There's another, very important item here. Because it's points, and not "real money", they can allow you to have a bunch of unused points sitting in your account without issue. If it was listed as real money, and you had X amount of money there, then they have a LOT more government regulation and issues to worry about since suddenly they're taking on part of the role of a "financial institution", which makes things a lot harder and murkier, and isn't of any real benefit to anyone.
You're right, the Zune won't be gone in 6 months, but for the completely wrong reasons.
Zune isn't about a drive into the living room. Portable music players like the Zune aren't meant for the living room, and never have been.
The reason it won't be gone in 6 months is that Microsoft doesn't come up with new things to get instant profit, and they don't make their choice whether or not to kill a product based on immediate consumer reaction. The company doesn't make decisions to only improve next quarter's profits, and it's idea of a long-term goal isn't 1 year away - and both of those are in constrast to 99% of corporate America. The company thinks much further ahead than that.
What's funny is the way that people here bash other companies for only thinking about the next quarter or the next year. Then Microsoft comes along and does things with 3 year, 5 year, or even longer-term plans, and then they get bashed for the long term thinking.
Oh, and here's a hint - the points model for payment matches up with the Xbox Live Arcade and Video marketplaces. You dump $20 worth of points into your account, and you can use those points to buy songs, buy games, and buy/rent videos. And as the points have worked so well on the Xbox, why not try them out for the Zune too? I really bet the bashing of the usage of points is more just an excuse than a real complaint.
Yes, they set it up so that getting an achievement on one difficulty level unlocks the ones for the easier levels - a nice change from most games that require you to play through on each difficulty level.
Honestly, that didn't sound preachy to me, so I think you managed to avoid that.:)
And thanks for the explanation, but to be honest, it sounds contrived to me, an explanation to try and make the nonsensical sound like it makes sense. It doesn't do too bad of a job though.:)
International Communism was atheistic in nature (note that most religion is illegal even today in China, Cuba, etc.), and yet was responsible for 60-100 million deaths in the last century. Nazism was responsible (directly) for 11 million deaths, indirectly perhaps twice that. No religion has ever come close to that. Not even remotely.
First of all, Hitler was Catholic. He made multiple statements throughout the years to that effect. And the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis was strongly rooted in the religious anti-Semitism that had been around for a LONG time. It's a lot easier to draw connections from the Holocaust to religion than it is to atheism, so I suggest you drop that one now.
Second, just because brutal Communist regimes were meant to be atheistic doesn't mean that the people they killed were killed in the name of non-belief. It was always more of a "state religion" - have faith in the leaders and the Communistic dogma. Those regimes didn't kill in the name of religion as we know it, but they did it based on similar principles of doing with some authority figure told them to do, out of a strong faith that something someone else told them was right.
The lack of belief in a higher power, and the ultimate accountability that it brings, definitely opens people up to commit more heinous acts. If you're nothing but another conglomerate of matter, and I have absolutely nothing to lose by destroying you, then what exactly would stop me if you're in my way?/i?
What do I have to lose? Well, accountability to the law, and in cases where it's the leader of a nation, accountability to the rest of the world. We don't live in a vacuum, so all of our actions have impacts on others and will result in reactions from them.
Besides, a little logical thought will allow someone to derive a basic sense of morality relatively easily. Given the fact that I want certain freedoms in my life, and the fact that I assume others feel the same way, I should behave toward others in ways that I want them to behave toward me. (Yes, the "Golden Rule", which is present in many religions and cultures throughout history) That says a lot right there.
And I'll say I much prefer having people around who have come to their morality through the above means than through what a book tells them not to do - because if the latter ever lose belief in their book, they lose their entire sense of morality. I want people around who won't kill me because they know it's the wrong thing to do, rather than those who don't do it only because a book tells them not to.
Oh, and the simple act of sentencing someone to hell for eternity is a greater evil than anything that any human being could ever do. A human being, no matter how evil, can only cause a finite amount of suffering. No matter what scale you use for punishment (such as causing 1 day of suffering for one person is worth 1 billion years in hell), eventually it will become miniscule compared to eternity. The concept is fundamentally unjust, and any being who would create such a place and send people there for eternity is pure evil.
Hey, God created the universe, and he created all the rules. He didn't need Jesus to come to Earth and die to for everyone's sins - he could have just decided to forgive everyone instead. Heck, he could have just as easily just wiped out the universe and started over.
It's like playing a game of The Sims, deciding you think your sims are behaving badly, thus you create a Sim with the purpose of having that sim die to make up for the bad behavior of all the other sims. Notice that doing so makes absolutely no sense?
And don't forget that as Sony's adding those features, the Xbox 360 will continue adding others. So unless Sony puts a ton of work into updates for the PS3, they'll always be behind the 360 in functionality.
We'll see if the graphics for the PS3 do end up being anything to justify people picking it over the 360. None of the launch titles are any better than the 360's launch titles, and the multi-platform games are looking equal or better on the 360. And given the 360's much superior development tools (and any game developer out there will agree the 360's tools are far better), there's reason to think that developers will make better use of the 360 faster than on the much-harder to program PS3. And for those people who really love online play and the like, the 360 is far and away the best choice.
And your point's not valid. Watch - it's going to be quite a while until ANY of the current gen consoles really starts surpassing the PS2 in sales. By your logic, none of them are going to win this generation in that case. PS2 sales this late in the console's lifetime, with the low price and large library just can't be appropriately compared to systems early in their lifetimes
...with the 360, most stores had 20 or less units at launch. With the PS3, most sellers had several hundred units.
If that's true, then it means the PS3 was available in a lot fewer places. The 360 launched with approximate 326,000 units available in the US. Sony's high estimate for the US launch was 400,000 units - but they also said 100,000 for Japan, and they only hit 88,000. There were articles going around that said that Sony was only going to have 150,000-200,000 units available. We'll just have to see what the numbers end up being.
Regardless, unless Sony pulled a massive number of PS3s out of their ass, the PS3 launch numbers will be little better than the 360, if at all.
BTW, from my understanding, most EB Games/Gamestop stores had fewer PS3s available than they did 360s to fill their preorders.
First, the parent said "this generation", which now that the PS3 has launched, does not include the PS2. I mean heck, the PS2 is outselling the PS3 by a huge margin too, so what does that mean for Sony - that their old product is better than their new product? Heck, for a long time the PS1 outsold the PS2. That's the way it works as console generations advance. I'd say that PS2 sales should start dropping significantly now that the PS3 is out, but considering that Sony seems unable to produce more than a dozen a day, and people need to work second jobs to buy them (their words, not mine), it'll probably be a while.
PS2's are much cheaper, and there are tons and tons of games available. And heck, a significant portion of their sales are probably people buying new ones to replace old ones that have stopped working.
Let's compare the 360's showing to the Wii and PS3, and not previous generations of consoles.
OMG! The three-quarteres of the Earth is covered in very deep bodies of liquid nanoparticles! Even worse, the atmosphere now consists almost entirely of nanoparticles! We inhale huge amounts of them with every breath!
For non-time critical things, 1080i is better than 720p. I have my Xbox 360 hooked up to a small HDTV here, and I set the machine to 1080i because it just looks better because of the higher resolution. And the system will set to 1080i or 720p as appropriate - games tend to go to 720p.
The Bungie article that it's linked to refers to it as a public beta, not a demo. So you're completely correct on that account - it's the Slashdot article that called it a demo instead.
And they are paid by Ubisoft, but don't let that make you think they're not really gamers. I've spent time with a few of them, and about half are members of the PMS Clan - they're serious gamers who happened to get a job where they get paid to do gaming stuff. A friend of mine tried out for them, and would have made it were she not already busy with her helicopter lessons - and she kicks serious gaming ass.
They also won the Ghost Recon tournament at PAX in 2005.
Then you can take your printout to your boss at work and show him you voted the way he told you to so he won't fire you. Threw your printout away? Fired. Voted wrong? Fired.
There's a reason that there's no record of who you personally voted for. A long as it's possible, there exists the potential for voter coercion.
Here in Redmond, WA, my polling place has a choice. There's a single electronic voting machine, and the option to take a paper ballot. There were four other people there voting, and all of them selected paper ballots. I saw nobody choose the electronic voting machine.
I get the impression the poll workers understand that nobody wants to use the electronic machines.
Re:Wing Commander 3...
on
Game Breakers
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· Score: 1
Did you ever play the first Gabriel Knight? If not, you should try and hunt it down and play it. No actual actors or video - all animated, and it was a wonderful and interesting game. Much, much better than the second - I never finished the second, since it just wasn't anywhere close to as good.
Re:Wing Commander 3...
on
Game Breakers
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· Score: 1
Bah. WC3 was worse than both WC1 and WC2. And part of that was the live actors.
Of course, the other part was the horrible scripted missions. I sat on that last mission for like a half hour, destroying wave after wave of Kilrathi ships, before I finally got the point that you had to let your wingmen die to continue. Like, WTF?
I hate to say it, but in some ways, Sony does have a little bit of an advantage here.
The first generation Xbox also had Xbox Live Arcade. But it required an add-on disc to use, and had other issues that prevented it from really going anywhere. The 360 integreated everything into the dash, and it took off. However, nobody was prepared for how well it would turn out, and there wasn't much of a push for good, original games before launch. Once the 360 launched and XBLA became a hit, lots of companies have come on board for doing games.
The PS3 has an advantage because they're launching a year later and Sony's had the chance to see what worked and what didn't - so they know to get good, original games, just like the 360's starting to do.
When you sign up for Xbox Live, you get shown the Terms of Use and have to agree to them. You violate them, you can get banned. This not only includes hardware and software modding, but excessive cursing, misuse of the video camera, etc. It doesn't stop the console from working, but with certain violations of the terms of use, the console will be blocked from connecting again.
The only way to come to the conclusion the 360 is doing worse than the Xbox is to artifically limit your time span to the time when the 360 was still having production issues. Ever since they took care of that, the 360 has been significantly outselling the Xbox for t6he same period of time. I'm pretty certain that the 360 has sold more than the original Xbox had at this amount of time after launch - and if not, it's extremely close.
If you don't require devs to add achievements, then a bunch of them don't include them cause it's something new. So because a majority of games don't have them, it doesn't really catch on, and goes nowhere.
Instead, they required that there be at least 5 in every game. Some developers, realizing they had to do it, went and took the time to try and do it well. Others, like the first 2K sports games, threw in 5 crappy ones just to meet the certification requirements. But all the games had them, and it caught on.
If you notice, nobody's doing crappy achievements anymore. Every developer is taking the time to make them at least decent, and some are being creative and trying new and different challenges. In just one year, achievements have become a big deal for the 360 for quite a few people.
The Xbox team isn't stupid - they knew when they made the decision that any additional requirement for certification that meant additional work for game developers made it that much more likely that some would decide not to develop for the system. But this was a small requirement overall, and it was considered worth taking the risk of losing some devs to have the achievement and gamerscore system work with EVERY title.
I haven't heard of a single developer that's decided not to develop for the 360 because they have to add achievements, and with the popularity of the system, I have to say that their decision to require achievements cannot be described as bad based on the results of that decision. It's like saying that requiring games to not crash during normal gameplay is "bad" since it reduces the freedom of game devs to make games that crash.
OK. How about they just sell the game with the extra content for 1800 instead. Is that preferable?
Ever thhink that they're going this route so that you can get most of the game for less, and only get the other chunk of content if you want it?
You know, if they took a $40 game and broke it up into 4 pieces which they sold at $10 each, I'm sure we'd see a ton of bitching here about how they're just trying to get more money out of people.
Not only are they surely reducing the amount of compression they're doing since they have the room to not do it, I'm sure they're also reusing assets in multiple places on the disc to make it easier to load them as needed - and probably reusing them even more times than a game on DVD.
So, yeah, they're filling the disc, but only because they don't have to worry about how they use their space.
The worst part? If they're leaving the data uncompressed, then it's going to make the loading times EVEN WORSE. A compressed piece of data on a faster DVD drive is going to load a hell of a lot quicker. And well written decompression algorithms that make use of the processors to decompress while loading and perhaps even as the level starts playing could make sure that you don't get additional delays due to that decompression.
Slashdot Mirror
There's another, very important item here. Because it's points, and not "real money", they can allow you to have a bunch of unused points sitting in your account without issue. If it was listed as real money, and you had X amount of money there, then they have a LOT more government regulation and issues to worry about since suddenly they're taking on part of the role of a "financial institution", which makes things a lot harder and murkier, and isn't of any real benefit to anyone.
You're right, the Zune won't be gone in 6 months, but for the completely wrong reasons.
Zune isn't about a drive into the living room. Portable music players like the Zune aren't meant for the living room, and never have been.
The reason it won't be gone in 6 months is that Microsoft doesn't come up with new things to get instant profit, and they don't make their choice whether or not to kill a product based on immediate consumer reaction. The company doesn't make decisions to only improve next quarter's profits, and it's idea of a long-term goal isn't 1 year away - and both of those are in constrast to 99% of corporate America. The company thinks much further ahead than that.
What's funny is the way that people here bash other companies for only thinking about the next quarter or the next year. Then Microsoft comes along and does things with 3 year, 5 year, or even longer-term plans, and then they get bashed for the long term thinking.
Oh, and here's a hint - the points model for payment matches up with the Xbox Live Arcade and Video marketplaces. You dump $20 worth of points into your account, and you can use those points to buy songs, buy games, and buy/rent videos. And as the points have worked so well on the Xbox, why not try them out for the Zune too? I really bet the bashing of the usage of points is more just an excuse than a real complaint.
Yes, they set it up so that getting an achievement on one difficulty level unlocks the ones for the easier levels - a nice change from most games that require you to play through on each difficulty level.
Honestly, that didn't sound preachy to me, so I think you managed to avoid that. :)
:)
And thanks for the explanation, but to be honest, it sounds contrived to me, an explanation to try and make the nonsensical sound like it makes sense. It doesn't do too bad of a job though.
International Communism was atheistic in nature (note that most religion is illegal even today in China, Cuba, etc.), and yet was responsible for 60-100 million deaths in the last century. Nazism was responsible (directly) for 11 million deaths, indirectly perhaps twice that. No religion has ever come close to that. Not even remotely.
First of all, Hitler was Catholic. He made multiple statements throughout the years to that effect. And the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis was strongly rooted in the religious anti-Semitism that had been around for a LONG time. It's a lot easier to draw connections from the Holocaust to religion than it is to atheism, so I suggest you drop that one now.
Second, just because brutal Communist regimes were meant to be atheistic doesn't mean that the people they killed were killed in the name of non-belief. It was always more of a "state religion" - have faith in the leaders and the Communistic dogma. Those regimes didn't kill in the name of religion as we know it, but they did it based on similar principles of doing with some authority figure told them to do, out of a strong faith that something someone else told them was right.
The lack of belief in a higher power, and the ultimate accountability that it brings, definitely opens people up to commit more heinous acts. If you're nothing but another conglomerate of matter, and I have absolutely nothing to lose by destroying you, then what exactly would stop me if you're in my way?/i?
What do I have to lose? Well, accountability to the law, and in cases where it's the leader of a nation, accountability to the rest of the world. We don't live in a vacuum, so all of our actions have impacts on others and will result in reactions from them.
Besides, a little logical thought will allow someone to derive a basic sense of morality relatively easily. Given the fact that I want certain freedoms in my life, and the fact that I assume others feel the same way, I should behave toward others in ways that I want them to behave toward me. (Yes, the "Golden Rule", which is present in many religions and cultures throughout history) That says a lot right there.
And I'll say I much prefer having people around who have come to their morality through the above means than through what a book tells them not to do - because if the latter ever lose belief in their book, they lose their entire sense of morality. I want people around who won't kill me because they know it's the wrong thing to do, rather than those who don't do it only because a book tells them not to.
Oh, and the simple act of sentencing someone to hell for eternity is a greater evil than anything that any human being could ever do. A human being, no matter how evil, can only cause a finite amount of suffering. No matter what scale you use for punishment (such as causing 1 day of suffering for one person is worth 1 billion years in hell), eventually it will become miniscule compared to eternity. The concept is fundamentally unjust, and any being who would create such a place and send people there for eternity is pure evil.
Hey, God created the universe, and he created all the rules. He didn't need Jesus to come to Earth and die to for everyone's sins - he could have just decided to forgive everyone instead. Heck, he could have just as easily just wiped out the universe and started over.
It's like playing a game of The Sims, deciding you think your sims are behaving badly, thus you create a Sim with the purpose of having that sim die to make up for the bad behavior of all the other sims. Notice that doing so makes absolutely no sense?
And don't forget that as Sony's adding those features, the Xbox 360 will continue adding others. So unless Sony puts a ton of work into updates for the PS3, they'll always be behind the 360 in functionality.
We'll see if the graphics for the PS3 do end up being anything to justify people picking it over the 360. None of the launch titles are any better than the 360's launch titles, and the multi-platform games are looking equal or better on the 360. And given the 360's much superior development tools (and any game developer out there will agree the 360's tools are far better), there's reason to think that developers will make better use of the 360 faster than on the much-harder to program PS3. And for those people who really love online play and the like, the 360 is far and away the best choice.
And your point's not valid. Watch - it's going to be quite a while until ANY of the current gen consoles really starts surpassing the PS2 in sales. By your logic, none of them are going to win this generation in that case. PS2 sales this late in the console's lifetime, with the low price and large library just can't be appropriately compared to systems early in their lifetimes
...with the 360, most stores had 20 or less units at launch. With the PS3, most sellers had several hundred units.
If that's true, then it means the PS3 was available in a lot fewer places. The 360 launched with approximate 326,000 units available in the US. Sony's high estimate for the US launch was 400,000 units - but they also said 100,000 for Japan, and they only hit 88,000. There were articles going around that said that Sony was only going to have 150,000-200,000 units available. We'll just have to see what the numbers end up being.
Regardless, unless Sony pulled a massive number of PS3s out of their ass, the PS3 launch numbers will be little better than the 360, if at all.
BTW, from my understanding, most EB Games/Gamestop stores had fewer PS3s available than they did 360s to fill their preorders.
First, the parent said "this generation", which now that the PS3 has launched, does not include the PS2. I mean heck, the PS2 is outselling the PS3 by a huge margin too, so what does that mean for Sony - that their old product is better than their new product? Heck, for a long time the PS1 outsold the PS2. That's the way it works as console generations advance. I'd say that PS2 sales should start dropping significantly now that the PS3 is out, but considering that Sony seems unable to produce more than a dozen a day, and people need to work second jobs to buy them (their words, not mine), it'll probably be a while.
PS2's are much cheaper, and there are tons and tons of games available. And heck, a significant portion of their sales are probably people buying new ones to replace old ones that have stopped working.
Let's compare the 360's showing to the Wii and PS3, and not previous generations of consoles.
OMG! The three-quarteres of the Earth is covered in very deep bodies of liquid nanoparticles! Even worse, the atmosphere now consists almost entirely of nanoparticles! We inhale huge amounts of them with every breath!
WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!
For non-time critical things, 1080i is better than 720p. I have my Xbox 360 hooked up to a small HDTV here, and I set the machine to 1080i because it just looks better because of the higher resolution. And the system will set to 1080i or 720p as appropriate - games tend to go to 720p.
The Bungie article that it's linked to refers to it as a public beta, not a demo. So you're completely correct on that account - it's the Slashdot article that called it a demo instead.
I guess that's why they gave up on the silver and white color schemes - they looked more like George Foreman grills in those colors...
http://www.fragdolls.com/us/
And they are paid by Ubisoft, but don't let that make you think they're not really gamers. I've spent time with a few of them, and about half are members of the PMS Clan - they're serious gamers who happened to get a job where they get paid to do gaming stuff. A friend of mine tried out for them, and would have made it were she not already busy with her helicopter lessons - and she kicks serious gaming ass.
They also won the Ghost Recon tournament at PAX in 2005.
Awesome.
Then you can take your printout to your boss at work and show him you voted the way he told you to so he won't fire you. Threw your printout away? Fired. Voted wrong? Fired.
There's a reason that there's no record of who you personally voted for. A long as it's possible, there exists the potential for voter coercion.
Here in Redmond, WA, my polling place has a choice. There's a single electronic voting machine, and the option to take a paper ballot. There were four other people there voting, and all of them selected paper ballots. I saw nobody choose the electronic voting machine.
I get the impression the poll workers understand that nobody wants to use the electronic machines.
Did you ever play the first Gabriel Knight? If not, you should try and hunt it down and play it. No actual actors or video - all animated, and it was a wonderful and interesting game. Much, much better than the second - I never finished the second, since it just wasn't anywhere close to as good.
Bah. WC3 was worse than both WC1 and WC2. And part of that was the live actors.
Of course, the other part was the horrible scripted missions. I sat on that last mission for like a half hour, destroying wave after wave of Kilrathi ships, before I finally got the point that you had to let your wingmen die to continue. Like, WTF?
I hate to say it, but in some ways, Sony does have a little bit of an advantage here.
The first generation Xbox also had Xbox Live Arcade. But it required an add-on disc to use, and had other issues that prevented it from really going anywhere. The 360 integreated everything into the dash, and it took off. However, nobody was prepared for how well it would turn out, and there wasn't much of a push for good, original games before launch. Once the 360 launched and XBLA became a hit, lots of companies have come on board for doing games.
The PS3 has an advantage because they're launching a year later and Sony's had the chance to see what worked and what didn't - so they know to get good, original games, just like the 360's starting to do.
When you sign up for Xbox Live, you get shown the Terms of Use and have to agree to them. You violate them, you can get banned. This not only includes hardware and software modding, but excessive cursing, misuse of the video camera, etc. It doesn't stop the console from working, but with certain violations of the terms of use, the console will be blocked from connecting again.
The only way to come to the conclusion the 360 is doing worse than the Xbox is to artifically limit your time span to the time when the 360 was still having production issues. Ever since they took care of that, the 360 has been significantly outselling the Xbox for t6he same period of time. I'm pretty certain that the 360 has sold more than the original Xbox had at this amount of time after launch - and if not, it's extremely close.
If you don't require devs to add achievements, then a bunch of them don't include them cause it's something new. So because a majority of games don't have them, it doesn't really catch on, and goes nowhere.
Instead, they required that there be at least 5 in every game. Some developers, realizing they had to do it, went and took the time to try and do it well. Others, like the first 2K sports games, threw in 5 crappy ones just to meet the certification requirements. But all the games had them, and it caught on.
If you notice, nobody's doing crappy achievements anymore. Every developer is taking the time to make them at least decent, and some are being creative and trying new and different challenges. In just one year, achievements have become a big deal for the 360 for quite a few people.
The Xbox team isn't stupid - they knew when they made the decision that any additional requirement for certification that meant additional work for game developers made it that much more likely that some would decide not to develop for the system. But this was a small requirement overall, and it was considered worth taking the risk of losing some devs to have the achievement and gamerscore system work with EVERY title.
I haven't heard of a single developer that's decided not to develop for the 360 because they have to add achievements, and with the popularity of the system, I have to say that their decision to require achievements cannot be described as bad based on the results of that decision. It's like saying that requiring games to not crash during normal gameplay is "bad" since it reduces the freedom of game devs to make games that crash.
OK. How about they just sell the game with the extra content for 1800 instead. Is that preferable?
Ever thhink that they're going this route so that you can get most of the game for less, and only get the other chunk of content if you want it?
You know, if they took a $40 game and broke it up into 4 pieces which they sold at $10 each, I'm sure we'd see a ton of bitching here about how they're just trying to get more money out of people.
IF YOU DON'T WANT THE CONTENT, DON'T BUY IT.
Not only are they surely reducing the amount of compression they're doing since they have the room to not do it, I'm sure they're also reusing assets in multiple places on the disc to make it easier to load them as needed - and probably reusing them even more times than a game on DVD.
So, yeah, they're filling the disc, but only because they don't have to worry about how they use their space.
The worst part? If they're leaving the data uncompressed, then it's going to make the loading times EVEN WORSE. A compressed piece of data on a faster DVD drive is going to load a hell of a lot quicker. And well written decompression algorithms that make use of the processors to decompress while loading and perhaps even as the level starts playing could make sure that you don't get additional delays due to that decompression.