The reason it is so low is that they do not have a great enough majority to actually do anything. Everything ends in a stalemate or just shy of votes to pass anything. People are upset over this fact. If Dems had full control to over-ride a presidential veto, the approval rate would be through the roof right now.
You gotta admit, they've been at least trying to be more consumer friendly than they have been. I mean, Microsoft of old might have bought all the big game developers (Rockstar, Kojima Productions, Square/Enix, etc) outright so they could gain exclusive content. Today, they just toss money as an incentive and keep their fingers crossed.
This is who repairs the UK 360s that die. They have stopped repairing all 360s that come to them that have the red ring of death because they've concluded that the system board is flawed and that "fixing" a system with another flawed system board is not a solution. They have contacted Microsoft asking for a real solution with no response.
Taking bets on how long the EU will force Microsoft to do a full and total recall on the 360.
As of, I believe, July 1st, Cable companies need to offer an alternative method for people to tune into stations. The solution is called Cable Card, and all cable companies are REQUIRED to give them out to users, and even use them in their own cable boxes. They will not be allowed to use proprietary cable boxes any longer. So the person was correct, you will be able to buy your own tuners at Best Buy, as they will contain cable card slots. You will still need to rent the cards from the cable company, but that is far cheaper than renting a box. Usually only a few bucks per card a month.
The best part of this is as I mentioned, the cable companies need to use them as well. Nothing can be proprietary anymore. This law was made on purpose for cable companies to "fix" whatever problems might arise from using cable cards because they'll be stuck with them. (They were asking for an extension, but were denied).
God ever help you if you have to open one of those PC cases to upgrade your RAM! Did you even try or not? You pop the cover off, put the memory in, pop it back on. End of story. Cripes.
If anyone has noticed, Best Buy has begun to scale back their Blu-Ray section. HD-DVD offerings outnumber it significantly now. Not sure if this is any indication on the "format wars", but I am going to guess the whole UMD fiasco is probably making retailers pulling out quicker than normal this time around.
After looking at my options for RPGs on the DS, 360, and the PC. I wanted something with a ton of depth, lots of lore, single player, and decent graphics and music. I picked up Eterian Odessey for the DS and was impressed with the graphics and music, and the return to the old school first person dungeon crawl. But it was missing a story! It was missing all the puzzles that classics like M&M, EotB, Dungeon Master, etc all had! It was nothing more than a grind.
I went back to look at what else the DS offered, old classics remade such as Final Fantasy, and the new Pokemon were about it. I half considered both of them, but in the end they were $40 for a game I would play at most a month.
I went back to Everquest 2. It is $15 for a month of play, offers the most lore I've ever seen in any RPG. You can play it solo, you can play it with people. I mostly play it solo, but the thing is, this game is designed in a way that any sort of person can enjoy. Starting over is a new experience every time. Granted I don't keep the subscription going. I basically play until my RPG hunger is satisfied and then cancel again. Only to renew when it returns. I've been doing this for two years now and I gotta say, it sure beats out most of the competition available. They ARE the same market regardless what anyone thinks. You can ignore people and solo your way through the game, or you can work with other people and guilds.
I would have to agree. The circular thumb-thing was an early attempt at bringing us back to an analogue thumbstick. You can also see the early design how todays modern controllers have taken. I used to LOVE my NES Max. The only thing that I would have preferred was also a proper D-Pad IN ADDITION to the Circle pad.
How the PS2 and N64 controllers even got considered is beyond me. They were the most uncomfortable controllers ever made. The PS2s separate D-Pad buttons made it 100% useless for fighting games, and the N64 controller was just... messed up. No human could use the thing perfectly. I think it was made for 3 armed aliens.
I also do LOVE the 360 controller. As I loved the Logitech PS2 Wireless controller as well.
I'm not so sure about that. Gears of War was basically a five hour tech demo and not much else. Multiplayer was pretty limited with major game play modes missing that everyone loves. The gameplay was good, but the cover system was a bit frustrating, sometimes you felt like a magnet being sucked into every wall. The lack of a true jump also was a pain in the butt as well.
Really, the only thing Gears had going for it were great graphics, and some pretty epic moments sprinkled in. You could beat it in a rental easily, so it made the cost pretty much not worth the sixty it cost.
For what its worth, the best bang for your buck on the 360 right now is Earth Defense Force with a friend sitting next to you. They nailed this game right out of the ballpark.
Their job is to regulate the spectrum in the public's interest. If the public complains about [sex/language/violence/other] on the public spectrum, then isn't it the FCC's job to regulate [X]?
I assert that "no regulation" isn't a viable option, so what's the alternative? Non-government regulation? How is a non-government organization accountable to the people?
What's your alternative?
No, it's to allocate and partition out the spectrums, not what it carried through them. If the public has a problem with X, the public simply needs to not tune in X. "No regulation" is a viable option. It falls in line with free speech and pretty much everything this country is supposed to stand for. If you don't want to hear what someone has to say, then don't listen. Pretty simple, yeah?
The Wii wasn't designed with the thought of cross platform titles in mind to begin with. Nintendo purposely made the system entirely different because they want the games available to it to be entirely different. They weren't expecting developers to make exact copies of their PC/360/PS3 games on it. They were expecting developers to make an entirely new and unique version of that game if possible. I can understand the ranting, but if the developers can't see that the Wii is in its own market, and simply CANNOT be lumped next to the PC/360/PS3, then it is the developers own fault. You need to step back, take a deep breath and look at the Wii for what it is, not for how you want it to be.
Saying the Wii isn't going to see many triple-A titles is a bit ignorant. The Wii will see plenty of them, but they will be unique and exclusive to only the Wii. I think what you meant to say was that it more than likely wont be seeing many PC/360/PS3 Triple-A titles ported to it. Which isn't a problem, because gamers are not buying a Wii to play those games. They are buying a Wii to play Wii games. Why do you think the "Wii60" term is so prevalent? It's not because we buy both systems to play the same games! Think again!
It's time to move on, man. Yeah we know your beloved Sega doesn't make consoles anymore, and it could do what Nintendo couldn't. But you need to get to grips with whats going on today. Nintendo has shed its skin, and learned from its mistakes. They're not reverting to playing hardball anymore.
Simply because they don't need to. They have created their own separate markets, and Sony and Microsoft are not a part of it. Maybe next generation when they come out with their own wands and touchpads, but this time they're all alone. There is no reason to play hardball. Either game companies want money or they don't. It's that simple.
Development houses follow the money trail. If the Wii ends up pulling a DS on the console industry, you can bet you'll see the UE3 appear on it. No one wants to be left behind on a run away hit. So many game publishers are kicking themselves in the rear right now for missing the boat on the DS. They could have had two years of strong games sales to have their product on the shelves, and are just only NOW getting their games out. Talk about being blind sided. And yet, here we are in Feb 07, and the Wii is STILL selling out EVERY DAY with people STILL LINING UP for the UPS truck at every store across the nation. Deja Vu? Maybe, but I can put money down some of these publishers and developers are going to be kicking themselves in the rear again.
"Vista won't require a hardware upgrade for relatively new systems unless you want to experience all of it's bells and whistles."
Which is the point of upgrading to Vista in the first place. People don't upgrade for no reason, they want to upgrade to get the newest stuff. Period. Otherwise we'd all be running Windows 3.1 still.
"IMHO that's beside the point completely since most consumers will stick with the operating system they have until they buy a new PC that will be preloaded with Vista anyway."
Exactly the point the article was making. They'll be buying new machines anyways, which they shouldn't have to do! They should be able to install Vista on their current machines and get all the "bells and whistles", slap a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive in and watch full 1080p movies on their 5 year old monitors. But they can't. So they'll do as you say and "upgrade anyways". What a waste.
One of the more amusing bits I heard yesterday was a reporting asking Bill Gates (paraphrased)"Will Vista run on older machines fine? Will I have to upgrade my PC to get the most out of it?" and his response? "Of course it will run on old PCs! Any PC purchases in the last two years should be fine!"
Last two years is OLD? Try last 5-7 years! Most companies are still running their Y2K hardware upgrades just fine with XP. Hardware lifecycle might be two years for gamers, but certainly not for your typical home user!
In 2009 we will be seeing the next generation of consoles. The war will have been over long before then. I'm not so sure the analysts have been following previous consoles, but the first two years pretty much show who is the premiere console, and then we have a year or two left before the next one is out. Sony and Microsoft need to lower their prices big time if they ever hope to outlast what the Wii is capable of. If sales continue through 2007, the Wii will be the next "Playstation".
"until Nintendo offers up a selection of games that use the WiiMote in new and entertaining ways"
You're in luck! You can go buy one now, as the games like Wii Sport, Rayman Rabbid Rabbits, etc are incredibly fun in new and entertaining ways. Seriously, I own a 360, and a friend owns a Wii. After playing it at his place for a night I will buy a Wii the moment I see one on the shelf. The system is GOOD, and the games available now are really exciting to play. It's so different. It's the DS all over again, people seemed to discard the touch screen as a stupid gimmick. Guess what? Nintendo knows what they're doing this time around. You're going to have a freaking BLAST.
Ubisoft says Assassins Creed will have more intelligent AI in the 360 version simply because the three dedicated cores offer more raw horsepower that the PS3 doesn't have. You can also tell that the PS3 has run into some issues regarding the limit of 256MB of texture memory compared to the 360, most textures are all blurry and low res compared to their 360 counterparts. It's the PS2 hype all over again.
If you look around at 1080P lcd prices, you'll find they run around 2500-5000 from companies like Samsung, Sony, etc. Yet, then if you go look at brands like Westinghouse, you'll find the same LCDs for nearly $1500-2000 cheaper all around. Sure, the larger companies use better parts, but $2000 better? Yeah I don't think so. Maybe we'll see a nice $1500 drop across the board after this.
I'm not sure how or why, but I have images turned off in all my email software, I run 3rd party spam filters running on 3rd party spam filters and these emails STILL get through AND show their images. I tried making a custom filter for these particular messages and nothing seems to work. The images themselves aren't even seen as images in the messages, they are just text with some funky inline embedding. I honestly don't understand how they're doing it, but "Turn off images, duh!" doesn't work. Nothing works, which is partially why this is news.
Microsoft is bringing Live to the Windows platform shortly. It will be an all inclusive download service for games, HD TV Shows, music, and everything else out there. Games will hopefully have a lot of the same elements that their 360 counterparts will have. Achievements, episodic content, multiplayer invites through a standardized friends list, etc. Steam was the start of things to come, but it will be replaced by Live which will most likely come packaged with future versions of Windows. Valve is also working with Microsoft to distribute their games on the 360 over Live, so it would be safe to assume Steam will gracefully bow out of the download service in the future. This is all speculation, but Live really is a streamlines masterpiece. I just hope Microsoft can keep up with the bandwidth demands. Steam went through the same thing.
Re:Sorry, I meant 10 Million instead of 20-30m. Et
on
Gears of War Review
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· Score: 1
I would have been fine with paying for this at $30 to be perfectly honest. Thats about what I feel I got out of the game, content wise.
Sorry, I meant 10 Million instead of 20-30m. Etc,.
on
Gears of War Review
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, it cost 10 million to make instead of 20-30 million. In any case, it's a moot point. They should have spent that extra 10-20 million on hiring more level designers to make the game longer.
I bought the game, and thought it was awesome. But the length of the game was just far too short for the $60. They cheered how this game only cost $1 million to make instead of 10 million. Now you know why, because they didn't bother putting any content into the game. I would have rather they had spent $10 million and given us 20 hours of solid game play and a functioning multiplayer.
Dont get me wrong, the game was awesome. But in the end it seemed like a $60 tech demo, rather than a game. The multiplayer Versus is just too buggy and limited to even bother with. If they ever add in Capture The Flag and up it to 40 or so players, then I might pick it up. But 4 vs 4 straight DM is just lame. The Co-Op should have also allowed up to 4 players as well. It was hard to play this game with all your friends wanting you to join in. Only two at a time stunk.
Basically, I played through the campaign twice over the weekend it came out and haven't touched it since. It should have been a rental.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason it is so low is that they do not have a great enough majority to actually do anything. Everything ends in a stalemate or just shy of votes to pass anything. People are upset over this fact. If Dems had full control to over-ride a presidential veto, the approval rate would be through the roof right now.
You gotta admit, they've been at least trying to be more consumer friendly than they have been. I mean, Microsoft of old might have bought all the big game developers (Rockstar, Kojima Productions, Square/Enix, etc) outright so they could gain exclusive content. Today, they just toss money as an incentive and keep their fingers crossed.
This is who repairs the UK 360s that die. They have stopped repairing all 360s that come to them that have the red ring of death because they've concluded that the system board is flawed and that "fixing" a system with another flawed system board is not a solution. They have contacted Microsoft asking for a real solution with no response.
Taking bets on how long the EU will force Microsoft to do a full and total recall on the 360.
The best part of this is as I mentioned, the cable companies need to use them as well. Nothing can be proprietary anymore. This law was made on purpose for cable companies to "fix" whatever problems might arise from using cable cards because they'll be stuck with them. (They were asking for an extension, but were denied).
God ever help you if you have to open one of those PC cases to upgrade your RAM! Did you even try or not? You pop the cover off, put the memory in, pop it back on. End of story. Cripes.
If anyone has noticed, Best Buy has begun to scale back their Blu-Ray section. HD-DVD offerings outnumber it significantly now. Not sure if this is any indication on the "format wars", but I am going to guess the whole UMD fiasco is probably making retailers pulling out quicker than normal this time around.
I went back to look at what else the DS offered, old classics remade such as Final Fantasy, and the new Pokemon were about it. I half considered both of them, but in the end they were $40 for a game I would play at most a month.
I went back to Everquest 2. It is $15 for a month of play, offers the most lore I've ever seen in any RPG. You can play it solo, you can play it with people. I mostly play it solo, but the thing is, this game is designed in a way that any sort of person can enjoy. Starting over is a new experience every time. Granted I don't keep the subscription going. I basically play until my RPG hunger is satisfied and then cancel again. Only to renew when it returns. I've been doing this for two years now and I gotta say, it sure beats out most of the competition available. They ARE the same market regardless what anyone thinks. You can ignore people and solo your way through the game, or you can work with other people and guilds.
How the PS2 and N64 controllers even got considered is beyond me. They were the most uncomfortable controllers ever made. The PS2s separate D-Pad buttons made it 100% useless for fighting games, and the N64 controller was just... messed up. No human could use the thing perfectly. I think it was made for 3 armed aliens.
I also do LOVE the 360 controller. As I loved the Logitech PS2 Wireless controller as well.
Really, the only thing Gears had going for it were great graphics, and some pretty epic moments sprinkled in. You could beat it in a rental easily, so it made the cost pretty much not worth the sixty it cost.
For what its worth, the best bang for your buck on the 360 right now is Earth Defense Force with a friend sitting next to you. They nailed this game right out of the ballpark.
No, it's to allocate and partition out the spectrums, not what it carried through them. If the public has a problem with X, the public simply needs to not tune in X. "No regulation" is a viable option. It falls in line with free speech and pretty much everything this country is supposed to stand for. If you don't want to hear what someone has to say, then don't listen. Pretty simple, yeah?
Saying the Wii isn't going to see many triple-A titles is a bit ignorant. The Wii will see plenty of them, but they will be unique and exclusive to only the Wii. I think what you meant to say was that it more than likely wont be seeing many PC/360/PS3 Triple-A titles ported to it. Which isn't a problem, because gamers are not buying a Wii to play those games. They are buying a Wii to play Wii games. Why do you think the "Wii60" term is so prevalent? It's not because we buy both systems to play the same games! Think again!
Simply because they don't need to. They have created their own separate markets, and Sony and Microsoft are not a part of it. Maybe next generation when they come out with their own wands and touchpads, but this time they're all alone. There is no reason to play hardball. Either game companies want money or they don't. It's that simple.
Development houses follow the money trail. If the Wii ends up pulling a DS on the console industry, you can bet you'll see the UE3 appear on it. No one wants to be left behind on a run away hit. So many game publishers are kicking themselves in the rear right now for missing the boat on the DS. They could have had two years of strong games sales to have their product on the shelves, and are just only NOW getting their games out. Talk about being blind sided. And yet, here we are in Feb 07, and the Wii is STILL selling out EVERY DAY with people STILL LINING UP for the UPS truck at every store across the nation. Deja Vu? Maybe, but I can put money down some of these publishers and developers are going to be kicking themselves in the rear again.
Which is the point of upgrading to Vista in the first place. People don't upgrade for no reason, they want to upgrade to get the newest stuff. Period. Otherwise we'd all be running Windows 3.1 still.
"IMHO that's beside the point completely since most consumers will stick with the operating system they have until they buy a new PC that will be preloaded with Vista anyway."
Exactly the point the article was making. They'll be buying new machines anyways, which they shouldn't have to do! They should be able to install Vista on their current machines and get all the "bells and whistles", slap a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive in and watch full 1080p movies on their 5 year old monitors. But they can't. So they'll do as you say and "upgrade anyways". What a waste.
One of the more amusing bits I heard yesterday was a reporting asking Bill Gates (paraphrased)"Will Vista run on older machines fine? Will I have to upgrade my PC to get the most out of it?" and his response? "Of course it will run on old PCs! Any PC purchases in the last two years should be fine!"
Last two years is OLD? Try last 5-7 years! Most companies are still running their Y2K hardware upgrades just fine with XP. Hardware lifecycle might be two years for gamers, but certainly not for your typical home user!
In 2009 we will be seeing the next generation of consoles. The war will have been over long before then. I'm not so sure the analysts have been following previous consoles, but the first two years pretty much show who is the premiere console, and then we have a year or two left before the next one is out. Sony and Microsoft need to lower their prices big time if they ever hope to outlast what the Wii is capable of. If sales continue through 2007, the Wii will be the next "Playstation".
You're in luck! You can go buy one now, as the games like Wii Sport, Rayman Rabbid Rabbits, etc are incredibly fun in new and entertaining ways. Seriously, I own a 360, and a friend owns a Wii. After playing it at his place for a night I will buy a Wii the moment I see one on the shelf. The system is GOOD, and the games available now are really exciting to play. It's so different. It's the DS all over again, people seemed to discard the touch screen as a stupid gimmick. Guess what? Nintendo knows what they're doing this time around. You're going to have a freaking BLAST.
Ubisoft says Assassins Creed will have more intelligent AI in the 360 version simply because the three dedicated cores offer more raw horsepower that the PS3 doesn't have. You can also tell that the PS3 has run into some issues regarding the limit of 256MB of texture memory compared to the 360, most textures are all blurry and low res compared to their 360 counterparts. It's the PS2 hype all over again.
Why not ask this about current gen?
If you look around at 1080P lcd prices, you'll find they run around 2500-5000 from companies like Samsung, Sony, etc. Yet, then if you go look at brands like Westinghouse, you'll find the same LCDs for nearly $1500-2000 cheaper all around. Sure, the larger companies use better parts, but $2000 better? Yeah I don't think so. Maybe we'll see a nice $1500 drop across the board after this.
I'm not sure how or why, but I have images turned off in all my email software, I run 3rd party spam filters running on 3rd party spam filters and these emails STILL get through AND show their images. I tried making a custom filter for these particular messages and nothing seems to work. The images themselves aren't even seen as images in the messages, they are just text with some funky inline embedding. I honestly don't understand how they're doing it, but "Turn off images, duh!" doesn't work. Nothing works, which is partially why this is news.
Microsoft is bringing Live to the Windows platform shortly. It will be an all inclusive download service for games, HD TV Shows, music, and everything else out there. Games will hopefully have a lot of the same elements that their 360 counterparts will have. Achievements, episodic content, multiplayer invites through a standardized friends list, etc. Steam was the start of things to come, but it will be replaced by Live which will most likely come packaged with future versions of Windows. Valve is also working with Microsoft to distribute their games on the 360 over Live, so it would be safe to assume Steam will gracefully bow out of the download service in the future. This is all speculation, but Live really is a streamlines masterpiece. I just hope Microsoft can keep up with the bandwidth demands. Steam went through the same thing.
I would have been fine with paying for this at $30 to be perfectly honest. Thats about what I feel I got out of the game, content wise.
Sorry, it cost 10 million to make instead of 20-30 million. In any case, it's a moot point. They should have spent that extra 10-20 million on hiring more level designers to make the game longer.
Dont get me wrong, the game was awesome. But in the end it seemed like a $60 tech demo, rather than a game. The multiplayer Versus is just too buggy and limited to even bother with. If they ever add in Capture The Flag and up it to 40 or so players, then I might pick it up. But 4 vs 4 straight DM is just lame. The Co-Op should have also allowed up to 4 players as well. It was hard to play this game with all your friends wanting you to join in. Only two at a time stunk.
Basically, I played through the campaign twice over the weekend it came out and haven't touched it since. It should have been a rental.
The Wii shipped 2 million units, and sold out. They are hoping to have between 4-5 million sold by January 1st.
By the end of January Nintendo will have probably a 4 million lead over the PS3 if Sony can even get 1 million PS3s shipped.