I agree that the two "shake outs" are not completely comparable.
Well, they're not at all comparable. Either this guy didn't actually live through the crash of 84 as he says he did, or he's just completely forgot about it.
Christmas of 1983 was a disaster, and that was after a huge drop in the stock market price of all of the major game manufacturers (which constricted their investment). The losses incurred in 1983 and 1984 were staggering. It's pretty disingenuous to say both Atari and the Intellivision lived on after that - Mattel practically went out of business (the electronics division in fact did; INTV Corp came in and picked up the scraps), Coleco exited the business after only 2 years, and even the mighty Atari, owned by Warner, was forced to cut their losses.
Console gaming died in 1984. I mean that literally. 1984 was the only time in the past 40 that no major home console was on the market in the United States. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine today walking into a Toys R Us and seeing not a single video game system on display? Can you imagine GameStop switching back to selling business software? Can you imagine Microsoft/SubLogic Flight Simulator II being the #1 game?
That's what happened in 1984. I'm 34, and I was there. It was a crash.
You can't say that because INTV later took over Mattel's stock and started selling the scraps mail order-only that that means nothing really happened. Or that the fact that a gutted and reorganized Atari released a new console three years after exiting the market, that that also means there was no crash. And what of Coleco? He doesn't even mention them. Where's the Coleco Vision in 1985?
After 1984, the entire center of gravity for the industry shifted to Japan. Prior to 1984, most Americans were not even aware that people played games outside of the United States. All game consoles (as we knew them) were American. That's just the way it was. By 1985, every console on the market would be Japanese. (The Atari 7800 was not officially on the market until 1987 and was never a serious contender. The later Jaguar was not really a factor at all and finally put the company under.)
There was nothing remotely comparable in 1994-1995. Nintendo continued making money hand over fist. Sony was just beginning their initial investment. Sega was the only major manufacturer experiencing hard times, but nobody thought that was anything but a momentary blip at that time... and in fact it was not clear who would ultimately win the 32 bit race for several years. Atari was still around, but by this time they were playing a bit part. They never recovered from the crash.
This guy brings up all the minor players - which historically have never done well in the console industry - and selectively uses them to prove a non-existent point about 94-95. Why doesn't he mention Magnavox in 1980? Or Vectrex in 1983? What about all the other 3DO's and Amigas over the years? There have been plenty. These sorts of companies and systems do not indicate industry trends - it would be like talking about the "crash of 2004" because the Tapwave Zodiac was a flop. Isn't it obvious that it's the major players in the industry that matter, not these circus sideshows?
I'm probably a little more annoyed at this "article" than I should be, but it's completely revisionist history. He cites one article full of wishful thinking that he probably read in an Electronic Games magazine he just bought off of Ebay and uses that as a basis for his whole entry. Some of us actually remember what it was like back then, walking into TRU and seeing a bunch of Cabbage Patch Kids where the video games used to be.
This is such a good idea. Which means it will never happen.
Well, it's not necessarily a good idea, for two reasons.
a) It will mean higher prices.
b) It will mean fewer choices.
Pretty much exactly the opposite of why some people seem to want it. Let me explain.
Right now, you pay what, $30 for 100 channels or whatever your cable company charges for the package you have. Switch to a-la-carte and do you really think any channel is going to allow themselves to be priced for under a buck a month? It's one thing to be included as part of a package, but if you break it down and say "this channel is worth 20 cents, this channel is worth $2", no channel is going to accept being priced on that low end. And the whole point of a-la-carte pricing is to take the power out of the cable company's hands, so it will be the channels themselves that do the pricing.
A lot of channels right now are subsidized by other channels that whatever media conglomerate that owns them requires the cable company to include as part of a package of other, more popular channels. This is how channels like Sundance Channel and BBC America exist. It both helps new channels mature and grow a customer base and it brings prestige and cross-marketing opportunities to the channels' owner. These channels will be gone under a-la-carte pricing, because they will be forced to pay their own way from day one, and they will not be able to command the prices required for them to operate profitably.
What you're going to end up with is a bunch of lowest common denominator, mainstream channels that are as driven by the cable equivalent of "ratings" as the major TV networks are now (in cable's case, those "ratings" would be represented by subscriptions). Is that really a good thing? Not to me, it isn't.
Now, you can argue that it's the free market, blah blah blah, and that's true, but I'd like to point out that it's the free market that made Titanic the #1 movie of all time and Britney Spears the #1 selling music artist of the past few years. Do you really want to be relying on your fellow customers to support the channels you want well enough to keep them afloat on their own?
Now, I'm not saying the current system is perfect; it isn't. It needs major changes, and it is a government-sanctioned monopoly right now from the bottom on up. But one of the good things about the current system, which will be thrown out the window with a-la-carte pricing, is a sort of immunity to mainstream whims that the major networks have to contend with. It's why cable channels can be a little edgier, why they can take more chances in finding and building an audience. You should really be asking yourself why it is that the FCC is recommending this in the name of promoting decency on television - it's not about price. It's about putting out of business channels that do anything outside the mainstream.
You see, I've got to disagree with most of what you have to say. The only EA game I play regularly is Madden. Madden has done a decent job of adding features without screwing too much with the formula since about Madden 2003 (where 2003 is actually the year 2002 here).
"Many of the unique gameplay features of the last couple of Madden games are missing; lots of missing modes--all you get is a husk of a franchise mode and online play; some unsightly animation and graphical hang-ups that stick out all the more on a next-gen console; you can't challenge plays."
In other words, the latest, greatest version of Madden actually has much less in the way of features than the previous versions.
I don't know if this is intentional on the part of EA - trying to backtrack with the 360 so they can re-add all those features later and charge people again for stuff they already paid for in the original Xbox era - but if so, it's pretty shameless. And if you read the reviews for all of EA's sports games on the 360, the same is true across the line.
This is exactly the kind of thing these analysts are talking about turning people off.
That's the point I think is being missed. After everything is said and done, the thing is still, design-wise, pretty much a glorified PC. Microsoft has come out with a proprietary platform which they're using the gamer market to propagate. They can gradually add other functionality to increase it's market.
The fact of the matter is every console is pretty much a "glorified PC" (or a "dumbed down" PC, depending on your perspective), and every single time - yes, every single time a new console is released, the manufacturer claims that it's going to do this, that and the other thing eventually, or that it's going to converge a whole bunch of devices into one. This is true going all the way back to the Odyssey II and Atari 2600, which also promised PC functionality. The Sega CD and NEC Turbo CD were the first (or among the first) to then promise home entertainment functionality once optical storage became the norm.
The reality is people just don't care. A few do, and those are the kind of people that sued Mattel when they never actually released their promised keyboard component from lack of interest (they only had something like 4,000 orders, which meant they couldn't get the component cost low enough to make a profit). Those people can be very vocal. They're the real hardcore. They're on the internet complaining when companies don't release promised add-ons, they're the ones that always have to be the contrarians when someone like me points out that they're the minority.
But they are the extreme, extreme minority. I agree with the parent poster who said as soon as the next hot console comes along, gamers will abandon the Xbox 360, because it really is about the games and only about the games, and it always will be. This is not going to be some great window into the living room. It is simply the console of the moment, and in five years it will be forgotten like every other console of the moment. MS is not creating some sort of home entertainment "standard" with the Xbox 360.
It never ceases to amuse me how people say the exact same things every time a new console is released. "It's going to do all these great things besides playing video games! It's revolutionary!" Ha! So in other words, it's just like every other console ever.
The Xbox 360 explores new menu structures with a unique and pleasant GUI. One often-overlooked element that the Microsoft games group brings to the party is its unique GUIs that are unlike the folder/desktop metaphor that Xerox and Apple developed."
Since when has the GUI had anything whatsoever to do with how good and/or successful a console is? Does Dvorak not realize the whole purpose of a console is to play games?
Even if you're a convergence guy and believe people will be using their Xbox for movies as well as games, I still don't see how the GUI has anything to do with anything. What you want is a system where you interact with the GUI as little as possible, whatever you're doing. Most people shouldn't even know that it exists.
The fact that so many people are focusing so heavily on the Xbox 360's GUI suggests to me that it's far too prominent and intrusive.
So very true. If "acting" is what's important, then why are all actresses (even the B-list ones), with a few minor exceptions, ridiculously hot? I mean, is it a coincidence?
Man, you guys are cynical. I work in the TV industry, and I've worked on films as well (not as a casting director, but I've worked with them).
The reality is actors are cast because of a combination of ability and looks that fit the part. If a part calls for an 80 year old woman, are you going to cast Keira Knightley in the role? Obviously not.
If a part calls for a 20 year old woman, then maybe you will. Yes, you want the most attractive actors with the best ability. There are plenty of award-winning actors (both male and female) that are not particularly attractive but who fit the needs of a lot of roles in Hollywood - Frances McDormand, Lili Taylor, etc. Of the "hot" actresses in the world, you seem to be pretty insulting towards their ability - is Charlize Theron not a great actress? Did you not see her in Monster? Did you not see Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted? Have you not seen Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive or 21 Grams?
Not all actresses you see in Hollywood films are the greatest in the world. But A-list actresses by and large are; that's how they became A-list actresses, through their professionalism, their ability, and yes, their look. The fact that the movies surrounding them may not always be written or directed to their strengths says little about their ability; it says more about your taste in movies that this is the only work of theirs that you've seen.
Everybody knows about gamerankings.com and I think a lot of people put too much stock in them.
The problem is review scores - even aggregated ones - tell you nothing. Reviewers often get so caught up in hype themselves that they can't (or won't) see a game's faults, and of course there's the issue of paid advertising at almost every publication. That's not to say reviews themselves are useless, but just looking at a score - even an average of the scores from a bunch of publications - is not going to tell you anything.
But for some of the same reasons, simply reading one or two reviews is not going to help you either. What you need to do is read between the lines when you read these reviews. Ask yourself "what is this reviewer not telling me about this game?"
For example, before I bought NFL 2K5, I read a bunch of reviews about it. None of them spent more than a couple sentences talking about the franchise mode, which is the main mode I play in every sports game I buy. If they said anything, it was just about it being more "fleshed out" than the year before. Still, they all said the core gameplay was great, so I bought the game. Sure enough, franchise mode was so buggy that it was literally impossible to play more than a couple seasons of it (destroying the whole point of that mode). The developer forums were flush with complaints about numerous game-stopping bugs, several of which I personally encountered pretty quickly, but none of which were mentioned in any review I read.
Obviously, these reviewers simply hadn't played that mode. They looked at the options and assumed they knew how it worked and that was enough for them. I should have known better, because not a single one of these reviews mentioned anything about playing more than a couple games in franchise mode.
It's not just about bugs, though. Reviewers are paid to review what's there, not what's not there. Ask yourself what you're expecting out of a game and whether the reviews you're reading are speaking directly to those wants or not. If you're looking for an adventure game and you find a game you think you might be interested in but the reviewers just talk about how much fun it is to shoot zombies, then even if the game gets a high score, it's probably not for you.
Beyond that, though, there is definitely real corruption in game journalism, whether intentional or not. I think a lot of it is actually not intentional; reviewers get wooed and wowed by big publishers with trips and gifts and whatnot, and all the while the publisher hammers into their heads how big a particular game is going to be, how awesome it is, how everybody's looking forward to it. Eventually it becomes a self-fulfilling thing, and you see more preview coverage and more hype. The press themselves buy into it. The game comes out and in order to justify themselves, all of the press gives it a ridiculously high score. Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, which even Shigeru Miyamoto now calls "boring" and basically unfinished. But it has a score of 94.9% on GameRankings, because the press bought the hype that they themselves helped create.
So my point is you cannot rely on scores (even aggregate ones) and you cannot rely solely on "sound bites" culled from reviews. You need to read reviews carefully and think about why reviewers say certain things and why they are not saying other things. Basically, just use some critical thinking skills - skills that a lot of game reviewers lack.
Not a huge number of classics, but I would argue that SSX was pretty revolutionary and it's still fun today. The only game that really sort of approximated what it did prior to that was 1080, but it wasn't nearly as tight.
There were also some good niche titles in that list, such as Silent Scope, Kessen, and Dynasty Warriors 2. The 360 launch is lacking quality niche titles to draw in those who aren't all about sports or FPS games. The PS2 also had *two* triple-A fighting games; the 360 has none.
Here's the Dreamcast launch list:
* Airforce Delta | Konami | $49
* Blue Stinger | Sega | $49
* CART Flag to Flag | Sega | $49
* Expendable | Infogrames | $49
* House of the Dead 2 | Sega | $49
* Hydro Thunder | Midway | $49
* Monaco Grand Prix | Ubi Soft | $49
* Mortal Kombat Gold | Midway | $49
* NFL 2000 | Sega | $49
* NFL Blitz 2000 | Midway | $49
* Pen Pen Tri-Icelon | Infogrames | $49
* Power Stone | Capcom | $49
* Ready 2 Rumble | Midway | $49
* Sonic Adventure | Sega | $49
* Soul Calibur | Namco | $49
* TNN Hardcore Heat | ASC | $49
* Tokyo Xtreme Racing | Crave | $49
* TrickStyle | Acclaim | $49
You'll never convince me that Power Stone was not revolutionary, Sonic Adventure wasn't the best platformer of its time, and Soul Calibur was not the best fighting game ever made. Beyond that, again a good mix of mainstream stuff (NFL 2K being the best sports title available at the time) and niche titles (HotD2, TXR, etc.). The 360 just doesn't have the mix right, and it's lacking *any* true standouts.
It's also worth noting that the Dreamcast launch had a much better proportion of original titles to sequels than the Xbox 360 does.
The GameCube I might grant you, although at least the GameCube did have some of Nintendo's best franchises represented (though no Mario) - and it had one of my favorite games of all time, Super Monkey Ball. Show me that kind of silly fun in the Xbox 360's launch lineup.
I would agree with those that say the 360's launch lineup is relatively weak. It's not the worst I've ever seen (go back a few years and you'll find systems that launched with only 2 or 3 games total!), but it's not great by recent standards.
This was settled back in the days of the NES. The courts ruled Tengen could make third-party games for the Nintendo system. So why would RARE bother with grovelling at MS's feet for a certification? It's established enough so that customers won't care.
Ignoring the part about Rare being owned by MS (which is really irrelevant to the point), your assumption is mistaken.
First of all, it's neither here nor there but you've got the wrong precedent. The only case in which Nintendo actually went to court against Tengen was found in favor of Nintendo. The case which you're probably thinking of was settled out of court (again, though, with Tengen paying damages to Nintendo for breach of contract - they had been a licensee).
The precedent you're thinking of was decided in Atari vs. Activision, which settled the fact that third party developers had a right to develop games on any manufacturer's system, with or without help from that manufacturer. This is not disputed today.
However, manufacturers still have the right to implement technological "locks" on their systems, and in fact this is why Nintendo ended up suing Tengen and Tengen ended up paying them damages. Reverse-engineering is one thing, but Tengen lied to the US copyright office to obtain Nintendo's lockout program (they told them they needed it for the court case, not for commercial use), which they then duplicated on their cartridges. Tengen was clearly guilty of copyright infringement in that case.
The same would be true of anyone who today tried to release games without the approval of a console manufacturer, especially now that the DMCA exists, which prohibits the breaking of encryption around copyrighted works (in this case, the code on the lockout protection chips). Console manufacturers own code needed for a publisher to run their games on the console in question, and only the manufacturer has a right to license that code. They're also free to set conditions (such as quality control conditions) in their license contracts.
All 3rd party developers today go through a quality control process run by the console manufacturer, whether it's Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft. Otherwise they would not have access to the code they would need for their games to work. It was exactly the case you mistakenly described that standardized this process to begin with (it did the opposite of what you think it did), and the DMCA has only strengthened the console manufacturers' hand. (I hate the DMCA, but I think most people are happy that there is a standard QA process for console games.)
The only developers who do not go through a standardized QA process are PC game developers. Which is one reason why PC games tend to be buggier and why the quality control is inconsistent from one developer to another. (Some developers may put out games that are pretty clean, others may put out games that are an unplayable mess.) That's not to say that every console manufacturer's process is created equally - in my own personal experience MS and Sony are both pretty lax in terms of bugs and overall polish in both first- and third-party games when compared with Nintendo, probably because they're competing so hard with each other lately on release dates while Nintendo sort of goes its own way. (Sony also seems to have gotten worse over the years, again as MS has started to catch up a bit in sales.)
But the point is, the way the process is described here is the way it always works; the only difference is Rare started pressing discs before the game was certified.
The XBox 360 is getting a *lot* of visibility in both the regular media, and in IT/gaming media. As the other poster mentioned, posters and advertising is abundant, especially in gaming shops and places like Akihabara.
Note that this was true of the original Xbox as well.
Note also that Japan is more than Akihabara. I don't know if you're a westerner in Japan or a native Japanese, but a lot of westerners seem to think that the entire nation of Japan visits Akihabara to buy their electronics. I'm not sure why this is; it's just a single neighborhood in a single city.
I wonder, for example, how many Xbox 360 posters you'd see if you went to the WonderGoo in Ryu-Gasaki? Probably not many. (You're free to go there and prove me wrong if you like.) What about at 7-11's, which is where most rural Japanese buy their systems? What about in other large cities like Osaka or Sapporo? Japan is a country of 125 million people; they don't all live in or near Akihabara.
I'm sure MS is running TV ads but a lot of companies run TV ads that you've probably still never heard of. My co-worker yesterday, for example, told me he'd never heard of Bristol-Myers Squibb. This is a huge pharmeceutical company with an ad budget that probably rivals McDonalds. I think the point is if you're not interested in the product to begin with, you're pretty much just going to tune it out. And there is just not much interest in the Xbox 360 there.
You can deny it all you want, just like some people denied the lack of interest in the original Xbox. I argued with people about this 5 years ago too; I even predicted the number of units it'd sell at launch to within 10,000 units. I do think the 360 will do a bit better initially but not that much better, and interest will wane quickly just as it did with the original system. It's not a system casual gamers have any interest whatsoever there; it's strictly for the hardcore and the import crowd. Nothing MS has done has changed that, whatever the impression you might get from walking around one tiny neighborhood in one city.
The type of mutation scientists are worried about would spread easily human-to-human. If the virus spreads fast enough, it doesn't matter if the victims are healthy in the morning and dead by night.
Well, yes it does, because as has been pointed out, the virus would die out pretty quickly in that case.
What the scientists are worried about is a more traditional pattern of incubation followed by a period of outward symptoms that lasts for a week or two. It's during the incubation period, though, that you're contagious, and with other flus that can last for a few days to a week.
The danger of the "bird flu" strain isn't so much how virulent it is as how deadly. Every year, hundreds of millions of people contract the flu, and more still would if vaccines didn't exist (no vaccines exist for the bird flu strain). The vast majority of these people get better. In this case, though, with a 50% mortality rate you'd be talking millions and millions of dead. And that's with a standard infection pattern.
I think there are people who are making some pretty extreme predictions on both sides of this. Some say it's almost certain that this will be a pandemic and when it happens, there will be no escape. Others say it's highly unlikely this virus will ever mutate and that if it does, a combination of effective quarantines, an expected vaccine and other measures will put it down. I'm sure that like most things, the truth is probably in the middle.
Is it just me, or are most of the scores pretty arbitary?
Completely, and most of them are utter bullshit.
I truly believe that, like films or music or a lot of other things, you need the passage of time to judge the quality of any console launch. True, part of the equation is the excitement generated at the time, and the organization of the logistics, marketing and promotion, but the whole purpose of a launch is to start selling a system (duh) and often the particular strategy being used takes some time to play out. To at least some extent, it's pretty meaningless if you have a launch that generates a lot of hype but not much in the way of sales (i.e. Dreamcast).
So, there's that. But some of these scores are also completely ridiculous on their face. The DS landed with a "thud"? It sold as many units its first week as the PSP! The PSP's the one that only sold half the units produced.
Anyway, you can't take any article like this too seriously because they're specifically written to generate discussion like this - controversy is the goal. But this list does seem particularly ridiculous.
I'm not so sure this is artificial scarcity anymore. It's one thing to create a buzz with a brief period of scarcity. It's another thing to extend it so long that you eat up all of your much touted lead time on the competition.
And it's another still to rely on clerks at GameStop for reliable information.
Seriously, I don't get this. Do you rely on the cashier at Wal-Mart for information on your favorite director's next film or for the latest info on HD technology? Why are people constantly quoting counter clerks at game stores for industry info? These guys know nothing. It's a truly bizarre phenomenon - every time I walk into a game store I see half a dozen people literally hovering over the counter talking to the clerks about games, then I'll bet it's those same people who hit up sites like this with the "info" they've gleaned. To me, this carries no more weight than asking any random person on the street the same questions and then posting their answers.
These guys make minimum wage to ring up your purchases. That's all they do. They do not have industry "contacts", they do not talk to developers or publishers or manufacturers. They ring up purchases and they vacuum the store at closing time. That's what they're paid to do and that's the extent of their real knowledge. Anything else you get from them is, at best, something they've read in a magazine - which is the same thing you could do yourself.
I kinda get the feeling that both the clerks themselves and the guys who chat them up for info to post on the net actually like feeling like they have this little "shadow" game industry unto themselves. They like starting rumors; they don't even want real info. A couple years ago I actually worked for a publisher and I'd go into the GameStop near my company all the time, often with my company colors on (we had jackets with our company name on them). Not that I'd tell anyone anything if they asked, but not a single person ever even tried getting info from me, even if they were talking to the counter clerk about my company's games with me standing right next to them! The clerks themselves must have known who we were (a lot of us frequented this GameStop, and they knew we were in the neighborhood), but not a single one of them ever tried to pump us for info either. It was kind of funny, but it definitely made me think that real info is not even what these guys want - juicy info is what they want, whether or not it's true. Truth is not really on their radar, and that's most likely the case with this Xbox 360 rumor just as it is with everything else.
Since your two biggest competitors (Sony PS3, Nintendo revolution) have announced that feature? And that it was one of the major reasons the Dreamcast was hurled into obscurity and securing the Playstation's spot as market leader?
So in your mind, the history of game consoles starts in 1999?
The PS1 was obviously not backward compatible with anything and it did pretty well. Same deal with the original Xbox.
Hardware manufacturers made the mistake of putting too much stock in backward compatibility in 1982-1983 too (the Atari 5200, Mattel Intellivision and Coleco Vision all featured adapters that were compatible with the Atari 2600). You know what happened? Every single one of them - every single company making systems at that time - lost so much money with that strategy that they exited the industry within a year. (And probably directly because of that strategy, because it allowed developers to continue dumping poor-quality, obsolete Atari 2600 cartridges on the market, taking attention and shelf space away from the new systems and diluting the market.)
Atari came back in 1987 with the 7800, which was compatible with the 2600 out of the box. You know what happened? The NES - which was not backward compatible with anything - blew it out of the water.
Neither Sony nor MS could even exist in the video game industry if backward compatibility was a requirement for success. They came very late to the party when established makers dominated the industry, and their all-new products did pretty well, I think you'll agree.
Can you say "formula for success"?
No. The results of backward compatibility in the marketplace are mixed at best. For every success (the Game Boy, the PS2) there are probably a half dozen failures. And for every successful console that did feature backward compatibility, there are half a dozen other successful consoles that didn't.
I'd say the record pretty much proves that backward compatibility is mostly a non-issue. There's no "formula" for anything contained in this one feature. It is just a feature. Some people want it, some people don't care, just like some people want a hard drive and some people don't care or some people want custom soundtracks in their games and some people don't care. Is it probably a good thing to include if you can, as simply another feature to attract a subset of gamers? Sure, but if you focus so much on that one feature at the expense of everything else, your console will be a failure. By the same token, if you decide early on that backward compatibility will be too difficult to implement, and you instead work on nailing everything else about the system, then your console will be a success. But success or failure does not hinge on this one feature and history has proven it time and time again.
Note that I am not predicting that the Xbox 360 will be as popular as the PS3; I don't think it will be. But it's not because I think a bunch of people are going to be spending $400 on a PS3 to play their old PS2 games. There are a variety of reasons why I have this opinion, but none of them have to do with the 360's backward compatibility.
What if you considered that it might just have something to do with the quality of the programming?
So you're saying Bizarre are bad coders? Have you ever actually played one of their games? Specifically any of the games in this series, going back to the original Metropolis Street Racer on Dreamcast.
Bizarre have always gotten the most out of the hardware they're working on, even if it's early in the console's lifespan. There are, even today, few racing games on the Xbox that look as good as the first PGR, and that was a first-wave title.
Let's assume you're right, and that Bizarre is not getting much out of the Xbox 360. That would suggest, at best, that the system is incredibly difficult to program for. If some of the best and most experienced racing game coders in the world cannot manage true HD on the system, what hope does anyone else have?
I think it's more likely that the 360 is just underpowered. That's the price you pay being first to market. The max res the 360 even supports is 1080i, and you don't even hear MS talking much about games that'll utilize that - all the talk I've heard has been about 720p, and now we're hearing that even one of those games, from a great developer, won't even really make that res. Something ain't kosher here.
Where does the line between manga and comic art exist then, if not by country of origin?
I was thinking the same thing when I read that last sentence in the submission. "Manga" is not a style, it specifically refers to Japanese graphic storytelling. Otherwise there'd be no reason to even use that word. We use that word to refer to their comics/graphic novels because they use that word to refer to the same material. (It is the same with "anime".)
Anything that is created outside of Japan is not manga, at least not if you're using that word to differentiate something from a standard comic (i.e. you are speaking English and not Japanese). It may be "manga-inspired", but it is not manga.
People do get into arguments about this sort of thing, and yes, there can be questions of degree... a lot of anime, for example, is written and designed in Japan but drawn in Korea. Is it really anime? Probably. Same is true of some manga. But if you're talking about comics written by Americans, drawn by Americans, in America, that's just a comic. That's got nothing to do with manga, however its visual style may look.
The problem is this is literally not safe with a high-speed drive. This was Sony's stated reason for not going that route with the PS2 (everyone expected them to, originally). The PS2 doesn't even have a very high-speed drive, but imagine a 52X spinner shooting out of a game console's slot - that'd literally be like a buzzsaw heading most likely straight at you. That's not even considering the problem of shattered discs, which does happen in high-speed drives. The shrapnel can exit a slot loader at roughly the same speed as an exploding grenade. (MythBusters tested the effects of this; they found most discs will not break in a drive unless cracked or damaged, but that's hardly an uncommon thing among gamers, who are often teenagers who don't take care of their stuff.)
Obviously you can design a system such that it has safety mechanisms in place, but you can't protect an open slot from escaping shrapnel. You'd have to really over-design a complicated system that has an internal motorized door that really then basically acts the same way as a tray-loader and is no more reliable (and probably less).
The Revolution can probably get away with a slot-loader because it's not going to be using an ultra high-speed drive. Though I don't know how they're going to handle the loading of the smaller GameCube discs (since it's supposedly backward compatible).
The only big mistake in the GC design was the original color. It just looked silly. A black GC looks fairly sleek and cool. I'm not entirely sure who that pastel purple was supposed to resonate with.
It is (or was, not sure if it still is) Nintendo's "house" color since the early 1990's. And it's not purple, it's "indigo".
The stock SNES and N64 both had indigo accents. The base Game Boy Color was also indigo (there was also a clear indigo model, which is the one I have). Nintendo also used that color for their logo for a while (though not consistently). The official Game Boy logo is still indigo. It was/is a branding thing.
Whether you do or don't like the color, I think almost everybody who knows games identifies that color with Nintendo, in the same way people now identify Apple with white. And I don't think the color hurt the system - black was available fairly early on (if not at launch, I don't remember for sure - I know black was available in Japan before the US launch, when I bought my system).
btw, to go back to the original point regarding stackability, here's a list of some other systems that were not stackable:
Atari 2600 Atari 5200 Atari 7800 Coleco Vision Intellivision NES SNES Sega Genesis 1, 2, and 3 Sega Master System Neo Geo AES N64 PlayStation 1 (unless you put it on top, with clearance for the drive door) PlayStation 2 is marginal, again unless you put it on top Xbox
In other words, pretty much every major console ever made. If this is news to anyone, then you just haven't been a gamer very long. Consoles are meant to stand out, they're meant to be conversation pieces, the center of attention. I personally like it that way.
He also mentioned that most computer monitors have higher def than HD.
Which is not true anyway. The highest-res monitor I have in my house - out of four - is my HDTV. It's 1920x1080 capable. Of the PC-only monitors I have, the highest-res tops out at 1280x800.
At work, I'm a little better off. I have a 23" Apple Cinema Display HD that hits 1920x1200. But this is a $1300 display, and most people don't have that. My PC monitor sitting next to it is only really capable of 1152x864 (that's what I run it at, though it's happier at 1024x768).
According to my own web stats that I keep for my web site, most users are still running at either 1024x768 or 800x600. Something like 80% of my viewers run one of those two resolutions.
So I don't know where he gets that "most computer monitors" have "higher def" than HD. You're still lucky to find a computer monitor with 1920x1080 resolution and if you do, you'll pay for it. You just plain can't find a PC monitor that'll give you that resolution at 50 inches, though (although when you're talking digital HDTV's at that size using HDMI inputs, there's really no difference anymore between a PC monitor and a TV anyway).
I'd say that this guy just doesn't quite get it. He doesn't really know what he's talking about; he can't seriously be arguing against HD. He can't seriously believe that HD is simply "marketing" either; the fact of the matter is it is much higher resolution than the previous NTSC standard. The fact that some PC-centric monitors now feature HD-like resolutions just means the PC world finally caught up, not the other way around. It doesn't diminish the fact that playing a game in HD will be a much sharper, clearer experience than playing the same game in SD would be.
I have to say, it is true that X-Play, while pretty vapid at times in their contrived little skits, are a bit more honest than most game "journalists". So much so that I sometimes wonder how they can still manage to score review copies of games anymore.
But this issue is one reason why I refuse to ever not use quotes when I talk about game "journalists". They're not journalists. They consider themselves part of the game industry, and most of the time, they are. Think about that - think about a reporter from the Washington Post who considers himself part of George Bush's administration. And he's being asked to write articles on George Bush's administration. Is this really a journalist? Of course not. This is a PR spokesman.
But this is the situation with game "journalism", for the most part. These little fanboys like to think of themselves as part of the industry, and they rely on the industry for "exclusives" and for free review copies of games in advance of release so that they can compete with other publications. There is no way to be objective in such an arrangement. And that's not even taking into account the effects of paid advertising, which is a more subtle influence (it honestly does not affect individual writers that much, but it may affect overall editorial direction from the top).
You just can't have it both ways. Either you consider yourself part of the industry, continue with these shady practices and admit you're a PR shill, or you completely separate yourself from the industry and only then can you call yourself a journalist.
X-Play has done something of the impossible in that they've stayed relatively objective even as the industry has continued to support them. I'm sure that's in no small part due to the fact that they are really the only show on that godforsaken channel that anybody watches. Which in turn means they're really the only TV show that matters to the industry at all. But that situation probably will not remain true forever.
there are so many forms of competition that multiple humans can engage in. Why the obscession with combat in MMORPGs?
Well, it is called Star Wars. What would you expect a MMO game based on Star Wars to be like? Have you not seen the movies? The whole point of them is the good vs. evil swashbuckling-style space combat. (Lucas himself seemed to have forgotten this for a while...)
Maybe there's room for a non-combat oriented MMORPG on the market, but Star Wars Galaxies should not be that game. It's not Star Wars without the "Wars".
By that same token, I think this sounds like a great update. If I had more free time it might be enough for me to re-activate my subscription, which I cancelled specifically because I thought the game was a) boring, and b) too much like work. MMORPG's really need to be more fun across the board, IMO, and this one specifically was in dire need of a combat revamp. But the other changes they're making - no more "buying" skills, no more item decay (never understood that in any MMORPG), more movie-focused classes, etc. all sound like good changes too. Sounds like this game is finally becoming what it should have been in the first place.
Does that mean I forgive them for releasing a beta to the public and charging both the cost of the game and the monthly fees to play it in the meantime? No. The industry should not work that way. But at least they've done the mea culpa now and can hopefully move on.
They probably know they can't pull it off like MS did, so they aren't even going to bother.
You know, success is relative. Let's look at some numbers here.
Number of PS2's sold: 90 million Number of Xboxes sold: 24 million
Number of subscribers to Xbox Live: ~2 million
Amount of revenue MS has generated from the Xbox, Xbox Live, and Xbox games: -$4 billion (that's negative four billion dollars)
So, let's see. The decentralized PS2 has sold more than three times the number of Xboxes worldwide, and even among that much smaller Xbox user base, less than one in ten owners actually subscribes to Xbox Live. With a $4 billion loss, I literally just can't see what XBL has contributed to MS's bottom line - if the service itself has turned any sort of profit, it's buried under an avalanche of other losses related to the system.
If this is success, I'd like to see what gets termed failure around here!
Personally, XBL is one reason I'm waiting on buying an Xbox 360. I am actually averse to it, and I don't think I'm alone. It's one of the things that's given the current Xbox its reputation as a system for hardcore gamers; it's almost as if you have to have a little community of fellow geeks willing to play online to really get much out of the system. With MS focusing so heavily on even further promoting XBL for the 360, it's basically scaring me away as someone who likes to play solo and with friends or the wife in the same room. I'm just not interested in gaming with a bunch of immature, bitch-happy teen and pre-teen strangers, and I unfortunately (or fortunately?) do not have a little community of online geek friends around me to play games with.
I don't think I'm alone. The PS2 sold as well as it did because it catered to such a broad cross-section of gamers. I don't see that from the 360 - MS keeps saying they're trying to broaden the audience, but their actions say exactly the opposite. Every game has to be online, the system will always be online, buying the system automatically gives you an XBL account. Developers will need to make games with those things in mind. I don't want that. All I want is a little box that sits there and lets me play games either alone or with other people in my own house. Even approximately 90% of current Xbox users appear to feel the same way. I honestly think the heavy focus on Xbox Live is holding back both current Xbox sales as well as future Xbox 360 sales - it's scaring away offline players.
All three of the next-gen systems will be online in one way or another, but I prefer the model Sony and Nintendo are using, which is much more relaxed and feels less forced.
As long as you stick to Intel chipset and recommended hardware, you don't need much power to run MCE smoothly.
Huh? You're as bad as the guy you're replying to. Why would you need to stick to Intel chipsets?
I run an AMD/VIA setup, with an Athlon XP 2600+, and while recording *and* playing back *and* running a separate remote session (which you're not supposed to be able to do, but there's a hack for it) all at the same time, my CPU usage never rises above 20-25%.
In fact, I used to watch one show on my TV, record another, and be encoding video in the background over that remote session, all with no hitches at all.
I have no idea what the advantage of running an Intel chipset would be.
I also have no idea what sort of problem the guy who wrote this review has. I admit I don't actually use MCE for TV anymore (I wanted HD cable, including pay channels, which basically ruled MCE out at that point), but I've never had *any* of the problems with it that he's saying he had. That's not to say MCE is perfect - it is far from it. But it is a heck of a lot better than TiVo, especially if you raise your recording bit rates in the registry (this should be easier, but you can't do it at all with TiVo). I had mine set to 12mbps for the best quality setting and there was no difference whatsoever from my raw cable feed. In fact, one of the reasons I dumped TiVo for MCE in the first place was for the better picture quality. Especially with sports, I just couldn't even stomach TiVo anymore once I got my HDTV.
MCE 2007 or whatever had better include real Cable Card support and should include updates like easily selectable bit rates, along with being able to tune HDTV without having an analog card installed. But generally speaking, MCE is the most streamlined, easiest to use, and best quality homebrew DVR you can get right now. (And yes, I've tried MythTV, Snapstream, etc.)
I don't think widescreen is worth the expense. As it is, for example, a 20" widescreen costs just as much or more than a 21" standard aspect ratio, but gives the user less vertical resolution, despite having the same horizontal resolution. Why pay more for fewer pixels?
This is not really true. For example, currently on Dell's web site, there are a 20" 4:3 and a 20" 16:10 monitor that are exactly the same but for the aspect ratio and the inherent resolution difference that that implies. The 4:3 version is $749 and the 16:10 is currently on sale for $545, though it normally sells for $699.
The resolution on the 4:3 model is 1600x1200, while it's 1680x1050 on the 16:10 version. That's a negligible difference in total pixels, and the price reflects that negligible difference (i.e. the widescreen version is actually slightly less expensive).
Now, are those extra 80 horizontal pixels useful for anything? Well yes, because it's not just about pixels. It's also about actual horizontal size. When you're watching a DVD or HDTV, you're not going to be looking at actual pixels anyway. The same is true of today's high-resolution digital photos. In those cases, it's better to have an aspect ratio that more closely matches the source aspect ratio to give you the most actual screen area (in inches, or however you want to measure it... but not pixels). Viewing a 3:2 photo (standard 35mm/APS ratio) on a 4:3 20" monitor will appear much smaller than it would on a 16:10 20" monitor when opened in an app that puts various tools on the side (as almost all image browsers/editors do).
It really depends on what you use your computer for whether a widescreen monitor is worth it or not. For most "home" users, who watch DVD's, play games, maybe edit their digital photos, I would think a widescreen monitor would be best. I really enjoy having one myself. Obviously for any video or photo pros, widescreen is also better. For someone who's writing code, though, maybe not so much.
That said, a widescreen display is only 12% wider in aspect ratio (1.5 vs. 1.333)
No, 16:10 is obviously 1.6:1, not 1.5:1. You can also get 16:9 screens which are 1.77:1, matching HDTV exactly. Most people go for 16:10, though, because it's a compromise that allows you greater width for movies and photos while still being reasonable for web browsing and word processing apps that can better use the extra height.
I use it once a week or less, and after three years have learnt to do a few things, but every time I need to do something different I have to spend half an hour digging through the help, which is almost as bad as a Unix man page, or Googling for an explanation. Unless you meant "easy to use after you're experienced", certainly not "easy to learn" for most people.
But it is easy to learn the "45 things" that most photographers do all the time. Cropping, resizing, etc. are all either on the main tool palette or they're top-level menu items. If you can't figure out how to do these things, then I don't see how you can figure out how to use any modern computer application. You can have a discussion about how applications have gotten unuseable in general, but Photoshop is no worse than any other app in this.
If you want to do something advanced, like, say, dropping realistic clouds into a cloudless sky, then yeah, it's going to take some time to learn to do that. But most photo apps can't do something like that at all, so I don't see that it's something to complain about. And most advanced tasks either cannot be automated or you wouldn't want them to be - I can't even imagine what a "drop in clouds" function would end up doing to your photos. And even if it did basically work (which it wouldn't), you'd suddenly have eight billion photos on the web that all look exactly the same with these fake-looking clouds.
If you want a really basic image editor that's really easy to use, just download Picasa2 (it's free) and press the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button for all your photos. For most people, that's all they want anyway, and it doesn't get any easier than that (I can't say the quality will always be the best, but you can always undo, and anyway we're talking simple to use now, not best quality). Even cropping can be done automatically for common photo paper sizes, though there's no real reason I can see that you'd want to do this.
But for anything more advanced, yes, you're going to have to do some work. To me, a lot of this whining about image editors that goes on these days is just laziness - people just want to press a button and have the software do everything for them, even if it's beyond simple things like adjusting brightness, contrast or color balance. Well, it wasn't like that when people had to process all their photos in a darkroom and it's not that way today and it will never be that way. If you want to do real heavy work on your photos, you are going to need to learn how to do things and you are going to need to spend some time doing them. That's just the way it is.
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I agree that the two "shake outs" are not completely comparable.
Well, they're not at all comparable. Either this guy didn't actually live through the crash of 84 as he says he did, or he's just completely forgot about it.
Christmas of 1983 was a disaster, and that was after a huge drop in the stock market price of all of the major game manufacturers (which constricted their investment). The losses incurred in 1983 and 1984 were staggering. It's pretty disingenuous to say both Atari and the Intellivision lived on after that - Mattel practically went out of business (the electronics division in fact did; INTV Corp came in and picked up the scraps), Coleco exited the business after only 2 years, and even the mighty Atari, owned by Warner, was forced to cut their losses.
Console gaming died in 1984. I mean that literally. 1984 was the only time in the past 40 that no major home console was on the market in the United States. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine today walking into a Toys R Us and seeing not a single video game system on display? Can you imagine GameStop switching back to selling business software? Can you imagine Microsoft/SubLogic Flight Simulator II being the #1 game?
That's what happened in 1984. I'm 34, and I was there. It was a crash.
You can't say that because INTV later took over Mattel's stock and started selling the scraps mail order-only that that means nothing really happened. Or that the fact that a gutted and reorganized Atari released a new console three years after exiting the market, that that also means there was no crash. And what of Coleco? He doesn't even mention them. Where's the Coleco Vision in 1985?
After 1984, the entire center of gravity for the industry shifted to Japan. Prior to 1984, most Americans were not even aware that people played games outside of the United States. All game consoles (as we knew them) were American. That's just the way it was. By 1985, every console on the market would be Japanese. (The Atari 7800 was not officially on the market until 1987 and was never a serious contender. The later Jaguar was not really a factor at all and finally put the company under.)
There was nothing remotely comparable in 1994-1995. Nintendo continued making money hand over fist. Sony was just beginning their initial investment. Sega was the only major manufacturer experiencing hard times, but nobody thought that was anything but a momentary blip at that time... and in fact it was not clear who would ultimately win the 32 bit race for several years. Atari was still around, but by this time they were playing a bit part. They never recovered from the crash.
This guy brings up all the minor players - which historically have never done well in the console industry - and selectively uses them to prove a non-existent point about 94-95. Why doesn't he mention Magnavox in 1980? Or Vectrex in 1983? What about all the other 3DO's and Amigas over the years? There have been plenty. These sorts of companies and systems do not indicate industry trends - it would be like talking about the "crash of 2004" because the Tapwave Zodiac was a flop. Isn't it obvious that it's the major players in the industry that matter, not these circus sideshows?
I'm probably a little more annoyed at this "article" than I should be, but it's completely revisionist history. He cites one article full of wishful thinking that he probably read in an Electronic Games magazine he just bought off of Ebay and uses that as a basis for his whole entry. Some of us actually remember what it was like back then, walking into TRU and seeing a bunch of Cabbage Patch Kids where the video games used to be.
This is such a good idea. Which means it will never happen.
Well, it's not necessarily a good idea, for two reasons.
a) It will mean higher prices.
b) It will mean fewer choices.
Pretty much exactly the opposite of why some people seem to want it. Let me explain.
Right now, you pay what, $30 for 100 channels or whatever your cable company charges for the package you have. Switch to a-la-carte and do you really think any channel is going to allow themselves to be priced for under a buck a month? It's one thing to be included as part of a package, but if you break it down and say "this channel is worth 20 cents, this channel is worth $2", no channel is going to accept being priced on that low end. And the whole point of a-la-carte pricing is to take the power out of the cable company's hands, so it will be the channels themselves that do the pricing.
A lot of channels right now are subsidized by other channels that whatever media conglomerate that owns them requires the cable company to include as part of a package of other, more popular channels. This is how channels like Sundance Channel and BBC America exist. It both helps new channels mature and grow a customer base and it brings prestige and cross-marketing opportunities to the channels' owner. These channels will be gone under a-la-carte pricing, because they will be forced to pay their own way from day one, and they will not be able to command the prices required for them to operate profitably.
What you're going to end up with is a bunch of lowest common denominator, mainstream channels that are as driven by the cable equivalent of "ratings" as the major TV networks are now (in cable's case, those "ratings" would be represented by subscriptions). Is that really a good thing? Not to me, it isn't.
Now, you can argue that it's the free market, blah blah blah, and that's true, but I'd like to point out that it's the free market that made Titanic the #1 movie of all time and Britney Spears the #1 selling music artist of the past few years. Do you really want to be relying on your fellow customers to support the channels you want well enough to keep them afloat on their own?
Now, I'm not saying the current system is perfect; it isn't. It needs major changes, and it is a government-sanctioned monopoly right now from the bottom on up. But one of the good things about the current system, which will be thrown out the window with a-la-carte pricing, is a sort of immunity to mainstream whims that the major networks have to contend with. It's why cable channels can be a little edgier, why they can take more chances in finding and building an audience. You should really be asking yourself why it is that the FCC is recommending this in the name of promoting decency on television - it's not about price. It's about putting out of business channels that do anything outside the mainstream.
You see, I've got to disagree with most of what you have to say. The only EA game I play regularly is Madden. Madden has done a decent job of adding features without screwing too much with the formula since about Madden 2003 (where 2003 is actually the year 2002 here).
You need to read this.
"Many of the unique gameplay features of the last couple of Madden games are missing; lots of missing modes--all you get is a husk of a franchise mode and online play; some unsightly animation and graphical hang-ups that stick out all the more on a next-gen console; you can't challenge plays."
In other words, the latest, greatest version of Madden actually has much less in the way of features than the previous versions.
I don't know if this is intentional on the part of EA - trying to backtrack with the 360 so they can re-add all those features later and charge people again for stuff they already paid for in the original Xbox era - but if so, it's pretty shameless. And if you read the reviews for all of EA's sports games on the 360, the same is true across the line.
This is exactly the kind of thing these analysts are talking about turning people off.
That's the point I think is being missed. After everything is said and done, the thing is still, design-wise, pretty much a glorified PC. Microsoft has come out with a proprietary platform which they're using the gamer market to propagate. They can gradually add other functionality to increase it's market.
What, you mean kinda like this?
The fact of the matter is every console is pretty much a "glorified PC" (or a "dumbed down" PC, depending on your perspective), and every single time - yes, every single time a new console is released, the manufacturer claims that it's going to do this, that and the other thing eventually, or that it's going to converge a whole bunch of devices into one. This is true going all the way back to the Odyssey II and Atari 2600, which also promised PC functionality. The Sega CD and NEC Turbo CD were the first (or among the first) to then promise home entertainment functionality once optical storage became the norm.
The reality is people just don't care. A few do, and those are the kind of people that sued Mattel when they never actually released their promised keyboard component from lack of interest (they only had something like 4,000 orders, which meant they couldn't get the component cost low enough to make a profit). Those people can be very vocal. They're the real hardcore. They're on the internet complaining when companies don't release promised add-ons, they're the ones that always have to be the contrarians when someone like me points out that they're the minority.
But they are the extreme, extreme minority. I agree with the parent poster who said as soon as the next hot console comes along, gamers will abandon the Xbox 360, because it really is about the games and only about the games, and it always will be. This is not going to be some great window into the living room. It is simply the console of the moment, and in five years it will be forgotten like every other console of the moment. MS is not creating some sort of home entertainment "standard" with the Xbox 360.
It never ceases to amuse me how people say the exact same things every time a new console is released. "It's going to do all these great things besides playing video games! It's revolutionary!" Ha! So in other words, it's just like every other console ever.
The Xbox 360 explores new menu structures with a unique and pleasant GUI. One often-overlooked element that the Microsoft games group brings to the party is its unique GUIs that are unlike the folder/desktop metaphor that Xerox and Apple developed."
Since when has the GUI had anything whatsoever to do with how good and/or successful a console is? Does Dvorak not realize the whole purpose of a console is to play games?
Even if you're a convergence guy and believe people will be using their Xbox for movies as well as games, I still don't see how the GUI has anything to do with anything. What you want is a system where you interact with the GUI as little as possible, whatever you're doing. Most people shouldn't even know that it exists.
The fact that so many people are focusing so heavily on the Xbox 360's GUI suggests to me that it's far too prominent and intrusive.
So very true. If "acting" is what's important, then why are all actresses (even the B-list ones), with a few minor exceptions, ridiculously hot? I mean, is it a coincidence?
Man, you guys are cynical. I work in the TV industry, and I've worked on films as well (not as a casting director, but I've worked with them).
The reality is actors are cast because of a combination of ability and looks that fit the part. If a part calls for an 80 year old woman, are you going to cast Keira Knightley in the role? Obviously not.
If a part calls for a 20 year old woman, then maybe you will. Yes, you want the most attractive actors with the best ability. There are plenty of award-winning actors (both male and female) that are not particularly attractive but who fit the needs of a lot of roles in Hollywood - Frances McDormand, Lili Taylor, etc. Of the "hot" actresses in the world, you seem to be pretty insulting towards their ability - is Charlize Theron not a great actress? Did you not see her in Monster? Did you not see Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted? Have you not seen Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive or 21 Grams?
Not all actresses you see in Hollywood films are the greatest in the world. But A-list actresses by and large are; that's how they became A-list actresses, through their professionalism, their ability, and yes, their look. The fact that the movies surrounding them may not always be written or directed to their strengths says little about their ability; it says more about your taste in movies that this is the only work of theirs that you've seen.
What do you think about http://www.gamerankings.com/?
Everybody knows about gamerankings.com and I think a lot of people put too much stock in them.
The problem is review scores - even aggregated ones - tell you nothing. Reviewers often get so caught up in hype themselves that they can't (or won't) see a game's faults, and of course there's the issue of paid advertising at almost every publication. That's not to say reviews themselves are useless, but just looking at a score - even an average of the scores from a bunch of publications - is not going to tell you anything.
But for some of the same reasons, simply reading one or two reviews is not going to help you either. What you need to do is read between the lines when you read these reviews. Ask yourself "what is this reviewer not telling me about this game?"
For example, before I bought NFL 2K5, I read a bunch of reviews about it. None of them spent more than a couple sentences talking about the franchise mode, which is the main mode I play in every sports game I buy. If they said anything, it was just about it being more "fleshed out" than the year before. Still, they all said the core gameplay was great, so I bought the game. Sure enough, franchise mode was so buggy that it was literally impossible to play more than a couple seasons of it (destroying the whole point of that mode). The developer forums were flush with complaints about numerous game-stopping bugs, several of which I personally encountered pretty quickly, but none of which were mentioned in any review I read.
Obviously, these reviewers simply hadn't played that mode. They looked at the options and assumed they knew how it worked and that was enough for them. I should have known better, because not a single one of these reviews mentioned anything about playing more than a couple games in franchise mode.
It's not just about bugs, though. Reviewers are paid to review what's there, not what's not there. Ask yourself what you're expecting out of a game and whether the reviews you're reading are speaking directly to those wants or not. If you're looking for an adventure game and you find a game you think you might be interested in but the reviewers just talk about how much fun it is to shoot zombies, then even if the game gets a high score, it's probably not for you.
Beyond that, though, there is definitely real corruption in game journalism, whether intentional or not. I think a lot of it is actually not intentional; reviewers get wooed and wowed by big publishers with trips and gifts and whatnot, and all the while the publisher hammers into their heads how big a particular game is going to be, how awesome it is, how everybody's looking forward to it. Eventually it becomes a self-fulfilling thing, and you see more preview coverage and more hype. The press themselves buy into it. The game comes out and in order to justify themselves, all of the press gives it a ridiculously high score. Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, which even Shigeru Miyamoto now calls "boring" and basically unfinished. But it has a score of 94.9% on GameRankings, because the press bought the hype that they themselves helped create.
So my point is you cannot rely on scores (even aggregate ones) and you cannot rely solely on "sound bites" culled from reviews. You need to read reviews carefully and think about why reviewers say certain things and why they are not saying other things. Basically, just use some critical thinking skills - skills that a lot of game reviewers lack.
Launch titles have never been revolutionary. What revolutionary title did the PS2 launch with? The Gamecube? The Dreamcast?
The PS2 launch lineup:
Armored Core 2 (Agetec, Action)
DOA2: Hardcore (Tecmo, Fighting)
Dynasty Warriors 2 (Koei, Action)
ESPN International Track and Field (Konami, Sports)
ESPN X-Games Snowboarding (Konami, Sports)
Eternal Ring (Agetec, RPG)
Evergrace (Agetec, RPG)
FantaVision (SCEI, Puzzle)
Gun Griffon Blaze (Working Designs, Action)
Kessen (EA, Adventure)
Madden NFL 2001 (EA, Sports)
Midnight Club (Rockstar, Racing)
Moto GP (Namco, Racing)
NHL 2001 (EA, Sports)
Orphen (Activision, RPG)
Q-Ball Billiards Master (Take-Two Interactive, Simulation)
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2 (Midway, Sports)
Ridge Racer V (Namco, Racing)
Silent Scope (Konami, Shooter)
Smuggler's Run (Rockstar, Racing-Adventure)
SSX (EA, Sports)
Street Fighter EX3 (Capcom, Fighting)
Summoner (THQ, RPG)
Swing Away (Paradise Golf in Japan) (EA, Sports)
Tekken Tag Tournament (Namco, fighting)
TimeSplitters (Eidos, First-Person Shooter)
Unreal Tournament (Infogrames, First-Person Shooter)
Wild Wild Racing (Interplay, Racing)
X-Squad (EA, Action)
Not a huge number of classics, but I would argue that SSX was pretty revolutionary and it's still fun today. The only game that really sort of approximated what it did prior to that was 1080, but it wasn't nearly as tight.
There were also some good niche titles in that list, such as Silent Scope, Kessen, and Dynasty Warriors 2. The 360 launch is lacking quality niche titles to draw in those who aren't all about sports or FPS games. The PS2 also had *two* triple-A fighting games; the 360 has none.
Here's the Dreamcast launch list:
* Airforce Delta | Konami | $49
* Blue Stinger | Sega | $49
* CART Flag to Flag | Sega | $49
* Expendable | Infogrames | $49
* House of the Dead 2 | Sega | $49
* Hydro Thunder | Midway | $49
* Monaco Grand Prix | Ubi Soft | $49
* Mortal Kombat Gold | Midway | $49
* NFL 2000 | Sega | $49
* NFL Blitz 2000 | Midway | $49
* Pen Pen Tri-Icelon | Infogrames | $49
* Power Stone | Capcom | $49
* Ready 2 Rumble | Midway | $49
* Sonic Adventure | Sega | $49
* Soul Calibur | Namco | $49
* TNN Hardcore Heat | ASC | $49
* Tokyo Xtreme Racing | Crave | $49
* TrickStyle | Acclaim | $49
You'll never convince me that Power Stone was not revolutionary, Sonic Adventure wasn't the best platformer of its time, and Soul Calibur was not the best fighting game ever made. Beyond that, again a good mix of mainstream stuff (NFL 2K being the best sports title available at the time) and niche titles (HotD2, TXR, etc.). The 360 just doesn't have the mix right, and it's lacking *any* true standouts.
It's also worth noting that the Dreamcast launch had a much better proportion of original titles to sequels than the Xbox 360 does.
The GameCube I might grant you, although at least the GameCube did have some of Nintendo's best franchises represented (though no Mario) - and it had one of my favorite games of all time, Super Monkey Ball. Show me that kind of silly fun in the Xbox 360's launch lineup.
I would agree with those that say the 360's launch lineup is relatively weak. It's not the worst I've ever seen (go back a few years and you'll find systems that launched with only 2 or 3 games total!), but it's not great by recent standards.
This was settled back in the days of the NES. The courts ruled Tengen could make third-party games for the Nintendo system. So why would RARE bother with grovelling at MS's feet for a certification? It's established enough so that customers won't care.
Ignoring the part about Rare being owned by MS (which is really irrelevant to the point), your assumption is mistaken.
First of all, it's neither here nor there but you've got the wrong precedent. The only case in which Nintendo actually went to court against Tengen was found in favor of Nintendo. The case which you're probably thinking of was settled out of court (again, though, with Tengen paying damages to Nintendo for breach of contract - they had been a licensee).
The precedent you're thinking of was decided in Atari vs. Activision, which settled the fact that third party developers had a right to develop games on any manufacturer's system, with or without help from that manufacturer. This is not disputed today.
However, manufacturers still have the right to implement technological "locks" on their systems, and in fact this is why Nintendo ended up suing Tengen and Tengen ended up paying them damages. Reverse-engineering is one thing, but Tengen lied to the US copyright office to obtain Nintendo's lockout program (they told them they needed it for the court case, not for commercial use), which they then duplicated on their cartridges. Tengen was clearly guilty of copyright infringement in that case.
The same would be true of anyone who today tried to release games without the approval of a console manufacturer, especially now that the DMCA exists, which prohibits the breaking of encryption around copyrighted works (in this case, the code on the lockout protection chips). Console manufacturers own code needed for a publisher to run their games on the console in question, and only the manufacturer has a right to license that code. They're also free to set conditions (such as quality control conditions) in their license contracts.
All 3rd party developers today go through a quality control process run by the console manufacturer, whether it's Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft. Otherwise they would not have access to the code they would need for their games to work. It was exactly the case you mistakenly described that standardized this process to begin with (it did the opposite of what you think it did), and the DMCA has only strengthened the console manufacturers' hand. (I hate the DMCA, but I think most people are happy that there is a standard QA process for console games.)
The only developers who do not go through a standardized QA process are PC game developers. Which is one reason why PC games tend to be buggier and why the quality control is inconsistent from one developer to another. (Some developers may put out games that are pretty clean, others may put out games that are an unplayable mess.) That's not to say that every console manufacturer's process is created equally - in my own personal experience MS and Sony are both pretty lax in terms of bugs and overall polish in both first- and third-party games when compared with Nintendo, probably because they're competing so hard with each other lately on release dates while Nintendo sort of goes its own way. (Sony also seems to have gotten worse over the years, again as MS has started to catch up a bit in sales.)
But the point is, the way the process is described here is the way it always works; the only difference is Rare started pressing discs before the game was certified.
The XBox 360 is getting a *lot* of visibility in both the regular media, and in IT/gaming media. As the other poster mentioned, posters and advertising is abundant, especially in gaming shops and places like Akihabara.
Note that this was true of the original Xbox as well.
Note also that Japan is more than Akihabara. I don't know if you're a westerner in Japan or a native Japanese, but a lot of westerners seem to think that the entire nation of Japan visits Akihabara to buy their electronics. I'm not sure why this is; it's just a single neighborhood in a single city.
I wonder, for example, how many Xbox 360 posters you'd see if you went to the WonderGoo in Ryu-Gasaki? Probably not many. (You're free to go there and prove me wrong if you like.) What about at 7-11's, which is where most rural Japanese buy their systems? What about in other large cities like Osaka or Sapporo? Japan is a country of 125 million people; they don't all live in or near Akihabara.
I'm sure MS is running TV ads but a lot of companies run TV ads that you've probably still never heard of. My co-worker yesterday, for example, told me he'd never heard of Bristol-Myers Squibb. This is a huge pharmeceutical company with an ad budget that probably rivals McDonalds. I think the point is if you're not interested in the product to begin with, you're pretty much just going to tune it out. And there is just not much interest in the Xbox 360 there.
You can deny it all you want, just like some people denied the lack of interest in the original Xbox. I argued with people about this 5 years ago too; I even predicted the number of units it'd sell at launch to within 10,000 units. I do think the 360 will do a bit better initially but not that much better, and interest will wane quickly just as it did with the original system. It's not a system casual gamers have any interest whatsoever there; it's strictly for the hardcore and the import crowd. Nothing MS has done has changed that, whatever the impression you might get from walking around one tiny neighborhood in one city.
The type of mutation scientists are worried about would spread easily human-to-human. If the virus spreads fast enough, it doesn't matter if the victims are healthy in the morning and dead by night.
Well, yes it does, because as has been pointed out, the virus would die out pretty quickly in that case.
What the scientists are worried about is a more traditional pattern of incubation followed by a period of outward symptoms that lasts for a week or two. It's during the incubation period, though, that you're contagious, and with other flus that can last for a few days to a week.
The danger of the "bird flu" strain isn't so much how virulent it is as how deadly. Every year, hundreds of millions of people contract the flu, and more still would if vaccines didn't exist (no vaccines exist for the bird flu strain). The vast majority of these people get better. In this case, though, with a 50% mortality rate you'd be talking millions and millions of dead. And that's with a standard infection pattern.
I think there are people who are making some pretty extreme predictions on both sides of this. Some say it's almost certain that this will be a pandemic and when it happens, there will be no escape. Others say it's highly unlikely this virus will ever mutate and that if it does, a combination of effective quarantines, an expected vaccine and other measures will put it down. I'm sure that like most things, the truth is probably in the middle.
Is it just me, or are most of the scores pretty arbitary?
Completely, and most of them are utter bullshit.
I truly believe that, like films or music or a lot of other things, you need the passage of time to judge the quality of any console launch. True, part of the equation is the excitement generated at the time, and the organization of the logistics, marketing and promotion, but the whole purpose of a launch is to start selling a system (duh) and often the particular strategy being used takes some time to play out. To at least some extent, it's pretty meaningless if you have a launch that generates a lot of hype but not much in the way of sales (i.e. Dreamcast).
So, there's that. But some of these scores are also completely ridiculous on their face. The DS landed with a "thud"? It sold as many units its first week as the PSP! The PSP's the one that only sold half the units produced.
Anyway, you can't take any article like this too seriously because they're specifically written to generate discussion like this - controversy is the goal. But this list does seem particularly ridiculous.
I'm not so sure this is artificial scarcity anymore. It's one thing to create a buzz with a brief period of scarcity. It's another thing to extend it so long that you eat up all of your much touted lead time on the competition.
And it's another still to rely on clerks at GameStop for reliable information.
Seriously, I don't get this. Do you rely on the cashier at Wal-Mart for information on your favorite director's next film or for the latest info on HD technology? Why are people constantly quoting counter clerks at game stores for industry info? These guys know nothing. It's a truly bizarre phenomenon - every time I walk into a game store I see half a dozen people literally hovering over the counter talking to the clerks about games, then I'll bet it's those same people who hit up sites like this with the "info" they've gleaned. To me, this carries no more weight than asking any random person on the street the same questions and then posting their answers.
These guys make minimum wage to ring up your purchases. That's all they do. They do not have industry "contacts", they do not talk to developers or publishers or manufacturers. They ring up purchases and they vacuum the store at closing time. That's what they're paid to do and that's the extent of their real knowledge. Anything else you get from them is, at best, something they've read in a magazine - which is the same thing you could do yourself.
I kinda get the feeling that both the clerks themselves and the guys who chat them up for info to post on the net actually like feeling like they have this little "shadow" game industry unto themselves. They like starting rumors; they don't even want real info. A couple years ago I actually worked for a publisher and I'd go into the GameStop near my company all the time, often with my company colors on (we had jackets with our company name on them). Not that I'd tell anyone anything if they asked, but not a single person ever even tried getting info from me, even if they were talking to the counter clerk about my company's games with me standing right next to them! The clerks themselves must have known who we were (a lot of us frequented this GameStop, and they knew we were in the neighborhood), but not a single one of them ever tried to pump us for info either. It was kind of funny, but it definitely made me think that real info is not even what these guys want - juicy info is what they want, whether or not it's true. Truth is not really on their radar, and that's most likely the case with this Xbox 360 rumor just as it is with everything else.
Since your two biggest competitors (Sony PS3, Nintendo revolution) have announced that feature? And that it was one of the major reasons the Dreamcast was hurled into obscurity and securing the Playstation's spot as market leader?
So in your mind, the history of game consoles starts in 1999?
The PS1 was obviously not backward compatible with anything and it did pretty well. Same deal with the original Xbox.
Hardware manufacturers made the mistake of putting too much stock in backward compatibility in 1982-1983 too (the Atari 5200, Mattel Intellivision and Coleco Vision all featured adapters that were compatible with the Atari 2600). You know what happened? Every single one of them - every single company making systems at that time - lost so much money with that strategy that they exited the industry within a year. (And probably directly because of that strategy, because it allowed developers to continue dumping poor-quality, obsolete Atari 2600 cartridges on the market, taking attention and shelf space away from the new systems and diluting the market.)
Atari came back in 1987 with the 7800, which was compatible with the 2600 out of the box. You know what happened? The NES - which was not backward compatible with anything - blew it out of the water.
Neither Sony nor MS could even exist in the video game industry if backward compatibility was a requirement for success. They came very late to the party when established makers dominated the industry, and their all-new products did pretty well, I think you'll agree.
Can you say "formula for success"?
No. The results of backward compatibility in the marketplace are mixed at best. For every success (the Game Boy, the PS2) there are probably a half dozen failures. And for every successful console that did feature backward compatibility, there are half a dozen other successful consoles that didn't.
I'd say the record pretty much proves that backward compatibility is mostly a non-issue. There's no "formula" for anything contained in this one feature. It is just a feature. Some people want it, some people don't care, just like some people want a hard drive and some people don't care or some people want custom soundtracks in their games and some people don't care. Is it probably a good thing to include if you can, as simply another feature to attract a subset of gamers? Sure, but if you focus so much on that one feature at the expense of everything else, your console will be a failure. By the same token, if you decide early on that backward compatibility will be too difficult to implement, and you instead work on nailing everything else about the system, then your console will be a success. But success or failure does not hinge on this one feature and history has proven it time and time again.
Note that I am not predicting that the Xbox 360 will be as popular as the PS3; I don't think it will be. But it's not because I think a bunch of people are going to be spending $400 on a PS3 to play their old PS2 games. There are a variety of reasons why I have this opinion, but none of them have to do with the 360's backward compatibility.
What if you considered that it might just have something to do with the quality of the programming?
So you're saying Bizarre are bad coders? Have you ever actually played one of their games? Specifically any of the games in this series, going back to the original Metropolis Street Racer on Dreamcast.
Bizarre have always gotten the most out of the hardware they're working on, even if it's early in the console's lifespan. There are, even today, few racing games on the Xbox that look as good as the first PGR, and that was a first-wave title.
Let's assume you're right, and that Bizarre is not getting much out of the Xbox 360. That would suggest, at best, that the system is incredibly difficult to program for. If some of the best and most experienced racing game coders in the world cannot manage true HD on the system, what hope does anyone else have?
I think it's more likely that the 360 is just underpowered. That's the price you pay being first to market. The max res the 360 even supports is 1080i, and you don't even hear MS talking much about games that'll utilize that - all the talk I've heard has been about 720p, and now we're hearing that even one of those games, from a great developer, won't even really make that res. Something ain't kosher here.
Where does the line between manga and comic art exist then, if not by country of origin?
I was thinking the same thing when I read that last sentence in the submission. "Manga" is not a style, it specifically refers to Japanese graphic storytelling. Otherwise there'd be no reason to even use that word. We use that word to refer to their comics/graphic novels because they use that word to refer to the same material. (It is the same with "anime".)
Anything that is created outside of Japan is not manga, at least not if you're using that word to differentiate something from a standard comic (i.e. you are speaking English and not Japanese). It may be "manga-inspired", but it is not manga.
People do get into arguments about this sort of thing, and yes, there can be questions of degree... a lot of anime, for example, is written and designed in Japan but drawn in Korea. Is it really anime? Probably. Same is true of some manga. But if you're talking about comics written by Americans, drawn by Americans, in America, that's just a comic. That's got nothing to do with manga, however its visual style may look.
Well, there's one more option, slot loading.
The problem is this is literally not safe with a high-speed drive. This was Sony's stated reason for not going that route with the PS2 (everyone expected them to, originally). The PS2 doesn't even have a very high-speed drive, but imagine a 52X spinner shooting out of a game console's slot - that'd literally be like a buzzsaw heading most likely straight at you. That's not even considering the problem of shattered discs, which does happen in high-speed drives. The shrapnel can exit a slot loader at roughly the same speed as an exploding grenade. (MythBusters tested the effects of this; they found most discs will not break in a drive unless cracked or damaged, but that's hardly an uncommon thing among gamers, who are often teenagers who don't take care of their stuff.)
Obviously you can design a system such that it has safety mechanisms in place, but you can't protect an open slot from escaping shrapnel. You'd have to really over-design a complicated system that has an internal motorized door that really then basically acts the same way as a tray-loader and is no more reliable (and probably less).
The Revolution can probably get away with a slot-loader because it's not going to be using an ultra high-speed drive. Though I don't know how they're going to handle the loading of the smaller GameCube discs (since it's supposedly backward compatible).
The only big mistake in the GC design was the original color. It just looked silly. A black GC looks fairly sleek and cool. I'm not entirely sure who that pastel purple was supposed to resonate with.
It is (or was, not sure if it still is) Nintendo's "house" color since the early 1990's. And it's not purple, it's "indigo".
The stock SNES and N64 both had indigo accents. The base Game Boy Color was also indigo (there was also a clear indigo model, which is the one I have). Nintendo also used that color for their logo for a while (though not consistently). The official Game Boy logo is still indigo. It was/is a branding thing.
Whether you do or don't like the color, I think almost everybody who knows games identifies that color with Nintendo, in the same way people now identify Apple with white. And I don't think the color hurt the system - black was available fairly early on (if not at launch, I don't remember for sure - I know black was available in Japan before the US launch, when I bought my system).
btw, to go back to the original point regarding stackability, here's a list of some other systems that were not stackable:
Atari 2600
Atari 5200
Atari 7800
Coleco Vision
Intellivision
NES
SNES
Sega Genesis 1, 2, and 3
Sega Master System
Neo Geo AES
N64
PlayStation 1 (unless you put it on top, with clearance for the drive door)
PlayStation 2 is marginal, again unless you put it on top
Xbox
In other words, pretty much every major console ever made. If this is news to anyone, then you just haven't been a gamer very long. Consoles are meant to stand out, they're meant to be conversation pieces, the center of attention. I personally like it that way.
He also mentioned that most computer monitors have higher def than HD.
Which is not true anyway. The highest-res monitor I have in my house - out of four - is my HDTV. It's 1920x1080 capable. Of the PC-only monitors I have, the highest-res tops out at 1280x800.
At work, I'm a little better off. I have a 23" Apple Cinema Display HD that hits 1920x1200. But this is a $1300 display, and most people don't have that. My PC monitor sitting next to it is only really capable of 1152x864 (that's what I run it at, though it's happier at 1024x768).
According to my own web stats that I keep for my web site, most users are still running at either 1024x768 or 800x600. Something like 80% of my viewers run one of those two resolutions.
So I don't know where he gets that "most computer monitors" have "higher def" than HD. You're still lucky to find a computer monitor with 1920x1080 resolution and if you do, you'll pay for it. You just plain can't find a PC monitor that'll give you that resolution at 50 inches, though (although when you're talking digital HDTV's at that size using HDMI inputs, there's really no difference anymore between a PC monitor and a TV anyway).
I'd say that this guy just doesn't quite get it. He doesn't really know what he's talking about; he can't seriously be arguing against HD. He can't seriously believe that HD is simply "marketing" either; the fact of the matter is it is much higher resolution than the previous NTSC standard. The fact that some PC-centric monitors now feature HD-like resolutions just means the PC world finally caught up, not the other way around. It doesn't diminish the fact that playing a game in HD will be a much sharper, clearer experience than playing the same game in SD would be.
I have to say, it is true that X-Play, while pretty vapid at times in their contrived little skits, are a bit more honest than most game "journalists". So much so that I sometimes wonder how they can still manage to score review copies of games anymore.
But this issue is one reason why I refuse to ever not use quotes when I talk about game "journalists". They're not journalists. They consider themselves part of the game industry, and most of the time, they are. Think about that - think about a reporter from the Washington Post who considers himself part of George Bush's administration. And he's being asked to write articles on George Bush's administration. Is this really a journalist? Of course not. This is a PR spokesman.
But this is the situation with game "journalism", for the most part. These little fanboys like to think of themselves as part of the industry, and they rely on the industry for "exclusives" and for free review copies of games in advance of release so that they can compete with other publications. There is no way to be objective in such an arrangement. And that's not even taking into account the effects of paid advertising, which is a more subtle influence (it honestly does not affect individual writers that much, but it may affect overall editorial direction from the top).
You just can't have it both ways. Either you consider yourself part of the industry, continue with these shady practices and admit you're a PR shill, or you completely separate yourself from the industry and only then can you call yourself a journalist.
X-Play has done something of the impossible in that they've stayed relatively objective even as the industry has continued to support them. I'm sure that's in no small part due to the fact that they are really the only show on that godforsaken channel that anybody watches. Which in turn means they're really the only TV show that matters to the industry at all. But that situation probably will not remain true forever.
there are so many forms of competition that multiple humans can engage in. Why the obscession with combat in MMORPGs?
Well, it is called Star Wars. What would you expect a MMO game based on Star Wars to be like? Have you not seen the movies? The whole point of them is the good vs. evil swashbuckling-style space combat. (Lucas himself seemed to have forgotten this for a while...)
Maybe there's room for a non-combat oriented MMORPG on the market, but Star Wars Galaxies should not be that game. It's not Star Wars without the "Wars".
By that same token, I think this sounds like a great update. If I had more free time it might be enough for me to re-activate my subscription, which I cancelled specifically because I thought the game was a) boring, and b) too much like work. MMORPG's really need to be more fun across the board, IMO, and this one specifically was in dire need of a combat revamp. But the other changes they're making - no more "buying" skills, no more item decay (never understood that in any MMORPG), more movie-focused classes, etc. all sound like good changes too. Sounds like this game is finally becoming what it should have been in the first place.
Does that mean I forgive them for releasing a beta to the public and charging both the cost of the game and the monthly fees to play it in the meantime? No. The industry should not work that way. But at least they've done the mea culpa now and can hopefully move on.
They probably know they can't pull it off like MS did, so they aren't even going to bother.
You know, success is relative. Let's look at some numbers here.
Number of PS2's sold: 90 million
Number of Xboxes sold: 24 million
Number of subscribers to Xbox Live: ~2 million
Amount of revenue MS has generated from the Xbox, Xbox Live, and Xbox games: -$4 billion (that's negative four billion dollars)
So, let's see. The decentralized PS2 has sold more than three times the number of Xboxes worldwide, and even among that much smaller Xbox user base, less than one in ten owners actually subscribes to Xbox Live. With a $4 billion loss, I literally just can't see what XBL has contributed to MS's bottom line - if the service itself has turned any sort of profit, it's buried under an avalanche of other losses related to the system.
If this is success, I'd like to see what gets termed failure around here!
Personally, XBL is one reason I'm waiting on buying an Xbox 360. I am actually averse to it, and I don't think I'm alone. It's one of the things that's given the current Xbox its reputation as a system for hardcore gamers; it's almost as if you have to have a little community of fellow geeks willing to play online to really get much out of the system. With MS focusing so heavily on even further promoting XBL for the 360, it's basically scaring me away as someone who likes to play solo and with friends or the wife in the same room. I'm just not interested in gaming with a bunch of immature, bitch-happy teen and pre-teen strangers, and I unfortunately (or fortunately?) do not have a little community of online geek friends around me to play games with.
I don't think I'm alone. The PS2 sold as well as it did because it catered to such a broad cross-section of gamers. I don't see that from the 360 - MS keeps saying they're trying to broaden the audience, but their actions say exactly the opposite. Every game has to be online, the system will always be online, buying the system automatically gives you an XBL account. Developers will need to make games with those things in mind. I don't want that. All I want is a little box that sits there and lets me play games either alone or with other people in my own house. Even approximately 90% of current Xbox users appear to feel the same way. I honestly think the heavy focus on Xbox Live is holding back both current Xbox sales as well as future Xbox 360 sales - it's scaring away offline players.
All three of the next-gen systems will be online in one way or another, but I prefer the model Sony and Nintendo are using, which is much more relaxed and feels less forced.
As long as you stick to Intel chipset and recommended hardware, you don't need much power to run MCE smoothly.
Huh? You're as bad as the guy you're replying to. Why would you need to stick to Intel chipsets?
I run an AMD/VIA setup, with an Athlon XP 2600+, and while recording *and* playing back *and* running a separate remote session (which you're not supposed to be able to do, but there's a hack for it) all at the same time, my CPU usage never rises above 20-25%.
In fact, I used to watch one show on my TV, record another, and be encoding video in the background over that remote session, all with no hitches at all.
I have no idea what the advantage of running an Intel chipset would be.
I also have no idea what sort of problem the guy who wrote this review has. I admit I don't actually use MCE for TV anymore (I wanted HD cable, including pay channels, which basically ruled MCE out at that point), but I've never had *any* of the problems with it that he's saying he had. That's not to say MCE is perfect - it is far from it. But it is a heck of a lot better than TiVo, especially if you raise your recording bit rates in the registry (this should be easier, but you can't do it at all with TiVo). I had mine set to 12mbps for the best quality setting and there was no difference whatsoever from my raw cable feed. In fact, one of the reasons I dumped TiVo for MCE in the first place was for the better picture quality. Especially with sports, I just couldn't even stomach TiVo anymore once I got my HDTV.
MCE 2007 or whatever had better include real Cable Card support and should include updates like easily selectable bit rates, along with being able to tune HDTV without having an analog card installed. But generally speaking, MCE is the most streamlined, easiest to use, and best quality homebrew DVR you can get right now. (And yes, I've tried MythTV, Snapstream, etc.)
I don't think widescreen is worth the expense. As it is, for example, a 20" widescreen costs just as much or more than a 21" standard aspect ratio, but gives the user less vertical resolution, despite having the same horizontal resolution. Why pay more for fewer pixels?
This is not really true. For example, currently on Dell's web site, there are a 20" 4:3 and a 20" 16:10 monitor that are exactly the same but for the aspect ratio and the inherent resolution difference that that implies. The 4:3 version is $749 and the 16:10 is currently on sale for $545, though it normally sells for $699.
The resolution on the 4:3 model is 1600x1200, while it's 1680x1050 on the 16:10 version. That's a negligible difference in total pixels, and the price reflects that negligible difference (i.e. the widescreen version is actually slightly less expensive).
Now, are those extra 80 horizontal pixels useful for anything? Well yes, because it's not just about pixels. It's also about actual horizontal size. When you're watching a DVD or HDTV, you're not going to be looking at actual pixels anyway. The same is true of today's high-resolution digital photos. In those cases, it's better to have an aspect ratio that more closely matches the source aspect ratio to give you the most actual screen area (in inches, or however you want to measure it... but not pixels). Viewing a 3:2 photo (standard 35mm/APS ratio) on a 4:3 20" monitor will appear much smaller than it would on a 16:10 20" monitor when opened in an app that puts various tools on the side (as almost all image browsers/editors do).
It really depends on what you use your computer for whether a widescreen monitor is worth it or not. For most "home" users, who watch DVD's, play games, maybe edit their digital photos, I would think a widescreen monitor would be best. I really enjoy having one myself. Obviously for any video or photo pros, widescreen is also better. For someone who's writing code, though, maybe not so much.
That said, a widescreen display is only 12% wider in aspect ratio (1.5 vs. 1.333)
No, 16:10 is obviously 1.6:1, not 1.5:1. You can also get 16:9 screens which are 1.77:1, matching HDTV exactly. Most people go for 16:10, though, because it's a compromise that allows you greater width for movies and photos while still being reasonable for web browsing and word processing apps that can better use the extra height.
I use it once a week or less, and after three years have learnt to do a few things, but every time I need to do something different I have to spend half an hour digging through the help, which is almost as bad as a Unix man page, or Googling for an explanation. Unless you meant "easy to use after you're experienced", certainly not "easy to learn" for most people.
But it is easy to learn the "45 things" that most photographers do all the time. Cropping, resizing, etc. are all either on the main tool palette or they're top-level menu items. If you can't figure out how to do these things, then I don't see how you can figure out how to use any modern computer application. You can have a discussion about how applications have gotten unuseable in general, but Photoshop is no worse than any other app in this.
If you want to do something advanced, like, say, dropping realistic clouds into a cloudless sky, then yeah, it's going to take some time to learn to do that. But most photo apps can't do something like that at all, so I don't see that it's something to complain about. And most advanced tasks either cannot be automated or you wouldn't want them to be - I can't even imagine what a "drop in clouds" function would end up doing to your photos. And even if it did basically work (which it wouldn't), you'd suddenly have eight billion photos on the web that all look exactly the same with these fake-looking clouds.
If you want a really basic image editor that's really easy to use, just download Picasa2 (it's free) and press the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button for all your photos. For most people, that's all they want anyway, and it doesn't get any easier than that (I can't say the quality will always be the best, but you can always undo, and anyway we're talking simple to use now, not best quality). Even cropping can be done automatically for common photo paper sizes, though there's no real reason I can see that you'd want to do this.
But for anything more advanced, yes, you're going to have to do some work. To me, a lot of this whining about image editors that goes on these days is just laziness - people just want to press a button and have the software do everything for them, even if it's beyond simple things like adjusting brightness, contrast or color balance. Well, it wasn't like that when people had to process all their photos in a darkroom and it's not that way today and it will never be that way. If you want to do real heavy work on your photos, you are going to need to learn how to do things and you are going to need to spend some time doing them. That's just the way it is.