The per-pixel control doesn't fit that well into Zelda (as part of the game, it's mainly only used for ranged attacks, such as with Zelda's bow). But it's also used quite a bit as a mouse would be in a computer game, letting the user pick things from a UI interface, selecting enemies to focus on, etc. I might have thought that computer UI semantics might not be more complex than consoles (and Nintendo in particular) might go for, but if mouse-like control is the right way to go, then Nintendo's controller will be used quite a bit in a broad range of games.
The presentation also showed that almost every sports game will make big use of the controller.... from Madden to tennis to running (which the Wii sees as the controller being shaken up and down as you make a jogging motion) to driving (as a simulated wheel that should have more resolution than a 1/4" stick can have) to obviously sword fighting.
Also, the Wii controller will have a rumble feature, but the PS3 controller won't? Is that right?
As the GP mentioned, CVT transmissions (and other parts of the drivetrain) typically have other efficiency losses. (as a quick example... the reason that manual transmissions get higher MPG than automatics is that the torque converter in an auto has high efficiency losses)
I would assume most porn DVD's are purchased over the internet, so you don't have to have a human review your purchase of "Extreme Aholes" (or you don't have to see their face when they review it).
There's millions of people over the pond who think Japanese desserts are sweet, and who think American desserts are unpleasantly too sweet.
Sweetness is something that's relative, really, and one does get used to diet sodas. I personally think that diet Coke tastes great, and that Japanese desserts are an abomination that aren't sweet in the slightest, but that's just me.
Yup. It kind of sucks because the name is a homophone of very common words, but humans have long figured out what speech means based on sentence context (eg. I / eye / aye, you / ewe), and I'm sure we'll continue to be able to do so. (still, most of the gaming press seems to think the name is a distinct marketing mistake, but it's not the end of the world).
The gaming press is under an NDA that will be lifted at E3. A lot of the gaming press has already played the Wii, they just can't talk about it until E3 (or talk about it that much... a couple of the game press podcasts have been slipping some bits of info out).
To whoever modded the post as troll, I probably shouldn't have used the word "fanboy". I'm most distinctly not a fanboy, and try to avoid anything that remotely sounds like moronic fanboy-speak. However, I think it's dishonest (and maybe even simple-minded) to pass off a large company as being uniformly non-innovative.
I'm not sure how you can possibly say the 360 Live isn't an obvious step forward. 1) it has centralized messaging, so you can see and message your friends, no matter what game they're in (compared to the original Live, and other consoles, where you could only see them if they were playing the same game as you), 2) you can see the progress your friends have made in games, which tends to make games a little more competitive, even if single player (and also gives encouragement to players to buy the xbox 360 version of non-exclusive games, just so they can increase their total game score), 3) you can download smaller games, which means that a broader range of game developers, and a broader range of players can enjoy the console (not every developer has enough money to devote a large team for years to develop a game, and not every person wants to try to spend 40 hours to finish a normal game)
MS didn't innovate with XBox 360? I don't mean to sound like a fanboy, but it's obvious that MS put a lot of work into figuring out what an online centralized service should be. And it was so obvious to Sony that MS got most of it right, that they made an exact copy of it for PS3.
Also, I don't use Windows Media Center, but it sounds like a sizable portion of the trade press considers Media Center to be definitely better than most commercial alternatives (eg. frontrow at the least).
(for what it's worth, I loathe every minute I'm forced to develop webapps for MSIE, and I dislike that I'm forced to use Windows+Outlook at work... but I think that MS is being innovative in a few small areas... that is, it's obviously a large company, and even if most of the company is going down in flames, some departments are going to be successful from time to time)
Yes, the previous generation of consoles had multiplayer online games. No, that's not the important part.
What's important is the centralized service that provides instant messaging, indication to friends of progress made through games, and downloadable content (on the xbox 360, there's a decent amount that's not crap, and is free or isn't overpriced). It shouldn't need to be said, but Sony is almost exactly copying the XBox 360's centralized online service. This sort of service is obviously really useful to end-users, and will be a part of all future consoles. Period, end of story.
Console makers shouldn't (and usually won't) spend time/money to develop silly features that nobody actually uses.
Having a single friends list and associated messaging interface is important. Having worldwide scoreboards gets pros hooked. Being able to compare progress through games with your local friends gets more people hooked. Being able to download smaller games brings a wider range of game developers to the table, and attracts a wider range of players.
It doesn't just appear to be important, it really actually is.
And since supply (for a given recording) doesn't matter, you just look at the demand vs price curve to find the optimum price. If you raise the price 2x, and demand only drops 40%, then it's more profitable to raise prices.
I didn't really mean the comment to sound very negative (unrealistic bodies are indeed a marvelous thing), it's just that fantasy women and strong plots don't usually coincide in movies. It may very well be a good movie, I don't know, I was just saying that one shouldn't set one's expectations too high when it comes to plot.
Dead or Alive's sole purpose seems to be to outdo Lara Croft for the most inaccurate representations of women in games. Did you really expect the movie version of that to have a whole lot of substance?
Come on now, browser-lite was always a niche market, and it's only getting more niche. Mozilla never tried to be the snappiest. Opera was pretty good, but lately, it's started packing on many more features too.
More and more people are spending more of their time online, learning more of their information from the web. Information propagation online is also getting more complicated (eg. del.icio.us, digg, wikipedia, rss blogs, podcasts,....), and the tools that people use to access those also need to accomodate the greater amount of time they spend with them.
There are still browser-lite projects out there, but Mozilla/Firefox should not be one of them, it should continue to be a mainstream project.
It can still be about ego... if I could get thousands of people to remember my name and discuss what I tell them I think is important, that would definitely give me a bit of an ego boost.
(eg. bloggers spend a lot of personal time writing, with the sole purpose of becoming popular (at least in the beginning, it's more about popularity than it is ad revenue))
And, for the subject of user-created quality, I recommend listening to this week's This Week in Tech podcast, where Kevin Rose talks about some of the inards of Digg, and how they have to do a lot of ongoing work to avoid letting Digg becoming a vehicle for spam, and that they implement an internal system of Karma. There are multiple parallels to both Slashdot's karma system, and Wikipedia's work that is done to prevent wikipedia from being used to promote spam, etc.
(which is relevant, because once you have other people deciding what is quality and what isn't, the spammers want to jump in, pretend to be anonymous, and say Hey! my adverts are quality stuff everyone should look at!)
It's starting to become a cliche for Dvorak or Cringely to postulate on possible future moves by Apple or Google, and the crazier their suggestions, the more internet posters get riled up, and the more traffic gets driven to their site. Do they really have to pander to the lowest among internet posters?
Since I was looking for knowledge and not a debate, does anyone have any substantive information? Are marketshare figures often something of an inconsistent guess that wouldn't be very useful if graphed (particularly because they tend to be skewed by self-interested parties)? Or are they consistent enough (like the market price of a barrel of oil) that it would be informative if graphed?
Isn't marketshare one of those semi-subjective terms? It requires someone to 1) clearly define what the specific market is (server chips? desktop? mobile? is there a bright red line you can draw between them?), 2) to accurately estimate the total size of the market, and finally, 3) get the company to accurately report their sales figures in that market.
This just in... Nerf has released a new product that lets you stealthily sneak into an enemy base on the other side of the world using realistic graphics and textures, lets you play with friends and strangers at any time of the night over the network, lets you play "hot coffee" with decent-looking graphics, and lets you play engrosing concept games like Katamari Damacy, and is so engrosing that some people sit there and do the same action over and over just to slightly increase numbers labeled STR and INT.
In the long run, it's simply not going to work for companies to try to prevent parallel imports of digital media over the internet. That's the real issue discussed in this article, and piracy has little/nothing to do with that.
Did the FPS genre materialize as soon as the mouse was invented? No. Might it take game makers a little while to experiment with a wide range of games, before narrowing down on a few specific types, the games that are the most engaging when using the controller?
It makes it a PITA to tab deep into a directory though, because the sequential tab completion means it can't add the final "\" onto the directory name, and then tab complete into the subdirectory without first typing a "\".
Slashdot Mirror
The presentation also showed that almost every sports game will make big use of the controller.... from Madden to tennis to running (which the Wii sees as the controller being shaken up and down as you make a jogging motion) to driving (as a simulated wheel that should have more resolution than a 1/4" stick can have) to obviously sword fighting.
Also, the Wii controller will have a rumble feature, but the PS3 controller won't? Is that right?
As the GP mentioned, CVT transmissions (and other parts of the drivetrain) typically have other efficiency losses. (as a quick example... the reason that manual transmissions get higher MPG than automatics is that the torque converter in an auto has high efficiency losses)
I would assume most porn DVD's are purchased over the internet, so you don't have to have a human review your purchase of "Extreme Aholes" (or you don't have to see their face when they review it).
Sweetness is something that's relative, really, and one does get used to diet sodas. I personally think that diet Coke tastes great, and that Japanese desserts are an abomination that aren't sweet in the slightest, but that's just me.
Yup. It kind of sucks because the name is a homophone of very common words, but humans have long figured out what speech means based on sentence context (eg. I / eye / aye, you / ewe), and I'm sure we'll continue to be able to do so. (still, most of the gaming press seems to think the name is a distinct marketing mistake, but it's not the end of the world).
The gaming press is under an NDA that will be lifted at E3. A lot of the gaming press has already played the Wii, they just can't talk about it until E3 (or talk about it that much... a couple of the game press podcasts have been slipping some bits of info out).
To whoever modded the post as troll, I probably shouldn't have used the word "fanboy". I'm most distinctly not a fanboy, and try to avoid anything that remotely sounds like moronic fanboy-speak. However, I think it's dishonest (and maybe even simple-minded) to pass off a large company as being uniformly non-innovative.
I'm not sure how you can possibly say the 360 Live isn't an obvious step forward. 1) it has centralized messaging, so you can see and message your friends, no matter what game they're in (compared to the original Live, and other consoles, where you could only see them if they were playing the same game as you), 2) you can see the progress your friends have made in games, which tends to make games a little more competitive, even if single player (and also gives encouragement to players to buy the xbox 360 version of non-exclusive games, just so they can increase their total game score), 3) you can download smaller games, which means that a broader range of game developers, and a broader range of players can enjoy the console (not every developer has enough money to devote a large team for years to develop a game, and not every person wants to try to spend 40 hours to finish a normal game)
Also, I don't use Windows Media Center, but it sounds like a sizable portion of the trade press considers Media Center to be definitely better than most commercial alternatives (eg. frontrow at the least).
(for what it's worth, I loathe every minute I'm forced to develop webapps for MSIE, and I dislike that I'm forced to use Windows+Outlook at work... but I think that MS is being innovative in a few small areas... that is, it's obviously a large company, and even if most of the company is going down in flames, some departments are going to be successful from time to time)
What's important is the centralized service that provides instant messaging, indication to friends of progress made through games, and downloadable content (on the xbox 360, there's a decent amount that's not crap, and is free or isn't overpriced). It shouldn't need to be said, but Sony is almost exactly copying the XBox 360's centralized online service. This sort of service is obviously really useful to end-users, and will be a part of all future consoles. Period, end of story.
Having a single friends list and associated messaging interface is important. Having worldwide scoreboards gets pros hooked. Being able to compare progress through games with your local friends gets more people hooked. Being able to download smaller games brings a wider range of game developers to the table, and attracts a wider range of players.
It doesn't just appear to be important, it really actually is.
And since supply (for a given recording) doesn't matter, you just look at the demand vs price curve to find the optimum price. If you raise the price 2x, and demand only drops 40%, then it's more profitable to raise prices.
I didn't really mean the comment to sound very negative (unrealistic bodies are indeed a marvelous thing), it's just that fantasy women and strong plots don't usually coincide in movies. It may very well be a good movie, I don't know, I was just saying that one shouldn't set one's expectations too high when it comes to plot.
Dead or Alive's sole purpose seems to be to outdo Lara Croft for the most inaccurate representations of women in games. Did you really expect the movie version of that to have a whole lot of substance?
More and more people are spending more of their time online, learning more of their information from the web. Information propagation online is also getting more complicated (eg. del.icio.us, digg, wikipedia, rss blogs, podcasts, ....), and the tools that people use to access those also need to accomodate the greater amount of time they spend with them.
There are still browser-lite projects out there, but Mozilla/Firefox should not be one of them, it should continue to be a mainstream project.
(eg. bloggers spend a lot of personal time writing, with the sole purpose of becoming popular (at least in the beginning, it's more about popularity than it is ad revenue))
(which is relevant, because once you have other people deciding what is quality and what isn't, the spammers want to jump in, pretend to be anonymous, and say Hey! my adverts are quality stuff everyone should look at!)
It's starting to become a cliche for Dvorak or Cringely to postulate on possible future moves by Apple or Google, and the crazier their suggestions, the more internet posters get riled up, and the more traffic gets driven to their site. Do they really have to pander to the lowest among internet posters?
Since I was looking for knowledge and not a debate, does anyone have any substantive information? Are marketshare figures often something of an inconsistent guess that wouldn't be very useful if graphed (particularly because they tend to be skewed by self-interested parties)? Or are they consistent enough (like the market price of a barrel of oil) that it would be informative if graphed?
Isn't marketshare one of those semi-subjective terms? It requires someone to 1) clearly define what the specific market is (server chips? desktop? mobile? is there a bright red line you can draw between them?), 2) to accurately estimate the total size of the market, and finally, 3) get the company to accurately report their sales figures in that market.
This just in... Nerf has released a new product that lets you stealthily sneak into an enemy base on the other side of the world using realistic graphics and textures, lets you play with friends and strangers at any time of the night over the network, lets you play "hot coffee" with decent-looking graphics, and lets you play engrosing concept games like Katamari Damacy, and is so engrosing that some people sit there and do the same action over and over just to slightly increase numbers labeled STR and INT.
In the long run, it's simply not going to work for companies to try to prevent parallel imports of digital media over the internet. That's the real issue discussed in this article, and piracy has little/nothing to do with that.
Did the FPS genre materialize as soon as the mouse was invented? No. Might it take game makers a little while to experiment with a wide range of games, before narrowing down on a few specific types, the games that are the most engaging when using the controller?
It makes it a PITA to tab deep into a directory though, because the sequential tab completion means it can't add the final "\" onto the directory name, and then tab complete into the subdirectory without first typing a "\".
Be sure to turn on tab-completion while you're at it (it's not the best tab completion in the world, but it's better than nothing)