Gamers/nerds have been given steaming piles of crap in place of good movies, over and over again. We've also been given equally crappy GAMES based on movies.
And don't even get me started on comic book movies.
"Hey, it might not suck" isn't a "good review." It's a fervent prayer that Hollywood hasn't screwed up yet ANOTHER property that we know and love just to make a quick buck.
Look at the markets where embedded devices work, and where they don't.
Embedded VCR's sold well - provided you only wanted a 13-inch TV. They failed to sell well when the TV was any bigger. Why? Because they were only space-efficient at the point where you had that tiny a TV. Rednecks living in trailer parks and college students living in dorms, who couldn't fit anything bigger than a 13" TV into their living space anyways, bought TV's with VCR's built in. Everyone else bought a TV, bought a VCR, and were quite happy to have them separate.
Plus, everyone who had a separate VCR never had to worry about what to do when the inevitable happened and the VCR ate a tape or had a belt slip. Most of the 13" TV's with a built-in VCR couldn't even BE repaired because they weren't built for anyone to open them up.
Embedded gaming systems have been around for ages. Where do you find them? Hotels. Pay-per-play Nintendo, SNES, or even Playstation titles built into your hotel's TV in case you get bored watching their ultra-stripped-down cable that gets all the boring local channels plus CNN and the in-house pay per view movie channels.
In home theaters what do you find? People want their components separate. They buy a DVD player separate from the TV. Even if the DVD player came as a set with the speaker system, it's removable - you can plug another DVD player or something else into the sound system just as easily.
Why do they do this? Because modular systems work best.
Think about it seriously. Say you buy a nice, 36" TV. You want your TV to work with your DVD player, your Xbox, your Gamecube, your Revolution, whatever else you hook up to it.
You want to know that three years from now, the TV still works and you can hook up something new to it. You want to know that if your DVD player is on the fritz you can unplug the DVD player, plug something else in, and go.
The LAST thing you want is to have to take the TV in for servicing because the Xbox part broke down. Now not only can't you play your Xbox games, you can't do anything ELSE until it comes back from the repair shop because your TV had to go with it.
These will sell well to hotels but if someone thinks they're going to sell any appreciable number to home consumers they're delusional.
Look at your list again. Take the average release time.
Oops. That's just the "G" list.
How's about that year and a half for Angelic Layer? How's about the year and two months for the Appleseed movie, only for them to show it in a pitiful number of theaters? How's about a full year for Azumanga Daioh?
Wow. And that's just the "A" list.
You just proved my point FOR me. For every one that gets a decent turnaround time, there are way too many that they drag their feet on.
Fansubbers and those who have not paid for the right to series do NOT play a factor in their plans. You have no valid complaint.
We're the public. If we don't like what they're doing, they don't get our money. It's that simple. If they piss us off, we're the customers: we have every right to complain.
Nevermind that licensors get the ACTUAL TYPED SCRIPTS TO THE SHOWS and can make queries back to the companies and the original WRITERS if need be.
But they don't ever bother. And I've seen their translations. There's no difference between the higher-end fansub groups (the ones that, yes, DO have members in both countries) and the professional companies.
Try putting the "official" translation next to the fansub sometime and let them run side by side. See if you can tell just by watching which one is which. You won't be able to.
Five years? What fucking bizzaro world do you live in. At worst I've seen two years. Geneon is lightning quick, having turned some series around in 9 months. Often the only thing holding Bandai back is licensing requirements specifying a delay of x months.
Pioneer put out Tenchi Muyo OAV 3 in Japan over two years ago. Geneon has YET to release an American DVD of it, the first one is *supposedly* coming out next month but it's already been delayed once.
ADV sat on Slayers for almost half a decade after translating the first movie and the only thing that got them off their lazy asses was the release of the final movie.
I could go on and on. Only the series Cartoon Network or Bandai want to get onto TV get any decent speed in coming over, and those wind up with crappy voice acting and have to wait a year after they're on TV before we get DVD releases.
Oh, if they could they would. Often they do. Many times they can't. If they could without flooding the market and pissing off retailers, they would. They're damn well near flooding the market now. If you want to see faster turn around times, then convince people to EAT IT UP cause there's lots of good shows with good releases that people are simply NOT BUYING.
We buy. We buy and we buy and we buy as fast as we can. We buy THE GOOD STUFF. We want to buy the ones we LIKE. You think we should be buying or trying something? Give us a reason to. Make it easy to buy the stuff.
Geneon doesn't even have the cover art up for 90% of their online catalog. Go figure. ADV is busy pushing The Anime Network but they have very little of value to run on it. Cartoon Network isn't a bad place, now if they'd only start showing some of the series at a decent time of day instead of that "Maguzi" crap like Hihi Puffy AmiYumi or the Teen Barbie Dolls in Tight Leather Show.
Come on. Be serious. I know what I'm talking about and the companies are screwing up by trying to cram titles down our throats rather than paying attention to what's good and what's bad.
And don't even get me started on the "Use them up and spit them out" way that ADV treats the decent voice actors they have (or in most cases, HAD but don't have any more).
1. Companies like ADV (and for that matter "Geneon" which used to be Pioneer) wait until a show is popular in the fansub community, buy up the rights to it, and then rather than get on with the job of subtitling and dubbing it sit on it for YEARS before American audiences get the chance to see their "licensed" version.
2. As it would turn out, the "professional" translators at ADV and other places are usually not as good at translating the anime as the army of semi-bilingual teens/twentysomethings on both sides of the pond (in Japan and America) who can email each other back and forth to make sure that not only is the translation correct, they got the idioms right.
3. Even when a big Anime movie comes out - like Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away - the American companies don't promote it properly. Disney should have had Howl's Moving Castle showing as a full-scale release with advertisements all over every TV station. But Eisner wouldn't do it because (a) it would prove him wrong about the "death" of traditional animation and (b) he dicked it over because John Lasseter wouldn't resign Pixar with Disney.
In that kind of environment, the reason Fansubs are popular is because WE ARE TIRED OF WAITING FOR THE COMPANIES TO FUCKING DO IT.
We can accept that it takes time to translate - though the speedsubbing groups doing Naruto have it pretty much down to a 24-hour turnaround and they're no less accurate than ADV or VIZ.
We can accept that it takes time to record dubbing voices. We CANNOT accept that it takes them FIVE FUCKING YEARS before they're ready to release a single DVD with only two episodes on it.
Here's your challenge, ADV and the rest of the studios: Get it down to a six-month turnaround. Six months after you license the anime, we want to see it on the fucking shelf.
Then, if fansubs are still "killing the industry", maybe we'll take you seriously.
Let's see... Sony underproduced the first run of the Playstation deliberately.
Then they underproduced the first run of the PS2 deliberately to claim it was "selling out."
Then they did the same with the PSP... as well as underproducing decent-sized Memory Stick DUO cards and then jacking the price up 200%.
I detect a subtle pattern here. Couldn't tell you what it is, though.
Let's look at the alternate option: MS is angling for their console to be the big thing. They're releasing it with NO competition, onto the busy holiday season, so there's definitely going to be competition for the units. Of course they want to have large numbers of preorders, because it's a marketing point.
Of course they want to get as many units out onto the street as they can. Only someone who actually has a unit is likely to be receiving and/or buying a game for it.
Yeah, it's a marketing spiel. But I'd rather they tell us right now, that they'll get as many as they can out the door and see what happens, rather than have them claim (like Sony did) that they had more than enough while secretly holding stock back in a warehouse just to create the illusion of scarcity.
No, not really.
Technically, compared to the fidelity of a hi-fi system with massive and perfectly calibrated speakers... yes.
But ripped in a sufficiently high bitrate, to be run into my car stereo or a pair of headphones? I'll live.
The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD's. But those other music sites have lots of music that you can't get at the iTunes store. So, if you have an iPod, you are out of luck. If you are really a geek, you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will go into the iPod. But then you have also degraded the sound quality. How cruel.
Y'know what? None of my MP3 collection has "degraded sound quality."
If any of the stores wanted to, they could easily sell me MP3's, which would go onto my iPod no problem. But they won't, because the RIAA still haven't wised up that consumers don't want their DRM crap.
No, now we get Hilary Rosen, mouthpiece of the RIAA for so long, whining about how "Apple" stops their songs from going onto the iPod rather than whining about how none of the stores are willing to sell a song in a format the iPod will take.
Orson Scott Card is a gifted writer. Nobody denies this. Well, maybe a few.
But let's be serious here. As far as "Sci Fi" goes, he's off the deep end. He's the sci-fi world's equivalent of some british royalty gimboid sipping tea from a saucer with their little finger sticking out, mumbling on about how the "unwashed commoners" don't truly appreciate horse racing, or polo, and how ghastly sports like soccer are.
So he champions the hardcore sci-fi shows. That's fine. I've watched them. Some of them, I've actually enjoyed.
I doubt if Orson Scott Card has seriously watched a Trek series, ever.
I doubly doubt if he's paid attention to some of the absolutely amazing episodes Enterprise has had this year.
And I really don't understand why anyone gives a shit what this ivory-tower sci-fi snob has to say on the subject.
Oxyride(TM) Extreme Power is the next generation of batteries--with two major breakthroughs in innovative new materials and advanced manufacturing technology....
This added power gives you quicker shooting for your digital photos, faster flash recovery, faster battery powered toys and brighter flashlights.
Ok, so let's take a look at those claims:
(A) quicker shooting for your digital photos --> Well, no. Your digital camera's CCD and processor don't run any quicker on a high battery charge than on a low one.
(B) faster flash recovery --> Actually, yes, this will; the more current the battery can deliver, the quicker the capacitors will charge up.
(C) faster battery powered toys --> Depends on how the toy works. If it's an unregulated device that just pulls current directly, sure - but you could get the same results just hot-wiring an extra AA into the circuit.
True story: I used to have an old R/C car that ran on 8 AA batteries. I "fixed" that by hacking into the wiring and adding batteries to the circuit with a separate, modular battery bay from an electronics kit my parents gave me a few years earlier. I took it all the way up to 16 batteries total; at that point, it worked for about 1/2 hour and gave me great speed until something in the control board decided it had had enough.
If on the other hand it uses any sort of a voltage or current regulation system, no, it won't move any faster.
(D) brighter flashlights Well, sure. See the above on devices that pull what essentially is unregulated current, relying only on the natural resistance of the device to keep it at a reasonable pace. I=V/R; Put in more Volts, even marginally, get more Amps and thus a brighter bulb. Whether it's enough to be really noticeable... well, you can tell the difference between a new and used battery, so sure, I'll assume that you can.
Of course, you'll also cause the bulb to burn out quicker.
--On the one hand, as the designers point out, that is merely an early screenshot. The real avatar may look like that, or may look entirely different.
--We also have to consider that if you make a cel-shaded farmland scene, it will probably look like a cel-shaded farmland scene in another game. Just like how a red-haired chibi-anime girl looks a hell of a lot like every other red-haired chibi-anime girl.
--The *NAME* of the game is Wiki. No, the puff of air will not stay right there the entire game. It's a promo shot, so they stuffed the game's title into the scene... and since they wouldn't want to override any of the aesthetics, the bottom-right corner was the best spot for it. Coincidence of design, not an attempt at deception.
--That being said, Webzen could very well have done their avatar with some other design options, and shifted the scene camera around to put their logo into another spot.
Yeah, it's a screenshot that looks similar. Deal with it. I think this is an instance of an overzealous lawyer (What, an overzealous lawyer from Nintendo? That'd be like Apple suing their fans for discussing gossip... wait... right.)
#1 - Medal of Honor: The Same Game, Over And Fucking Over Again. After the first one, it's a bunch of fucking mission packs. See my previous complaint about EA.
Not done by EA either, done by various studios and the EA logo slapped on the side of the box.
#2 - Command & Conquer: a series that steadily went downhill, as Westwood just died.
#3 - SSX... sssnnnoooozzzeeee
#4 - FIFA: see NFL For Europe. Same Shit, Different Year.
#5 - Need for Speed: driving games ceased to amuse me after Pole Position II. I'd much rather have a game that's FUN, thank you.
#6 - Burnout. SEE Need for Speed.
#7 - Battlefield 1942: AGAIN, not done by EA, just had the EA logo slapped on it. And the best thing it has going for it is that it is customizable, so there are crews who are taking it and redoing it with more fun scenarios like Star Wars and Battletech.
Highly acclaimed by magazines that were paid to highly acclaim them, doesn't mean they interest me. Sorry.
As far as Two Towers and RotK, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt that it was the rush to meet movie deadline, and not just EA, that caused them to be mediocre-at-best rushed titles.
Sorry, but EA is boring. That's my position, and I'm sticking to it.
Come on now, the best one they've got now is Oddworld, and that only because some marketroid at Microsoft doesn't know his head from his ass and let the publishing rights slip away.
the rest of them are all the kind of stuff EA does - boring, same old same old creations.
I don't give a shit about Madden now being the only "official" NFL game, if they can come back and actually make it worth playing, maybe I'll buy the next one. If not, I'll happily go right back to playing Tecmo Bowl.
Face it. EA does two things: rushed-out crappy mission packs/expansions, and rushed-out crappy football games that are exactly the same crappy gameplay as last year's but with the new year's roster and 10% more polygons on the fucking shoelaces.
Even the Lord of the Rings games were rushed, and suffered accordingly.
they'd have realized by now that forcing the employees to work such long hours is part of the reason that their games are all complete crap.
Face it. After someone's been awake for more than 24 hours straight, their reaction time and mental abilities are worse off than if they had a 1.1 blood-alcohol content.
Force your employees where their sleep debt over the course of a week is above 24 hours, and imagine what you've got.
EA should take the hint. The gamers are getting tired of crappy games, the programmers can't program like that. Cut the crap on the programmers, let them get some decent rest, and your games will turn out better because they won't spend 90% of their time fixing all the bugs that were created because people were too fucking tired to code correctly.
I'm assuming heavily mouse-based titles will be your games of choice, and probably not twitch-based ones. Therefore, most online multiplayer games (unless they're turn-based) will be right out.
That being said: Activision's Total War series Any game of the Civilization series
If someone codes a set of keypresses for you, games on emulated systems (Final Fantasy titles on NES/SNES/PSX for instance, or turn-based games on a GBA emulator like Advance Wars) would likely be doable.
Some of the older MAME titles - not fighting titles like Soul Calibur, but scrollers like R-Type - could be mapped to your headmouse incredibly easily.
You might be able to convince someone to code you a custom interface to use EQ, WoW, or FFXI if you're interested in them; most of the hotkeys are fairly straightforward and could be bound to a wheel-type mouse interface pretty easily.
Steer clear of FPS play, as you'd need (at least) fingers capable of WASD to do them.
If all else fails, there's always games like Go, Chess, and the like to be played out on Yahoo Games or elsewhere. Yeah, they're somewhat old school, but it's always possible to find a game.
Oh, and I did mention a lot of "someone would have to code up the interface", but for most of them it's just remapping joystick axes/hotkeys to certain mouse movements.
It's not, though. They've only got 30 instances so far. Their (obviously leaning on the safe-side) estimate of the failure rate is approximately 1 in 10,000. How many Xboxes have been sold again?
More likely, there was some thing in the production line that wasn't quite right, or one of several vendors they'd contracted to make the cords wasn't up to spec. It happens - there are thousands of product recalls a year in the States alone.
I for one wish Sony had recalled the first-gen PS2's when tons of their DVD drives died after the first year; those motors were never designed to spin constantly at the rate required to stream a DVD movie.
that even if they "discovered" a flaw, actually tracking it down and being sure of the cause of a flaw with a failure rate of a mere 1 in 10,000 is going to take a while to work through?
that they retool the design process every few months anyways.
They alter the cord... because they get a new, lower-bidding supplier, or because they can make the cord for a few cents cheaper per cord (trust me, it adds up!) a new way.
They alter the PSU, change suppliers on the internal components like the DVD drive, switch to a different variety of internal cabling... it happens all the time.
The fact that only the older cords were changed at some point could be due to any one of a dozen design changes that they made to cut down the production cost, and it isn't an indication that they knew of any problems with them.
If you can get a video board that works with only a passive heatsink, and then run this thing with a minimal heatsink, you lower your heat problems.
Lower them enough, and you can get a smaller fan to cool the entire unit, or even get away without a fan entirely (though given how long a TIVO has to stay turned on, it's likely you need some minimal level of guaranteed airflow to avoid overheating the unit the same way you used to be able to overheat an NES).
But the smaller, and fewer, fans you have to put into it, the quieter it is. And living-room appliances want to be as quiet as possible, to avoid interfering with the quiet moments inside of a game/movie/TV show.
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They've been working on this movie forever.
Gamers/nerds have been given steaming piles of crap in place of good movies, over and over again. We've also been given equally crappy GAMES based on movies.
And don't even get me started on comic book movies.
"Hey, it might not suck" isn't a "good review." It's a fervent prayer that Hollywood hasn't screwed up yet ANOTHER property that we know and love just to make a quick buck.
The fansubbers I know take pride in getting it right.
I've met ADV's group, face to face. They have no pride. All they care about is shoving crap out the door as fast as they can.
And they're not even good at THAT.
Look at the markets where embedded devices work, and where they don't.
Embedded VCR's sold well - provided you only wanted a 13-inch TV. They failed to sell well when the TV was any bigger. Why? Because they were only space-efficient at the point where you had that tiny a TV. Rednecks living in trailer parks and college students living in dorms, who couldn't fit anything bigger than a 13" TV into their living space anyways, bought TV's with VCR's built in. Everyone else bought a TV, bought a VCR, and were quite happy to have them separate.
Plus, everyone who had a separate VCR never had to worry about what to do when the inevitable happened and the VCR ate a tape or had a belt slip. Most of the 13" TV's with a built-in VCR couldn't even BE repaired because they weren't built for anyone to open them up.
Embedded gaming systems have been around for ages. Where do you find them? Hotels. Pay-per-play Nintendo, SNES, or even Playstation titles built into your hotel's TV in case you get bored watching their ultra-stripped-down cable that gets all the boring local channels plus CNN and the in-house pay per view movie channels.
In home theaters what do you find? People want their components separate. They buy a DVD player separate from the TV. Even if the DVD player came as a set with the speaker system, it's removable - you can plug another DVD player or something else into the sound system just as easily.
Why do they do this? Because modular systems work best.
Think about it seriously. Say you buy a nice, 36" TV. You want your TV to work with your DVD player, your Xbox, your Gamecube, your Revolution, whatever else you hook up to it.
You want to know that three years from now, the TV still works and you can hook up something new to it. You want to know that if your DVD player is on the fritz you can unplug the DVD player, plug something else in, and go.
The LAST thing you want is to have to take the TV in for servicing because the Xbox part broke down. Now not only can't you play your Xbox games, you can't do anything ELSE until it comes back from the repair shop because your TV had to go with it.
These will sell well to hotels but if someone thinks they're going to sell any appreciable number to home consumers they're delusional.
Look at your list again. Take the average release time.
Oops. That's just the "G" list.
How's about that year and a half for Angelic Layer?
How's about the year and two months for the Appleseed movie, only for them to show it in a pitiful number of theaters?
How's about a full year for Azumanga Daioh?
Wow. And that's just the "A" list.
You just proved my point FOR me. For every one that gets a decent turnaround time, there are way too many that they drag their feet on.
Fansubbers and those who have not paid for the right to series do NOT play a factor in their plans. You have no valid complaint.
We're the public. If we don't like what they're doing, they don't get our money. It's that simple. If they piss us off, we're the customers: we have every right to complain.
Nevermind that licensors get the ACTUAL TYPED SCRIPTS TO THE SHOWS and can make queries back to the companies and the original WRITERS if need be.
But they don't ever bother. And I've seen their translations. There's no difference between the higher-end fansub groups (the ones that, yes, DO have members in both countries) and the professional companies.
Try putting the "official" translation next to the fansub sometime and let them run side by side. See if you can tell just by watching which one is which. You won't be able to.
Five years? What fucking bizzaro world do you live in. At worst I've seen two years. Geneon is lightning quick, having turned some series around in 9 months. Often the only thing holding Bandai back is licensing requirements specifying a delay of x months.
Pioneer put out Tenchi Muyo OAV 3 in Japan over two years ago. Geneon has YET to release an American DVD of it, the first one is *supposedly* coming out next month but it's already been delayed once.
ADV sat on Slayers for almost half a decade after translating the first movie and the only thing that got them off their lazy asses was the release of the final movie.
I could go on and on. Only the series Cartoon Network or Bandai want to get onto TV get any decent speed in coming over, and those wind up with crappy voice acting and have to wait a year after they're on TV before we get DVD releases.
Oh, if they could they would. Often they do. Many times they can't. If they could without flooding the market and pissing off retailers, they would. They're damn well near flooding the market now. If you want to see faster turn around times, then convince people to EAT IT UP cause there's lots of good shows with good releases that people are simply NOT BUYING.
We buy. We buy and we buy and we buy as fast as we can. We buy THE GOOD STUFF. We want to buy the ones we LIKE. You think we should be buying or trying something? Give us a reason to. Make it easy to buy the stuff.
Geneon doesn't even have the cover art up for 90% of their online catalog. Go figure. ADV is busy pushing The Anime Network but they have very little of value to run on it. Cartoon Network isn't a bad place, now if they'd only start showing some of the series at a decent time of day instead of that "Maguzi" crap like Hihi Puffy AmiYumi or the Teen Barbie Dolls in Tight Leather Show.
Come on. Be serious. I know what I'm talking about and the companies are screwing up by trying to cram titles down our throats rather than paying attention to what's good and what's bad.
And don't even get me started on the "Use them up and spit them out" way that ADV treats the decent voice actors they have (or in most cases, HAD but don't have any more).
Yeah, that's right.
The reason fansubs are popular is simple.
1. Companies like ADV (and for that matter "Geneon" which used to be Pioneer) wait until a show is popular in the fansub community, buy up the rights to it, and then rather than get on with the job of subtitling and dubbing it sit on it for YEARS before American audiences get the chance to see their "licensed" version.
2. As it would turn out, the "professional" translators at ADV and other places are usually not as good at translating the anime as the army of semi-bilingual teens/twentysomethings on both sides of the pond (in Japan and America) who can email each other back and forth to make sure that not only is the translation correct, they got the idioms right.
3. Even when a big Anime movie comes out - like Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away - the American companies don't promote it properly. Disney should have had Howl's Moving Castle showing as a full-scale release with advertisements all over every TV station. But Eisner wouldn't do it because (a) it would prove him wrong about the "death" of traditional animation and (b) he dicked it over because John Lasseter wouldn't resign Pixar with Disney.
In that kind of environment, the reason Fansubs are popular is because WE ARE TIRED OF WAITING FOR THE COMPANIES TO FUCKING DO IT.
We can accept that it takes time to translate - though the speedsubbing groups doing Naruto have it pretty much down to a 24-hour turnaround and they're no less accurate than ADV or VIZ.
We can accept that it takes time to record dubbing voices. We CANNOT accept that it takes them FIVE FUCKING YEARS before they're ready to release a single DVD with only two episodes on it.
Here's your challenge, ADV and the rest of the studios: Get it down to a six-month turnaround. Six months after you license the anime, we want to see it on the fucking shelf.
Then, if fansubs are still "killing the industry", maybe we'll take you seriously.
In the US they overproduced - from what I remember, they pulled the shortage trick in Japan.
Let's see... Sony underproduced the first run of the Playstation deliberately.
Then they underproduced the first run of the PS2 deliberately to claim it was "selling out."
Then they did the same with the PSP... as well as underproducing decent-sized Memory Stick DUO cards and then jacking the price up 200%.
I detect a subtle pattern here. Couldn't tell you what it is, though.
Let's look at the alternate option: MS is angling for their console to be the big thing. They're releasing it with NO competition, onto the busy holiday season, so there's definitely going to be competition for the units. Of course they want to have large numbers of preorders, because it's a marketing point.
Of course they want to get as many units out onto the street as they can. Only someone who actually has a unit is likely to be receiving and/or buying a game for it.
Yeah, it's a marketing spiel. But I'd rather they tell us right now, that they'll get as many as they can out the door and see what happens, rather than have them claim (like Sony did) that they had more than enough while secretly holding stock back in a warehouse just to create the illusion of scarcity.
No, not really. Technically, compared to the fidelity of a hi-fi system with massive and perfectly calibrated speakers... yes. But ripped in a sufficiently high bitrate, to be run into my car stereo or a pair of headphones? I'll live.
The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD's. But those other music sites have lots of music that you can't get at the iTunes store. So, if you have an iPod, you are out of luck. If you are really a geek, you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will go into the iPod. But then you have also degraded the sound quality. How cruel.
Y'know what? None of my MP3 collection has "degraded sound quality."
If any of the stores wanted to, they could easily sell me MP3's, which would go onto my iPod no problem. But they won't, because the RIAA still haven't wised up that consumers don't want their DRM crap.
No, now we get Hilary Rosen, mouthpiece of the RIAA for so long, whining about how "Apple" stops their songs from going onto the iPod rather than whining about how none of the stores are willing to sell a song in a format the iPod will take.
Give me a fucking break.
Orson Scott Card is a gifted writer. Nobody denies this. Well, maybe a few.
But let's be serious here. As far as "Sci Fi" goes, he's off the deep end. He's the sci-fi world's equivalent of some british royalty gimboid sipping tea from a saucer with their little finger sticking out, mumbling on about how the "unwashed commoners" don't truly appreciate horse racing, or polo, and how ghastly sports like soccer are.
So he champions the hardcore sci-fi shows. That's fine. I've watched them. Some of them, I've actually enjoyed.
I doubt if Orson Scott Card has seriously watched a Trek series, ever.
I doubly doubt if he's paid attention to some of the absolutely amazing episodes Enterprise has had this year.
And I really don't understand why anyone gives a shit what this ivory-tower sci-fi snob has to say on the subject.
but this topic has been killed by circumstances involving D/C (dropped connection).
You'll have to work it back up from level 1 again.
Ok, so let's take a look at those claims:
(A) quicker shooting for your digital photos
--> Well, no. Your digital camera's CCD and processor don't run any quicker on a high battery charge than on a low one.
(B) faster flash recovery
--> Actually, yes, this will; the more current the battery can deliver, the quicker the capacitors will charge up.
(C) faster battery powered toys
--> Depends on how the toy works. If it's an unregulated device that just pulls current directly, sure - but you could get the same results just hot-wiring an extra AA into the circuit.
True story: I used to have an old R/C car that ran on 8 AA batteries. I "fixed" that by hacking into the wiring and adding batteries to the circuit with a separate, modular battery bay from an electronics kit my parents gave me a few years earlier. I took it all the way up to 16 batteries total; at that point, it worked for about 1/2 hour and gave me great speed until something in the control board decided it had had enough.
If on the other hand it uses any sort of a voltage or current regulation system, no, it won't move any faster.
(D) brighter flashlights
Well, sure. See the above on devices that pull what essentially is unregulated current, relying only on the natural resistance of the device to keep it at a reasonable pace. I=V/R; Put in more Volts, even marginally, get more Amps and thus a brighter bulb. Whether it's enough to be really noticeable... well, you can tell the difference between a new and used battery, so sure, I'll assume that you can.
Of course, you'll also cause the bulb to burn out quicker.
Warner would be the ones to sue Disney - Bugs predates Thumper.
--On the one hand, as the designers point out, that is merely an early screenshot. The real avatar may look like that, or may look entirely different.
--We also have to consider that if you make a cel-shaded farmland scene, it will probably look like a cel-shaded farmland scene in another game. Just like how a red-haired chibi-anime girl looks a hell of a lot like every other red-haired chibi-anime girl.
--The *NAME* of the game is Wiki. No, the puff of air will not stay right there the entire game. It's a promo shot, so they stuffed the game's title into the scene... and since they wouldn't want to override any of the aesthetics, the bottom-right corner was the best spot for it. Coincidence of design, not an attempt at deception.
--That being said, Webzen could very well have done their avatar with some other design options, and shifted the scene camera around to put their logo into another spot.
Yeah, it's a screenshot that looks similar. Deal with it. I think this is an instance of an overzealous lawyer (What, an overzealous lawyer from Nintendo? That'd be like Apple suing their fans for discussing gossip... wait... right.)
Yeah. It's kind of like that.
#1 - Medal of Honor: The Same Game, Over And Fucking Over Again. After the first one, it's a bunch of fucking mission packs. See my previous complaint about EA.
Not done by EA either, done by various studios and the EA logo slapped on the side of the box.
#2 - Command & Conquer: a series that steadily went downhill, as Westwood just died.
#3 - SSX... sssnnnoooozzzeeee
#4 - FIFA: see NFL For Europe. Same Shit, Different Year.
#5 - Need for Speed: driving games ceased to amuse me after Pole Position II. I'd much rather have a game that's FUN, thank you.
#6 - Burnout. SEE Need for Speed.
#7 - Battlefield 1942: AGAIN, not done by EA, just had the EA logo slapped on it. And the best thing it has going for it is that it is customizable, so there are crews who are taking it and redoing it with more fun scenarios like Star Wars and Battletech.
Highly acclaimed by magazines that were paid to highly acclaim them, doesn't mean they interest me. Sorry.
As far as Two Towers and RotK, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt that it was the rush to meet movie deadline, and not just EA, that caused them to be mediocre-at-best rushed titles.
Sorry, but EA is boring. That's my position, and I'm sticking to it.
Come on now, the best one they've got now is Oddworld, and that only because some marketroid at Microsoft doesn't know his head from his ass and let the publishing rights slip away.
the rest of them are all the kind of stuff EA does - boring, same old same old creations.
I don't give a shit about Madden now being the only "official" NFL game, if they can come back and actually make it worth playing, maybe I'll buy the next one. If not, I'll happily go right back to playing Tecmo Bowl.
Face it. EA does two things: rushed-out crappy mission packs/expansions, and rushed-out crappy football games that are exactly the same crappy gameplay as last year's but with the new year's roster and 10% more polygons on the fucking shoelaces.
Even the Lord of the Rings games were rushed, and suffered accordingly.
Sorry about that, my finger slipped and I didn't catch it before posting.
.11, not 1.1.
That should have read
Thanks.
they'd have realized by now that forcing the employees to work such long hours is part of the reason that their games are all complete crap.
Face it. After someone's been awake for more than 24 hours straight, their reaction time and mental abilities are worse off than if they had a 1.1 blood-alcohol content.
Force your employees where their sleep debt over the course of a week is above 24 hours, and imagine what you've got.
EA should take the hint. The gamers are getting tired of crappy games, the programmers can't program like that. Cut the crap on the programmers, let them get some decent rest, and your games will turn out better because they won't spend 90% of their time fixing all the bugs that were created because people were too fucking tired to code correctly.
Actually, any game that's "real time" RPG play, as long as it has a pause-and-give-orders feature, could be doable.
I'm assuming heavily mouse-based titles will be your games of choice, and probably not twitch-based ones. Therefore, most online multiplayer games (unless they're turn-based) will be right out.
That being said:
Activision's Total War series
Any game of the Civilization series
If someone codes a set of keypresses for you, games on emulated systems (Final Fantasy titles on NES/SNES/PSX for instance, or turn-based games on a GBA emulator like Advance Wars) would likely be doable.
Some of the older MAME titles - not fighting titles like Soul Calibur, but scrollers like R-Type - could be mapped to your headmouse incredibly easily.
You might be able to convince someone to code you a custom interface to use EQ, WoW, or FFXI if you're interested in them; most of the hotkeys are fairly straightforward and could be bound to a wheel-type mouse interface pretty easily.
Steer clear of FPS play, as you'd need (at least) fingers capable of WASD to do them.
If all else fails, there's always games like Go, Chess, and the like to be played out on Yahoo Games or elsewhere. Yeah, they're somewhat old school, but it's always possible to find a game.
Oh, and I did mention a lot of "someone would have to code up the interface", but for most of them it's just remapping joystick axes/hotkeys to certain mouse movements.
Happy gaming!
then that'd be one thing.
It's not, though. They've only got 30 instances so far. Their (obviously leaning on the safe-side) estimate of the failure rate is approximately 1 in 10,000. How many Xboxes have been sold again?
More likely, there was some thing in the production line that wasn't quite right, or one of several vendors they'd contracted to make the cords wasn't up to spec. It happens - there are thousands of product recalls a year in the States alone.
I for one wish Sony had recalled the first-gen PS2's when tons of their DVD drives died after the first year; those motors were never designed to spin constantly at the rate required to stream a DVD movie.
that even if they "discovered" a flaw, actually tracking it down and being sure of the cause of a flaw with a failure rate of a mere 1 in 10,000 is going to take a while to work through?
that they retool the design process every few months anyways.
They alter the cord... because they get a new, lower-bidding supplier, or because they can make the cord for a few cents cheaper per cord (trust me, it adds up!) a new way.
They alter the PSU, change suppliers on the internal components like the DVD drive, switch to a different variety of internal cabling... it happens all the time.
The fact that only the older cords were changed at some point could be due to any one of a dozen design changes that they made to cut down the production cost, and it isn't an indication that they knew of any problems with them.
Two words:
NO HEATSINK.
If you can get a video board that works with only a passive heatsink, and then run this thing with a minimal heatsink, you lower your heat problems.
Lower them enough, and you can get a smaller fan to cool the entire unit, or even get away without a fan entirely (though given how long a TIVO has to stay turned on, it's likely you need some minimal level of guaranteed airflow to avoid overheating the unit the same way you used to be able to overheat an NES).
But the smaller, and fewer, fans you have to put into it, the quieter it is. And living-room appliances want to be as quiet as possible, to avoid interfering with the quiet moments inside of a game/movie/TV show.