"This news comes after a reporter at the BBC paid $611 for an XBOX 360 on eBay, only to find out that he had not read the item description, which clearly explained that he would not be getting an XBOX 360 console, but a cardboard box with the numbers '360' written on the side of it in green marker..."
I live in Michigan, and I know for a fact that Governer Granholm is Canadian... I'm assuming, by looking at the figures you posted, and by the figures posted on that bill, that her prices are in Canadian and she just hasn't converted them yet.:)
I was a huge fan of EVO from ENIX for the SNES. A lot of people I know loved this game. A graphically intense 3D sequel with thousands of possibilities as to what you could do to your characters would be pretty sweet. I stll go back and play through this game sometimes... the gameplay isn't very deep, but it's something fun that you can pick up and put down.
I'm not one to usually shamelessly plug something but God of War on PS2 is seriously one of the best games I've played since Mario 64 on the N64.
The game is straight up fun. They somehow manage to get you to use every single button on the controller, but they do it in such a way that it's not hard at all. You don't even have to think about what you're doing and before you know it your hands are all over the controller and your character is pulling off some awesome and visually stunning moves.
The game is fun from beginning to end... they put in just the right amount of each element to make the game good - the right amount of action, adventure, puzzle solving, RPG elements, sweet weapons and magics, surprises, an awesome storyline, not to mention the graphics and sound are some of the best I've seen on the PS2 EVER.
Anyone who likes what games used to be like and wants a game that's fun from beginning to end but isn't 100 hours long should pick this one up - seriously. Rent it if nothing else and blow through it in a couple days. It's the most fun I've had on a console in a long time - this comes from someone who bought an XBOX to play NES and SNES games on.
God of War doesn't disappoint. The pick-up-and-play aspect is always there - because there's no more than 20-30 minutes between each save point and the action is constantly happening. I've found myself picking this game up again and again after beating it - which in this day in age is usually rare of a console game for me.
Old school gameplay with new school graphics and sound - anyone who has a PS2 should definetly pick this one up.
Really? As a GENERAL look back on the habbits of my peers and I when when we were little, and my little cousins, neices, and nephews now - almost all of the little girls play with toys like dolls, "My Little Ponies," baby dolls, etc., and the boys play with stuff like Legos or other blocks, computers, video games, etc.
It makes sense to me that some toys are naturally a little more mentally stimulating than others, and usually those are the toys that are geared toward young boys. I'm not saying that little girls never play with Legos, computers, or video games, but look how many do compared to boys.
Tell that to the female Japanese foreign exchange student that we had in my 9th grade class that used to mop the class with us because she was doing the equivalent of Calc III in Japan while we were rockin Algebra I in the US.:)
FYI I owned a 94 BMW 325is with the sport package, and recently after that bought a 95 Acura Integra GSR (which is on the same platform as the 96-00 Honda Civic) and modded the Integra GS-R to the point where I'd feel comfortable racing any BMW on a curvy road short of an M. My 325is cost me over $10,000 and the GS-R cost me $8,000 mods included, and the GS-R performed far better than the 325is ever coudl have hoped. The only BMW I ever ran across that could hold a candle to the GS-R as far as handling was a M3, which cost someone $53,000. Granted their car was a lot nicer than mine, but the GS-R could outhandle it for $45,000 less.
Don't underestimate the potential of Hondas/Acuras when they're modded by someone who knows what their doing and not by some 16 year old ricer.
Just because it worked in your case doesn't mean that it works in others. You make a valid point and I don't doubt the credibility of your school, its scholars, or its teachers - but just because you have a succesful institution implemented in your area doesn't automatically make every private school better than every public school.
I attended a public school in a small town and I'm not going to lie - most of my graduating class are total losers. Infact I would say around 80% of them. Maybe more. By "losers" I mean most of them will probably make less than $20,000/yr. for the rest of their lives and never leave this town. You get out of public school what you put into it - and therein lies the problem - we were never taught in school that it's important to excel at all. Most of the graduates from my class went on to college on sports scholarships. Most of those people have come back and are now working in gas stations beacuse they got injured, or cut because they found out that just because they're good in our low string school doesn't mean that they're as good as they thought they were when compared to everyone else out there.
For as many people that came out of our school like that though - there are atleast one other (given size to size relationship obviously) that came out of the local Christian/Catholic school as bad or wosre off. Our local Catholic school only runs until high school (9th grade) and then all of the Catholic school kids have to finish off their K-12 career in a public high school. All of the males were so timid and scared of the general population when they walked down the halls and saw something "different" (a gay kid, a gothic kid, some 'stoner punks,' etc.) That was all totally foreign to them so it scared the shit out of them. Eventually some of them adapted but not a lot. The girls coming from the Catholic schools were all so repressed by parents and were feared by many of the Catholic school males that they turned into huge sluts as soon as they found attention from the public school crowd. I can name 20 or 30 girls that graduated with me that had kids before the end of high school.
The Christian school kids had it just as bad in my town... there's a girl that works with me that graduated from an all Christian private school (not all-girls school either) that has the intellegence of a 7 year old. She can barely do basic math, her vocabulary is rediculously small for someone who is 20 years old (someone said "monitary" the other day and she asked what that meant... we work in a bank), etc. She was drilled that she should keep herself "pure" until marriage and she was so itching to have sex that she just reently (a couple weeks ago) married a kid that she'd known for two months. They're now living together and not able to pay any bills, and she wants to have a ton of kids and quit her job to stay at home and be "mom." She says things all the time like "If ____ and I have kids and I quit my job and stay home I'm sure the lord will provide for us." Her boyfriend graduated with me and is one of "those kids" (read above) so he's making $8/hr working at a garage. I cringe every time she says it - If Jesus was handing out cash to pay bills I would have asked a long time ago.
Apart from her being as ubersmart as she is, the slutty Catholic girls that pop out 3 babies every 2 weeks, and the crybaby catholic boys that run when they see a goth, homosexual, or african american - I'm glad I went to public schools.
The Saturn didn't fail just because of it's media type if that's what you're saying. The 32X and Jupiter sucked period. The games wren't any better looking than Super NES games, infact many of them were MUCH worse than a lot of the SNES games. All of Sega's consoles after the Genesis were doomed to fail independent of their media type. 32X was cart based and it sucked, Saturn was CD based and a complex hardware confiruation made the system impossible to program for by anyone but Sega's AM2. Those consoles, and the Dreamcast, failed because Sega of America was taking orders from Sega of Japan, and SoJ had their business and marketing heads up virtual asses.
As far as battery times being dwindled by optical media as opposed to carts, I'm going to call BS. I can get over 60 hours of continuous play time out of my Sony MD player on a single AA battery, and the MD disc is constantly spinning and streaming. They could put 4 AA's in the PSP and dedicate 1/4 of the total power to the optical drive and it'd be a 60+ hour run. If anything, the huge color screen (of which the Nintendo DS has TWO of) is going to eat away at battery life, not the optical drive.
What EB says doesn't always go the way they plan it. I ordered Gran Turismo 4 last November from them because they said the relase date was going to be 1/1/2004. We know how that worked out, don't we.:-/
Just reading through this I'm seeing a TON of people that are saying "Well the Nintendo handheld is obviously going to be better because Nintendo has been the king of handhelds for the past X number of years, and Sony will have to play catch-up like Microsoft is with the XBOX."
I was hearing those same kinds of things back in around 94 when Sony announced they were releasing a game console. Everyone said "Oh Sony's got so much money that they won't need to make it good, they'll just throw it out and expect people to buy it - and it'll be SO expensive that it'll never float. And they won't put as much money into it as Nintendo and Sega do their game systems because that's their specialty and that's ALL they do."
Well we are now seeing how that went, aren't we. Sega tanked. Sega was more innovative than any game company out there... the first 16-bit system, the first mainstream CD system, the first 128-bit system (Jaguar doesn't count - that was just a mess), etc. etc. and they still went under. Now they've whored all of their characters out over all platforms just to stay afloat. I'm waiting to see Sonic and Tails appear in the next Smash Bros game.
Innovation doesn't always mean practicality. It's going to take twice as much power to run two LCDs as opposed to just one. The second LCD on the DD will end up being as worthless as the screen on the VMUs for Dreamcast. Was there really any game that was worth looking down at the VMU screen? 3rd party developers don't care what kind of crazy high tech new invention that 1st party companies dream up. If a company wants to put a game on the PS2, XBOX, PSP, and the new Nintendo handheld, they're not going to completely change the game for the Nintendo handheld... they're going to stick a static image or something on the second screen and that'll be that... just like on the Dreamcast VMUs.
Good idea? Sure. Will it actually do much from any games EXECPT the ones from Nintendo? I'm betting not. Look at game company "innovations" that were supposed to be all extraordinary and then proved themselves to be pretty worthless once released... Dreamcast VMUs, the mouse for the SNES, the Sega fishing controller, Nintendo Power Pad, the memory expansion pack for the N64, the 32X (hah), the Jaguar controllers with the numeric pad (wtf), the list goes on and on.
802.11B? Who cares? If I have to sit on my couch in my living room, 30 feet or so away from my wi-fi base station to play multiplayer games, I'm going to be doing it through an XBOX or a PS2 or my PC on my 50" TV... not staring at some 3" LCD on a handheld. Chatting with a stylus on a handheld? Have you ever tried that before? Do you know how rediculous it is? Get online with Auto Modellista and try typing with the onscreen keyboard and a controller and see how fast you get sick of it. You'll get one sentance out and the room will have moved on to some completely different topic. Chatting is for PCs. If you want to chat, download an IRC client.
Moveis on the PSP? Come on. I'm going to go out and spend $20 for a movie that I already own on DVD to watch it on my PSP on a smaller screen and listen to it through a 1" speaker? Hell no. I don't know what Sony was thinking with this - but I hope they're not seriously thinking that a large source of their income on the PSP will be from movie sales. One awesome thing though - if I can carry Gran Turismo 4 around in my pocket, I'll shell $300 for a PSP right now.
In reality, if either company wants to succeed with either of these things they're going to have to do some things. Number one, when I carry a hand held game system around, it damn well better fit in my pocket. If I have to carry it around in a large bag, I might as well bring my laptop and a game controller and have 15" of emulator fun for hours on end. Number two the batteries better last a long time. 2 hours is Game Gear. If I can get 100+ hours of play out of my Sony MD player with one AA battery (WITH moving parts) then they should be able to get 20 hours out of a portable game system with 4 AAA's in it. If either system ea
With a name like Mr. McCool... I don't see how you could really go wrong with this. I mean come on... McCool. Is anyone going to argue with that? I didn't think so.:)
This is exactly what I thought when I read this story. I bought Unreal 2 as soon as it came out thinking it was going to be sweet, and it wasn't even playable on my system, which was top of the line at the time. They promised a patch for two months after release that never came. I wasn't the only one getting 12fps when I should have been getting a lot more. I ended up getting a huge retailer, who will remain nameless, to take the game back and bought UT2003 instead.:) I vowed never to buy anything from a company who would rush a buggy game out like that ever again... looks like I can scratch Legend off the list. Good riddance.
FYI I got a USB Dual Action as well, and I don't have calibrations with any of the buttons. I'm running DX9 under WinXP, and the drivers that came on the Logitech CD. I don't know if that's got anything to do with it, but I play NFS Hot Pursuit 2 all the time and I've never had any problems with it.
'I'm unaware of any company that would shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market,'
My most recent experience with this would have to be Unreal II. I bought this game as soon as it hit the shelf after drooling over screen shots of it for a year or so. When I got the game home, and installed it, it wasn't even playable. 5-7 fps on a good day. At first I thought that it was my slightly-outdated PC (Athlon XP 1800, 512MB PC2700, GeForce 4 Ti4800SE), but when I consulted the official Unreal II forums, I got sick...
Apparently the problem wasn't just my PC, but a problem in the Unreal II engine that was due to the game being rushed. People with then top of the line P4/Athlon systems with as much as 1.5GB of RAM and the fastest NVidia and ATI card were still getting anywhere from 5-15 fps.
For two months I waited as the developers promised day after day that a patch was going to be released... days quickly became months. 3 months to be exact, with no patch. The cost of the game dropped $10... still no patch. I eventually took it back into Walmart, explaining that the software was faulty, the developers aknowledged it, but weren't doing anything to fix it. They gave me store credit on that account... for $39.99 instead of the $49.99 I paid for it, which was still better than nothing.
Literally, I paid $10 to hold on to a useless CD for 3 months... completely unplayable, all because of a company that was so eager to release a game well before a more popular title, then looming overhead (read: Doom III) that they didn't even thouroughly test it first.
Win-G was so flawed and ill-fated MS denies even creating it now. If you call up MS and ask them anything about Win-G they'll pretend that they have no idea as to what you're talking about.
Win-G was the predicessor to Direct X... It was a game development library that was created by MS that was developed under Windows 3 when game programmers were wanting to make the big switch from DOS games to Windows games. The library was so bad, that very few books were ever published on how to program for the API, and there were VERY few games released that utilized it beause it was so hard to program for, for as weak and slow as it was.
About a year after it's release, they saw it wasn't catching on AT ALL and yanked all references to it from their website, and never spoke of it again. They dropped the Win-G name completely when Direct X was released, and never spoke of it again.
They've done such a good job covering it up, that it usually doesn't even make lists like this.:)
As a test about 4 months ago I created a Hotmail account, and never gave the address to ANYONE. I didn't so much as log into the account, except once to activate it. I unchecked all of the subscription services when joining up, and didn't check the box that said MS could sell the address name.
2 months later I logged into it, and it was full of spam. How'd that happen?! The only one besides me that knew the address existed was MS... Hmm...
Actually what you've posted is completely wrong. Nintendo screwed themselves over on the PlayStation deal. Nintendo wanted to make a CD addon to compete with the Mega CD in Japan (Sega CD in the US) around 1988, before SNES was even out in the US. Since they already had nice bonds with Sony for supplying them with the sound processors for the SNES, they decided it might be a good idea to look to Sony for a CD addon instead of going elsewhere.
Sony agreed to do the work if they could take part of the profit from sales of the unit (obviously), Nintendo said that was cool, so all went ahead. At the time Sony was developing the console, Sony ImageSoft started developing CD based games for it. The SNES CD drive games were to be loaded into caddies, like the older Macs used to use. When you bought a game, you wouldn't just get a CD like a 3DO game or a Sega CD game, but you'd get a caddy. Nintendo didn't want to do this to protect the CD, rather they wanted to embed a chip in the CD casing that the system would check to make sure the product was a licensed Nintendo game. Nintendo is completely anal about licensing for all of their games, and reviews each game to a great extent before it'll allow the game out for any of its systems -- it does this still today.
Nintendo also started talking to Sony about licensing fees for all of the games that Sony ImageSoft was developing for the CD console. Sony thought that since they were building the hardware, that Sony ImageSoft should be able to develop games freely. Nintendo diagreed. This is where all the fun started. In addition to that, Sony also wanted to release CD only medium... and do away with Nintendo's CD caddy idea. They wanted to embed code in the first sectors of the CD, and have the console check that, rather than a chip. They actually put this functionality into the unit, which both companies had dubbed, unofficially the PlayStation at the time.
The "PSX" coming from the development name of the PlayStation, as you stated "PlayStation X" is wrong. Some people say that "PSX" comes from the term "PlayStation eXperimental." This is another one of those internet farses spread about by 12 year olds. The actual acronym at time was PSe... which later evolved into all of those "UR NOT e" commercials where the "e" was red (e.g. you are not ready). The PSX acronym came from game magazines before the release of the actual Sony PlayStation and just stuck. Sony hates the acronym, and that's why they acciented so heavily on the "PS2" acronym to devoid the frequently questioned "X." If the PSX acronym was infact a Sony acronym, I'd have "PSX2" plastered on the top of my PS2, not "PS2.":)
Back to the point... what Sony had was a semi-functional unit that Nintendo wasn't sure if they wanted.
Nintendo, while still under contract with Sony, decided that they would instead give attention to Phillips Magnavox to come up with copy protection and to have a huge hand in continued development of the Sony console. Sony didn't like this at all, since Sony and Phillips-Magnavox are HUGE competitors in Japan. Nintendo, being a game company, didn't care about this too much, and obviously just wanted what was best for business.
Needless to say, the whole thing fell apart, and Sony scrapped the layout for the original PlayStation project. The actual console that they came out with 3-5 years later was completely different in design, both physically and internally of the original Nintendo/Sony PlayStation project.
Slashdot Mirror
"This news comes after a reporter at the BBC paid $611 for an XBOX 360 on eBay, only to find out that he had not read the item description, which clearly explained that he would not be getting an XBOX 360 console, but a cardboard box with the numbers '360' written on the side of it in green marker..."
I live in Michigan, and I know for a fact that Governer Granholm is Canadian... I'm assuming, by looking at the figures you posted, and by the figures posted on that bill, that her prices are in Canadian and she just hasn't converted them yet. :)
You said "Kuhnt"
I was a huge fan of EVO from ENIX for the SNES. A lot of people I know loved this game. A graphically intense 3D sequel with thousands of possibilities as to what you could do to your characters would be pretty sweet. I stll go back and play through this game sometimes... the gameplay isn't very deep, but it's something fun that you can pick up and put down.
I'm not one to usually shamelessly plug something but God of War on PS2 is seriously one of the best games I've played since Mario 64 on the N64.
The game is straight up fun. They somehow manage to get you to use every single button on the controller, but they do it in such a way that it's not hard at all. You don't even have to think about what you're doing and before you know it your hands are all over the controller and your character is pulling off some awesome and visually stunning moves.
The game is fun from beginning to end... they put in just the right amount of each element to make the game good - the right amount of action, adventure, puzzle solving, RPG elements, sweet weapons and magics, surprises, an awesome storyline, not to mention the graphics and sound are some of the best I've seen on the PS2 EVER.
Anyone who likes what games used to be like and wants a game that's fun from beginning to end but isn't 100 hours long should pick this one up - seriously. Rent it if nothing else and blow through it in a couple days. It's the most fun I've had on a console in a long time - this comes from someone who bought an XBOX to play NES and SNES games on.
God of War doesn't disappoint. The pick-up-and-play aspect is always there - because there's no more than 20-30 minutes between each save point and the action is constantly happening. I've found myself picking this game up again and again after beating it - which in this day in age is usually rare of a console game for me.
Old school gameplay with new school graphics and sound - anyone who has a PS2 should definetly pick this one up.
-1, Flamebait
"You're all ignorant... that Adjustment Layer was just to help my breathin..."
I wonder what happens when you put a LENS FLARE in the genes of a dog... or a LENS FLARE in the genes of a camel... or a LENS FLARE...
am totally shocked.
That's what they said about the PStwo too... look how long that took to crack.
It makes sense to me that some toys are naturally a little more mentally stimulating than others, and usually those are the toys that are geared toward young boys. I'm not saying that little girls never play with Legos, computers, or video games, but look how many do compared to boys.
Tell that to the female Japanese foreign exchange student that we had in my 9th grade class that used to mop the class with us because she was doing the equivalent of Calc III in Japan while we were rockin Algebra I in the US. :)
FYI I owned a 94 BMW 325is with the sport package, and recently after that bought a 95 Acura Integra GSR (which is on the same platform as the 96-00 Honda Civic) and modded the Integra GS-R to the point where I'd feel comfortable racing any BMW on a curvy road short of an M. My 325is cost me over $10,000 and the GS-R cost me $8,000 mods included, and the GS-R performed far better than the 325is ever coudl have hoped. The only BMW I ever ran across that could hold a candle to the GS-R as far as handling was a M3, which cost someone $53,000. Granted their car was a lot nicer than mine, but the GS-R could outhandle it for $45,000 less.
Don't underestimate the potential of Hondas/Acuras when they're modded by someone who knows what their doing and not by some 16 year old ricer.
Just because it worked in your case doesn't mean that it works in others. You make a valid point and I don't doubt the credibility of your school, its scholars, or its teachers - but just because you have a succesful institution implemented in your area doesn't automatically make every private school better than every public school.
I attended a public school in a small town and I'm not going to lie - most of my graduating class are total losers. Infact I would say around 80% of them. Maybe more. By "losers" I mean most of them will probably make less than $20,000/yr. for the rest of their lives and never leave this town. You get out of public school what you put into it - and therein lies the problem - we were never taught in school that it's important to excel at all. Most of the graduates from my class went on to college on sports scholarships. Most of those people have come back and are now working in gas stations beacuse they got injured, or cut because they found out that just because they're good in our low string school doesn't mean that they're as good as they thought they were when compared to everyone else out there.
For as many people that came out of our school like that though - there are atleast one other (given size to size relationship obviously) that came out of the local Christian/Catholic school as bad or wosre off. Our local Catholic school only runs until high school (9th grade) and then all of the Catholic school kids have to finish off their K-12 career in a public high school. All of the males were so timid and scared of the general population when they walked down the halls and saw something "different" (a gay kid, a gothic kid, some 'stoner punks,' etc.) That was all totally foreign to them so it scared the shit out of them. Eventually some of them adapted but not a lot. The girls coming from the Catholic schools were all so repressed by parents and were feared by many of the Catholic school males that they turned into huge sluts as soon as they found attention from the public school crowd. I can name 20 or 30 girls that graduated with me that had kids before the end of high school.
The Christian school kids had it just as bad in my town... there's a girl that works with me that graduated from an all Christian private school (not all-girls school either) that has the intellegence of a 7 year old. She can barely do basic math, her vocabulary is rediculously small for someone who is 20 years old (someone said "monitary" the other day and she asked what that meant... we work in a bank), etc. She was drilled that she should keep herself "pure" until marriage and she was so itching to have sex that she just reently (a couple weeks ago) married a kid that she'd known for two months. They're now living together and not able to pay any bills, and she wants to have a ton of kids and quit her job to stay at home and be "mom." She says things all the time like "If ____ and I have kids and I quit my job and stay home I'm sure the lord will provide for us." Her boyfriend graduated with me and is one of "those kids" (read above) so he's making $8/hr working at a garage. I cringe every time she says it - If Jesus was handing out cash to pay bills I would have asked a long time ago.
Apart from her being as ubersmart as she is, the slutty Catholic girls that pop out 3 babies every 2 weeks, and the crybaby catholic boys that run when they see a goth, homosexual, or african american - I'm glad I went to public schools.
The Saturn didn't fail just because of it's media type if that's what you're saying. The 32X and Jupiter sucked period. The games wren't any better looking than Super NES games, infact many of them were MUCH worse than a lot of the SNES games. All of Sega's consoles after the Genesis were doomed to fail independent of their media type. 32X was cart based and it sucked, Saturn was CD based and a complex hardware confiruation made the system impossible to program for by anyone but Sega's AM2. Those consoles, and the Dreamcast, failed because Sega of America was taking orders from Sega of Japan, and SoJ had their business and marketing heads up virtual asses.
As far as battery times being dwindled by optical media as opposed to carts, I'm going to call BS. I can get over 60 hours of continuous play time out of my Sony MD player on a single AA battery, and the MD disc is constantly spinning and streaming. They could put 4 AA's in the PSP and dedicate 1/4 of the total power to the optical drive and it'd be a 60+ hour run. If anything, the huge color screen (of which the Nintendo DS has TWO of) is going to eat away at battery life, not the optical drive.
What EB says doesn't always go the way they plan it. I ordered Gran Turismo 4 last November from them because they said the relase date was going to be 1/1/2004. We know how that worked out, don't we. :-/
Just reading through this I'm seeing a TON of people that are saying "Well the Nintendo handheld is obviously going to be better because Nintendo has been the king of handhelds for the past X number of years, and Sony will have to play catch-up like Microsoft is with the XBOX." I was hearing those same kinds of things back in around 94 when Sony announced they were releasing a game console. Everyone said "Oh Sony's got so much money that they won't need to make it good, they'll just throw it out and expect people to buy it - and it'll be SO expensive that it'll never float. And they won't put as much money into it as Nintendo and Sega do their game systems because that's their specialty and that's ALL they do." Well we are now seeing how that went, aren't we. Sega tanked. Sega was more innovative than any game company out there... the first 16-bit system, the first mainstream CD system, the first 128-bit system (Jaguar doesn't count - that was just a mess), etc. etc. and they still went under. Now they've whored all of their characters out over all platforms just to stay afloat. I'm waiting to see Sonic and Tails appear in the next Smash Bros game. Innovation doesn't always mean practicality. It's going to take twice as much power to run two LCDs as opposed to just one. The second LCD on the DD will end up being as worthless as the screen on the VMUs for Dreamcast. Was there really any game that was worth looking down at the VMU screen? 3rd party developers don't care what kind of crazy high tech new invention that 1st party companies dream up. If a company wants to put a game on the PS2, XBOX, PSP, and the new Nintendo handheld, they're not going to completely change the game for the Nintendo handheld... they're going to stick a static image or something on the second screen and that'll be that... just like on the Dreamcast VMUs. Good idea? Sure. Will it actually do much from any games EXECPT the ones from Nintendo? I'm betting not. Look at game company "innovations" that were supposed to be all extraordinary and then proved themselves to be pretty worthless once released... Dreamcast VMUs, the mouse for the SNES, the Sega fishing controller, Nintendo Power Pad, the memory expansion pack for the N64, the 32X (hah), the Jaguar controllers with the numeric pad (wtf), the list goes on and on. 802.11B? Who cares? If I have to sit on my couch in my living room, 30 feet or so away from my wi-fi base station to play multiplayer games, I'm going to be doing it through an XBOX or a PS2 or my PC on my 50" TV... not staring at some 3" LCD on a handheld. Chatting with a stylus on a handheld? Have you ever tried that before? Do you know how rediculous it is? Get online with Auto Modellista and try typing with the onscreen keyboard and a controller and see how fast you get sick of it. You'll get one sentance out and the room will have moved on to some completely different topic. Chatting is for PCs. If you want to chat, download an IRC client. Moveis on the PSP? Come on. I'm going to go out and spend $20 for a movie that I already own on DVD to watch it on my PSP on a smaller screen and listen to it through a 1" speaker? Hell no. I don't know what Sony was thinking with this - but I hope they're not seriously thinking that a large source of their income on the PSP will be from movie sales. One awesome thing though - if I can carry Gran Turismo 4 around in my pocket, I'll shell $300 for a PSP right now. In reality, if either company wants to succeed with either of these things they're going to have to do some things. Number one, when I carry a hand held game system around, it damn well better fit in my pocket. If I have to carry it around in a large bag, I might as well bring my laptop and a game controller and have 15" of emulator fun for hours on end. Number two the batteries better last a long time. 2 hours is Game Gear. If I can get 100+ hours of play out of my Sony MD player with one AA battery (WITH moving parts) then they should be able to get 20 hours out of a portable game system with 4 AAA's in it. If either system ea
With a name like Mr. McCool... I don't see how you could really go wrong with this. I mean come on... McCool. Is anyone going to argue with that? I didn't think so. :)
This is exactly what I thought when I read this story. I bought Unreal 2 as soon as it came out thinking it was going to be sweet, and it wasn't even playable on my system, which was top of the line at the time. They promised a patch for two months after release that never came. I wasn't the only one getting 12fps when I should have been getting a lot more. I ended up getting a huge retailer, who will remain nameless, to take the game back and bought UT2003 instead. :) I vowed never to buy anything from a company who would rush a buggy game out like that ever again... looks like I can scratch Legend off the list. Good riddance.
FYI I got a USB Dual Action as well, and I don't have calibrations with any of the buttons. I'm running DX9 under WinXP, and the drivers that came on the Logitech CD. I don't know if that's got anything to do with it, but I play NFS Hot Pursuit 2 all the time and I've never had any problems with it.
'I'm unaware of any company that would shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market,'
:/
My most recent experience with this would have to be Unreal II. I bought this game as soon as it hit the shelf after drooling over screen shots of it for a year or so. When I got the game home, and installed it, it wasn't even playable. 5-7 fps on a good day. At first I thought that it was my slightly-outdated PC (Athlon XP 1800, 512MB PC2700, GeForce 4 Ti4800SE), but when I consulted the official Unreal II forums, I got sick...
Apparently the problem wasn't just my PC, but a problem in the Unreal II engine that was due to the game being rushed. People with then top of the line P4/Athlon systems with as much as 1.5GB of RAM and the fastest NVidia and ATI card were still getting anywhere from 5-15 fps.
For two months I waited as the developers promised day after day that a patch was going to be released... days quickly became months. 3 months to be exact, with no patch. The cost of the game dropped $10... still no patch. I eventually took it back into Walmart, explaining that the software was faulty, the developers aknowledged it, but weren't doing anything to fix it. They gave me store credit on that account... for $39.99 instead of the $49.99 I paid for it, which was still better than nothing.
Literally, I paid $10 to hold on to a useless CD for 3 months... completely unplayable, all because of a company that was so eager to release a game well before a more popular title, then looming overhead (read: Doom III) that they didn't even thouroughly test it first.
Unaware my pasty white nerd ass.
Win-G was so flawed and ill-fated MS denies even creating it now. If you call up MS and ask them anything about Win-G they'll pretend that they have no idea as to what you're talking about.
:)
Win-G was the predicessor to Direct X... It was a game development library that was created by MS that was developed under Windows 3 when game programmers were wanting to make the big switch from DOS games to Windows games. The library was so bad, that very few books were ever published on how to program for the API, and there were VERY few games released that utilized it beause it was so hard to program for, for as weak and slow as it was.
About a year after it's release, they saw it wasn't catching on AT ALL and yanked all references to it from their website, and never spoke of it again. They dropped the Win-G name completely when Direct X was released, and never spoke of it again.
They've done such a good job covering it up, that it usually doesn't even make lists like this.
As a test about 4 months ago I created a Hotmail account, and never gave the address to ANYONE. I didn't so much as log into the account, except once to activate it. I unchecked all of the subscription services when joining up, and didn't check the box that said MS could sell the address name. 2 months later I logged into it, and it was full of spam. How'd that happen?! The only one besides me that knew the address existed was MS... Hmm...
I don't see internet porn anywhere on that list!
Actually what you've posted is completely wrong. Nintendo screwed themselves over on the PlayStation deal. Nintendo wanted to make a CD addon to compete with the Mega CD in Japan (Sega CD in the US) around 1988, before SNES was even out in the US. Since they already had nice bonds with Sony for supplying them with the sound processors for the SNES, they decided it might be a good idea to look to Sony for a CD addon instead of going elsewhere.
:)
Sony agreed to do the work if they could take part of the profit from sales of the unit (obviously), Nintendo said that was cool, so all went ahead. At the time Sony was developing the console, Sony ImageSoft started developing CD based games for it. The SNES CD drive games were to be loaded into caddies, like the older Macs used to use. When you bought a game, you wouldn't just get a CD like a 3DO game or a Sega CD game, but you'd get a caddy. Nintendo didn't want to do this to protect the CD, rather they wanted to embed a chip in the CD casing that the system would check to make sure the product was a licensed Nintendo game. Nintendo is completely anal about licensing for all of their games, and reviews each game to a great extent before it'll allow the game out for any of its systems -- it does this still today.
Nintendo also started talking to Sony about licensing fees for all of the games that Sony ImageSoft was developing for the CD console. Sony thought that since they were building the hardware, that Sony ImageSoft should be able to develop games freely. Nintendo diagreed. This is where all the fun started. In addition to that, Sony also wanted to release CD only medium... and do away with Nintendo's CD caddy idea. They wanted to embed code in the first sectors of the CD, and have the console check that, rather than a chip. They actually put this functionality into the unit, which both companies had dubbed, unofficially the PlayStation at the time.
The "PSX" coming from the development name of the PlayStation, as you stated "PlayStation X" is wrong. Some people say that "PSX" comes from the term "PlayStation eXperimental." This is another one of those internet farses spread about by 12 year olds. The actual acronym at time was PSe... which later evolved into all of those "UR NOT e" commercials where the "e" was red (e.g. you are not ready). The PSX acronym came from game magazines before the release of the actual Sony PlayStation and just stuck. Sony hates the acronym, and that's why they acciented so heavily on the "PS2" acronym to devoid the frequently questioned "X." If the PSX acronym was infact a Sony acronym, I'd have "PSX2" plastered on the top of my PS2, not "PS2."
Back to the point... what Sony had was a semi-functional unit that Nintendo wasn't sure if they wanted.
Nintendo, while still under contract with Sony, decided that they would instead give attention to Phillips Magnavox to come up with copy protection and to have a huge hand in continued development of the Sony console. Sony didn't like this at all, since Sony and Phillips-Magnavox are HUGE competitors in Japan. Nintendo, being a game company, didn't care about this too much, and obviously just wanted what was best for business.
Needless to say, the whole thing fell apart, and Sony scrapped the layout for the original PlayStation project. The actual console that they came out with 3-5 years later was completely different in design, both physically and internally of the original Nintendo/Sony PlayStation project.