While inflation has gone up, the cost of manufacturing electronics has gone down.
Following that logic, why can't I buy a 50" plasma HDTV for $400? Or a brand new car for $3,000?
Manufacturing costs have gone down, but the costs for the latest parts has gone up, and the costs for R&D have gone way up. That's one reason why inflation exists in the first place. Electronics are no more immune to it than anything else. The same product using the same parts may get cheaper over time (to a point), but new products using new parts only ever get more expensive. Doesn't matter what industry you're talking about.
However, every single Final Fantasy since then has been good, but *not* the awe-inspiring series we remember. Even the Final Fantasy movies were more about being pretty than about the actual story. The last Final Fantasy I played through was Final Fantasy X, and I always had a feeling that Square was more focused on kick ass cutscenes than having a kick ass story. ='(
Honestly, part of this is probably just that you have grown older and more jaded. Another is probably that you may no longer be as open-minded as you think you are. You are obviously looking for the same experience FF7 gave you, rather than opening yourself to a *new* experience that may be different, but just as satisfying. If it's not like FF7, it's nothing to you. (Your comments about remaking FF7 and FF3 reinforce that.)
FFVII is my favorite game of all time, and to me it was a truly religious experience as well. And I also admit to being totally unimpressed with FFVIII and I couldn't even make it through FFIX. But FFX... FFX deeply affected me in a way no game had since FFVII. It was not the same experience - it was sort of quieter, and more subtle - but it was just as deep. FFVII threw everything but the kitchen sink at you whereas FFX I remember as being almost serene. It was exactly what I wanted to play at that somewhat older stage of life (vs. FFVII), and I felt truly sad when I got to the end.
I also think it had the tightest gameplay of any FF since VII - not just the best story. There were a half-dozen boss battles right at the end and all of them were amazing. And I grew to love the sphere grid system (though it did take a while).
My point being, I don't think it's necessarily that the series has peaked than it is just that you're looking for something other than what Square is producing these days. FFVIII was the only time I sort of felt like Square was trying to recreate something from FFVII, and it fell flat. FFIX and FFX were both somewhat different styles, one a lot more successful (IMO) than the other. But you can't always look for the second coming of FFVII, because you just can't recreate the same magic. But you can make new magic, and I think Square has done that. You just have to be open to it.
I did think FFX-2 was a big disappointment after X, though even it had its moments. But it's yet another example of how lightning never strikes in the same place twice.
But I think Sony really screwed up here and forgot that the hardcore gamer market is a minuscule fraction of the people out there buying console titles.
And I think you and others like you forgot that there are almost always huge shortages at console launches, and that prices are not set in stone for the life of a console.
I was one of the guys that waited in line for a PS2 on launch day. I didn't get one. You just saw recently what happened with the Xbox 360 launch and that was at $399. You don't think the PS3 will have at least that much demand attached to it? Of course it will - the PS2 sold four times more systems than the original Xbox, and the PS3 already has more exclusives attached to it than the Xbox 360.
Sony's saying they will have 4 million systems ready in the "launch window", and that's worldwide. So that's less than 2 million per territory in November and December. You will not be able to get one of these at any price.
Once demand slackens, the price will drop. As always happens.
I can do a LOT more with my PC, like development, graphics, and audio.
You cannot play Final Fantasy XIII, Gran Turismo HD or Metal Gear Solid 4.
This is why people buy game consoles - to play the games that they can play nowhere else. All you're saying is that you're not interested in video games. Nobody buys game consoles to do development, graphics and audio.
Judging by the xbox360, the only real thing we can expect is more detailed graphics,
And Final Fantasy XIII, and Gran Turismo HD, and probably the next Grand Theft Auto, etc...
The PS2 didn't sell 103 million units based on the power of its graphics. It sold all those systems based on the games available for the system, and specifically the games that were available on no other system.
MS is still the odd man out here because they're going to get crushed by both Sony and Nintendo on exclusive titles. Sony's still got Japan behind them and they've got the power of numbers everywhere else (103 million PS2's vs. 25 million Xboxes). Nintendo's got their own first-party games plus with the Wii, almost every third-party game on the system will by definition be a unique experience.
The PS2 had both massive exclusives like the FF and Dragon Quest series, as well as the sheer power of quantity that saw literally thousands of niche titles released for the system. No matter what kind of gamer you are, you could find something to like on the PS2. The PS3 will probably be no different - it's certainly going to have the lion's share of Japanese development devoted to it at the very least. That gives Sony a huge built-in advantage worldwide.
Just remember, man - it's all about the games. People focus way too much on the power of these systems - historically speaking, it's actually been the *least* powerful system that has won out more often than not. (This gen is probably going to be an exception to that, but the point is you should look at the games, not the specs.)
I beg to differ. Death and Rebirth was basically the creator going "What, you didn't like my ending? FINE. HERE. Everyone dies and is miserable, you happy now?"
Er, you guys have both got it backwards, and you specifically have got it backwards in two different ways.
"Death & Rebirth" was a recap of the series; not much more. It had a few minutes of extra footage but it was basically intended as the equivalent of a clip show.
"The End of Evangelion" is the real ending of the series. Hideaki Anno has said himself repeatedly that for a variety of reasons, he wasn't able to do what he wanted for the TV ending. I'm sure there were some nods to what the fans wanted in EoE that weren't Anno's original ideas, but it is closer to what he had originally intended than the TV ending was. Anno has said he ran out of both time and money and was also just plain burnt out by the end of the TV run. So EoE was a revisit of the material.
It's also probably worth pointing out that there is no real difference between the substance of EoE and the TV ending. A lot of people take both endings much too literally - but underneath, they both tell the same story. The TV ending just tells it completely through symbolism and exposition; EoE shows a whole lot more of what was actually going on, and does a lot more visually (while still keeping a whole lot of the symbolism intact, and adding more). But there is no actual difference between what both endings are saying; all of what happened in EoE presumably happened in the TV ending too, you just didn't see it.
So really, you can look at both endings as complementary... but EoE is the only one you actually need, since it shows events from both the inside and the outside. The TV ending shows only the inside.
I predict that we are heading for a crash like the one that occurred in the 1983, and killed off most games publishers.
Yeah, you and every other naysayer since 1985.
Back then, games had got too staid and predictable, being nothing but cash-ins on existing IP (E.T. is the prime example). Competition within the business was fierce, with home computers such as the C64 slashing their prices and console prices being slashed to compete.
We are now seeing a similar situation.
Huh? So Dell is is slashing their prices and MS and Sony are slashing their console prices to compete?
There is very little going on now that is similar to what was happening in 1983. Back then, there was a mass migration away from game consoles to cheap computer systems to play games. The exact opposite is occurring now.
Interestingly, it was Nintendo who saved the industry last time, by coming up with a product that was different, and by conceiving a revolutionary (but controversial) business model.
What "revolutionary" business model was this? Selling video games and systems?
Nintendo came in and did exactly what Atari, Coleco and Mattel had been doing just 2 years before. They just did it with a new product that hadn't yet become stale, and that had new games on it - including the ace up their sleeve, Super Mario Bros. But there was nothing at all revolutionary about the Famicom or NES. The only innovation Nintendo put into the NES was in realizing that there was still a video game market in the US at all.
Let's not forget that Atari survived the crash of 1983-84 and in fact continued selling the Atari 2600 until 1991, alongside the 7800. It's kind of disengenuous to say the crash "killed off" most game publishers, because there were really only about six or seven at the time. Atari, Coleco, Mattel, Activision, Imagic, Sega, and some other, smaller publishers. Of those, Atari, Activision and Imagic survived, and Activision came out of the crash stronger than it had ever been. They gobbled up Imagic and a few smaller companies, released a little PC game called Mechwarrior and the rest is history.
Which is not to belittle the crash. But there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding it and one of those is that it completely destroyed the game industry. It didn't. Japanese publishers like Sega came out of it basically unscathed, and both the largest first-party and third-party publishers also survived.
These days, the companies involved in the game industry are so large that a downturn like that of 1983-1984 would basically be a blip on the radar. MS has already absorbed losses with their Xbox division that are far larger than anything Atari ever went through during the crash. Atari lost $500 million in 1983 - Microsoft has lost $4 billion so far on Xbox (including $388 million in the last quarter alone - 75% of what Atari lost in the entire first year of the great video game crash). We are dealing now with corporations that are both willing and able to weather these sorts of storms, whereas the industry in the early days was not nearly as hardy.
That's not to say things won't ever be difficult for certain developers or manufacturers. But that's true of any industry. The strong survive; the weak die or get absorbed by larger competitors. This is just the way business works; it is not unique to the game industry.
It's an unelected international body. Therefore not binding law. Right?
Right, and after that last sentence I'm not quite sure that the article submitter really understands how treaties work.
Every country handles treaties a little bit differently, but to my knowledge no country allows an international treaty to trump national sovereignty. In the US, for example, treaties must be ratified by both houses of congress and signed by the President to take effect. Thus, there is no danger of an "unelected international body" dictating anything. The supreme court can also overturn any ratified treaty, if it's challenged and is determined to be unconstitutional.
Most other countries that I know of deal with treaties similarly, in that they're basically handled like any other law. A treaty is sort of a master document that guides policy at the legislative level within each individual country. It is not a binding law unto itself, even if it is signed by the ambassadors or even leaders of any country. It still must be ratified by the signatory countries to be binding.
The Xbox lost $4 billion over its lifespan (and counting - some of those new losses are still attributable to the original).
What MS seems to have forgotten is their original predictions (and you can still do a Google search and find these quotes) were for an "investment" of around $2 billion, followed by sustained profitability by the 3rd year of the Xbox's life.
They also were aiming for Xbox 360 profitability from day one (again, Google "xbox 360 profit"). So for them to now say "oh, we expected this, and it's all for the good of the future" is at best revisionist on their part, and at worst outright denial.
The fact of the matter is they are billions of dollars behind where they initially predicted they'd be. They're more than $2 billion further in the hole than they ever wanted to be and they're three years behind on their profit forecasts, with no guarantee that it will ever turn around. Assuming a relatively modest prediction of a $500 million profit per year, they're now close to $4 billion (and counting) behind their initial predictions, and really $5 billion in the hole all told. That's assuming they would have been close to $1 billion up at this point, rather than $4 billion in the red.
$4-$5 billion isn't chump change even for MS.
All MS has done is a major land grab. They've proven that you can grab market share provided you just pump a huge wad of cash into the industry. I don't think that's news to anyone. But that's only the first step in building a business and I'm sure that, whatever their public statements, internally they realize that this is not all going according to plan at this point. They may have bitten off more than they can chew - if they *never* turn a profit (and remember, they need to turn $4 billion worth of profits from now on to have even broken even overall), then what exactly was the point?
(You can say they denied Sony market dominance, or whatever, but to what end? Should MS be sticking its nose into every single random and unrelated market just to keep another player from being dominant? Are they going to get into cleaning products next and go head to head with Proctor & Gamble? Are they going to take on Wal-Mart with a bunch of MS-branded superstores? I mean, there does come a point at which it just gets stupid.)
MS has the cash to keep up this charade as long as they want. I don't think anybody expects a quick exit. But at some point, there will come a day of reckoning, when MS finally has to look at what's working and what's not company-wide, and if the entertainment division is still losing money hand over fist on that day, then heads will roll and shops will be closed up.
I would've liked to see some commentary in the article about the gaming markets in Europe and Asia, which are much more developed. These things always lag behind in North America, and the article was very US-centric in that regards. Culturally, it may well be that mobile games will never be as big in NA as they are in Europe and Asia.
They may be bigger in certain specific markets than they are in the US, but I think you're probably overestimating their popularity in Europe and Asia as a whole. I would like to see some real stats on this myself, but I know just from my own experiences in Japan, gaming there is probably about as big as it is here. Cell phones there are used for more tasks than they are here, yes, but gaming is just one of those tasks and it is secondary to web browsing, messaging, and yes, actually talking on the phone. Most people there have handheld gaming systems if they want to play portable games, just like here.
I couldn't find any real hardcore info on the net about the Japanese market but I did find this article from last year that talks about Square Enix's position that there is '"more potential" in the US mobile games market than Japan' and that 'the percentage of game content is already much larger on mobile in the US than the percentage in Japan'. So clearly at least one major game developer saw the US as a better opportunity for mobile gaming than Japan, which supports my comments above.
I just don't think people in general want to play most games on their mobile phones, any more than I think they want to play mp3's or browse the web. The success that NTT DoCoMo has had with iMode and the successful games that there are in Asia all happened because developers considered the mobile phone as a separate category of device and created new categories of content for it. You're not browsing the regular web when you visit an iMode site - you're browsing specially-formatted pages. Same with games, which are created from scratch specifically for phones - they are not generally adapted from games on other portables.
Even so, the success of these games overseas has been pretty limited. There hasn't really been a Dragon Quest style phenomenon that's originated on a cell phone and there probably never will be. Cell phones are best suited to time-killer type games, but those aren't the kinds of games people will pay a premium for.
If ever a cell phone game really does break out on its own, it will have to be a unique experience - probably something community-based that uses the phone's communication ability. It will have to be viral. But I don't see anyone trying to shake things up like that; every cell phone game I see is some variation on something we already know and can play better on a different platform.
Given the current situation, and even what we can know of the forseeable future, I agree that 3% market share is probably pretty much the saturation point for cell phone games. Like a lot of the dot-com era bubble ideas, this is another industry with expectations that were always way out of whack with reality. The cell phone music industry will be next to figure this out...
Is anyone else surprised at how Flash has become the new standard for video distribution?
No, because it does everything the content providers want and it is as cross-platform as it currently gets. It is not perfect (nothing is) but it is as close to it as it gets right now for both providers and viewers.
I wonder if Macromedia itself ever predicted that Flash's wide availability would become its selling point for streaming video.
Well, why the heck do you think Flash video even exists? Flash video wasn't created until I think Flash 6. By then Flash already had around a 90% penetration, lots of people were trying to do video over the interweb without much success, and Macromedia had the bright idea that their platform was a better solution.
I think this is a bad trend because it is hiding more and more of the content from the browser. I would have liked to see W3C specify some formats and controls for video that browsers should support.
And the content providers would have ignored these formats.
I mean the bottom line is like it or not, ABC owns Lost. They're not obligated to put it out on formats that they don't want to. Oh, I agree completely that *you* should be able to put it on whatever format you want for *your* own consumption, but *they* don't have to make it available in any format they don't want to and they're perfectly within their rights to sue anybody who is actually distributing it without their permission.
So if you want an official, legally sanctioned web "broadcast" of Lost on the net, you're going to have to make some compromises with the owner of the show. And honestly, the way they're doing it on the net is not really much different - and is in some ways better - than the way they're doing it over the air.
So now you have three choices. You can watch (or record) these shows when they're broadcast on cable or OTA, you can download them from iTunes commercial-free for $1.99 and keep them for as long as you want, or you can stream them for free on ABC's web site but with commercials.
It seems to me that there is very little to complain about here. If you ask me, this is good behavior on the part of the content industry. And I am not one to compliment the content industry very often.
The summary could have at least mentioned the codec used or the bit rate.
The codec is Flash video. It's Macromedia's/Adobe's own codec.
The bit rate is unknowable unless ABC says what it is in a press release or elsewhere on the site. Maybe you could figure out a way to save one of these flv files and open it in a standalone player that'd tell you the bit rate. My guess is ABC is smart enough to have locked out that ability, though.
"Flash Video Quality" is still basically meaningless, because Flash video can have whatever quality you give it. You can encode Flash video in HD if you want to; it'd be pretty pointless to do so because the whole point of Flash video is to stream, but you could do it if you wanted to.
But omitting the codec or bit rate from the summary aren't really oversights - the codec is a given, the bit rate is just unknown.
Sony is claiming it's supposed to last double the time of the PS2 (5 years) so this console is meant to last 10 years.
The PS2 has already been on the market for six years and will likely remain on the market for some time after the PS3 is released (just as the PS1 was on the market for some time after the PS2 was released). The PS1 also lasted almost exactly ten years from its original launch date to the date production stopped.
I think that this whole "five year cycle" thing is a little confused to begin with. Most successful consoles last well beyond that artificial limit. The NES/Famicom was on the market from 1983-2003 - 20 years. The Intellivision was on the market for 11 years. The Atari 2600 was on the market for around 15 years. The PS1 lasted ten. I could go on and on.
In addition, it's very rare that all console manufacturers launch systems in the same year. For example, the Sega Genesis was released in 1989, with the SNES launching in 1991. The Atari 2600 launched in 1977, the Intellivision in 1980, the Coleco Vision in 1982 and the NES in 1985. Some of these systems then went on to stay on the market for years afterwards. Where are the "generational" lines there? Even nowadays, the Dreamcast launched in 1999, the PS2 launched in 2000 and the Xbox in 2001 - even as the PS1 stuck around. The Xbox 360 launched in 2005 and the PS3 and Wii will launch in 2006. So it's really hard to divide the timeline up into these five-year chunks. It's a much more organic industry than a lot of people seem to realize - consoles stay on the market for as long as they're profitable, whether that's two years or 20.
Where I think the five year cycle came from is hardcore gamers who may themselves only consider a system relevant as long as it's the latest and greatest thing. (It's also an unfortunate fact that a lot of systems popular with the hardcore crowd - like the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast - die early deaths.) But that's not the way the market or industry works as a whole. Hardcore gamers wouldn't have considered buying an Atari 2600 in 1990, but it was out there. Same with the PS1 in 2004.
And same, probably, with the PS2 in 2007 and the PS3 in 2015. I don't think Sony's out of bounds in making that sort of prediction. If Atari can take a console that was underpowered to begin with and sell it from 1977-1991 - through the crash of 1983-1984, no less - why can't Sony do something similar with the PS3?
Wii Nintendo, Wii? Gotta say that's a very bad name. It doesn't make me think of video games at all
And "Revolution" does why?
"Revolution" makes me think of guillotines and blood running down rain-soaked streets to chants of "Vive la France!"
Not video games.
Anyway, "Revolution" is a name that makes promises that it can't necessarily keep. It's a good code name, because it's hinting at what Nintendo *wants* to happen. But it's not a good product name because once it's on the market for a while, people are going to judge it by whether it's lived up to that name.
Names like PlayStation, GameCube, Xbox, etc. are better names because they don't make any promises beyond basically describing what their core function is. (The "Xbox" is so named because it ran on DirectX.) Same with names like "Nintendo Entertainment System" or "Atari Video Computer System". The best names just say what the system does and nothing more - it's the system itself that does the talking. And the names become iconic because of that - not because there was anything special about the name itself. Form follows function - that's as true with iconic names as anything else.
I'm definitely not sold on "Wii", just because it smacks of one of those outsource naming firms that companies hire to come up with "hip" and "cool" names with wacky spellings for common words. The problem with "wii" is that it leaves themselves open to derision - it's got a sound that we all know but a spelling that doesn't belong to any real word, so we're left to interpret it how we want. And part of that interpretation, for me, anyway, is that they're trying way too hard. That's even beyond the fact that all I can hear is Homer Simpson saying "wheeeeeeeeee!" whenever I see the logo. (I was going to suggest that it might have been fine if they'd just called it "We", but then I realized they'd get a whole bunch of "Entertainment for women" jokes.)
But they were right to give it a proper name other than the Revolution code-name. I just don't think they really picked the right one.
The "pro" prefix in the term "pro-gamers" means profesional. That means those tournaments are their job
No, it means that's how they make money. There's a difference.
If they can no longer make money doing it, then there is nothing "pro" about what they do. They are simply gamers, like everybody else.
You can't just take any leisure activity and call it a professional activity and have it be sustainable. Hey, look at me, I'm a professional lemonade drinker! Just because someone gave me a dollar once to watch me drink a glass of lemonade doesn't mean I can actually sustain myself doing it for the long term. Same applies here. There needs to be an actual market for it, along with a level of skill that can both be easily appreciated and incredibly difficult to match. Otherwise nobody's going to be interested, even if the activity itself is interesting. And honestly, watching other people play video or computer games has never even been interesting to begin with.
(Now, you could argue that the same is true for a lot of major sports, but the market has proven you wrong.)
In closing, let me agree with the "get a job" sentiment, etc. etc.
I think one of the reasons why publishers see ebooks as more threatening to their industry than the paper books is because ebooks will always be in "Like New" condition, thus it can be traded in the 2nd hand market at very close to the retail price.
Someone has apparently never been to college! (At least not in the United States...)
Most college students purposely buy used books not just because they're cheaper (though that is a reason) but also because all of the important passages have already been highlighted and in many cases, answers to common questions or other notes written in the margins. They're like cheat sheets. If you're lucky, you get a book from a student that had the same professor as you, and then it's practically like getting the answers to every test.
This is a huge disadvantage to ebooks or other digital media in a specific situation like this. Students don't buy books for that "new book smell". They buy them a) to learn, and b) to get better grades. A new book or ebook does not help anyone get better grades. Used books can and usually do.
X-play is only good as a comedy show. They know very little about good games IMO.
They know very little about comedy, if you ask me. Their inane little high school skits grate on me like fingernails on a blackboard - they think they're being ironically low-budget funny, but then so does every other teenager with a camcorder. The truth is being an intern on a cable TV show doesn't automatically qualify you as undiscovered talent.
Morgan and Adam are still good hosts, although they've both become a bit too jaded at this point - Morgan especially. I actually look forward to those little moments that happen every couple shows where Morgan gets off-script - when she genuinely laughs at something she wasn't expecting (usually something Adam says or does) or improvs a line that she obviously hadn't practiced beforehand. That's the "old" Morgan Webb that we all knew and loved from the TechTV days. But generally, she just sticks to her all-too-cynical script.
The rest of the "cast" of this show, though, are all just a bunch of wanna-be fratboy rejects, and it hurts my eyes to watch them. Unfortunately, about 20 of the 22 minutes of each new episode these days seems to be taken up by these lame skits, with games almost an afterthought. Which kind of fits in with what's going on at the rest of the channel, making me wonder if this is not a conscious (and possibly forced) change.
Most people run virus software all the time. They also have a few other programs running all the time. Touting your machines ability to run these programs while playing games is an obvious fit.
Unless you're a gamer. You know, the kind of people Dell is hoping will buy an XPS system.
It's all fine and dandy if "most people" want to have all these programs running all the time. Hardcore gamers, though, know to turn everything off if they want the best performance. Dell apparently still doesn't understand this - they first of all load all the same junk onto their XPS machines as they do on their mainstream machines, then rather than tout the raw gaming performance of the XPS line, they tout the fact that you can multitask. Gamers don't care about multitasking. They care about one task and one task only: playing games.
Again, if Dell wants to market the XPS line as sort of a high-end everyman computer, that's fine. But that's never been their stated goal. This was the line intended to garner them street cred, the "top-down" approach where the real hardcore users will spend that extra money and then tell all their friends how great Dell is.
This strategy is ass-backwards if that is their goal. They should be touting how lean their systems are, not how many things you can do at once. They should be touting how many frames per second you can get running the latest games, not how you can encode music while you're playing. These are things that appeal to mainstream users, not the high-end, hardcore users Dell is trying to attract.
nstead, the gaming industry seems to still be focusing on teenage gamers. There are some valid reasons for this, and I'm not arguing those. However, as years go by and more and more people over 30 have grown up with video games, the industry really can't afford to continue to ignore this demographic.
I wouldn't say the industry is ignoring this demographic, but it probably is underserved. Still, games like The Sims appeal to the 30-and-up crowd, IMO, as do titles like Star Wars: Empire at War, and of course there's all those classic compilations and remakes, not to mention new stuff like Katamari Damacy that's in that classic gaming vein. (And hopefully will introduce a new generation to what real video gaming is like...)
But the main reason I think this demographic is maybe disproportionately represented on store shelves compared to the slew of ultra-violent, ultra-sexed up games for the barely legal crowd, is probably a simple one: while most game buyers are in their late 20's and early 30's, most game developers are at least half a decade younger. You can blame it at least in part on the notorious working conditions that the industry still suffers, where 12 hour days are considered a vacation. That's fine when you're just out of college, but get yourself married and settled down and very few people are going to continue living that life.
And it's true that games for the barely legal set do sell. But as titles like The Sims show, games for "the rest of us" can sell even better. But developers can only develop what they know, and given a choice between developing "Game A" for the college-age crowd or "Game B" for the gaming geezers, they'll choose "Game A" every time. Management will go along, because they know games like that have been profitable in the past, whereas games for the older demographic don't have as long of a track record.
The solution is really to try to keep us old guys making games in the industry (I used to be part of it too), and that means changing a lot of bad corporate habits; really a whole corporate culture. It's probably not going to happen. But unless it does, the industry is leaving a whole lot of money on the table, if you ask me.
btw, guys like Peter Molyneux, who have been around for decades, are the exception rather than the rule.
I imagine old Grampa Ugg the caveman turned his nose up at little Grogg and his young pals' hunting with sharpened stones rather than blunt clubs.
And we will be doing the same when we're old and grey and these damn kids keep running their mouths off about holographic gaming.
We're also the first generation to grow up with the internet, hybrid vehicles, Islamic (and Christian) fundamentalism, and a lot of other things. We take all of these things for granted while our grandparents just give us the "in my day, we didn't need the 'internets'" speech.
But we will be saying the same about whatever newfangled inventions confound us as we age, including inventions related to gaming. Already there's a large number of people (myself included) that argues that the best, most creative days of video gaming are behind us, and we're now stuck in a small set of specific genres with prettier graphics. That's just the start. Once (and/or "if") this whole online-centric "marketplace" for video games really takes off, where everything is just connected all the time and there is no way to even get away from it, you're going to have a whole new round of disenchanted old fuddy-duddies for whom video gaming is no longer what it used to be.
I guess what I'm saying is that things change and they never stop changing, and there will always be a generation gap. We're not so much the pioneers from the early days of video gaming as much as we're our grandkids' future dimentia-suffering grandparents who are just as out of touch with their world as our own grandparents were with ours.
Dell = No Bluetooth, No DVD Burner, No Gigabit Ethernet, 20GB less HD space, No built in webcam & much worse graphics.
While I still think that Apples are priced highly, you do get alot of features built into the system.
A lot of which are useless for most people. Are laptop webcams in any danger of becoming standard-issue items? Are most people's homes wired for gigabit ethernet (heck, are most businesses)?
I think a big part of Apple's perception problem is that they focus so highly on the high end where you get diminishing returns for extra features and specs. A PC with exactly the same specs as the $2,000 MacBook Pro probably would cost close to $2,000, but a PC with 90% of the features specs of the MacBook Pro might only cost $1,000. In fact, I just went to HP's site right now and built a PC with everything the MacBook Pro has except the webcam and the gigabit ethernet, and with a 64 bit AMD CPU and a 1280x800 screen, and the total was $1,033.99. That's still with a DL DVD burner, ATI graphics card w/ 128MB dedicated, 1GB of system RAM, same hard drive, etc.
I mean the question is what are you paying literally 100% more for? Most people just aren't going to see it. Yeah, component-wise, maybe Apple is pretty close to what those specific components cost. But they could choose only *slightly* less powerful stuff and shave a huge amount off the price. They choose not to do that, and that gives them the perception of being overpriced.
I realize they have the iBook line, but until they actually update/replace that line, it's really a joke at this point. Nobody takes a G4 seriously anymore, and the $1,000 HP laptop I just priced absolutely blows the doors off the $1,000 iBook. (Again, I realize the iBook is smaller and lighter, but when you're comparing overall specs and features, it appears the iBook is way overpriced.)
What exactly does "Cannot be avoided" mean? do they actually think they can prevent people from skipping the commercials?
Um, yes?
It's very easy. Encode the video in Flash and do a php call so the file name is never revealed - not even the url to the directory where the file *is* is revealed. Can't be downloaded (even by workaround methods), and controls can be set in the embedded player so you can't fast-forward (my guess is the last part of the article submission is wrong - you can maybe rewind and then ff to the last point you were at in the video, but you won't be able to skip ahead).
The big video sites don't do this right now, but it is possible, and a lot of smaller sites do do it. We'll see if ABC is smart enough, but judging by the way they describe this, it sounds like they've figured it out.
I've been saying TV stations should do this exact thing for years. You want to stop "piracy" of your shows? Put them online for free. Show the ads; we know you've gotta make money. But don't force me to pay 2 bucks just because I wasn't home at the time the show was on and presumably don't have (or can't afford?) TiVo.
Now you've got a choice, at least with the bigger shows. Pay 2 bucks and watch them ad-free, or pay nothing and watch with ads. Pretty much the way it should be, if you ask me.
The only question left is what sort of quality we'll get. I mean considering HDTV is free, then ideally the online version should match that quality - but no way it will for reasons of bandwidth. Hopefully it'll at least match what you can find on file sharing sites, though... if they really are serious about doing away with that sort of thing, especially.
Both the Xbox 1 and the Xbox 360 are "region free consoles" it's the games that are region locked, not the console.
Give me a break - you've swallowed MS's marketing spin hook, line and sinker.
Here's my simple question to you - if the console isn't region coded, how does the game know to lock itself out if it's being played in the wrong region?
Of course the Xbox and Xbox 360 are region coded. MS has never claimed they're not. They've only claimed that it's up to publishers whether or not to use that coding. The same is true for the PS2 and every other system out there that isn't either a) portable, or b) a Neo Geo.
The difference here is that Phil Harrison, at least according to IGN (who don't seem to actually quote him that I can see), is saying that PS3 software will be region-free. The hardware itself may or may not still identify it by region. But the software will ignore it if that's the case.
Bill Gates had previously stated he planned to release around the time of Playstation 3. Microsoft distanced themselves from those comments after it was apparent that Halo 3 wouldn't be ready in time, but with Playstation 3's delay this could once again become a threat to them.
Repeat after me: there is no US delay. This is a delay in Japan.
Halo 3 in Japan will sell somewhere between four and six copies. So I doubt Sony is any more worried about this today than they were yesterday.
The US plan officially has always been to launch the PS3 "this year." The only region to get an actual launch period was Japan, which was going to be "spring" of 2006. Given that, you can extrapolate from the launches of the PS1 and PS2 (which had Japan/US launches that were staggered by nearly a year in the PS1's case and around 8 months in the PS2's case) that the PS3 was probably going to arrive here before Christmas, but not much before. Most people had expected Thanksgiving or thereabouts.
But the bottom line is you can't "delay" something that has never had a launch date to begin with, or even a launch month. Nothing more specific than 2006 was ever announced for the US before today. The delay affects Japan and Japan alone, so any talk of MS taking advantage of the situation is misguided. MS can no more exploit the situation as it exists today than they could exploit the situation that existed 3 weeks ago, because that situation hasn't changed in the west.
My only guess about how all this confusion is happening even among supposedly highly-paid analysts is that somehow either a simultaneous launch had always been assumed (because, you know, MS did it) or some of these guys just simply failed to differentiate between regions. Not all of these guys are experienced enough to have been dealing with the game industry even back when the PS2 was launched. These analysts often deal with many different industries and they're not always as on top of things as it seems.
Slashdot Mirror
While inflation has gone up, the cost of manufacturing electronics has gone down.
Following that logic, why can't I buy a 50" plasma HDTV for $400? Or a brand new car for $3,000?
Manufacturing costs have gone down, but the costs for the latest parts has gone up, and the costs for R&D have gone way up. That's one reason why inflation exists in the first place. Electronics are no more immune to it than anything else. The same product using the same parts may get cheaper over time (to a point), but new products using new parts only ever get more expensive. Doesn't matter what industry you're talking about.
However, every single Final Fantasy since then has been good, but *not* the awe-inspiring series we remember. Even the Final Fantasy movies were more about being pretty than about the actual story. The last Final Fantasy I played through was Final Fantasy X, and I always had a feeling that Square was more focused on kick ass cutscenes than having a kick ass story. ='(
Honestly, part of this is probably just that you have grown older and more jaded. Another is probably that you may no longer be as open-minded as you think you are. You are obviously looking for the same experience FF7 gave you, rather than opening yourself to a *new* experience that may be different, but just as satisfying. If it's not like FF7, it's nothing to you. (Your comments about remaking FF7 and FF3 reinforce that.)
FFVII is my favorite game of all time, and to me it was a truly religious experience as well. And I also admit to being totally unimpressed with FFVIII and I couldn't even make it through FFIX. But FFX... FFX deeply affected me in a way no game had since FFVII. It was not the same experience - it was sort of quieter, and more subtle - but it was just as deep. FFVII threw everything but the kitchen sink at you whereas FFX I remember as being almost serene. It was exactly what I wanted to play at that somewhat older stage of life (vs. FFVII), and I felt truly sad when I got to the end.
I also think it had the tightest gameplay of any FF since VII - not just the best story. There were a half-dozen boss battles right at the end and all of them were amazing. And I grew to love the sphere grid system (though it did take a while).
My point being, I don't think it's necessarily that the series has peaked than it is just that you're looking for something other than what Square is producing these days. FFVIII was the only time I sort of felt like Square was trying to recreate something from FFVII, and it fell flat. FFIX and FFX were both somewhat different styles, one a lot more successful (IMO) than the other. But you can't always look for the second coming of FFVII, because you just can't recreate the same magic. But you can make new magic, and I think Square has done that. You just have to be open to it.
I did think FFX-2 was a big disappointment after X, though even it had its moments. But it's yet another example of how lightning never strikes in the same place twice.
But I think Sony really screwed up here and forgot that the hardcore gamer market is a minuscule fraction of the people out there buying console titles.
And I think you and others like you forgot that there are almost always huge shortages at console launches, and that prices are not set in stone for the life of a console.
I was one of the guys that waited in line for a PS2 on launch day. I didn't get one. You just saw recently what happened with the Xbox 360 launch and that was at $399. You don't think the PS3 will have at least that much demand attached to it? Of course it will - the PS2 sold four times more systems than the original Xbox, and the PS3 already has more exclusives attached to it than the Xbox 360.
Sony's saying they will have 4 million systems ready in the "launch window", and that's worldwide. So that's less than 2 million per territory in November and December. You will not be able to get one of these at any price.
Once demand slackens, the price will drop. As always happens.
I can do a LOT more with my PC, like development, graphics, and audio.
You cannot play Final Fantasy XIII, Gran Turismo HD or Metal Gear Solid 4.
This is why people buy game consoles - to play the games that they can play nowhere else. All you're saying is that you're not interested in video games. Nobody buys game consoles to do development, graphics and audio.
Judging by the xbox360, the only real thing we can expect is more detailed graphics,
And Final Fantasy XIII, and Gran Turismo HD, and probably the next Grand Theft Auto, etc...
The PS2 didn't sell 103 million units based on the power of its graphics. It sold all those systems based on the games available for the system, and specifically the games that were available on no other system.
MS is still the odd man out here because they're going to get crushed by both Sony and Nintendo on exclusive titles. Sony's still got Japan behind them and they've got the power of numbers everywhere else (103 million PS2's vs. 25 million Xboxes). Nintendo's got their own first-party games plus with the Wii, almost every third-party game on the system will by definition be a unique experience.
The PS2 had both massive exclusives like the FF and Dragon Quest series, as well as the sheer power of quantity that saw literally thousands of niche titles released for the system. No matter what kind of gamer you are, you could find something to like on the PS2. The PS3 will probably be no different - it's certainly going to have the lion's share of Japanese development devoted to it at the very least. That gives Sony a huge built-in advantage worldwide.
Just remember, man - it's all about the games. People focus way too much on the power of these systems - historically speaking, it's actually been the *least* powerful system that has won out more often than not. (This gen is probably going to be an exception to that, but the point is you should look at the games, not the specs.)
I beg to differ. Death and Rebirth was basically the creator going "What, you didn't like my ending? FINE. HERE. Everyone dies and is miserable, you happy now?"
Er, you guys have both got it backwards, and you specifically have got it backwards in two different ways.
"Death & Rebirth" was a recap of the series; not much more. It had a few minutes of extra footage but it was basically intended as the equivalent of a clip show.
"The End of Evangelion" is the real ending of the series. Hideaki Anno has said himself repeatedly that for a variety of reasons, he wasn't able to do what he wanted for the TV ending. I'm sure there were some nods to what the fans wanted in EoE that weren't Anno's original ideas, but it is closer to what he had originally intended than the TV ending was. Anno has said he ran out of both time and money and was also just plain burnt out by the end of the TV run. So EoE was a revisit of the material.
It's also probably worth pointing out that there is no real difference between the substance of EoE and the TV ending. A lot of people take both endings much too literally - but underneath, they both tell the same story. The TV ending just tells it completely through symbolism and exposition; EoE shows a whole lot more of what was actually going on, and does a lot more visually (while still keeping a whole lot of the symbolism intact, and adding more). But there is no actual difference between what both endings are saying; all of what happened in EoE presumably happened in the TV ending too, you just didn't see it.
So really, you can look at both endings as complementary... but EoE is the only one you actually need, since it shows events from both the inside and the outside. The TV ending shows only the inside.
I predict that we are heading for a crash like the one that occurred in the 1983, and killed off most games publishers.
Yeah, you and every other naysayer since 1985.
Back then, games had got too staid and predictable, being nothing but cash-ins on existing IP (E.T. is the prime example). Competition within the business was fierce, with home computers such as the C64 slashing their prices and console prices being slashed to compete.
We are now seeing a similar situation.
Huh? So Dell is is slashing their prices and MS and Sony are slashing their console prices to compete?
There is very little going on now that is similar to what was happening in 1983. Back then, there was a mass migration away from game consoles to cheap computer systems to play games. The exact opposite is occurring now.
Interestingly, it was Nintendo who saved the industry last time, by coming up with a product that was different, and by conceiving a revolutionary (but controversial) business model.
What "revolutionary" business model was this? Selling video games and systems?
Nintendo came in and did exactly what Atari, Coleco and Mattel had been doing just 2 years before. They just did it with a new product that hadn't yet become stale, and that had new games on it - including the ace up their sleeve, Super Mario Bros. But there was nothing at all revolutionary about the Famicom or NES. The only innovation Nintendo put into the NES was in realizing that there was still a video game market in the US at all.
Let's not forget that Atari survived the crash of 1983-84 and in fact continued selling the Atari 2600 until 1991, alongside the 7800. It's kind of disengenuous to say the crash "killed off" most game publishers, because there were really only about six or seven at the time. Atari, Coleco, Mattel, Activision, Imagic, Sega, and some other, smaller publishers. Of those, Atari, Activision and Imagic survived, and Activision came out of the crash stronger than it had ever been. They gobbled up Imagic and a few smaller companies, released a little PC game called Mechwarrior and the rest is history.
Which is not to belittle the crash. But there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding it and one of those is that it completely destroyed the game industry. It didn't. Japanese publishers like Sega came out of it basically unscathed, and both the largest first-party and third-party publishers also survived.
These days, the companies involved in the game industry are so large that a downturn like that of 1983-1984 would basically be a blip on the radar. MS has already absorbed losses with their Xbox division that are far larger than anything Atari ever went through during the crash. Atari lost $500 million in 1983 - Microsoft has lost $4 billion so far on Xbox (including $388 million in the last quarter alone - 75% of what Atari lost in the entire first year of the great video game crash). We are dealing now with corporations that are both willing and able to weather these sorts of storms, whereas the industry in the early days was not nearly as hardy.
That's not to say things won't ever be difficult for certain developers or manufacturers. But that's true of any industry. The strong survive; the weak die or get absorbed by larger competitors. This is just the way business works; it is not unique to the game industry.
It's an unelected international body. Therefore not binding law. Right?
Right, and after that last sentence I'm not quite sure that the article submitter really understands how treaties work.
Every country handles treaties a little bit differently, but to my knowledge no country allows an international treaty to trump national sovereignty. In the US, for example, treaties must be ratified by both houses of congress and signed by the President to take effect. Thus, there is no danger of an "unelected international body" dictating anything. The supreme court can also overturn any ratified treaty, if it's challenged and is determined to be unconstitutional.
Most other countries that I know of deal with treaties similarly, in that they're basically handled like any other law. A treaty is sort of a master document that guides policy at the legislative level within each individual country. It is not a binding law unto itself, even if it is signed by the ambassadors or even leaders of any country. It still must be ratified by the signatory countries to be binding.
Didn't the Xbox experience similar losses?
The Xbox lost $4 billion over its lifespan (and counting - some of those new losses are still attributable to the original).
What MS seems to have forgotten is their original predictions (and you can still do a Google search and find these quotes) were for an "investment" of around $2 billion, followed by sustained profitability by the 3rd year of the Xbox's life.
They also were aiming for Xbox 360 profitability from day one (again, Google "xbox 360 profit"). So for them to now say "oh, we expected this, and it's all for the good of the future" is at best revisionist on their part, and at worst outright denial.
The fact of the matter is they are billions of dollars behind where they initially predicted they'd be. They're more than $2 billion further in the hole than they ever wanted to be and they're three years behind on their profit forecasts, with no guarantee that it will ever turn around. Assuming a relatively modest prediction of a $500 million profit per year, they're now close to $4 billion (and counting) behind their initial predictions, and really $5 billion in the hole all told. That's assuming they would have been close to $1 billion up at this point, rather than $4 billion in the red.
$4-$5 billion isn't chump change even for MS.
All MS has done is a major land grab. They've proven that you can grab market share provided you just pump a huge wad of cash into the industry. I don't think that's news to anyone. But that's only the first step in building a business and I'm sure that, whatever their public statements, internally they realize that this is not all going according to plan at this point. They may have bitten off more than they can chew - if they *never* turn a profit (and remember, they need to turn $4 billion worth of profits from now on to have even broken even overall), then what exactly was the point?
(You can say they denied Sony market dominance, or whatever, but to what end? Should MS be sticking its nose into every single random and unrelated market just to keep another player from being dominant? Are they going to get into cleaning products next and go head to head with Proctor & Gamble? Are they going to take on Wal-Mart with a bunch of MS-branded superstores? I mean, there does come a point at which it just gets stupid.)
MS has the cash to keep up this charade as long as they want. I don't think anybody expects a quick exit. But at some point, there will come a day of reckoning, when MS finally has to look at what's working and what's not company-wide, and if the entertainment division is still losing money hand over fist on that day, then heads will roll and shops will be closed up.
I would've liked to see some commentary in the article about the gaming markets in Europe and Asia, which are much more developed. These things always lag behind in North America, and the article was very US-centric in that regards. Culturally, it may well be that mobile games will never be as big in NA as they are in Europe and Asia.
They may be bigger in certain specific markets than they are in the US, but I think you're probably overestimating their popularity in Europe and Asia as a whole. I would like to see some real stats on this myself, but I know just from my own experiences in Japan, gaming there is probably about as big as it is here. Cell phones there are used for more tasks than they are here, yes, but gaming is just one of those tasks and it is secondary to web browsing, messaging, and yes, actually talking on the phone. Most people there have handheld gaming systems if they want to play portable games, just like here.
I couldn't find any real hardcore info on the net about the Japanese market but I did find this article from last year that talks about Square Enix's position that there is '"more potential" in the US mobile games market than Japan' and that 'the percentage of game content is already much larger on mobile in the US than the percentage in Japan'. So clearly at least one major game developer saw the US as a better opportunity for mobile gaming than Japan, which supports my comments above.
I just don't think people in general want to play most games on their mobile phones, any more than I think they want to play mp3's or browse the web. The success that NTT DoCoMo has had with iMode and the successful games that there are in Asia all happened because developers considered the mobile phone as a separate category of device and created new categories of content for it. You're not browsing the regular web when you visit an iMode site - you're browsing specially-formatted pages. Same with games, which are created from scratch specifically for phones - they are not generally adapted from games on other portables.
Even so, the success of these games overseas has been pretty limited. There hasn't really been a Dragon Quest style phenomenon that's originated on a cell phone and there probably never will be. Cell phones are best suited to time-killer type games, but those aren't the kinds of games people will pay a premium for.
If ever a cell phone game really does break out on its own, it will have to be a unique experience - probably something community-based that uses the phone's communication ability. It will have to be viral. But I don't see anyone trying to shake things up like that; every cell phone game I see is some variation on something we already know and can play better on a different platform.
Given the current situation, and even what we can know of the forseeable future, I agree that 3% market share is probably pretty much the saturation point for cell phone games. Like a lot of the dot-com era bubble ideas, this is another industry with expectations that were always way out of whack with reality. The cell phone music industry will be next to figure this out...
Is anyone else surprised at how Flash has become the new standard for video distribution?
No, because it does everything the content providers want and it is as cross-platform as it currently gets. It is not perfect (nothing is) but it is as close to it as it gets right now for both providers and viewers.
I wonder if Macromedia itself ever predicted that Flash's wide availability would become its selling point for streaming video.
Well, why the heck do you think Flash video even exists? Flash video wasn't created until I think Flash 6. By then Flash already had around a 90% penetration, lots of people were trying to do video over the interweb without much success, and Macromedia had the bright idea that their platform was a better solution.
I think this is a bad trend because it is hiding more and more of the content from the browser. I would have liked to see W3C specify some formats and controls for video that browsers should support.
And the content providers would have ignored these formats.
I mean the bottom line is like it or not, ABC owns Lost. They're not obligated to put it out on formats that they don't want to. Oh, I agree completely that *you* should be able to put it on whatever format you want for *your* own consumption, but *they* don't have to make it available in any format they don't want to and they're perfectly within their rights to sue anybody who is actually distributing it without their permission.
So if you want an official, legally sanctioned web "broadcast" of Lost on the net, you're going to have to make some compromises with the owner of the show. And honestly, the way they're doing it on the net is not really much different - and is in some ways better - than the way they're doing it over the air.
So now you have three choices. You can watch (or record) these shows when they're broadcast on cable or OTA, you can download them from iTunes commercial-free for $1.99 and keep them for as long as you want, or you can stream them for free on ABC's web site but with commercials.
It seems to me that there is very little to complain about here. If you ask me, this is good behavior on the part of the content industry. And I am not one to compliment the content industry very often.
The summary could have at least mentioned the codec used or the bit rate.
The codec is Flash video. It's Macromedia's/Adobe's own codec.
The bit rate is unknowable unless ABC says what it is in a press release or elsewhere on the site. Maybe you could figure out a way to save one of these flv files and open it in a standalone player that'd tell you the bit rate. My guess is ABC is smart enough to have locked out that ability, though.
"Flash Video Quality" is still basically meaningless, because Flash video can have whatever quality you give it. You can encode Flash video in HD if you want to; it'd be pretty pointless to do so because the whole point of Flash video is to stream, but you could do it if you wanted to.
But omitting the codec or bit rate from the summary aren't really oversights - the codec is a given, the bit rate is just unknown.
Sony is claiming it's supposed to last double the time of the PS2 (5 years) so this console is meant to last 10 years.
The PS2 has already been on the market for six years and will likely remain on the market for some time after the PS3 is released (just as the PS1 was on the market for some time after the PS2 was released). The PS1 also lasted almost exactly ten years from its original launch date to the date production stopped.
I think that this whole "five year cycle" thing is a little confused to begin with. Most successful consoles last well beyond that artificial limit. The NES/Famicom was on the market from 1983-2003 - 20 years. The Intellivision was on the market for 11 years. The Atari 2600 was on the market for around 15 years. The PS1 lasted ten. I could go on and on.
In addition, it's very rare that all console manufacturers launch systems in the same year. For example, the Sega Genesis was released in 1989, with the SNES launching in 1991. The Atari 2600 launched in 1977, the Intellivision in 1980, the Coleco Vision in 1982 and the NES in 1985. Some of these systems then went on to stay on the market for years afterwards. Where are the "generational" lines there? Even nowadays, the Dreamcast launched in 1999, the PS2 launched in 2000 and the Xbox in 2001 - even as the PS1 stuck around. The Xbox 360 launched in 2005 and the PS3 and Wii will launch in 2006. So it's really hard to divide the timeline up into these five-year chunks. It's a much more organic industry than a lot of people seem to realize - consoles stay on the market for as long as they're profitable, whether that's two years or 20.
Where I think the five year cycle came from is hardcore gamers who may themselves only consider a system relevant as long as it's the latest and greatest thing. (It's also an unfortunate fact that a lot of systems popular with the hardcore crowd - like the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast - die early deaths.) But that's not the way the market or industry works as a whole. Hardcore gamers wouldn't have considered buying an Atari 2600 in 1990, but it was out there. Same with the PS1 in 2004.
And same, probably, with the PS2 in 2007 and the PS3 in 2015. I don't think Sony's out of bounds in making that sort of prediction. If Atari can take a console that was underpowered to begin with and sell it from 1977-1991 - through the crash of 1983-1984, no less - why can't Sony do something similar with the PS3?
Wii Nintendo, Wii? Gotta say that's a very bad name. It doesn't make me think of video games at all
And "Revolution" does why?
"Revolution" makes me think of guillotines and blood running down rain-soaked streets to chants of "Vive la France!"
Not video games.
Anyway, "Revolution" is a name that makes promises that it can't necessarily keep. It's a good code name, because it's hinting at what Nintendo *wants* to happen. But it's not a good product name because once it's on the market for a while, people are going to judge it by whether it's lived up to that name.
Names like PlayStation, GameCube, Xbox, etc. are better names because they don't make any promises beyond basically describing what their core function is. (The "Xbox" is so named because it ran on DirectX.) Same with names like "Nintendo Entertainment System" or "Atari Video Computer System". The best names just say what the system does and nothing more - it's the system itself that does the talking. And the names become iconic because of that - not because there was anything special about the name itself. Form follows function - that's as true with iconic names as anything else.
I'm definitely not sold on "Wii", just because it smacks of one of those outsource naming firms that companies hire to come up with "hip" and "cool" names with wacky spellings for common words. The problem with "wii" is that it leaves themselves open to derision - it's got a sound that we all know but a spelling that doesn't belong to any real word, so we're left to interpret it how we want. And part of that interpretation, for me, anyway, is that they're trying way too hard. That's even beyond the fact that all I can hear is Homer Simpson saying "wheeeeeeeeee!" whenever I see the logo. (I was going to suggest that it might have been fine if they'd just called it "We", but then I realized they'd get a whole bunch of "Entertainment for women" jokes.)
But they were right to give it a proper name other than the Revolution code-name. I just don't think they really picked the right one.
The "pro" prefix in the term "pro-gamers" means profesional. That means those tournaments are their job
No, it means that's how they make money. There's a difference.
If they can no longer make money doing it, then there is nothing "pro" about what they do. They are simply gamers, like everybody else.
You can't just take any leisure activity and call it a professional activity and have it be sustainable. Hey, look at me, I'm a professional lemonade drinker! Just because someone gave me a dollar once to watch me drink a glass of lemonade doesn't mean I can actually sustain myself doing it for the long term. Same applies here. There needs to be an actual market for it, along with a level of skill that can both be easily appreciated and incredibly difficult to match. Otherwise nobody's going to be interested, even if the activity itself is interesting. And honestly, watching other people play video or computer games has never even been interesting to begin with.
(Now, you could argue that the same is true for a lot of major sports, but the market has proven you wrong.)
In closing, let me agree with the "get a job" sentiment, etc. etc.
I think one of the reasons why publishers see ebooks as more threatening to their industry than the paper books is because ebooks will always be in "Like New" condition, thus it can be traded in the 2nd hand market at very close to the retail price.
Someone has apparently never been to college! (At least not in the United States...)
Most college students purposely buy used books not just because they're cheaper (though that is a reason) but also because all of the important passages have already been highlighted and in many cases, answers to common questions or other notes written in the margins. They're like cheat sheets. If you're lucky, you get a book from a student that had the same professor as you, and then it's practically like getting the answers to every test.
This is a huge disadvantage to ebooks or other digital media in a specific situation like this. Students don't buy books for that "new book smell". They buy them a) to learn, and b) to get better grades. A new book or ebook does not help anyone get better grades. Used books can and usually do.
X-play is only good as a comedy show. They know very little about good games IMO.
They know very little about comedy, if you ask me. Their inane little high school skits grate on me like fingernails on a blackboard - they think they're being ironically low-budget funny, but then so does every other teenager with a camcorder. The truth is being an intern on a cable TV show doesn't automatically qualify you as undiscovered talent.
Morgan and Adam are still good hosts, although they've both become a bit too jaded at this point - Morgan especially. I actually look forward to those little moments that happen every couple shows where Morgan gets off-script - when she genuinely laughs at something she wasn't expecting (usually something Adam says or does) or improvs a line that she obviously hadn't practiced beforehand. That's the "old" Morgan Webb that we all knew and loved from the TechTV days. But generally, she just sticks to her all-too-cynical script.
The rest of the "cast" of this show, though, are all just a bunch of wanna-be fratboy rejects, and it hurts my eyes to watch them. Unfortunately, about 20 of the 22 minutes of each new episode these days seems to be taken up by these lame skits, with games almost an afterthought. Which kind of fits in with what's going on at the rest of the channel, making me wonder if this is not a conscious (and possibly forced) change.
Most people run virus software all the time. They also have a few other programs running all the time. Touting your machines ability to run these programs while playing games is an obvious fit.
Unless you're a gamer. You know, the kind of people Dell is hoping will buy an XPS system.
It's all fine and dandy if "most people" want to have all these programs running all the time. Hardcore gamers, though, know to turn everything off if they want the best performance. Dell apparently still doesn't understand this - they first of all load all the same junk onto their XPS machines as they do on their mainstream machines, then rather than tout the raw gaming performance of the XPS line, they tout the fact that you can multitask. Gamers don't care about multitasking. They care about one task and one task only: playing games.
Again, if Dell wants to market the XPS line as sort of a high-end everyman computer, that's fine. But that's never been their stated goal. This was the line intended to garner them street cred, the "top-down" approach where the real hardcore users will spend that extra money and then tell all their friends how great Dell is.
This strategy is ass-backwards if that is their goal. They should be touting how lean their systems are, not how many things you can do at once. They should be touting how many frames per second you can get running the latest games, not how you can encode music while you're playing. These are things that appeal to mainstream users, not the high-end, hardcore users Dell is trying to attract.
ake this for example:
s .jpg
"The main-chase scene in Matrix 2 is the best I have ever seen; it's too bad the rest of the movie couldn't keep pace."
Spin enabled: "...Matrix 2 is the best I have ever seen.."
Anybody with half of an education should know this stuff.
Hey, so what if it's actually in the title of the game??
One of the stranger game covers I've seen is the original European release of Grand Theft Auto: http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/images/game
"...Grand Theft Auto..."
Somewhere, at some time, somebody said "grand theft auto" as part of a sentence... and we captured that moment!
nstead, the gaming industry seems to still be focusing on teenage gamers.
There are some valid reasons for this, and I'm not arguing those. However, as years go by and more and more people over 30 have grown up with video games, the industry really can't afford to continue to ignore this demographic.
I wouldn't say the industry is ignoring this demographic, but it probably is underserved. Still, games like The Sims appeal to the 30-and-up crowd, IMO, as do titles like Star Wars: Empire at War, and of course there's all those classic compilations and remakes, not to mention new stuff like Katamari Damacy that's in that classic gaming vein. (And hopefully will introduce a new generation to what real video gaming is like...)
But the main reason I think this demographic is maybe disproportionately represented on store shelves compared to the slew of ultra-violent, ultra-sexed up games for the barely legal crowd, is probably a simple one: while most game buyers are in their late 20's and early 30's, most game developers are at least half a decade younger. You can blame it at least in part on the notorious working conditions that the industry still suffers, where 12 hour days are considered a vacation. That's fine when you're just out of college, but get yourself married and settled down and very few people are going to continue living that life.
And it's true that games for the barely legal set do sell. But as titles like The Sims show, games for "the rest of us" can sell even better. But developers can only develop what they know, and given a choice between developing "Game A" for the college-age crowd or "Game B" for the gaming geezers, they'll choose "Game A" every time. Management will go along, because they know games like that have been profitable in the past, whereas games for the older demographic don't have as long of a track record.
The solution is really to try to keep us old guys making games in the industry (I used to be part of it too), and that means changing a lot of bad corporate habits; really a whole corporate culture. It's probably not going to happen. But unless it does, the industry is leaving a whole lot of money on the table, if you ask me.
btw, guys like Peter Molyneux, who have been around for decades, are the exception rather than the rule.
I imagine old Grampa Ugg the caveman turned his nose up at little Grogg and his young pals' hunting with sharpened stones rather than blunt clubs.
And we will be doing the same when we're old and grey and these damn kids keep running their mouths off about holographic gaming.
We're also the first generation to grow up with the internet, hybrid vehicles, Islamic (and Christian) fundamentalism, and a lot of other things. We take all of these things for granted while our grandparents just give us the "in my day, we didn't need the 'internets'" speech.
But we will be saying the same about whatever newfangled inventions confound us as we age, including inventions related to gaming. Already there's a large number of people (myself included) that argues that the best, most creative days of video gaming are behind us, and we're now stuck in a small set of specific genres with prettier graphics. That's just the start. Once (and/or "if") this whole online-centric "marketplace" for video games really takes off, where everything is just connected all the time and there is no way to even get away from it, you're going to have a whole new round of disenchanted old fuddy-duddies for whom video gaming is no longer what it used to be.
I guess what I'm saying is that things change and they never stop changing, and there will always be a generation gap. We're not so much the pioneers from the early days of video gaming as much as we're our grandkids' future dimentia-suffering grandparents who are just as out of touch with their world as our own grandparents were with ours.
Now get the hell off my virtual lawn!
Dell = No Bluetooth, No DVD Burner, No Gigabit Ethernet, 20GB less HD space, No built in webcam & much worse graphics.
While I still think that Apples are priced highly, you do get alot of features built into the system.
A lot of which are useless for most people. Are laptop webcams in any danger of becoming standard-issue items? Are most people's homes wired for gigabit ethernet (heck, are most businesses)?
I think a big part of Apple's perception problem is that they focus so highly on the high end where you get diminishing returns for extra features and specs. A PC with exactly the same specs as the $2,000 MacBook Pro probably would cost close to $2,000, but a PC with 90% of the features specs of the MacBook Pro might only cost $1,000. In fact, I just went to HP's site right now and built a PC with everything the MacBook Pro has except the webcam and the gigabit ethernet, and with a 64 bit AMD CPU and a 1280x800 screen, and the total was $1,033.99. That's still with a DL DVD burner, ATI graphics card w/ 128MB dedicated, 1GB of system RAM, same hard drive, etc.
I mean the question is what are you paying literally 100% more for? Most people just aren't going to see it. Yeah, component-wise, maybe Apple is pretty close to what those specific components cost. But they could choose only *slightly* less powerful stuff and shave a huge amount off the price. They choose not to do that, and that gives them the perception of being overpriced.
I realize they have the iBook line, but until they actually update/replace that line, it's really a joke at this point. Nobody takes a G4 seriously anymore, and the $1,000 HP laptop I just priced absolutely blows the doors off the $1,000 iBook. (Again, I realize the iBook is smaller and lighter, but when you're comparing overall specs and features, it appears the iBook is way overpriced.)
What exactly does "Cannot be avoided" mean? do they actually think they can prevent people from skipping the commercials?
Um, yes?
It's very easy. Encode the video in Flash and do a php call so the file name is never revealed - not even the url to the directory where the file *is* is revealed. Can't be downloaded (even by workaround methods), and controls can be set in the embedded player so you can't fast-forward (my guess is the last part of the article submission is wrong - you can maybe rewind and then ff to the last point you were at in the video, but you won't be able to skip ahead).
The big video sites don't do this right now, but it is possible, and a lot of smaller sites do do it. We'll see if ABC is smart enough, but judging by the way they describe this, it sounds like they've figured it out.
I've been saying TV stations should do this exact thing for years. You want to stop "piracy" of your shows? Put them online for free. Show the ads; we know you've gotta make money. But don't force me to pay 2 bucks just because I wasn't home at the time the show was on and presumably don't have (or can't afford?) TiVo.
Now you've got a choice, at least with the bigger shows. Pay 2 bucks and watch them ad-free, or pay nothing and watch with ads. Pretty much the way it should be, if you ask me.
The only question left is what sort of quality we'll get. I mean considering HDTV is free, then ideally the online version should match that quality - but no way it will for reasons of bandwidth. Hopefully it'll at least match what you can find on file sharing sites, though... if they really are serious about doing away with that sort of thing, especially.
Actually I wonder which half is being re-written?
Knowing Microsoft, probably the good half.
Both the Xbox 1 and the Xbox 360 are "region free consoles" it's the games that are region locked, not the console.
Give me a break - you've swallowed MS's marketing spin hook, line and sinker.
Here's my simple question to you - if the console isn't region coded, how does the game know to lock itself out if it's being played in the wrong region?
Of course the Xbox and Xbox 360 are region coded. MS has never claimed they're not. They've only claimed that it's up to publishers whether or not to use that coding. The same is true for the PS2 and every other system out there that isn't either a) portable, or b) a Neo Geo.
The difference here is that Phil Harrison, at least according to IGN (who don't seem to actually quote him that I can see), is saying that PS3 software will be region-free. The hardware itself may or may not still identify it by region. But the software will ignore it if that's the case.
This is 100% different than the Xbox 360 if true.
Bill Gates had previously stated he planned to release around the time of Playstation 3. Microsoft distanced themselves from those comments after it was apparent that Halo 3 wouldn't be ready in time, but with Playstation 3's delay this could once again become a threat to them.
Repeat after me: there is no US delay. This is a delay in Japan.
Halo 3 in Japan will sell somewhere between four and six copies. So I doubt Sony is any more worried about this today than they were yesterday.
The US plan officially has always been to launch the PS3 "this year." The only region to get an actual launch period was Japan, which was going to be "spring" of 2006. Given that, you can extrapolate from the launches of the PS1 and PS2 (which had Japan/US launches that were staggered by nearly a year in the PS1's case and around 8 months in the PS2's case) that the PS3 was probably going to arrive here before Christmas, but not much before. Most people had expected Thanksgiving or thereabouts.
But the bottom line is you can't "delay" something that has never had a launch date to begin with, or even a launch month. Nothing more specific than 2006 was ever announced for the US before today. The delay affects Japan and Japan alone, so any talk of MS taking advantage of the situation is misguided. MS can no more exploit the situation as it exists today than they could exploit the situation that existed 3 weeks ago, because that situation hasn't changed in the west.
My only guess about how all this confusion is happening even among supposedly highly-paid analysts is that somehow either a simultaneous launch had always been assumed (because, you know, MS did it) or some of these guys just simply failed to differentiate between regions. Not all of these guys are experienced enough to have been dealing with the game industry even back when the PS2 was launched. These analysts often deal with many different industries and they're not always as on top of things as it seems.