Remind me again, why is free trade with China such a great deal for the developed world?Because it provides cheaper goods and a higher standard of living for the developed world, and higher wages, a stronger economy and a higher standard of living for China.
Remind me again, why are artificial, punitive trade barriers a good deal for anyone?
The MMOs I'm familiar have multiple servers and you get to choose which one you log into when you play. Suppose the game owner were to establish some fraction of those servers as the "pay for stuff" servers where you can buy levels, equipment, etc. using real money.
The problem with that is, people only buy stuff so they can be better than other players. On a server full of people who've all paid for stuff, there's no advantage, so no point in paying for anything.
Of course they're already predicting that people will complain this is far too similar to 'life' and not want to play it, but that's expected to take a fair amount of time.
No, if it was like 'life', you'd just be stuck at level 1 permanently, killing the same rats over and over again.
They may have a culture and history, but I'm not sure it's worth saving. Their re-locating costs are zero considering they just park their caravans on someone's field, and make a living through theft and intimidation.
Screw paying for a soon-outdated single purpose device
PCs get outdated far more quickly than consoles. In five years you'll still be able to buy and play wii games. In five years you'll have had to spend several grand to keep your PC up to date.
What scares people about China is not that it is getting ahead but that we're open to their citizens but they are not really open to us (for instance, no foreign companies can have more than 49% ownership in a domestic company over there).
America doesn't seem very open to people buying their ports or media companies. Or other countries' steel...
For example they only use white paint for the lines. In the States they use white and yellow. You can tell the difference real quick which lanes are for your direction of traffic (white) and which is the divider line (yellow).
Roads with multiple lanes are supposed to have central reservations. Otherwise, the lane dividers will be dashes, and the central lines will be solid.
I take that back there are two things about driving in the UK, the second is do you people believe in F'ing street/road signs?
No, we usually know where we're going. Otherwise we read a map or get directions.
HD-DVD doesn't tell you what it is. From the name, I'd assume it was a normal DVD with HD content on, that could be played by hooking up a normal DVD player to a HDTV. With blu ray you know it's a different format straight off. And five fucking syllables...
They're not necessarily popular, just accessible. Any game that comes free with Windows and can be played discreetely at work will be played by a lot of people.
I would say that by some measures WoW is already a greater cultural influence that Shakespeare.
Well we'll see if people are referencing and playing WoW in 400 years, then we can compare it to Shakespeare.
Personally I don't think that millions of people mindlessly drooling at a screen like zombies playing a game they probably hate and only play because they're addicted and just have to get that next sword/armour/scroll, counts as cultural influence, but that's just my opinion.
WoW won't go down as a classic, nor will any MMO. There's nothing significant about them that will make people remember them, they're just finely tuned to be as addictive as possible.
Arm wrestling is all about twisting arms, there's nothing else to it. If FPSs are designed to be mouse contests, why bother with all the weapons, running around, etc?
I suppose if internet connection speeds were never going to get any better than today, you'd be right.
For most people, speeds are limited by distance to the exchange, and short of some major technological breakthrough, they're not going to get any faster.
Remind me again why you're going to store streaming video on your hard drive?
So I can watch it more than once without having to download it over again or saturate my connection whilst watching it so I can't download anything else.
Plus you'd need one hell of a connection to stream HDTV.
Optical storage's days are numbered. Flash memory and fast internet connections are making it worthless.
Definitely. I really don't want to keep a stack of DVDs when I can sit waiting for something to download for hours and hours, then get cut off for breaking my monthly quota in a day. Then have to re-download everything if the hard disk crashes.
Early adopters know what they're getting into. You pay more, and might end up with something that doesn't take off. Mostly they buy them to show off how much money they've got, rather than as an investment in the technology.
How exactly does it upscale? It can't show more data than is on the DVD, and if the DVD was recorded at 576i then putting it up to 720p is just guesswork.
So what you are complaining about is that there are other people better than you.
Except they're not necessarily better at the game, just faster at twitching their fingers. I don't consider an FPS to be a very decent genre when there's so little to the game other than mouse skills.
that's one of the allures of playing games on a PC. You can have a MUCH more complicated game
I don't see the appeal in games being complicated. The way I see it, if you have to use the keyboard to do much more than type, then the game's interface is too convoluted. I think the playstation controller with its 15 buttons is way overboard, let alone over a hundred on a keyboard.
Remember what I said earlier, if you don't have the competitive spirit, then don't play to be competitive; play to have fun.
I never said I didn't want to compete. The problem is that you can't compete as these games are designed to reward fast mousework above anything else. Unless you inject yourself with crack and have a super-accurate mouse with eighty buttons, you may as well not bother logging in.
It doesn't help that many FPSs have characters that move with no sense of the laws of momentum or physiology. When you can run around at 100mph, stop on a sixpence, turn round and instantly fire off a pixel-perfect shot at someone 500 yards away, then it's not a game it's just a twitch contest.
I think we can blame the keyboard/mouse setup for encouraging PC FPS designers to make games that rely more on optimal use of the interface than the actual game. If they had to use slow, inaccurate controllers, they might make games that depend more on tactics, style, patience, trickery, decision making etc, rather than just who reacts and moves the mouse the quickest.
I thought I was the only one in the UK who realised that, for a system to work, you need balancing pressures, and a hereditary Lords is an ideal unbribable chamber. All politicians are easily corrupted, and paying them more only makes them greedier.
Yes, what could be more balancing that a load of people who have no accountability, who cannot be removed, and whose only qualification is that they were born into priviledge.
Who needs democracy anyway? Let's just pay tribute to our local knights and barons, and keep our heads down in the fields. And if you think a lord can't be bribed, you're fucking deluded.
There's a reason all of the serious online gamers use PCs - a console controller won't cut it. When the difference between headshotting someone is 3-4 pixels in hi-def, well, good luck on a PS3.
If there's a game where you need split-second, pixel-perfect precision in order to succeed at it, then I've no interest in playing it. Unreal Tournament isn't really a good example as it was designed for stupid twitch play.
Maybe if PCs had controllers rather than mice, then PC game designers might have to make games that weren't just mouse-clicking contests. Every PC FPS I've played seems like it was designed for people who's bloodstreams were 60% caffeine, and who had 25" monitors and specialised 'gaming' mice. Seriously, there are people who turn down all the graphics just so they can see a single pixel of someone's head a hundred yards away, then click on that exact pixel within a fraction of a second. I prefer games that you don't need to be some sort of freak to play.
1280*1024 is considered medium resolution in fact by most PC gamers
PC gamers will spend more on a video card that you could get a PS2 or Xbox for, so I wouldn't consider their opinions worth much.
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Remind me again, why is free trade with China such a great deal for the developed world?Because it provides cheaper goods and a higher standard of living for the developed world, and higher wages, a stronger economy and a higher standard of living for China.
Remind me again, why are artificial, punitive trade barriers a good deal for anyone?
IANAM (I am not a mobster), but I assume that in Italy the outcome is based on who bribes/threatens the judges most effectively.
Yeah, no grinding in EVE. Instead of spending a few weeks xping, you wait around for several months doing nothing. What an improvement...
The map tells you the name of the road you're on. Pretty simple really.
HD-DVD doesn't tell you what it is. From the name, I'd assume it was a normal DVD with HD content on, that could be played by hooking up a normal DVD player to a HDTV. With blu ray you know it's a different format straight off. And five fucking syllables...
They're not necessarily popular, just accessible. Any game that comes free with Windows and can be played discreetely at work will be played by a lot of people.
Personally I don't think that millions of people mindlessly drooling at a screen like zombies playing a game they probably hate and only play because they're addicted and just have to get that next sword/armour/scroll, counts as cultural influence, but that's just my opinion.
WoW won't go down as a classic, nor will any MMO. There's nothing significant about them that will make people remember them, they're just finely tuned to be as addictive as possible.
Arm wrestling is all about twisting arms, there's nothing else to it. If FPSs are designed to be mouse contests, why bother with all the weapons, running around, etc?
Plus you'd need one hell of a connection to stream HDTV.
Early adopters know what they're getting into. You pay more, and might end up with something that doesn't take off. Mostly they buy them to show off how much money they've got, rather than as an investment in the technology.
How exactly does it upscale? It can't show more data than is on the DVD, and if the DVD was recorded at 576i then putting it up to 720p is just guesswork.
It doesn't help that many FPSs have characters that move with no sense of the laws of momentum or physiology. When you can run around at 100mph, stop on a sixpence, turn round and instantly fire off a pixel-perfect shot at someone 500 yards away, then it's not a game it's just a twitch contest.
I think we can blame the keyboard/mouse setup for encouraging PC FPS designers to make games that rely more on optimal use of the interface than the actual game. If they had to use slow, inaccurate controllers, they might make games that depend more on tactics, style, patience, trickery, decision making etc, rather than just who reacts and moves the mouse the quickest.
Who needs democracy anyway? Let's just pay tribute to our local knights and barons, and keep our heads down in the fields. And if you think a lord can't be bribed, you're fucking deluded.
Maybe if PCs had controllers rather than mice, then PC game designers might have to make games that weren't just mouse-clicking contests. Every PC FPS I've played seems like it was designed for people who's bloodstreams were 60% caffeine, and who had 25" monitors and specialised 'gaming' mice. Seriously, there are people who turn down all the graphics just so they can see a single pixel of someone's head a hundred yards away, then click on that exact pixel within a fraction of a second. I prefer games that you don't need to be some sort of freak to play.PC gamers will spend more on a video card that you could get a PS2 or Xbox for, so I wouldn't consider their opinions worth much.