Re:what about the DRM "feature"?
on
ZOMG New Zunes
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· Score: 1
So, i was reading a number of the comments that said basically the same thing - it might not be good, but it is better than nothing. Obviously some people feel it is NOT better than nothing, myself included and I wasn't sure why. So, I started thinking about it, trying to understand why I felt the way I did.
Apple is some guy walking past you on the street.
MS is some guy on the street offering you $50 if you give him a blowjob.
All the second guy does is giving you more choices. So that's great, right?
It reminds me of how Sony initially used the PS3 to push Blu-Ray adoption instead of videogames. Likewise, MS used GFW to promote Vista and DX10 instead PC games.
It's even worse because GfW lacks any coherent strategy to address the PC's biggest problems for gaming which are on-board graphics and requirements stickers half the size of the box.
You don't need a $4000 PC to play games. My current PC cost about 1000 three years ago and it can still play just about all games (even though I have to dial the settings way down on e.g. Bioshock ). When you buy a new PC every few years you have to pay a premium of about $300 to get a PC that's good at playing games instead of just office stuff, but not enough people are ready to pay that price.
I think one of the biggest problems here is that all too many have simply no idea what they'd have to buy to be able to play games, whether that game they're looking at will play on their PC and what's wrong if it doesn't.
The Vista performance rating would have been the ideal way to address this problem but unfortunately a marginally bigger and faster hard drive will have a bigger impact on your score than a switch from a 6600 to a 8800.
The other problem is that MS and the graphics card corps are incapable of solving the driver mess. I installed the Bioshock demo. Then I needed new beta drivers for my nvidia card. Then I had to find a fix for the old 60Hz problem that's still around (iirc at some point nvidia allowed games to set their own refresh rate. All too many don't and you're stuck at 60Hz. That's fine if you got a LCD but sucks dick if you don't, meaning you need a 3rd party tool -nvtweak- to activate the hidden entry in nvidia's control panel to force refresh rate overrides. Now try explaining that to some non-geek). Even better ten years ago you could install games on a different partition without problems, nowadays suddenly there are quite a few games that will break if you don't install them on C:.
I mean wtf, this is 2007, nvidia makes boatloads of money by selling gaming hardware, games cost tens of millions to produce and MS needs the early adopters because we're the guys who buy overpriced retail editions of Windows. You should think they'd be able to fix all that small stuff. But nooooo...
If GFW was about providing gamers with an enjoyable experience, there'd be a bigger focus on XP and no Live fees. Making several "flagship" GFW titles Vista-only was incredibly stupid as well.
When GfW was announced originally there were some tin-foil hat theories that it was MS' new plan to kill off PC gaming. As the Xbox provides the most PC-like games generally, the idea was that by killing PC gaming MS could gain Xbox customers.
I dismissed it originally but now I'm not so sure.
Games for Windows. So which Games for Windows did MS release to launch its bold new initative? A crappy port of a two year old game with subpar graphics, crappy performance and loads of bugs. And a worse port of a overpriced game with crippled controls, crappy performance, and metric fucktons of bugs. IGN reported it wouldn't even run on half their PCs. Wow. WTF? This is the bold new world of MS enforced console-style QA for the PC? But hey, it supported the 360 gamepad.
You'd have thought MS would have been able to produce one game that wasn't a port and wasn't a B- title, or at least give us Mass Effect at the same time as the 360.
And then of course there's GfWL. If you pay them you get half the features other corps offer for free. Great.
Long story short:
Without the baggage of promoting a new OS or some other crap, Valve can focus on what gamers care about: games!
Even more important, Valve (and others, e.g. Stardock, who are catering to a more niche audience but offer less drm crap) care about gamers.
MS has lost about $*7* *billion* on the Xbox ($4bn being the accepted figure for the original Xbox, plus the losses of their games division since the launch of the 360 -less a safety margin-, plus the $1bn to fix their POS), if they have to piss off 10 PC people to gain 1 new 360 customer who cares?
"First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." Amen.
Actually, NASA needed a space station as a destination for the Shuttle (what else would they've done with the Shuttle otherwise) and a Shuttle to supply the ISS (If we retire the Shuttle all those billions for the ISS would've been wasted!).
Russia needed foreign investment in their space sector after the USSR went belly up and didn't really care what they were paid for.
And the ESA saw it as a relatively cheap way to establish a kinda-sorta-sometimes manned presence in space with the positive PR effects but without the costs of a man-rated launch system.
In short, everything went downhill after von Braun retired.
1) Start your trip from Earth Orbit, by firing up them engines and transferring into a nice trajectory to our friendly-neighborhood planet Mars. 2) ??? 3) Profit!... no, I mean, half-way through the journey (or actually, just a little bit before half way, to give some leeway for properly transferring into a Mars orbital path), switch off them engines! 4) Swing your craft around so that the pointy-end is towards the trajectory's rear and the business end (the engines) are pointing towards the trajectory's forward path. 5) Fire up them engines again! Hey presto! You're now flying into nuclear explosions! 6) ??? 7) Hulk Smash!
Propagandists for al Quaeda, you mean? Certainly one of the many #2s and 3s of that organisation that we've neutralized. But of course you bleeding heart liberals want to free them again so they can kill Americans, and puppies.
one that offered a reward of about $25 for the capture of Bill Clinton
So they wanted to abduct the president of the US, probably to behead him on Al Jazeera.
after he ordered an attack on that aspirin factory in Africa.
Cavuto says it was a WMD factory. But of course you believe everything the Islamofacists tell you.
One of the brothers was released after 3 years,
See? The system works.
the other is apparently still in lockup.
Of course he is, because he is guilty. If he weren't guilty why would he be in Guantanamo. But you, of course, want to release terrorists so they can kill us because they hate our freedom. Are you a traitor?
The sad fact is that the above is a more or less faithful representation of how FoxNews would treat this story.
The idea was to create a level playing field for MS, Apple, Real and others to convince OEMs to include their media player.
Just like the browser wars any competing media player had to fight against one that was installed on just about every PC anyway. An advantage MS used to sell their WM tech. Unfortunately as somebody already pointed out, it was too little, too late and more of a symbolic gesture. Other parts of the ruling (documenting the APIs) were more important.
XP(N) was just a side effect that MS milked for propaganda purposes (Look at those stupid eurocrats! Noone wants a crippled Windows, they just want to punish a successful company, stupid socialist French, yaddayadda)
Neither harddrive nor vastly more power could save the original Xbox.
It's meaningless how much better the PS3 is as long as MS manages to leave the PS3 in the dust in terms of installed base.
Some analyst predicted that Sony sold of one of their divisions to be able to sell the PS3 at $399. If that's true it might save the console because unlike the original Xbox Sony does enjoy a strong brand and a PS3 at a competitive would probably be able to get enough games and sales to at least catch up with the 360. But if the 360 continues to outsell the PS3 at a 2:1 ratio till next spring this generation will be the inverse of the last one with MS and Nintendo beating out Sony by a wide margin (I believe one of the more expensive consoles can catch up to the Wii over the next few years as the price difference shrinks)
It was pretty boring when I watched it after recording it on my VCR (yes, old school). I don't think this type of show would work for U.S. compared to South Korean where it is popular.
There are a number of different but related problems:
Most sports are boring if you know nothing about them.
The average American still thinks videogames are either stuff like pong or terrorist training tools
Many computer games are more complicated than most real world sports, making it harder to appreciate the subtleties (and even with stuff like football that has a rulebook that's 3000 pages, those rules are often just as much about making the game *look* right for spectators as about having it feel right for the player)
to circumvent those problems mainstream coverage is oversimplifying which doesn't get them more average viewers but turns off the enthusiasts.
On a positive note, there's youtube. Watch the MSL final (with excellent commentary by Klazart)
here. A really great match over 5 games that had both great rushes and macro-heavy games.
I don't know whether it would impress anyone who doesn't know anything about starcraft but football broadcasts also don't explain what a blitz is every time one occurs. Even if you don't understand the terms at first, you will still get a feeling for the depth and flow of the game and you'll either learn the terminology over time, or the sport will simply bore you but that's a problem that's not really unique to esports.
IMHO watching baseball is like watching grass grow but the networks don't try to "fix" that by aiming their shows at 6yr olds because that would only lose them lots of existing fans. Soccer tried stuff like that in the US btw. No draws, clock stopping every time there's a foul and of course the all-glitz NY Cosmos. It was a disaster. Despite Beckham, it seems they've learned they're lesson, they try to stay true to the game and cater to soccer fans, instead of trying to wow otherwise disinterested people with fluff.
Taking your viewers and your topic seriously is the key to growing your audience.
They seemed completely unable to release a game that wasn't part of the genre du jour.
Mechwarrior was a mech simulation at heart. But haven't you read the news? Simulations are dead, so let's do... a RTS! But wait, now FPS are the best-selling titles and we're busy losing $4bn on our console anyway so let's drop the PC...
Chromehounds sold well despite having some big flaws (just look at the reviews) and despite being part of a "dead" genre. This shows that there would have been a niche for a well made "realistic" mech simulation, even if it didn't sell as many units as Halo 2. And one of the major flaws of the original Xbox was a distinct lack of good games that weren't fps or by EA Sports.
If MS FS hadn't such a long tradition at MS, I swear FSX would have you shoot terrorists on the wings of your plane with an M-16; oh, but there would be an airplane minigame where you have to press the triggers rythmically to take off and land.
This whole thing is turning into the bastard child of Vista and the iPhone. And this list doesn't even include the articles (about the 360 and ilovebees) that were about Halo but didn't have Halo 3 in the topic. Despite this we still have two news posts about Halo 3 *marketing*, two about it going gold and one correcting an incorrect earlier/. article (I think that was a first).
Wouldn't that mean that we should try and convert Ballmer so he can throw Gates down the bottomless pit below Redmond?
And should we do that before or after we push him into a stream of molten rock and hack off his hand? (I have to confess, I like this part of your plan)
"Could be", it's a bit early to say with that kind of certainty (as you know by your previous sentence). There could [likely?] also be some unknown force at play, something that changes the way time's perceived (thus things look to be moving faster/slower than they are, throwing off mass estimations), a property of matter that changes how much it interacts with/produces gravity. How many constants in the equations we use are really constants, and how many are maybe functions of the length of time since the big bang, that we're not yet aware are changing? "Dark matter" and "dark energy" are just words, placeholders for an attracting and a repelling something, that are needed to fit the world as we see it into our current models. It doesn't mean they have to be matter and energy, therefore the >90% *is* true by the very definition of the terms (perhaps you use a more literal definition so ymmv. But we certainly mean the same thing)
Our current model I wouldn't say it "way off", just only a [small] part of the overall picture. If you construct a car that lacks brakes it's a disaster. It doesn't mean that the vast majority of the car isn't well designed, it also doesn't mean that it isn't relatively easy to fix. It just means that the car is completely unusable for its design purpose. The fix for our understanding of gravity etc. might be minor -certainly on the scale affecting us directly- but if, for every bit of stuff you can detect, you need to invent 20 times the amount just to explain how it works, something's way off.
I kinda hope there's not a trivial explanation (i.e. not a measurement error, non-uniform radiation pressure etc.)
Our current model for how the universe works is way off ( >90% of the universe are dark matter and dark energy) and any clues on when and how reality deviates from theory should be quite interesting.
Could all the mods who are on crack please refrain from modding? Where the fuck is the parent trolling?
The article makes it seem as if Microsoft rushed DX10 out before it was truly ready; That's sure as hell what it looks like when you release an incompatible replacement for a standard that's just starting to get some use. Especially if it's for some minor changes.
when you consider that this is what they often seem to do with their OS's, this should probably come as no surprise. Just about anyone who needs Windows computers for anything important, will always wait for SP1 of any given Windows version.
Of course, we're seeing this news on the Inquirer, often considered to be a slightly less-than-reliable source of tech news. I challenge you to dispute that.
This leaves just:
Maybe I'll reserve judgement until I hear another explanation from some other source. Waiting for confirmation from more than one source, omg that's almost as bad as calling your mom a ho.
However, the supreme court only reviews cases that are controversial and/or of judicial importance in the first place. The 9th circuit had a whopping 24 cases reviewed by the SC and 18 decisions were overturned - most of the other courts had only 1-4 cases reviewed.
Yes, a whopping 24 cases out of 6387 by a court that accounts for 18% of all appeals while the remaining 80% are distributed over 12 other circuits.
I've read that the 9th's ratio is somewhat higher both in percentage of reviewed as well as overturned cases (although not much higher, the supreme court generally overturns about three quarters of all cases they accept) but looking at the absolute numbers all that 9th circuit scorn is just bullshit.
The reason everyone hates the 9th are a number of high profile cases not a systematic problem.
Ugh don't even suggest that. I sc isn't as server intensive as wow is. They don't have to deal with persistent inventories and they don't have massive sprawling environments or require constant expensive content updates. If they do that I won't buy. And that is despite the fact that I'm following it very closely right now. I pay enough bills per month as it is. It's a rumor that's been brought up a number of times and it makes sense because subscriptions and micro-payments are big in Korea and that's the main market for Starcraft. I wouldn't like it either and I certainly wouldn't pay for it, it would just kill multiplayer for me.
As for the rest of your note. I'm looking forward to online. Big time. However I will be playing through the single player and the longer it is the happier I will be. I don't care if some missions don't advance the story. I just want to play at least five well thought out, hard missions with my entire tech tree. I don't think I'd play through all of that if it was part of the main story. Why can't we agree that there should be a short to medium length (i.e. 12-15h) campaign and a bunch of extra scenarios (if Blizzard is providing even minimal mod support we're gonna see those anyway) that go beyond the multiplayer-with-bots of skirmish. I think I'd even play all of them but I can't stand campaigns that drag on and on with no story advancement in sight. =(
There's nothing as informative, interesting and insightful as acceptance speeches. People tend to save their most thoughtful insights for the person shoving a microphone in their face right after they got a prize.
This is even more true if the prize is meaningless and instead of an immediate reaction it is dispensed by press release.
Let's hope they get it right and it doesn't lead to a bunch of skirmish-like missions only. Definitely, but kotaku's preview sounds like there's a lot of game-engine cinematics between missions which makes it unlikely that they're not also heavily customizing the missions.
What I hope for is fewer missions. It might sound crazy but I think the 30 missions in the original SC were too many, at least the way they played. It felt like there were 6-7 real missions in the scripting, storytelling and mission types and then there were 3-4 skirmish missions built in to increase the playtime.
Now I think part of that was that then people expected campaigns that long and Blizzard would have been crucified if they'd only made 20-24 missions in total but I think that has changed. The success of multiplayer is the most important reason. Multiplayer and skirmish now are considered part of the gametime and they really weren't back then. The other would be that the average gamer has gotten older and we simply have less time. We want tight storytelling and missions and not all that filler that was normal back then.
Two RTSes that really nailed good mission design imho were Homeworld (great scripting, story and in-game as well as fmv cinematics) and Joint Task Force (it's imho the best game with expanding maps. I.e. you start on a small map, complete an objective and then the map expands and you get the next logical objective with a short in-game cinematic to introduce it. Supreme Commander did it too but much worse -- oh and a warning, if you're interested try the demo, ignore the reviews. The game plays more like Commandoes than Starcraft and IGN&Co apparently didn't notice. The reviews were really bad).
I want 12-15h, a campaign that doesn't feel like it's going too long (unlike this post, sry =). And after I'm done with the campaign I can play skirmish, LAN and online to get my money's worth (unless they charge money for online gaming like it's been rumored, as that would be a major cash cow in Korea)
Apple fanboys are like people in an abusive relationship, they will interpret everything as a sign that Steve still does love them even while he's beating them with a belt (but it's not His fault! Of course, He's angry! If only they'd bought new Macs every 2 years like Windows users...)
Oh don't you love the smell of burnt karma in the morning =)
Noone (almost) wants them because apart from spotting the miniscule differences between Arial and Helvetica the main duty of designers is to make sure that fonts on all webpages are illegibly small even at normal dpis.
Years and years ago when developers still ruled the internet before the time of usability-optimized webdesign there was this funny setting in browsers called "font size". If you changed the value the size of the fonts changed.
Completely stupid, only a nerd could want something like that, I know. As everyone knows, larger font sizes should be avoided because they distract the eye from the overall structure of the webpage and lead it to focus on the actual content and no designer wants that. So now we have CSS, the font size setting in browsers is useless on >50% of all pages, you have to work with minimum font sizes which break the layout of the rest.
In short: Until the majority of all computer users has an OS with a resolution independent UI, high dpis are useless because they create more problems (the above isn't only a problem of browsers, I've got a number of apps -.Net apps especially - where the GUI breaks if you change the font size in Windows) than they solve.
Money, money, money Must be funny In the rich man's world Money, money, money Always sunny In the rich man's world Aha-ahaaa All the things I could do If I had a little money It's a rich man's world.
Lobbying: Providing the best government money can pay.
Using advanced business analyzement systematics, nutshell42, principal analyst of the nutshell42 Group reached the conclusion that Sony Corp leverages a synergistic profit of $40 on every PLAYSTATION 3 sold. The costs break down as follows:
The nutshell42 Group helps businesses realize eBusiness synergies since Juli 2007. It is the leading partner for up-to-date strategy evaluations in the technology sector, providing members of/.inc with all the facts they need to achieve a competitive advantage.
Sony, Corp. is the leading provider of highest value entertainment systems and integrated solutions. Moving decisively to shape the living room of tomorrow.*
*: I dare you to find one sentence in all this drivel that's more bullshit than all those other analyst crap out there =)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is some guy walking past you on the street.
MS is some guy on the street offering you $50 if you give him a blowjob.
All the second guy does is giving you more choices. So that's great, right?
It reminds me of how Sony initially used the PS3 to push Blu-Ray adoption instead of videogames. Likewise, MS used GFW to promote Vista and DX10 instead PC games.
It's even worse because GfW lacks any coherent strategy to address the PC's biggest problems for gaming which are on-board graphics and requirements stickers half the size of the box.
You don't need a $4000 PC to play games. My current PC cost about 1000 three years ago and it can still play just about all games (even though I have to dial the settings way down on e.g. Bioshock ). When you buy a new PC every few years you have to pay a premium of about $300 to get a PC that's good at playing games instead of just office stuff, but not enough people are ready to pay that price.
I think one of the biggest problems here is that all too many have simply no idea what they'd have to buy to be able to play games, whether that game they're looking at will play on their PC and what's wrong if it doesn't.
The Vista performance rating would have been the ideal way to address this problem but unfortunately a marginally bigger and faster hard drive will have a bigger impact on your score than a switch from a 6600 to a 8800.
The other problem is that MS and the graphics card corps are incapable of solving the driver mess. I installed the Bioshock demo. Then I needed new beta drivers for my nvidia card. Then I had to find a fix for the old 60Hz problem that's still around (iirc at some point nvidia allowed games to set their own refresh rate. All too many don't and you're stuck at 60Hz. That's fine if you got a LCD but sucks dick if you don't, meaning you need a 3rd party tool -nvtweak- to activate the hidden entry in nvidia's control panel to force refresh rate overrides. Now try explaining that to some non-geek). Even better ten years ago you could install games on a different partition without problems, nowadays suddenly there are quite a few games that will break if you don't install them on C:.
I mean wtf, this is 2007, nvidia makes boatloads of money by selling gaming hardware, games cost tens of millions to produce and MS needs the early adopters because we're the guys who buy overpriced retail editions of Windows. You should think they'd be able to fix all that small stuff. But nooooo...
If GFW was about providing gamers with an enjoyable experience, there'd be a bigger focus on XP and no Live fees. Making several "flagship" GFW titles Vista-only was incredibly stupid as well.
When GfW was announced originally there were some tin-foil hat theories that it was MS' new plan to kill off PC gaming. As the Xbox provides the most PC-like games generally, the idea was that by killing PC gaming MS could gain Xbox customers.
I dismissed it originally but now I'm not so sure.
Games for Windows. So which Games for Windows did MS release to launch its bold new initative? A crappy port of a two year old game with subpar graphics, crappy performance and loads of bugs. And a worse port of a overpriced game with crippled controls, crappy performance, and metric fucktons of bugs. IGN reported it wouldn't even run on half their PCs. Wow. WTF? This is the bold new world of MS enforced console-style QA for the PC? But hey, it supported the 360 gamepad.
You'd have thought MS would have been able to produce one game that wasn't a port and wasn't a B- title, or at least give us Mass Effect at the same time as the 360.
And then of course there's GfWL. If you pay them you get half the features other corps offer for free. Great.
Long story short:
Without the baggage of promoting a new OS or some other crap, Valve can focus on what gamers care about: games!
Even more important, Valve (and others, e.g. Stardock, who are catering to a more niche audience but offer less drm crap) care about gamers.
MS has lost about $*7* *billion* on the Xbox ($4bn being the accepted figure for the original Xbox, plus the losses of their games division since the launch of the 360 -less a safety margin-, plus the $1bn to fix their POS), if they have to piss off 10 PC people to gain 1 new 360 customer who cares?
"First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." Amen.
Russia needed foreign investment in their space sector after the USSR went belly up and didn't really care what they were paid for.
And the ESA saw it as a relatively cheap way to establish a kinda-sorta-sometimes manned presence in space with the positive PR effects but without the costs of a man-rated launch system.
In short, everything went downhill after von Braun retired.
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries. Now go away or I shall taunt you again!
1) Start your trip from Earth Orbit, by firing up them engines and transferring into a nice trajectory to our friendly-neighborhood planet Mars.
2) ???
3) Profit!... no, I mean, half-way through the journey (or actually, just a little bit before half way, to give some leeway for properly transferring into a Mars orbital path), switch off them engines!
4) Swing your craft around so that the pointy-end is towards the trajectory's rear and the business end (the engines) are pointing towards the trajectory's forward path.
5) Fire up them engines again! Hey presto! You're now flying into nuclear explosions!
6) ???
7) Hulk Smash!
Two? So it was a conspiracy?
who were editors of a newspaper in Pakistan
Propagandists for al Quaeda, you mean? Certainly one of the many #2s and 3s of that organisation that we've neutralized. But of course you bleeding heart liberals want to free them again so they can kill Americans, and puppies.
one that offered a reward of about $25 for the capture of Bill Clinton
So they wanted to abduct the president of the US, probably to behead him on Al Jazeera.
after he ordered an attack on that aspirin factory in Africa.
Cavuto says it was a WMD factory. But of course you believe everything the Islamofacists tell you.
One of the brothers was released after 3 years,
See? The system works.
the other is apparently still in lockup.
Of course he is, because he is guilty. If he weren't guilty why would he be in Guantanamo. But you, of course, want to release terrorists so they can kill us because they hate our freedom. Are you a traitor?
The sad fact is that the above is a more or less faithful representation of how FoxNews would treat this story.
Just like the browser wars any competing media player had to fight against one that was installed on just about every PC anyway. An advantage MS used to sell their WM tech. Unfortunately as somebody already pointed out, it was too little, too late and more of a symbolic gesture. Other parts of the ruling (documenting the APIs) were more important.
XP(N) was just a side effect that MS milked for propaganda purposes (Look at those stupid eurocrats! Noone wants a crippled Windows, they just want to punish a successful company, stupid socialist French, yaddayadda)
Many 19th century inventions invented by 19th century inventors. Film at 11.
It's meaningless how much better the PS3 is as long as MS manages to leave the PS3 in the dust in terms of installed base.
Some analyst predicted that Sony sold of one of their divisions to be able to sell the PS3 at $399. If that's true it might save the console because unlike the original Xbox Sony does enjoy a strong brand and a PS3 at a competitive would probably be able to get enough games and sales to at least catch up with the 360. But if the 360 continues to outsell the PS3 at a 2:1 ratio till next spring this generation will be the inverse of the last one with MS and Nintendo beating out Sony by a wide margin (I believe one of the more expensive consoles can catch up to the Wii over the next few years as the price difference shrinks)
There are a number of different but related problems:
On a positive note, there's youtube. Watch the MSL final (with excellent commentary by Klazart) here. A really great match over 5 games that had both great rushes and macro-heavy games.
I don't know whether it would impress anyone who doesn't know anything about starcraft but football broadcasts also don't explain what a blitz is every time one occurs. Even if you don't understand the terms at first, you will still get a feeling for the depth and flow of the game and you'll either learn the terminology over time, or the sport will simply bore you but that's a problem that's not really unique to esports.
IMHO watching baseball is like watching grass grow but the networks don't try to "fix" that by aiming their shows at 6yr olds because that would only lose them lots of existing fans. Soccer tried stuff like that in the US btw. No draws, clock stopping every time there's a foul and of course the all-glitz NY Cosmos. It was a disaster. Despite Beckham, it seems they've learned they're lesson, they try to stay true to the game and cater to soccer fans, instead of trying to wow otherwise disinterested people with fluff.
Taking your viewers and your topic seriously is the key to growing your audience.
Mechwarrior was a mech simulation at heart. But haven't you read the news? Simulations are dead, so let's do... a RTS! But wait, now FPS are the best-selling titles and we're busy losing $4bn on our console anyway so let's drop the PC...
Chromehounds sold well despite having some big flaws (just look at the reviews) and despite being part of a "dead" genre. This shows that there would have been a niche for a well made "realistic" mech simulation, even if it didn't sell as many units as Halo 2. And one of the major flaws of the original Xbox was a distinct lack of good games that weren't fps or by EA Sports.
If MS FS hadn't such a long tradition at MS, I swear FSX would have you shoot terrorists on the wings of your plane with an M-16; oh, but there would be an airplane minigame where you have to press the triggers rythmically to take off and land.
Online Co-Op For Halo 3 Launch Confirmed
Halo 3 Preorders Top 1 Million, Marketing Begins
Halo 3 Almost Done
Halo 3 Has Gone Gold
A Look At Halo 3's $10 Million Ad Campaign
Halo 3 - The Final Word
This whole thing is turning into the bastard child of Vista and the iPhone. And this list doesn't even include the articles (about the 360 and ilovebees) that were about Halo but didn't have Halo 3 in the topic. Despite this we still have two news posts about Halo 3 *marketing*, two about it going gold and one correcting an incorrect earlier /. article (I think that was a first).
Did /. ever push any other game like this?
And should we do that before or after we push him into a stream of molten rock and hack off his hand? (I have to confess, I like this part of your plan)
Our current model for how the universe works is way off ( >90% of the universe are dark matter and dark energy) and any clues on when and how reality deviates from theory should be quite interesting.
This leaves just:
Maybe I'll reserve judgement until I hear another explanation from some other source. Waiting for confirmation from more than one source, omg that's almost as bad as calling your mom a ho.Yes, a whopping 24 cases out of 6387 by a court that accounts for 18% of all appeals while the remaining 80% are distributed over 12 other circuits.
I've read that the 9th's ratio is somewhat higher both in percentage of reviewed as well as overturned cases (although not much higher, the supreme court generally overturns about three quarters of all cases they accept) but looking at the absolute numbers all that 9th circuit scorn is just bullshit.
The reason everyone hates the 9th are a number of high profile cases not a systematic problem.
This is even more true if the prize is meaningless and instead of an immediate reaction it is dispensed by press release.
What I hope for is fewer missions. It might sound crazy but I think the 30 missions in the original SC were too many, at least the way they played. It felt like there were 6-7 real missions in the scripting, storytelling and mission types and then there were 3-4 skirmish missions built in to increase the playtime.
Now I think part of that was that then people expected campaigns that long and Blizzard would have been crucified if they'd only made 20-24 missions in total but I think that has changed. The success of multiplayer is the most important reason. Multiplayer and skirmish now are considered part of the gametime and they really weren't back then. The other would be that the average gamer has gotten older and we simply have less time. We want tight storytelling and missions and not all that filler that was normal back then.
Two RTSes that really nailed good mission design imho were Homeworld (great scripting, story and in-game as well as fmv cinematics) and Joint Task Force (it's imho the best game with expanding maps. I.e. you start on a small map, complete an objective and then the map expands and you get the next logical objective with a short in-game cinematic to introduce it. Supreme Commander did it too but much worse -- oh and a warning, if you're interested try the demo, ignore the reviews. The game plays more like Commandoes than Starcraft and IGN&Co apparently didn't notice. The reviews were really bad).
I want 12-15h, a campaign that doesn't feel like it's going too long (unlike this post, sry =). And after I'm done with the campaign I can play skirmish, LAN and online to get my money's worth (unless they charge money for online gaming like it's been rumored, as that would be a major cash cow in Korea)
Oh don't you love the smell of burnt karma in the morning =)
Noone (almost) wants them because apart from spotting the miniscule differences between Arial and Helvetica the main duty of designers is to make sure that fonts on all webpages are illegibly small even at normal dpis.
Years and years ago when developers still ruled the internet before the time of usability-optimized webdesign there was this funny setting in browsers called "font size". If you changed the value the size of the fonts changed.
Completely stupid, only a nerd could want something like that, I know. As everyone knows, larger font sizes should be avoided because they distract the eye from the overall structure of the webpage and lead it to focus on the actual content and no designer wants that. So now we have CSS, the font size setting in browsers is useless on >50% of all pages, you have to work with minimum font sizes which break the layout of the rest.
In short: Until the majority of all computer users has an OS with a resolution independent UI, high dpis are useless because they create more problems (the above isn't only a problem of browsers, I've got a number of apps - .Net apps especially - where the GUI breaks if you change the font size in Windows) than they solve.
Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich man's world
Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man's world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It's a rich man's world.
Lobbying: Providing the best government money can pay.
Using advanced business analyzement systematics, nutshell42, principal analyst of the nutshell42 Group reached the conclusion that Sony Corp leverages a synergistic profit of $40 on every PLAYSTATION 3 sold. The costs break down as follows:
Cell: $85
RSX: $92
256MB GDR: $25
256MB sthDR: $28
Blu-Ray drive: $101
Mainboard and Cooling: $32
Harddrive: $18
I/O, Bluetooth, etc: $15
WiFi: $23
SIXAXIS, various: $11
Case, Assembly and Shipping: $30
Total: $459
The nutshell42 Group helps businesses realize eBusiness synergies since Juli 2007. It is the leading partner for up-to-date strategy evaluations in the technology sector, providing members of /.inc with all the facts they need to achieve a competitive advantage.
Sony, Corp. is the leading provider of highest value entertainment systems and integrated solutions. Moving decisively to shape the living room of tomorrow.*
*: I dare you to find one sentence in all this drivel that's more bullshit than all those other analyst crap out there =)