As it seems everybody trying to get a PS3 right now is doing it to ebay it. So I'm guessing we won't be hearing any comments on the console itself before a few days for the bids to settle and the shipping delays. At first I felt sad that people were willing to stay in line for a console. But seeing the reports on how everybody is doing it to sell them, now I'm just sad to know there are so many people ready to buy it at inflate prices.
It's not like the PS3 will save the world or something, you're just going to be playing the same games as before with a little more graphics.
There's something I don't understand. Maybe I'm too naive but I would have thought this kind of pump and dump would be illegal ( the stock trading part of it at least ). So shouldn't it be easy to trace just who bought 10,000 actions of xyz to begin with and start asking questions?
I finished the game twice. First time was a light side Jedi Gardian (15) and Jedi Weapon Master (10-15 don't remember). I found the game challenging until I got my first lightsaber (2 handed), then with master speed and master flurry I could pretty much take any enemy in the game (except final bosses) in one round. I'm not sure the amount of hours I took to finish it, probably around 25-30.
Second time was a dark side Jedi Consular (15) and Sith Lord (35). Maxed the levels using the dead jedi in the tomb on korriban. Most of the game was very easy as I even had more skills than the first time so allies were almost useless and I could take out most group of enemies with 1 or 2 force storms. But this character wasn't as strong as I expected because it had way too many force points for nothing (I would rarely go below 80% after a while) and too few vitality points (I would still get beaten up from time to time). So I guess a maxed balanced character would have been better.
Except for a few glitches and bugs, the game was pretty good. I was a little disapointed with my second game as I was expecting more differences between the 2 storylines.
I agree with the new item filter, it would have been much more usefull than the current ones. Item creation was a nice addition but it was pretty much not needed because you were already strong enough.
A bug (I would say it's a bug) I found was that only your main character's repair skill can be used to break down items. While for medical items, you can use one of your ally's with high treat injury to break down into chemicals. So if you have a guardian with low skills, until you find lots of items to boost your repair skill you will never get much more than 1 component from breaking down items.
The other thing with item creation is that there as no super strong items to create, once you have skill levels around 25-30 it doesn't give you anything to have something higher.
I work for a company VisuAide that specializes in software and hardware for the blind and visually impaired.
I would recommend to check one of the Victor Reader players we make. They are designed for the blind to read digital books. They can also read standard mp3 CDs. All butons have audio feedback, the messages are voice recorded (not TextToSpeech) and they are localized in many languages.
Of course this lets the blind person read books which are produced by the different libraries (depends on each country). Depending on the model chosen you have different options, like bookmarking, goto page, next/previous level (chapter or subchapter depends on the book)/page/phrase/ and other options are being added.
Anyway, if you are visually impaired on know someone who is, you should check out our products. Ina addition to the Victor Reader product line, we also have the Trekker, a GPS orientation system, and the Maestro an accessible handheld PC.
49.4 % of Quebec voters voted yes in 1995. So saying it's about nut cases is exagerating, I would rather say it's not understanding a very large segment of the Quebec population. This was again confirmed by the very large vote for the bloc quebecois during the federal election monday while the consertives (religious right) had most of the votes/seats in the west compared to no seats in the whole province of Quebec.
the "top title at retail" in analyst estimates was EA's Need for Speed Underground, and other top-sellers include True Crime, Tony Hawk's Underground, and GTA Double Pack
I mean just look at that list.
Need for speed and Tony Hawk are just yet another sequel in their series.
GTA Double Pack is a port of 2 great games from the most popular console to a lot less popular one.
Then there's true crime that I have no idea what it is (and I won't even bother checking).
I'm not doubting they will sell copies, I just don't see how (or rather why) they should sell a lot.
I don't know much about US law, but assuming SCO folds after this whole fiasco and nothing is to be gained from actually suing SCO itself...
Would there be any legal basis for suing SCO executives who either sold their stocks or had public comments about the case (read here our good friend Darl) under a civil court of law for damages?
I can't see how this would be out of reach for someone like Linus who has been publicly targeted by SCO.
While I agree with you for most cases, I remember reading an article about the matrix where the brother specificly stated that the purpose of the first movie was to convince the audience that in that virtual world it was possible to defy the normal laws if you set your mind through it.
Of course, if you don't really "accept" that fact, I seriously doubt you'll be able to completely enjoy the next 2 movies. Because it's actually like you said, people will loose interest since of course you'll just know it's really fake.
perhaps one day you could give your love a diamond engagement CPU instead of a ring
There a fundamental flaw in that statement. From my experiments, I observed that women in general usually do NOT want to be offered something usefull. They want even less something even remotely close to what we desire.
It's like saying : "perharps one day you could give your love a pc/xbox/ps2 instead of jewelery/flowers/chocolate"
Of course, if you have a girlfriend that actually wants one of these, I don't know why you're wasting time around here:o)
Isn't it Microsoft that not too long ago testified that opening their source code would be a treath to national security? And yet they did not have a problem sharing their source with the chinese goverment to increase their bottom line.
Let's face it, Microsoft has time and time again (explorer can't be removed from windows anyone?) proven in the past that their testimonies aren't worth anything.
Curiously I was under the impression that lying in these circumstances was against US laws. Then again, I'm not from the US, are they required to tell the truth in these testimonies?
In my opinion, the whole idea of having to read a EULA online would never work. How could you prove that you agreed to the current EULA posted online?
What if the the agreement changes at one point? You might have agreed to the version that was online but not the new one. But the first one should be the legaly binding one since this was the one available when you bought it.
Would keeping a copy of the EULA be enough? What if you just happened to know someone who has a copy of an old less-restrictive EULA (do they ever get less restrictive?) They would then need to keep an archive of past EULAs online with their respective effective dates so you and the store managers could find the effective EULA based on your receipt. A big mess really, and I doubt the software companies would actually enjoy providing a history of their EULAs so people could easely see how they were altered over time.
This I think is a much bigger problem then just not having access to the website at the time of purchase.
First of all we all know these numbers for the losses in software are totally bogus. What I would really like to know is the amount of money lost because of the bandwidth used by the sites that were shut down here. These sites aren't running on cable you know, we're talking about things like OC-3s with tetrabytes of storage. Somebody is paying for these, and I doubt it's with income coming from pirating the apps/games/movies/porn/mp3 that goes on there. Would someone care to give numbers on the montly cost for high speed connections like these? And I'm guessing the more data is used, the more you pay too. There's also the actual hardware needed to store these, my 2 cents says it's not running on 5400rpm IDE hard drives. How many copies of X,Y,Z would one need to sell to actually come even? I'm sure the number is far too great.
I don't know where these sites are usually located. It could be universities, isps, companies. I'm sure they are losing a LOT more money than the software companies that "loose" money to people who probably wouldn't even buy the software because there is simply too much warez being released for anyone to actually use even a small portion of what they were getting.
So basicly: How many sites? What is the average costs in hardware per site? What is the average monthly cost in bandwidth per site? What is the cost in human resources that were lost due to people spending time on the warez instead of the actual work?
Now these are figures I could actually believe in terms of real losses.
I played a lot of Square games mostly FF, FF2(US), FF3(US), FF7, FF8, Chrono Trigger. I haven't played FF9 yet so what I'm saying might not entirely be true. But what I found that the series started with a lot of fun and challenge to just being about eye candy with the movie sequences. In fact at one point I didn't even feel like finishing FF8 I would have prefered having an option "Watch the story".
I mean, seriously, FF was challenging. The best thing of all was that you had 4 characters and you could pick any combination. If you found the game too easy, just pick a harder team to play with. Just pick 4 of the same type and the game will be hard, either at the beginning, end or the whole game (anyone who tried playing with 4 white mages knows what this is about). The magic system was limited, but it was all part of the gameplay/challenge.
FF2 was fun, but you didn't control your team, complete opposite of the first one. Characters would come and go and only the main character would always stay. Your only choice was the name of the characters. It was also one of the first games I played where some of the good guys died (old guy with meteo, the twins...). And at the end of the game some characters were really strong (Rydia), the special items you could steal/find also had some interest for the end game.
FF3 was a good all around game, characters were pretty different from one another, some nice features like the input for the special moves with Sabin. And here again you had some very powerfull items (economizer, atma weapon, multiple magic, multiple attacks...). The magic system was pretty fun too.
FF7 was simply overkill. You were SO strong there was not any challenge left. But the nice movies made up for it, and you kind of felt like a god walking around.
FF8 on the other hand, I didn't like the magic system (too long to store magic to be usefull) it was only good to boost the stats. Leveling up was not usefull until very late in the game where you had bonuses for stats on level up (what's up with that? I WANT to be able to level up).
But the others never came close the fun I could get from playing FF1. Who doesn't remember seeing a pack of sorcerers and saying "Oh f***"...slain, paralyzed, slain, paralyzed, slain, slain...ah the sweet memories. Or how about meeting Warmech? or 4 gas dragons? FF7 and FF8 had ruby/ultima/omega weapons for really though battles, but in FF1 the most challenging enemies could be encountered randomly. How can it get better? And at least the final boss could be hard, if he used the right spells you didn't stand a chance.
Oh and did anyone else exploit the NES random generator in FF1? I remember using a Kyzoku trick (I found it myself, I'm guessing others did the same thing or a variance in another city). Just after getting the boat, you would save in coneria, power down the NES (or was it reset, power, reset...), turn it on, immediatly enter the boat, and the first battle was always a pack of Kyzoku (120G each). I found it was the best way to get easy money early on with weak mages teams, even more so once you could buy/use a LIT2/FIR2 spell to finish them quicker.
And just a quick note, Chrono Trigger rocked, it was just a fantastic game for replay value. I would love to try Chrono Cross:(
Slashdot Mirror
As it seems everybody trying to get a PS3 right now is doing it to ebay it. So I'm guessing we won't be hearing any comments on the console itself before a few days for the bids to settle and the shipping delays. At first I felt sad that people were willing to stay in line for a console. But seeing the reports on how everybody is doing it to sell them, now I'm just sad to know there are so many people ready to buy it at inflate prices.
It's not like the PS3 will save the world or something, you're just going to be playing the same games as before with a little more graphics.
There's something I don't understand. Maybe I'm too naive but I would have thought this kind of pump and dump would be illegal ( the stock trading part of it at least ). So shouldn't it be easy to trace just who bought 10,000 actions of xyz to begin with and start asking questions?
They just forgot to mention the stats were for 1,000 units :)
Second time was a dark side Jedi Consular (15) and Sith Lord (35). Maxed the levels using the dead jedi in the tomb on korriban. Most of the game was very easy as I even had more skills than the first time so allies were almost useless and I could take out most group of enemies with 1 or 2 force storms. But this character wasn't as strong as I expected because it had way too many force points for nothing (I would rarely go below 80% after a while) and too few vitality points (I would still get beaten up from time to time). So I guess a maxed balanced character would have been better.
Except for a few glitches and bugs, the game was pretty good. I was a little disapointed with my second game as I was expecting more differences between the 2 storylines.
I agree with the new item filter, it would have been much more usefull than the current ones. Item creation was a nice addition but it was pretty much not needed because you were already strong enough.
A bug (I would say it's a bug) I found was that only your main character's repair skill can be used to break down items. While for medical items, you can use one of your ally's with high treat injury to break down into chemicals. So if you have a guardian with low skills, until you find lots of items to boost your repair skill you will never get much more than 1 component from breaking down items.
The other thing with item creation is that there as no super strong items to create, once you have skill levels around 25-30 it doesn't give you anything to have something higher.
I would recommend to check one of the Victor Reader players we make. They are designed for the blind to read digital books. They can also read standard mp3 CDs. All butons have audio feedback, the messages are voice recorded (not TextToSpeech) and they are localized in many languages.
Of course this lets the blind person read books which are produced by the different libraries (depends on each country). Depending on the model chosen you have different options, like bookmarking, goto page, next/previous level (chapter or subchapter depends on the book)/page/phrase/ and other options are being added.
Anyway, if you are visually impaired on know someone who is, you should check out our products. Ina addition to the Victor Reader product line, we also have the Trekker, a GPS orientation system, and the Maestro an accessible handheld PC.
that didn't understand why Penny Arcade would sue them? :)
49.4 % of Quebec voters voted yes in 1995. So saying it's about nut cases is exagerating, I would rather say it's not understanding a very large segment of the Quebec population. This was again confirmed by the very large vote for the bloc quebecois during the federal election monday while the consertives (religious right) had most of the votes/seats in the west compared to no seats in the whole province of Quebec.
As an xbox owner, I would love to know what are those 3 good adventure games. I was just looking for something new.
I'm not so sure, the firewire port is just way too tight for my taste :)
Oh! so that's how budweiser beer is brewed.
- A good pc for gaming
- One of each current consoles. Maybe more than one to test lan play, might need additional TVs too. I mean you can't be too cautious.
- A copy of every newly released game
And I will give our little millionaire gamer buddy plenty of unbiased reviews of games without any kind of hype. I won't even charge him for my time.Think of it as a priceless gift for a gamer who doesn't know how to spend his money and time.
I mean just look at that list.
I'm not doubting they will sell copies, I just don't see how (or rather why) they should sell a lot.
- Providing a cheaper service to the users.
- Make higher profits to screw consumers more.
I'm betting on #2 tactical donations.Would there be any legal basis for suing SCO executives who either sold their stocks or had public comments about the case (read here our good friend Darl) under a civil court of law for damages?
I can't see how this would be out of reach for someone like Linus who has been publicly targeted by SCO.
Ha! So I guess Intel wasn't totally misleading when they said their new processor made the Internet go faster? :)
Sexy Losers
You may be grossed out by a few of them at first, but they are just so funny.
You mean your kids, right? :)
Of course, if you don't really "accept" that fact, I seriously doubt you'll be able to completely enjoy the next 2 movies. Because it's actually like you said, people will loose interest since of course you'll just know it's really fake.
There a fundamental flaw in that statement. From my experiments, I observed that women in general usually do NOT want to be offered something usefull. They want even less something even remotely close to what we desire.
It's like saying : "perharps one day you could give your love a pc/xbox/ps2 instead of jewelery/flowers/chocolate"
Of course, if you have a girlfriend that actually wants one of these, I don't know why you're wasting time around here :o)
Let's face it, Microsoft has time and time again (explorer can't be removed from windows anyone?) proven in the past that their testimonies aren't worth anything.
Curiously I was under the impression that lying in these circumstances was against US laws. Then again, I'm not from the US, are they required to tell the truth in these testimonies?
In my opinion, the whole idea of having to read a EULA online would never work. How could you prove that you agreed to the current EULA posted online?
What if the the agreement changes at one point? You might have agreed to the version that was online but not the new one. But the first one should be the legaly binding one since this was the one available when you bought it.
Would keeping a copy of the EULA be enough? What if you just happened to know someone who has a copy of an old less-restrictive EULA (do they ever get less restrictive?) They would then need to keep an archive of past EULAs online with their respective effective dates so you and the store managers could find the effective EULA based on your receipt. A big mess really, and I doubt the software companies would actually enjoy providing a history of their EULAs so people could easely see how they were altered over time.
This I think is a much bigger problem then just not having access to the website at the time of purchase.
I don't know where these sites are usually located. It could be universities, isps, companies. I'm sure they are losing a LOT more money than the software companies that "loose" money to people who probably wouldn't even buy the software because there is simply too much warez being released for anyone to actually use even a small portion of what they were getting.
So basicly:
How many sites?
What is the average costs in hardware per site?
What is the average monthly cost in bandwidth per site?
What is the cost in human resources that were lost due to people spending time on the warez instead of the actual work?
Now these are figures I could actually believe in terms of real losses.
I mean, seriously, FF was challenging. The best thing of all was that you had 4 characters and you could pick any combination. If you found the game too easy, just pick a harder team to play with. Just pick 4 of the same type and the game will be hard, either at the beginning, end or the whole game (anyone who tried playing with 4 white mages knows what this is about). The magic system was limited, but it was all part of the gameplay/challenge.
FF2 was fun, but you didn't control your team, complete opposite of the first one. Characters would come and go and only the main character would always stay. Your only choice was the name of the characters. It was also one of the first games I played where some of the good guys died (old guy with meteo, the twins...). And at the end of the game some characters were really strong (Rydia), the special items you could steal/find also had some interest for the end game.
FF3 was a good all around game, characters were pretty different from one another, some nice features like the input for the special moves with Sabin. And here again you had some very powerfull items (economizer, atma weapon, multiple magic, multiple attacks...). The magic system was pretty fun too.
FF7 was simply overkill. You were SO strong there was not any challenge left. But the nice movies made up for it, and you kind of felt like a god walking around.
FF8 on the other hand, I didn't like the magic system (too long to store magic to be usefull) it was only good to boost the stats. Leveling up was not usefull until very late in the game where you had bonuses for stats on level up (what's up with that? I WANT to be able to level up).
But the others never came close the fun I could get from playing FF1. Who doesn't remember seeing a pack of sorcerers and saying "Oh f***"...slain, paralyzed, slain, paralyzed, slain, slain...ah the sweet memories. Or how about meeting Warmech? or 4 gas dragons? FF7 and FF8 had ruby/ultima/omega weapons for really though battles, but in FF1 the most challenging enemies could be encountered randomly. How can it get better? And at least the final boss could be hard, if he used the right spells you didn't stand a chance.
Oh and did anyone else exploit the NES random generator in FF1? I remember using a Kyzoku trick (I found it myself, I'm guessing others did the same thing or a variance in another city). Just after getting the boat, you would save in coneria, power down the NES (or was it reset, power, reset...), turn it on, immediatly enter the boat, and the first battle was always a pack of Kyzoku (120G each). I found it was the best way to get easy money early on with weak mages teams, even more so once you could buy/use a LIT2/FIR2 spell to finish them quicker.
And just a quick note, Chrono Trigger rocked, it was just a fantastic game for replay value. I would love to try Chrono Cross :(