Yeah, but imagine what Burt could do if the White Knight was powered by a scramjet and capable of mach 15 and much higher altitude.
He would be a lot closer to putting Space Ship One into orbit, although obviously he would have a little trouble getting it back in its current incarnation.
I don't think you would end up with the same data. In order to do that you would have to have the exact same start data for the first and second compression, meaning you would have to end up with the orginal data exactly, i.e. lossless compression, after the first uncompression. Instead you end up with a perfect copy of the compressed data, just uncompressed, it still suffers the same degredation as the compressed version though.
Since the start data is not the same, the new compressed data won't be the same and will degrade further. It's like repeatedly saving a jpeg. It gets worse every time.
How come, if ice accumulates at 1.5m per year, steadily burying 4 stations in the past, the shelf is about to calve off by 2010?
Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't that mean the shelf is getting steadily thicker? Is it melting away from below faster than it accumulates or something?
That's a good point about the percentages, but I don't think the sets based on Intel's chips will cost $1000 in a year. There is no way that's going to happen, that's just hype. Maybe they can lower the price of bulbs by the time the sets actually hit $1000.
Even if Intel could price the chips at a level that would allow $1000 TVs, they still aren't the ones who are going to be setting the final price on the TVs, they aren't going to be building their own, just making the chips.
The consumer electronic companies are going to have to choose between hugely undercutting everybody at $1000 with thin profit margins, or still significantly undercutting everybody at $2000-$2500 with large profit margins. I can tell you which way they would go, although I don't think Intel can really get it that cheap in that amount of time in the first place.
If they are going to have anything in a year, let alone at a $1000, they better already be distributing basically final chips to TV manufacturers so they can design the sets. I've seen the delays between having a final prototype on display and volume shipping take most of a year, getting a new design out in under a year would be extremely fast.
From the article: "The true market test only started this summer," he said. "Rear-projection D.L.P. systems are flying off the shelf."
If it hasn't slowed down DLP, it probably won't slow this down either. Besides when you pay the $200 to replace the bulb in 5 years, your DLP will look brand new, exactly as it did the day you bought it. Try that with a five year old CRT rear projection set.
A friend's wife used her brand new 20GB ipod during a half marathon, and not only did it skip, it completely stopped playing music twice. She had to actually hit play again to get it running again. This doesn't seem like a likely failure mode unless she actually triggered some kind of protection mechanism to prevent damage to the harddrive. Wouldn't it just keep trying to fill the buffer until it succeeded?
It was a rough course and maybe it was subjected to more shock than running on the beach. Also, hers was strapped to her waste, not her arm, which possibly provides some shock absorbtion because there isn't a direct path through your body to the ground? Finally it could have been a bad unit as I only have that one data point, but there definitely is at least the potential to have problems.
Has anyone else seen this? She is curous now as to whether there are problems with her unit.
I don't know much about encryption, but this is something I was wondering about. How do you tell when it is cracked? How is this different from standard encryption where the key is much smaller than the plaintext being encrypted? Do you just rely on the fact that because the key is much smaller, all possible combinations of output text cannot be arrived at? Therefore the chance you will end up with something that is plaintext, yet not the original message is very small?
Is that how you even tell when you have arrived at the correct key when brute forcing a traditional encryption algorithm? By looking at the output determining whether it is something that could be the correct source data?
I believe you are mistaken about image burn. DLP's do not suffer degredation over time, and therefore are not suseptable to the uneven wear that cause burn-in with static images.
At least with rear projection sets, this is one of the primary advantages of DLP over CRT. I have less experience with front projection, but as it is the same DLP engine technology, I'm fairly certain they also do not experience burn-in.
Maybe what he meant was very few sets are actually capable of displaying the full resolution of 1080i. You are correct that pretty much all sets support 1080i inputs, but almost all can't display that many pixels. Aside from Toshiba's new 3-chip LCOS rear projection tv, or a front or rear projection crt with 9" guns, almost nothing is actually capable of resolving 1920x1080 pixels.
I recently saw this article http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/05/21/gravity.m ystery/ from cnn on how both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 have not covered nearly the distance that conventional physics said they should have.
It seems that something is decelerating them both with equal force towards the sun.
"Something is slowing down the spacecraft. And we have not been successful in finding the source of that. There is more slowing than you would expect from Newtonian gravity," said John Anderson, a senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
This is somewhat of an old article, has anyone heard whether there has been an update on the cause of this?
There are other reasons beside quality to dislike anolog only outputs from SACD/DVD Audio players. For one, most receivers and pre/pros only have one set of analog 5.1 channel inputs. This means unless you have a hybrid player (they are becoming more common but that used to be difficult) you need some sort of switching device to plug both players in.
Another factor is that bass management in most of the players is not up to the level provided by most receivers and pre/pros. You have to either re-digitize the signal so that your receiver can do the processing, or live with whatever signal ends up going to your speakers.
Also, in regards to the 4*-Ai series Pioneer receivers, I'm not sure whether this is a proprietary encryption, or whether it is interoperable with other equipment. If you need a pioneer player and a pioneer receiver to be able to use it, it is much less interesting than a true standard that would operate between manufacturers.
Just a shot in the dark, but could this have anything to do with the decision in Australia that mod chip makers don't violate the Australian equivalent of the DMCA? IIRC the court decided (among other things) that because the protections in the ps2 aren't meant to stop copying, only make it so you can't play copied/imported media, it didn't fall under protection of the law.
Could it be that Microsft just doesn't want to fight it in court, and lose. Thus setting the precedent that such hardware protections are not protected under the DMCA?
I agree it is nice to see voluntary progress in this direction, and that should be encouraged, but I do not think being forced to switch due to depleting oil reserves would be so sudden.
Oil is not simply going to run out one day. It is going to slowly become harder and harder to get out remaining stores. This will slowly increase the cost of petroleum based products (gas) and give competing technologies more of a cost advantage (or less of a cost disadvantage) until they become economically viable.
When oil becomes too expensive to be economically practical (which should occur way before we are completely out) other technologies which were previously not economically practical will become so.
It's debateable it isn't broken for pcs (you better pick your counter strike server pretty carefully if you don't want to play with cheaters) but that same model is most definitely broken for consoles.
Console players are a different market. Once you are past the early adopters of the new online system you are going to be selling to casual gamers. These people are not going to put up with any inconvenience, or hassle with getting their online game to work properly. If the system doesn't let you put in the game and start playing within a few seconds, without jumping through all the hoops you have to on the pc, it simply won't be popular with the majority of console gamers.
It seems to me that Mircrosoft's approach is more risky, either everything is secure or it isn't. But if they can pull it off it will be great. Sony's system will undoubtably have some games which are executed well, and some that are unplayable, since the individual implementation is left to the developers.
You have done an excellent job of pointing out many of the potential security issues with consoles being online. I admit I am skeptical of whether Microsoft can keep their system secure, and I am unsure of what the consequences will be if they don't
What I didn't see, other than by semi-applicable analogy, is why you think Sony's system is going to be any more secure. They have all the same issues which Microsoft will have to deal with. However, it won't be them dealing with them, it will be each individual developer putting up their own, incompatible, *closed* online network, like Mircrsoft's network times 100.
Every new company that puts games online will have to solve all the same problems over again when they implement their own proprietary network. Will Sony help them get things right? Probably. Will competing companies help eachother avoid the pitfalls of onine gaming? Possibly. The fact remains with Sony's system you are relying on a hundred companies getting a hundred closed networks safe and secure, rather than one. Admittedly, the consequences may be lower for the failure of a single network, but if it is popular, and allows access to a large percentage of online PS2s, they will not be much lower.
All good points. I would add a few other things. One, Blizzard is a good example of why Microsoft's strategy may be more successful. Battle.net may be free, but it is also buggy, overcrowded, laggy, and infested with cheaters. Blizzard lacks either the ability, or the desire to fix these problems. With Microsoft's strategy there is one system to police and maintain. If it works well, all the games on it will work well. With Sony's strategy each game will be a crapshoot. Some companies will get it right, others will be abysmal failures whether they charge or not.
Battle.net would not be successful on a console. There environment it too hostile for casual gamers. The console market is different from the pc market. PC online gamers are mostly hardcore gamers willing to fiddle with stuff to get it to work. Consoles like the playstation 2 are so successful (>30 million world-wide) precisely because they don't limit themselves to hardcore gamers. Microsoft's system will present one unified, homogenous, well maintained destination for all gaming. On Sony's system you will have to deal with 10 different companies and their separate bills, servers, interfaces, matchmaking systems and quirks. Plus, with the XBox you can find your friends and talk with them anywhere on the network, anytime, no matter what game they are playing.
p.s. If you like subspace, it is far from dead. It is now called Continuum, but it is the exact same game. Check out www.subspacehq.com. That game ate my life when it was in beta years ago. It is a perfect example of a game that would have succeeded with Microsoft's system because they wouldn't have had to pay for servers. There are many great games that will never be popular enough to pay for the infrastructure investment necessary to make them online. The only way around this is user hosted servers (the common pc model) and this won't work with consoles.
I don't know if you are still looking but I figured I'd reply anyway.
I'm not saying it doesn't do boneheaded things occasionally, but it is, on average, quite smart. The guys that are supposed to be intelligent behave very well. If you stumble across them and backoff they move so they aren't in the same place when you come back. If you stay back a while they circle around behind you. If they start taking fire they duck and dive to the side. If their shield goes all the way down they hide until it recharges. If there are multiple enemies, some will pin you down while others circle around. If you stick a grenade to one of them (some of the grenades stick to enemies) they will charge you to try and take you with them. I have even seen them backtrack to come at you from another angle. It is still preprogrammed responses, but at least they are fairly intelligent preprogrammed responses.
I agree about jedi knight 2, and in principle I'm not disagreeing with what you said. Half-life was an absolutely amazing game. One of my favorites. All I was saying is don't discount halo out of hand because it doesn't use a mouse and keyboard if you haven't sat down and played it for few hours. If you like first person shooters as much as it sounds like, I honestly think you would like halo.
As far as coop, I wasn't saying it was new, just rare. Plus playing split screen and being in the same room so you can chat is cool. Console games are a lot more social than pc games usually. I play my pc by myself usually and my console with friends.
I have played and loved many fps's on the computer, especially Half-life. Halo is one of the best games ever. Period. Not just one of the best first person shooters.
The graphics and AI put half-life to shame. The control detracts not at all (although it would if you had to compete against other humans using a keyboard and mouse). The story is as good. Cooperative multiplayer is absolutely killer. This is a feature I have just about never seen on a pc. The only thing better than playing a great game is playing a great game from your couch with a beer and your best friend.
On the down side some parts of some of the levels get a little repetitive and online multiplayer is a joke compared to half-life's mod community, but still fun.
It's even more impressive when you consider it was a launch title on a brand new console from a company with no console history. In my opinion it is easily the best launch titles I have ever seen on any console ever.
The leader of the ASCI Blue program spoke at a graduate seminar I attended. He mentioned that when they first got AIX up and running on the over 6000 processors they found once a year bugs (a bug that in a normal implementation would only appear roughly once a year) at a rate of one every few days for quite a while. At the very least it ought to help flush out a lot of very rare bugs.
These games may be coming out to a pc, but a lot of console gamers don't have pc's with good enough specs to play these games. Sure there is some overlap but the pc competes with Xbox much less than the ps2 does.
As for online, it may or may not be the killer app. That depends on how they implement it. But you can't deny that it has been a killer app for a lot of pc games. When I play counter-strike (a half-life mod) there are so many servers it takes 10 minutes to update. Do you think anyone would still be playing half-life if it wasn't online? It was a great game but it's been out forever. Microsoft needs to eat the cost of the servers (come on, it's a tiny percentage of their marketing budget for the xbox alone) and make it free. Plus give developers incentive to make great online games. Then I absolutely believe it could be the next great thing.
Halo is a very good first person shooter for all the reasons mentioned already. It is a great first person shooter because of the AI. I have never seen as intelligent enemies as in Halo (the ones that are supposed to be intelligent anyway). Run across and enemy and back off like a normal game, and when you come back he won't be there anymore. Wait a little longer and he has circled around behind you. Kill a powerful enemy out of the middle of a group of weak ones and the weak ones go running. Stick a plasma grenade to an enemy and he charges you to see if he can take you with him. When he starts taking fire he will duck and then go for cover, not sit there and take it. Take his shield all the way down and he hides until it recharges. Attack one enemy and his buddies circle around while the first one has you pinned down. I have even seen enemies backtrack and take a different route to end up behind you. Throw a grenade into a group and they yell "Grenade!" and scatter to avoid it.
Also there are literally dozens of different messages that both your friends and enemies say in response to different situations. Ranging from dull to truly hilarious. For example, Shoot one of your marines and he may ask if he owes you money. Somtimes they say something in Spanish. There are way to many to list, but I am still hearing new ones.
The physics have been mentioned a couple of times. This is another example. Throw a grendade into a room and the enemies go flying with the explosion because you can set off granades that are lying around on the ground. I have seen them blasted through a glass window to land at my feet, or launched up through a hole in the floor from the room below. Shoot a banshee while it's strafing you and it crashes out of the air and slides up to your feet. Or lands on you and kills you.
It is a very good game until you notice all of the little touches. They are why it is a great game.
I agree with most of your points but there are a couple of things I take issue with.
Great Games for Xbox (IMHO): Halo, DOA3, Project Gotham Racing, Rallisport Challenge, Jet Set Radio Future, Morrowind this month (hopefully good). This is admittedly weaker than the current PS2 lineup but remember the PS2 has a year head start and Microsoft knew that. They didn't ever expect to outsell Sony this generation, just get a foot in the door.
This is an incredibly strong lineup for this early. Much stronger than the ps2's at this time. Halo just became the Fastest million selling game on a next generation console. How many ps2 launch titles have sold million copies even more than a year and a half later? That's right, not one. The first million seller on ps2 was GT3 and that didn't sell a million until nearly a year after the ps2 launch.
Online support: Sony has just said that they will not be creating servers for ps2 online. The software companies are on their own to host online games. This is a large expense to pass on to the software companies, especially if you don't want each one charging $10/month. Also, the fact is, the ethernet modem kit, and the harddrive (both necessary for games like FFXI) are not selling well at all. This may put Square up against a wall with FFXI if it still isn't a big enough reason to get people to fork over $200 for a harddrive and modem. Xbox has announced nothing yet, however every Xbox is capable of online out of the box. This is also one of the largest advantages between Xbox and the other consoles, I would be amazed if Microsoft didn't take full advantage.
One thing obvious from your summary is that the hardware is clearly superior. And you didn't even mention true dolby digital 5.1 encoding. Microsoft wins in every hardware category you had. Sony's head start may be too much to to overcome this generation, but give Microsoft credit for designing a good console the first time around.
Your suggstions at the end are very good, and would probably help microsoft considerably. I'd qualify drop price with drop price in Europe though. Japan is already low, and the US is selling well, it is easily out selling the gamecube, although not in the last week measured as someone else mentioned. Actully with the currently available world wide numbers Xbox has out sold gamecube, although they are about equal and gamecube hasn't launched in Europe yet. It has been on sale in Japan for a long time though.
One thing I would add is release a progressive scan dvd playback kit. That would be another big advantage.
As a die-hard pc fps player I thought the same thing until I played halo. Are the controls as accurate as they would be on a PC? No. But they are completely transparent after 10 minutes to get used to them and don't detract from the game at all.
If you had to play against someone using a keyboard and mouse you would get slaughtered, but you don't so why miss out on one of the best fps's of all time because of imagined problems with the control scheme. It is incredibly fun and, after all, that's what is important.
Now the lack of an online mod community for multiplayer, that is another problem entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but imagine what Burt could do if the White Knight was powered by a scramjet and capable of mach 15 and much higher altitude.
He would be a lot closer to putting Space Ship One into orbit, although obviously he would have a little trouble getting it back in its current incarnation.
I don't think you would end up with the same data. In order to do that you would have to have the exact same start data for the first and second compression, meaning you would have to end up with the orginal data exactly, i.e. lossless compression, after the first uncompression. Instead you end up with a perfect copy of the compressed data, just uncompressed, it still suffers the same degredation as the compressed version though.
Since the start data is not the same, the new compressed data won't be the same and will degrade further. It's like repeatedly saving a jpeg. It gets worse every time.
David
How come, if ice accumulates at 1.5m per year, steadily burying 4 stations in the past, the shelf is about to calve off by 2010?
Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't that mean the shelf is getting steadily thicker? Is it melting away from below faster than it accumulates or something?
David
That's a good point about the percentages, but I don't think the sets based on Intel's chips will cost $1000 in a year. There is no way that's going to happen, that's just hype. Maybe they can lower the price of bulbs by the time the sets actually hit $1000.
Even if Intel could price the chips at a level that would allow $1000 TVs, they still aren't the ones who are going to be setting the final price on the TVs, they aren't going to be building their own, just making the chips.
The consumer electronic companies are going to have to choose between hugely undercutting everybody at $1000 with thin profit margins, or still significantly undercutting everybody at $2000-$2500 with large profit margins. I can tell you which way they would go, although I don't think Intel can really get it that cheap in that amount of time in the first place.
If they are going to have anything in a year, let alone at a $1000, they better already be distributing basically final chips to TV manufacturers so they can design the sets. I've seen the delays between having a final prototype on display and volume shipping take most of a year, getting a new design out in under a year would be extremely fast.
David
From the article: "The true market test only started this summer," he said. "Rear-projection D.L.P. systems are flying off the shelf."
If it hasn't slowed down DLP, it probably won't slow this down either. Besides when you pay the $200 to replace the bulb in 5 years, your DLP will look brand new, exactly as it did the day you bought it. Try that with a five year old CRT rear projection set.
David
Your replacement had no problems with the same use?
Thanks,
David
A friend's wife used her brand new 20GB ipod during a half marathon, and not only did it skip, it completely stopped playing music twice. She had to actually hit play again to get it running again. This doesn't seem like a likely failure mode unless she actually triggered some kind of protection mechanism to prevent damage to the harddrive. Wouldn't it just keep trying to fill the buffer until it succeeded?
It was a rough course and maybe it was subjected to more shock than running on the beach. Also, hers was strapped to her waste, not her arm, which possibly provides some shock absorbtion because there isn't a direct path through your body to the ground? Finally it could have been a bad unit as I only have that one data point, but there definitely is at least the potential to have problems.
Has anyone else seen this? She is curous now as to whether there are problems with her unit.
I don't know much about encryption, but this is something I was wondering about. How do you tell when it is cracked? How is this different from standard encryption where the key is much smaller than the plaintext being encrypted? Do you just rely on the fact that because the key is much smaller, all possible combinations of output text cannot be arrived at? Therefore the chance you will end up with something that is plaintext, yet not the original message is very small?
Is that how you even tell when you have arrived at the correct key when brute forcing a traditional encryption algorithm? By looking at the output determining whether it is something that could be the correct source data?
Thanks for satisfying my curiosity.
I believe you are mistaken about image burn. DLP's do not suffer degredation over time, and therefore are not suseptable to the uneven wear that cause burn-in with static images.
At least with rear projection sets, this is one of the primary advantages of DLP over CRT. I have less experience with front projection, but as it is the same DLP engine technology, I'm fairly certain they also do not experience burn-in.
David
Maybe what he meant was very few sets are actually capable of displaying the full resolution of 1080i. You are correct that pretty much all sets support 1080i inputs, but almost all can't display that many pixels. Aside from Toshiba's new 3-chip LCOS rear projection tv, or a front or rear projection crt with 9" guns, almost nothing is actually capable of resolving 1920x1080 pixels.
I recently saw this article http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/05/21/gravity.m ystery/ from cnn on how both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 have not covered nearly the distance that conventional physics said they should have.
It seems that something is decelerating them both with equal force towards the sun.
"Something is slowing down the spacecraft. And we have not been successful in finding the source of that. There is more slowing than you would expect from Newtonian gravity," said John Anderson, a senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
This is somewhat of an old article, has anyone heard whether there has been an update on the cause of this?
-David
There are other reasons beside quality to dislike anolog only outputs from SACD/DVD Audio players. For one, most receivers and pre/pros only have one set of analog 5.1 channel inputs. This means unless you have a hybrid player (they are becoming more common but that used to be difficult) you need some sort of switching device to plug both players in.
Another factor is that bass management in most of the players is not up to the level provided by most receivers and pre/pros. You have to either re-digitize the signal so that your receiver can do the processing, or live with whatever signal ends up going to your speakers.
Also, in regards to the 4*-Ai series Pioneer receivers, I'm not sure whether this is a proprietary encryption, or whether it is interoperable with other equipment. If you need a pioneer player and a pioneer receiver to be able to use it, it is much less interesting than a true standard that would operate between manufacturers.
David
Just a shot in the dark, but could this have anything to do with the decision in Australia that mod chip makers don't violate the Australian equivalent of the DMCA? IIRC the court decided (among other things) that because the protections in the ps2 aren't meant to stop copying, only make it so you can't play copied/imported media, it didn't fall under protection of the law.
Could it be that Microsft just doesn't want to fight it in court, and lose. Thus setting the precedent that such hardware protections are not protected under the DMCA?
David
I agree it is nice to see voluntary progress in this direction, and that should be encouraged, but I do not think being forced to switch due to depleting oil reserves would be so sudden.
Oil is not simply going to run out one day. It is going to slowly become harder and harder to get out remaining stores. This will slowly increase the cost of petroleum based products (gas) and give competing technologies more of a cost advantage (or less of a cost disadvantage) until they become economically viable.
When oil becomes too expensive to be economically practical (which should occur way before we are completely out) other technologies which were previously not economically practical will become so.
David
It's debateable it isn't broken for pcs (you better pick your counter strike server pretty carefully if you don't want to play with cheaters) but that same model is most definitely broken for consoles.
Console players are a different market. Once you are past the early adopters of the new online system you are going to be selling to casual gamers. These people are not going to put up with any inconvenience, or hassle with getting their online game to work properly. If the system doesn't let you put in the game and start playing within a few seconds, without jumping through all the hoops you have to on the pc, it simply won't be popular with the majority of console gamers.
It seems to me that Mircrosoft's approach is more risky, either everything is secure or it isn't. But if they can pull it off it will be great. Sony's system will undoubtably have some games which are executed well, and some that are unplayable, since the individual implementation is left to the developers.
David
You have done an excellent job of pointing out many of the potential security issues with consoles being online. I admit I am skeptical of whether Microsoft can keep their system secure, and I am unsure of what the consequences will be if they don't
What I didn't see, other than by semi-applicable analogy, is why you think Sony's system is going to be any more secure. They have all the same issues which Microsoft will have to deal with. However, it won't be them dealing with them, it will be each individual developer putting up their own, incompatible, *closed* online network, like Mircrsoft's network times 100.
Every new company that puts games online will have to solve all the same problems over again when they implement their own proprietary network. Will Sony help them get things right? Probably. Will competing companies help eachother avoid the pitfalls of onine gaming? Possibly. The fact remains with Sony's system you are relying on a hundred companies getting a hundred closed networks safe and secure, rather than one. Admittedly, the consequences may be lower for the failure of a single network, but if it is popular, and allows access to a large percentage of online PS2s, they will not be much lower.
David
All good points. I would add a few other things. One, Blizzard is a good example of why Microsoft's strategy may be more successful. Battle.net may be free, but it is also buggy, overcrowded, laggy, and infested with cheaters. Blizzard lacks either the ability, or the desire to fix these problems. With Microsoft's strategy there is one system to police and maintain. If it works well, all the games on it will work well. With Sony's strategy each game will be a crapshoot. Some companies will get it right, others will be abysmal failures whether they charge or not.
Battle.net would not be successful on a console. There environment it too hostile for casual gamers. The console market is different from the pc market. PC online gamers are mostly hardcore gamers willing to fiddle with stuff to get it to work. Consoles like the playstation 2 are so successful (>30 million world-wide) precisely because they don't limit themselves to hardcore gamers. Microsoft's system will present one unified, homogenous, well maintained destination for all gaming. On Sony's system you will have to deal with 10 different companies and their separate bills, servers, interfaces, matchmaking systems and quirks. Plus, with the XBox you can find your friends and talk with them anywhere on the network, anytime, no matter what game they are playing.
p.s. If you like subspace, it is far from dead. It is now called Continuum, but it is the exact same game. Check out www.subspacehq.com. That game ate my life when it was in beta years ago. It is a perfect example of a game that would have succeeded with Microsoft's system because they wouldn't have had to pay for servers. There are many great games that will never be popular enough to pay for the infrastructure investment necessary to make them online. The only way around this is user hosted servers (the common pc model) and this won't work with consoles.
David
I don't know if you are still looking but I figured I'd reply anyway.
I'm not saying it doesn't do boneheaded things occasionally, but it is, on average, quite smart. The guys that are supposed to be intelligent behave very well. If you stumble across them and backoff they move so they aren't in the same place when you come back. If you stay back a while they circle around behind you. If they start taking fire they duck and dive to the side. If their shield goes all the way down they hide until it recharges. If there are multiple enemies, some will pin you down while others circle around. If you stick a grenade to one of them (some of the grenades stick to enemies) they will charge you to try and take you with them. I have even seen them backtrack to come at you from another angle. It is still preprogrammed responses, but at least they are fairly intelligent preprogrammed responses.
David
I agree about jedi knight 2, and in principle I'm not disagreeing with what you said. Half-life was an absolutely amazing game. One of my favorites. All I was saying is don't discount halo out of hand because it doesn't use a mouse and keyboard if you haven't sat down and played it for few hours. If you like first person shooters as much as it sounds like, I honestly think you would like halo.
As far as coop, I wasn't saying it was new, just rare. Plus playing split screen and being in the same room so you can chat is cool. Console games are a lot more social than pc games usually. I play my pc by myself usually and my console with friends.
I have played and loved many fps's on the computer, especially Half-life. Halo is one of the best games ever. Period. Not just one of the best first person shooters.
The graphics and AI put half-life to shame. The control detracts not at all (although it would if you had to compete against other humans using a keyboard and mouse). The story is as good. Cooperative multiplayer is absolutely killer. This is a feature I have just about never seen on a pc. The only thing better than playing a great game is playing a great game from your couch with a beer and your best friend.
On the down side some parts of some of the levels get a little repetitive and online multiplayer is a joke compared to half-life's mod community, but still fun.
It's even more impressive when you consider it was a launch title on a brand new console from a company with no console history. In my opinion it is easily the best launch titles I have ever seen on any console ever.
David
The leader of the ASCI Blue program spoke at a graduate seminar I attended. He mentioned that when they first got AIX up and running on the over 6000 processors they found once a year bugs (a bug that in a normal implementation would only appear roughly once a year) at a rate of one every few days for quite a while. At the very least it ought to help flush out a lot of very rare bugs.
David
These games may be coming out to a pc, but a lot of console gamers don't have pc's with good enough specs to play these games. Sure there is some overlap but the pc competes with Xbox much less than the ps2 does.
As for online, it may or may not be the killer app. That depends on how they implement it. But you can't deny that it has been a killer app for a lot of pc games. When I play counter-strike (a half-life mod) there are so many servers it takes 10 minutes to update. Do you think anyone would still be playing half-life if it wasn't online? It was a great game but it's been out forever. Microsoft needs to eat the cost of the servers (come on, it's a tiny percentage of their marketing budget for the xbox alone) and make it free. Plus give developers incentive to make great online games. Then I absolutely believe it could be the next great thing.
David
Halo is a very good first person shooter for all the reasons mentioned already. It is a great first person shooter because of the AI. I have never seen as intelligent enemies as in Halo (the ones that are supposed to be intelligent anyway). Run across and enemy and back off like a normal game, and when you come back he won't be there anymore. Wait a little longer and he has circled around behind you. Kill a powerful enemy out of the middle of a group of weak ones and the weak ones go running. Stick a plasma grenade to an enemy and he charges you to see if he can take you with him. When he starts taking fire he will duck and then go for cover, not sit there and take it. Take his shield all the way down and he hides until it recharges. Attack one enemy and his buddies circle around while the first one has you pinned down. I have even seen enemies backtrack and take a different route to end up behind you. Throw a grenade into a group and they yell "Grenade!" and scatter to avoid it.
Also there are literally dozens of different messages that both your friends and enemies say in response to different situations. Ranging from dull to truly hilarious. For example, Shoot one of your marines and he may ask if he owes you money. Somtimes they say something in Spanish. There are way to many to list, but I am still hearing new ones.
The physics have been mentioned a couple of times. This is another example. Throw a grendade into a room and the enemies go flying with the explosion because you can set off granades that are lying around on the ground. I have seen them blasted through a glass window to land at my feet, or launched up through a hole in the floor from the room below. Shoot a banshee while it's strafing you and it crashes out of the air and slides up to your feet. Or lands on you and kills you.
It is a very good game until you notice all of the little touches. They are why it is a great game.
All my opinions of course,
David
I agree with most of your points but there are a couple of things I take issue with.
Great Games for Xbox (IMHO): Halo, DOA3, Project Gotham Racing, Rallisport Challenge, Jet Set Radio Future, Morrowind this month (hopefully good). This is admittedly weaker than the current PS2 lineup but remember the PS2 has a year head start and Microsoft knew that. They didn't ever expect to outsell Sony this generation, just get a foot in the door.
This is an incredibly strong lineup for this early. Much stronger than the ps2's at this time. Halo just became the Fastest million selling game on a next generation console. How many ps2 launch titles have sold million copies even more than a year and a half later? That's right, not one. The first million seller on ps2 was GT3 and that didn't sell a million until nearly a year after the ps2 launch.
Online support: Sony has just said that they will not be creating servers for ps2 online. The software companies are on their own to host online games. This is a large expense to pass on to the software companies, especially if you don't want each one charging $10/month. Also, the fact is, the ethernet modem kit, and the harddrive (both necessary for games like FFXI) are not selling well at all. This may put Square up against a wall with FFXI if it still isn't a big enough reason to get people to fork over $200 for a harddrive and modem. Xbox has announced nothing yet, however every Xbox is capable of online out of the box. This is also one of the largest advantages between Xbox and the other consoles, I would be amazed if Microsoft didn't take full advantage.
One thing obvious from your summary is that the hardware is clearly superior. And you didn't even mention true dolby digital 5.1 encoding. Microsoft wins in every hardware category you had. Sony's head start may be too much to to overcome this generation, but give Microsoft credit for designing a good console the first time around.
Your suggstions at the end are very good, and would probably help microsoft considerably. I'd qualify drop price with drop price in Europe though. Japan is already low, and the US is selling well, it is easily out selling the gamecube, although not in the last week measured as someone else mentioned. Actully with the currently available world wide numbers Xbox has out sold gamecube, although they are about equal and gamecube hasn't launched in Europe yet. It has been on sale in Japan for a long time though.
One thing I would add is release a progressive scan dvd playback kit. That would be another big advantage.
I too could be wrong about all this.
David
As a die-hard pc fps player I thought the same thing until I played halo. Are the controls as accurate as they would be on a PC? No. But they are completely transparent after 10 minutes to get used to them and don't detract from the game at all.
If you had to play against someone using a keyboard and mouse you would get slaughtered, but you don't so why miss out on one of the best fps's of all time because of imagined problems with the control scheme. It is incredibly fun and, after all, that's what is important.
Now the lack of an online mod community for multiplayer, that is another problem entirely.
David