I love it when "scientists" proclaim absolute crap like they are going to be no languages in less than 100 years. Try telling that to the Chinese whom have been around longer than anyone else without much change to their language or culture.
Where's the end? I wanted to know what the heck happened to SNK? Did they go out of business? Did they get bought out by someone else? See below for "The End" to this good story:
Finally, not long after its first release, the Neo Geo Pocket was on its way to follow the Hyper 64 into the great void of defunct video game systems and was officially abandoned in late 2000.
All these of SNK's adventures finally lead to a financial desaster. Unable to pay the bills, SNK tried to find an investor. At the same time, when the word of SNK's economical breakdown had spread throughout the gaming world, several third parties began to show interest in the companies' treasures.
It has to be said that the company we all were referring to as "SNK" up to and until 2001 actually was the core of SNK ASIA LTD, the once proud corporation which also did most of their hardware construction themselves. In 1999, the inner sanctum SNK decidet to close all the Asian branches, including the hardware departement, and to get rid of the Neo Geo World merchandise, a chain of amusement centers with themes and artwork from SNK's universe in Japan. All the financially negative projects had finally taken their toll.
On of these "interested third parties" were Aruze, a Patchinko company, one of Japan's most popular amusement machines. They signalled that they'd support SNK by taking over parts of their debts. It sounded too good to be true, but soon several SNK executives and Aruze managers confered about a possible "friendly take over" of SNK by Aruze. With lots of concern, but without a real chance to escape their kismet, SNK finally nodded, and Aruze jumped aboard.
Dark day in SNK
Aruze had promised to keep away from running projects and the overall SNK philosophy. As we know now, sequels to highly successful series like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsou were planned and partly under developement, but as it were, Aruze appruptly closed all projects and went to make their bucks with SNK's family silver, the intellectual properties of series like The King of Fighters or Samurai Shodown. It seemed that Aruze just wanted to boost their Patchinko biz by liquidating SNK's most valuable licenses. After a while, some SNK executives came to the same conclusion, and finally went into the boardroom, only to witness that the whole board had been fittet with Aruze-friendly staff.
Although it was planned that SNK moved over to Aruze's properties, SNK suddenly stopped the process and returned to Osaka, while trying to regain control over the general direction of the corporation. Meanwhile, Aruze's share holders began to grumble about the way Aruze treated SNK and their funny little video game licenses. They wanted to see profits, but felt that parts of the Aruze board worked against the interest of SNK and thus against the share holders. It has to be noted that not only Aruze executives were suspected to work against the interest of SNK, but also about five SNK managers who rather wanted to sell all the stuff and retire than to fight against bancruptcy.
The whole thing escalated with the filling of suit against Aruze by the share holders, accusing the company of a loss of more than 27.5 billion Yen. But the ship was sinking already. Throughout the whole year 2000 and the first half of 2001, SNK fought for their life, but it was too late; in October 2001, events culminated in the bankruptcy of SNK parent company. Requiescat in pace.
Aruze, unwilling to go to court, tried (and prolly still try) to find a compromise. Yet, all of a sudden, two of the possibly sold SNK IPs of Metal Slug and The King of Fighters licenses showed up - Eolith announced their King of Fighters 2001, while the Korean company MegaKing all of a sudden opened a Metal Slug 4 web site. Looking through the tears of despair about the death of SNK, the Neo fans couldn't believe their eyes. The synergy that resulted from this however lead to a new frontier. BrezzaSoft, about to develop a new ar
First was the 9 month old article on diamonds and now (wow) someone has made something cool with legos!!! C'mon, the whole lego/movie thing hit it's height when those guys did Monty Python's Holy Grail in legos. Heck, they even have lego PORN: Lego Porn
Man what a bunch of whinny bitches we have become. "Three grand" too much for a state of the art desktop replacement? The thing is a friggin' monster! 3.4 ghz and a 9700 card to boot! And it has a greater than HDTV resolution screen! I paid about $2,200 for my then state of the art Sony 1.7 ghz last year, why is paying a grand or so more for a laptop that can do everything! And when is 9 pounds considered to be a "beast?" Yeah, you can get a really good lcd screen/projector and a cube and possibly get better results for cheaper, but then again, that's the poing of laptop: portability....
Now Windows will be 10x more insecure than before! Awesome! As far as something positive coming out of this leak, I doubt it. Sure, the "good guys" will take this opportunity to study what makes windows tick, but others will just try to make windows tock.:(
Well, the basic game has been improved and the weapons seem to basically do the same amount of damage now. The vehicles are horrific though. I was hoping that the vehicles would at least be on par with HALO, but they are far from it. I was wondering why nobody was using the "humvee" aka "warthog," that was until I tried it... It's like the designers said "Hey! lets make a vehicle that nobody can actually drive!" In Halo, the warthog takes a few seconds to get used to, but then it just feels right. I could not get the damn humvee in UT2004 to even turn at all. The flyers in UT2004 are fast, but are generally ineffective. Then there's the tank... Once again the designers seemed like they tried to make the tank as boring as possible. The new maps are pretty well designed and like I said before, the standard (non vehicle) gameplay has been sanitized to the point of being very blaise. Every time I play UT2004 it reminds me of how fantastic just plain old Half-Life's multiplayer weapons were. Ultimately, "Atari," has dropped the ball on this one. It does not hold up against Halo, let alone any of the next-gen titles like HL2.
There is an old adage which goes, "when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one." To try and target EVERY demographic is silly. Pretty much what Hollywood is doing to movies today. Every movie has to be either dumbed down, or edited to be a PG-13 movie to appeal to the masses....
Not to troll, but why was this posted? A simple 2 second search on google pulls up a lot of info on everything one would need to either buy a trackball, or make one. Once again, the slow news week continues (CNN just posted an article on two sea turtles who are joined on the side who are getting separated) yea!!:)
I always wondered why the game manufacturers never tried more VR games, or at least high-end multi-player games, with experiences you simply could not get at home. The arcade manuf. simply gave up when they realized that the public was not buying into yet another Tekken/Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter sequel, which is sad. Arcades should be a place where you go to have fun that you simply cannot have at home. At worst I had hoped that the arcades would have the same situation that movies do now. Essentially movies have become long trailers for the dvd release. I wish someone would realize that the arcade model is very viable, but needs to be "reinvented" per-ce.... sigh...
Well, if you are stupid enough to believe that a PILL can enlarge your penis, your deserve to get ripped off. Otherwise, if you bought a pill to give you an erection and it did not work, then you would have a reason to be pist (figuratively, not literally, I mean.....):)
Halo still is a relatively obscure game in the online world. I can say without a doubt that I have not come across a mac user in my hours put in playing HALO online so far. There are less than 200 servers with only about 1,500 players most of the time. In fact, there are so many T'kers (team killers) now, I doubt anyone will be playing Halo in a few months, especially with no updates planned till JUNE. Like the other MAC users have complained, nobody can play HALO at an acceptable frame rate. Even on high end PC's the damn game can slow to a crawl. Who are we to feel sorry for here? The suckers who paid for HALO, or the suckers who "pirated" HALO?:)
I bought HALO last month for the PC, even though I have owned it for the past two years on my XBox. Why did I buy it? Well, I was dying to play the rediculously large multiplayer maps with more than FOUR people and to be finally able to use my mouse and keyboard. Now, after playing it for a month, I am bored, and apparently so are a lot of other players given the immense amount of T'kers lurking online with Halo. Biggest question: Where are all the f'ing maps? You mean to tell me that after two years, M$ could not come up with any new multiplayer maps for HALO? Now the Halo Editor is coming out in June?!!! By then we will hopefully have moved onto Unreal 2004, HL2, and DOOM3; with Halo becoming a game that could have been much more.
This is why every business should have bouncers, preferably 7 foot tall Black Bouncers. They won't take shit from anyone, and unless that person or persons has a badge (police badge) they ain't gettin' in, period! Or just shoot them for trespassing and then make up some story that you felt your life was being threatened. Just be sure to have a knife to put in their hand and be sure to sure them from the front.:)
I actually bought the "premium" edition of realplayer and the fucking thing has never worked. I have download patches, new versions, to no avail. I thought quicktime pro was a scam, but at least it works (mostly). I hope realmedia goes out of business.
I don't know why M$ is wasting money on advertising and actually trying to sell the system (xbox). If M$ gave the systems away for a cheap price they could easily outspend SONY. Much like they did with IE. But with THREE processors and PS3 having some never before seen CELL processor(s), who the fuck is going to be able to program games for these new systems. Everyone bitched about how hard the ps2 was, and now this. If they don't put a hard drive in, then they are stupid. Can't have online games without the drive. Look what has happened to the online games for the PS2. People are using the gameshark and cheat codes and have ruined the ps2's online game linup. If the ps2 had a built in drive they could easily issue a patch.
Lastly, who cares about backward compatibility anymore?! Is this really an issue? Most people sell their old systems whenever a new one comes out and happily abandon their old system. For the diehards are the new systems really going to have a problem emulating the older systems? Really, if the xbox2 cannot emulate a 800mhz processor and an aging geforce 3 chipset, then it sucks.
I played the original HALO on my 65 inch HDTV set two years ago and was blown away; it was fantastic! Just for shits and giggles I disconnected the "HD" part and played the game in regular res. Boy did it blow. I just wish there was a keyboard/mouse adapter for the Xbox. I hate having to wait two years to play the game the way it really was meant to play (that is until Bungie was bought and what began as a computer game became "optimized" for the xbox.)
Lets see, cheaters ruined the following games for me:
Warcraft II
Starcraft
Diablo
Half Life
CounterStrike
Unreal Tournament (s)
Halo (although it's better now) and countless other online games. I don't care if it's a wall hack, or a "god" code, I hate all cheat codes in online games. Rampant cheating for game consoles has already proven it simply destroys the game. It's unfair to those who spent $50 and simply now cannot play the game due to rampant cheating.
Bill Gates could be named CEO tommorrow and it would not change a thing: The Phantom is nothing more than a Ghost. I see this system being a mere bump in the road for the PS3 and XBox2 to roll over when they come out. O.K. best case scenario:
Phantom comes out and really DOES have just about every game you could play on your COMPUTER. So what? They certainly are not going to have really good "Only on Phantom" custom games, nor be able to play the games from any other current console. The price cannot be below $299 as I am certain that infinium labs cannot lose money on each system, so for the price of roughly both the Xbox and the PS2 and possibly even the Gamecube, one can get a Phantom.
The biggest question everyone should be asking, is WHO is going to buy this system and WHY?
Atari 2600 E.T. and Atari 2600 Pac-Man.
Even as bad as "truckers" is, it can't compare to getting fucking stuck in pit and being unable to get out. The 2600 version of Pac-Man was so rushed, it barely resembled the game it was based on. The worst part about 2600 Pac-Man, was the COLORS; blue became yellow/orange and dots became rectangular wafers. Later on when Atari released Ms.Pac-Man, it proved that they could have done at good job in the first place, given the time.
Mario 64 has to be one of the coolest, innovative, groundbreaking, games of all time. Yeah, I miss 2d games, but before mario 64 I must have played a zillion (including Zillion) 2d scrollers. After mario 64 I cannot bear to play em' anymore. Viewtiful Joe is a great example of how 2d and 3d can work together in a great game!
I got to talk to Don Bluth, the saviour of classical animation, (if it were not for him classical animation would have died a long time ago) at Comic-Con two years ago. He was one of the nicest persons I have ever met. He drew me Dirk the Daring from Dragon's Lair in about 5 seconds, perfect. He told me that Roy Disney came to his studios in Ireland (at the time) and essentially told him "Join us, or Die." So enough of the B.S. that Roy Disney is trying to save classical animation. He is just pist that they forced him to retire. The worst part about the termination of the Florida animation unit, is that they actually churned out two hits in their short lifespan. So it's b.s. that Disney needed to shut em' down to save money. Classical Animation is not dead, it just has had a few set backs in the past few years. It will return. I wish Disney would use Miramax and make an adult animated film.
O.K. there is a B.S. program that will copy any game disc perfectly. Yeah, right. Even with the plethora of of cd/dvd copying software out there it still is not an easy task copying some of today's games. Also, the game industry will always be ahead of these "all in one" copy programs. Irregardless of if you can actually make an "easy" backup of your game, it does not propagate rampant piracy as one would think. Look at Unreal Tournament. Think you are going to give your buddy a copy so you both can play online? Wrong. You have to connect to the internet to play and it checks your serial number. Newer discs have inperfections purposely in them and the program scans for those inpefections and if it does not detect them, the game will not run. Ultimately, the game publishers and movie studios greatest "enemy" is the casual copier, not ripoffs from Hong Kong or counterfeit games/dvds.
I always scratch my cds/dvds, mainly because I am a laxy slobbo that never puts them back in their cases. Do I really deserve the right to backup my games/movies?:)
I don't know if this new "game" system is a good idea, at least not from APEX. Yes, APEX has always been hacker friendly, but APEX has a pretty bad track record in the DVD player market; I had to swap out APEX DVD players four times before I got one that worked. Coupled this with the unreliability of the VIA chipset= "Emachines" 3 years ago, i.e. crap. Ironically, now Emachines has a really good quality and good value, for about the same price as this APEX game system. Even if they bundled this new game machine with a Radeon 9800 chip built in, I would be wary of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I love it when "scientists" proclaim absolute crap like they are going to be no languages in less than 100 years. Try telling that to the Chinese whom have been around longer than anyone else without much change to their language or culture.
Where's the end? I wanted to know what the heck happened to SNK? Did they go out of business? Did they get bought out by someone else? See below for "The End" to this good story:
Finally, not long after its first release, the Neo Geo Pocket was on its way to follow the Hyper 64 into the great void of defunct video game systems and was officially abandoned in late 2000.
All these of SNK's adventures finally lead to a financial desaster. Unable to pay the bills, SNK tried to find an investor. At the same time, when the word of SNK's economical breakdown had spread throughout the gaming world, several third parties began to show interest in the companies' treasures.
It has to be said that the company we all were referring to as "SNK" up to and until 2001 actually was the core of SNK ASIA LTD, the once proud corporation which also did most of their hardware construction themselves. In 1999, the inner sanctum SNK decidet to close all the Asian branches, including the hardware departement, and to get rid of the Neo Geo World merchandise, a chain of amusement centers with themes and artwork from SNK's universe in Japan. All the financially negative projects had finally taken their toll.
On of these "interested third parties" were Aruze, a Patchinko company, one of Japan's most popular amusement machines. They signalled that they'd support SNK by taking over parts of their debts. It sounded too good to be true, but soon several SNK executives and Aruze managers confered about a possible "friendly take over" of SNK by Aruze. With lots of concern, but without a real chance to escape their kismet, SNK finally nodded, and Aruze jumped aboard.
Dark day in SNK
Aruze had promised to keep away from running projects and the overall SNK philosophy. As we know now, sequels to highly successful series like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsou were planned and partly under developement, but as it were, Aruze appruptly closed all projects and went to make their bucks with SNK's family silver, the intellectual properties of series like The King of Fighters or Samurai Shodown. It seemed that Aruze just wanted to boost their Patchinko biz by liquidating SNK's most valuable licenses. After a while, some SNK executives came to the same conclusion, and finally went into the boardroom, only to witness that the whole board had been fittet with Aruze-friendly staff.
Although it was planned that SNK moved over to Aruze's properties, SNK suddenly stopped the process and returned to Osaka, while trying to regain control over the general direction of the corporation. Meanwhile, Aruze's share holders began to grumble about the way Aruze treated SNK and their funny little video game licenses. They wanted to see profits, but felt that parts of the Aruze board worked against the interest of SNK and thus against the share holders. It has to be noted that not only Aruze executives were suspected to work against the interest of SNK, but also about five SNK managers who rather wanted to sell all the stuff and retire than to fight against bancruptcy.
The whole thing escalated with the filling of suit against Aruze by the share holders, accusing the company of a loss of more than 27.5 billion Yen. But the ship was sinking already. Throughout the whole year 2000 and the first half of 2001, SNK fought for their life, but it was too late; in October 2001, events culminated in the bankruptcy of SNK parent company. Requiescat in pace.
Aruze, unwilling to go to court, tried (and prolly still try) to find a compromise. Yet, all of a sudden, two of the possibly sold SNK IPs of Metal Slug and The King of Fighters licenses showed up - Eolith announced their King of Fighters 2001, while the Korean company MegaKing all of a sudden opened a Metal Slug 4 web site. Looking through the tears of despair about the death of SNK, the Neo fans couldn't believe their eyes. The synergy that resulted from this however lead to a new frontier. BrezzaSoft, about to develop a new ar
First was the 9 month old article on diamonds and now (wow) someone has made something cool with legos!!! C'mon, the whole lego/movie thing hit it's height when those guys did Monty Python's Holy Grail in legos. Heck, they even have lego PORN: Lego Porn
Man what a bunch of whinny bitches we have become. "Three grand" too much for a state of the art desktop replacement? The thing is a friggin' monster! 3.4 ghz and a 9700 card to boot! And it has a greater than HDTV resolution screen! I paid about $2,200 for my then state of the art Sony 1.7 ghz last year, why is paying a grand or so more for a laptop that can do everything! And when is 9 pounds considered to be a "beast?" Yeah, you can get a really good lcd screen/projector and a cube and possibly get better results for cheaper, but then again, that's the poing of laptop: portability....
Now Windows will be 10x more insecure than before! Awesome! As far as something positive coming out of this leak, I doubt it. Sure, the "good guys" will take this opportunity to study what makes windows tick, but others will just try to make windows tock. :(
Well, the basic game has been improved and the weapons seem to basically do the same amount of damage now. The vehicles are horrific though. I was hoping that the vehicles would at least be on par with HALO, but they are far from it. I was wondering why nobody was using the "humvee" aka "warthog," that was until I tried it... It's like the designers said "Hey! lets make a vehicle that nobody can actually drive!" In Halo, the warthog takes a few seconds to get used to, but then it just feels right. I could not get the damn humvee in UT2004 to even turn at all. The flyers in UT2004 are fast, but are generally ineffective. Then there's the tank... Once again the designers seemed like they tried to make the tank as boring as possible. The new maps are pretty well designed and like I said before, the standard (non vehicle) gameplay has been sanitized to the point of being very blaise. Every time I play UT2004 it reminds me of how fantastic just plain old Half-Life's multiplayer weapons were. Ultimately, "Atari," has dropped the ball on this one. It does not hold up against Halo, let alone any of the next-gen titles like HL2.
There is an old adage which goes, "when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one." To try and target EVERY demographic is silly. Pretty much what Hollywood is doing to movies today. Every movie has to be either dumbed down, or edited to be a PG-13 movie to appeal to the masses....
Not to troll, but why was this posted? A simple 2 second search on google pulls up a lot of info on everything one would need to either buy a trackball, or make one. Once again, the slow news week continues (CNN just posted an article on two sea turtles who are joined on the side who are getting separated) yea!! :)
I always wondered why the game manufacturers never tried more VR games, or at least high-end multi-player games, with experiences you simply could not get at home. The arcade manuf. simply gave up when they realized that the public was not buying into yet another Tekken/Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter sequel, which is sad. Arcades should be a place where you go to have fun that you simply cannot have at home. At worst I had hoped that the arcades would have the same situation that movies do now. Essentially movies have become long trailers for the dvd release. I wish someone would realize that the arcade model is very viable, but needs to be "reinvented" per-ce.... sigh...
Well, if you are stupid enough to believe that a PILL can enlarge your penis, your deserve to get ripped off. Otherwise, if you bought a pill to give you an erection and it did not work, then you would have a reason to be pist (figuratively, not literally, I mean.....) :)
Halo still is a relatively obscure game in the online world. I can say without a doubt that I have not come across a mac user in my hours put in playing HALO online so far. There are less than 200 servers with only about 1,500 players most of the time. In fact, there are so many T'kers (team killers) now, I doubt anyone will be playing Halo in a few months, especially with no updates planned till JUNE. Like the other MAC users have complained, nobody can play HALO at an acceptable frame rate. Even on high end PC's the damn game can slow to a crawl. Who are we to feel sorry for here? The suckers who paid for HALO, or the suckers who "pirated" HALO? :)
I bought HALO last month for the PC, even though I have owned it for the past two years on my XBox. Why did I buy it? Well, I was dying to play the rediculously large multiplayer maps with more than FOUR people and to be finally able to use my mouse and keyboard. Now, after playing it for a month, I am bored, and apparently so are a lot of other players given the immense amount of T'kers lurking online with Halo. Biggest question: Where are all the f'ing maps? You mean to tell me that after two years, M$ could not come up with any new multiplayer maps for HALO? Now the Halo Editor is coming out in June?!!! By then we will hopefully have moved onto Unreal 2004, HL2, and DOOM3; with Halo becoming a game that could have been much more.
This is why every business should have bouncers, preferably 7 foot tall Black Bouncers. They won't take shit from anyone, and unless that person or persons has a badge (police badge) they ain't gettin' in, period! Or just shoot them for trespassing and then make up some story that you felt your life was being threatened. Just be sure to have a knife to put in their hand and be sure to sure them from the front. :)
I actually bought the "premium" edition of realplayer and the fucking thing has never worked. I have download patches, new versions, to no avail. I thought quicktime pro was a scam, but at least it works (mostly). I hope realmedia goes out of business.
I don't know why M$ is wasting money on advertising and actually trying to sell the system (xbox). If M$ gave the systems away for a cheap price they could easily outspend SONY. Much like they did with IE. But with THREE processors and PS3 having some never before seen CELL processor(s), who the fuck is going to be able to program games for these new systems. Everyone bitched about how hard the ps2 was, and now this. If they don't put a hard drive in, then they are stupid. Can't have online games without the drive. Look what has happened to the online games for the PS2. People are using the gameshark and cheat codes and have ruined the ps2's online game linup. If the ps2 had a built in drive they could easily issue a patch. Lastly, who cares about backward compatibility anymore?! Is this really an issue? Most people sell their old systems whenever a new one comes out and happily abandon their old system. For the diehards are the new systems really going to have a problem emulating the older systems? Really, if the xbox2 cannot emulate a 800mhz processor and an aging geforce 3 chipset, then it sucks.
I played the original HALO on my 65 inch HDTV set two years ago and was blown away; it was fantastic! Just for shits and giggles I disconnected the "HD" part and played the game in regular res. Boy did it blow. I just wish there was a keyboard/mouse adapter for the Xbox. I hate having to wait two years to play the game the way it really was meant to play (that is until Bungie was bought and what began as a computer game became "optimized" for the xbox.)
Lets see, cheaters ruined the following games for me:
Warcraft II
Starcraft
Diablo
Half Life
CounterStrike
Unreal Tournament (s)
Halo (although it's better now)
and countless other online games. I don't care if it's a wall hack, or a "god" code, I hate all cheat codes in online games. Rampant cheating for game consoles has already proven it simply destroys the game. It's unfair to those who spent $50 and simply now cannot play the game due to rampant cheating.
How in the hell is my comment "off topic"?! The article is REALLY only like 20 words! stupid mods.
What is it, like 20 words? :)
Bill Gates could be named CEO tommorrow and it would not change a thing: The Phantom is nothing more than a Ghost. I see this system being a mere bump in the road for the PS3 and XBox2 to roll over when they come out. O.K. best case scenario:
Phantom comes out and really DOES have just about every game you could play on your COMPUTER. So what? They certainly are not going to have really good "Only on Phantom" custom games, nor be able to play the games from any other current console. The price cannot be below $299 as I am certain that infinium labs cannot lose money on each system, so for the price of roughly both the Xbox and the PS2 and possibly even the Gamecube, one can get a Phantom.
The biggest question everyone should be asking, is WHO is going to buy this system and WHY?
Atari 2600 E.T. and Atari 2600 Pac-Man. Even as bad as "truckers" is, it can't compare to getting fucking stuck in pit and being unable to get out. The 2600 version of Pac-Man was so rushed, it barely resembled the game it was based on. The worst part about 2600 Pac-Man, was the COLORS; blue became yellow/orange and dots became rectangular wafers. Later on when Atari released Ms.Pac-Man, it proved that they could have done at good job in the first place, given the time.
Mario 64 has to be one of the coolest, innovative, groundbreaking, games of all time. Yeah, I miss 2d games, but before mario 64 I must have played a zillion (including Zillion) 2d scrollers. After mario 64 I cannot bear to play em' anymore. Viewtiful Joe is a great example of how 2d and 3d can work together in a great game!
I got to talk to Don Bluth, the saviour of classical animation, (if it were not for him classical animation would have died a long time ago) at Comic-Con two years ago. He was one of the nicest persons I have ever met. He drew me Dirk the Daring from Dragon's Lair in about 5 seconds, perfect. He told me that Roy Disney came to his studios in Ireland (at the time) and essentially told him "Join us, or Die." So enough of the B.S. that Roy Disney is trying to save classical animation. He is just pist that they forced him to retire. The worst part about the termination of the Florida animation unit, is that they actually churned out two hits in their short lifespan. So it's b.s. that Disney needed to shut em' down to save money. Classical Animation is not dead, it just has had a few set backs in the past few years. It will return. I wish Disney would use Miramax and make an adult animated film.
O.K. there is a B.S. program that will copy any game disc perfectly. Yeah, right. Even with the plethora of of cd/dvd copying software out there it still is not an easy task copying some of today's games. Also, the game industry will always be ahead of these "all in one" copy programs. Irregardless of if you can actually make an "easy" backup of your game, it does not propagate rampant piracy as one would think. Look at Unreal Tournament. Think you are going to give your buddy a copy so you both can play online? Wrong. You have to connect to the internet to play and it checks your serial number. Newer discs have inperfections purposely in them and the program scans for those inpefections and if it does not detect them, the game will not run. Ultimately, the game publishers and movie studios greatest "enemy" is the casual copier, not ripoffs from Hong Kong or counterfeit games/dvds. I always scratch my cds/dvds, mainly because I am a laxy slobbo that never puts them back in their cases. Do I really deserve the right to backup my games/movies? :)
I don't know if this new "game" system is a good idea, at least not from APEX. Yes, APEX has always been hacker friendly, but APEX has a pretty bad track record in the DVD player market; I had to swap out APEX DVD players four times before I got one that worked. Coupled this with the unreliability of the VIA chipset= "Emachines" 3 years ago, i.e. crap. Ironically, now Emachines has a really good quality and good value, for about the same price as this APEX game system. Even if they bundled this new game machine with a Radeon 9800 chip built in, I would be wary of it.