Before the PS1 came out, "First Gen" titles usually, and rightfully, became instant classics. NES? Super Mario Bros 1 is considered to be the first classic game after Pong. Sega Master System? Phantasy Star 1 for early RPG fans. SNES, Super Mario World was beautiful, entertaining and the hidden star worlds were a treat. Sega Genesis, Sonic 1 showed that hardware was no longer a limit for bright, good looking, speedy-looking 2D games. N64, Super Mario 64 was a tech demo, a giant playground for people new to 3D and showed developers and gamers how to use 3D worlds effectively, oh and it was fun. Sega Saturn, Panzer Dragoon was artistic for its time with a huge (looking) world when games like Super Mario 64 was limited to fairly small areas.
PS1 had... FFVII which is really second generation since it came out almost 2 years after the PS1 did. PS2 had... SSX, a good looking fun game but hardly took advantage of the hardware. Xbox had Halo and even the most supportive fanboys generally agree that the game wasn't quite finished let alone polished (The Library level anyone? All that backtracking through old levels?). Xbox360 has 2 PC ports (Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4), yet another subpar FPS (Perfect Dark Zero) and another wave of EA Sports games.
The reason why the prize is so small is, in a nutshell, politics. Lets face it, the average politician barely knows more than the average citizen when it comes to space exploration, AI development or anything that requires a prototype. The net result is a government which lowers the value on science leaving private companies to pick up the pieces.
Does this mean we can expect more than one Smash Bros game on the Revolution? I mean it'd be a huge waste of resources to open an office for one game then shut it down upon completion..
Except the game was recieving awards like 'Game of the Year' and 'Best FPS' for years after its release. Counter-Strike and other popular mods simply came along too late in its lifetime to credit mods as the saving grace of Half-Life.
Good game? Yes. Experiment gone right? Yes. Game able to withstand time? Yes.
"Greatest" game of any time period? No. Financially successful but lets face it, if it wasn't for the hardcore modders, the game would've gone stagnant years ago. The expansion packs offer beans compared to the meat and potatoes of the free online add-ons. Revolutionary? No, all they did was take SimCity and put it at the micro/Sim level. The only reason it was never done before was due to hardware limitations. Is The Sims' ability to withstand time a mark of its success? No, again thats entirely due to EA's complete failure to make the expansions worthwhile and the community's ability to make far better content for free.
The Sims IS a good game, just not the reasons they listed.
No, now you're simply setting double standard. If development costs rise due to better graphics and music as you say, then the price to buy a NES game should be low since the music would be written, composed and implemented by one man. Sprite graphics? We have fan-made sprites that could pass off for officially made ones these days. Don't forget, development teams that hit the double digits during the Nintendo age were considered to be huge. Look at the staff lists on handheld games, you usually have the same name appear 2 or 3 times in different listings. Just look at the staff listing for The Legend of Zelda for the NES. A staff with 12 listings, 3 of which are filled by Shigeru Miyamoto alone.
As for developers feeling the 'need' to fill whatever data mediums are used, just look at how much actual space is used in a PS2 or Xbox game. Most of them never use half the disc in terms of raw data (GTA3 is something like 1.5 gigs, Halo 2 is around 3 gigs). On top of that, some of that data is nothing more than buffer for FMVs to be streamed off the DVD/CD due to weak hardware (see: PS1 and PS2).
Actually, the change in physical media should have caused a rise, followed by a drop in prices. As cartridges grew more expensive in price due to memory costs, prices should have increased (and they did, to an extent).
However, the flaw in this is the flip side. If prices increased due to cartridge costs, then prices should have DROPPED when the PS1 popularized CDs as the new storage format. Moreso with DVDs, you don't even need to print multiple CDs anymore, one copy = one DVD. Instead we get Microsoft trying to jack us over with this just because companies aren't happy with the profit margins they get already.
This is rubbish. If you go by the logic that 'better graphics/voice acting = higher price tag' then console games should have dropped to $30 for a brand new, day its released game during the PS2/Xbox/GC era. Most console games flat-out have awful graphics, poor textures and low resolutions. That alone should justify a $10 cut but it doesnt happen. Vice versa, PC games with their resolutions commonly reaching 1600*1200 the least, often times requiring a hardware upgrade just to reach 60 frames per second, hardware stress-testing graphics should cost $60~$80 by now. Same thing for voice acting, music, and the extra cost of developing for new hardware (if you add $10 for each hardware generation since the Atari 2600 we should be paying over $100 for a game by now.)
I think you have to distinguish between instances for doing Missions/Quests/Storyline from doing instances for getting phat-l3wt. Any instance thats done for a mission is a good thing by my book. The last thing anyone wants is to get ganked or have to wait in line to finish a mission. On the other hand, instancing for special l3wt generally isn't a good thing for a wide range of reasons.
Naturally its all subjective, but this is generally the case. Games with more instance designed areas tend to be less competitive than those that force players to gather in one area to kill the same monster/boss/dragon.
Slashdot doesn't like outdated ideas
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The End of Copyright
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The reason why so many/. readers hate articles from Gamasutra is because so many of them are simply outdated or wouldn't fit in today's context. Permadeath in MMOGs? Why the hell would I pay to play then? I could just play a FPS with a mod for swords with no regular fee instead, since I'm probably going to just get ganked every 10 minutes. Permadeath WORKED for MUDs because so little data was actually saved and even assuming you managed to get all the best l3wt, it probably didn't have much meaning in it beyond personal satisfaction.
Same with pay-per-play systems here. We had an entire design built around that before, they were called arcades. Everytime you lost, you paid to play again. When you left, almost none of your work was saved besides a high score (assuming the staff didn't reset that regularly). It was good, only as long home consoles and PCs remained vastly inferior. Nowadays, arcades have gone the way of the dinosaur. Theres simply too much lack of value in such a system. At least when you buy a game, you OWN it. When you pay-per-play, its like a scam you can't win without outscamming the scammer. (Or in the case of 'never-ending games' you can never, ever win.)
Admittedly it was harsh, but refining does not equal innovation. With an airplane, you still need to invent the internal combustion engine (external is too large), steel is impossible due to lack of coal at the time and lets face it, a military that LIKES change during peacetime is a relatively new thing.
Technology is advancing so quickly these days we simply forget how slowly things progressed previously. The printing press is barely 500 years old, we had to copy documents BY HAND before that. The Bible alone would've taken months to copy let alone other writings such as novels or fictions. Postal service? A guy heading in the direction of your package/letter. Entertainment? Watching the town idiot get thrown into the ditch for passing out in the middle of the road.
Assuming the glider doesn't have a human passenger, any amount of gunpowder explosive would be too small to have any major effect other than the initial shock of seeing it for the first time. Thats assuming you can launch the glider from a high enough altitude to get over the walls as well. And gunpowder was nowhere near militarily viable during Roman times.
Last time I checked SOCOM 1 sold well primarily because it was the first PS2 to use the internet adaptor. SOCOM 2 was met with a 'meh, more of the same' and poor sales. SOCOM 3? Given the fact that Sony has more or less signed the PS2's death warrant at this point, sales would be lucky to break even.
(Some) people were saying that itunes wasn't worth it
Bolding mine.
Fast forward iTunes to 2005 and iTunes is so worth it, the RIAA is trying to muscle in on pricing. Throw in the MPAA, whos only saving factor right now is the fact that movie sizes are still fairly large and cannot be easily traded online (700 megs is still fairly large), and you have these two **AA groups suddenly muscling into legal online trading business Mafia-style.
Same with cellphone songs. Fast forward to 2005 and are cellphone songs STILL worth it? Theres iTunes and virtually free with any new pre-built computer CD burners for those with regular access to a computer. If you have an iPod (or more or less any other mp3 player), bonus points there. Some music CDs are now sold at discounted prices either through the bargain bin, used sales, trade-ins, coupons, etc. On top of all that, theres a lot of recent stigma against loud cellphones, use of cellphones in public areas is (mostly) banned (movie theatres), and of course theses the recent writing of some laws prohibiting driving while talking on a cellphone (even with 'hands-free' sets).
By the time you get through all the modern hassle of having a loud cellphone, you might as well just buy a cheap $50 or so portable CD player and use that in order to reuse your old CD music library. Got a big CD library, bonus points there. Too lazy to swap CDs? Drop an extra $50 for an iPod Shuffle (arguably the best mp3 player in terms of reliability-price ratio).
I hate to break this to you, but no it isn't. It's based off of who has more charisma on the screen, and in most cases, who has the hottest babes.
By that logic, all Hollywood needs to do is legitmize showing breasts and they'll suddenly be able to make profits that'll make Titanic look like a failure. Yes, that movie had nudity but lets face it, people didn't go back to watch it repeatedly just to see Kate Winslet's breasts.
Same thing can be applied to video games, by your logic Nintendo should have been killed and buried after the N64. The Dreamcast should have killed the PS2's pathetic hardware. The Xbox should have smashed into first place and the Xbox360 should ensure Microsoft's dominance in video gaming history for the next five years. Oh and the Revolution? Thats Nintendo's corpse rising from the dead as a zombie only to get killed again by a double-barreled shotgun to the face by Microsoft and Sony simultaneously./sarcasm
There have been a LOT more poor movie/franchise licensed games in comparison. There was at LEAST 3 different Star Wars games on the SNES alone (episode 4, 5 and 6 games), somewhere around 20~30 games on the PC (not counting expansions) and way too many to count on the Xbox and PS2 (anywhere from Star Wars Pod Racing (or whatever it was called) to Star Wars Battlefront 2).
Then theres the imfamous E.T. game, the incredibly bad Matrix games and the Batman/Superman/Spiderman comic book games which almost always seem destined to fail.
Before the PS2 came out, Sony was raving about how the DVD playing ability would blow people away, how the Dreamcast was gonna fail, and how they'd already 'killed' Nintendo (which just about everyone mentions, every time, since the PS1).
Now Sony is trying to hype the PS3 as some kind of supercomputer playing video game system with their Cell processors, their Blu-Ray discs will become the new industry replacement for DVDs and that they're gonna nail the coffin shut on Nintendo (again).
I'd say Microsoft is just taking a page out of Sony's marketing book here. Artifical shortage? PS2 did that. First to launch? PS2 did that to the Xbox and Gamecube. Claiming the opposition is already defeated? PS2 did that to the Dreamcast. Hyping up hardware as primary feature? PS2 did that.
While I agree with you on some of the launches, some of your scores and reasoning is way off.
Gameboy (5 stars) : Launched with Tetris, singlehandedly sealing the Gameboy in the realm of gaming history and handheld dominance. The sheer number of Tetris clones will attest to that. On top of that, this was back when black and white TVs was still the norm for the average citizen having a monochrome screen in a HANDHELD was frikin amazing.
Playstation 1 (1 star) : The PS1's launch games were either overhyped, completely uninspired, ugly, and/or just plain bad after coming from the SNES/Genesis war. While the N64 was amazing gamers with Super Mario 64, an analog stick and the Z-trigger; the PS1 had a SNES ripped off controller design, buttons with shapes instead of letters, symmetrical button sizes and shapes, and the now imfamously remembered "Loading" screen. While future games proved to outdo the N64 despite hardware weakness, the poor decision to do nothing to resolve the loading screen in the PS2 has hurt Sony. (The Gamecube avoids this with their mini-discs and the Xbox has the hard drive.)
Playstation 2 (-1 star) : Hmm, where to start? First there was the last minute cut of shipments from 1 million units to half a million units before launch (sound familiar?), then there were the stories of people getting mugged for their PS2 units and then there was the now legendary price markups on eBay going high into the thousands in some cases. Then there were the subpar games with SSX, a snowboarding game of all genres, being the 'best' out of the crowd, the fact that the loading issues hadn't been resolved and the controller being nothing more than a repainted version of the PS1's Dual Shock controller.
Sony PSP (3 stars) : Thanks to a marketing blitz rivaled only by the Xbox and Xbox360's, the PSP has made some serious headway against Nintendo's entrenched handheld monopoly (Some estimates place the PSP around 10% in handheld marketshare.) However, its library of both games and movies were rivaled in their lack of variety only by one another, its Wi-Fi abilities were and remain largely unused and the additional costs of having to buy a memory stick in addition to the PSP unit turned many gamers away as estimates of total costs commonly reached above $500 USD.
Nintendo DS (2 stars) : Nintendo nearly dropped the ball even harder here than they did with Luigi's Mansion. With the best launch game being a N64 port, many PSP fans were quick to claim that this was one of Nintendo's worst launches. Hardware features that went largely unused in its first generation, a touch screen no one knew how to implement, a voice recognition system that most people simply forgot and Wi-Fi thats only NOW being put into effect about hurt Nintendo during the first generation of games.
Yes, it'd be nice if everyone used 100 character passwords, but is there a suggestion for us mortals?
Zebra = Z-E-B-R-A = 26-5-2-16-1 = twentysixfivetwosixteenoone. Twenty-eight characters. Use a phrase instead and mix up the combination a bit (say F is 1 instead on the second, G is 1 on third, etc) and a hundred character password is easy to make up and remember for the dedicated.
Seriously, its because when it comes right down to it, Nintendo is the only 'good' guy between the three.
Sony is being a jackass with their 'let developers do whatever the fuck they want with their online models and leave the bullshit sorting to the gamers.' Throw in their hardware pissing contest with Microsoft and their recent DRM attempt, and you've got a VERY angry geek community.
Microsoft is the natural enemy of Slashdot. Throw in the Joe Average confusing Xbox360 packages, the recently announced artifical shortage and the fact that its really nothing more than a graphical upgrade in terms of gaming potential and you can see why gamers don't like the Xbox360.
Nintendo is being a weirdo (as always) with their controller and are refusing to play the hardware game, but other than that they're doing nothing to piss people off. On top of that, Nintendo is being the only innovator here (better graphics does not make innovation), is foregoing plugging into a router and going straight to wireless Wi-Fi (read: major geek points), and is now saying 'on top of all this, we're gonna have the cheapest price!'
Rather than stealing a person's rights and having them in expensive prison, it is far cheaper to buy the computing power.
Not necessarily. If you REALLY wanted to hide something on your hard drive, it'd be cakewalk for anyone really determined. Just get a 256 bit encryption system put on there (nearly impossible to 'brute force' with simple computing power due to the sheer number of possibilities).
On top of that you can hide messages in thousands of different possible files on the computer. It could be anywhere; a driver, a PC save game file, the user name and password for someone MMO account spelt backwards, it could be in plain sight on the desktop except its a code-word phrase that only the (presumably) terrorist knows. And thats on top of the encryption so the code breaking geeks can't even being working on this until the computers are done. Hiding data on a computer these days is a joke for anyone willing to spend the time and effort.
"Brute forcing" encryptions is a thing of the past. Contrary to popular belief, hardware has not necessarily kept up with software, as many high-end computer graphics designers will attest to. (Imagine today's top of the line computers trying to real-time render the orc's attack on Helm's Deep with all the fancy graphics, special AI and fancy camera work all going on at the same time.)
I guess you're unaware of the fact that Sony ALREADY uses DRM in their music CDs. Oh and its most recent attempt isn't their first either. And then theres the whole backing of the RIAA and the MPAA in their 'anti-piracy' efforts. And lets not forget their regional locking of PSP games.
According to popular TV, the HUMAN RACE wages war regularly (take your pick of popular sci-fi shows from Star Wars and Star Trek to Stargate and Star Trek: Enterprise.) Or theres the countless "the government is being controlled/working with/covering up the existance of aliens!" shows. (And government officials wonder why people won't believe them when they say anything anymore.) Finally, you can mix things up with the now traditional yet unbelievable 'single man and woman coincidentally meet and singlehandedly stop an alien invasion/government conspiracy to take over the world/prevent the escape of a biological monster.'
I mean, comon, most of these shows often times don't even mix things up sometimes. The only show that attempts to change things a bit is Battlestar Galatica and even THEN you could argue its just an extention of the original show's 'we lost, we run, who knows what'll happen next' formula.
And thats not even counting all the documentaries (war, medical causes, etc), history shows (an insane amount of footage from the WWII concentration camps is virtually banned from television) and then theres the media whos always willing to show 'the dark side' (whether its the hurricane aftermath, Iraqi prisoners (of war depending on who you ask), or the recent riots in France.)
The real reason for this is simply balance. As much as we'd all like to be the uber-evil super villain with the thermalnuclear bomb holding the world hostage, the game would be disrupted when some griefer(s) decides to actually push the button and kill the world.
On top of that, going up against other heroes (or even other players) would get boring since it'd never be a 'fair' fight (either YOU have the element of surprise, the enemy would have the element of surprise, or the fight would be unbalanced since they ARE "heroes.")
Finally, if you don't mind nitpicking, you can just say that the corrupt Rogue Island Police are 'corrupt' because they're working with the heroes. (Maybe they're funneling money to the heroes?) Those who kidnapped the Wretch? Minions of rogue heroes but the heroes themselves are careful enough to avoid being implicated/caught with the 'crime'. (Happens all the even in the comic books.) The intruders? Minions of heroes attacking to gather intel on your defenses. (Think recon units.) The list goes on. Aliens invading the planet? Thats not good for business. Some rogue villian trying to blow up the bridge just to settle a score? Well thats not gonna be good for being in the new destruct-o-beam for your base. Someone kidnapped someone close to the boss of the city? Well rescuing him is a good way to win favor.
Animals don't shit in toilets as humans, cleaning up regularly would take up time and effort. Why not use human wastes for fertilizer instead? Gotta get rid of the stuff anyway. What are you gonna feed the animals? Can't exactly grow fields of grain to feed both the astronauts AND the livestock. Same with the pigs. Unless you can feed them plastics, most trash is simply gonna be dumped out into space. Everything else will more or less be recycled or used up (remember, spaceship, can't waste food or, god forbid, spare room). Livestock simply isn't feasible by current or even sub-futuristic planning. Not enough space, not enough feed, not enough benefits. For now, vegetables and freeze dried foods win out for current space exploration foods.
Slashdot Mirror
PS1 had... FFVII which is really second generation since it came out almost 2 years after the PS1 did. PS2 had... SSX, a good looking fun game but hardly took advantage of the hardware. Xbox had Halo and even the most supportive fanboys generally agree that the game wasn't quite finished let alone polished (The Library level anyone? All that backtracking through old levels?). Xbox360 has 2 PC ports (Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4), yet another subpar FPS (Perfect Dark Zero) and another wave of EA Sports games.
The reason why the prize is so small is, in a nutshell, politics. Lets face it, the average politician barely knows more than the average citizen when it comes to space exploration, AI development or anything that requires a prototype. The net result is a government which lowers the value on science leaving private companies to pick up the pieces.
Does this mean we can expect more than one Smash Bros game on the Revolution? I mean it'd be a huge waste of resources to open an office for one game then shut it down upon completion..
Except the game was recieving awards like 'Game of the Year' and 'Best FPS' for years after its release. Counter-Strike and other popular mods simply came along too late in its lifetime to credit mods as the saving grace of Half-Life.
Experiment gone right? Yes.
Game able to withstand time? Yes.
"Greatest" game of any time period? No. Financially successful but lets face it, if it wasn't for the hardcore modders, the game would've gone stagnant years ago. The expansion packs offer beans compared to the meat and potatoes of the free online add-ons.
Revolutionary? No, all they did was take SimCity and put it at the micro/Sim level. The only reason it was never done before was due to hardware limitations.
Is The Sims' ability to withstand time a mark of its success? No, again thats entirely due to EA's complete failure to make the expansions worthwhile and the community's ability to make far better content for free.
The Sims IS a good game, just not the reasons they listed.
As for developers feeling the 'need' to fill whatever data mediums are used, just look at how much actual space is used in a PS2 or Xbox game. Most of them never use half the disc in terms of raw data (GTA3 is something like 1.5 gigs, Halo 2 is around 3 gigs). On top of that, some of that data is nothing more than buffer for FMVs to be streamed off the DVD/CD due to weak hardware (see: PS1 and PS2).
However, the flaw in this is the flip side. If prices increased due to cartridge costs, then prices should have DROPPED when the PS1 popularized CDs as the new storage format. Moreso with DVDs, you don't even need to print multiple CDs anymore, one copy = one DVD. Instead we get Microsoft trying to jack us over with this just because companies aren't happy with the profit margins they get already.
This is rubbish. If you go by the logic that 'better graphics/voice acting = higher price tag' then console games should have dropped to $30 for a brand new, day its released game during the PS2/Xbox/GC era. Most console games flat-out have awful graphics, poor textures and low resolutions. That alone should justify a $10 cut but it doesnt happen. Vice versa, PC games with their resolutions commonly reaching 1600*1200 the least, often times requiring a hardware upgrade just to reach 60 frames per second, hardware stress-testing graphics should cost $60~$80 by now. Same thing for voice acting, music, and the extra cost of developing for new hardware (if you add $10 for each hardware generation since the Atari 2600 we should be paying over $100 for a game by now.)
Naturally its all subjective, but this is generally the case. Games with more instance designed areas tend to be less competitive than those that force players to gather in one area to kill the same monster/boss/dragon.
Same with pay-per-play systems here. We had an entire design built around that before, they were called arcades. Everytime you lost, you paid to play again. When you left, almost none of your work was saved besides a high score (assuming the staff didn't reset that regularly). It was good, only as long home consoles and PCs remained vastly inferior. Nowadays, arcades have gone the way of the dinosaur. Theres simply too much lack of value in such a system. At least when you buy a game, you OWN it. When you pay-per-play, its like a scam you can't win without outscamming the scammer. (Or in the case of 'never-ending games' you can never, ever win.)
Technology is advancing so quickly these days we simply forget how slowly things progressed previously. The printing press is barely 500 years old, we had to copy documents BY HAND before that. The Bible alone would've taken months to copy let alone other writings such as novels or fictions. Postal service? A guy heading in the direction of your package/letter. Entertainment? Watching the town idiot get thrown into the ditch for passing out in the middle of the road.
Assuming the glider doesn't have a human passenger, any amount of gunpowder explosive would be too small to have any major effect other than the initial shock of seeing it for the first time. Thats assuming you can launch the glider from a high enough altitude to get over the walls as well. And gunpowder was nowhere near militarily viable during Roman times.
Last time I checked SOCOM 1 sold well primarily because it was the first PS2 to use the internet adaptor. SOCOM 2 was met with a 'meh, more of the same' and poor sales. SOCOM 3? Given the fact that Sony has more or less signed the PS2's death warrant at this point, sales would be lucky to break even.
Bolding mine.
Fast forward iTunes to 2005 and iTunes is so worth it, the RIAA is trying to muscle in on pricing. Throw in the MPAA, whos only saving factor right now is the fact that movie sizes are still fairly large and cannot be easily traded online (700 megs is still fairly large), and you have these two **AA groups suddenly muscling into legal online trading business Mafia-style.
Same with cellphone songs. Fast forward to 2005 and are cellphone songs STILL worth it? Theres iTunes and virtually free with any new pre-built computer CD burners for those with regular access to a computer. If you have an iPod (or more or less any other mp3 player), bonus points there. Some music CDs are now sold at discounted prices either through the bargain bin, used sales, trade-ins, coupons, etc. On top of all that, theres a lot of recent stigma against loud cellphones, use of cellphones in public areas is (mostly) banned (movie theatres), and of course theses the recent writing of some laws prohibiting driving while talking on a cellphone (even with 'hands-free' sets).
By the time you get through all the modern hassle of having a loud cellphone, you might as well just buy a cheap $50 or so portable CD player and use that in order to reuse your old CD music library. Got a big CD library, bonus points there. Too lazy to swap CDs? Drop an extra $50 for an iPod Shuffle (arguably the best mp3 player in terms of reliability-price ratio).
By that logic, all Hollywood needs to do is legitmize showing breasts and they'll suddenly be able to make profits that'll make Titanic look like a failure. Yes, that movie had nudity but lets face it, people didn't go back to watch it repeatedly just to see Kate Winslet's breasts.
Same thing can be applied to video games, by your logic Nintendo should have been killed and buried after the N64. The Dreamcast should have killed the PS2's pathetic hardware. The Xbox should have smashed into first place and the Xbox360 should ensure Microsoft's dominance in video gaming history for the next five years. Oh and the Revolution? Thats Nintendo's corpse rising from the dead as a zombie only to get killed again by a double-barreled shotgun to the face by Microsoft and Sony simultaneously. /sarcasm
Then theres the imfamous E.T. game, the incredibly bad Matrix games and the Batman/Superman/Spiderman comic book games which almost always seem destined to fail.
Now Sony is trying to hype the PS3 as some kind of supercomputer playing video game system with their Cell processors, their Blu-Ray discs will become the new industry replacement for DVDs and that they're gonna nail the coffin shut on Nintendo (again).
I'd say Microsoft is just taking a page out of Sony's marketing book here. Artifical shortage? PS2 did that. First to launch? PS2 did that to the Xbox and Gamecube. Claiming the opposition is already defeated? PS2 did that to the Dreamcast. Hyping up hardware as primary feature? PS2 did that.
Gameboy (5 stars) : Launched with Tetris, singlehandedly sealing the Gameboy in the realm of gaming history and handheld dominance. The sheer number of Tetris clones will attest to that. On top of that, this was back when black and white TVs was still the norm for the average citizen having a monochrome screen in a HANDHELD was frikin amazing.
Playstation 1 (1 star) : The PS1's launch games were either overhyped, completely uninspired, ugly, and/or just plain bad after coming from the SNES/Genesis war. While the N64 was amazing gamers with Super Mario 64, an analog stick and the Z-trigger; the PS1 had a SNES ripped off controller design, buttons with shapes instead of letters, symmetrical button sizes and shapes, and the now imfamously remembered "Loading" screen. While future games proved to outdo the N64 despite hardware weakness, the poor decision to do nothing to resolve the loading screen in the PS2 has hurt Sony. (The Gamecube avoids this with their mini-discs and the Xbox has the hard drive.)
Playstation 2 (-1 star) : Hmm, where to start? First there was the last minute cut of shipments from 1 million units to half a million units before launch (sound familiar?), then there were the stories of people getting mugged for their PS2 units and then there was the now legendary price markups on eBay going high into the thousands in some cases. Then there were the subpar games with SSX, a snowboarding game of all genres, being the 'best' out of the crowd, the fact that the loading issues hadn't been resolved and the controller being nothing more than a repainted version of the PS1's Dual Shock controller.
Sony PSP (3 stars) : Thanks to a marketing blitz rivaled only by the Xbox and Xbox360's, the PSP has made some serious headway against Nintendo's entrenched handheld monopoly (Some estimates place the PSP around 10% in handheld marketshare.) However, its library of both games and movies were rivaled in their lack of variety only by one another, its Wi-Fi abilities were and remain largely unused and the additional costs of having to buy a memory stick in addition to the PSP unit turned many gamers away as estimates of total costs commonly reached above $500 USD.
Nintendo DS (2 stars) : Nintendo nearly dropped the ball even harder here than they did with Luigi's Mansion. With the best launch game being a N64 port, many PSP fans were quick to claim that this was one of Nintendo's worst launches. Hardware features that went largely unused in its first generation, a touch screen no one knew how to implement, a voice recognition system that most people simply forgot and Wi-Fi thats only NOW being put into effect about hurt Nintendo during the first generation of games.
Zebra = Z-E-B-R-A = 26-5-2-16-1 = twentysixfivetwosixteenoone. Twenty-eight characters. Use a phrase instead and mix up the combination a bit (say F is 1 instead on the second, G is 1 on third, etc) and a hundred character password is easy to make up and remember for the dedicated.
Sony is being a jackass with their 'let developers do whatever the fuck they want with their online models and leave the bullshit sorting to the gamers.' Throw in their hardware pissing contest with Microsoft and their recent DRM attempt, and you've got a VERY angry geek community.
Microsoft is the natural enemy of Slashdot. Throw in the Joe Average confusing Xbox360 packages, the recently announced artifical shortage and the fact that its really nothing more than a graphical upgrade in terms of gaming potential and you can see why gamers don't like the Xbox360.
Nintendo is being a weirdo (as always) with their controller and are refusing to play the hardware game, but other than that they're doing nothing to piss people off. On top of that, Nintendo is being the only innovator here (better graphics does not make innovation), is foregoing plugging into a router and going straight to wireless Wi-Fi (read: major geek points), and is now saying 'on top of all this, we're gonna have the cheapest price!'
Not necessarily. If you REALLY wanted to hide something on your hard drive, it'd be cakewalk for anyone really determined. Just get a 256 bit encryption system put on there (nearly impossible to 'brute force' with simple computing power due to the sheer number of possibilities).
On top of that you can hide messages in thousands of different possible files on the computer. It could be anywhere; a driver, a PC save game file, the user name and password for someone MMO account spelt backwards, it could be in plain sight on the desktop except its a code-word phrase that only the (presumably) terrorist knows. And thats on top of the encryption so the code breaking geeks can't even being working on this until the computers are done. Hiding data on a computer these days is a joke for anyone willing to spend the time and effort.
"Brute forcing" encryptions is a thing of the past. Contrary to popular belief, hardware has not necessarily kept up with software, as many high-end computer graphics designers will attest to. (Imagine today's top of the line computers trying to real-time render the orc's attack on Helm's Deep with all the fancy graphics, special AI and fancy camera work all going on at the same time.)
I guess you're unaware of the fact that Sony ALREADY uses DRM in their music CDs.
Oh and its most recent attempt isn't their first either.
And then theres the whole backing of the RIAA and the MPAA in their 'anti-piracy' efforts.
And lets not forget their regional locking of PSP games.
I mean, comon, most of these shows often times don't even mix things up sometimes. The only show that attempts to change things a bit is Battlestar Galatica and even THEN you could argue its just an extention of the original show's 'we lost, we run, who knows what'll happen next' formula.
And thats not even counting all the documentaries (war, medical causes, etc), history shows (an insane amount of footage from the WWII concentration camps is virtually banned from television) and then theres the media whos always willing to show 'the dark side' (whether its the hurricane aftermath, Iraqi prisoners (of war depending on who you ask), or the recent riots in France.)
On top of that, going up against other heroes (or even other players) would get boring since it'd never be a 'fair' fight (either YOU have the element of surprise, the enemy would have the element of surprise, or the fight would be unbalanced since they ARE "heroes.")
Finally, if you don't mind nitpicking, you can just say that the corrupt Rogue Island Police are 'corrupt' because they're working with the heroes. (Maybe they're funneling money to the heroes?) Those who kidnapped the Wretch? Minions of rogue heroes but the heroes themselves are careful enough to avoid being implicated/caught with the 'crime'. (Happens all the even in the comic books.) The intruders? Minions of heroes attacking to gather intel on your defenses. (Think recon units.) The list goes on. Aliens invading the planet? Thats not good for business. Some rogue villian trying to blow up the bridge just to settle a score? Well thats not gonna be good for being in the new destruct-o-beam for your base. Someone kidnapped someone close to the boss of the city? Well rescuing him is a good way to win favor.
Animals don't shit in toilets as humans, cleaning up regularly would take up time and effort. Why not use human wastes for fertilizer instead? Gotta get rid of the stuff anyway. What are you gonna feed the animals? Can't exactly grow fields of grain to feed both the astronauts AND the livestock. Same with the pigs. Unless you can feed them plastics, most trash is simply gonna be dumped out into space. Everything else will more or less be recycled or used up (remember, spaceship, can't waste food or, god forbid, spare room). Livestock simply isn't feasible by current or even sub-futuristic planning. Not enough space, not enough feed, not enough benefits. For now, vegetables and freeze dried foods win out for current space exploration foods.