Re:where next ? the backstreet markets of course !
on
iTMS Launches in Japan
·
· Score: 1
Actually... yes. I don't know if you've been to Japan, but it's rarely more than an hour to a city with over a million people, with a technology district where you can indeed buy not only entire albums for a couple hundred yen, but singles CDs for less.
And I don't know what this mythical country is of which you speak, but it ain't Japan.
My wife grew up in Ryu-Gasaki, a small town in the Ibaraki prefecture about 50 miles from Tokyo. By your definition, this would be a town within an hour of a major city, as the crow flies (though not in the real world).
But it costs about $20 round trip on the commuter train to get there, and that's not including the subway to get to the "technology district" of which you speak. So, maybe another $5-$10 round trip. Already you're pushing $30 just to get to the record/electronics stores, not to mention the time it's taken to do it. I've made this trip a bunch of times, from Ryu-Gasaki to Akihabara - it's a trek by car just to get to the nearest train station to begin with (don't forget the cost of gas!), so you're talking a total of about 2 hours each way.
Then you've gotta spend a couple hours trolling the stores to see if they even have what you want. If you're shopping used stores, this is a crap shoot. And I'm not sure what CD's you've ever seen for a "couple hundred yen", but it's not going to be anything anybody would want. New CD's are generally in the 2500-3000 yen range (I've seen CD's as high as 3800 yen); used CD's are in the 1500-2200 yen range, give or take. Old, old stuff goes for less, but we're talking the equivalent of Frampton Comes Alive type stuff in terms of current popularity, and even that would be more than a couple hundred yen.
The bottom line is it's not as easy (or as cheap) for most people to get to good stores in Japan as you seem to think it is, and anyway iTMS is seriously undercutting Japanese CD prices. They've got Amazon same as we do, so if they don't want the trek they can always just order, but they still then have to pay new CD prices. I think iTMS will prove to be pretty popular there.
$0.79/song x 3000 songs = $2370.00 $60/year x 40 years = $2400.00
And are you seriously delirious enough to think that Yahoo or anyone else is still going to be charging $15 a month in 40 years?
Do you still pay a nickel to get into a movie theater? Be a little realistic here. In 40 years you'll be paying $300 a month or more for your music rental. (And if that sounds like a lot to you, ask your grandparents how they feel about some of today's prices.)
This is the renter's fallacy, and it's true of everything. For most people, renting anything just doesn't make financial sense.
Of course, the price to buy new music will likely rise over time too, but the point is if you like the Rolling Stones, and assuming the Rolling Stones' best years are behind them, you're going to pay a lot less to just buy their entire back catalog now than you will to continue renting it through the years, because of the effects of inflation.
Well, the article suggests that it can be worth even more on ebay.
And how much is your time worth?
Unless you're a pro seller using pro tools (which cost money in themselves), it takes about an hour or so, all told, to set up an auction. That includes taking and editing photos (even the crappy photos you see on Ebay had to be shot and then looked at before uploading), and writing and uploading the text to accompany the auction.
Then once you've "sold" your console, you have to go back and forth with the seller about payment, shipping, etc. - and that's assuming your buyer isn't a deadbeat. Hopefully you'll get your money in 1-2 weeks, then you've got to pack up a box and trek down to the post office to mail it off.
All told you're looking at several weeks of waiting and at least 2-3 hours of actual work. Is that worth $25 to you? Maybe, but it wouldn't be to me.
(I do sell things on Ebay pretty often, but not when I have a local selling alternative.)
AI? I thought the ghosts in Pacman followed predetermined paths irrespective of what the player is doing, hence the ability of the player to "cheat" and use a predefined pattern to successfully complete the maze.
No, you're confusing patterns that were "discovered" that allowed you to win by beating the AI (which do exist), with patterns that the ghosts followed (which don't). The ghosts follow no pre-determined patterns - in fact each one is programmed to act and react in a different manner from the other. I don't recall all the differences but there are things like one of them being smart enough not to come near you while you're close to a power pellet, one of them being able to see you all the way on the other side of the board, etc. There is real uniqueness in how they act, though you wouldn't notice it unless you really played a lot.
The patterns come about because the AI is not advanced enough that it's going to do anything different given the same situation. So, assuming that Pac-Man travels at the same speed in every game (which he does), and you don't screw up, you can use the same pattern every time and the ghosts will act in the same way. But that doesn't mean they're not using AI.
GameCube: 9/01 - 8/06 (guess based on current information)
As you can see, the lifespan of consoles is decreasing as they become more advanced.
Well, your dates are a bit off, first of all.
The Nintendo Famicom was produced from 1983-2003. Yes, 20 years. The NES (which I guess is what you mean by "Nintendo") was produced from 1985-1995. So either way, your dates for it are completely wrong.
Your basic premise could still be true, but for the fact that Sony produced the original PlayStation from 1995-2004. So, nearly as long as Nintendo produced the NES, as long as Atari produced the 2600, longer than Sega produced the Genesis or Nintendo produced the SNES.
Many older consoles have also had extremely short life cycles. The Atari 5200 and Coleco Vision, successful in their day (yes, the 5200 actually outsold the CV), both were produced from 1982-1984. The 5200 was scheduled to be replaced by 1985 even if the crash of 1984 had never happened - the Atari 7800 was completed in 1983. (The crash delayed the 7800's launch by two more years.)
I'd say the length of a console's production life depends more on its success and its production costs than its position in the timeline of game console history. A lot of old consoles lasted a good long time (the Intellivision, for example, was produced from 1979-1991 despite limited marketplace success - it was cheap to make and market), but a lot of others only lasted a couple years. The same is true of today's machines.
Obviously you don't have an HDTV or Surround Sound, as XBox's OBVIOUS edge over other game consoles is Dolby Digital 5.1 and 480p on most titles.
Neither of these is really a distinct advantage on "most" Xbox titles.
I have only seen a few Xbox games that don't simply stretch the standard 640x480 resolution to get to "480p" (which is supposed to be 720x480 on a 16:9 screen). Progressive scanning is nice but I would take a truly widescreen interlaced image (upscaled to progressive, as all current HDTV's do) over a stretched progressive image any day of the week.
Similarly, most Xbox games do not really make great use of the system's real-time DD encoding. It's not that easy to tell the difference between DD and DPL in most games, both because the algorithms for real-time encoding just aren't as good as what can be done in non-real-time by a human sitting in front of a mixer, and because a lot of game creators just don't put a lot of thought into their games' sound design. Honestly, most of the time I don't even bother turning on my receiver to play games - I just play the sound through my HDTV's speakers.
The end result is that in terms of a home theater setting, I agree with the parent post that there's not a huge difference between the Xbox and the other two systems. (I mean, the GameCube and PS2 will both output progressively as well - the PS2 doesn't have great support for this but the GameCube will do it for every game.) Which is really to say none of them get it completely right - we'll have to wait for true HD from the Xbox 360 and PS3 until that happens.
This is disputed - I and many others have seen boxes over the years with an original $249 price tag, and still more people remember seeing them in stores at that price. The general feeling now is that $249 was the initial price of this system, although actual MSRP is not so simple to just go back and look up. (The old Atari no longer exists, there was no WWW back then, and people's memories are not always accurate.)
But, regardless, that would just make it that much more expensive, thereby further proving your point for you.
Nintendo Entertainment System 1985 price: $199
The NES was also originally available as a "Deluxe Set" for $249. I think this may have been the only set available when the system was first test-marketed in New York, but I'm not sure about that.
One thing to keep in mind about the earliest systems (though not the NES or above) is that prices were not "locked". There was an MSRP but manufacturers didn't enforce it - it was literally a suggested price, just like any other piece of electronic equipment gets. Stores could price as they saw fit. That changed around the time of the NES.
Some other hardware launch MSRP's:
Intellivision: $299 (mine was $280 in 1980) Atari 5200: $249 (although apparently you could get them near launch for $199 if you looked) Neo Geo AES: $699 Sega Genesis: $249 Sega Saturn: $399
All of those prices would be way over $300 in today's dollars.
Uh, the current stock price has nothing to do with sales. I don't know where "official" sales numbers are, but GTA is currently Amazon's 2nd highest selling title.
And it was #1 before the controversy.
It was also in the top 5 at EB and Best Buy. It's no longer even on the list at those stores.
You're still going to tell us controversy always helps sales?
why are these idiots making a big deal of this game, if nobody said anything i doubt the game would end up popular, now it's the game 'they are trying to ban' so everyone wants to play it now.
Yeah, because it's not as if Rockstar makes popular games or anything, controversy or no controversy.
Why do people keep saying stuff like this? Do you realize you're just regurgitating the same arguments people have been making for 50 years, regardless of whether or not the argument actually applies?
Here's a news flash: Rockstar has a PR department. They also spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising. Their games sell whether or not there's controversy. Go look up the sales numbers of the utterly bland and generally inferior Midnight Club 3 if you don't believe it - there is no way that game deserved to sell as many copies as it did. Yet how many calls for its banning did you see? It sold because of good marketing and some good promotional tie-ins - like every other Rockstar game.
I just wish people would put this "if nobody tried to ban it, nobody would buy it!" argument to rest. It just doesn't apply. People are going to buy Rockstar's games regardless of anything, and the days when something would sell just because of controversy are long gone (just look at the sales of BMX XXX or The Guy Game if you don't believe it). People buy games because of good marketing and hopefully because the game is good (though that's apparently not always a prerequisite).
There's a reason networking never really took off for PS2 and GameCube in this generation
The PS2 has always led the Xbox in online users by about a factor of four to one. The service being free certainly helps...
In fact, I disagree with your suggestion that MS didn't "fracture the market" with the way they implemented networking - because you have to pay, on an ongoing basis, to enable that feature on your box. Many people (more than 90% of Xbox users, by MS's own numbers) have chosen not to do so. So, to 90% of the market, the Xbox has no online capabilities. To the remaining 10%, it does. How is that different than how Sony has implemented it?
I know there are DVD games out there, I have a couple, but being on a DVD doesn't mean that DVD is full of stuff.
The PS2 and Xbox versions of GTA:VC and GTA:SA both fill up the discs. And that's with 32x32 textures.
The Xbox 360 and PS3 will support 1024x1024 textures and beyond. That's going to require a huge amount of storage space. Limiting the system to a standard DVD drive means a game like GTA:SA will not look any better on the Xbox 360 than it did on the original Xbox. Sure, the resolution will be higher, the animation might be smoother, but the actual look of the game will be low-res, blurry and ugly. Especially when compared to the PS3, which will have plenty of space on the disc for high-res textures.
It's a huge mistake to not include HD-DVD to begin with if that's the plan for the future. It's an even bigger mistake, though, to say they're going to include one "eventually". They just cost themselves at least one launch day sale (mine) and once word of this really starts spreading around, I suspect I will be far from the only one.
Of course, plans can always change, and they may still find a way to get an HD-DVD drive in there on day one. They really have to do it, if you ask me, or the Xbox 360 will always be noticeably inferior to the PS3 in terms of visual quality even if its graphics horsepower is otherwise comparable.
One thing the article missed though is about Metroid, specifically how Retro got into it and produced Metroid Prime (possibly one of the best games ever made)?
There are probably articles you can Google about this if you want to read up. The long and the short of the whole Metroid thing is that this game does not sell in Japan. At all. That's why there was no Metroid 64, that's why Nintendo outsourced Metroid Prime. It is just not a franchise they really believe in personally, and besides, being that it's always appealed more to western tastes than Japanese, who better to develop the GameCube update than a western developer?
They got Retro because they were cheap, and had done some decent work that Nintendo liked in the past (not enough to get them noticed by many people, though, so they stayed cheap). But still, there were apparently major problems with the development of Metroid Prime that forced Shigeru Miyamoto to get personally involved in the project - while most of the grunt work was done by Retro, it was Miyamoto that whipped the game into shape. It was supposedly in such a sad state about a year before release that Nintendo considered killing it altogether. Miyamoto just thought Retro was too inexperienced - talented, but inexperienced - and that all they needed was some guidance. He was right.
The game still didn't sell in Japan, though. It is completely a western phenomenon, which makes it completely different from everything else Nintendo does. They are still firmly rooted in Japan, and the rest of the world is secondary.
I wish I could give you some sources for all this, but it's nothing I didn't read online as the whole thing was going on so you should still be able to find articles at places like GameSpot and IGN.
This awards ceremony will honor Katamari Damacy, so it is legitimate.
Only if it were awarded game of the year, which is what it was.
"Best Innovation"? Come on - that's a copout category if there ever was one. That's the category where you put the games you know are going to be the ones remembered 15 or 20 years from now, but you can't give them "game of the year" because there's some other hot game of the moment. I mean it would be like the music industry giving a "best innovator" award to Beck or Radiohead or something and then giving "artist of the year" to Britney Spears. It's ridiculous.
I think it's time we realized that, like in all forms of media these days, the most popular games are not necessarily the best ones - in fact, they're almost always not the best ones. This list of winners is really just a popularity contest, so almost inherently meaningless. These are just the games that have the most broadbase appeal, even if that means appealing to the lowest common denominator. With the exception of KD's token entry in a category that was obviously created specifically for street cred appeal, there's nothing on that list that did anything special or that anybody is going to much care about in a few years.
It's also pretty striking how many sequels are on the list.
You clearly haven't been using a system recently that's been riddled with spyware,
So we're supposed to blame MS for Spyware? Windows doesn't ship with system-crashing spyware, and it's not even like viruses are its primary way in. Most spyware is willingly installed by clueless users.
My Windows machine at work is currently at 221 hours of uptime. I don't even remember why it was rebooted prior to that, but it wasn't because of a crash. The current version of Windows XP is pretty stable if you ask me - not as good of a 24/7 OS as most *nix's, though not for reasons of stability. Its interface is not designed for keeping large numbers of applications open at once, and it doesn't seem to handle memory all that well at this point (this used to be one of its strong suits compared to other OS's). But it doesn't crash unless you do something stupid (like install spyware) to make it crash.
t's nice to see a little dose of careful planning and good execution from the people at Microsoft.
Am I the only one that sees this as a collossal waste of time, money and effort? Am I the only one that just wants a game console to play games? Why do I need an interface with three years and millions of dollars put into it?
I want to turn the machine on, have it be instantly accessible, put a game in and be playing within ten seconds. That's all I need, that's probably all 90% of the world needs out of a game console. In fact, anything more than that is just clutter.
If I start the system with no game, I'd like to be able to manage saves. If I'm online, I'd like to do some basic account management. But these are tasks that would require maybe a week's worth of design by one guy (I work on web interfaces every day, so I'm not saying this without any knowledge of the subject).
Hearing that so much went into the design of the Xbox 360's interface frankly scares me. It does not make me look forward to turning the thing on for the first time. I swear to God, if the first thing I see when I turn the machine on is a dialogue box, it's going back to the store.
Also, whenever you see an interface described as "fast", that's code for "slow, but faster than we thought it'd be given all the crap we've loaded on." Ideally an interface for a game console is so fast that its speed doesn't need describing one way or another. You just don't even think about it. It should be assumed that a game console interface is fast enough to not even be noticed - why would it be otherwise? So this is really not encouraging - it's the opposite, in fact.
Dont know about you guys but a 1 in 113 chance of a massive catastrophy sounds pretty high to me.
And that's why they pay astronauts the big bucks.
The fact is space travel is still in its infancy. The space shuttle was supposed to transition us to the point where space travel was routine, but for a variety of reasons that never happened. We thought it was happening, in the early 1980's, but then the Challenger brought us back to reality (I actually wrote "back down to earth" before realizing what a bad metaphor that would be). Anyway, even if the shuttle was as successful at everything it was supposed to be, a transition is still a transition. The shuttle was to help us learn how to make space travel routine.
It's done that, but it is a complicated machine, and as the saying goes, this is rocket science. It's not easy, and I remember reading a bit after the Columbia accident that despite the OV (Orbiter Vehicle) designation the shuttles carry, they are still considered experimental vehicles within NASA and are treated as such. Astronauts are by definition test pilots. The fact that they actually get real work done on most missions is pretty amazing, considering. But they go into it with an understanding that it is dangerous work - even knowing that, could you imagine a better, more honorable way to die if it came to that? Would you rather die working for your country, for humanity, doing important scientific work that will pave the way for future generations, or would you rather die of a heart attack while sitting on a toilet taking a crap one day? This is the thinking astronauts have.
Someday, we will reach the point where space travel is relatively safe. But the early shuttle days were a red herring - space travel has never been safe, and it is still not safe. This doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Since Columbia, there has been a rumbling that suggests if you can't make space flight as safe as atmospheric flight, that manned space flight should simply be abandoned until it can be. That's at least partly what's behind the decision to ground the fleet today - after all, nothing happened on Discovery's launch that hasn't happened on every other launch before. The issue is this is no longer considered an acceptable risk.
Maybe in the end this will be a good thing, and it will drive NASA to create more robust vehicles that genuinely are safer, and that will put us on a path towards commoditizing space travel. My fear is that it will simply scare us away from manned space travel altogether, which will be a shame.
The space shuttle fleet is definitely near the end of its useful life, though... which is kind of hard for me to acknowledge, as someone who watched the first experimental flights of the Enterprise live on TV in the 1970's. This was a huge event back then, filled with the promise of things to come. Well, like a lot of things in life, the shuttle program accomplished a whole lot of things but never quite did live up to its full potential. And now it's winding down, in a not very good way. Oh well, such is life, and hopefully NASA and the world will learn from the experience. I just really hope the recent shuttle problems don't scare this country away from space flight altogether. It is dangerous and we must accept that, even as we strive to make it safer.
but we'd all much rather see actual video game scores nominated.
Then they need to create a category called "Best Video Game Score".
From what I'm reading here, this is a category for "Best Video Game Soundtrack", which is a completely different animal. Scores and soundtracks are not the same thing.
It's fine if you want to complain about them not having a Best Score category, and if you want to petition them about that, go right ahead. But I don't see the point in complaining that scores aren't included in the soundtrack category - that'd be like complaining Jethro Tull wasn't included in the "Best Heavy Metal Performance" categ... oh, wait.
Photographs show that the area has sustained surface damage (the black surface is missing) and potential heat shield tile shear. The "not hitting" the shuttle bit is merely that the debris didn't cause additional damage elsewhere.
You have obviously completely missed the point.
It's common for shuttles to lose a few sections of tile during missions - it has happened many times before (once, a shuttle came back with a pretty large section of its nose tiles missing - perhaps as many as 20. I don't remember the mission, but I saw the photos afterwards). This does not necessarily mean anything, and could in fact be completely normal. The fact is tile damage of one sort or another happens on every single mission.
Debris hitting the shuttle is a different story altogether, because it was conclusively proven that Columbia was brought down by a piece of foam impacting the reinforced carbon carbon leading edge of one of the wings at more than 500mph. The headline here suggests something similar happened on this launch, which it clearly did not, and nobody has suggested as much except whoever submitted this article. That is sensationalist, not to mention basically an outright lie.
It is worth mentioning and remembering that Columbia's disintegration had nothing to do with tiles. The reinforced carbon carbon on the leading edge of the wings is a completely different material than the tiles are made of and in fact it is structural material, not simply a cover on top of structural material (as the tiles are). The hole in Columbia's wing was blown through the leading edge of the wing - this would be equivalent to blowing a hole through the fuselage in the area we're talking about now. That did not happen.
The damage is close to the upper limit of what they could repair in space, if it does prove to be tile shear. This may force a rescue mission.
Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt. I mean I have about as much evidence for that as you do for a rescue mission. Nobody has said any such thing either at NASA or in the press. Hell, not even Drudge has suggested as much - that oughta show you how far out the statements you're making are.
Debris is inevitable, this is perfectly true. This is why such systems SHOULD have the best monitoring that money can buy, including internal sensors that can detect anomolous conditions.
So your solution is to put a sensor under every single tile on the shuttle? Or maybe more than one under each tile, to check for temperature anomalies under tiles that are partially broken? That's what it would take to do what you're suggesting.
There is a point at which more data is just more data. It doesn't tell anybody anything; in fact it is more likely to result in an error because the humans that are required to interpret such data can only process so much. (And as we all know, trying to program computers to interpret such data is even less reliable.) And it really doesn't make a difference is the temperature is 2 degrees higher in one spot than it is a millimeter and a half away.
In the case of Columbia, the damaged sections would have cooled faster than normal, due to being open to space,
News flash: the entire shuttle is in open space. The wings are not pressurized, nor are they heated. In the vacuum of space, the interior of the wings would have cooled at the same rate regardless of whether there was a hole there or not (and the hole only exposed metal structure until plasma melted it on re-entry, so the rest of the wing was still as shielded as it was going to be from temperature changes on launch).
You're so far off in your analysis here I really am not sure why I'm even bothering to argue the point, except for the fact that you write in a style that suggests more knowledge than you possess, and I do worry that some people may actually take you at your word. But rest assured, everything you have said
If you think it's "boring", what the hell are you doing in here? Go comment on an SCO thread or something.
It was a Simpsons quote, jesus. Lighten up and take a pop culture course at your local community college or something; you obviously need it.
Here's the full scene for you:
Tom: It's a lovely day for a launch, here, live at Cape Canaveral, at the lower end of the Florida Peninsula, and the purpose of today's mission is truly, really electrifying.
Man 2: That's correct, Tom. The lion's share of this flight will be devoted to the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws.
Tom: Unbelievable, and just imagine the logistics of weightlessness. And of course, this could have literally millions of applications here on Earth -- everything from watchmaking to watch repair.
Homer: Boring.
[tries to switch channels, but the batteries fall from the remote control]
No! The batteries!
Tom: Now let's look at the crew a little.
Man 2: They're a colorful bunch. They've been dubbed "the Three Musketeers". Heh heh heh --
Tom: And we laugh legitimately. There's a mathematician, a different _kind_ of mathematician, and a statistician.
Homer: Make it stop! [panics]
Bart: Oh no, not another boring space launch. Change the channel. Change the channel!
Homer: I can't! I can't!
Of course, this was almost a decade after Challenger and before Columbia, so a different sort of mentality than today.
I gotta say that it was the best coverage of a launch I have ever seen, even better than NASA TV's coverage!
I was watching HDNet's coverage before heading out to work - I can't wait to get home and watch the actual launch in HD (it's DVR'd). I did take note of the overall tone of the coverage, though, which was great - very little commentary at all, mostly just a run-down of what was happening at any given time. The goal was to inform, not to editorialize, and there was obviously no pressure to "fill in the gaps" left by silence. It really almost gave you a feeling of being there.
Their coverage also began about three hours ahead of time, with at least half a dozen HD cameras (a few of their cameras were in SD, unavoidably). You really got to see everything, including the astronauts driving up to the launch pad, then riding up the elevator, suiting up and buckling in. The shots of the launch pad in HD looked really amazing, and I can just imagine what the launch itself looked like. I wish they'd show all launches like this!
A month's programming on 200 channels simultaneously?
Obviously, they're not talking about the United States here. And it seems even for the UK, they were only talking a few SD-quality channels. So, basically equivalent to only getting the SD versions of CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and UPN in this country. Nothing to write home about - you can build a PC-based DVR that can do this already. You just stick five PCI tuners in it.
Even if you did 30 SD-quality digital cable channels, most of them are only running at about 1mbps. You'd just need a few extra hard drives and the ability to decrypt the channels (which is the major limiting factor in much of this country).
Now, if you instead want to talk about recording a full cable lineup of, say, your 200 SD channels, plus the fifteen or so HD channels most cable companies offer, then you are getting way out there. HD tops out at around 19mbps per channel, so you're talking about around 500mbps of total bandwidth and the storage space to go with it. The storage space required for a full month's worth of 500mbps of data is not going to be pretty - you're talking about around 225GB per hour. (Yes, I said GigaBYTES).
It's going to be many, many years before any of us have a DVR capable of that.
Kind of a pet peeve of mine - is it so hard to just copy and paste the correct title?
For those that don't get the reference, it's spelled "bur" as in "Excalibur". That's where the "Calibur" in "Soul Calibur" comes from. It's a play on words.
But really, even if you don't understand the pun, have you never even looked at any of the previous games? Never seen the title screen or game artwork?
Does anyone know " Sacramento County Sheriff's Lt. Bob Lozito of the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force."... I don't, I've never heard of him, besides, he's a bloody COP. He's entitled to believe whatever he likes is illegal, it's NOT UP TO HIM.
Find someone who cares when you're sitting in the holding cell waiting for your arraignment. "Oh, it's not illegal, huh? Tell it to the judge next week."
You don't think it's news when cops can make up their own laws? You don't think they matter? I've got news for you: in this country, at least, cops have guns, and the keys to the county jail.
This is typical scaremongering and dis-information. Hey, he's a County Sheriff.. Hi-Tech crimes probably translates to laptop-theft and computer vandalism at the local high-school.
According to the US census, this guy has jurisdiction over 1,330,711 people. I'm not sure you quite understand the size of some counties in this country. This is not some idiot in back-woods hick country. This is Sacramento, California - the capital of the most populous state in the country.
I'm a female gamer, and there isn't anything on here I want to play...
Well, I think it's probably good to note that this is a translated list that appears to show the Japanese game lineup. I mean, "Take the A Train X" is definitely not going to be released anywhere else. (On the other hand, all of the American games listed here probably will be released in Japan.)
What's missing from this list, at least to my knowledge, are some good platform based games.
Well there are a lot of "untitled" games, and some new titles that we don't know much about (or at least I don't - anybody heard of "Chrome Hounds" before? That kinda sounds mistranslated to me...). It seems like the only titles on this list that anybody can react to are the ones that are known quantities because they are sequels, which almost by nature are not going to be that exciting.
But I agree, it's a pretty weak list, especially if this is the Japanese lineup. It definitely doesn't do anything to change any previous statements I've made about the Xbox 360 having virtually no chance there, same as the original Xbox.
And as for games like Katamari Damacy, see the problem with games like that is they actually require a bit of creativity, which is not something a lot of people in the game industry seem to have anymore. Especially not when you can take a derivative shooter like Halo and make $200 million from it. The way the industry works these days is somebody makes a lot of money from a game and for the next five years everybody simply tries to replicate that. Sad but true. Games like KD are the exception these days, not the norm.
I do expect the same will be true of the PS3's lineup, at least initially, and the jury's still out on the Revolution because I have not seen a single announced game on that platform yet (maybe I've just been living under a rock). No doubt it'll have all of Nintendo's own franchises, though most of them are little more than dinosaurs these days themselves.
I'll still buy all three systems, but I do hope to see some better games than this list at some point.
I am looking forward to seeing what Treasure's got planned, at least.
Oh, and for the love of god, please, give us an DDR Ultramix or Beatmania for the Xbox 360...
I have no doubt you will be seeing more DDR games on both the Xbox 360 and PS3. DDR's not dead yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually... yes. I don't know if you've been to Japan, but it's rarely more than an hour to a city with over a million people, with a technology district where you can indeed buy not only entire albums for a couple hundred yen, but singles CDs for less.
And I don't know what this mythical country is of which you speak, but it ain't Japan.
My wife grew up in Ryu-Gasaki, a small town in the Ibaraki prefecture about 50 miles from Tokyo. By your definition, this would be a town within an hour of a major city, as the crow flies (though not in the real world).
But it costs about $20 round trip on the commuter train to get there, and that's not including the subway to get to the "technology district" of which you speak. So, maybe another $5-$10 round trip. Already you're pushing $30 just to get to the record/electronics stores, not to mention the time it's taken to do it. I've made this trip a bunch of times, from Ryu-Gasaki to Akihabara - it's a trek by car just to get to the nearest train station to begin with (don't forget the cost of gas!), so you're talking a total of about 2 hours each way.
Then you've gotta spend a couple hours trolling the stores to see if they even have what you want. If you're shopping used stores, this is a crap shoot. And I'm not sure what CD's you've ever seen for a "couple hundred yen", but it's not going to be anything anybody would want. New CD's are generally in the 2500-3000 yen range (I've seen CD's as high as 3800 yen); used CD's are in the 1500-2200 yen range, give or take. Old, old stuff goes for less, but we're talking the equivalent of Frampton Comes Alive type stuff in terms of current popularity, and even that would be more than a couple hundred yen.
The bottom line is it's not as easy (or as cheap) for most people to get to good stores in Japan as you seem to think it is, and anyway iTMS is seriously undercutting Japanese CD prices. They've got Amazon same as we do, so if they don't want the trek they can always just order, but they still then have to pay new CD prices. I think iTMS will prove to be pretty popular there.
$0.79/song x 3000 songs = $2370.00
$60/year x 40 years = $2400.00
And are you seriously delirious enough to think that Yahoo or anyone else is still going to be charging $15 a month in 40 years?
Do you still pay a nickel to get into a movie theater? Be a little realistic here. In 40 years you'll be paying $300 a month or more for your music rental. (And if that sounds like a lot to you, ask your grandparents how they feel about some of today's prices.)
This is the renter's fallacy, and it's true of everything. For most people, renting anything just doesn't make financial sense.
Of course, the price to buy new music will likely rise over time too, but the point is if you like the Rolling Stones, and assuming the Rolling Stones' best years are behind them, you're going to pay a lot less to just buy their entire back catalog now than you will to continue renting it through the years, because of the effects of inflation.
Well, the article suggests that it can be worth even more on ebay.
And how much is your time worth?
Unless you're a pro seller using pro tools (which cost money in themselves), it takes about an hour or so, all told, to set up an auction. That includes taking and editing photos (even the crappy photos you see on Ebay had to be shot and then looked at before uploading), and writing and uploading the text to accompany the auction.
Then once you've "sold" your console, you have to go back and forth with the seller about payment, shipping, etc. - and that's assuming your buyer isn't a deadbeat. Hopefully you'll get your money in 1-2 weeks, then you've got to pack up a box and trek down to the post office to mail it off.
All told you're looking at several weeks of waiting and at least 2-3 hours of actual work. Is that worth $25 to you? Maybe, but it wouldn't be to me.
(I do sell things on Ebay pretty often, but not when I have a local selling alternative.)
AI? I thought the ghosts in Pacman followed predetermined paths irrespective of what the player is doing, hence the ability of the player to "cheat" and use a predefined pattern to successfully complete the maze.
No, you're confusing patterns that were "discovered" that allowed you to win by beating the AI (which do exist), with patterns that the ghosts followed (which don't). The ghosts follow no pre-determined patterns - in fact each one is programmed to act and react in a different manner from the other. I don't recall all the differences but there are things like one of them being smart enough not to come near you while you're close to a power pellet, one of them being able to see you all the way on the other side of the board, etc. There is real uniqueness in how they act, though you wouldn't notice it unless you really played a lot.
The patterns come about because the AI is not advanced enough that it's going to do anything different given the same situation. So, assuming that Pac-Man travels at the same speed in every game (which he does), and you don't screw up, you can use the same pattern every time and the ghosts will act in the same way. But that doesn't mean they're not using AI.
Nintendo: 7/83 - 11/90
Super Nintendo: 11/90 - 6/96
Nintendo 64: 6/96 - 9/01
GameCube: 9/01 - 8/06 (guess based on current information)
As you can see, the lifespan of consoles is decreasing as they become more advanced.
Well, your dates are a bit off, first of all.
The Nintendo Famicom was produced from 1983-2003. Yes, 20 years. The NES (which I guess is what you mean by "Nintendo") was produced from 1985-1995. So either way, your dates for it are completely wrong.
Your basic premise could still be true, but for the fact that Sony produced the original PlayStation from 1995-2004. So, nearly as long as Nintendo produced the NES, as long as Atari produced the 2600, longer than Sega produced the Genesis or Nintendo produced the SNES.
Many older consoles have also had extremely short life cycles. The Atari 5200 and Coleco Vision, successful in their day (yes, the 5200 actually outsold the CV), both were produced from 1982-1984. The 5200 was scheduled to be replaced by 1985 even if the crash of 1984 had never happened - the Atari 7800 was completed in 1983. (The crash delayed the 7800's launch by two more years.)
I'd say the length of a console's production life depends more on its success and its production costs than its position in the timeline of game console history. A lot of old consoles lasted a good long time (the Intellivision, for example, was produced from 1979-1991 despite limited marketplace success - it was cheap to make and market), but a lot of others only lasted a couple years. The same is true of today's machines.
XBox has only A slight edge?
Obviously you don't have an HDTV or Surround Sound, as XBox's OBVIOUS edge over other game consoles is Dolby Digital 5.1 and 480p on most titles.
Neither of these is really a distinct advantage on "most" Xbox titles.
I have only seen a few Xbox games that don't simply stretch the standard 640x480 resolution to get to "480p" (which is supposed to be 720x480 on a 16:9 screen). Progressive scanning is nice but I would take a truly widescreen interlaced image (upscaled to progressive, as all current HDTV's do) over a stretched progressive image any day of the week.
Similarly, most Xbox games do not really make great use of the system's real-time DD encoding. It's not that easy to tell the difference between DD and DPL in most games, both because the algorithms for real-time encoding just aren't as good as what can be done in non-real-time by a human sitting in front of a mixer, and because a lot of game creators just don't put a lot of thought into their games' sound design. Honestly, most of the time I don't even bother turning on my receiver to play games - I just play the sound through my HDTV's speakers.
The end result is that in terms of a home theater setting, I agree with the parent post that there's not a huge difference between the Xbox and the other two systems. (I mean, the GameCube and PS2 will both output progressively as well - the PS2 doesn't have great support for this but the GameCube will do it for every game.) Which is really to say none of them get it completely right - we'll have to wait for true HD from the Xbox 360 and PS3 until that happens.
Atari 2600
1977 price: $199.95
This is disputed - I and many others have seen boxes over the years with an original $249 price tag, and still more people remember seeing them in stores at that price. The general feeling now is that $249 was the initial price of this system, although actual MSRP is not so simple to just go back and look up. (The old Atari no longer exists, there was no WWW back then, and people's memories are not always accurate.)
But, regardless, that would just make it that much more expensive, thereby further proving your point for you.
Nintendo Entertainment System
1985 price: $199
The NES was also originally available as a "Deluxe Set" for $249. I think this may have been the only set available when the system was first test-marketed in New York, but I'm not sure about that.
One thing to keep in mind about the earliest systems (though not the NES or above) is that prices were not "locked". There was an MSRP but manufacturers didn't enforce it - it was literally a suggested price, just like any other piece of electronic equipment gets. Stores could price as they saw fit. That changed around the time of the NES.
Some other hardware launch MSRP's:
Intellivision: $299 (mine was $280 in 1980)
Atari 5200: $249 (although apparently you could get them near launch for $199 if you looked)
Neo Geo AES: $699
Sega Genesis: $249
Sega Saturn: $399
All of those prices would be way over $300 in today's dollars.
Uh, the current stock price has nothing to do with sales. I don't know where "official" sales numbers are, but GTA is currently Amazon's 2nd highest selling title.
And it was #1 before the controversy.
It was also in the top 5 at EB and Best Buy. It's no longer even on the list at those stores.
You're still going to tell us controversy always helps sales?
why are these idiots making a big deal of this game, if nobody said anything i doubt the game would end up popular, now it's the game 'they are trying to ban' so everyone wants to play it now.
Yeah, because it's not as if Rockstar makes popular games or anything, controversy or no controversy.
Why do people keep saying stuff like this? Do you realize you're just regurgitating the same arguments people have been making for 50 years, regardless of whether or not the argument actually applies?
Here's a news flash: Rockstar has a PR department. They also spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising. Their games sell whether or not there's controversy. Go look up the sales numbers of the utterly bland and generally inferior Midnight Club 3 if you don't believe it - there is no way that game deserved to sell as many copies as it did. Yet how many calls for its banning did you see? It sold because of good marketing and some good promotional tie-ins - like every other Rockstar game.
I just wish people would put this "if nobody tried to ban it, nobody would buy it!" argument to rest. It just doesn't apply. People are going to buy Rockstar's games regardless of anything, and the days when something would sell just because of controversy are long gone (just look at the sales of BMX XXX or The Guy Game if you don't believe it). People buy games because of good marketing and hopefully because the game is good (though that's apparently not always a prerequisite).
There's a reason networking never really took off for PS2 and GameCube in this generation
The PS2 has always led the Xbox in online users by about a factor of four to one. The service being free certainly helps...
In fact, I disagree with your suggestion that MS didn't "fracture the market" with the way they implemented networking - because you have to pay, on an ongoing basis, to enable that feature on your box. Many people (more than 90% of Xbox users, by MS's own numbers) have chosen not to do so. So, to 90% of the market, the Xbox has no online capabilities. To the remaining 10%, it does. How is that different than how Sony has implemented it?
I know there are DVD games out there, I have a couple, but being on a DVD doesn't mean that DVD is full of stuff.
The PS2 and Xbox versions of GTA:VC and GTA:SA both fill up the discs. And that's with 32x32 textures.
The Xbox 360 and PS3 will support 1024x1024 textures and beyond. That's going to require a huge amount of storage space. Limiting the system to a standard DVD drive means a game like GTA:SA will not look any better on the Xbox 360 than it did on the original Xbox. Sure, the resolution will be higher, the animation might be smoother, but the actual look of the game will be low-res, blurry and ugly. Especially when compared to the PS3, which will have plenty of space on the disc for high-res textures.
It's a huge mistake to not include HD-DVD to begin with if that's the plan for the future. It's an even bigger mistake, though, to say they're going to include one "eventually". They just cost themselves at least one launch day sale (mine) and once word of this really starts spreading around, I suspect I will be far from the only one.
Of course, plans can always change, and they may still find a way to get an HD-DVD drive in there on day one. They really have to do it, if you ask me, or the Xbox 360 will always be noticeably inferior to the PS3 in terms of visual quality even if its graphics horsepower is otherwise comparable.
One thing the article missed though is about Metroid, specifically how Retro got into it and produced Metroid Prime (possibly one of the best games ever made)?
There are probably articles you can Google about this if you want to read up. The long and the short of the whole Metroid thing is that this game does not sell in Japan. At all. That's why there was no Metroid 64, that's why Nintendo outsourced Metroid Prime. It is just not a franchise they really believe in personally, and besides, being that it's always appealed more to western tastes than Japanese, who better to develop the GameCube update than a western developer?
They got Retro because they were cheap, and had done some decent work that Nintendo liked in the past (not enough to get them noticed by many people, though, so they stayed cheap). But still, there were apparently major problems with the development of Metroid Prime that forced Shigeru Miyamoto to get personally involved in the project - while most of the grunt work was done by Retro, it was Miyamoto that whipped the game into shape. It was supposedly in such a sad state about a year before release that Nintendo considered killing it altogether. Miyamoto just thought Retro was too inexperienced - talented, but inexperienced - and that all they needed was some guidance. He was right.
The game still didn't sell in Japan, though. It is completely a western phenomenon, which makes it completely different from everything else Nintendo does. They are still firmly rooted in Japan, and the rest of the world is secondary.
I wish I could give you some sources for all this, but it's nothing I didn't read online as the whole thing was going on so you should still be able to find articles at places like GameSpot and IGN.
This awards ceremony will honor Katamari Damacy, so it is legitimate.
Only if it were awarded game of the year, which is what it was.
"Best Innovation"? Come on - that's a copout category if there ever was one. That's the category where you put the games you know are going to be the ones remembered 15 or 20 years from now, but you can't give them "game of the year" because there's some other hot game of the moment. I mean it would be like the music industry giving a "best innovator" award to Beck or Radiohead or something and then giving "artist of the year" to Britney Spears. It's ridiculous.
I think it's time we realized that, like in all forms of media these days, the most popular games are not necessarily the best ones - in fact, they're almost always not the best ones. This list of winners is really just a popularity contest, so almost inherently meaningless. These are just the games that have the most broadbase appeal, even if that means appealing to the lowest common denominator. With the exception of KD's token entry in a category that was obviously created specifically for street cred appeal, there's nothing on that list that did anything special or that anybody is going to much care about in a few years.
It's also pretty striking how many sequels are on the list.
You clearly haven't been using a system recently that's been riddled with spyware,
So we're supposed to blame MS for Spyware? Windows doesn't ship with system-crashing spyware, and it's not even like viruses are its primary way in. Most spyware is willingly installed by clueless users.
My Windows machine at work is currently at 221 hours of uptime. I don't even remember why it was rebooted prior to that, but it wasn't because of a crash. The current version of Windows XP is pretty stable if you ask me - not as good of a 24/7 OS as most *nix's, though not for reasons of stability. Its interface is not designed for keeping large numbers of applications open at once, and it doesn't seem to handle memory all that well at this point (this used to be one of its strong suits compared to other OS's). But it doesn't crash unless you do something stupid (like install spyware) to make it crash.
t's nice to see a little dose of careful planning and good execution from the people at Microsoft.
Am I the only one that sees this as a collossal waste of time, money and effort? Am I the only one that just wants a game console to play games? Why do I need an interface with three years and millions of dollars put into it?
I want to turn the machine on, have it be instantly accessible, put a game in and be playing within ten seconds. That's all I need, that's probably all 90% of the world needs out of a game console. In fact, anything more than that is just clutter.
If I start the system with no game, I'd like to be able to manage saves. If I'm online, I'd like to do some basic account management. But these are tasks that would require maybe a week's worth of design by one guy (I work on web interfaces every day, so I'm not saying this without any knowledge of the subject).
Hearing that so much went into the design of the Xbox 360's interface frankly scares me. It does not make me look forward to turning the thing on for the first time. I swear to God, if the first thing I see when I turn the machine on is a dialogue box, it's going back to the store.
Also, whenever you see an interface described as "fast", that's code for "slow, but faster than we thought it'd be given all the crap we've loaded on." Ideally an interface for a game console is so fast that its speed doesn't need describing one way or another. You just don't even think about it. It should be assumed that a game console interface is fast enough to not even be noticed - why would it be otherwise? So this is really not encouraging - it's the opposite, in fact.
Dont know about you guys but a 1 in 113 chance of a massive catastrophy sounds pretty high to me.
And that's why they pay astronauts the big bucks.
The fact is space travel is still in its infancy. The space shuttle was supposed to transition us to the point where space travel was routine, but for a variety of reasons that never happened. We thought it was happening, in the early 1980's, but then the Challenger brought us back to reality (I actually wrote "back down to earth" before realizing what a bad metaphor that would be). Anyway, even if the shuttle was as successful at everything it was supposed to be, a transition is still a transition. The shuttle was to help us learn how to make space travel routine.
It's done that, but it is a complicated machine, and as the saying goes, this is rocket science. It's not easy, and I remember reading a bit after the Columbia accident that despite the OV (Orbiter Vehicle) designation the shuttles carry, they are still considered experimental vehicles within NASA and are treated as such. Astronauts are by definition test pilots. The fact that they actually get real work done on most missions is pretty amazing, considering. But they go into it with an understanding that it is dangerous work - even knowing that, could you imagine a better, more honorable way to die if it came to that? Would you rather die working for your country, for humanity, doing important scientific work that will pave the way for future generations, or would you rather die of a heart attack while sitting on a toilet taking a crap one day? This is the thinking astronauts have.
Someday, we will reach the point where space travel is relatively safe. But the early shuttle days were a red herring - space travel has never been safe, and it is still not safe. This doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Since Columbia, there has been a rumbling that suggests if you can't make space flight as safe as atmospheric flight, that manned space flight should simply be abandoned until it can be. That's at least partly what's behind the decision to ground the fleet today - after all, nothing happened on Discovery's launch that hasn't happened on every other launch before. The issue is this is no longer considered an acceptable risk.
Maybe in the end this will be a good thing, and it will drive NASA to create more robust vehicles that genuinely are safer, and that will put us on a path towards commoditizing space travel. My fear is that it will simply scare us away from manned space travel altogether, which will be a shame.
The space shuttle fleet is definitely near the end of its useful life, though... which is kind of hard for me to acknowledge, as someone who watched the first experimental flights of the Enterprise live on TV in the 1970's. This was a huge event back then, filled with the promise of things to come. Well, like a lot of things in life, the shuttle program accomplished a whole lot of things but never quite did live up to its full potential. And now it's winding down, in a not very good way. Oh well, such is life, and hopefully NASA and the world will learn from the experience. I just really hope the recent shuttle problems don't scare this country away from space flight altogether. It is dangerous and we must accept that, even as we strive to make it safer.
but we'd all much rather see actual video game scores nominated.
Then they need to create a category called "Best Video Game Score".
From what I'm reading here, this is a category for "Best Video Game Soundtrack", which is a completely different animal. Scores and soundtracks are not the same thing.
It's fine if you want to complain about them not having a Best Score category, and if you want to petition them about that, go right ahead. But I don't see the point in complaining that scores aren't included in the soundtrack category - that'd be like complaining Jethro Tull wasn't included in the "Best Heavy Metal Performance" categ... oh, wait.
Photographs show that the area has sustained surface damage (the black surface is missing) and potential heat shield tile shear. The "not hitting" the shuttle bit is merely that the debris didn't cause additional damage elsewhere.
You have obviously completely missed the point.
It's common for shuttles to lose a few sections of tile during missions - it has happened many times before (once, a shuttle came back with a pretty large section of its nose tiles missing - perhaps as many as 20. I don't remember the mission, but I saw the photos afterwards). This does not necessarily mean anything, and could in fact be completely normal. The fact is tile damage of one sort or another happens on every single mission.
Debris hitting the shuttle is a different story altogether, because it was conclusively proven that Columbia was brought down by a piece of foam impacting the reinforced carbon carbon leading edge of one of the wings at more than 500mph. The headline here suggests something similar happened on this launch, which it clearly did not, and nobody has suggested as much except whoever submitted this article. That is sensationalist, not to mention basically an outright lie.
It is worth mentioning and remembering that Columbia's disintegration had nothing to do with tiles. The reinforced carbon carbon on the leading edge of the wings is a completely different material than the tiles are made of and in fact it is structural material, not simply a cover on top of structural material (as the tiles are). The hole in Columbia's wing was blown through the leading edge of the wing - this would be equivalent to blowing a hole through the fuselage in the area we're talking about now. That did not happen.
The damage is close to the upper limit of what they could repair in space, if it does prove to be tile shear. This may force a rescue mission.
Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt. I mean I have about as much evidence for that as you do for a rescue mission. Nobody has said any such thing either at NASA or in the press. Hell, not even Drudge has suggested as much - that oughta show you how far out the statements you're making are.
Debris is inevitable, this is perfectly true. This is why such systems SHOULD have the best monitoring that money can buy, including internal sensors that can detect anomolous conditions.
So your solution is to put a sensor under every single tile on the shuttle? Or maybe more than one under each tile, to check for temperature anomalies under tiles that are partially broken? That's what it would take to do what you're suggesting.
There is a point at which more data is just more data. It doesn't tell anybody anything; in fact it is more likely to result in an error because the humans that are required to interpret such data can only process so much. (And as we all know, trying to program computers to interpret such data is even less reliable.) And it really doesn't make a difference is the temperature is 2 degrees higher in one spot than it is a millimeter and a half away.
In the case of Columbia, the damaged sections would have cooled faster than normal, due to being open to space,
News flash: the entire shuttle is in open space. The wings are not pressurized, nor are they heated. In the vacuum of space, the interior of the wings would have cooled at the same rate regardless of whether there was a hole there or not (and the hole only exposed metal structure until plasma melted it on re-entry, so the rest of the wing was still as shielded as it was going to be from temperature changes on launch).
You're so far off in your analysis here I really am not sure why I'm even bothering to argue the point, except for the fact that you write in a style that suggests more knowledge than you possess, and I do worry that some people may actually take you at your word. But rest assured, everything you have said
Seems to me a huge liberal, Hilary Clinton, got this ball rolling in NY state.
Except that Hillary Clinton is a Senator, and this was a vote in the House of Representatives.
In fact, this resolution was introduced by a Republican congressman from Indiana. Here he is.
Hillary Clinton is just fishing for votes; this guy actually believes it's worth wasting real congressional workday hours on.
If you think it's "boring", what the hell are you doing in here? Go comment on an SCO thread or something.
It was a Simpsons quote, jesus. Lighten up and take a pop culture course at your local community college or something; you obviously need it.
Here's the full scene for you:
Tom: It's a lovely day for a launch, here, live at Cape Canaveral, at the lower end of the Florida Peninsula, and the purpose of today's mission is truly, really electrifying.
Man 2: That's correct, Tom. The lion's share of this flight will be devoted to the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws.
Tom: Unbelievable, and just imagine the logistics of weightlessness. And of course, this could have literally millions of applications here on Earth -- everything from watchmaking to watch repair.
Homer: Boring.
[tries to switch channels, but the batteries fall from the remote control]
No! The batteries!
Tom: Now let's look at the crew a little.
Man 2: They're a colorful bunch. They've been dubbed "the Three Musketeers". Heh heh heh --
Tom: And we laugh legitimately. There's a mathematician, a different _kind_ of mathematician, and a statistician.
Homer: Make it stop! [panics]
Bart: Oh no, not another boring space launch. Change the channel. Change the channel!
Homer: I can't! I can't!
Of course, this was almost a decade after Challenger and before Columbia, so a different sort of mentality than today.
I gotta say that it was the best coverage of a launch I have ever seen, even better than NASA TV's coverage!
I was watching HDNet's coverage before heading out to work - I can't wait to get home and watch the actual launch in HD (it's DVR'd). I did take note of the overall tone of the coverage, though, which was great - very little commentary at all, mostly just a run-down of what was happening at any given time. The goal was to inform, not to editorialize, and there was obviously no pressure to "fill in the gaps" left by silence. It really almost gave you a feeling of being there.
Their coverage also began about three hours ahead of time, with at least half a dozen HD cameras (a few of their cameras were in SD, unavoidably). You really got to see everything, including the astronauts driving up to the launch pad, then riding up the elevator, suiting up and buckling in. The shots of the launch pad in HD looked really amazing, and I can just imagine what the launch itself looked like. I wish they'd show all launches like this!
A month's programming on 200 channels simultaneously?
Obviously, they're not talking about the United States here. And it seems even for the UK, they were only talking a few SD-quality channels. So, basically equivalent to only getting the SD versions of CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and UPN in this country. Nothing to write home about - you can build a PC-based DVR that can do this already. You just stick five PCI tuners in it.
Even if you did 30 SD-quality digital cable channels, most of them are only running at about 1mbps. You'd just need a few extra hard drives and the ability to decrypt the channels (which is the major limiting factor in much of this country).
Now, if you instead want to talk about recording a full cable lineup of, say, your 200 SD channels, plus the fifteen or so HD channels most cable companies offer, then you are getting way out there. HD tops out at around 19mbps per channel, so you're talking about around 500mbps of total bandwidth and the storage space to go with it. The storage space required for a full month's worth of 500mbps of data is not going to be pretty - you're talking about around 225GB per hour. (Yes, I said GigaBYTES).
It's going to be many, many years before any of us have a DVR capable of that.
not Soul Caliber 3.
Kind of a pet peeve of mine - is it so hard to just copy and paste the correct title?
For those that don't get the reference, it's spelled "bur" as in "Excalibur". That's where the "Calibur" in "Soul Calibur" comes from. It's a play on words.
But really, even if you don't understand the pun, have you never even looked at any of the previous games? Never seen the title screen or game artwork?
Does anyone know " Sacramento County Sheriff's Lt. Bob Lozito of the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force." ... I don't, I've never heard of him, besides, he's a bloody COP. He's entitled to believe whatever he likes is illegal, it's NOT UP TO HIM.
.. Hi-Tech crimes probably translates to laptop-theft and computer vandalism at the local high-school.
Find someone who cares when you're sitting in the holding cell waiting for your arraignment. "Oh, it's not illegal, huh? Tell it to the judge next week."
You don't think it's news when cops can make up their own laws? You don't think they matter? I've got news for you: in this country, at least, cops have guns, and the keys to the county jail.
This is typical scaremongering and dis-information. Hey, he's a County Sheriff
According to the US census, this guy has jurisdiction over 1,330,711 people. I'm not sure you quite understand the size of some counties in this country. This is not some idiot in back-woods hick country. This is Sacramento, California - the capital of the most populous state in the country.
I'm a female gamer, and there isn't anything on here I want to play...
Well, I think it's probably good to note that this is a translated list that appears to show the Japanese game lineup. I mean, "Take the A Train X" is definitely not going to be released anywhere else. (On the other hand, all of the American games listed here probably will be released in Japan.)
What's missing from this list, at least to my knowledge, are some good platform based games.
Well there are a lot of "untitled" games, and some new titles that we don't know much about (or at least I don't - anybody heard of "Chrome Hounds" before? That kinda sounds mistranslated to me...). It seems like the only titles on this list that anybody can react to are the ones that are known quantities because they are sequels, which almost by nature are not going to be that exciting.
But I agree, it's a pretty weak list, especially if this is the Japanese lineup. It definitely doesn't do anything to change any previous statements I've made about the Xbox 360 having virtually no chance there, same as the original Xbox.
And as for games like Katamari Damacy, see the problem with games like that is they actually require a bit of creativity, which is not something a lot of people in the game industry seem to have anymore. Especially not when you can take a derivative shooter like Halo and make $200 million from it. The way the industry works these days is somebody makes a lot of money from a game and for the next five years everybody simply tries to replicate that. Sad but true. Games like KD are the exception these days, not the norm.
I do expect the same will be true of the PS3's lineup, at least initially, and the jury's still out on the Revolution because I have not seen a single announced game on that platform yet (maybe I've just been living under a rock). No doubt it'll have all of Nintendo's own franchises, though most of them are little more than dinosaurs these days themselves.
I'll still buy all three systems, but I do hope to see some better games than this list at some point.
I am looking forward to seeing what Treasure's got planned, at least.
Oh, and for the love of god, please, give us an DDR Ultramix or Beatmania for the Xbox 360...
I have no doubt you will be seeing more DDR games on both the Xbox 360 and PS3. DDR's not dead yet.