Recalls happen all the time. In just about every industry. Exercise equipment, automobiles, televisions... you name it, there's been a recall. It happens.
It's not like there is a humongous danger. Nobody's house was burned down or car exploded, unlike several automobile types where a recall (faulty wiring in the ignition units and steering column pieces) only happened after lives were lost.
The facts are: - The failure rate on these cords is listed as 1 in 10,000. - The failure ONLY happens when the unit has been on for a ridiculously long time (read: someone just turned off the power-save feature and let the thing run all day and night).
- Seven people had minor burns from unplugging the cords while they were still hot. - 23 people smelled smoke or had minor damage (likely plastic melting, which is what you'd expect when the low-grade plastics used in most entertainment centers comes in contact with an overheated wire) to their entertainment centers or carpet (likely synthetic carpet that melted).
I know, there are plenty of little trolls out there who hate MS, but seriously. They're doing the right thing and recalling the cords.
No, the fact that cords after October 23, 2003 aren't susceptible to this isn't an indication they knew about it - it could be a standard part of ongoing redesigns (which they do every few months to lower the production costs anyways). Or it could be that they went to a new vendor, who were making the cords to a higher standard or with a different process anyways.
Or it could simply be that they were investigating the CAUSE of the incidents before they did anything - after all, if the culprit were really the power supply, then replacing the cords wouldn't have done any good.
So come on. They're doing the right thing. Give them credit for doing it, in spite of the fact that the raving MS-hater lunatics are going to be spewing "OMG did yew see the xbox got recalled haha" all over chat boards for the next couple weeks, and move on.
What I have a problem with is the fact that, instead of providing it in a decent format and proper frame size so that anyone could view it, snag it to their desktop, they deliberately tried to make it un-downloadable (at least until somebody posts the file name, at which point I'm sure Slashdot will get another cease-and-desist letter for linking it that way).
Putting the file out in crappy resolution, in a shitty encoding format, and deliberately making it hard to enjoy the trailer don't help their cause. Disney should know this by now. Hell, even Apple have finally fixed the problems quicktime used to have.
The only way Disney could have done anything worse would have been to release it as a Realplayer file.
to screw the fans over by forcing a site like Aint-It-Cool to shut down their download of the trailer just so that Amazon can have non-downloadable, lower resolution, crappier version up "exclusively."
but I would have hoped to see more variation than just "Doom 3, Half-Life 2, GTA, WoW, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, WoW...."
I mean, seriously. There are thousands of games released in a given year, and at least half of every category's nominations are just repeating the same tune.
I'm not going to whine about what I think they should have nominated, that'd be pointless. But I will point out that maybe, just maybe, there should be more variation in where they're looking for their nominations.
I've never seen anyone complain about the drop rate on items, or the spawn rate on some of the rarer monsters. IF your mythical friend actually exists - which seems unlikely since you had to hide behind the screen of an Anonymous Coward - then he had bad luck, no more, no less.
What I *HAVE* seen, time and again, is players being PO'ed that one of your fucking camp-bots is sitting right in the zone waiting for the same monster for days on end, and then having to go to the auction house or worse yet, some shithole operation like IGE, to get the item.
Then again, I long ago signed on to a petition that Square make all the Rare monster drops a sure thing, but Rare/EX instead so that they wouldn't face the campbot problem. Did they listen? NO.
Neither did they enforce their restrictions against 'bots.
Secondly, do you believe developers may hurt their own customer base by targeting them rather than the companies who purvey in the secondary market?
Steve: When they try and stifle the secondary market by action against players or companies like IGE, they hurt their game. If I were sitting in a management position at a developer or publisher, I would give my customers what they want. Gamers, by in large, want the benefit of the secondary market. If you don't believe me, check out the size of the market. Millions of gamers are involved. They vote every day with their dollars.
Yeah, there are how many players playing these games, outnumbering their "clients" by at least a 100 to 1 ratio. And we, the players, hate their "employees" who farm all this shit, because they grief us, get in the way by spawn camping, and are 100% certain to be nothing but bots that are in violation of the unattended character policies in any event.
Guess what, Steve. I voted with my wallet. I walked away from FFXI because they weren't doing shit about your "employees." And I know more people that have done the same, than haven't. They went to games like WoW where the terms of service are actually enforced, too.
We, the gamers, do not like your service. A bunch of Skr1pt Kiddiez who crow about twinking their characters with their parents' credit cards like your service, but we don't like those idiots either.
Comcast and Warner today operate under "gentleman's agreements" not to enter each other's territories, thus granting themselves monopolies and the ability to price-gouge where they currently are.
And no, no county does "franchises" for cable. Look at Milwaukee for a good example of how it USED to work - prior to the death of Viacom cable, there were two COMPETING cable companies in that county. The only reason no other cable company's come by since is that TW threatens to go into their existing counties and deliberately undercut their prices, running at a loss till they drive the competition out of business.
After two more rounds of mergers, we'll have two companies left in each area. Each with strict but unwritten agreements not to compete in each others' areas.
It's the same way Comcast/Time Warner do business in the Cable TV industry right now, anyways.
that's what Eidos is. They're distribution company.
All of those titles are Eidos titles, the same way every Tony Hawk title is both an Activision title (distributing company) and a Neversoft (or the associated company like Vicarious who do the port) work.
Eidos has been unfortunate enough to produce some real shitty titles - Whiplash comes to mind - but they are not just a Tomb Raider company.
The Legacy of Kain line have been up and down, but there's some real gems in there.
Anachronox was a beaut, even redone as a machinima movie it was wonderful.
Deus Ex was good. Deus Ex: Invisible War suffered too much from trying to pare it down to console size.
The first Tomb Raider was actually decently fun, it's just that they never should have made a sequel.
The Thief series is golden, beautiful all the way through. Deadly Shadows was wonderful to play; I hope we see another, perhaps picked up by the expanded Crystal Dynamics (you know, the guys who do Kain).
Eidos has been squeezed like all midrange developers because the cost of development keeps going up - nothing more, nothing less.
Loose Nut Between Keyboard And Chair.
It's the cause of at least 95% of all computer fatalities, the other 5% being bad components (hey, when they make a million of 'em, even with the best quality checking a few units will slip through the cracks).
And then of course there were those Taiwanese motherboards a few years back that had the exploding capacitors because some company's filler mixture was off...
It'd be an ideal way to get things out - look at the TOS continuation project for an idea of how well those things work. They distribute over BT and it's great.
But you'd be treading in dangerous waters, corporate-speaking, because:
1. Their lawyers would get their panties in a wad over it going out in a format that was easily copy-able, thus proving that file-sharing networks and BT have legitimate uses (which the MPAA is still trying to deny)
2. The marketroids would be shitting in their pants over the fact that decent-quality files were being distributed, rather than crappy-quality Quicktime mini-clips, thus providing a possibility that people wouldn't buy the DVD sets later. Or in the reverse, if the files weren't easily transmutable to DVD, the "fans" (read: hard-core geeks who take that XVID HDTV 5.1 RIP and make a DVD of it) would get all pissy about imagined quality defects even if there really weren't any.
3. There's a real possibility some of the actors would be pissed about it not still going out over the airwaves, and IMDB wouldn't know how to categorize the show anymore.
Money, while you possess it, is still technically the property of the Government - just like while you may "own" the plot of land your house is built on, it still is technically the territory of the country you live in, and if you die leaving no heirs, and the house is fully paid off, then the government will reclaim its right on that land.
Now, the government has an interest in keeping printing costs down. And they have an interest in seeing that a proper supply of money is available at all times, so as to keep the economy moving.
They even have a program where inadvertently-destroyed money - for example, if someone buries a bag of cash, and digs it up 10 years later to find it all moldy and ruined - can be turned in, and it will be examined by specialists, and the government will mail you a check for the total value that they can forensically determine was present.
See, the dollar bill is not just a piece of paper. It's currency, backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. When you destroy it, you're screwing not just with a piece of paper, but with a government-issued promise on the worth of that paper. THAT's why that law is on the books.
Connectix WON their court fight. They were completely legal to sell their emulator.
The only reason that VGS died was that Sony paid them boatloads of cash to stop selling it.
Bleem would have won, too, but they ran out of the financial resources needed to challenge Sony. Microsoft wouldn't have that liability, it'd be big company vs big company.
I think Microsoft's not going to go with Sony compatibility, but that's nothing to do with their lawyers - they know they could win the court fight, or at least drag it out long enough that the console was entrenched as-is.
The real reason I think they won't is that if they sell well, they're essentially handing Sony sold-market share; if people buy Sony games to play on an Xbox2, Microsoft doesn't see the licensing profit from that.
In the end, it could be an entirely winning tactic - kill your opponent because nobody's buying his console, even if people are still buying the games. But Microsoft would have to eat the fact that they're feeding Sony's bottom line a bit by keeping their software sales propped up.
PlayStation was the first generation for Sony, and a completely new disc format. There was nothing to be compatible with.
The Atari 7800 was backwards compatible, but didn't beat the NES to launch, and wasn't advertised properly. See any history of Atari if you want more details on the matter.
The PS2 was backwards compatible... and hey, it WORKED!
All things being equal, a backwards compatible console from the same company will do better than a non-compatible console, because you'll speed early adoption as players go for the "upgrade".
Nintendo has already said they're trying to sidestep the next generation of consoles; the focus is going to be on "Revolution" (whatever the heck it is). So they're out, and will probably be content with 20% market share. Look at Nintendo as trying to transition to the Apple business model, with the Gameboy Advance their bread and butter.
Xbox being 33% in the USA market is a good thing; they've got strong sales and they're getting better as the PS2's hardware just can't keep up with new games. Compare PS2 Spider-Man 2 to the Xbox version, the PS2 version looks like ass.
The trick for Microsoft now is to leverage themselves so that they're the next-buy instead of the PS3. They're 33% in the console market right now because the majority of Xbox owners also own a PS2. When crossover titles come out, this hurts them - people pick one console or the other as their primary, and only get the "must have" titles on the second.
It will help immensely for early adoption sales, however, for Microsoft to have the Xbox2 compatible with Xbox games; The Playstation did the same, and people saw it as an "upgrade" rather than a whole new platform. This enabled them to keep a lot of customers, as opposed to Nintendo's N64 being abandoned by many players for the Playstation - you can bet they'd have had better luck if the N64 had been backwards compatible with the SNES.
Of course, Microsoft could REALLY kick ass if someone (them or a third party; preferably them, and in the box) came out with an emulation layer that let the Xbox2 play Playstation/Playstation2 titles as well... they're moving to a RISC processor, so it shouldn't be all THAT hard, especially since they're emulating something that ran at an order of magnitude less clock speed.
Arcades in general, if you look at them, have been in a slow decline in the USA for quite a while.
Why? Exactly the reasons you mention, plus a few more. New versions replace old, even when the "new" isn't necessarily any better (or oftentimes is even worse), on the assumption that a "new" machine will prompt gamers to spend more money beating it. And it works, for about two weeks.
DDR iterations have gotten plain silly with the addition of "Freeze" arrows, that's obvious - it took one of the problems many new players had, that I referred to as a "kickstand" mentality (standing on one leg all the time, trying to hit the pad with the other foot), and forces players to do it.
The other problem you miss - and it seems to be peculiar to America, because of how America was introduced to arcade machines - is complete lack of maintenance. Arcade owners in America, even those running an Aladdin's Castle or something similar, don't want to send out for the repair guy until a machine is completely unplayable or the coin slot isn't working properly. Arcade owners in malls or arcade machines put into a little nook in a movie theater, it takes yet longer to repair even a popular machine.
Why is this? It's the Pac-Man mentality. When machines were one button and a joystick, arcade owners considered them a low-risk investment. Stick it in a corner, plug it in, collect the quarters once a week, and that was that. You'll still find machines in rural America that have been on, non-stop, for close to 15 years - the screen may be warping, the joystick gone completely loose, but the machine owner sees no reason to send for a repairman because people still dump in their quarters.
Unfortunately, this contributes to the decline of the arcade. When you can't trust the quality of the machine, many players simply aren't going to make the trip merely to spend more money on the arcade machines. Even unfaithful console translations that have soft-pads or crappy plastic guns start to seem preferable to showing up, only to find an "out of order" sign or, worse yet, dumping in $1-$2 worth of coins only to find out that an important button's not working, the pad's sensors are going dead and breaking out of "freeze" steps in the middle or just not registering steps in the first place, or the joystick will no longer register a push to the left.
If you don't believe me that the reputation of arcades for lack of maintenance is killing them, look at the corresponding upswing in the popularity of home "arcade" style controllers, like the X-Arcade joystick.
The other half is the dyslexic switchover - you can be running forward no problem, and want to attack "left" relative to your forward motion, but you push left and he goes right because of the camera switchover...
Psi-Ops had a very nicely arranged camera. Not perfect, but definitely up there on the scale.
As far as Sands of Time, there were spots the camera wasn't bad, and there were spots it was. A lot of times a bit of preplanning with the camera was all it took.
Slashdot Mirror
Recalls happen all the time. In just about every industry. Exercise equipment, automobiles, televisions... you name it, there's been a recall. It happens.
It's not like there is a humongous danger. Nobody's house was burned down or car exploded, unlike several automobile types where a recall (faulty wiring in the ignition units and steering column pieces) only happened after lives were lost.
The facts are:
- The failure rate on these cords is listed as 1 in 10,000.
- The failure ONLY happens when the unit has been on for a ridiculously long time (read: someone just turned off the power-save feature and let the thing run all day and night).
- Seven people had minor burns from unplugging the cords while they were still hot.
- 23 people smelled smoke or had minor damage (likely plastic melting, which is what you'd expect when the low-grade plastics used in most entertainment centers comes in contact with an overheated wire) to their entertainment centers or carpet (likely synthetic carpet that melted).
I know, there are plenty of little trolls out there who hate MS, but seriously. They're doing the right thing and recalling the cords.
No, the fact that cords after October 23, 2003 aren't susceptible to this isn't an indication they knew about it - it could be a standard part of ongoing redesigns (which they do every few months to lower the production costs anyways). Or it could be that they went to a new vendor, who were making the cords to a higher standard or with a different process anyways.
Or it could simply be that they were investigating the CAUSE of the incidents before they did anything - after all, if the culprit were really the power supply, then replacing the cords wouldn't have done any good.
So come on. They're doing the right thing. Give them credit for doing it, in spite of the fact that the raving MS-hater lunatics are going to be spewing "OMG did yew see the xbox got recalled haha" all over chat boards for the next couple weeks, and move on.
Compare what's on the Amazon site to what you linked to. Two entirely different trailers.
I don't really mind the exclusivity clause.
What I have a problem with is the fact that, instead of providing it in a decent format and proper frame size so that anyone could view it, snag it to their desktop, they deliberately tried to make it un-downloadable (at least until somebody posts the file name, at which point I'm sure Slashdot will get another cease-and-desist letter for linking it that way).
Putting the file out in crappy resolution, in a shitty encoding format, and deliberately making it hard to enjoy the trailer don't help their cause. Disney should know this by now. Hell, even Apple have finally fixed the problems quicktime used to have.
The only way Disney could have done anything worse would have been to release it as a Realplayer file.
to screw the fans over by forcing a site like Aint-It-Cool to shut down their download of the trailer just so that Amazon can have non-downloadable, lower resolution, crappier version up "exclusively."
Bite me, Eisner.
but I would have hoped to see more variation than just "Doom 3, Half-Life 2, GTA, WoW, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, WoW...."
I mean, seriously. There are thousands of games released in a given year, and at least half of every category's nominations are just repeating the same tune.
I'm not going to whine about what I think they should have nominated, that'd be pointless. But I will point out that maybe, just maybe, there should be more variation in where they're looking for their nominations.
I've never seen anyone complain about the drop rate on items, or the spawn rate on some of the rarer monsters. IF your mythical friend actually exists - which seems unlikely since you had to hide behind the screen of an Anonymous Coward - then he had bad luck, no more, no less.
What I *HAVE* seen, time and again, is players being PO'ed that one of your fucking camp-bots is sitting right in the zone waiting for the same monster for days on end, and then having to go to the auction house or worse yet, some shithole operation like IGE, to get the item.
Then again, I long ago signed on to a petition that Square make all the Rare monster drops a sure thing, but Rare/EX instead so that they wouldn't face the campbot problem. Did they listen? NO.
Neither did they enforce their restrictions against 'bots.
So I left.
See Milwaukee, Viacom, and Time Warner.
Guess what, Steve. I voted with my wallet. I walked away from FFXI because they weren't doing shit about your "employees." And I know more people that have done the same, than haven't. They went to games like WoW where the terms of service are actually enforced, too.
We, the gamers, do not like your service. A bunch of Skr1pt Kiddiez who crow about twinking their characters with their parents' credit cards like your service, but we don't like those idiots either.
Comcast and Warner today operate under "gentleman's agreements" not to enter each other's territories, thus granting themselves monopolies and the ability to price-gouge where they currently are.
And no, no county does "franchises" for cable. Look at Milwaukee for a good example of how it USED to work - prior to the death of Viacom cable, there were two COMPETING cable companies in that county. The only reason no other cable company's come by since is that TW threatens to go into their existing counties and deliberately undercut their prices, running at a loss till they drive the competition out of business.
After two more rounds of mergers, we'll have two companies left in each area. Each with strict but unwritten agreements not to compete in each others' areas. It's the same way Comcast/Time Warner do business in the Cable TV industry right now, anyways.
that's what Eidos is. They're distribution company.
All of those titles are Eidos titles, the same way every Tony Hawk title is both an Activision title (distributing company) and a Neversoft (or the associated company like Vicarious who do the port) work.
Eidos has been unfortunate enough to produce some real shitty titles - Whiplash comes to mind - but they are not just a Tomb Raider company.
The Legacy of Kain line have been up and down, but there's some real gems in there.
Anachronox was a beaut, even redone as a machinima movie it was wonderful.
Deus Ex was good. Deus Ex: Invisible War suffered too much from trying to pare it down to console size.
The first Tomb Raider was actually decently fun, it's just that they never should have made a sequel.
The Thief series is golden, beautiful all the way through. Deadly Shadows was wonderful to play; I hope we see another, perhaps picked up by the expanded Crystal Dynamics (you know, the guys who do Kain).
Eidos has been squeezed like all midrange developers because the cost of development keeps going up - nothing more, nothing less.
Loose Nut Between Keyboard And Chair. It's the cause of at least 95% of all computer fatalities, the other 5% being bad components (hey, when they make a million of 'em, even with the best quality checking a few units will slip through the cracks). And then of course there were those Taiwanese motherboards a few years back that had the exploding capacitors because some company's filler mixture was off...
because it makes too much sense.
It'd be an ideal way to get things out - look at the TOS continuation project for an idea of how well those things work. They distribute over BT and it's great.
But you'd be treading in dangerous waters, corporate-speaking, because:
1. Their lawyers would get their panties in a wad over it going out in a format that was easily copy-able, thus proving that file-sharing networks and BT have legitimate uses (which the MPAA is still trying to deny)
2. The marketroids would be shitting in their pants over the fact that decent-quality files were being distributed, rather than crappy-quality Quicktime mini-clips, thus providing a possibility that people wouldn't buy the DVD sets later. Or in the reverse, if the files weren't easily transmutable to DVD, the "fans" (read: hard-core geeks who take that XVID HDTV 5.1 RIP and make a DVD of it) would get all pissy about imagined quality defects even if there really weren't any.
3. There's a real possibility some of the actors would be pissed about it not still going out over the airwaves, and IMDB wouldn't know how to categorize the show anymore.
Bungie's biggest mistake was removing falling damage from Halo 2.
It completely changed - for the worse - multiplayer tactics by making suicidal leaps an everyday occurrence.
the fact that LCD projectors tend to have a 2-3 frame delay?
Money, while you possess it, is still technically the property of the Government - just like while you may "own" the plot of land your house is built on, it still is technically the territory of the country you live in, and if you die leaving no heirs, and the house is fully paid off, then the government will reclaim its right on that land.
Now, the government has an interest in keeping printing costs down. And they have an interest in seeing that a proper supply of money is available at all times, so as to keep the economy moving.
They even have a program where inadvertently-destroyed money - for example, if someone buries a bag of cash, and digs it up 10 years later to find it all moldy and ruined - can be turned in, and it will be examined by specialists, and the government will mail you a check for the total value that they can forensically determine was present.
See, the dollar bill is not just a piece of paper. It's currency, backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. When you destroy it, you're screwing not just with a piece of paper, but with a government-issued promise on the worth of that paper. THAT's why that law is on the books.
Connectix WON their court fight. They were completely legal to sell their emulator.
The only reason that VGS died was that Sony paid them boatloads of cash to stop selling it.
Bleem would have won, too, but they ran out of the financial resources needed to challenge Sony. Microsoft wouldn't have that liability, it'd be big company vs big company.
I think Microsoft's not going to go with Sony compatibility, but that's nothing to do with their lawyers - they know they could win the court fight, or at least drag it out long enough that the console was entrenched as-is.
The real reason I think they won't is that if they sell well, they're essentially handing Sony sold-market share; if people buy Sony games to play on an Xbox2, Microsoft doesn't see the licensing profit from that.
In the end, it could be an entirely winning tactic - kill your opponent because nobody's buying his console, even if people are still buying the games. But Microsoft would have to eat the fact that they're feeding Sony's bottom line a bit by keeping their software sales propped up.
PlayStation was the first generation for Sony, and a completely new disc format. There was nothing to be compatible with.
The Atari 7800 was backwards compatible, but didn't beat the NES to launch, and wasn't advertised properly. See any history of Atari if you want more details on the matter.
The PS2 was backwards compatible... and hey, it WORKED! All things being equal, a backwards compatible console from the same company will do better than a non-compatible console, because you'll speed early adoption as players go for the "upgrade".
#2 - Nintendo's PR and designers have made statements that the console currently named "Revolution" will be a "different" sort of Console.
To wit: THIS.
it's what Sony does, or doesn't, do to counter.
Nintendo has already said they're trying to sidestep the next generation of consoles; the focus is going to be on "Revolution" (whatever the heck it is). So they're out, and will probably be content with 20% market share. Look at Nintendo as trying to transition to the Apple business model, with the Gameboy Advance their bread and butter.
Xbox being 33% in the USA market is a good thing; they've got strong sales and they're getting better as the PS2's hardware just can't keep up with new games. Compare PS2 Spider-Man 2 to the Xbox version, the PS2 version looks like ass.
The trick for Microsoft now is to leverage themselves so that they're the next-buy instead of the PS3. They're 33% in the console market right now because the majority of Xbox owners also own a PS2. When crossover titles come out, this hurts them - people pick one console or the other as their primary, and only get the "must have" titles on the second.
It will help immensely for early adoption sales, however, for Microsoft to have the Xbox2 compatible with Xbox games; The Playstation did the same, and people saw it as an "upgrade" rather than a whole new platform. This enabled them to keep a lot of customers, as opposed to Nintendo's N64 being abandoned by many players for the Playstation - you can bet they'd have had better luck if the N64 had been backwards compatible with the SNES.
Of course, Microsoft could REALLY kick ass if someone (them or a third party; preferably them, and in the box) came out with an emulation layer that let the Xbox2 play Playstation/Playstation2 titles as well... they're moving to a RISC processor, so it shouldn't be all THAT hard, especially since they're emulating something that ran at an order of magnitude less clock speed.
Arcades in general, if you look at them, have been in a slow decline in the USA for quite a while.
Why? Exactly the reasons you mention, plus a few more. New versions replace old, even when the "new" isn't necessarily any better (or oftentimes is even worse), on the assumption that a "new" machine will prompt gamers to spend more money beating it. And it works, for about two weeks.
DDR iterations have gotten plain silly with the addition of "Freeze" arrows, that's obvious - it took one of the problems many new players had, that I referred to as a "kickstand" mentality (standing on one leg all the time, trying to hit the pad with the other foot), and forces players to do it.
The other problem you miss - and it seems to be peculiar to America, because of how America was introduced to arcade machines - is complete lack of maintenance. Arcade owners in America, even those running an Aladdin's Castle or something similar, don't want to send out for the repair guy until a machine is completely unplayable or the coin slot isn't working properly. Arcade owners in malls or arcade machines put into a little nook in a movie theater, it takes yet longer to repair even a popular machine.
Why is this? It's the Pac-Man mentality. When machines were one button and a joystick, arcade owners considered them a low-risk investment. Stick it in a corner, plug it in, collect the quarters once a week, and that was that. You'll still find machines in rural America that have been on, non-stop, for close to 15 years - the screen may be warping, the joystick gone completely loose, but the machine owner sees no reason to send for a repairman because people still dump in their quarters.
Unfortunately, this contributes to the decline of the arcade. When you can't trust the quality of the machine, many players simply aren't going to make the trip merely to spend more money on the arcade machines. Even unfaithful console translations that have soft-pads or crappy plastic guns start to seem preferable to showing up, only to find an "out of order" sign or, worse yet, dumping in $1-$2 worth of coins only to find out that an important button's not working, the pad's sensors are going dead and breaking out of "freeze" steps in the middle or just not registering steps in the first place, or the joystick will no longer register a push to the left.
If you don't believe me that the reputation of arcades for lack of maintenance is killing them, look at the corresponding upswing in the popularity of home "arcade" style controllers, like the X-Arcade joystick.
A couple of reader letters and a whole second page on problems and solutions have gone up to the article, have a look!
That's part of it.
The other half is the dyslexic switchover - you can be running forward no problem, and want to attack "left" relative to your forward motion, but you push left and he goes right because of the camera switchover...
Psi-Ops had a very nicely arranged camera. Not perfect, but definitely up there on the scale.
As far as Sands of Time, there were spots the camera wasn't bad, and there were spots it was. A lot of times a bit of preplanning with the camera was all it took.