1985-to-1990 - NES - inferior to Sega Master System and Atari ProSystem/7800
SMS had more colors in a small space, but NES had a better sound chip, including three different tonal qualities for the square wave and hardware digital sample playback. As for Game Boy vs. Game Gear, Game Boy had the better sound and the better battery life and Alexey Pajitnov designing some of its games.
Funny hinis that in the NES and SNES era outside of japan homecomputers were more dominant than consoles, this carried over into the 90s when the PC was the dominant platform. The situation has shifted however due to constant quality problems on the software side, and due to Intel and Microsoft trying everything to shy away gamers from the PC (Intel with their inferior graphics chipsets being pushed into every notebook computer, and microsoft oh well, xbox)
I ignore the specs and just look at what's on the screen, and ever since 1977 the "winner" console has always been inferior to the competition, with only one exception:
1977-to-1984 - Atari VCS/2600 - inferior to Intellivision 1985-to-1990 - NES - inferior to Sega Master System and Atari ProSystem/7800 1990-to-1995 - Super Nintendo 1995-to-2000 - PS1 - inferior to N64's graphics 2000-to-2005 - PS2 - inferior to both the Cube and the Box 2005-to-2010 - Wii - inferior to the HD-capable consoles
I don't know why the general public is drawn to the lower-quality console with less-polished graphics, but that seems to be the trend overall. Perhaps it's the library and variety of games that make the difference, or maybe it's the lower price. I'm not really sure.
First it is the initial price, the Wii was cheap, while the others were on the edge of being unaffordable especially the PS3. Secondly it is the games and the mouth propaganda, the hardware does not count it is the games, it is as simple as that!
The wii is marketed to the general public and it worked out as it seems. The downside of this is that third party publishers have a hard time on the platform, as well as hardcore titles!
Actually no it was not the most powerful, and the PS2 was the slowest of its generation. The original PS1 was inferior to the Dreamcast and graphics hardwarwise also inferior to the N64, (The n64 was limited by its modules however) and the PS2 was slower than the gamecube and the xbox!
And this time the PS3 although it is supposed to be a powerhouse is severely crippled by its limited ram and the general purpose cores of the Cell processors so that the end result is around the same league as the xbox!
I would not be so sure about it. Ok the Wii is a system which fits into the style of games Nintendo makes, but that does not mean it is just Nintendo who release decent games. Here is a small list: Mad World, No more Heroes, Sam and Max Season 1, Tenchu Shadow Assasins, Disaster day of Crisis. All of those are relatively newly released and definitely gather to the hardcore crowd!
So you have obviously played Okami, Tenchu and Disaster Day of Crisis, No More Heroes, Mad World and and Sam and Max?
The situation on the WII is not good regarding good titles but it is not that bad either. The next indiana jones game will come out in 1-2 weeks, and Telltale will release also Tales of Monkey Island in a Wii version.
Problem mainly is that people demand that stuff, if you sell 15 mio wii fit and maybe 20.000-40.000 Disaster day of Crisis (guessed number) which way do you go? Nintendo just goes the way they earn most money with, thats the reality of life!
Actually Nintendo still makes original games, but for some strange kind of reason they seem to drown it themselves. Example, last year they released the excellent survival action game Disaster Day of Crisis, what happend. Almost zero advertisement, and the release only happend in Japan and Europe. Overall the game got very high ratings, it was full of fresh ideas, but it drowned! I guess we never will see a sequel, not because of the game quality but because it did not sell at all! (Even the hardcore crowd did not know about it!)
It is easier to ride the Zelda/Mario train as long as it sells to keep the platform alive.
Its nice to see Nintendo actually making an effort to appeal to gamers who want a game more involved than a tech demo, but can we please have something... fresh? Sure, Mario, Metroid, and Golden Sun are good, but it seems like Nintendo has really stagnated in good games that aren't gimmicks. Plus theres a bunch of old IP that isn't being capitalized on such as the old Japanese Fire Emblem games, Earthbound hasn't even seen a US release on the Virtual Console and Kid Icarus hasn't seen a new game in ages.
Nintendo needs to make more "hardcore" games so whenever they aren't in first place anymore they won't go belly up.
The end will come when developers simply decide it's not worth jumping through hoops for an antiquated browser and IT departments in corporate America are flooded with calls of "this site won't work - what's wrong with my browser" thereby forcing IT departments to get with the program and update the browsers on their networks. Until then, why should an IT department invest any time and effort into updating the browsers on their systems? The kicker is all that it will take is one major website to take the bold step forward but the question is who has the balls to be first?
I think the solution simply is to raise the costs, lets face it support of IE6 causes 30% additional costs on the development side, supporting IE7 causes around 5-10% with the gap widening every year! If you roll out the costs towards the departement who gives the money they will have a second thought of wanting to pay 30% more just to cover a customer base of 5-10% of all possible people (with the rate dropping significantly)
"I checked the site statistics for my site and IE6 went from 15% of the hits in April to 0% in May."
Well, duh, because no sod can see anything in IE6 - visit once and never come back again.
This is the sort of crap that Opera has thrown at it - email a complaint to MSN, the BBC, any large website about parts not working in Opera (although they all do now), and you only ever got "nobody uses Opera to visit us"... OF COURSE NOT! BECAUSE IT DOESN'T BLOODY WORK!
It's like saying "Since we started banning unhappy people, our store recorded that 100% of customers in the store were happy with us!"
If you can just make a graceful degradation, in my last project I simply degraded the experience for IE6 users, and all others got a flashy version... I know this is not a real option for many projects out there which demand pixel perfect positioning even on IE6 (which is close to impossible without trial and error) but if you can simply make a graceful fallback. Even IE itself can help you with it by using conditional includes for CSS!
If I can I follow nowadays the route, if something cannot be brought to work for IE6 within 5 minutes of fixing time, it is dropped and the blank div is shown period!
Actually corporate context hurts more, the last big corporate project I was was IE6 is a must IE7 is a must because we are in a transition phase while some will be on IE6 for the years to come, but everything must be flashy and ajax and must absolutely run on IE6.
Also Firefox must be supported in its latest two incarnations! Add to that a shitload of absolutely abstruse security stuff which tried to interfere, and once it did of course the webapp was at fault not the security until you had enough proof to blame it onto security and even then you had to find workarounds.
Natural degredation is what i use mostly nowadays, but the problem lies somewhere else, the customers often still demand pixel perfect accuracy and the person having the money basically is always right, even if he is not!
Developers are the weakest link on the chain, in my experience it is like that. Customer wants latest flashy stuff, but still must run on ie6, developer says without me, customer says, ok then someone else will do it. If you are in a corporation, developer says I wont do it, pointy haired boss gives a smack on the head!
I have to meet one developer who really still wants to support IE6. At least over here in Europe the situation is way better than in the US, most private users have at least upgraded to IE7, Firefox has become the dominant browsers. Which leaves mostly the corporations on IE6!
Actually they were more than ok if you played them with a Gamepad, as for mouse driven, they were not ideal, but far from the broken controls Grim Fandang, Dreamfall, or MI4 had. I personally even liked it more with a gamepad because it allowed me to play W&G in the livingroom sitting on a sofar with the laptop being in front of me and the gamepad being plugged in.
The cleanup to some degree can be done with a plain osx install nowadays, throw away not needed printer drivers throw away not needed languages, unused power pc code, garage band loops etc... and you have reduced your install literally by several gigabytes!
Without knowing exactly where it goes I can only speculate, but could this fine by so high to help fix European budgets stretched too thin by a weak economy?
No, it would not even be enough to fix the buget of a single EU country, but high enough that intel basically feels a smack on the hand,
besides that the entire thing now goes into revision several times and by the time everything is settled the economy crisis is over.
Actually Qt was relicensed into GPL because of KDE, not because of Gnome. KDE used Qt and came under heavy fire due to using Qt, TrollTech relicensed then Qt due to this criticis, and later on hired some of the KDE developers!
The relicensing to LGPL now happened after the Nokia buyout, and was also preplanned because Trolltech always said, if it was bought or went bankrupt it would relicense it into LGPL!
A decent PC graphics card which can do the latest games is around 100$ and the games usually are 20-30% cheaper.
Yeah, but some of us prefer not to pirate games, and pirated games are the only ones that *work* on the PC (because of the DRM for shop-bought games being so picky and borderline malware).
I thought so too before I picked up pc gaming again about a year ago when the next gen graphics cards became cheap. Actually the entire DRM issue while it is there is not that bad anymore. The only title having serious issues I recall was GTA4, a title I was not even interested into remotely! It really helps that most games nowadays come out on consoles first, so the console owners have to iron out the bugs. The entire PC situation has become way more interesting the last year, because the games are cheaper, they are not as bug ridden as they used to be and the hardware upgrade cycle has slowed down to the console upgrade cycle!
That was an effective 'stroke to the heart' of many religious fundamentalist's main arguments defending their agenda while abandoning the core 'cause'.
No, it was a stroke against Christian fundamentalists. Other religions have different messages.
Fundamentalists are pretty much the same in every religion, just look for instance at the Taliban, they probably would even have killed Muhammad if they had encountered him, as disbeliever! While one of the core message of the Qran is at least tolerance to others who believe into the book (jews and christians) they Taliban even kill other Muslims because they do not believe into the same fraction of Muslims as they do!
In case of Gnosticism yes, almost all church leaders omitted gnosticism, as I said it is a meta religion which also found its way into christianity long after the religion was founded, the early christian texts definitely were non gnostic and Gnosticism basically emerged after 100 BC and constantly was seen as heretic by all other christian philosophers and church leaders, because some of its aspects broke extremely with the already established christian doctrine (like seeing god as evil being or trying to push the devil at the same level with god etc...)
Please also tell that to Dan Brown before he spills out his next badly researched book full of historical errors!
Ahh. Another one who doesn't understand the differences between "fiction" and "non fiction".
I do but DB obviously doesnÂt if you follow his interviews. I once made the mistake to open his latest books alone in the description of the time of Constantine and the Council of Nicea he made several historical mistakes intermixing events which often occurred within 150 years! Just to prove his point. I dont have a problem with him doing that, my problem with him is that he then talks in front of the camera how long he has researched and he is right on things, while the history books say clearly he is wrong.
Those gospels have been known for ages and have been omitted in the 5th century for many reasons one of them in many cases was that they were unreliable and often written by third parties trying to promote an agenda. Have in mind early christianity was split way more than we are today and everyone could run his/her religious and monetary agenda on top of the religion. Often those gospels also were folk tales written down which can be attributed to the area of folk legends nothing more!
And how exactly is that different from the other "accepted" gospels?
You can see that by the historical dates, in which area the gospels can be attributed to and which philosophical context they are. A gnostic gospel for instance easily immediately can be ommitted because gnosticism never made it into christianity before 100 AC also you pretty much have the date of the first occurrence of each gospel and other non canonized texts by historical letters preserved until today.
"Non-canonical gospels"? As opposed to pre-Christian Gnostic and related texts that shed light on the true origins of Christianity?
Wrong, Gnosticism was sort of a meta religion which existed outside of Christianity when it arrived at the scene, remember first christianity started as a judaic side religion.
Gnosticims made it into Christianity to my knowledge after 100 AC as one of the influences which influenced christianity heavily, the other was greek pholosophy like stoism. There are well documented disputes of early christian philosophers and the entire gnostic angle of early christianity is well documented!
Have in mind such things are normal when you dont have a clear canon nor a central religious authority. Heaves, simply look at all the splits protestantic churces had the last 300 years to having no central religious authority. So assume this tenfold in early christianity, with Arianism, Trinitarism running wild, later even Gnisticism came to the mix. And everyone was working on his/her own canon or stories.
What you can do in such a situation is try to make a canon which tries to be as accurate as possible in its historical roots and omit newer ones. The biggest issue back than AFAIK was the split between Trinitarism and Arianism, which was finally resolved in the council of Nicea, Gnostic sects always were seen as non christians by the bigger streams of early christianity and were rather late to the table!
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Okami was Wii and PS2 and Sam and Max is not Virtual Console, but a disk release.
1985-to-1990 - NES - inferior to Sega Master System and Atari ProSystem/7800
SMS had more colors in a small space, but NES had a better sound chip, including three different tonal qualities for the square wave and hardware digital sample playback. As for Game Boy vs. Game Gear, Game Boy had the better sound and the better battery life and Alexey Pajitnov designing some of its games.
Funny hinis that in the NES and SNES era outside of japan homecomputers were more dominant than consoles, this carried over into the 90s when the PC was the dominant platform. The situation has shifted however due to constant quality problems on the software side, and due to Intel and Microsoft trying everything to shy away gamers from the PC (Intel with their inferior graphics chipsets being pushed into every notebook computer, and microsoft oh well, xbox)
I ignore the specs and just look at what's on the screen, and ever since 1977 the "winner" console has always been inferior to the competition, with only one exception:
1977-to-1984 - Atari VCS/2600 - inferior to Intellivision
1985-to-1990 - NES - inferior to Sega Master System and Atari ProSystem/7800
1990-to-1995 - Super Nintendo
1995-to-2000 - PS1 - inferior to N64's graphics
2000-to-2005 - PS2 - inferior to both the Cube and the Box
2005-to-2010 - Wii - inferior to the HD-capable consoles
I don't know why the general public is drawn to the lower-quality console with less-polished graphics, but that seems to be the trend overall. Perhaps it's the library and variety of games that make the difference, or maybe it's the lower price. I'm not really sure.
First it is the initial price, the Wii was cheap, while the others were on the edge of being unaffordable especially the PS3.
Secondly it is the games and the mouth propaganda, the hardware does not count it is the games, it is as simple as that!
The wii is marketed to the general public and it worked out as it seems. The downside of this is that third party publishers have a hard time on the platform, as well as hardcore titles!
compare that to about 5c for a blue ray disk...
and wake me up when you can ramp up sdhc production within days on demand...
Actually no it was not the most powerful, and the PS2 was the slowest of its generation.
The original PS1 was inferior to the Dreamcast
and graphics hardwarwise also inferior to the N64,
(The n64 was limited by its modules however)
and the PS2 was slower than the gamecube and the xbox!
And this time the PS3 although it is supposed to be a powerhouse is severely crippled by its limited ram and the general purpose cores of the Cell processors so that the end result is around the same league as the xbox!
I would not be so sure about it. Ok the Wii is a system which fits into the style of games Nintendo makes, but that does not mean it is just Nintendo who release decent games.
Here is a small list:
Mad World, No more Heroes, Sam and Max Season 1, Tenchu Shadow Assasins, Disaster day of Crisis. All of those are relatively newly released and definitely gather to the hardcore crowd!
So you have obviously played Okami, Tenchu and Disaster Day of Crisis, No More Heroes, Mad World and and Sam and Max?
The situation on the WII is not good regarding good titles but it is not that bad either.
The next indiana jones game will come out in 1-2 weeks, and Telltale will release also Tales of Monkey Island in a Wii version.
Problem mainly is that people demand that stuff, if you sell 15 mio wii fit and maybe 20.000-40.000 Disaster day of Crisis (guessed number) which way do you go?
Nintendo just goes the way they earn most money with, thats the reality of life!
Actually Nintendo still makes original games, but for some strange kind of reason they seem to drown it themselves.
Example, last year they released the excellent survival action game Disaster Day of Crisis, what happend.
Almost zero advertisement, and the release only happend in Japan and Europe.
Overall the game got very high ratings, it was full of fresh ideas, but it drowned! I guess we never will see a sequel, not because of the game quality but because it did not sell at all!
(Even the hardcore crowd did not know about it!)
It is easier to ride the Zelda/Mario train as long as it sells to keep the platform alive.
Its nice to see Nintendo actually making an effort to appeal to gamers who want a game more involved than a tech demo, but can we please have something... fresh? Sure, Mario, Metroid, and Golden Sun are good, but it seems like Nintendo has really stagnated in good games that aren't gimmicks. Plus theres a bunch of old IP that isn't being capitalized on such as the old Japanese Fire Emblem games, Earthbound hasn't even seen a US release on the Virtual Console and Kid Icarus hasn't seen a new game in ages.
Nintendo needs to make more "hardcore" games so whenever they aren't in first place anymore they won't go belly up.
It is around 15% nowadays problem is that many of them are corporate people!
The end will come when developers simply decide it's not worth jumping through hoops for an antiquated browser and IT departments in corporate America are flooded with calls of "this site won't work - what's wrong with my browser" thereby forcing IT departments to get with the program and update the browsers on their networks. Until then, why should an IT department invest any time and effort into updating the browsers on their systems? The kicker is all that it will take is one major website to take the bold step forward but the question is who has the balls to be first?
I think the solution simply is to raise the costs, lets face it support of IE6 causes 30% additional costs on the development side, supporting IE7 causes around 5-10% with the gap widening every year!
If you roll out the costs towards the departement who gives the money they will have a second thought of wanting to pay 30% more just to cover a customer base of 5-10% of all possible people (with the rate dropping significantly)
"I checked the site statistics for my site and IE6 went from 15% of the hits in April to 0% in May."
Well, duh, because no sod can see anything in IE6 - visit once and never come back again.
This is the sort of crap that Opera has thrown at it - email a complaint to MSN, the BBC, any large website about parts not working in Opera (although they all do now), and you only ever got "nobody uses Opera to visit us"... OF COURSE NOT! BECAUSE IT DOESN'T BLOODY WORK!
It's like saying "Since we started banning unhappy people, our store recorded that 100% of customers in the store were happy with us!"
If you can just make a graceful degradation, in my last project I simply degraded the experience for IE6 users, and all others got a flashy version... I know this is not a real option for many projects out there which demand pixel perfect positioning even on IE6 (which is close to impossible without trial and error)
but if you can simply make a graceful fallback. Even IE itself can help you with it by using conditional includes for CSS!
If I can I follow nowadays the route, if something cannot be brought to work for IE6 within 5 minutes of fixing time, it is dropped and the blank div is shown period!
Actually corporate context hurts more, the last big corporate project I was was IE6 is a must IE7 is a must because we are in a transition phase while some will be on IE6 for the years to come, but everything must be flashy and ajax and must absolutely run on IE6.
Also Firefox must be supported in its latest two incarnations!
Add to that a shitload of absolutely abstruse security stuff which tried to interfere, and once it did of course the webapp was at fault not the security until you had enough proof to blame it onto security and even then you had to find workarounds.
That is the corporate context...
Natural degredation is what i use mostly nowadays, but the problem lies somewhere else, the customers often still demand pixel perfect accuracy and the person having the money basically is always right, even if he is not!
Developers are the weakest link on the chain, in my experience it is like that.
Customer wants latest flashy stuff, but still must run on ie6, developer says without me,
customer says, ok then someone else will do it.
If you are in a corporation, developer says I wont do it, pointy haired boss gives a smack on the head!
I have to meet one developer who really still wants to support IE6. At least over here in Europe the situation is way better than in the US, most private users have at least upgraded to IE7, Firefox has become the dominant browsers. Which leaves mostly the corporations on IE6!
Actually they were more than ok if you played them with a Gamepad, as for mouse driven, they were not ideal, but far from the broken controls Grim Fandang, Dreamfall, or MI4 had.
I personally even liked it more with a gamepad because it allowed me to play W&G in the livingroom sitting on a sofar with the laptop being in front of me and the gamepad being plugged in.
The cleanup to some degree can be done with a plain osx install nowadays, throw away not needed printer drivers throw away not needed languages, unused power pc code, garage band loops etc... and you have reduced your install literally by several gigabytes!
Sorry to shatter your worldview here, 1 and 2 are not related. The fine is not even close to help out of any recession...
Without knowing exactly where it goes I can only speculate, but could this fine by so high to help fix European budgets stretched too thin by a weak economy?
No, it would not even be enough to fix the buget of a single EU country, but high enough that intel basically feels a smack on the hand,
besides that the entire thing now goes into revision several times and by the time everything is settled the economy crisis is over.
Actually Qt was relicensed into GPL because of KDE, not because of Gnome. KDE used Qt and came under heavy fire due to using Qt, TrollTech relicensed then Qt due to this criticis, and later on hired some of the KDE developers!
The relicensing to LGPL now happened after the Nokia buyout, and was also preplanned because Trolltech always said, if it was bought or went bankrupt it would relicense it into LGPL!
A decent PC graphics card which can do the latest games is around 100$ and the games usually are 20-30% cheaper.
Yeah, but some of us prefer not to pirate games, and pirated games are the only ones that *work* on the PC (because of the DRM for shop-bought games being so picky and borderline malware).
I thought so too before I picked up pc gaming again about a year ago when the next gen graphics cards became cheap. Actually the entire DRM issue while it is there is not that bad anymore. The only title having serious issues I recall was GTA4, a title I was not even interested into remotely! It really helps that most games nowadays come out on consoles first, so the console owners have to iron out the bugs. The entire PC situation has become way more interesting the last year, because the games are cheaper, they are not as bug ridden as they used to be and the hardware upgrade cycle has slowed down to the console upgrade cycle!
That was an effective 'stroke to the heart' of many religious fundamentalist's main arguments defending their agenda while abandoning the core 'cause'.
No, it was a stroke against Christian fundamentalists. Other religions have different messages.
Fundamentalists are pretty much the same in every religion, just look for instance at the Taliban, they probably would even have killed Muhammad if they had encountered him, as disbeliever!
While one of the core message of the Qran is at least tolerance to others who believe into the book (jews and christians) they Taliban even kill other Muslims because they do not believe into the same fraction of Muslims as they do!
In case of Gnosticism yes, almost all church leaders omitted gnosticism, as I said it is a meta religion which also found its way into christianity long after the religion was founded, the early christian texts definitely were non gnostic and Gnosticism basically emerged after 100 BC and constantly was seen as heretic by all other christian philosophers and church leaders, because some of its aspects broke extremely with the already established christian doctrine (like seeing god as evil being or trying to push the devil at the same level with god etc...)
Please also tell that to Dan Brown before he spills out his next badly researched book full of historical errors!
Ahh. Another one who doesn't understand the differences between "fiction" and "non fiction".
I do but DB obviously doesnÂt if you follow his interviews. I once made the mistake to open his latest books alone in the description of the time of Constantine and the Council of Nicea he made several historical mistakes intermixing events which often occurred within 150 years!
Just to prove his point.
I dont have a problem with him doing that, my problem with him is that he then talks in front of the camera how long he has researched and he is right on things, while the history books say clearly he is wrong.
Those gospels have been known for ages and have been omitted in the 5th century for many reasons one of them in many cases was that they were unreliable and often written by third parties trying to promote an agenda. Have in mind early christianity was split way more than we are today and everyone could run his/her religious and monetary agenda on top of the religion.
Often those gospels also were folk tales written down which can be attributed to the area of folk legends nothing more!
And how exactly is that different from the other "accepted" gospels?
You can see that by the historical dates, in which area the gospels can be attributed to and which philosophical context they are. A gnostic gospel for instance easily immediately can be ommitted because gnosticism never made it into christianity before 100 AC also you pretty much have the date of the first occurrence of each gospel and other non canonized texts by historical letters preserved until today.
"Non-canonical gospels"? As opposed to pre-Christian Gnostic and related texts that shed light on the true origins of Christianity?
Wrong, Gnosticism was sort of a meta religion which existed outside of Christianity when it arrived at the scene, remember first christianity started as a judaic side religion.
Gnosticims made it into Christianity to my knowledge after 100 AC as one of the influences which influenced christianity heavily, the other was greek pholosophy like stoism. There are well documented disputes of early christian philosophers and the entire gnostic angle of early christianity is well documented!
Have in mind such things are normal when you dont have a clear canon nor a central religious authority. Heaves, simply look at all the splits protestantic churces had the last 300 years to having no central religious authority. So assume this tenfold in early christianity, with Arianism, Trinitarism running wild, later even Gnisticism came to the mix. And everyone was working on his/her own canon or stories.
What you can do in such a situation is try to make a canon which tries to be as accurate as possible in its historical roots and omit newer ones. The biggest issue back than AFAIK was the split between Trinitarism and Arianism, which was finally resolved in the council of Nicea, Gnostic sects always were seen as non christians by the bigger streams of early christianity and were rather late to the table!