Nah this won't work because it's not their goal. They want everyone to have to pay full for everything. You won't be able to mix and match multiplay because that means that people aren't paying the max amount they can for everything. Everyone will have to pay for everything to play against each other.
Much like in the near future there will be DLC for Modern Warfare 2 that will have to be purchased in order to continue playing on IWNet.
And suggesting the game would cost half as much in stores? Don't make me laught. I thought we'd already established this, it's not about giving the consumer what they want, it's about making the consumer pay as much as possible for as long as possible.
I still try to fantasize about a world in which games hadn't been pirated to hell and back and we could just buy nice games in fancy boxes that looked cool on shelves and that we just owned the game instead of being locked behind shitty DRM and that expansions were released on their own discs that again you weren't purchasing at the mercy of the stability of the publisher or authentication severs because they were purely digital downloads tied to user accounts or console ids on flaky hardware.
Agreed. I'm actually quite happy to make all my future gaming purchases a continuation of my collection of PS2/Xbox games and PC games pre-DLC/DRM bullshit. In fact I'm somewhat like that already, it's much more entertaining browsing Ebay and Gametrader stores for game purchases than to look at which game store between Gamestop/GAME/EB and JB HiFi (in Australia) offer the 'best' pre-order bonus on the latest internet authentication requiring game or console title that will have day 1 DLC and further expansions locked to the (flaky hardware) console.
Of course that involves second hand sales, another thing that all this DRM/DLC related garbage is trying to put a stop to.
ANNO 1404 was the last DRM laden game I will buy, and even then I had to download an entire ISO in addition to paying for it because there wasn't a torrent for the crack alone, and I refused to let it authenticate.
Which reminds me I must find a crack for Flatout Ultimate Carnage, as the authentication/patch servers are down for that game and to play it you have to go through GFWL which requires the latest version of a game if it detects a patch, so as it stands the game is unplayable.
You laugh but I told by a pastor once that I should consider the possibilty that all the stars in the sky at night are there because his god loves us to much and wanted to give us something truly beautiful to look at. He said it honestly, like it was what he actually believed. It was really quite sad, or disturbing, or both.
You haven't got any mod points so no one will read yours or my post, but this is, in hindsight, a perfect example of why UFO related observations get such an incredibly bad rap. I'm not attacking you personally per se, but yours is a near perfect example.
With obviously no knowledge of rocketry at all you're happy to put forward that
The stipulation that it was a rocket that had gone out of control also seems unlikely.
yet now that it's all been and gone this is exactly what it actually was. And this is why that lone observations from people that have seen 'something' carry virtually no weight. Without, or even with, experience in all relevant airborne related fields it's near impossible to be sure that what the majority of people have seen is anything other than the mundane that appears incredible to the untrained eye. Sufficently indistinguishable from magic, if you will.
And you weren't even there. Get a report from someone at the scene and you're suddenly including in hysteria, panic, adrenaline, and a whole other list of things that someone seeing something unfamilar will have affect their judgement. Put on top of all that a bias towards assigning anything unknown to an alien race and right there you have the perfect receipe for a completely mis-identified flying object.
This is the part that always sends me off the edge when reading the assorted bullshit justifications or derisions of what someone else chooses to do with their life.
At the expense of a long ranting post that will serve just as much purpose as a short and to the point one, I'll stay short and get straight to the point :
If you care, in the slightest, about what someone else thinks of what you yourself do with your own time, then you've already clearly, totally and absolutely, 'lost' whatever apparent competition you think that life is about.
Okay, here comes the rant anyway. I do have to take issue with this part:
Doing things like building a car or a house or spending months perfecting a masterpiece of oil and canvas open people up to more social exposure than, say, having some friends over to check out your paladin.
Shit, I didn't get the memo about social exposure being the point in life. I suppose if I'd been told that, I would have strived to be something that would raise other peoples opinions of me and, you know, actually cared about what other people thought in the first place. Damnit, I've been doing it all wrong this whole time! I thought my life was mine to live. I've wasted my life. In 100 years when we all sit down and compare where we're up to in our strive to be noticed we'll... hmmm.
You can drive your hot rod, take it to shows, hell even be a guest speaker in an auto-mechanics class. A composition of music could be enjoyed for hundreds of years by audiences you never imagined.
This is actually a good point, basically your justification is that what you've done will be heralded as a feat of great accomplishment in the small community of others. This is a good thing, right? Because we've already established that what other people think of your achievements is clearly the whole point to everything, so that's okay.
Your WoW account, however, will likely not be heralded as a feat of great accomplishment outside of a small community of others
Oh. Hang on, but you said that... and then you said that... well, fuck, I'm confused now.
I really shouldn't read threads like this. Endless spouting by people trying to convince others that their constant striving for for approval from everyone else is the right way to live just irritate me to no end.
Quake 2. Can't for the life of me remember which vanilla DM map it is, but it has three unavoidable armor shards in a tight corridoor if you're heading towards the rocket launcher (I don't think you can get to it from the other side). And you can hear shards being picked up from a long distance away, and when you hear three in a row, you bolt to the outside area to get a shot on the rocket laucher and can time it well enough to smack people just as they come out. And get called a hacker simply because you know the map.
Hell, there are plenty of newer games that give the ability to move silently if you walk (although I'm likely thinking of MOHAA), and people blunder around full tilt with audible footsteps and complain about cheating when you're already shooting at the corner before they're visible.
The moral is that people are morons and that no one can comprehend the possibility that someone might simply be better than them. I suppose if stuff like knowing where items are on the map or actually listening for other players don't occur to you then you're more likely to put it down to cheating if someone uses those things to beat you.
The thing is that it's always a single event that brings out the calls of hackers, and it always has been. It's just idiot people that can't handle getting killed or that can't accept that there is such a thing as a lucky shot. I was having a pretty bad day on MOHAA many years ago, and I was about 6th or something, and with 5 seconds to go on the map I ran around a corner with my sniper rifle and trained it on a guy that was moving past a window, and I unscoped just as I took the shot, figuring I had no chance. It was a headshot kill, I laughed, the round ended, and the next map loaded. The dude spent the first 5 minutes of the next round calling out the dude that had finished in 6th on a DM map for using cheats.
Then I played on a map with a guy that was clearly using an aimbot, everyone called him out on it, everyone avoided him or teamed up on him, and he still won the map about 50-5 or something. Cheats are generally either blatantly obvious, or subtle enough that you can't make them distinct from good players or lucky shots. The big problem is these idiots that can't handle that they might be on the receiving end of a bullshit shot from across the map, or that there are people out there that are *gasp* that much better than them.
Craptastic. Obviously only the first line was meant to be the quote. Sigh.
To progress in an action game, the player has to improve
Don't worry, modern action games are working on that bit as well. Who needs skills when you can't die, you can do complicated multi-hit attacks with a single button, or when QTEs can make even the most complicated task come down to a single button press.
To progress in an action game, the player has to improve Don't worry, modern action games are working on that bit as well. Who needs skills when you can't die, you can do complicated multi-hit attacks with a single button, or when QTEs can make even the most complicated task come down to a single button press.
Michael Atkinson has been hammering his dolphin button ever since he saw the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2.
There is something wrong with the government, I'll grant you that. But what's worse is that we appear to have a higher than average amount of parents willing to pass their parenting responsibilities onto the government.
Seriously, I think it was in Queensland, about 6 months ago, a family tragically lost their child who drowned in the family pool, which I believe did not have a fence, or which had an open gate, or something. It was a "brief moment of inattentiveness", as if that was an excuse, given they had a small child, and owned a pool. They then had a good 15 minutes of fame loudly proclaiming that the government should implement a pool gate checking system by which every home that has a pool has periodic checks to ensure that their pool fence adheres to some to-be-created government pool fence standard.
Even losing your own child to inattentiveness while around a pool wasn't enough to shock these people into realising the responsibilities involved in raising a child when owning a pool. Their immediate call was for the government to do something about it. This is the way a lot of parents appear to work in Australia. They would prefer being forced into parenting responsibilties by the government. Even when they are apparently already clearly aware of said responsibilities.
Also, Atkinson launched a brief inquiry into the possibilty that the parents owned a copy of The Sims, describing it as "basically a depraved pool drowning simulator".
Yeah this is the thing. The story in WoW is actually quite reasonable for the most part, it's just that no one ever reads it. Admittedly the text scrolls so slowly that you need to have instant quest text turned on regardless but there is some genuinely entertaining writing, and some truly funny stuff as well.
You can tell the villian is insane because he gives his troops random armor and weaponry, and his orders to glue guns and armor to their bodies were ignored by some of the goons meaning that the main character can occasionally remove them from dead enemies and use them himself, because of course he entered the fight originally with a sharp stick and some rags.
The one thing you will never find though is a setting in which the black plague is rife. Kinda hard when all your heroes spend their formative years destroying the rat population.
Excuse me, but if you don't instantly recognize a Space Marine from the Mr T 40k Universe ("I pity the genestealer!"), E'Latina'a the Hispanic Night Elf from the further reaches of southern Kalimdor (She is the one that gives you the quest to kidnap the rich daughter of King Varian for ransom, you know, the "My white powdered goods are of the highest quality" chick) and... and... that game with the psychopathic purple rat wearing the ammo belt... I think it's a character from Everquest (surely one of the millions of expansions must have dealt with mutation in lab mice), then I really don't know how to help you out here.
Why even bother posting LHC news on/. anymore. It's just top to bottom black hole and collision jokes. The bottom of the barrel has been scraped, and you guys have worked your way through the wood and there is light peeking through on the other side. No funny can escape from this. These are the same jokes that occur every day in the upper atmosphere at much higher humor levels than we can manage. The universe is actively avoiding the discovery of a funny black hole joke, and will mysteriously break any attempts to discover it.
Yeah it becomes frankly embarassing the logic these retards employ in an attempt to validate pirating stuff.
I present exhibit A) : http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1440056&cid=30070586 which I don't want to respond directly to because I don't need this idiot thinking I'm even remotely respecting his opinion by responding to it. And I don't want to feed the trolls and so on.
I have one: the benefit to the pirate (of the one copy) exceeds the loss to the makers of the game of that one lost potential sale. That is, if we sum up everybody's utility, this is a net gain.
Entitlement generation at it's finest.
Because once the game exists, the price of each additional copy is so close to zero that the consumers are willing to bear it amongst themselves (see bittorrent, generous seeders, TPB, etc.).
This guy is seriously presenting this stuff as valid arguments, this isn't making faces and fart noises while you attempt reasonable discussion; this is shitting your pants and offering around samples while you laugh manicially.
This is the most useful thing I've read in a long, long time. Thank you for this.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the link is the 'ON' the presents itself after you hit the 'Membership Level' section under accounts, not the ON that appears on the account summary page. I seriously thought that maybe it had been changed at some point to no longer allow this. You're right though, the amount of crap they show you to try and convince you to stay is almost embarrassing, and the fact that the link was so subtle with no indication that there was any way to actually turn it off was well past being almost shameful.
I just want to go back to using subscription cards because I'm sick of paying for something that I use maybe twice a month at best, and I dreaded having to make the damn phone call. Again, thank you very much for this.
This is correct, and it's really disappointing. I got my console modded for the same reason that I got my PS2 and Xbox modded, so I could play import games, either titles that weren't released in PAL or so I could pay cheaper prices than the rip-offs that we deal with in Australia (easily over three quarters of my game PS2/Xbox game collection is NTSC, and I'm trying to resist the urge to take photos of my collection to show I'm not just talking it up as an "importer" that uses the definition as someone that gets their games from fucking mininova or something).
I still have my copy of Raiden Fighters Aces that I can't do anything with and I've on-sold the copy of Oneechabara after the PAL release came out, and I was eyeing off all these great shooters from Cave et al that I was going to be playing on my modded console. You can imagine how that worked out, and I'm just thankful that I only purchased two games before discovering this was the case.
To completely digress, I remember reading some interview with the apparent idiots that did either RFA or Raiden 4 in the US, saying that they specifically made the game region locked so they could get the sales to get permission for a PAL release, or some other retarded logic. The mind boggles. It's a niche market anyway, why you would deliberately cripple your sales chances to entertain some fantasy of selling enough to get a second release of a genre that is hardly known outside of Japan is completely beyond me.
I assumed a mod was a way of getting around this idiotic logic and region encoding and game prices. Okay I lie, I assumed that it wouldn't matter anyway as shoot-em up fan as the PS3 would surely be the source of all the shooters on the next gen system and with it being region free (or at least unenforced for the most part), it wouldn't be a problem. But importing stuff like Culdcept on 360 (thanks for the PAL port guys! Culdcept was one of the games I specfically modded my PS2 for) would have been great.
Back on track to finish, my experience is that it's definitely 0.1% with honorable reasons for modding, and I won't deny that I've tried burned games to see what they are like, but then I imagine I'm one of the few people that returns from a trip to Gametraders or receives a package from Ebay and their first step is to find the burnt copies of those games that they have and bin them.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah this won't work because it's not their goal. They want everyone to have to pay full for everything. You won't be able to mix and match multiplay because that means that people aren't paying the max amount they can for everything. Everyone will have to pay for everything to play against each other.
Much like in the near future there will be DLC for Modern Warfare 2 that will have to be purchased in order to continue playing on IWNet.
And suggesting the game would cost half as much in stores? Don't make me laught. I thought we'd already established this, it's not about giving the consumer what they want, it's about making the consumer pay as much as possible for as long as possible.
I still try to fantasize about a world in which games hadn't been pirated to hell and back and we could just buy nice games in fancy boxes that looked cool on shelves and that we just owned the game instead of being locked behind shitty DRM and that expansions were released on their own discs that again you weren't purchasing at the mercy of the stability of the publisher or authentication severs because they were purely digital downloads tied to user accounts or console ids on flaky hardware.
I want to OWN the things I buy, not rent them.
Agreed. I'm actually quite happy to make all my future gaming purchases a continuation of my collection of PS2/Xbox games and PC games pre-DLC/DRM bullshit. In fact I'm somewhat like that already, it's much more entertaining browsing Ebay and Gametrader stores for game purchases than to look at which game store between Gamestop/GAME/EB and JB HiFi (in Australia) offer the 'best' pre-order bonus on the latest internet authentication requiring game or console title that will have day 1 DLC and further expansions locked to the (flaky hardware) console.
Of course that involves second hand sales, another thing that all this DRM/DLC related garbage is trying to put a stop to.
ANNO 1404 was the last DRM laden game I will buy, and even then I had to download an entire ISO in addition to paying for it because there wasn't a torrent for the crack alone, and I refused to let it authenticate.
Which reminds me I must find a crack for Flatout Ultimate Carnage, as the authentication/patch servers are down for that game and to play it you have to go through GFWL which requires the latest version of a game if it detects a patch, so as it stands the game is unplayable.
You laugh but I told by a pastor once that I should consider the possibilty that all the stars in the sky at night are there because his god loves us to much and wanted to give us something truly beautiful to look at. He said it honestly, like it was what he actually believed. It was really quite sad, or disturbing, or both.
I knew that never giving up on the GREATEST CONSOLE OF ALL TIME would reward me in the end.
THE DREAMCAST IS BACK PEOPLE, BOW BEFORE YOUR NEW GAMING GOD.
I love Sega.
You haven't got any mod points so no one will read yours or my post, but this is, in hindsight, a perfect example of why UFO related observations get such an incredibly bad rap. I'm not attacking you personally per se, but yours is a near perfect example.
With obviously no knowledge of rocketry at all you're happy to put forward that
The stipulation that it was a rocket that had gone out of control also seems unlikely.
yet now that it's all been and gone this is exactly what it actually was. And this is why that lone observations from people that have seen 'something' carry virtually no weight. Without, or even with, experience in all relevant airborne related fields it's near impossible to be sure that what the majority of people have seen is anything other than the mundane that appears incredible to the untrained eye. Sufficently indistinguishable from magic, if you will.
And you weren't even there. Get a report from someone at the scene and you're suddenly including in hysteria, panic, adrenaline, and a whole other list of things that someone seeing something unfamilar will have affect their judgement. Put on top of all that a bias towards assigning anything unknown to an alien race and right there you have the perfect receipe for a completely mis-identified flying object.
Before I got bored of it, I used to just quote 80s song lyrics
Simon is ... hearing the secrets that you keep, when you're talking in your sleep.
My hope was that either people get the song references, which is cool, or get really disturbed by it, which is just as cool.
My observation as a guy is that I would dump my wife right now if Liz Lemon wanted me.
but I think far more people would find value
This is the part that always sends me off the edge when reading the assorted bullshit justifications or derisions of what someone else chooses to do with their life.
At the expense of a long ranting post that will serve just as much purpose as a short and to the point one, I'll stay short and get straight to the point :
If you care, in the slightest, about what someone else thinks of what you yourself do with your own time, then you've already clearly, totally and absolutely, 'lost' whatever apparent competition you think that life is about.
Okay, here comes the rant anyway. I do have to take issue with this part :
Doing things like building a car or a house or spending months perfecting a masterpiece of oil and canvas open people up to more social exposure than, say, having some friends over to check out your paladin.
Shit, I didn't get the memo about social exposure being the point in life. I suppose if I'd been told that, I would have strived to be something that would raise other peoples opinions of me and, you know, actually cared about what other people thought in the first place. Damnit, I've been doing it all wrong this whole time! I thought my life was mine to live. I've wasted my life. In 100 years when we all sit down and compare where we're up to in our strive to be noticed we'll ... hmmm.
You can drive your hot rod, take it to shows, hell even be a guest speaker in an auto-mechanics class. A composition of music could be enjoyed for hundreds of years by audiences you never imagined.
This is actually a good point, basically your justification is that what you've done will be heralded as a feat of great accomplishment in the small community of others. This is a good thing, right? Because we've already established that what other people think of your achievements is clearly the whole point to everything, so that's okay.
Your WoW account, however, will likely not be heralded as a feat of great accomplishment outside of a small community of others
Oh. Hang on, but you said that ... and then you said that ... well, fuck, I'm confused now.
I really shouldn't read threads like this. Endless spouting by people trying to convince others that their constant striving for for approval from everyone else is the right way to live just irritate me to no end.
I do. I really wish they would use simply COD6 or whatever it's up to now.
Or for a more classic example.
Quake 2. Can't for the life of me remember which vanilla DM map it is, but it has three unavoidable armor shards in a tight corridoor if you're heading towards the rocket launcher (I don't think you can get to it from the other side). And you can hear shards being picked up from a long distance away, and when you hear three in a row, you bolt to the outside area to get a shot on the rocket laucher and can time it well enough to smack people just as they come out. And get called a hacker simply because you know the map.
Hell, there are plenty of newer games that give the ability to move silently if you walk (although I'm likely thinking of MOHAA), and people blunder around full tilt with audible footsteps and complain about cheating when you're already shooting at the corner before they're visible.
The moral is that people are morons and that no one can comprehend the possibility that someone might simply be better than them. I suppose if stuff like knowing where items are on the map or actually listening for other players don't occur to you then you're more likely to put it down to cheating if someone uses those things to beat you.
The thing is that it's always a single event that brings out the calls of hackers, and it always has been. It's just idiot people that can't handle getting killed or that can't accept that there is such a thing as a lucky shot. I was having a pretty bad day on MOHAA many years ago, and I was about 6th or something, and with 5 seconds to go on the map I ran around a corner with my sniper rifle and trained it on a guy that was moving past a window, and I unscoped just as I took the shot, figuring I had no chance. It was a headshot kill, I laughed, the round ended, and the next map loaded. The dude spent the first 5 minutes of the next round calling out the dude that had finished in 6th on a DM map for using cheats.
Then I played on a map with a guy that was clearly using an aimbot, everyone called him out on it, everyone avoided him or teamed up on him, and he still won the map about 50-5 or something. Cheats are generally either blatantly obvious, or subtle enough that you can't make them distinct from good players or lucky shots. The big problem is these idiots that can't handle that they might be on the receiving end of a bullshit shot from across the map, or that there are people out there that are *gasp* that much better than them.
Today, we have artificial meat; meat that you eat that isn't even meat.
Tomorrow will we have artificial eating? You won't even get to eat your artificial meat in the old fashioned way.
How long until all you can get is a hot beef injection? I don't know about you guys, but that sounds pretty gay to me.
Craptastic. Obviously only the first line was meant to be the quote. Sigh.
To progress in an action game, the player has to improve
Don't worry, modern action games are working on that bit as well. Who needs skills when you can't die, you can do complicated multi-hit attacks with a single button, or when QTEs can make even the most complicated task come down to a single button press.
To progress in an action game, the player has to improve
Don't worry, modern action games are working on that bit as well. Who needs skills when you can't die, you can do complicated multi-hit attacks with a single button, or when QTEs can make even the most complicated task come down to a single button press.
Michael Atkinson has been hammering his dolphin button ever since he saw the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2.
There is something wrong with the government, I'll grant you that. But what's worse is that we appear to have a higher than average amount of parents willing to pass their parenting responsibilities onto the government.
Seriously, I think it was in Queensland, about 6 months ago, a family tragically lost their child who drowned in the family pool, which I believe did not have a fence, or which had an open gate, or something. It was a "brief moment of inattentiveness", as if that was an excuse, given they had a small child, and owned a pool. They then had a good 15 minutes of fame loudly proclaiming that the government should implement a pool gate checking system by which every home that has a pool has periodic checks to ensure that their pool fence adheres to some to-be-created government pool fence standard.
Even losing your own child to inattentiveness while around a pool wasn't enough to shock these people into realising the responsibilities involved in raising a child when owning a pool. Their immediate call was for the government to do something about it. This is the way a lot of parents appear to work in Australia. They would prefer being forced into parenting responsibilties by the government. Even when they are apparently already clearly aware of said responsibilities.
Also, Atkinson launched a brief inquiry into the possibilty that the parents owned a copy of The Sims, describing it as "basically a depraved pool drowning simulator".
(I might have made that last sentence up)
Yeah this is the thing. The story in WoW is actually quite reasonable for the most part, it's just that no one ever reads it. Admittedly the text scrolls so slowly that you need to have instant quest text turned on regardless but there is some genuinely entertaining writing, and some truly funny stuff as well.
You can tell the villian is insane because he gives his troops random armor and weaponry, and his orders to glue guns and armor to their bodies were ignored by some of the goons meaning that the main character can occasionally remove them from dead enemies and use them himself, because of course he entered the fight originally with a sharp stick and some rags.
The one thing you will never find though is a setting in which the black plague is rife. Kinda hard when all your heroes spend their formative years destroying the rat population.
Excuse me, but if you don't instantly recognize a Space Marine from the Mr T 40k Universe ("I pity the genestealer!"), E'Latina'a the Hispanic Night Elf from the further reaches of southern Kalimdor (She is the one that gives you the quest to kidnap the rich daughter of King Varian for ransom, you know, the "My white powdered goods are of the highest quality" chick) and ... and ... that game with the psychopathic purple rat wearing the ammo belt ... I think it's a character from Everquest (surely one of the millions of expansions must have dealt with mutation in lab mice), then I really don't know how to help you out here.
Why even bother posting LHC news on /. anymore. It's just top to bottom black hole and collision jokes. The bottom of the barrel has been scraped, and you guys have worked your way through the wood and there is light peeking through on the other side. No funny can escape from this. These are the same jokes that occur every day in the upper atmosphere at much higher humor levels than we can manage. The universe is actively avoiding the discovery of a funny black hole joke, and will mysteriously break any attempts to discover it.
In reality, that's retarded.
Words to live by.
spacious reasoning; reasoning with large gaps where the logic just slips right through.
Yeah it becomes frankly embarassing the logic these retards employ in an attempt to validate pirating stuff.
I present exhibit A) : http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1440056&cid=30070586 which I don't want to respond directly to because I don't need this idiot thinking I'm even remotely respecting his opinion by responding to it. And I don't want to feed the trolls and so on.
I have one: the benefit to the pirate (of the one copy) exceeds the loss to the makers of the game of that one lost potential sale. That is, if we sum up everybody's utility, this is a net gain.
Entitlement generation at it's finest.
Because once the game exists, the price of each additional copy is so close to zero that the consumers are willing to bear it amongst themselves (see bittorrent, generous seeders, TPB, etc.).
This guy is seriously presenting this stuff as valid arguments, this isn't making faces and fart noises while you attempt reasonable discussion; this is shitting your pants and offering around samples while you laugh manicially.
This is the most useful thing I've read in a long, long time. Thank you for this.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the link is the 'ON' the presents itself after you hit the 'Membership Level' section under accounts, not the ON that appears on the account summary page. I seriously thought that maybe it had been changed at some point to no longer allow this. You're right though, the amount of crap they show you to try and convince you to stay is almost embarrassing, and the fact that the link was so subtle with no indication that there was any way to actually turn it off was well past being almost shameful.
I just want to go back to using subscription cards because I'm sick of paying for something that I use maybe twice a month at best, and I dreaded having to make the damn phone call. Again, thank you very much for this.
This is correct, and it's really disappointing. I got my console modded for the same reason that I got my PS2 and Xbox modded, so I could play import games, either titles that weren't released in PAL or so I could pay cheaper prices than the rip-offs that we deal with in Australia (easily over three quarters of my game PS2/Xbox game collection is NTSC, and I'm trying to resist the urge to take photos of my collection to show I'm not just talking it up as an "importer" that uses the definition as someone that gets their games from fucking mininova or something).
I still have my copy of Raiden Fighters Aces that I can't do anything with and I've on-sold the copy of Oneechabara after the PAL release came out, and I was eyeing off all these great shooters from Cave et al that I was going to be playing on my modded console. You can imagine how that worked out, and I'm just thankful that I only purchased two games before discovering this was the case.
To completely digress, I remember reading some interview with the apparent idiots that did either RFA or Raiden 4 in the US, saying that they specifically made the game region locked so they could get the sales to get permission for a PAL release, or some other retarded logic. The mind boggles. It's a niche market anyway, why you would deliberately cripple your sales chances to entertain some fantasy of selling enough to get a second release of a genre that is hardly known outside of Japan is completely beyond me.
I assumed a mod was a way of getting around this idiotic logic and region encoding and game prices. Okay I lie, I assumed that it wouldn't matter anyway as shoot-em up fan as the PS3 would surely be the source of all the shooters on the next gen system and with it being region free (or at least unenforced for the most part), it wouldn't be a problem. But importing stuff like Culdcept on 360 (thanks for the PAL port guys! Culdcept was one of the games I specfically modded my PS2 for) would have been great.
Back on track to finish, my experience is that it's definitely 0.1% with honorable reasons for modding, and I won't deny that I've tried burned games to see what they are like, but then I imagine I'm one of the few people that returns from a trip to Gametraders or receives a package from Ebay and their first step is to find the burnt copies of those games that they have and bin them.
Make sure you have legit details behind this /. account because when TDS want to use this line, you'll be a
bonehead with a computer, a cable modem and a half-baked opinion
who is in the money :)