6 or 7 years ago and looking at the sample programs. I randomly picked a couple of them to try running and analyzing. Every one of them I tried failed to compile due to errors in the code. I ended up learning OpenGL instead because of that.
After all, it's up to the OS to decide if a bad driver can bring down the whole system.
Generally speaking, drivers for internal devices need to run in kernel mode. That gives them the ability to do just about anything. They're perfectly free to trample on the kernel, whether it be intentional (DRM schemes) or unintentional (bad pointer). There's just no way around that. There isn't much the OS can do to prevent a crash if the OS itself has been scribbled over by a bad pointer.
The summary says "The console has taken just ten months to sell 20 Million units", but it should be "20 months to sell 10 million units." The DS was released in Nov. 2004.
Sirius got sued a few months earlier. Sirius agreed to pay a per unit royalty, largely because they didn't expect to sell that many of the S50. The S50 needs to be docked to receive live broadcasts, whereas the XM2Go models don't. Also, XM has a few million more subscribers, so between the better technology and larger customer base, XM probably isn't as willing to settle.
An NVidia Quadro card isn't very different from a GeForce card. The biggest difference is the drivers are optimized for visual accuracy, whereas the GeForce drivers will take shortcuts to improve the frame rate.
If you go for something like a Wildcat card, the cards tend to focus on raw numbers of polygons more than on effects (although they've been improving in those aspects in recent years). A few years ago I worked in a department that did Computational Fluid Dynamics. The results came out as a mesh with lots of data points at each mesh point. We'd view the results in 3D by just adding shading to the models. The points would be given a color on a red to blue scale (think weather charts) with the graphics card interpolating the colors along the polygon surface. We compared a then high end Quadro card with a 2 year old Wildcat card. The Wildcat completely blew away the Quadro in performance.
Also of note, the graphics cards in the then 5 year old SGI workstations seemed to hold their own against the Quadro card. I don't remember which was faster, but they were close enough in performance that you didn't really notice a difference unless you were looking for it.
There is no reason for a GAMER to buy the $600 PS3 over the $500 model - you can play 1080p over a component connection, and a gamer does not need a media card reader for loding pictures from the beach trip!
Yes there is. Only the $600 version of the PS3 has WiFi. Most people don't have an Ethernet drop in their living room, so you're either going to have to run wires across the house or go for the more expensive PS3 if you want to play online.
It would've looked amazing for an N64 game, and ok if it was, say, a PS2 launch title, but it wasn't either. It was part of the second wave of GameCube titles, yet it didn't look as good as the GameCube launch titles.
Here's the gist of it. The game is entirely linear, with very simplistic and repetitive puzzles. The combat is very easy, and there are only a few different types of enemies that constantly show up over and over. However, presentation is excellent, the story is very good (it's basically H.P. Lovecraft stories with the names changed), and it's rather well polished.
If you like games for the story and presentation, Eternal Darkness is great. If the gameplay is what you care about, it's a horrible game.
There's also some fairly complex (in console terms) magic and combat systems.
The magic system is great, except it's way overpowered. Your magic meter recharges simply by moving around. Once you get the recover spell about 1/3 thru the game, there is no more challenge. You recover some health, walk in a circle a few times, and then you can cast it again.
As for the combat, it's interesting how it lets you target different body parts, however, there really isn't any reason to target anything other than the head. It's always fastest to kill an enemy by attacking the head.
Gameplay wise, the game is entirely linear, to the point that in the entire game, there are only about 3 or 4 rooms that branch off from the main path. Most of the puzzles come down to just matching colors - sometimes going for the same color, other times going for the opposing color.
Graphically, the game isn't very impressive, although it does get better towards the end. The FMV parts are mostly ok, although a little grainy.
Eternal Darkness is really overrated. I tried to like it, but it's a huge let down. The insanity effects were kinda cool, but you won't see many of them unless you make a strong effort to keep your sanity meter low the entire time. The story was decent, but it's just watered down H.P. Lovecraft stories, so it's not exactly original.
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It wasn't Zelda fans that objected to the style of Wind Waker, it was the graphics snobs. The 2D Zelda games are very cartoonish. The animation style in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask was also rather cartoonish, but the N64 just wasn't powerful enough to draw cell shaded graphics.
Graphically, Twilight Princess is completely out of place compared to the rest of the series.
Nintendo's profitability comes from two things:
1) They don't sell anything at a loss.
2) They rely primarily on first party games. The entire profit of a first party game goes to Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft rely mainly on 3rd party games, of which they get around $8 per sale (and less on budget games).
Nintendo being massively profitable means they make really good games that sell a lot.
Actually, the value of the yen went up. It was the US Dollar that dropped. They invest their profits in the country they are earned in, but report results in yen. Without the dollar bombing, they actually would've had a rather successful quarter.
This part is a bit messy. It costs them supposedly $763 per console in the US and Japan, and they're selling for $600. So they lose $163 per console in the US and Japan. In GBP, they're selling for $757, so they're only losing about $6 per console.
Keep in mind that European retail prices usually include the tax, whereas US prices don't.
While I do agree there aren't many people who will buy 30+ games, I would think that a large portion of those people are the people buying a PS3 now. $600 (or more on eBay) for a console is a lot easier to justify if you plan on buying a lot of games for it.
The Xbox systems easily have more good games than the Nintendo systems.
True only if your idea of a good game is one that revolves around shooting.
Why isn't anyone discussing how his years of experience both managing a bank account the size of a small country's GDP and running a huge corporation would be beneficial/detrimental to him being a President? Seems to me like everyone here is arguing emotion. For example, "I don't like him" isn't a useful tidbit of information.
Well, take an honest look at Microsoft. They have had three major moneymakers - DOS, Windows, and Office.
DOS was bought from another company in a rather sleazy business deal. Once DOS got established, they blocked out the competition through illegal business practices.
Windows only got anywhere because they tied it with DOS. Windows wasn't better than the competition until after the competition was all driven out of business.
Office's success is largely from tying it to Windows.
Everything else Microsoft does loses money.
Microsoft got really lucky with a great contract from IBM for DOS, then abused the hell out of it for 15 years or so until the government slapped them on the wrist and said to stop. Since then, they've just been riding on the huge cash pile and lack of competition.
Do you really want someone as intolerant of competition as Bill Gates in charge of in army?
The FCC didn't mandate HDTV. They mandated digital broadcasts. Digital does not imply HD.
The reason? Analog broadcast TV takes up a huge chunk of very desirable radio spectrum space. Digital broadcasts can transmit more data in a smaller frequency range.
That system sold roughly 700K in its first two weeks. Considering the fact that the Gamecube is considerably more popular than the N64 was (thus generating more brand loyalty), going up to 1M would not be an unexpected boost.
I wouldn't consider the GameCube more popular. It never had a really good run. The N64 and PS1 were pretty close in sales for the first half of the generation until developers got sick of cartridges and left in mass. From there PS1 sales really took off and the N64 dropped off. The GameCube had an ok start, picked up a little steam when Mario, Zelda, and Metroid came out, then just began a slow death.
The DOS / Windows 3.x days were when MS was at its worst. DOS and Windows each had much better alternatives, but the licensing from MS made it financial suicide to ship a PC with anything else. If a computer manufacturer wanted to ship 1 computer with DOS and/or Windows on it, it had to pay licensing fees for *every* computer they made. There was no negotiating over those terms, it was take it or leave it. That didn't change until the government got involved, at which point all the other players had already been wiped out (well, Apple was still alive, but barely).
The magnetic platter surface certainly doesn't care about the sector size, but controller chips that make it work certainly prefer working in powers of 2 instead of 10.
It's *much* easier for the software running on the CPU to handle arbitrary bases than it is for the disk controller to do it.
You might argue that sector payload is what "counts" - to that I say you are making up an arbitrary distinction. If that were an acceptable argument, then one could say the same thing about networks - that it is the packet payload that counts and not the raw packet itself. After all, with the earlier MFM and RLL drives, the entire sector contents were exposed to the disk controller card on the system just like the entire packet contents are exposed to the network interface cards on current systems (presuming you don't have a tcp offload engine or the like, that is).
Well, at least on hard disks, any data outside of the payload isn't accessible or standardized in any way. The drive takes read and write requests in units of 512 byte sectors. That's the only unit of any meaning.
I don't know much about DVDs, but I do know CDs have odd sized sectors as well. At least with CDs, it was possible to read the raw sectors off. You would at least have a case there for non power of two measurements. That said, the sector size is a consequence of the intended payload size, so it's not like the power of 2 number is an accident.
which filesystems read/write powers-of-ten block sizes.
Here you are correct. But the reason has nothing to do with the nature of disks, but rather with the binary nature of RAM and the data types used to keep track of the data on disk.
Nope, that's entirely due to the fact that the minimum addressable unit of a disk drive is a power of two. It wouldn't make sense to allocate data in, say, 500 byte chunks if you can only read and write it in 512 byte chunks.
Another example was determining when teams are mathematically eliminated from playoffs. It sounds like a simple problem, but it isn't since a team could lose a game yet remain in the running because a different team lost its own game.
Why is that hard? I was wondering how baseball magic numbers were calculated recently, and it only took me about 2 minutes to figure it out.
Magic Number = Games in Season - Wins by First Place team - Losses by 2nd place team + 1
As long as that is above zero, the 2nd place team can still pass the first place team. It doesn't necessarily have to be the 1st and 2nd place teams, just substitute in the teams you care about. Use the lowest ranked qualifying team, and anyone ranked lower than them for a more general case.
Another area ripe for development is Physics. Sure, you can skid cars now, and occasionally you can knock bottles over, but can you punch holes into walls?
I think the problem there has more to do with the implications of doing it. If you punch through a wall, you need to ensure something is on the other side to see. You also need to take into account things like being able to shoot the enemies in the next room through the holes. Those things potentially could make the level design much more complicated. Also, you have to increase your memory requirements for tracking these holes, because you know there will be people running around punching holes in the walls all over just because they can. People would probably be more likely to remember where they put a fist sized hole than where they put bullet holes, so you'd need to keep them around a long time.
Does your character tip back further based on the weight of the item they're carrying?
My friends would often joke about what Link would do with the giant swords and iron boots when he wasn't using them. The consensus was Link has a magical ass cavity he sticks things in, since he really doesn't have anywhere else to put things. I can't see the game being more fun if he had to drag that giant sword and other large/heavy objects around all the time.
Also, ever play Eternal Darkness? As your health went down, your character would limp around. It was kinda cool, but it also had the effect increasing the difficulty when you were having a hard time. The combat was pretty easy in the game, so you didn't run into that scenario too often.
Do we even have hair that gets close to sitting on people's shoulders, rather than hovering six inches above it?
Hair is actually really hard to do. Clothing too. They take a lot of processing power. Bodies have a very small number of joints. Fabric and hair are flexible anywhere, making it a lot harder to model. They're also the kind of thing you're not going to notice 99% of the time while you're playing.
I think they're in the process of changing this, but at least for now, aren't patents awarded to the first to invent, not the first to file? If you were to file for your own patent, wouldn't the agreement demonstrate that you invented it first? It's not quite the same as invalidating their patent.
i think the hardware guys are doing the best with what they've got. And what they've got is Microsoft's buggy code to work with.
I'm sure that's true to an extent. I remember downloading the the then current DirectX SDK 6 or 7 years ago and looking at the sample programs. I randomly picked a couple of them to try running and analyzing. Every one of them I tried failed to compile due to errors in the code. I ended up learning OpenGL instead because of that.
After all, it's up to the OS to decide if a bad driver can bring down the whole system.
Generally speaking, drivers for internal devices need to run in kernel mode. That gives them the ability to do just about anything. They're perfectly free to trample on the kernel, whether it be intentional (DRM schemes) or unintentional (bad pointer). There's just no way around that. There isn't much the OS can do to prevent a crash if the OS itself has been scribbled over by a bad pointer.
The summary says "The console has taken just ten months to sell 20 Million units", but it should be "20 months to sell 10 million units." The DS was released in Nov. 2004.
Sirius got sued a few months earlier. Sirius agreed to pay a per unit royalty, largely because they didn't expect to sell that many of the S50. The S50 needs to be docked to receive live broadcasts, whereas the XM2Go models don't. Also, XM has a few million more subscribers, so between the better technology and larger customer base, XM probably isn't as willing to settle.
An NVidia Quadro card isn't very different from a GeForce card. The biggest difference is the drivers are optimized for visual accuracy, whereas the GeForce drivers will take shortcuts to improve the frame rate.
If you go for something like a Wildcat card, the cards tend to focus on raw numbers of polygons more than on effects (although they've been improving in those aspects in recent years). A few years ago I worked in a department that did Computational Fluid Dynamics. The results came out as a mesh with lots of data points at each mesh point. We'd view the results in 3D by just adding shading to the models. The points would be given a color on a red to blue scale (think weather charts) with the graphics card interpolating the colors along the polygon surface. We compared a then high end Quadro card with a 2 year old Wildcat card. The Wildcat completely blew away the Quadro in performance.
Also of note, the graphics cards in the then 5 year old SGI workstations seemed to hold their own against the Quadro card. I don't remember which was faster, but they were close enough in performance that you didn't really notice a difference unless you were looking for it.
There is no reason for a GAMER to buy the $600 PS3 over the $500 model - you can play 1080p over a component connection, and a gamer does not need a media card reader for loding pictures from the beach trip!
Yes there is. Only the $600 version of the PS3 has WiFi. Most people don't have an Ethernet drop in their living room, so you're either going to have to run wires across the house or go for the more expensive PS3 if you want to play online.
Speaking of NP #1, I just ran into a link to a site that scanned the magazine into a PDF file.
d o-power-1-jul-aug-1988.html
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/2006/06/pdf-ninten
It would've looked amazing for an N64 game, and ok if it was, say, a PS2 launch title, but it wasn't either. It was part of the second wave of GameCube titles, yet it didn't look as good as the GameCube launch titles.
Here's the gist of it. The game is entirely linear, with very simplistic and repetitive puzzles. The combat is very easy, and there are only a few different types of enemies that constantly show up over and over. However, presentation is excellent, the story is very good (it's basically H.P. Lovecraft stories with the names changed), and it's rather well polished.
If you like games for the story and presentation, Eternal Darkness is great. If the gameplay is what you care about, it's a horrible game.
There's also some fairly complex (in console terms) magic and combat systems.
The magic system is great, except it's way overpowered. Your magic meter recharges simply by moving around. Once you get the recover spell about 1/3 thru the game, there is no more challenge. You recover some health, walk in a circle a few times, and then you can cast it again.
As for the combat, it's interesting how it lets you target different body parts, however, there really isn't any reason to target anything other than the head. It's always fastest to kill an enemy by attacking the head.
Gameplay wise, the game is entirely linear, to the point that in the entire game, there are only about 3 or 4 rooms that branch off from the main path. Most of the puzzles come down to just matching colors - sometimes going for the same color, other times going for the opposing color.
Graphically, the game isn't very impressive, although it does get better towards the end. The FMV parts are mostly ok, although a little grainy.
Eternal Darkness is really overrated. I tried to like it, but it's a huge let down. The insanity effects were kinda cool, but you won't see many of them unless you make a strong effort to keep your sanity meter low the entire time. The story was decent, but it's just watered down H.P. Lovecraft stories, so it's not exactly original.