Honestly, no joke, I don't think I played more than a few minutes of Resident Evil 4 without two of my best friends (one male and one female) and my little sister passing the controller back and forth the entire time. Despite being a completely single player game, its cinematic nature and fairly easy controls really did make it fun for everyone that was in a certain age group. Just like siblings who are 5 and 7 might play Jak and Daxter together, my 19-year-old sister and I really enjoyed RE4 together.
Just because a game doesn't necessarily appeal to all-ages doesn't mean that it can't be a party game. Guitar Hero is, to a degree, an example of this.
BSG has been full of them, especially of late, with fantastic "should we ask him if he still has that bomb we know was ours yet is the only one unaccounted for? Naaaaaah."-related activities.
I think the reason you don't get it is because you're missing the fact that Galactica is largely based around politics, which means that it is intentionally based around the "idiot plot", where everyone acts like idiots. For instance, if they accused Baltar of stealing a nuke, who are they really accusing? They're accusing the second most politically powerful human left, who also happens to be some sort of Bill Gates/Stephen Hawking celebrity mega-genius. Just look at all the accusations that have been levelled against George Bush or Dick Cheney, neither of whom are ridiculously popular outside of politics the way Baltar is. Regardless of that, those accusations go nowhere, even if they're from other powerful politicians.
The whole thing is about people knowing the right thing to do, but having their hands tied to the point where they're forced to act like idiots. In the finale, literally every main character knows Baltar is wrong... but he's the president, so WTF are you going to do? Plenty of Western heads of state have done very bad things, but very, very few end up like Richard Nixon.
I really wished that games with optional difficult levels, such as Kingdom Hearts 2, actually described them the way Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 did. It's clear from a lot of the reviews and a lot of veteran gamers' complaints that their biggest problem with the game isn't the game itself, but the fact that they were somehow convinced that "Normal" was their choice. The game should've said:
Easy - "Are you a young child? Is this the first video game you've ever played?"
Normal - "Are you a very casual gamer? Is this only the second or third PS2 game you've picked up?"
Hard - "Have been played and/or beaten Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid, God of War, Prince of Persia, or any other action game?"
If you're actually at the point where you can REVIEW video games, Hard Mode was definitely your choice, and you would actually be using the games' different systems in that mode, instead of saying "Why bother? Air combo works just fine!"
In Hard Mode, instead of finding myself skipping the reaction commands, I started wishing that Devil May Cry would implement them, because they're a great way to pull off an action sequence. In DMC, getting skyscrapers thrown at you and trying to parry them would probably kill you two or three times before you got it, but in KH2, it's just a matter of pressing the reaction command at the perfect moment, and suddenly you're doing amazing things that were obviously ripped straight out of Advent Children. Also, in Hard Mode, the Drive command is every bit as essential as Devil Trigger in DMC, and summoning Stitch was the only logical way to get out of a couple of the Organization XIII fights without getting rescued. Unfortunately, because they picked Normal Mode, most players probably never bothered with Summons, Drives, or many Reaction Commands, and I doubt that many of them were ever rescued during the Organization XIII fights (I was only rescued once, but it was an awesome idea).
Sephiroth on Hard was also probably the coolest boss battle outside of Vergil 2 and 3 in Devil May Cry 3, because he literally had no pattern. It was like I was fighting another player online. If I tried to get a breather for a second and use the temporary invincibility that you get when using Cure to fully heal yourself, he'd wait patiently and hit me in the back as soon as it finished. If he wanted to use an attack that I could only block with a Reaction Move on the ground, he'd wait until the very second that I jumped. He'd even announce "Sin Harvest" and start floating up in the air, which is a move that you can only stop if you hit him, and then decide midway through that he'd rather do a different attack that makes him temporarily invulnerable and does massive damage. Instead of having a pattern, he baits you, randomly changes his mind, and abuses the Hell out of the game system. It was brilliant.
I think one thing that this story is missing is the way that connectivity can really improve your social life. As a young guy still working a fairly lame non-cubicle job, connectivity makes my social life much easier. With a cellphone that not only makes basic calls with plenty of minutes, but also text messaging and mobile AIM, I can contact virtually all of my friends at any time and schedule any kind of get-together I want.
It used to be that if you wanted to get all of your friends together, you'd have to call all of them, and if they didn't answer their phone, you either leave a message on their machine at home or just have to call them back. Now, I just type in the message "Sushi tonight?" and send it to the eight people that have cellphones with text messaging, and then load up mobile AIM for the one or two that don't. In five minutes, I'd easily convinced all of my friends to go to the same restaurant as soon as they got out of work.
I also don't come home to any tedious questions or demands. I already know from text messages during the day that someone was too busy to feed the dogs, so I just walk in and do it. I already know that my sister had a bad day at work and I can read every detail of it while I'm eating lunch at work, rather than listening to a furious rant as soon as I've switched from "work mood" to "relaxed mood" when I walk in the door at home.
Connectivity makes life a lot easier in this regard. If I could do my work like this, it would even better.
They may not require an D but... the game could be crippled without one. Imagine when all the new maps come out for Halo3 and you're the one that can't play with your friends on Live because you don't have the HD to download the map-pack.
I think you have it backwards. The problem isn't that the people without the hard drive won't be able to use that feature. The problem is that in order to accomodate those people, the game will never HAVE that feature to begin with. Take the PS2 for instance. Because not everyone has a modem, very few games are online, especially compared to the Xbox. Similarly, because not every 360 owner will have a hard drive, very few games for the 360 will use the hard drive feature.
The target market is in the late teens and while this segment has a lot of purchasing power, they're also a hotly metketed-to segment.
This inevitably results in fierce competition for the teen dollar, and hey, "if I can get this game for free, I can afford to spend the money on that neat pair of sneakers everyone says are so cool" and so on...
I think a more logical reason for why cost is an issue is because games are usually priced somewhat equally, even though the content is vastly different. GTA: San Andreas, Disgaea, or Guild Wars might give you 100+ hours of gameplay for $50, whereas Star Wars: Republic Commando, Prince of Persia 2, or God of War might give you 10 or 20. After you spend $50 each for three great games that last 100+ hours, and then spend another $50 each on three lesser games that are much, much shorter, you start to think, "Maybe it's safer to pirate the next one... that way I can't get burned."
It's even worse with PC games, because if you buy a game that won't run correctly on your system, you've wasted $50 that will never be returned to you. If you pirate a game that won't run correctly on your system, you've wasted nothing more than hour or so of your time in a futile attempt to get it up and running. I think that after these kids get burned enough times by shoddy games, they come to realize that the only way to guarantee they won't get burned is to not purchase the game at all.
With the 360 and the PS3 releases so soon, it doesn't really make much sense to make it for PS2, let alone PS2 only.
I think it's really pretty simple:
PS2 installed base > 360 and PS3 launch sales
Ease of coding on PS2 > ease of coding on new console
Ease of coding on one console > ease of coding on many
As great as the Soul Calibur series is, it's really just a rehash of Street Fighter 2's sales formula. They've found a great gameplay engine with very few bugs, which is all that any fighting game fan really wants, and they just keep using the same core game engine and movelist over and over while adding a few graphical tweaks, minigames, and a handful of extra characters. The entire philosophy behind it seems to be, much like SF2, "let's find a way to do less work for more money". Releasing it only on the PS2 means that the game is cheaper to make, but will still sell very strongly.
It's also worth noting that a lot of Xbox and GameCube owners also own a PS2, but chose to buy the Xbox or GameCube versions because they're prettier. They may have sold like 700,000 copies of SC2 for the GameCube, but they'll probably only lose like 25% of those customers by making it PS2 exclusive, because a lot of those GameCube customers also own a PS2. The lost sales from making it PS2 exclusive are probably eclipsed by the savings from only coding on one console and not bothering with making multiple ports that all have to be individually coded, bug tested, packaged, and shipped.
Bullet time is, at best, a very cool looking special effect that isn't all that special in terms of gameplay.
Instead of adding bullet time to these sorts of games, I'd rather see them just take a game with cool moves that's played at a normal pace, such as Gunz Online, and add a Replay Mode similar to Gran Turismo's. The actual game is played at normal speed, but when you play the replay, you have a beautifully choreographed video of your exploits that's full of swords sparking, water flying around, and trenchcoats flowing in the wind. It would essentially turn a game of deathmatch into a cutscene from Devil May Cry 3.
I have advocated this before , but one sure way to stiff up the elephant populations and to eliminate illegal poaching is to create elephant farms. In doing so we create a reputable ivory trade , a great source of work for the local communities,a new source of food and a strong elephant population. I am not talking about factory farming as i find that disgusting , It should be rather free range. It could also double as a safari trip , ivory could be harvested via profitable hunts (then sold on , including selling of the meat).
This is functionally no different than the argument that things like iTunes Music Service are going to make piracy go away. If you're a pirate, and you're downloading lossless FLAC or Monkey's Audio encodes of whole CDs for free every day, and you're not really getting hassled about it, are you going to switch over to iTunes and pay $10 for the same CDs, but now with the industry-mandated amounts of DRM attached, just so you can be a "good boy"?
No, you aren't.
Similarly, if you're in the ivory trade right now, you're not going to switch over to a legal, morally justifiable way of "farming" ivory. At best, you can only hope to get the same returns you're getting now (just like a lossless FLAC encode versus a lossless AAC encode), but with much more hassle and greater overall expenses. If you're already an ivory poacher, would you go through all that just to "do the right thing"? Probably not. Most music pirates aren't even willing to pay $10 a CD to "do the right thing" and feel better about themselves, so I doubt most ivory poachers are going to go through the hassle of setting up an ivory farm just to get that "Look Ma, I'm a good citizen" feeling.
If farming ivory were somehow monumentally better in terms of time spent and money gained for the people who are currently poachers, they'll start farming ivory. But I doubt that will ever happen.
I think the main problem with Christian games is that they're all focused on being pseudo-educational, non-violent budget games that won't offend anyone. If they got over this hangup and made the game about fighting vampires, demons, zombies, or something else that rectifies religious pacifism with entertaining gameplay, making a fun game that has a message behind it wouldn't be very hard.
Just look at Metal Gear Solid. Extremely fun game, but it had a definite message that it was trying to get across. It was trying to make the statement that things like "genetic destiny" and "it's nature, not nurture" are absolute crap, and every conflict between Solid Snake and Liquid Snake got that message across perfectly. I don't see why it would be hard for someone to make a game similar in tone to Castlevania that just happened to have a strong Christian message behind it.
But no one will make that game, because they don't want to "spread the word" or even make a fun game. They want to line their pockets with money from devout Christians who believe that if any form of entertainment includes demons and such, even as just the bad guys, it's "the devil's work" and must not be purchased.
How can any list of the best independant games of the year not include Doukutsu Monogatari? It's not only one of the well-written and emotional games I've ever played, it's also one of the best side-scrollers, period.
It's nice living in a fantasy world where one can say "OMG, COMPANIES ARE TEH SUX0RS! THEY SHOULD LOWER PRICES!", but anime is an area where this cannot be done so easily.
Hell, if you want to complain so much, collect stuff a few years old. You can get some GREAT deals! Try ADV's Essential Anime line. I collected their Nadesico disks. The subtitles had a few errors which made me want to break my TV screen, but I paid about £15 for the series -- 30 bucks!
You keep putting words in my mouth. If you would look at the rest of my posts in this thread (and even the ones you're responding to!), I'm just talking about the articles that were in the/. story, which questioned whether or not anime will become mainstream outside Japan and become a major economic export for Japan, and quite simply saying, "No, at $200-$300 to collect a single show, it certainly isn't." I don't have ANY personal problem with the price of anime, but when someone sees a couple of episodes of Ghost In The Shell or Samurai Champloo on Adult Swim and thinks, "Hey, maybe I'll just buy the DVD," and finds out that it will cost them a couple hundred bucks for the whole series, they're probably going to pass.
In order to become popular, someone is eventually going to have to take a chance on making cheaper anime box sets in the hopes of receiving greater sales, because domestic anime releases aren't competitive with any other form of video entertainment, and they aren't going to become mainstream until they are.
To be honest, US Anime DVDs are great for the most part. They aren't insanely fucking expensive like Japanese DVDs and aren't overpriced (paying $30 for a goddamn DVD means you're a fool. I just bought 3 dvds with a $29.99 MSRP for just under $16.)
I'm not really complaining about the price of the DVDs at all. When I buy a DVD, I probably get it the same way you do, and for roughly the same price. The only point I'm trying to make is that the linked articles talk about whether or not anime can become mainstream in America, but they're not going to do it if new fans keep walking into Suncoast and figuring out that the average 26 episode anime will cost them $200-$300 at retail. It creates a huge burden of entry into anime fandom that leaves us with just a bunch of hardcore fans buying DVDs and supporting what seems to be a very high-margin niche industry.
And, OH!?, you spotted some typos in the subtitles!? Which fansubs are YOU watching? It's not like there hasn't been any typos in fansubs. I mean, if you come down from those top-quality groups (which there are far too few of:(), there can be dozens of typos per episode in a fansub. "90% of fansub groups" is a huge over-exageration, because well under half of the fansub groups out there even put out decent product. The amount of groups that can even HOPE to put out a typo-free script come in at around a dozen maybe, imo (possibly a few more; I don't watch as many fansubs as I used to - the quality and delays often depresses me, so I stick to series that are fully subbed by good groups).
I admit some ADV DVDs can be VERY bad, but boo-hoo. Speed-subbed Naruto is VERY, VERY, VERY bad. Go watch that, if you think it's so great.
This is very true. When I said 90% of fansubs, I meant from the groups that are generally reliable. You may have to wait awhile longer for them, but the most part, anything that gets fansubbed eventually gets fansubbed by a decent group. There are speedsubs of Naruto, Tsubasa Chronicle, and others, but I generally just ignore them until a group that doesn't obviously suck comes along. When you take that into account, the number of good fansubs drops much lower.
And on money, that is more of a complicated issue, which I don't like discussing. But the thing I have to ask is: what do American shows have to do with anime? What does it have to do with the price of fish in China? Nothing. That's like complaining that buying PCs is too expensive when compared to buying motorcycles.
Anime is animated and comes from Japan. IT COMES FROM A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ECONOMY. The costs involed in making anime in a different economy differ completely from an American show. Shall we also mention that the AUDIENCE differs completely? That anime is aimed at a TINY audience compared to the listed American shows? I'm sure if Geneon knew that Last Exile would sell HALF as much as Friends or something then they'd be happy to sell the boxset for $60.
How does that make any sense at all? Anime isn't as different from TV, movies, or video games as a PC is from a motorcycle. We're talking about four forms of entertainment that all come on a DVD and are played on your TV screen. That Last Exile box set, for instance, costs four times as much as an average video game of the same length and six times as much as a TV show box set of the same length. The article that started this thread was about anime catching on in the United States, but I don't see how it's going to do that at its current price point. Last Exile and The Dead Zone are both just TV shows, so why should I pay six times more for one than the other? Because it's Japanese? Because that makes it special? That's ridiculous. I don't pay twice as much for Metal Gear Solid 3 than I do for Halo 2 because MGS3 "comes from a different economy", just like I wasn't charged twice as much for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the theaters than I was for The Matrix.
Having a smaller audience also isn't a defense, because you don't pay double the normal price for a game like Katamari Damacy or Shin Megami Tensei that will obviously have low sales than you would for any other game. You also don't pay any more for a cancelled TV show than you would for, as you mentioned, Friends. Domestic anime companies are the only companies in DVD sales (or really, any entertainment sales) that get to say, "Well, we've got a small audience, so we have to charge 600% of the price of other DVD sets," and get away with it.
For the same amount of entertainment, Evangelion costs nearly five times the price of The Dead Zone. Not only is that not exactly "competitively priced", but it's kind of ridiculous to expect anime to become more mainstream in America when watching one show costs $170. And that's in a box set! Buying the DVDs individually can cost upwards of $200, sometimes as high as $300. Anime costs much less in the US than it does in Japan, but it still costs way, way more than anything else that appears on my TV, be it movies, TV shows, or games.
In one scene, a character looks at a giant robot with surprise and clearly says, in a heavy Japanese accent, "Gundam... Mark II?!", but in the subs, he says, "It's a Gundam?" I haven't seen the series, so I don't know the context, but they may well have done that because in English, they felt that phrase was more appropriate.
Zeta Gundam is just dubtitled. That's just the way it is. Every single sentence, and consequently much longer pieces of exposition, have been totally rewritten to fit the characters' mouth movements. There's never a good reason for the English subs to perfectly match the English dub, because you know that the dub has been changed around for this reason. In particular, the conversation that I mentioned involving newtypes was completely changed. Originally, Quattro explains that Amuro was held under house arrest for years by the Federation because even though he was a decorated war hero who pretty much saved all of their lives, the Federation was still afraid of powerful newtypes, and would prefer to abuse them, even the ones on their side, than tolerate them. The sub on my box set has a vague, nonsensical, and obviously poorly translated explanation about how Amuro was a war hero and "that's what the Federation does to its heroes". It doesn't make sense in terms of the story or even the context of the conversation, because the only war hero that's been mistreated is Amuro, and he is, apparently coincidentally, a massively powerful newtype.
I think the benefit of fansubs is that even though they may not flow perfectly in English, they retain the original meaning, so there's no way for the translators to misinterpret it or screw it up. Translation notes are also a much better way of handling parts of the dialogue that are difficult to translate than the way they're traditionally handled in US DVDs, which is to just ignore them. In Bubblegum Crisis, one character calls another by the suffix "-pyon" (Leon-pyon). They never, EVER tell you what it means, because they apparently regard translation notes as "unprofessional". The result? A significantly crappier DVD. If you're watching the subtitled version of the show, you're obviously not watching it with the same expectations as the casual anime fan watching the dub, so I don't think that things like making the dialogue flow perfectly in the subs are really an issue. If you're watching the sub, you're trying to watch the closest thing to the original, not what sounds or "flows" better.
One of the characters has a nickname, Hachimaki (IIRC), which means headband, and this is explained (in a footnote) once. I would have thought it would be more appropriate to translate it each time, because that's what a Japanese audience would be hearing.
This is kind of a tossup, because it depends on how you read subtitles. For instance, I've watched Keroro Gunsou, which means Sergeant Frog, in fansubs. Whenever someone audibly calls the main character "Gunsou", but the sub says "Sergeant", I miss a beat in the subtitles because something just "does not compute" in my head for a moment. You're probably experiencing the same thing whenever they say "Hachimaki", but your brain takes a second to replace it with "Headband". Either way, it's gonna bother somebody.
Despite the fact that anime is wildly overpriced in America, with some 26 episode series costing as much as $200 or $300 after you've collected all of the eight to ten DVDs in the series (what casual fan would pay for this?), the quality is still very low.
Take the $200 Zeta Gundam box set, for instance. You can see in every single episode that the subs are off. In one scene, a character looks at a giant robot with surprise and clearly says, in a heavy Japanese accent, "Gundam... Mark II?!", but in the subs, he says, "It's a Gundam?" And sure enough, if you change the language from Japanese to English, the dubbed voice says, "It's a Gundam?", because that's what fits the character's mouth movements. This means that in a $200 box set, no one even bothered to spend the money on proper subtitles, and in longer conversations, you can see that the meaning is completely lost in the translation. In another scene, a character making a longer speech says the word "Newtype" three times, but the subs never even mention it. Kind of important when the entire series revolves around newtypes and many characters' personalities are defined by the fact that they're a newtype.
The number of times that's happened in a fansub? Zero. In all of the fansubs I've watched, I've never seen as many blatant mistranslations as I have in a DVD box set from Bandai that I paid $200 for. And the same goes for other companies, as well. Obviously no one even spellchecked ADV's Bubblegum Crisis 2040 DVDs, because there are at least five or six typos in every DVD's subtitles. That's the sort of thing that would never get past 90% of fansub groups, because they'd be afraid of looking like idiots, but ADV and Bandai don't seem to be very afraid of making you feel like an idiot for buying their product.
So between lower quality, a higher price, and a generally narrower selection of titles, it's not really worth watching US anime DVDs. Not just versus watching fansubs, but versus most other things you could do with your time.
Tell me about it. The 2D sidescroller was the most abandoned technology in history. I'd love another version of Castlevania SOTN, Golden Axe, Final Fight.
As another poster already pointed out, the Gameboy Advance Castlevanias are a trio of really, really great SotN-style games, and the Metroids are pretty damn good, too. Aria of Sorrow in particular is like a shorter, but equally greater SotN, with great gameplay and a great plot.
To be honest, I think that a lot of people like older games because these they evoke memories from a more innocent/carefree time in the player's life (e.g. teen-age years, or college), rather than better gameplay.
I don't think it's just nostalgia. I think a big part of it is that over the course of years of development on certain platforms, people found some types of games that were really fun, but in the last five years or so we've gotten rid of them because they're "old technology". Getting rid of the 2D side-scroller because we have 3D games with "better graphics" and "a bigger world" would be like letting all the chess, go, and Monopoly boards rot on the shelves in the '80s because Pong and its wonderful "new technology" is somehow infinitely superior to all board games.
I think that little by little, the industry is starting to realize that games like 2D sidescrollers, isometric strategy games, and simple-but-deep (think Ico or Katamari Damacy) games aren't obsolete forms of gaming. There are plenty of GBA games that are totally new, but are done in the older style of a lot of beloved games, and a lot of those games have been really successful. Hopefully those won't go away with the slow death of the GBA and its somewhat older hardware.
Change the shortcut to point to "runas/u Administator/p (the admin password)/e (the path to the exe)/a (whatever the arguments are)". That should let you run something as an Admin while still being an LU.
Yeah, and then after you set up a bunch of programs like that for someone, they download a new game from Yahoo or wherever that won't run without admin rights, and they just say, "Screw this, I'll use the 'Administrator' account from now on."
LUA doesn't really work in a home Windows environment because the people that shouldn't have admin rights usually aren't experienced enough to use it, while the people that ARE experienced enough don't necessarily need it, because they're not going to open an email attachment named "HotRussianXXXGirls.exe".
On the other hand, I can pay $9.50 (it's actually a little cheaper where I live) and see a movie in a theater. More like $5 for a matinee.
Assuming a "home theater" system costs $1000 (which would be a really cheap setup), that's the equivalent of 105 movies in the theater. I doubt I've seen that many in my entire life.
Price for myself and six of my friends to see a movie in a theater: $57
$1000 divided by $57 = 17.543 movies with friends
Your equation only holds up if you only go to the movies alone.
Sony is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America Sony designed the PSP to (among other things) play movies They're still burned about the whole DeCSS thing.
Exactly. Absolute best example of this:
Burn a weird DVD. Maybe it has the wrong region, maybe it's in PAL... just something weird about it. Throw it in an Apex player that you got for $20 on sale at Best Buy. It plays the disc. Now throw that disc in a $300-$400 Sony DVD player + surround sound setup. Disc cannot be read.
I'm personally much more productive on a larger screen, full sized keyboard, and a comfortable external mouse.
And to the smart asses who say you can hook all these up to a notebook, yeah but why?
There are plenty of widescreen 17" notebooks out there with a full size keyboard, 3GHz+ Pentium 4 or equivalent Athlon 64, and 1GB of RAM. All you're really missing is the external mouse, which is as simple as popping a wireless mouse adapter that's the size of a USB flash drive into the USB port on the side.
This isn't like the old days when the biggest laptop you could find was a 15" and getting yourself set up at a coffee shop meant plugging in a telephone wire, a power cable, and a wired mouse. Lots of laptops have decent battery life, built-in wifi, and a USB port on the side for a wireless mouse.
You're fucking kidding, right? I don't have a single DVD with more than 4 episodes on; 3 is more common, 2 is becoming more common, and I've even seen a couple of series where the first disc contains one single episode.
The general rule since anime moved to the DVD format is that extra-long series like Gundam, Dragonball, etc. have 5 episodes per disc, 24 episode series have 3 or 4, and 13 episode series possibly have even less, with a few super-expensive-to-license OVAs like Blue Submarine #6 or FLCL having ridiculously low episode numbers.
Naruto in all likelihood would have five per disc. In fact, it might even have six per disc because of its length. Definitely not less than that, though.
And face it, I'm sure most of the people downloading Naruto wouldn't even think of buying the DVDs. I mean, just look at all the complaints on the forums when the Naruto license was announced, when their free flow of episodes was in danger of getting shut down.
I think that that problem is more specific to Naruto than you would think. When Naruto was licensed, it had already gone far past the 100 episode mark. Anime DVDs are typically 5 episodes long and released every two to three months (usually three), so if the fansubbing stopped when the show was licensed, the fans would've gotten to see the rest of the series roughly five years from now. If the show had a faster than normal release, maybe only two or three.
The domestic anime industry obviously watches the fansub downloads to see what the American fans think about it, which is essentially using them as a free focus group. If they're going to do that, they should at least be courteous enough to license a show before it hits that kind of mark. If they aren't, then... well... the fans kind of rebel. I know I have the same feeling about Sunabouzu. The show was almost halfway through its fansubbing last month when Funimation announced that it would be released in the US "some time in 2006". And they announced it right after the first episode of a two-parter was released. I understand why they do it, but it kind of sucks to be a fan in that situation.
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Honestly, no joke, I don't think I played more than a few minutes of Resident Evil 4 without two of my best friends (one male and one female) and my little sister passing the controller back and forth the entire time. Despite being a completely single player game, its cinematic nature and fairly easy controls really did make it fun for everyone that was in a certain age group. Just like siblings who are 5 and 7 might play Jak and Daxter together, my 19-year-old sister and I really enjoyed RE4 together.
Just because a game doesn't necessarily appeal to all-ages doesn't mean that it can't be a party game. Guitar Hero is, to a degree, an example of this.
BSG has been full of them, especially of late, with fantastic "should we ask him if he still has that bomb we know was ours yet is the only one unaccounted for? Naaaaaah."-related activities.
I think the reason you don't get it is because you're missing the fact that Galactica is largely based around politics, which means that it is intentionally based around the "idiot plot", where everyone acts like idiots. For instance, if they accused Baltar of stealing a nuke, who are they really accusing? They're accusing the second most politically powerful human left, who also happens to be some sort of Bill Gates/Stephen Hawking celebrity mega-genius. Just look at all the accusations that have been levelled against George Bush or Dick Cheney, neither of whom are ridiculously popular outside of politics the way Baltar is. Regardless of that, those accusations go nowhere, even if they're from other powerful politicians.
The whole thing is about people knowing the right thing to do, but having their hands tied to the point where they're forced to act like idiots. In the finale, literally every main character knows Baltar is wrong... but he's the president, so WTF are you going to do? Plenty of Western heads of state have done very bad things, but very, very few end up like Richard Nixon.
I really wished that games with optional difficult levels, such as Kingdom Hearts 2, actually described them the way Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 did. It's clear from a lot of the reviews and a lot of veteran gamers' complaints that their biggest problem with the game isn't the game itself, but the fact that they were somehow convinced that "Normal" was their choice. The game should've said:
Easy - "Are you a young child? Is this the first video game you've ever played?"
Normal - "Are you a very casual gamer? Is this only the second or third PS2 game you've picked up?"
Hard - "Have been played and/or beaten Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid, God of War, Prince of Persia, or any other action game?"
If you're actually at the point where you can REVIEW video games, Hard Mode was definitely your choice, and you would actually be using the games' different systems in that mode, instead of saying "Why bother? Air combo works just fine!"
In Hard Mode, instead of finding myself skipping the reaction commands, I started wishing that Devil May Cry would implement them, because they're a great way to pull off an action sequence. In DMC, getting skyscrapers thrown at you and trying to parry them would probably kill you two or three times before you got it, but in KH2, it's just a matter of pressing the reaction command at the perfect moment, and suddenly you're doing amazing things that were obviously ripped straight out of Advent Children. Also, in Hard Mode, the Drive command is every bit as essential as Devil Trigger in DMC, and summoning Stitch was the only logical way to get out of a couple of the Organization XIII fights without getting rescued. Unfortunately, because they picked Normal Mode, most players probably never bothered with Summons, Drives, or many Reaction Commands, and I doubt that many of them were ever rescued during the Organization XIII fights (I was only rescued once, but it was an awesome idea).
Sephiroth on Hard was also probably the coolest boss battle outside of Vergil 2 and 3 in Devil May Cry 3, because he literally had no pattern. It was like I was fighting another player online. If I tried to get a breather for a second and use the temporary invincibility that you get when using Cure to fully heal yourself, he'd wait patiently and hit me in the back as soon as it finished. If he wanted to use an attack that I could only block with a Reaction Move on the ground, he'd wait until the very second that I jumped. He'd even announce "Sin Harvest" and start floating up in the air, which is a move that you can only stop if you hit him, and then decide midway through that he'd rather do a different attack that makes him temporarily invulnerable and does massive damage. Instead of having a pattern, he baits you, randomly changes his mind, and abuses the Hell out of the game system. It was brilliant.
I think one thing that this story is missing is the way that connectivity can really improve your social life. As a young guy still working a fairly lame non-cubicle job, connectivity makes my social life much easier. With a cellphone that not only makes basic calls with plenty of minutes, but also text messaging and mobile AIM, I can contact virtually all of my friends at any time and schedule any kind of get-together I want.
It used to be that if you wanted to get all of your friends together, you'd have to call all of them, and if they didn't answer their phone, you either leave a message on their machine at home or just have to call them back. Now, I just type in the message "Sushi tonight?" and send it to the eight people that have cellphones with text messaging, and then load up mobile AIM for the one or two that don't. In five minutes, I'd easily convinced all of my friends to go to the same restaurant as soon as they got out of work.
I also don't come home to any tedious questions or demands. I already know from text messages during the day that someone was too busy to feed the dogs, so I just walk in and do it. I already know that my sister had a bad day at work and I can read every detail of it while I'm eating lunch at work, rather than listening to a furious rant as soon as I've switched from "work mood" to "relaxed mood" when I walk in the door at home.
Connectivity makes life a lot easier in this regard. If I could do my work like this, it would even better.
They may not require an D but... the game could be crippled without one. Imagine when all the new maps come out for Halo3 and you're the one that can't play with your friends on Live because you don't have the HD to download the map-pack.
I think you have it backwards. The problem isn't that the people without the hard drive won't be able to use that feature. The problem is that in order to accomodate those people, the game will never HAVE that feature to begin with. Take the PS2 for instance. Because not everyone has a modem, very few games are online, especially compared to the Xbox. Similarly, because not every 360 owner will have a hard drive, very few games for the 360 will use the hard drive feature.
The target market is in the late teens and while this segment has a lot of purchasing power, they're also a hotly metketed-to segment.
This inevitably results in fierce competition for the teen dollar, and hey, "if I can get this game for free, I can afford to spend the money on that neat pair of sneakers everyone says are so cool" and so on...
I think a more logical reason for why cost is an issue is because games are usually priced somewhat equally, even though the content is vastly different. GTA: San Andreas, Disgaea, or Guild Wars might give you 100+ hours of gameplay for $50, whereas Star Wars: Republic Commando, Prince of Persia 2, or God of War might give you 10 or 20. After you spend $50 each for three great games that last 100+ hours, and then spend another $50 each on three lesser games that are much, much shorter, you start to think, "Maybe it's safer to pirate the next one... that way I can't get burned."
It's even worse with PC games, because if you buy a game that won't run correctly on your system, you've wasted $50 that will never be returned to you. If you pirate a game that won't run correctly on your system, you've wasted nothing more than hour or so of your time in a futile attempt to get it up and running. I think that after these kids get burned enough times by shoddy games, they come to realize that the only way to guarantee they won't get burned is to not purchase the game at all.
With the 360 and the PS3 releases so soon, it doesn't really make much sense to make it for PS2, let alone PS2 only.
I think it's really pretty simple:
PS2 installed base > 360 and PS3 launch sales
Ease of coding on PS2 > ease of coding on new console
Ease of coding on one console > ease of coding on many
As great as the Soul Calibur series is, it's really just a rehash of Street Fighter 2's sales formula. They've found a great gameplay engine with very few bugs, which is all that any fighting game fan really wants, and they just keep using the same core game engine and movelist over and over while adding a few graphical tweaks, minigames, and a handful of extra characters. The entire philosophy behind it seems to be, much like SF2, "let's find a way to do less work for more money". Releasing it only on the PS2 means that the game is cheaper to make, but will still sell very strongly.
It's also worth noting that a lot of Xbox and GameCube owners also own a PS2, but chose to buy the Xbox or GameCube versions because they're prettier. They may have sold like 700,000 copies of SC2 for the GameCube, but they'll probably only lose like 25% of those customers by making it PS2 exclusive, because a lot of those GameCube customers also own a PS2. The lost sales from making it PS2 exclusive are probably eclipsed by the savings from only coding on one console and not bothering with making multiple ports that all have to be individually coded, bug tested, packaged, and shipped.
Bullet time is, at best, a very cool looking special effect that isn't all that special in terms of gameplay.
Instead of adding bullet time to these sorts of games, I'd rather see them just take a game with cool moves that's played at a normal pace, such as Gunz Online, and add a Replay Mode similar to Gran Turismo's. The actual game is played at normal speed, but when you play the replay, you have a beautifully choreographed video of your exploits that's full of swords sparking, water flying around, and trenchcoats flowing in the wind. It would essentially turn a game of deathmatch into a cutscene from Devil May Cry 3.
I have advocated this before , but one sure way to stiff up the elephant populations and to eliminate illegal poaching is to create elephant farms.
In doing so we create a reputable ivory trade , a great source of work for the local communities
I am not talking about factory farming as i find that disgusting , It should be rather free range
It could also double as a safari trip , ivory could be harvested via profitable hunts (then sold on , including selling of the meat)
This is functionally no different than the argument that things like iTunes Music Service are going to make piracy go away. If you're a pirate, and you're downloading lossless FLAC or Monkey's Audio encodes of whole CDs for free every day, and you're not really getting hassled about it, are you going to switch over to iTunes and pay $10 for the same CDs, but now with the industry-mandated amounts of DRM attached, just so you can be a "good boy"?
No, you aren't.
Similarly, if you're in the ivory trade right now, you're not going to switch over to a legal, morally justifiable way of "farming" ivory. At best, you can only hope to get the same returns you're getting now (just like a lossless FLAC encode versus a lossless AAC encode), but with much more hassle and greater overall expenses. If you're already an ivory poacher, would you go through all that just to "do the right thing"? Probably not. Most music pirates aren't even willing to pay $10 a CD to "do the right thing" and feel better about themselves, so I doubt most ivory poachers are going to go through the hassle of setting up an ivory farm just to get that "Look Ma, I'm a good citizen" feeling.
If farming ivory were somehow monumentally better in terms of time spent and money gained for the people who are currently poachers, they'll start farming ivory. But I doubt that will ever happen.
I think the main problem with Christian games is that they're all focused on being pseudo-educational, non-violent budget games that won't offend anyone. If they got over this hangup and made the game about fighting vampires, demons, zombies, or something else that rectifies religious pacifism with entertaining gameplay, making a fun game that has a message behind it wouldn't be very hard.
Just look at Metal Gear Solid. Extremely fun game, but it had a definite message that it was trying to get across. It was trying to make the statement that things like "genetic destiny" and "it's nature, not nurture" are absolute crap, and every conflict between Solid Snake and Liquid Snake got that message across perfectly. I don't see why it would be hard for someone to make a game similar in tone to Castlevania that just happened to have a strong Christian message behind it.
But no one will make that game, because they don't want to "spread the word" or even make a fun game. They want to line their pockets with money from devout Christians who believe that if any form of entertainment includes demons and such, even as just the bad guys, it's "the devil's work" and must not be purchased.
How can any list of the best independant games of the year not include Doukutsu Monogatari? It's not only one of the well-written and emotional games I've ever played, it's also one of the best side-scrollers, period.
It's nice living in a fantasy world where one can say "OMG, COMPANIES ARE TEH SUX0RS! THEY SHOULD LOWER PRICES!", but anime is an area where this cannot be done so easily.
/. story, which questioned whether or not anime will become mainstream outside Japan and become a major economic export for Japan, and quite simply saying, "No, at $200-$300 to collect a single show, it certainly isn't." I don't have ANY personal problem with the price of anime, but when someone sees a couple of episodes of Ghost In The Shell or Samurai Champloo on Adult Swim and thinks, "Hey, maybe I'll just buy the DVD," and finds out that it will cost them a couple hundred bucks for the whole series, they're probably going to pass.
Hell, if you want to complain so much, collect stuff a few years old. You can get some GREAT deals! Try ADV's Essential Anime line. I collected their Nadesico disks. The subtitles had a few errors which made me want to break my TV screen, but I paid about £15 for the series -- 30 bucks!
You keep putting words in my mouth. If you would look at the rest of my posts in this thread (and even the ones you're responding to!), I'm just talking about the articles that were in the
In order to become popular, someone is eventually going to have to take a chance on making cheaper anime box sets in the hopes of receiving greater sales, because domestic anime releases aren't competitive with any other form of video entertainment, and they aren't going to become mainstream until they are.
To be honest, US Anime DVDs are great for the most part. They aren't insanely fucking expensive like Japanese DVDs and aren't overpriced (paying $30 for a goddamn DVD means you're a fool. I just bought 3 dvds with a $29.99 MSRP for just under $16.)
I'm not really complaining about the price of the DVDs at all. When I buy a DVD, I probably get it the same way you do, and for roughly the same price. The only point I'm trying to make is that the linked articles talk about whether or not anime can become mainstream in America, but they're not going to do it if new fans keep walking into Suncoast and figuring out that the average 26 episode anime will cost them $200-$300 at retail. It creates a huge burden of entry into anime fandom that leaves us with just a bunch of hardcore fans buying DVDs and supporting what seems to be a very high-margin niche industry.
And, OH!?, you spotted some typos in the subtitles!? Which fansubs are YOU watching? It's not like there hasn't been any typos in fansubs. I mean, if you come down from those top-quality groups (which there are far too few of :(), there can be dozens of typos per episode in a fansub. "90% of fansub groups" is a huge over-exageration, because well under half of the fansub groups out there even put out decent product. The amount of groups that can even HOPE to put out a typo-free script come in at around a dozen maybe, imo (possibly a few more; I don't watch as many fansubs as I used to - the quality and delays often depresses me, so I stick to series that are fully subbed by good groups).
I admit some ADV DVDs can be VERY bad, but boo-hoo. Speed-subbed Naruto is VERY, VERY, VERY bad. Go watch that, if you think it's so great.
This is very true. When I said 90% of fansubs, I meant from the groups that are generally reliable. You may have to wait awhile longer for them, but the most part, anything that gets fansubbed eventually gets fansubbed by a decent group. There are speedsubs of Naruto, Tsubasa Chronicle, and others, but I generally just ignore them until a group that doesn't obviously suck comes along. When you take that into account, the number of good fansubs drops much lower.
And on money, that is more of a complicated issue, which I don't like discussing.
But the thing I have to ask is: what do American shows have to do with anime? What does it have to do with the price of fish in China? Nothing.
That's like complaining that buying PCs is too expensive when compared to buying motorcycles.
Anime is animated and comes from Japan. IT COMES FROM A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ECONOMY. The costs involed in making anime in a different economy differ completely from an American show. Shall we also mention that the AUDIENCE differs completely? That anime is aimed at a TINY audience compared to the listed American shows? I'm sure if Geneon knew that Last Exile would sell HALF as much as Friends or something then they'd be happy to sell the boxset for $60.
How does that make any sense at all? Anime isn't as different from TV, movies, or video games as a PC is from a motorcycle. We're talking about four forms of entertainment that all come on a DVD and are played on your TV screen. That Last Exile box set, for instance, costs four times as much as an average video game of the same length and six times as much as a TV show box set of the same length. The article that started this thread was about anime catching on in the United States, but I don't see how it's going to do that at its current price point. Last Exile and The Dead Zone are both just TV shows, so why should I pay six times more for one than the other? Because it's Japanese? Because that makes it special? That's ridiculous. I don't pay twice as much for Metal Gear Solid 3 than I do for Halo 2 because MGS3 "comes from a different economy", just like I wasn't charged twice as much for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the theaters than I was for The Matrix.
Having a smaller audience also isn't a defense, because you don't pay double the normal price for a game like Katamari Damacy or Shin Megami Tensei that will obviously have low sales than you would for any other game. You also don't pay any more for a cancelled TV show than you would for, as you mentioned, Friends. Domestic anime companies are the only companies in DVD sales (or really, any entertainment sales) that get to say, "Well, we've got a small audience, so we have to charge 600% of the price of other DVD sets," and get away with it.
The Dead Zone: The Complete Third Season - $35 for 13 hours of TV
Lost: The Complete First Season - $60 for 24 hours of TV
Neon Genesis Evangelion Perfect Collection - $170 for 13 hours of TV
Last Exile Complete Series - $209.98 for 13 hours of TV
For the same amount of entertainment, Evangelion costs nearly five times the price of The Dead Zone. Not only is that not exactly "competitively priced", but it's kind of ridiculous to expect anime to become more mainstream in America when watching one show costs $170. And that's in a box set! Buying the DVDs individually can cost upwards of $200, sometimes as high as $300. Anime costs much less in the US than it does in Japan, but it still costs way, way more than anything else that appears on my TV, be it movies, TV shows, or games.
In one scene, a character looks at a giant robot with surprise and clearly says, in a heavy Japanese accent, "Gundam... Mark II?!", but in the subs, he says, "It's a Gundam?"
I haven't seen the series, so I don't know the context, but they may well have done that because in English, they felt that phrase was more appropriate.
Zeta Gundam is just dubtitled. That's just the way it is. Every single sentence, and consequently much longer pieces of exposition, have been totally rewritten to fit the characters' mouth movements. There's never a good reason for the English subs to perfectly match the English dub, because you know that the dub has been changed around for this reason. In particular, the conversation that I mentioned involving newtypes was completely changed. Originally, Quattro explains that Amuro was held under house arrest for years by the Federation because even though he was a decorated war hero who pretty much saved all of their lives, the Federation was still afraid of powerful newtypes, and would prefer to abuse them, even the ones on their side, than tolerate them. The sub on my box set has a vague, nonsensical, and obviously poorly translated explanation about how Amuro was a war hero and "that's what the Federation does to its heroes". It doesn't make sense in terms of the story or even the context of the conversation, because the only war hero that's been mistreated is Amuro, and he is, apparently coincidentally, a massively powerful newtype.
I think the benefit of fansubs is that even though they may not flow perfectly in English, they retain the original meaning, so there's no way for the translators to misinterpret it or screw it up. Translation notes are also a much better way of handling parts of the dialogue that are difficult to translate than the way they're traditionally handled in US DVDs, which is to just ignore them. In Bubblegum Crisis, one character calls another by the suffix "-pyon" (Leon-pyon). They never, EVER tell you what it means, because they apparently regard translation notes as "unprofessional". The result? A significantly crappier DVD. If you're watching the subtitled version of the show, you're obviously not watching it with the same expectations as the casual anime fan watching the dub, so I don't think that things like making the dialogue flow perfectly in the subs are really an issue. If you're watching the sub, you're trying to watch the closest thing to the original, not what sounds or "flows" better.
One of the characters has a nickname, Hachimaki (IIRC), which means headband, and this is explained (in a footnote) once. I would have thought it would be more appropriate to translate it each time, because that's what a Japanese audience would be hearing.
This is kind of a tossup, because it depends on how you read subtitles. For instance, I've watched Keroro Gunsou, which means Sergeant Frog, in fansubs. Whenever someone audibly calls the main character "Gunsou", but the sub says "Sergeant", I miss a beat in the subtitles because something just "does not compute" in my head for a moment. You're probably experiencing the same thing whenever they say "Hachimaki", but your brain takes a second to replace it with "Headband". Either way, it's gonna bother somebody.
Despite the fact that anime is wildly overpriced in America, with some 26 episode series costing as much as $200 or $300 after you've collected all of the eight to ten DVDs in the series (what casual fan would pay for this?), the quality is still very low.
Take the $200 Zeta Gundam box set, for instance. You can see in every single episode that the subs are off. In one scene, a character looks at a giant robot with surprise and clearly says, in a heavy Japanese accent, "Gundam... Mark II?!", but in the subs, he says, "It's a Gundam?" And sure enough, if you change the language from Japanese to English, the dubbed voice says, "It's a Gundam?", because that's what fits the character's mouth movements. This means that in a $200 box set, no one even bothered to spend the money on proper subtitles, and in longer conversations, you can see that the meaning is completely lost in the translation. In another scene, a character making a longer speech says the word "Newtype" three times, but the subs never even mention it. Kind of important when the entire series revolves around newtypes and many characters' personalities are defined by the fact that they're a newtype.
The number of times that's happened in a fansub? Zero. In all of the fansubs I've watched, I've never seen as many blatant mistranslations as I have in a DVD box set from Bandai that I paid $200 for. And the same goes for other companies, as well. Obviously no one even spellchecked ADV's Bubblegum Crisis 2040 DVDs, because there are at least five or six typos in every DVD's subtitles. That's the sort of thing that would never get past 90% of fansub groups, because they'd be afraid of looking like idiots, but ADV and Bandai don't seem to be very afraid of making you feel like an idiot for buying their product.
So between lower quality, a higher price, and a generally narrower selection of titles, it's not really worth watching US anime DVDs. Not just versus watching fansubs, but versus most other things you could do with your time.
Tell me about it. The 2D sidescroller was the most abandoned technology in history. I'd love another version of Castlevania SOTN, Golden Axe, Final Fight.
As another poster already pointed out, the Gameboy Advance Castlevanias are a trio of really, really great SotN-style games, and the Metroids are pretty damn good, too. Aria of Sorrow in particular is like a shorter, but equally greater SotN, with great gameplay and a great plot.
To be honest, I think that a lot of people like older games because these they evoke memories from a more innocent/carefree time in the player's life (e.g. teen-age years, or college), rather than better gameplay.
I don't think it's just nostalgia. I think a big part of it is that over the course of years of development on certain platforms, people found some types of games that were really fun, but in the last five years or so we've gotten rid of them because they're "old technology". Getting rid of the 2D side-scroller because we have 3D games with "better graphics" and "a bigger world" would be like letting all the chess, go, and Monopoly boards rot on the shelves in the '80s because Pong and its wonderful "new technology" is somehow infinitely superior to all board games.
I think that little by little, the industry is starting to realize that games like 2D sidescrollers, isometric strategy games, and simple-but-deep (think Ico or Katamari Damacy) games aren't obsolete forms of gaming. There are plenty of GBA games that are totally new, but are done in the older style of a lot of beloved games, and a lot of those games have been really successful. Hopefully those won't go away with the slow death of the GBA and its somewhat older hardware.
Change the shortcut to point to "runas /u Administator /p (the admin password) /e (the path to the exe) /a (whatever the arguments are)". That should let you run something as an Admin while still being an LU.
Yeah, and then after you set up a bunch of programs like that for someone, they download a new game from Yahoo or wherever that won't run without admin rights, and they just say, "Screw this, I'll use the 'Administrator' account from now on."
LUA doesn't really work in a home Windows environment because the people that shouldn't have admin rights usually aren't experienced enough to use it, while the people that ARE experienced enough don't necessarily need it, because they're not going to open an email attachment named "HotRussianXXXGirls.exe".
On the other hand, I can pay $9.50 (it's actually a little cheaper where I live) and see a movie in a theater. More like $5 for a matinee.
Assuming a "home theater" system costs $1000 (which would be a really cheap setup), that's the equivalent of 105 movies in the theater. I doubt I've seen that many in my entire life.
Price for myself and six of my friends to see a movie in a theater: $57
$1000 divided by $57 = 17.543 movies with friends
Your equation only holds up if you only go to the movies alone.
Sony is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America
Sony designed the PSP to (among other things) play movies
They're still burned about the whole DeCSS thing.
Exactly. Absolute best example of this:
Burn a weird DVD. Maybe it has the wrong region, maybe it's in PAL... just something weird about it. Throw it in an Apex player that you got for $20 on sale at Best Buy. It plays the disc. Now throw that disc in a $300-$400 Sony DVD player + surround sound setup. Disc cannot be read.
I'm personally much more productive on a larger screen, full sized keyboard, and a comfortable external mouse.
And to the smart asses who say you can hook all these up to a notebook, yeah but why?
There are plenty of widescreen 17" notebooks out there with a full size keyboard, 3GHz+ Pentium 4 or equivalent Athlon 64, and 1GB of RAM. All you're really missing is the external mouse, which is as simple as popping a wireless mouse adapter that's the size of a USB flash drive into the USB port on the side.
This isn't like the old days when the biggest laptop you could find was a 15" and getting yourself set up at a coffee shop meant plugging in a telephone wire, a power cable, and a wired mouse. Lots of laptops have decent battery life, built-in wifi, and a USB port on the side for a wireless mouse.
Anime DVDs are typically 5 episodes long
You're fucking kidding, right? I don't have a single DVD with more than 4 episodes on; 3 is more common, 2 is becoming more common, and I've even seen a couple of series where the first disc contains one single episode.
The general rule since anime moved to the DVD format is that extra-long series like Gundam, Dragonball, etc. have 5 episodes per disc, 24 episode series have 3 or 4, and 13 episode series possibly have even less, with a few super-expensive-to-license OVAs like Blue Submarine #6 or FLCL having ridiculously low episode numbers.
Naruto in all likelihood would have five per disc. In fact, it might even have six per disc because of its length. Definitely not less than that, though.
And face it, I'm sure most of the people downloading Naruto wouldn't even think of buying the DVDs. I mean, just look at all the complaints on the forums when the Naruto license was announced, when their free flow of episodes was in danger of getting shut down.
I think that that problem is more specific to Naruto than you would think. When Naruto was licensed, it had already gone far past the 100 episode mark. Anime DVDs are typically 5 episodes long and released every two to three months (usually three), so if the fansubbing stopped when the show was licensed, the fans would've gotten to see the rest of the series roughly five years from now. If the show had a faster than normal release, maybe only two or three.
The domestic anime industry obviously watches the fansub downloads to see what the American fans think about it, which is essentially using them as a free focus group. If they're going to do that, they should at least be courteous enough to license a show before it hits that kind of mark. If they aren't, then... well... the fans kind of rebel. I know I have the same feeling about Sunabouzu. The show was almost halfway through its fansubbing last month when Funimation announced that it would be released in the US "some time in 2006". And they announced it right after the first episode of a two-parter was released. I understand why they do it, but it kind of sucks to be a fan in that situation.