No, the upgradeability argument is slowly ceasing to hold water. What is a concern is heat dissipation, cost, and (as a side effect of those two) raw power of your components. You simply won't get the same performance from a notebook as from a desktop, comparing highest end notebooks and highest end desktops.
One word: Cost.
If you want to upgrade your laptop, you have a to pay a serious premium on every part. The hard drive costs more, the video card costs more, the RAM costs more, and if you want to add any kind of special functionality that isn't already there, like a higher-end DVD burner, a video capture card, more ports, or virtually anything else, you're going to pay at least 20% more for it, if not much, much more than that.
Hmmm. Maybe being a Mac user makes me biased on this, but I reckon that computer users (of all kinds) should be able to flick a switch and just have it work. They shouldn't have to educate themselves about viruses and other malware. They shouldn't need to be concerned about security and other issues. After all, I don't need to read up on emission spectra and the effect of induction on power phase lag just to fit a light bulb or press a light switch; neither should I need to learn lots about computer security just to use a few applications. In short, we shouldn't be having this conversation!
Any suitably complicated household appliance will need to receive at least SOME care. I'd love to believe that I don't need to clean the lint trap, don't need to put this mysterious "detergent" in my dishwasher, and don't need to take old food out of my refrigerator and throw it in the trash. But I do.
Most appliances in our homes are slightly more complicated than a lightbulb. The strange part is that even though protecting a computer isn't much more complicated, no one does it. Going to Windows Update requires what, two clicks? That's easier than cleaning a lint trap. And pressing "OK" when Zone Alarm says, "Hey, you need to update me!" is even easier. While I'd love to live in a world where my appliances all take care of themselves, I'm still glad to live in a world where taking care of them is a two minute process like cleaning a lint trap or going to Windows Update. And it's ridiculous that the average computer user isn't there with me just because HP, Toshiba, and other computer manufacturers put a higher priority on pre-installing AOL on your machine than pre-installing Zone Alarm, Ad-Aware, or a host of other ridiculously-easy-to-use programs.
The instruction manual for a dryer tells you to clean the lint trap. Why can't your PC's manual do the same damn thing?
To me, it seems like a horrible answer to a (what should be) simple problem. Developers should be concerned with making a good game, not how much battery life their game will have. I'm sure this will eliminate or seriously affect entire genres. When building a portable, you would think that one of the first things you would focus on is battery life. Most companies hold off on releasing a product until it gets acceptable battery life.
I think you're misunderstanding the issue, here. The problem isn't that the hardware takes up a lot of power. The problem is that with an optical drive, the software developers have control over how much power their game takes up, not the hardware developer. One software developer can create a very efficiently coded game that very rarely spins the optical drive, while another could create a very inefficient, poorly coded game that spins the optical drive almost constantly. So whereas one game from one company could drain the battery in ten, another game from another company could drain it in just six.
And the worst part is that when Spongebob Squarepants: The Jackass Licensed Game Developer's Adventure drains the battery in six hours, no one will care that other, more professional developers like Capcom and Square are getting four more hours of battery life out of their games, or that the problem is obviously the Jackass Licensed Game Developer's fault. They'll just blame Sony, because they've never had an optical drive in a handheld before and will assume that any power inefficiency is the hardware developer's fault, just like it was with Sega and the Game Gear.
The vulnerability has been identified, people are complaining that it's not being fixed... I bet it takes a virus to get MS (and others) moving to fix it.
The problem is that it CAN'T be fixed. Microsoft's programs, like Office, explorer.exe, the built-in Windows image viewer, etc. have been fixed, but that doesn't mean that everything on your machine is fixed. Anyone using third party image viewer software needs to get an update from the developer of that software, because they probably created their own equally vulnerable implementation of GDI+. And if you're attached to a certain outdated image viewer that no longer has a developer to patch it (like myself), then you're just screwed.
This article is not economics, not public policy, not even deserving opinion. Just the typical xenophobic, bigoted kind of rant that the nativist crowd likes to engage in. Anti-immigrant sentiment is the omnivorous reptile in the fauna of politics. A recession with falling wages? Cheap immigrant labor must be to blame. Terrorism? Without immigration there wouldn't be any. Traffic? Too many immigrants must have moved in. Whatever the issue at hand, the subterfuged racism of the nativist crowd always translates into an immigration problem.
The United States has millions of illegal Mexican immigrants who live in fear of getting caught and are regularly abused by employers who can get away with paying them slave wages. Both from the point of view of the immigrants and the citizens, we do have some sort of immigration problem. It isn't the key problem behind everything wrong in the United States, but at the very least, SOME sort of problem is there. There's no reason to jump between the extremes of "the immigration problem is the new apocalypse" and "there is no immigration problem, you bigot". There's a very wide area between those two ideas, and I believe that the United States is somewhere within it.
...considering Gran Turismo 3 was essentially perfect in what it was trying to achieve. The whole point of a GT4 (aside from making craploads of money) was to play Online.
I guess GT4 will just be GT3 with new cars and tracks - another expansion pack.
GT3 was a great game, but it wasn't "essentially perfect". The tuning system was really abusive if you didn't already know EXACTLY how to tune a car (and the in-game information was absolute crap), the physics engine didn't allow for anything other than very stiff or very wild movement, and the physics engine also rewarded driving like an idiot. I've played one of the mountain stages probably over a hundred times and I still haven't found a faster way to handle the widest curve other than letting your car slam into the guardrail and slide across it.
The real attraction, for me, is the new physics engine, which is the soul of the entire game, along with the new modes, such as the drift competition. The new cars and tracks are just gravy on top of that.
Um...that came with my wife's Gateway machine. It's not like we copied some "l33t" CD copy program hack. It fricken CAME with the machine!
More than 90% of PCs sold in North America come with this software right now, as well as the vast majority of burners. If a PC has a CD-RW installed (I've seen ONE in a retail store that doesn't and I don't believe Dell or Gateway offer many online), then it comes with something to use it, usually Nero, EasyCD, or a similar program.
In roughly two to three years, blocks like this simply won't be practical, because absolutely no one would be able to install the software without problems.
Dynasty Warriors (Koei) Metal Gear Solid Acid (Konami) Koron (Cyber Front) Ape Escape (SCE) Dokodemo Issho (SCE) Minna no Golf (SCE) Ten no Kagi Chi no Mon (SCE) Armored Core Formula Front (From Software) Puyo Puyo Fever (Sega) The Tower of Purgatory (Hudson)
Yeah, I really don't know what Sony's thinking. Why don't they go for the best-selling games, rather than bargain bin crap like Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo*, Dynasty Warriors, Tony Hawk Underground*, Hot Shots Golf, Armored Core, and Disgaea*? You'd think that instead of doing that, they would produce sequels to their most popular franchises and make them PSP launch titles. Oh, wait...
* Games marked with an asterisk are announced games that weren't on your list. Did you forget about them or did you intend for "first generation" to mean "released the exact same day as the system"?
Prove to me that Sony has sold all their consoles at a loss.
I guarantee you cannot cite adequate evidence to support this. You don't know what you're talking about and you're just repeating the same old crap that gets posted in the games section all the time. Not all consoles are sold at a loss - get over it.
Most of the reliable sources (newspapers, magazines) don't have the stories available for the PlayStation and PS2 in easily-searchable sources like Google news, but a quick search turned up two interesting bits about their current plans:
As per 1Up's article, Sony plans to sell the PSP at a loss. And if you Ctrl+F for the word "loss" in ZDNet's PSX story, it will not only tell you that the PSX was planned to sell at a loss, but that it is generally an industry standard, much like the razorblade entry.
makers typically sell hardware at a loss and make their profits from royalties on game software sales. That model gets shaky, however, when you start cramming nongame functions into the same box, Cole said.
"They've been able to get the price way down on game systems, because they can make it up on software," Cole said. "With these kinds of hybrid devices, you're selling to people who aren't necessarily going to buy a lot of games. But you can't necessarily expect to charge a premium over the existing products it's intended to replace."
The only thing I can't really prove is that Nintendo actually sells theirs at a profit. That's mostly from print sources like EGM's Quartermann column.
On a related note, how come Nintendo doesn't do this and utterly destroy the PSP? Like you said, the DVD disc would never work for a handheld, but the GCs discs are already the same size as Sony is plannign for the PSP. The GC is already fairly small, and by now they must be able to put the whole thing onto a single low power draw board. Instant access to the entire GC library coupled with a fairly low price ($200?) would make it the obvious choice.
Most Sony consoles, or at least the two that have existed so far, begin their life cycles as serious loss leaders. Sony loses tons of money for the first two years, at which point their slow refinements to the manufacturing process finally begin to draw a small profit. By the system's fifth year or so, they're actually out of the hole and profiting from the hardware itself.
Nintendo, on the other hand, based on what little they've told us in the past, likes to make at least some money on their consoles, and they're probably making a small profit on every GameCube they sell right now. If they were to make it a handheld competitor to the PSP, they'd have to start losing money on it and bet that they can make it up in software sales. The problem with that is that even though they could conceivably make up the difference in software sales, they're a much smaller company than Sony or Microsoft. If they produced a loss-leading console or handheld and Sony happened to royally kick the crap out of it, the one-two punch would probably knock Nintendo right out of the hardware business.
It seems console companies always put out these small, streamlined versions... that lose some features that nobody's using or that they don't like. Power LED, keyboard slot, mystery connection that nobody knows what it's for, MIL-CD support, that kind of thing.
Any bets on what we're going to lose this time?
Well, we may not necessarily lose anything. The PS2's business is starting to depend on the presence of a modem in the machine, so there's a good chance that Sony could release the PSTwo at the same price as the PS2, but with a modem built-in. If a NIC costs less than $10 at your local Best Buy, CompUSA, or Mom & Pop Computer Shop, just imagine how little it must cost Sony.
And besides, there's not a whole lot to lose in the PS2. The hard drive slot is mandatory for certain games, so they can't lose that. The modem slot is also mandatory for some, so they can't lose that. Removing the USB port would stab Logitech, Mad Catz, Namco, Sega, and a whole lot of other peripheral manufacturers in the back. The only thing it might lose is the DVD player, because the unit can be produced cheaper without the DVD licensing cost.
"lots of small and specialized programs work better than one bloated program."
No begging the question there! Here's an equally biased statement taking the opposite stand:
"One fully-integrated program works better than lots of small badly-named programs that are strung together to crudely approximate the desired function."
The philosophy doesn't have to be right; it just has to be THERE, which it most certainly is in Linux. The general statement that most Linux (or Unix) programs are built upon the idea that several smaller programs are better than one big one can really switch on the lightbulb above new users' heads. Once you realize that piping ls into grep is the same thing as pulling up Windows Explorer and using one of its many, many hotkeys to bring up a search function, Unix-based systems suddenly make a lot more sense.
Until they learn at least a little bit about the philosophy behind what they're doing, it's all just "monkey see, monkey do", giving them no way to learn on their own.
You really should have done it first oportunity you got. Me? I got the story before it went live on slashdot and therefore beat the rush. yay for subscription... but, now you'll have to contend with the hoards of people who rush to open steam after seeing this
This is a Slashdot Games article, not a frontpage Slashdot article. The only people that will see it are the ones that specifically go to games.slashdot.org or the people that have Slashdot Games in their newsbox on the side of Slashdot. Therefore, no rush has been or will be created by this article.
Just because there are good reasons to subscribe doesn't mean that every reason is a good reason.
The cameras are the only way that the government can enforce the congestion charges. There are no toll gates or places where you are blocked until you pay - you may travel anywhere freely. Hoever, if you enter the congestion charge zone, then your number plate is recorded by the cameras and if you don't pay for that day (using any one of a number of methods), then you get fined.
I think you missed my point. You were using the results of the congestion charge to illustrate that surveillance cameras are not a bad thing. I'm asking if the effect would be any different if they had just implemented tolls instead of cameras, because I think the charge itself is the key element that makes the congestion charge work, not the process by which that charge is delivered. And since you could easily (in the case of many cities) make the toll almost as wide as you want if it's placed outside of the city and onto the entrance to the highway, the additional congestion from the toll would be negligible, just like it is in the New York/New Jersey area.
I would welcome rather than fear more cameras on the streets in the UK. There is one thing that privacy advocates are forgetting, for there to be an impact on your privacy there needs to be either a person at the other end of the camera, or an automated consequence.
With so many cameras, I doubt there is the manpower or the interest for someone to look at them all, only the ones that are really relevent - where a crime or suspicious behaviour has already been reported. After this the cameras are simply pointing out the facts of the situation, and are we really that afraid of facts and consequences of our actions (if those actions are illegal or suspicious)?
Yes, but someone is always looking at some of the cameras, and when they are, who's to say what they're looking at? Are they just leering at tits and ass (as one earlier NYT article reported) or stalking certain individuals just for the juvenile fun of it, or are they seriously ignoring everything else and just paying attention to violence and thievery?
And if the cameras aren't a bad thing, then why don't they put some webcams up with a view of the guys watching the cameras, so that interested persons (like all of those civil liberties groups) can take a look at them? If they can look at us to make sure that we're keeping in line and doing what we're supposed to, then why can't we make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to?
At the moment I feel that I trust the British government enough that this is an acceptable situation, look at the impact the congestion charges (and enforcement cameras) have had on London traffic for example.
Is it the cameras or just the expense? If there was a $9 toll at every entrance and exit to New York City, I'm sure that would cut down on their congestion problems, too. People in the neighboring states already complain about how much it costs just to get to New York City with all the local tolls along the way. If there was a $9 toll on top of that, they just wouldn't go.
This guy is all about TV. High definition. Content delivered on hard drives. 100-megabit internet connections at home. Nothing he said was that radical, or that interesting.
Compared to every other rich American businessman in the entertainment industry who's all about commercials during movies, broadcast flags, content delivered on whatever can lock the user out, and adjusting the "consumer's" internet connection to put a priority on corporate content, he's a genius.
The guy might not be Einstein, but it's refreshing to see someone in the TV industry that gets... well, absolutely anything. It's sort of like a dog who can open doors or get his food down from a cabinet that's six feet above him. He may not be a genius, but he's way above the rest of his kind.
First, this is NOT meant as a flame at all. I would just like to know. Who here actually backs up their DVD's or CD's?
Lots of people do. LAN partiers. People with very small children (two to four year olds playing Reader Rabbit or listening to kids' songs). People who want a copy of a CD for both their home (real one) and their car (backup). People who would rather have a backup of a movie or CD on their laptop hard drive rather than switching disks (such as those who regularly travel by plane, train, ferry, etc.).
Personally, my family uses the "one album, two CDs" solution for the home and the car, and I know several people who use them for games at LAN parties. And if I ever have kids, I'll definitely be using the backup solution for games. If anyone handled disc-based games the way my friends and I handled NES cartridges, they'd be buying replacements constantly. Then again, I never broke many music CDs as a kid. But on the few occasions when I did, I was breaking $12-$13 worth of stuff, not $50. Teaching a kid to handle disc media can be pretty easy, but teaching them to never trip and fall on (or with) anything fragile is much harder.
Exactly what I was going to say. The iPod is now a status symbol. There may be more functional MP3 players (iRiver...debatable) and cheaper MP3 players, but the masses don't want the better player, they want the iPod.
There's also the fact that the iPod's status as a "status symbol" grants it essentially the same feature that Windows has: there's tons of support for it. In much the same way that there are tons of applications and games for Windows and a small percentage of them have a Linux port, there are tons of third party companies that make accessories for the iPod, and a small percentage of them make a matching accessory for another MP3 player. It's gotten to the point where there are entire aisles in some retail stores that are devoted solely to the iPod. Cases, battery packs, car adapters, FM transmitters, portable speakers, headphones... all designed either to interface with the iPod or, in the case where the part fits any MP3 player (headphones), match the iPod's color scheme.
Went there a couple of weeks ago to buy an iPod. Of course, the iPods were behind some sort of bullet-proof protected glass, so I had to get a salesperson even to look at the friggin' box.
This is because everything in a cardboard box gets the bottom cut out of it with a knife. In my store (a CompUSA), we actually had to put all of the retail boxes for the City of Heroes and Lineage extra time cards (about $15 each, I think?) in plastic security boxes because someone was repeatedly cutting the bottoms out, taking the contents, putting the box back on the shelf, and leaving without anyone ever knowing. If we get jackasses like that that are willing to steal fucking $15 time cards and, possibly worse, games like Doom 3 that were already cracked on their first day of release, how long do you think the iPod Minis would last out on the shelves?
What you can do is use CC rebates in addition to price matching (PM) to get great deals, but there isn't a store anywhere that will match a competitors rebates.
I work for CompUSA and we just price matched a rebate with a price break yesterday. Some guy came in with a print out that said that Staples would give him a $50 rebate on a scanner, a scanner which none of the local Staples stores had in stock. We had it in stock, so I brought it to customer service, asked the manager on duty if we matched rebates, and he gave the guy $50 off the sale price right on the spot. The customer bought a $99 scanner for $49 with no rebates and then bought the $11.99 one year service plan. Because the scanner is discontinued, it's guaranteed that he'll get a newer, better model of printer from the same company if anything happens to his extremely cheap scanner.
And just because Circuit City's site says that they don't price match rebates doesn't mean that the individual stores won't. Depending on the item (read: not a desktop or laptop PC), the managers can have a lot of leeway in pricing.
In any case, it's certainly true: People (and as a subset of people, gamers) have a marked affinity for rehashes, sequels, and clones. For the most part, they display aversion to anything new or innovative. We humans are strange that way, we find comfort in familiarity. I'm very much guilty of this myself. Rather than an innovative new game I'd much rather play a remake of one of my old favourites, whether that be X-COM, Master of Magic/Orion, Doom, Diablo, whatever, it doesn't matter.
I know I am, God forbid, stepping out of the Ivory Tower for a moment here, but could it be that people have simply found a concept that they love, such as racing games, and are willing to see them improved upon? Lots of games with innovative concepts don't always flawlessly execute those concepts on the first try. Sequels give the developers a chance to improve upon those concepts and create something that doesn't bring an entirely new concept to the table, but does bring a more refined, nuanced form of that concept.
I know that a lot of people here are going to assume that I fall into the category of "most humans" (read: ignorant peasant) when I say this, but I'm looking forward to games like Gran Turismo 4 and Prince of Persia 2. The idea of a racing sim with Gran Turismo's depth and variety, but devoid of Gran Turismo's usual failings (hitting walls >>> not hitting walls), is pretty close to my concept of a perfect game, even if it is the billionth console racing game ever and at least the fourth iteration of this particular series. And so far, I'm assuming that Prince of Persia 2 will be nothing more than a total rehash of Prince of Persia, but without the game's huge stumbling points (repetitive battles, numerous glitches, anticlimactic ending). But honestly, I wouldn't mind ten or twenty more hours of a innovative game concept, even if I have to pay for it again. I don't see why an innovative game concept should be kicked to the curb right after its debut, no matter how flawed, simply because it's "old news" to the elite gamers that have moved on to newer stuff.
vehicle's design is not really street-safe - this will be a problem as more efficient, lighter cars share the road with Hummers.
Because if the driver of an ultra-lightweight car suddenly swerved in front of a Prius and struck it head-on at full speed, the driver would've been okay?
So... do we get rid of HUMMER's or Solar Powered cars? Wouldn't common sense dictate that the bigger car is the threat and should be disallowed?
Since there's no question that eighteen wheelers, moving vans, commercial vans, cement mixers, buses, and pickups are never going to be banned from the road, why the Hell would you ban the Hummer? The economy of every industrialized nation relies on large vehicles of all kinds, so why ban just one, or several, if tons of them are still going to be around?
Sweet counter but it did look a bit amateurish seeing chun-li super from across the screen, especially as you could seen a few super attempt screw ups right before it was pulled off.
That's what I thought at first, but now I don't think they were really failed attempts at a super. I think that Chun-Li was standing in place and using lots of different attacks because all the player needed was ONE HIT, even a blocked hit, to finish his opponent off. When Daigo didn't go for it, he just decided to go for lots of tick damage with the super.
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No, the upgradeability argument is slowly ceasing to hold water. What is a concern is heat dissipation, cost, and (as a side effect of those two) raw power of your components. You simply won't get the same performance from a notebook as from a desktop, comparing highest end notebooks and highest end desktops.
One word: Cost.
If you want to upgrade your laptop, you have a to pay a serious premium on every part. The hard drive costs more, the video card costs more, the RAM costs more, and if you want to add any kind of special functionality that isn't already there, like a higher-end DVD burner, a video capture card, more ports, or virtually anything else, you're going to pay at least 20% more for it, if not much, much more than that.
Hmmm. Maybe being a Mac user makes me biased on this, but I reckon that computer users (of all kinds) should be able to flick a switch and just have it work. They shouldn't have to educate themselves about viruses and other malware. They shouldn't need to be concerned about security and other issues. After all, I don't need to read up on emission spectra and the effect of induction on power phase lag just to fit a light bulb or press a light switch; neither should I need to learn lots about computer security just to use a few applications. In short, we shouldn't be having this conversation!
Any suitably complicated household appliance will need to receive at least SOME care. I'd love to believe that I don't need to clean the lint trap, don't need to put this mysterious "detergent" in my dishwasher, and don't need to take old food out of my refrigerator and throw it in the trash. But I do.
Most appliances in our homes are slightly more complicated than a lightbulb. The strange part is that even though protecting a computer isn't much more complicated, no one does it. Going to Windows Update requires what, two clicks? That's easier than cleaning a lint trap. And pressing "OK" when Zone Alarm says, "Hey, you need to update me!" is even easier. While I'd love to live in a world where my appliances all take care of themselves, I'm still glad to live in a world where taking care of them is a two minute process like cleaning a lint trap or going to Windows Update. And it's ridiculous that the average computer user isn't there with me just because HP, Toshiba, and other computer manufacturers put a higher priority on pre-installing AOL on your machine than pre-installing Zone Alarm, Ad-Aware, or a host of other ridiculously-easy-to-use programs.
The instruction manual for a dryer tells you to clean the lint trap. Why can't your PC's manual do the same damn thing?
To me, it seems like a horrible answer to a (what should be) simple problem. Developers should be concerned with making a good game, not how much battery life their game will have. I'm sure this will eliminate or seriously affect entire genres. When building a portable, you would think that one of the first things you would focus on is battery life. Most companies hold off on releasing a product until it gets acceptable battery life.
I think you're misunderstanding the issue, here. The problem isn't that the hardware takes up a lot of power. The problem is that with an optical drive, the software developers have control over how much power their game takes up, not the hardware developer. One software developer can create a very efficiently coded game that very rarely spins the optical drive, while another could create a very inefficient, poorly coded game that spins the optical drive almost constantly. So whereas one game from one company could drain the battery in ten, another game from another company could drain it in just six.
And the worst part is that when Spongebob Squarepants: The Jackass Licensed Game Developer's Adventure drains the battery in six hours, no one will care that other, more professional developers like Capcom and Square are getting four more hours of battery life out of their games, or that the problem is obviously the Jackass Licensed Game Developer's fault. They'll just blame Sony, because they've never had an optical drive in a handheld before and will assume that any power inefficiency is the hardware developer's fault, just like it was with Sega and the Game Gear.
The vulnerability has been identified, people are complaining that it's not being fixed... I bet it takes a virus to get MS (and others) moving to fix it.
The problem is that it CAN'T be fixed. Microsoft's programs, like Office, explorer.exe, the built-in Windows image viewer, etc. have been fixed, but that doesn't mean that everything on your machine is fixed. Anyone using third party image viewer software needs to get an update from the developer of that software, because they probably created their own equally vulnerable implementation of GDI+. And if you're attached to a certain outdated image viewer that no longer has a developer to patch it (like myself), then you're just screwed.
This article is not economics, not public policy, not even deserving opinion. Just the typical xenophobic, bigoted kind of rant that the nativist crowd likes to engage in. Anti-immigrant sentiment is the omnivorous reptile in the fauna of politics. A recession with falling wages? Cheap immigrant labor must be to blame. Terrorism? Without immigration there wouldn't be any. Traffic? Too many immigrants must have moved in. Whatever the issue at hand, the subterfuged racism of the nativist crowd always translates into an immigration problem.
The United States has millions of illegal Mexican immigrants who live in fear of getting caught and are regularly abused by employers who can get away with paying them slave wages. Both from the point of view of the immigrants and the citizens, we do have some sort of immigration problem. It isn't the key problem behind everything wrong in the United States, but at the very least, SOME sort of problem is there. There's no reason to jump between the extremes of "the immigration problem is the new apocalypse" and "there is no immigration problem, you bigot". There's a very wide area between those two ideas, and I believe that the United States is somewhere within it.
...considering Gran Turismo 3 was essentially perfect in what it was trying to achieve. The whole point of a GT4 (aside from making craploads of money) was to play Online.
I guess GT4 will just be GT3 with new cars and tracks - another expansion pack.
GT3 was a great game, but it wasn't "essentially perfect". The tuning system was really abusive if you didn't already know EXACTLY how to tune a car (and the in-game information was absolute crap), the physics engine didn't allow for anything other than very stiff or very wild movement, and the physics engine also rewarded driving like an idiot. I've played one of the mountain stages probably over a hundred times and I still haven't found a faster way to handle the widest curve other than letting your car slam into the guardrail and slide across it.
The real attraction, for me, is the new physics engine, which is the soul of the entire game, along with the new modes, such as the drift competition. The new cars and tracks are just gravy on top of that.
Um...that came with my wife's Gateway machine. It's not like we copied some "l33t" CD copy program hack. It fricken CAME with the machine!
More than 90% of PCs sold in North America come with this software right now, as well as the vast majority of burners. If a PC has a CD-RW installed (I've seen ONE in a retail store that doesn't and I don't believe Dell or Gateway offer many online), then it comes with something to use it, usually Nero, EasyCD, or a similar program.
In roughly two to three years, blocks like this simply won't be practical, because absolutely no one would be able to install the software without problems.
Dynasty Warriors (Koei)
Metal Gear Solid Acid (Konami)
Koron (Cyber Front)
Ape Escape (SCE)
Dokodemo Issho (SCE)
Minna no Golf (SCE)
Ten no Kagi Chi no Mon (SCE)
Armored Core Formula Front (From Software)
Puyo Puyo Fever (Sega)
The Tower of Purgatory (Hudson)
Yeah, I really don't know what Sony's thinking. Why don't they go for the best-selling games, rather than bargain bin crap like Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo*, Dynasty Warriors, Tony Hawk Underground*, Hot Shots Golf, Armored Core, and Disgaea*? You'd think that instead of doing that, they would produce sequels to their most popular franchises and make them PSP launch titles. Oh, wait...
* Games marked with an asterisk are announced games that weren't on your list. Did you forget about them or did you intend for "first generation" to mean "released the exact same day as the system"?
Prove to me that Sony has sold all their consoles at a loss.
I guarantee you cannot cite adequate evidence to support this. You don't know what you're talking about and you're just repeating the same old crap that gets posted in the games section all the time. Not all consoles are sold at a loss - get over it.
Most of the reliable sources (newspapers, magazines) don't have the stories available for the PlayStation and PS2 in easily-searchable sources like Google news, but a quick search turned up two interesting bits about their current plans:
As per 1Up's article, Sony plans to sell the PSP at a loss. And if you Ctrl+F for the word "loss" in ZDNet's PSX story, it will not only tell you that the PSX was planned to sell at a loss, but that it is generally an industry standard, much like the razorblade entry.
makers typically sell hardware at a loss and make their profits from royalties on game software sales. That model gets shaky, however, when you start cramming nongame functions into the same box, Cole said.
"They've been able to get the price way down on game systems, because they can make it up on software," Cole said. "With these kinds of hybrid devices, you're selling to people who aren't necessarily going to buy a lot of games. But you can't necessarily expect to charge a premium over the existing products it's intended to replace."
The only thing I can't really prove is that Nintendo actually sells theirs at a profit. That's mostly from print sources like EGM's Quartermann column.
On a related note, how come Nintendo doesn't do this and utterly destroy the PSP? Like you said, the DVD disc would never work for a handheld, but the GCs discs are already the same size as Sony is plannign for the PSP. The GC is already fairly small, and by now they must be able to put the whole thing onto a single low power draw board.
Instant access to the entire GC library coupled with a fairly low price ($200?) would make it the obvious choice.
Most Sony consoles, or at least the two that have existed so far, begin their life cycles as serious loss leaders. Sony loses tons of money for the first two years, at which point their slow refinements to the manufacturing process finally begin to draw a small profit. By the system's fifth year or so, they're actually out of the hole and profiting from the hardware itself.
Nintendo, on the other hand, based on what little they've told us in the past, likes to make at least some money on their consoles, and they're probably making a small profit on every GameCube they sell right now. If they were to make it a handheld competitor to the PSP, they'd have to start losing money on it and bet that they can make it up in software sales. The problem with that is that even though they could conceivably make up the difference in software sales, they're a much smaller company than Sony or Microsoft. If they produced a loss-leading console or handheld and Sony happened to royally kick the crap out of it, the one-two punch would probably knock Nintendo right out of the hardware business.
It seems console companies always put out these small, streamlined versions... that lose some features that nobody's using or that they don't like. Power LED, keyboard slot, mystery connection that nobody knows what it's for, MIL-CD support, that kind of thing.
Any bets on what we're going to lose this time?
Well, we may not necessarily lose anything. The PS2's business is starting to depend on the presence of a modem in the machine, so there's a good chance that Sony could release the PSTwo at the same price as the PS2, but with a modem built-in. If a NIC costs less than $10 at your local Best Buy, CompUSA, or Mom & Pop Computer Shop, just imagine how little it must cost Sony.
And besides, there's not a whole lot to lose in the PS2. The hard drive slot is mandatory for certain games, so they can't lose that. The modem slot is also mandatory for some, so they can't lose that. Removing the USB port would stab Logitech, Mad Catz, Namco, Sega, and a whole lot of other peripheral manufacturers in the back. The only thing it might lose is the DVD player, because the unit can be produced cheaper without the DVD licensing cost.
"lots of small and specialized programs work better than one bloated program."
No begging the question there! Here's an equally biased statement taking the opposite stand:
"One fully-integrated program works better than lots of small badly-named programs that are strung together to crudely approximate the desired function."
The philosophy doesn't have to be right; it just has to be THERE, which it most certainly is in Linux. The general statement that most Linux (or Unix) programs are built upon the idea that several smaller programs are better than one big one can really switch on the lightbulb above new users' heads. Once you realize that piping ls into grep is the same thing as pulling up Windows Explorer and using one of its many, many hotkeys to bring up a search function, Unix-based systems suddenly make a lot more sense.
Until they learn at least a little bit about the philosophy behind what they're doing, it's all just "monkey see, monkey do", giving them no way to learn on their own.
You really should have done it first oportunity you got. Me? I got the story before it went live on slashdot and therefore beat the rush. yay for subscription... but, now you'll have to contend with the hoards of people who rush to open steam after seeing this
This is a Slashdot Games article, not a frontpage Slashdot article. The only people that will see it are the ones that specifically go to games.slashdot.org or the people that have Slashdot Games in their newsbox on the side of Slashdot. Therefore, no rush has been or will be created by this article.
Just because there are good reasons to subscribe doesn't mean that every reason is a good reason.
The cameras are the only way that the government can enforce the congestion charges. There are no toll gates or places where you are blocked until you pay - you may travel anywhere freely. Hoever, if you enter the congestion charge zone, then your number plate is recorded by the cameras and if you don't pay for that day (using any one of a number of methods), then you get fined.
I think you missed my point. You were using the results of the congestion charge to illustrate that surveillance cameras are not a bad thing. I'm asking if the effect would be any different if they had just implemented tolls instead of cameras, because I think the charge itself is the key element that makes the congestion charge work, not the process by which that charge is delivered. And since you could easily (in the case of many cities) make the toll almost as wide as you want if it's placed outside of the city and onto the entrance to the highway, the additional congestion from the toll would be negligible, just like it is in the New York/New Jersey area.
I would welcome rather than fear more cameras on the streets in the UK. There is one thing that privacy advocates are forgetting, for there to be an impact on your privacy there needs to be either a person at the other end of the camera, or an automated consequence.
With so many cameras, I doubt there is the manpower or the interest for someone to look at them all, only the ones that are really relevent - where a crime or suspicious behaviour has already been reported. After this the cameras are simply pointing out the facts of the situation, and are we really that afraid of facts and consequences of our actions (if those actions are illegal or suspicious)?
Yes, but someone is always looking at some of the cameras, and when they are, who's to say what they're looking at? Are they just leering at tits and ass (as one earlier NYT article reported) or stalking certain individuals just for the juvenile fun of it, or are they seriously ignoring everything else and just paying attention to violence and thievery?
And if the cameras aren't a bad thing, then why don't they put some webcams up with a view of the guys watching the cameras, so that interested persons (like all of those civil liberties groups) can take a look at them? If they can look at us to make sure that we're keeping in line and doing what we're supposed to, then why can't we make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to?
At the moment I feel that I trust the British government enough that this is an acceptable situation, look at the impact the congestion charges (and enforcement cameras) have had on London traffic for example.
Is it the cameras or just the expense? If there was a $9 toll at every entrance and exit to New York City, I'm sure that would cut down on their congestion problems, too. People in the neighboring states already complain about how much it costs just to get to New York City with all the local tolls along the way. If there was a $9 toll on top of that, they just wouldn't go.
This guy is all about TV. High definition. Content delivered on hard drives. 100-megabit internet connections at home. Nothing he said was that radical, or that interesting.
Compared to every other rich American businessman in the entertainment industry who's all about commercials during movies, broadcast flags, content delivered on whatever can lock the user out, and adjusting the "consumer's" internet connection to put a priority on corporate content, he's a genius.
The guy might not be Einstein, but it's refreshing to see someone in the TV industry that gets... well, absolutely anything. It's sort of like a dog who can open doors or get his food down from a cabinet that's six feet above him. He may not be a genius, but he's way above the rest of his kind.
First, this is NOT meant as a flame at all. I would just like to know. Who here actually backs up their DVD's or CD's?
Lots of people do. LAN partiers. People with very small children (two to four year olds playing Reader Rabbit or listening to kids' songs). People who want a copy of a CD for both their home (real one) and their car (backup). People who would rather have a backup of a movie or CD on their laptop hard drive rather than switching disks (such as those who regularly travel by plane, train, ferry, etc.).
Personally, my family uses the "one album, two CDs" solution for the home and the car, and I know several people who use them for games at LAN parties. And if I ever have kids, I'll definitely be using the backup solution for games. If anyone handled disc-based games the way my friends and I handled NES cartridges, they'd be buying replacements constantly. Then again, I never broke many music CDs as a kid. But on the few occasions when I did, I was breaking $12-$13 worth of stuff, not $50. Teaching a kid to handle disc media can be pretty easy, but teaching them to never trip and fall on (or with) anything fragile is much harder.
Exactly what I was going to say. The iPod is now a status symbol. There may be more functional MP3 players (iRiver...debatable) and cheaper MP3 players, but the masses don't want the better player, they want the iPod.
There's also the fact that the iPod's status as a "status symbol" grants it essentially the same feature that Windows has: there's tons of support for it. In much the same way that there are tons of applications and games for Windows and a small percentage of them have a Linux port, there are tons of third party companies that make accessories for the iPod, and a small percentage of them make a matching accessory for another MP3 player. It's gotten to the point where there are entire aisles in some retail stores that are devoted solely to the iPod. Cases, battery packs, car adapters, FM transmitters, portable speakers, headphones... all designed either to interface with the iPod or, in the case where the part fits any MP3 player (headphones), match the iPod's color scheme.
Went there a couple of weeks ago to buy an iPod. Of course, the iPods were behind some sort of bullet-proof protected glass, so I had to get a salesperson even to look at the friggin' box.
This is because everything in a cardboard box gets the bottom cut out of it with a knife. In my store (a CompUSA), we actually had to put all of the retail boxes for the City of Heroes and Lineage extra time cards (about $15 each, I think?) in plastic security boxes because someone was repeatedly cutting the bottoms out, taking the contents, putting the box back on the shelf, and leaving without anyone ever knowing. If we get jackasses like that that are willing to steal fucking $15 time cards and, possibly worse, games like Doom 3 that were already cracked on their first day of release, how long do you think the iPod Minis would last out on the shelves?
What you can do is use CC rebates in addition to price matching (PM) to get great deals, but there isn't a store anywhere that will match a competitors rebates.
I work for CompUSA and we just price matched a rebate with a price break yesterday. Some guy came in with a print out that said that Staples would give him a $50 rebate on a scanner, a scanner which none of the local Staples stores had in stock. We had it in stock, so I brought it to customer service, asked the manager on duty if we matched rebates, and he gave the guy $50 off the sale price right on the spot. The customer bought a $99 scanner for $49 with no rebates and then bought the $11.99 one year service plan. Because the scanner is discontinued, it's guaranteed that he'll get a newer, better model of printer from the same company if anything happens to his extremely cheap scanner.
And just because Circuit City's site says that they don't price match rebates doesn't mean that the individual stores won't. Depending on the item (read: not a desktop or laptop PC), the managers can have a lot of leeway in pricing.
In any case, it's certainly true: People (and as a subset of people, gamers) have a marked affinity for rehashes, sequels, and clones. For the most part, they display aversion to anything new or innovative. We humans are strange that way, we find comfort in familiarity. I'm very much guilty of this myself. Rather than an innovative new game I'd much rather play a remake of one of my old favourites, whether that be X-COM, Master of Magic/Orion, Doom, Diablo, whatever, it doesn't matter.
I know I am, God forbid, stepping out of the Ivory Tower for a moment here, but could it be that people have simply found a concept that they love, such as racing games, and are willing to see them improved upon? Lots of games with innovative concepts don't always flawlessly execute those concepts on the first try. Sequels give the developers a chance to improve upon those concepts and create something that doesn't bring an entirely new concept to the table, but does bring a more refined, nuanced form of that concept.
I know that a lot of people here are going to assume that I fall into the category of "most humans" (read: ignorant peasant) when I say this, but I'm looking forward to games like Gran Turismo 4 and Prince of Persia 2. The idea of a racing sim with Gran Turismo's depth and variety, but devoid of Gran Turismo's usual failings (hitting walls >>> not hitting walls), is pretty close to my concept of a perfect game, even if it is the billionth console racing game ever and at least the fourth iteration of this particular series. And so far, I'm assuming that Prince of Persia 2 will be nothing more than a total rehash of Prince of Persia, but without the game's huge stumbling points (repetitive battles, numerous glitches, anticlimactic ending). But honestly, I wouldn't mind ten or twenty more hours of a innovative game concept, even if I have to pay for it again. I don't see why an innovative game concept should be kicked to the curb right after its debut, no matter how flawed, simply because it's "old news" to the elite gamers that have moved on to newer stuff.
vehicle's design is not really street-safe - this will be a problem as more efficient, lighter cars share the road with Hummers.
Because if the driver of an ultra-lightweight car suddenly swerved in front of a Prius and struck it head-on at full speed, the driver would've been okay?
So... do we get rid of HUMMER's or Solar Powered cars? Wouldn't common sense dictate that the bigger car is the threat and should be disallowed?
Since there's no question that eighteen wheelers, moving vans, commercial vans, cement mixers, buses, and pickups are never going to be banned from the road, why the Hell would you ban the Hummer? The economy of every industrialized nation relies on large vehicles of all kinds, so why ban just one, or several, if tons of them are still going to be around?
Try GameFAQs.
And Ryu's spinning kick is the "Tatsumaki-Senpuu-Kyaku", more commonly known as the "Hurricane Kick".
Sweet counter but it did look a bit amateurish seeing chun-li super from across the screen, especially as you could seen a few super attempt screw ups right before it was pulled off.
That's what I thought at first, but now I don't think they were really failed attempts at a super. I think that Chun-Li was standing in place and using lots of different attacks because all the player needed was ONE HIT, even a blocked hit, to finish his opponent off. When Daigo didn't go for it, he just decided to go for lots of tick damage with the super.