I had the reverse of your experience, perhaps because I'm not so focused on the marginal eye-candy improvements of the XBox. Splinter Cell looks awesome--but that entire genre is pretty played out, IMHO. I've got a 36" HDTV that had the XBox and GC hooked up via component, and I think calling the GC graphics "disappointing" is a stretch. Did you buy my XBox on E-Bay? Sorry it was so dusty.
BMX XXX? Come on, that game blew. Not literally--that might have helped it. It was one of the weakest "extreme sports" titles I've seen.
You didn't finish Metroid Prime? You are no longer worthy to comment on this topic.
I can comment on TH:PS3, TH:PS4, Spider-Man, TimeSplitters 2, LoTR, Harry Potter, SSX Tricky having actually played them on multiple platforms. And I've read every "platform shootout" review on IGN when games come out for all 3.
The results are almost always consistent. XBox pushes more polygons while maintaining some more advanced lighting effects. GC next, PS2 third unless the developers gave short shrift to a certain platform.
You're completely wrong--the GameCube is obviously more capable than the PS2 for video. Both have limitations, but even with the giant developer community, great support from Sony, and years more to learn the tricks of the platform, PS2 games rarely show better than the same GC titles. Again, generalizing. And the XBox beats both easily, again with some exceptions.
GameCube has great sound when there's real DPLII support (which is most of the time), PS2 games vary wildly, but the XBox DTS output is the best. Yes, I've had all 3 hooked up to my surround sound setup, and component video for GC and XBox.
GameCube suffers from slightly less storage, and so FMV sequences are sometimes badly compressed.
Having said all that--who gives a crap. Good games look, sound, and play great on all 3 (if you can handle the dain-bramaged XBox controllers). Full motion video rarely adds to a title. Games are for playing, not for comparing. EA will always shovel out crap that underlines how the game industry--with happy exception of Nintendo first-party stuff--has completely forgotten what makes gaming fun. GameCube easily holds its own in the fun department.
XBox gigantic and noisy, controllers sucked, especially for my seven-year-old son with whom I do most of my gaming. Halo was stupendous, Jet Set Radio Future was trippy-excellent, most everything else was underwhelming. I'm bored with the console FPS stuff that is nearly all you can get for it. I bought probably 12 titles and rented several, but after it collected four solid months of dust, I sold it.
GameCube was a totally different story. Small, quiet, with genius controllers. Then the WaveBird wireless controllers came out and I couldn't believe how perfect they were. Several top-notch games that I have basically never stopped playing after I beat them: Pikmin, Rogue Leader, Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime, Zelda, Godzilla:DAMM, Monkey Ball, Eternal Darkness, and several others I'm spacing right now. Mario Sunshine and StarFox were clever but had little staying power.
Clearly I'm skewed towards the out-of-the-ordinary games that for some reason rarely show up on PS2 or XBox. (This is why we still bust out the Dreamcast once in a while.) But the GameCube could disappear today and I'd be forever glad I got one--it has been simply awesome.
Forget the FUD--GC has sold enough units to make Nintendo $$$, and the GameBoy juggernaut will keep them in business forever. Play the games you like, forget about the "big three" competition gossip--it's for industry hacks.
> Next election I'm voting for the guy who wants to repeal all this crap.
Good for you. His name's Nader, but he's probably not running this time. Lots of us voted for him last time (and in 1996 against Clinton), but all it seems to get us is scorn.
"That guy" might have been Howard Dean, except he's already gone on record as not wanting to touch the defense budget.
I'd advise you to go with whatever half-assed corporate whore the Democrats put up. I knew I was doing The Right Thing voting for the candidate I believed in, not the lesser of two evils. But I had absolutely no clue how much damage the truly evil candidate could do in four years. And it's not over yet.
Right on. With notable exceptions, "freedom" for most gun nuts means the freedom for everyone to Love the USA the Way I Do, or go back to Roosha^h^h^hFrance.
Having said that, we are perilously close to the state of affairs where the right to bear arms actually starts to make a smidgen of sense again. I'm never going to buy a gun. But our government as it functions today with the current "leadership" needs to be dismantled completely.
. Hello, spooks. How did you get here so fast?
> [Kernel tweaking] is also little more productive than a fragfest.
Ha! Some folks--you, I'd wager--play around with Linux for fun. Some folks use it to get work done. And some folks base their businesses on it. The latter two camps benefit quite obviously from speed optimizations.
One small example: I run a streaming audio (icecast) server for a public radio station. It easily saturates 2 T1 lines, and everything runs on a PII-166 with 128MB RAM. I couldn't even get the encoder (lame) to run reliably until I began the tedious process of benchmarking and recompiling each of the major components--it didn't have enough CPU time. After a few days of "tweaking," I now have a cheap box that handles 40 mp3 clients around the clock, with many months of uptime.
Rather than web search and determine optimal physics and materials for your Pinewood Derby racer, why don't you just make one? It's about making something cool with your son and crossing your fingers. My dad and I lost the speed race every year, and had a great time doing it.
My dad actually drilled through his hand while trying to make a hole for some fishing sinker weights in our second year. I remember mom driving us to the hospital, and the drill bit still sticking out of the back of his hand. No real damage done, and that was the year we came in second in the appearance trophy, but the little whorl in the center of his palm was the real prize: memories.
It's possible to overthink anything. And even in my small hometown, twenty years ago, the Pinewood Derby competition was fairly ruthless. It was the one thing we did in Scouting that wasn't at all about cooperation and fun. More like a bunch of aggro, little-league dads working out their frustrations through their sons' competitions. Take a step back from that, and you'll enjoy it more.
I *love* Komodo on Linux (and Win2k, when I have to). It has made my work with Python and XLST far more productive.
But...although ActiveState has done a masterful job of contributing to as well as profiting from Open Source software, Komodo is a closed-source, proprietary app.
So why is it being advertised here?./ continues to become less and less useful. Here's an idea: if you don't have a good story, don't put anything out! I'd rather see 2 good links a day here than the 10 crappy ones I usually see.
Guess I'd better get out of the way so some lameass can post his "Can you all help me do my research for a term paper?" post.
Tim O'Reilly has done many Good Things and is generally On Our Side. But in this case he's simply wrong--it is entirely fair to legislate preference for Open Source software, in the same way that we've mandated C2 security compliance for certain systems: because that ensures characteristics that we, the people, have decided are desirable.
And Tim's wrong in such an egregious way that I also question whether he hasn't thought hard about what he's saying, or whether he's simply being paid off--which I doubt. But Tim claims to be surprised that Open Source has become increasingly politicized. That's either just rhetoric, or evidence that even Mr. O'Reilly has stuck his head in the sand. Software is political, get used to it.
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I had the reverse of your experience, perhaps because I'm not so focused on the marginal eye-candy improvements of the XBox. Splinter Cell looks awesome--but that entire genre is pretty played out, IMHO. I've got a 36" HDTV that had the XBox and GC hooked up via component, and I think calling the GC graphics "disappointing" is a stretch. Did you buy my XBox on E-Bay? Sorry it was so dusty.
BMX XXX? Come on, that game blew. Not literally--that might have helped it. It was one of the weakest "extreme sports" titles I've seen.
You didn't finish Metroid Prime? You are no longer worthy to comment on this topic.
I can comment on TH:PS3, TH:PS4, Spider-Man, TimeSplitters 2, LoTR, Harry Potter, SSX Tricky having actually played them on multiple platforms. And I've read every "platform shootout" review on IGN when games come out for all 3.
The results are almost always consistent. XBox pushes more polygons while maintaining some more advanced lighting effects. GC next, PS2 third unless the developers gave short shrift to a certain platform.
You're completely wrong--the GameCube is obviously more capable than the PS2 for video. Both have limitations, but even with the giant developer community, great support from Sony, and years more to learn the tricks of the platform, PS2 games rarely show better than the same GC titles. Again, generalizing. And the XBox beats both easily, again with some exceptions.
GameCube has great sound when there's real DPLII support (which is most of the time), PS2 games vary wildly, but the XBox DTS output is the best. Yes, I've had all 3 hooked up to my surround sound setup, and component video for GC and XBox.
GameCube suffers from slightly less storage, and so FMV sequences are sometimes badly compressed.
Having said all that--who gives a crap. Good games look, sound, and play great on all 3 (if you can handle the dain-bramaged XBox controllers). Full motion video rarely adds to a title. Games are for playing, not for comparing. EA will always shovel out crap that underlines how the game industry--with happy exception of Nintendo first-party stuff--has completely forgotten what makes gaming fun. GameCube easily holds its own in the fun department.
Bought XBox, GameCube when both were released.
XBox gigantic and noisy, controllers sucked, especially for my seven-year-old son with whom I do most of my gaming. Halo was stupendous, Jet Set Radio Future was trippy-excellent, most everything else was underwhelming. I'm bored with the console FPS stuff that is nearly all you can get for it. I bought probably 12 titles and rented several, but after it collected four solid months of dust, I sold it.
GameCube was a totally different story. Small, quiet, with genius controllers. Then the WaveBird wireless controllers came out and I couldn't believe how perfect they were. Several top-notch games that I have basically never stopped playing after I beat them: Pikmin, Rogue Leader, Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime, Zelda, Godzilla:DAMM, Monkey Ball, Eternal Darkness, and several others I'm spacing right now. Mario Sunshine and StarFox were clever but had little staying power.
Clearly I'm skewed towards the out-of-the-ordinary games that for some reason rarely show up on PS2 or XBox. (This is why we still bust out the Dreamcast once in a while.) But the GameCube could disappear today and I'd be forever glad I got one--it has been simply awesome.
Forget the FUD--GC has sold enough units to make Nintendo $$$, and the GameBoy juggernaut will keep them in business forever. Play the games you like, forget about the "big three" competition gossip--it's for industry hacks.
> Next election I'm voting for the guy who wants to repeal all this crap.
Good for you. His name's Nader, but he's probably not running this time. Lots of us voted for him last time (and in 1996 against Clinton), but all it seems to get us is scorn.
"That guy" might have been Howard Dean, except he's already gone on record as not wanting to touch the defense budget.
I'd advise you to go with whatever half-assed corporate whore the Democrats put up. I knew I was doing The Right Thing voting for the candidate I believed in, not the lesser of two evils. But I had absolutely no clue how much damage the truly evil candidate could do in four years. And it's not over yet.
Right on. With notable exceptions, "freedom" for most gun nuts means the freedom for everyone to Love the USA the Way I Do, or go back to Roosha^h^h^hFrance. Having said that, we are perilously close to the state of affairs where the right to bear arms actually starts to make a smidgen of sense again. I'm never going to buy a gun. But our government as it functions today with the current "leadership" needs to be dismantled completely. . Hello, spooks. How did you get here so fast?
> [Kernel tweaking] is also little more productive than a fragfest.
Ha! Some folks--you, I'd wager--play around with Linux for fun. Some folks use it to get work done. And some folks base their businesses on it. The latter two camps benefit quite obviously from speed optimizations.
One small example: I run a streaming audio (icecast) server for a public radio station. It easily saturates 2 T1 lines, and everything runs on a PII-166 with 128MB RAM. I couldn't even get the encoder (lame) to run reliably until I began the tedious process of benchmarking and recompiling each of the major components--it didn't have enough CPU time. After a few days of "tweaking," I now have a cheap box that handles 40 mp3 clients around the clock, with many months of uptime.
On the contrary, tweaking is highly productive.
Rather than web search and determine optimal physics and materials for your Pinewood Derby racer, why don't you just make one? It's about making something cool with your son and crossing your fingers. My dad and I lost the speed race every year, and had a great time doing it.
My dad actually drilled through his hand while trying to make a hole for some fishing sinker weights in our second year. I remember mom driving us to the hospital, and the drill bit still sticking out of the back of his hand. No real damage done, and that was the year we came in second in the appearance trophy, but the little whorl in the center of his palm was the real prize: memories.
It's possible to overthink anything. And even in my small hometown, twenty years ago, the Pinewood Derby competition was fairly ruthless. It was the one thing we did in Scouting that wasn't at all about cooperation and fun. More like a bunch of aggro, little-league dads working out their frustrations through their sons' competitions. Take a step back from that, and you'll enjoy it more.
Why should we care? Liquid Audio to me was only another annoying, proprietary, DRM mess. Never helped me on my Linux laptop or Mac Cube. RIP.
I *love* Komodo on Linux (and Win2k, when I have to). It has made my work with Python and XLST far more productive. But...although ActiveState has done a masterful job of contributing to as well as profiting from Open Source software, Komodo is a closed-source, proprietary app. So why is it being advertised here? ./ continues to become less and less useful. Here's an idea: if you don't have a good story, don't put anything out! I'd rather see 2 good links a day here than the 10 crappy ones I usually see.
Guess I'd better get out of the way so some lameass can post his "Can you all help me do my research for a term paper?" post.
Poor taste? Come on.
Tim O'Reilly has done many Good Things and is generally On Our Side. But in this case he's simply wrong--it is entirely fair to legislate preference for Open Source software, in the same way that we've mandated C2 security compliance for certain systems: because that ensures characteristics that we, the people, have decided are desirable.
And Tim's wrong in such an egregious way that I also question whether he hasn't thought hard about what he's saying, or whether he's simply being paid off--which I doubt. But Tim claims to be surprised that Open Source has become increasingly politicized. That's either just rhetoric, or evidence that even Mr. O'Reilly has stuck his head in the sand. Software is political, get used to it.