Top selling 100 games of the past 4 and a half years. How very significant.
Actually, it is. Pac-Man does not compare very well to Grand Theft Auto, not only because of the type of game, but the venue of playing it. Modern games tend to be 3D and you tend to buy the game. You usually don't rack up "points" against a computer that will then take away "lives", but aim to "finish" the game or gain the most "frags" against a human opponent.
Sure, there are a lot of similarities too, but I think there are more differences. Add in the complexity of getting unit sales for earlier years and inflation's affect on dollar sales and the year 2000 isn't a half bad place to sum up modern gaming.
I'm not a sports fan, though I am a movie buff. If I were to buy either HD format it would be for the movies. Sports would have been far down my list as a subject I would have thought would become an HD success. Clearly I was wrong. Not being a sports fan I've often wondered what HD adds to the game. Does it really look that much better?
First off, I'm a PC gamer and I couldn't agree more.
Secondly, this sentence brought a question to mind:
I would guess that games like Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft would rank very highly in term of dollars produced
If they did include PC games and they did it based purely on "unit" sales, wouldn't that unfairly underrepresent the importance of games like WOW where subscriptions are a huge portion of the revenue? Similarly, wouldn't it overrepresent them if it was based purely on revenue?
A lot of people say that Solitare is the most successful game every made, based on number of copies shipped and number of people who have played. But it arguably has brought in zero revenue. How can you compare that on a chart vs. WOW?
In addition to the players, you have to expect differences due to the teams that put the releases together. If it's the same team and they're more familiar with HD-DVD, then they're likely to put together a nicer HD-DVD product. If it's a different team, then there might also be differences in skill level and quality control. Throw in differences in brand new, first generation players and you're unlikely to get a perfect apples to apples comparison of what the technologies are capable of.
Though this is certainly a good attempt at comparison, the real truth will only come from building concensuss over time.
You should be worrying about tests been done in people with a genetic make up as close to yours as possible...
Thanks, you just did it for me. Frankly, I lack the vocabulary to succinctly say "people with a genetic make up as close [to me] as possible" any better than just saying "white," but that is in fact what I meant. I thought that would be evident from the context of the message.
It's true that in this modern age, there is a lot of overlap. Races often intermingle freely, especially in America. A friend of mine recenlty inquired about a womans ethnicity, only to be told that she's white. She had a tan. He thought she might have been Latino. As someone posted earlier, you are the only one with your genetic makeup. But when hundreds of millions of people still share particular enough differences, they can bennefit significantly from drug testing on their racial type (read "genetic type) and we should make serious efforts to do so.
You might also mean: "No drug company ever gets any benefit from producing any drug that kill everyone who takes it", and this is trivially true, and entirely uninteresting.
I meant this one (roughly) and, in the context of the story, it's quite important (I don't know about "interesting"). The author is going on an on about how this drug very seriously fucked up a bunch of people. My statement was a reminder that if the drug company thought this was a likely occurance, they wouldn't have done the trial. They have nothing to gain (are they gonna be able to sell a drug like this?) and they have everything to lose (like, say, from massively bad publicity).
The conculsion is obvious to me. The drug company could not have known this drug would have this effect. I come to this conclusion simply because the question is so trivial that the drug company couldn't have missed it.
Now it's very possible(likely?) that this company didn't take the propper steps neccessary to minimize the risks at the drug trial. That's very bad and they should be held accountable if it's true. But sometimes drug companies produce drugs that are so bad they kill people and, yes, often that's an unforseen event. This is why we do drug trials instead of just shipping the drugs. This is why people on drug trials better understand what the word "risk" means. This is exactly why those honestly-run trials with propper pre-testing should not hurt the drug companies, even if they go horribly wrong. Hell, why are you going to bother to test a drug if you already know it's 100% safe?
Um... I agree with the examples you give. I was not suggesting otherwise, but just hoped that it was implied that I meant "for every race and gender that might actually use the medicine."
However, hypertension medicine tested exclusively on Indians would be a bad idea.
Ok. I looked it up in Wikipedia. You're right. Except for the part that it's not very relevant to medicine. Native Indians have a different disease profile than whites. Diseases affect them differently and at different rates. Drugs are unlikely to have the exact same effects.
A guy in a post above pointed out that each person reacts differently than others to the same drug. He's right. But groups of people statistically react the same. If i'm going to be taking medicine, I'd prefer to know it was determined to be statistically effective on a group of people as similar to me as possible, just like Indians deserve to be given medicines tested on Indians.
Did you all know that women respond differently to many medications that men? Did you know that black people respond differently than white people? I'm a white guy. I sure hope they continue to do plenty of testing on white guy's in the future. I'd hate to die because my medicine doesn't work as well on caucasions as it does the people of Indian.
In an ideal world, people would have drugs tested on all racial and gender type roughly equally, or at least according to the relative percentage of the population (which, of course, means Indian people perhaps should get more testing). This is rarely the case. Remember, when you test your drugs on people who are "expendable" you're really only hurting yourself in the long run unless you're just as expendable as they are.
(note: prisoners are alson not representitive of the general population. Do you want your antidepresents tested exlusively on criminals who have a much higher incidence of mental health problems and illegal drug use than the population as a whole? That would be rather silly, I think)
I'm glad someone sensible is posting. By the way, after calming down and taking a big breath, please stop to realize that the whole purpose of drug testing is to, well, test. The drug companies should be doing as much as possible to assure the safety of the drug before the test, but not everything can be forseen. This is why we do testing in the first place.
The drug companies don't get any bennefit from producing drugs that kill people. They don't do this on purpose.
You're very close right there. If MECOs exist, then blak holes can't exist. So obviously, all those black hole sightings were MECO sightings.
You can just as easily say the reverse can't you? If black holes exist, then this MECO sighting must, in fact, be a black hole sighting.
From the article:
A well accepted property of black holes is that they cannot sustain a magnetic field of their own. But observations of quasar Q0957+561 indicate that the object powering it does have a magnetic field, Schild's team says.
If all black holes we've found so far have not had magnetic fields, then isn't it a major problem to simply reclasify them as MECOs?
Look, I understand that the theory says that either one exists or the other, but the two are mutually exclusive. However, that simply gives you a scientific problem if a MECO is found, it doesn't automatically invalidate all other observations. We'd need to go back and look at some past black hole sightings and determine if it's possible they could be MECOs or if, in fact, their properties preclude them from being MECOs.
Science is about observation. Theory is important, but when the facts don't match up, theory doesn't win, observation does. Unless we observe that those objects we've been calling black holes do not, in fact, have the properties of black holes, then this goes down as a question mark, not a proof that they're all really MECOs.
Its mathematical really -- you can disprove by example. If the existence of MECO's disprove the existence of black holes -- then proof of one MECO is sufficient to disprove the existence of black holes.
Then doesn't proof of a single black hole also disprove the existence of MECOs?
One good MECO sighting clearly cannot erase all black hole sightings unless those black hole sightings are wrong. If the MECO is "confirmed" it simply means that there is conflict that must be resolved, not that Black Holes do not exist. The only way to resolve that conflict will be to prove that Black holes actually do not exist, not merely showig that mathmatics says they shouldn't.
All good and fine. But if we have decades of good work with black holes and we've appeared to find quite a few of them, then why would we be throwing them away with just one possible MECO sighting?
I mean, if all of a sudden my very smart next door neighbor told me the sky was purple, I'd have to give his account much more scruteny than normal, simply because I already have so much evidence that it's blue. I certaintly wouldn't elevate it much past "interesting" until I got a lot more information, and I'd certainly not discard blue until there was a great body of evidence.
Bluetooth mice are not very comon in PC land. I've only seen one Logitech (not easy to find) and one Think Outside BT mouse that seemed suitable for notebook use, but you're unlikely to find either in Best Buy or CompUSA. Why hasn't this caught on?
TW
Re:Don't Bother With The 360 Version
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Prey Review
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· Score: 1
Are those real intereactive screnshots or cutscreens and static shots? I looked at the IGN site and they are, indeed, very impressive. I would have to say that I've never personally seen a PC game that looks quite that good.
Is a midrange PC and video card capable of that quality? I don't know. I guess it doesn't matter what you're capable of, but rather what you accually do.
TW
Re:Don't Bother With The 360 Version
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Prey Review
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· Score: 1
Hob42 was correct, I was not intending to say that you can get great PC gaming performance for $300. I was intending to point out that if you add the cost of the computer you need plus the Xbox 360, that you could then take that money and buy a much nicer computer that would play great games rather well. The PC then ends up being the more economical solution for playing the latest generation of games.
Don't get me wrong, there might be plenty of other reasons why you might want the Xbox 360. You might want a game that's only available on that platform. Go for it if that's what you want. However, it appears to me that it would be a mistake to claim that 360 games look better or that it's cheaper to game on the 360. Even more so for the PS3.
TW
Re:Don't Bother With The 360 Version
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Prey Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
Compared to the pc version, the 360 version is a joke.
I was actually quite interested in how this game compares to games available on the 360 and games that will be available for the PS3. Without regard to whether the port is any good, the grapics on the PC version look great compared to screen shots I've seen of other games on next gen consoles. Being a long time PC gamer, I remember when the PS2 came out how jealous I was of how good it looked. But comparing these screen shots to shots I've seen of 360 games, it doesn't look like the 360 has much of an edge, if any.
Slashdotters have been happy to point out that for the cost of a PS3 you can get an Xbox 360 and a Wii. Consider for a moment that everyone who has a console will also have a PC. Looking on the Dell site right quick I was able to outfit an XPS 400 with a 2.8Ghz Pentium D, 1GB RAM and an nVidia 7300LE video card for $720 (Free shipping). The lowest end entry level PC on the site, the Dimension B110 goes for $299. That means that the cost of a reasonable, mainstream gaming PC, more than capable of running this game, is cheaper than the cost of either the Xbox 360 or the PS3, plus a cheapy PC (360@$400 plus PC@$299 equals $799. PS3 is $200 more). The Wii is the exception, but it's particular market and gimick make it an apples to oranges comparison.
Without going into whether the types of games you'll find on a console are better, are you getting better equipment out of them? Are you getting better looking games? Is this the generation of consoles that the PC ends up winning? I don't know, but it looks to me like the PC is both a more powerful gaming machine and a better value.
TW
Re:Does it run linux?
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Prey Review
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· Score: 4, Funny
Does it run Linux?
Yes, yes, the game has a full version of Linux in a virtual machine and on that version they've taken the liberty of preinstalling Tux Racer. You'll have just scads of fun as you pause the game to play TR whenever you want. But why stop there? You can pause the game and balance your checkbook on Linux, use OO.o to write a letter, or even develope your own high-end video game with all the included development tools.
Yes, it runs Linux, and after installing the 8th DVD you too can enjoy this beautiful operating system and just ignore this game as long as you'd like.
I do PC gameing in the living room and it's not really that easy. Sure you can set it up on a lapboard, but you better have a long one, or a short keyboard. And don't forget that you now have three pieces of gear, possibly with cords, so when you get up to get a fresh beer or soda you have to move everything to the side careully or it will fall all over the place. That's not even counting the tripping potential of all the cords.
I don't know if this will be a lot better, but at least someone is trying to fix the problem. I HATE doing FPS gaming with a joypad and a regular keyboard and mouse are cumbersome. This is the first honest attempt to fix this in a long time and I welcome the news that it's comming soon.
Yes, I was being tounge in cheek. Star Trek 2 is on my personal list of the top 5 greatest Sci-Fi movies of all time and I actually get misty eyed every time I hear Spock say, "the good of the many outweigh the good of the few, or the one" at the end. Star Trek 3 made me cry too, but only because I didn't have the resources to personally find every copy and burn it.
You can consider all the others in my list to have about the exact opposite real meaning as the one I stated in the post.
Couldn't tell if you were all tounge in cheek, all serious, or a combination. I'll take it at face value just for fun.
After all, without a story you can do "sequels" (read: Count up the release year and sell it as a new game) more easily.
One thing I've learned from my movie watching experience is how awesome sequels can be. The beauty of Star Trek 3, 4, and 5 after the mediocre Star Trek 2 totaly sold me on this concept. Terminator 3 and Blair Witch 2 were triumphs along with Friday the 13th 2 - 13. I will never forget Matrix 2 and 3. I cried for Neo.
But seriously. What do you want to sell a game with if not story? Graphics? We're already past super realistic 100% accurate graphics. If anything, story is a seller.
How about fun? Competition? Rivalry? Curiosity? The promise of a challenge? Novelty? Reality? Discovery? All these things can be present in non story-based games. They sell well.
I leave you with the story of the Sims. The Sims had no story, yet was the the best selling game of all time. It's 3d and fits every definition of modern gaming you might want to measure by. The Sims 2 sold quite well too and, yes, mostly by updating the graphics. It featured the promise of a challenge, novelty, reality, dicovery and plain old fashioned fun. Oh yeah, and no one had every really done anything like it before. That's what I want the next new game to be... new. And if they build it, I'll bet a lot of people will buy it.
I though impulsively that they'll make FPS games with no story, and no that we've seen close to a bajillion FPS games, the only thing now that can really make one better than another is story.
Not exactly true. Battlefield 2 has very little in the way of story. What story is there I just ignore. It has distinguished itself quite handily from the competition. Counter Strike similarly distinguished itself with no story (who are those hostages? Why are you rescuing them? No one knows or cares). I know they're not FPSs, but living in a similar universe are driving and sports games. I don't really play sports games, but I hear they can be a hoot, even with no story. I really enjoyed Need for Speed Underground with no story and I thought NFSU 2, which had a story, was actually inferior.
If you like competition, you don't need a story. What the article is saying is you make your own kind of competition emotions, such as fear of losing or exileration of victory, without having to have your heart strings tugged by the gamemaker's yarn. And I hate to be rude here, but most game stories are simply not that great. If I want cry over a story, whether in joy or sorrow, I'm much more likely to do it over a movie or a book.
I don't know how the Wii controller will make video game sports any cooler. I'd rather just go play sports outside... in the sunlight.
Wow! Talk about your inovative controler. More than a two hundred piece skeletal structure and fully thought controlled through a high speed interface with zero lag. Perfect force feadback as well as heat/cold sensations and actual pain when you screw up.
The visual interface features perfect High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and infinate polygonal surfaces with fully translucent light scattering substructures.
The environment is not only fully destructable, but fully interactive. Every single object down to individual grains of dirt can be manipulated at will and that awesome controller lets you manipulate it through a 100% 3D range of motion including rotation, push and pull along every axis.
For sports games, why would anyone use anything else?
Oh yeah, you have to F***ing excersize. Screw that, I'm gonna try out that Wii thingy.
And, mine is 6 years old now and runs Vista Beta just fine.
"Runs" can mean a lot of things. So can "runs just fine." Your machine most certainly doesn't run Vista with all the Vista eye candy turned on in any kind of a speedy fasion, and it most certainly isn't "peppy" about doing any real, modern work even with the eye-candy turned off.
If you don't want to, or need to, run demanding apps, then more power to you. If you don't care about waiting a bit for large apps to load, or maxing out memory with fewer apps running, then more power to you. But don't go throwing around that "works just fine" stuff as if you can play Oblivion on Vista with all the eye-candy turned on. You just can't.
I have a 9 year old dodge Neon that I drive sometimes. It has 170K miles, manual door locks, manual windows and a medium to slow oil leak, but it drives down the road "just fine." I'm happy with the car for many purposes, but I don't drive it far from home because of reliability concerns and I avoid using it for dates.
When you compare that to my Win98 box, well, my Win98 box is _awesome_ for all the work I ask it to do. That's the case because it's over specced for the apps I ask it to run. It's easy to overspec because 6 year old equipment is cheap as hell. At the same time, I have a WinXP box that is _awesome_ for the things I ask it to run. When I get Vista, it will be on a rig that is _awesome_ for the type of work I ask it to do. The rig you've described, your six your old box running Vista, is a 9 year old Neon. There's no shame in that, and I'm just happy driving one around for many purposes. But if you're running this years apps with this year's workload, then it's not running those things in an awesome fasion. If you leave it for the stuff it was designed to run, you'll find you have a much better user experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Top selling 100 games of the past 4 and a half years. How very significant.
Actually, it is. Pac-Man does not compare very well to Grand Theft Auto, not only because of the type of game, but the venue of playing it. Modern games tend to be 3D and you tend to buy the game. You usually don't rack up "points" against a computer that will then take away "lives", but aim to "finish" the game or gain the most "frags" against a human opponent.
Sure, there are a lot of similarities too, but I think there are more differences. Add in the complexity of getting unit sales for earlier years and inflation's affect on dollar sales and the year 2000 isn't a half bad place to sum up modern gaming.
TW
I'm not a sports fan, though I am a movie buff. If I were to buy either HD format it would be for the movies. Sports would have been far down my list as a subject I would have thought would become an HD success. Clearly I was wrong. Not being a sports fan I've often wondered what HD adds to the game. Does it really look that much better?
Just curious.
TW
First off, I'm a PC gamer and I couldn't agree more.
Secondly, this sentence brought a question to mind:
I would guess that games like Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft would rank very highly in term of dollars produced
If they did include PC games and they did it based purely on "unit" sales, wouldn't that unfairly underrepresent the importance of games like WOW where subscriptions are a huge portion of the revenue? Similarly, wouldn't it overrepresent them if it was based purely on revenue?
A lot of people say that Solitare is the most successful game every made, based on number of copies shipped and number of people who have played. But it arguably has brought in zero revenue. How can you compare that on a chart vs. WOW?
I'm curious what others think abou this.
TW
In addition to the players, you have to expect differences due to the teams that put the releases together. If it's the same team and they're more familiar with HD-DVD, then they're likely to put together a nicer HD-DVD product. If it's a different team, then there might also be differences in skill level and quality control. Throw in differences in brand new, first generation players and you're unlikely to get a perfect apples to apples comparison of what the technologies are capable of.
Though this is certainly a good attempt at comparison, the real truth will only come from building concensuss over time.
TW
Define what is "White race". ...
You should be worrying about tests been done in people with a genetic make up as close to yours as possible...
Thanks, you just did it for me. Frankly, I lack the vocabulary to succinctly say "people with a genetic make up as close [to me] as possible" any better than just saying "white," but that is in fact what I meant. I thought that would be evident from the context of the message.
It's true that in this modern age, there is a lot of overlap. Races often intermingle freely, especially in America. A friend of mine recenlty inquired about a womans ethnicity, only to be told that she's white. She had a tan. He thought she might have been Latino. As someone posted earlier, you are the only one with your genetic makeup. But when hundreds of millions of people still share particular enough differences, they can bennefit significantly from drug testing on their racial type (read "genetic type) and we should make serious efforts to do so.
TW
You might also mean: "No drug company ever gets any benefit from producing any drug that kill everyone who takes it", and this is trivially true, and entirely uninteresting.
I meant this one (roughly) and, in the context of the story, it's quite important (I don't know about "interesting"). The author is going on an on about how this drug very seriously fucked up a bunch of people. My statement was a reminder that if the drug company thought this was a likely occurance, they wouldn't have done the trial. They have nothing to gain (are they gonna be able to sell a drug like this?) and they have everything to lose (like, say, from massively bad publicity).
The conculsion is obvious to me. The drug company could not have known this drug would have this effect. I come to this conclusion simply because the question is so trivial that the drug company couldn't have missed it.
Now it's very possible(likely?) that this company didn't take the propper steps neccessary to minimize the risks at the drug trial. That's very bad and they should be held accountable if it's true. But sometimes drug companies produce drugs that are so bad they kill people and, yes, often that's an unforseen event. This is why we do drug trials instead of just shipping the drugs. This is why people on drug trials better understand what the word "risk" means. This is exactly why those honestly-run trials with propper pre-testing should not hurt the drug companies, even if they go horribly wrong. Hell, why are you going to bother to test a drug if you already know it's 100% safe?
TW
Um... I agree with the examples you give. I was not suggesting otherwise, but just hoped that it was implied that I meant "for every race and gender that might actually use the medicine."
However, hypertension medicine tested exclusively on Indians would be a bad idea.
TW
Ok. I looked it up in Wikipedia. You're right. Except for the part that it's not very relevant to medicine. Native Indians have a different disease profile than whites. Diseases affect them differently and at different rates. Drugs are unlikely to have the exact same effects.
A guy in a post above pointed out that each person reacts differently than others to the same drug. He's right. But groups of people statistically react the same. If i'm going to be taking medicine, I'd prefer to know it was determined to be statistically effective on a group of people as similar to me as possible, just like Indians deserve to be given medicines tested on Indians.
Did you all know that women respond differently to many medications that men? Did you know that black people respond differently than white people? I'm a white guy. I sure hope they continue to do plenty of testing on white guy's in the future. I'd hate to die because my medicine doesn't work as well on caucasions as it does the people of Indian.
In an ideal world, people would have drugs tested on all racial and gender type roughly equally, or at least according to the relative percentage of the population (which, of course, means Indian people perhaps should get more testing). This is rarely the case. Remember, when you test your drugs on people who are "expendable" you're really only hurting yourself in the long run unless you're just as expendable as they are.
(note: prisoners are alson not representitive of the general population. Do you want your antidepresents tested exlusively on criminals who have a much higher incidence of mental health problems and illegal drug use than the population as a whole? That would be rather silly, I think)
TW
I'm glad someone sensible is posting. By the way, after calming down and taking a big breath, please stop to realize that the whole purpose of drug testing is to, well, test. The drug companies should be doing as much as possible to assure the safety of the drug before the test, but not everything can be forseen. This is why we do testing in the first place.
The drug companies don't get any bennefit from producing drugs that kill people. They don't do this on purpose.
TW
One word: laptops.
Two words: No Dongle.
Lot of laptops now have bluetooth. A nice, small BT mouse designed for travel would be terrific.
TW
You can just as easily say the reverse can't you? If black holes exist, then this MECO sighting must, in fact, be a black hole sighting.
From the article:
If all black holes we've found so far have not had magnetic fields, then isn't it a major problem to simply reclasify them as MECOs?
Look, I understand that the theory says that either one exists or the other, but the two are mutually exclusive. However, that simply gives you a scientific problem if a MECO is found, it doesn't automatically invalidate all other observations. We'd need to go back and look at some past black hole sightings and determine if it's possible they could be MECOs or if, in fact, their properties preclude them from being MECOs.
Science is about observation. Theory is important, but when the facts don't match up, theory doesn't win, observation does. Unless we observe that those objects we've been calling black holes do not, in fact, have the properties of black holes, then this goes down as a question mark, not a proof that they're all really MECOs.
TW
Its mathematical really -- you can disprove by example. If the existence of MECO's disprove the existence of black holes -- then proof of one MECO is sufficient to disprove the existence of black holes.
Then doesn't proof of a single black hole also disprove the existence of MECOs?
One good MECO sighting clearly cannot erase all black hole sightings unless those black hole sightings are wrong. If the MECO is "confirmed" it simply means that there is conflict that must be resolved, not that Black Holes do not exist. The only way to resolve that conflict will be to prove that Black holes actually do not exist, not merely showig that mathmatics says they shouldn't.
TW
All good and fine. But if we have decades of good work with black holes and we've appeared to find quite a few of them, then why would we be throwing them away with just one possible MECO sighting?
I mean, if all of a sudden my very smart next door neighbor told me the sky was purple, I'd have to give his account much more scruteny than normal, simply because I already have so much evidence that it's blue. I certaintly wouldn't elevate it much past "interesting" until I got a lot more information, and I'd certainly not discard blue until there was a great body of evidence.
TW
Bluetooth mice are not very comon in PC land. I've only seen one Logitech (not easy to find) and one Think Outside BT mouse that seemed suitable for notebook use, but you're unlikely to find either in Best Buy or CompUSA. Why hasn't this caught on?
TW
Are those real intereactive screnshots or cutscreens and static shots? I looked at the IGN site and they are, indeed, very impressive. I would have to say that I've never personally seen a PC game that looks quite that good.
Is a midrange PC and video card capable of that quality? I don't know. I guess it doesn't matter what you're capable of, but rather what you accually do.
TW
Hob42 was correct, I was not intending to say that you can get great PC gaming performance for $300. I was intending to point out that if you add the cost of the computer you need plus the Xbox 360, that you could then take that money and buy a much nicer computer that would play great games rather well. The PC then ends up being the more economical solution for playing the latest generation of games.
Don't get me wrong, there might be plenty of other reasons why you might want the Xbox 360. You might want a game that's only available on that platform. Go for it if that's what you want. However, it appears to me that it would be a mistake to claim that 360 games look better or that it's cheaper to game on the 360. Even more so for the PS3.
TW
Compared to the pc version, the 360 version is a joke.
I was actually quite interested in how this game compares to games available on the 360 and games that will be available for the PS3. Without regard to whether the port is any good, the grapics on the PC version look great compared to screen shots I've seen of other games on next gen consoles. Being a long time PC gamer, I remember when the PS2 came out how jealous I was of how good it looked. But comparing these screen shots to shots I've seen of 360 games, it doesn't look like the 360 has much of an edge, if any.
Slashdotters have been happy to point out that for the cost of a PS3 you can get an Xbox 360 and a Wii. Consider for a moment that everyone who has a console will also have a PC. Looking on the Dell site right quick I was able to outfit an XPS 400 with a 2.8Ghz Pentium D, 1GB RAM and an nVidia 7300LE video card for $720 (Free shipping). The lowest end entry level PC on the site, the Dimension B110 goes for $299. That means that the cost of a reasonable, mainstream gaming PC, more than capable of running this game, is cheaper than the cost of either the Xbox 360 or the PS3, plus a cheapy PC (360@$400 plus PC@$299 equals $799. PS3 is $200 more). The Wii is the exception, but it's particular market and gimick make it an apples to oranges comparison.
Without going into whether the types of games you'll find on a console are better, are you getting better equipment out of them? Are you getting better looking games? Is this the generation of consoles that the PC ends up winning? I don't know, but it looks to me like the PC is both a more powerful gaming machine and a better value.
TW
Does it run Linux?
Yes, yes, the game has a full version of Linux in a virtual machine and on that version they've taken the liberty of preinstalling Tux Racer. You'll have just scads of fun as you pause the game to play TR whenever you want. But why stop there? You can pause the game and balance your checkbook on Linux, use OO.o to write a letter, or even develope your own high-end video game with all the included development tools.
Yes, it runs Linux, and after installing the 8th DVD you too can enjoy this beautiful operating system and just ignore this game as long as you'd like.
TW
I do PC gameing in the living room and it's not really that easy. Sure you can set it up on a lapboard, but you better have a long one, or a short keyboard. And don't forget that you now have three pieces of gear, possibly with cords, so when you get up to get a fresh beer or soda you have to move everything to the side careully or it will fall all over the place. That's not even counting the tripping potential of all the cords.
I don't know if this will be a lot better, but at least someone is trying to fix the problem. I HATE doing FPS gaming with a joypad and a regular keyboard and mouse are cumbersome. This is the first honest attempt to fix this in a long time and I welcome the news that it's comming soon.
TW
Yes, I was being tounge in cheek. Star Trek 2 is on my personal list of the top 5 greatest Sci-Fi movies of all time and I actually get misty eyed every time I hear Spock say, "the good of the many outweigh the good of the few, or the one" at the end. Star Trek 3 made me cry too, but only because I didn't have the resources to personally find every copy and burn it.
You can consider all the others in my list to have about the exact opposite real meaning as the one I stated in the post.
Cheers,
TW
One thing I've learned from my movie watching experience is how awesome sequels can be. The beauty of Star Trek 3, 4, and 5 after the mediocre Star Trek 2 totaly sold me on this concept. Terminator 3 and Blair Witch 2 were triumphs along with Friday the 13th 2 - 13. I will never forget Matrix 2 and 3. I cried for Neo.
How about fun? Competition? Rivalry? Curiosity? The promise of a challenge? Novelty? Reality? Discovery? All these things can be present in non story-based games. They sell well.
I leave you with the story of the Sims. The Sims had no story, yet was the the best selling game of all time. It's 3d and fits every definition of modern gaming you might want to measure by. The Sims 2 sold quite well too and, yes, mostly by updating the graphics. It featured the promise of a challenge, novelty, reality, dicovery and plain old fashioned fun. Oh yeah, and no one had every really done anything like it before. That's what I want the next new game to be... new. And if they build it, I'll bet a lot of people will buy it.
TW
I though impulsively that they'll make FPS games with no story, and no that we've seen close to a bajillion FPS games, the only thing now that can really make one better than another is story.
Not exactly true. Battlefield 2 has very little in the way of story. What story is there I just ignore. It has distinguished itself quite handily from the competition. Counter Strike similarly distinguished itself with no story (who are those hostages? Why are you rescuing them? No one knows or cares). I know they're not FPSs, but living in a similar universe are driving and sports games. I don't really play sports games, but I hear they can be a hoot, even with no story. I really enjoyed Need for Speed Underground with no story and I thought NFSU 2, which had a story, was actually inferior.
If you like competition, you don't need a story. What the article is saying is you make your own kind of competition emotions, such as fear of losing or exileration of victory, without having to have your heart strings tugged by the gamemaker's yarn. And I hate to be rude here, but most game stories are simply not that great. If I want cry over a story, whether in joy or sorrow, I'm much more likely to do it over a movie or a book.
TW
I don't know how the Wii controller will make video game sports any cooler. I'd rather just go play sports outside... in the sunlight.
Wow! Talk about your inovative controler. More than a two hundred piece skeletal structure and fully thought controlled through a high speed interface with zero lag. Perfect force feadback as well as heat/cold sensations and actual pain when you screw up.
The visual interface features perfect High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and infinate polygonal surfaces with fully translucent light scattering substructures.
The environment is not only fully destructable, but fully interactive. Every single object down to individual grains of dirt can be manipulated at will and that awesome controller lets you manipulate it through a 100% 3D range of motion including rotation, push and pull along every axis.
For sports games, why would anyone use anything else?
Oh yeah, you have to F***ing excersize. Screw that, I'm gonna try out that Wii thingy.
TW
And, mine is 6 years old now and runs Vista Beta just fine.
"Runs" can mean a lot of things. So can "runs just fine." Your machine most certainly doesn't run Vista with all the Vista eye candy turned on in any kind of a speedy fasion, and it most certainly isn't "peppy" about doing any real, modern work even with the eye-candy turned off.
If you don't want to, or need to, run demanding apps, then more power to you. If you don't care about waiting a bit for large apps to load, or maxing out memory with fewer apps running, then more power to you. But don't go throwing around that "works just fine" stuff as if you can play Oblivion on Vista with all the eye-candy turned on. You just can't.
I have a 9 year old dodge Neon that I drive sometimes. It has 170K miles, manual door locks, manual windows and a medium to slow oil leak, but it drives down the road "just fine." I'm happy with the car for many purposes, but I don't drive it far from home because of reliability concerns and I avoid using it for dates.
When you compare that to my Win98 box, well, my Win98 box is _awesome_ for all the work I ask it to do. That's the case because it's over specced for the apps I ask it to run. It's easy to overspec because 6 year old equipment is cheap as hell. At the same time, I have a WinXP box that is _awesome_ for the things I ask it to run. When I get Vista, it will be on a rig that is _awesome_ for the type of work I ask it to do. The rig you've described, your six your old box running Vista, is a 9 year old Neon. There's no shame in that, and I'm just happy driving one around for many purposes. But if you're running this years apps with this year's workload, then it's not running those things in an awesome fasion. If you leave it for the stuff it was designed to run, you'll find you have a much better user experience.
TW