True all three points of yours are true but there are major points countering those same arguments (as in any serious debate.)
While there will always be a market to customized software for simple things, eventually either one major type will take dominance (Winamp or iTunes for mp3's) or will completely collapse under the sheer amount of them. For an example on this, simply look at video codecs ranging from the horrid Realplayer codec, to the generally accepted Divx, to the more obscure Xvid along with new DVD designed codecs to add things such as different languages, subtitles, and DVD player like simplicities such as chapter skip/reverse, fast forward, etc... And yes, all these codecs and players are free (not to mention Xvid is open source). As it stands, no one seems to be able to establish a dominance in the mp3 software player or video codec market yet (Winamp is trying but not there yet and Divx has barely made Microsoft get serious against them.
True there will always be a market supporting software, but for how long and how much support? Microsoft and Linux may be the old Nintendo and Sega of the OS war but what about 'the next big thing'? We all consider Microsoft products to be bad but by your logic, in the event that Microsoft should ever be 'defeated' and made open source, it'll continue to exist and be supported on the net even with new future OS systems. In this case we've made a deal with the devil where the devil wins even if he loses. We'll tear down 'the evil Microsoft' only to have it continue to exist on millions of computers with no more future updates against bugs and viruses leaving them insanely vunerable to hackers for years after their downfall.
Not spend money on closed source software? Goodie! Now send a letter to the boss of a multimillion dollar corporation explaining why they should switch to Linux and then give all its employees a pay raise in order to pass the net gain down. Whoopie. Unless your a small business owner whos barely make a net gain, saving an extra one or two thousand dollars a year (a full-time month or two's pay at minimum wage including taxes) isn't worth spending years of programming to understand how to use Linux without hiring a system operator for Grandma's Corner Cookies.
On this topic, Gates is right. Open source is bad in the long run. Sure it means things are 'supposedly' safer, less buggy, and cheaper. But in the long run, who do you sue when a hacker breaks into a financial bank insitution and withdraws a couple million dollars? Who do you point the finger at when the world's international travel system is down for 2 hours and causes dozens of potential plane crashes because some jackass launched a DNS attack? Who do you tell the government to blaim when the weapon designs of the new M6 carbine (fictional) is stolen because some hacker used a backdoor exploit that was listed 'to be fixed' but was exploited 5 minutes after it was listed on the net? Programming is STILL a specialized skill, otherwise we'd see John Carmacks all over the place, Duke Nukem Forever would be out already, and Bill Gates wouldn't be stupid enough to drive a gasoline truck into a napalm bomb.
True theres not necessarily a need to read the most recent books on the markets by the number one considered to be the 'authority' on a certain philosophy, but when you meet up with a bunch of professors in philosophy or go to a banquet with your boss you want to sound intelligent and up to date even if you don't understand a word the book or or even if you like/agree with the stance.
In high school, sure you could be cheap and lazy and get all your referances from the local library, but when your in college or in the real world, making an argument on a thesis written over 40 years ago you're not gonna get a good grade. Thats when you turn to the internet, for the most update to date, the easiest, and the most accessible source there is.
The MPAA is accusing people of stealing their movies. We _don't_ want to prove them right. That only gives them leverage to take our freedoms away with absurd legislation like the DMCA!
True, but whos the one keeping track of pirated movies? Certainly not the rippers/uploaders/downloaders. No way in hell would the MPAA have hard evidence. The government? Cue privacy invasion lawsuits.
Even if EVERYBODY was to cease online piracy for a month, and I mean ALL piracy, do you really think some big suit executive will say 'hey, look they stopped stealing our stuff for the month. That means we can reason with them!' Or will the same suit say 'hey, look they stopped stealing our stuff for the month. But our DVD and movie sales dropped by 15%. I know! Lets make false piracy reports and complain to the government to get a tax refund or tax exemption!'
I've been on a bit of a tear myself, playing old games and finding them deficient. First it was Double Dragon on the NES, which I had at one time thought was pretty ok, but now realize is awful. Then there was Prince of Persia (again, NES), which is a neat idea, but way too long. Then Deceptor on the Commodore 64, which I had always wanted to finish. I played through it, beat it, and found that the ending was absolutely terrible. Then Into the Eagle's Nest, another Commodore game, that is really not worth the effort. (As a generous human, however, I'm making a series of maps for it just so other people don't have to suffer.) And then DragonStrike (back on the NES) which turns out to be a terrible version of a classic Commodore 64 game I'd always wanted.
Well to be fair, think about what you're saying.
1. Double Dragon (1) on the NES was a port of an ARCADE game. Any gamer who played in an arcade knows that arcade games don't port well to consoles flat out (either they're made too easy, unlimited continues, or they're too hard, 3 continues in a game where every enemy can kill you in one hit with Ikaruga difficulty? Not cool!) 2. Prince of Persia originated on the PC and was designed to be an action/puzzle game (though more on the puzzle side), not exactly the type of game you wanna put on the NES during the days of twitch, hardcore memorization gaming. 3. Commodore 64? You're not exactly talking about CD-Rom memory sized games here. Nor are we talking about the golden age of adventure/puzzle designed games of the late 80's on the PC. (King's Quest series, Space Quest series, etc etc.)
I don't mean to bash but when you think about it, all the games you mentioned have 'cheap port' written all over them. That would be like bashing the Xbox version of GTA3 for not having Xbox Live support over the PS2 version when you know Rockstar really only did it to cash in on Xbox owners.
Geez, as if blocking a whole country from even viewing your site actually helps anyone!
Well if I'm an e-commerce website and blocking off Macedonia helps protect me from thousands and thousands of bogus orders, I say blacklist them. If I live in Macedonia and I get caught in this blacklist business I'm gonna call up my ISP and tell them to get their act together. If that doesn't work, screw them I'll go get another ISP thats willing to get their act together.
As long as the majority of orders/visitors from a certain country/area/ISP are going to surf the net to cause trouble, theres no reason why business should have to put up with international bullshit in a legal system that doesn't exist.
What about all the people playing SOCOM on PS2? Splinter Cell on XBox?
Well about SOCOM, theres no comparison with it on the PS2 (either their far better, far worse, or developed and geared totally differently.) But Splinter Cell would be a more interesting comparison, assuming you could convince Microsoft to release the number of Xbox Live Splinter Cell : Pandora Tomorrow players (the first game flat out had no multiplayer, the second did, perfect for this type of argument.)
The very fact that there are few examples to make an argument in this situation is proof of the very lack of online games proving themselves to be successful. Sure you could say games like Madden have been doing selling wonderfully because of their new online capabilities, but where are the numbers? Can/Will EA show me the ratio of online players to number of units sold? Course not, because the ratio would be something like 1:10 which any investor would blast as 'a waste of money.'
'When you think about it, most younger gamers get their games as gifts, generally for birthdays and christmas. So for that target audience, christmas is the right time for most releases.'
Don't forget about Christmas bonuses at that time. Around Christmas time, lots of people have instant disposible cash and lots of reasons to blow it FAST.
... that "demographics" have led developers to think that most gamers are in their 20's or 30's so they should make more 'mature' games. This of course leads to the article's problem, gamers supposedly 'objectifing' women. True women at times have been major... topics of discussion, but whens the last time someone went out and bought a copy of the horribly buggy Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness over Half-Life just because Gordon Freeman was male?
The second major problem is too much media coverage on booth babes. We know they exist. We know they look hot. We know when the show ends all the makeup comes off and the costumes are presumably destroyed in an act of corporate waste. We don't need thousands of pictures of them on hundreds of different webpages in "post-E3 coverage" reports. We don't need web contests of 'which E3 babe was the hottest looking this year?' contests. I don't know about other Slashdotters but after reading my 4th or 5th E3 coverage I'm getting kinda tired of looking at pictures of women I'll never speak to, hear about ever again, let alone meet in real life.
Three guys are pulled over on an interstate highway by the police. For not wearing a seatbelt. The police then proceeded to search the car for contraband. Then they DISMANTLED A CAR on an INTERSTATE HIGHWAY. The police then left them with a SCREWDRIVER. All this in TWO hours, on an INTERSTATE HIGHWAY. And this is 'one of a half-dozen incidents'.
Uh huh. Sure I believe this story. The police just disassemble a car on an interstate highway, one of the busiest in the country I-95, and no one notices or says a damned thing? Thats like saying a drunk obviously underage teenage wanders around downtown for two hours, never gets noticed by the police, and then sobers up and drives away safely only to have the story reported days after the incident occured. On a backroad somewhere in the countryside, maybe. But on an interstate highway? For crying out loud people are ignorant not blind.
However, it is not that the Internet would die; more like this crappy insecure non-authenticated protocol called SMTP would die. The only problem with just pre-emptorily killing it ourselves is that it would cost many $billions to replace it.
Or theres the worst case scenario system which most people never even dream of happening. Completely locking and disconnecting servers while distrusting everyone you haven't met in real life/someone you can walk up to and punch in the face. In this scenario, there is nothing free 'free' on the net since everyone assumes it'd be abused for evil rather than good (free Yahoo/Hotmail accounts?). No one would visit Slashdot in fear of the site tanking and then having their IP addresses sold to make what little money they can to break even. Public game servers would be non-existant in fear of being hit by a/. effect causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. Online shopping would go bankrupt since no one would trust putting their credit card information online. Blogs would become non-existant since everyone would be paranoid of one another (whens the last time you gave out your real life phone number to someone you met less than 5 minutes ago on the internet?).
In otherwords, without the establishment of a 'few good guys' the internet would devolve into a hellhole of distrust, the very foundation of the internet in the first place. Its not about money, remember people did is decades ago for a fraction of what they would've gotten today (ie. billions to make Microsoft look like an internet startup). Its all about the belief that none (to few) people will ever use the software like Internet Explorer to brainwash children into believing the Holocaust never happened. Its all about the belief that Slashdot won't turn into a site where terrorists can hide and recieve secret messages to one another. Etc, etc...
Sony is effectively saying "Upgrade to the $350 PS3 by trading in the PS2 for $100, and keep all your games!".
True, but by that logic we should be playing FFVII on our PS2s because people don't like FFX-2's girl theme. We should be playing Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 on our PS2s instead of buying a Gamecube and buying the remade versions of them. We should be playing Mega Man 8 on our PS2s instead of waiting for the remade version of Mega Man 8.
In the short run, yes, people are going to go for the system that is backward-compatible. But in the long run, when push comes to shove, gamers are not going to buy a PS3 or Xbox2 just to play FFX or Halo 1.
Hell, even Grandma knows better than to send cash in the mail;
Yeah, thats because Grandma may be old, she may be senial, but she's not so far gone enough to remember that her grown up son/daughter can just use a credit card.
Thats like saying, 'well billions and billions of different letters and packages are sent through the postal service safely and securely daily, but that doesn't mean we can't take the 234235546234 to 1 chance that our package will be the one that will be lost/stolen.'
Probably not, but all things considered (its FIFTY BUCKS for a Dreamcast system, most people spend double that on gasoline for their car a month), for the cheap gamers, hackers, programmers, and those tired of 'remade games just with better graphics' this is excellent news.
Every time you think you've scored a point by managing to rip this CD, all you've done is to further play yourself -- and you liberties -- into the hands of BMG and the RIAA. You're given them a precedents to point to and a spurious "threat" to whine to Congress about. Who's really winning here?
Those clever enough to realize this beforehand, not buy a CD at all, and wait to download a copy from someone who through they were sticking it to 'the man' like you said. The ones are REALLY win through this are those who are totally cheap and wouldn't buy the CD even if they were anti-RIAA and end up downloading a 'free' copy online without a care as to how or 'why' it was ripped.
Agreed, technology goes to fast in Civ 3 (well all of them really, in easier difficulties I can get space flight before the 1850's, eariler if I focus on getting it). But another thing that bothered me was the cultural victory. Without playing on a large map with lots of land, it was nearly impossible to achieve victory that way since you'd always be warring with some other nation for some reason either for land, resources, or 'just because.'
Does IGN/GameSpy accurately represent the mainstream?
No.
Judging someone's preferences to video games based on what they subscribe to is like judging someone's preferences on food based on what they buy. Sure a college student LOGICALLY likes instant ramen if he buys a Costco sized 48 pack of the stuff every week. But when you take other factors into consideration (budget, time, lazyness, want something to eat a 4 AM while studing for your final, etc) obviously you noticed the data is slanted.
Same with video games. When you're in college and you're stuck in a small room with 2-4 other guys you've never met until 2 months ago, you're not gonna 'break the ice' with a game like Xenosaga or Final Fantasy. No you're gonna reach for a game like Goldeneye, Halo, or Quake. But when College Calvin goes back home, he MIGHT keep playing those games, or he might go back to his old singleplayer friendly games like turn-based strategy games.
True, but its goes beyond that. Do you REALLY think that just because you keep your CDs in a nice jewel case everytime you stop using it, its not gonna take some wear and tear? Course not, by merely owning it its gonna take damage. Lets go over the list of "what goes wrong, when you're doing things right."
1. Merely removing the shrink wrap from the jewel case exposes it to air and airborne chemicals which will erode your disc. 2. Removing the CD, causes pressure to be FOCUSED on the center because thats really the only part of the CD thats being used to hold it in place. This leads to potential cracks and simple wear and tear. 3. USING THE CD, causes its damage. Think about it, whats the RPM (rotation per minute) of your CD player? How long do you typically use that CD at a time? How hot does the CD get when its rotated that quickly and for so long? What about the heat generated from the rest of the system (PC of stereo system?) 4. The area you live in also predict the lifetime of your CD in the longrun. If you use the CD in a closed, temperture controlled, atmosphere controlled laboratory and use the CD maybe once a week, yeah its gonna last about the estimated 10 years. But if you live in a tent, in the middle of the Sahara Desert and the sand just somehow manages to get into your air-sealed CD case and scratch it up, you'll be lucky if your CD managed to make its way into the hands of a black market dealer with 2 tracks still playable.
The PS2 has had an official 8MB card since launch. The Xbox has had that size as well AND included a HD in the first place.
Well to be fair, if you take a look at some of the memory usage for PS2 games, you most of them have some serious memory usage differences. RPGs? You're fine, maybe 20-100 KBs each. But sports games? Some sports games take half the memory card! God forbid you're hardcore and you ALWAYS save and keep your memory data from older versions of football, basketball, and soccer games. A moment of silence for those who play multiple seasons at a time as well.
As for the Xbox... well I think its safe to safe MS wasn't exactly thinking short term when they settled on 8 gigs.
why are you worried about your friends asking you why they can't play with all the settings turned up?
I donno, maybe because they're computers are less than 6-months old like I said? Thats like saying, 'well you have a rocket car but you can't expect it to faster than a pickup truck because they use the same gasoline.' The moment you start telling people with top of the line hardware to turn down their settings is the moment you tell people to expect crap for their money.
Without complaining about EQ2 copying FFXI, I think its a good idea that they're taking the no PvP system seriously. Ever since the release of Ultima Online, PvP hs generated largely unpopular support. Yeah it was cool you could kill your friends or some random people you just ran into. But it wasn't cool if you were on the recieving end. Or if you got 'PKed' for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. PvP was largely, uncool in MMO games.
With the expection of the unique cases (Planetside and Lineage 2 FOCUSING on PvP) PvP has largely be unsuccessful in MMO games. GM support is woefully outstretched with most players takings matters into their own hands (spam in a high populated area and guess how many people will mute you... and leave you muted as long they play the game.) One of the most unbelieved results was when players in Ultima Online formed anti-PK clans and went around PKing PKers.
"We draw every little blade of grass, because we can"
Gee THANKS! And my friends keep asking me why their less than 6-month old, top of the line PCs have trouble playing games with all the settings turned up. You CAN draw every little, individual grass and then give it its own individual animation and whatnot, but that doesn't mean me, as a gamer, is even gonna be able to run the game in the first place. Some developers need to understand that less is more sometimes.
Admittedly there are some cool cases (in Soldier of Fortune 2 in one of the jungle parts, they used the grass to hide a tripwire connected to explosives) but after a certain point in the game, often times it goes unused after that point. (In C&C:Generals the game shows you its game engine capability by freeze framing and then rotating the camera around a guy sent into the air by an explosion. Cool, now show replay that again with 500 guys being sent into the air. What do you mean you're not gonna do that again? Wth? I gotta make my own scenario if I wanna see that? Oh forget that!)
Also, he is wrong in his introductory paragraph. These are all TACTICS games, not strategy games. It's call Final Fantasy TACTICS, not Final Fantasy STRATEGY.
Actually they are 'strategy' games. A 'strategy' is something thats developed over a period of time for an ultimate goal. In these games its to make X character super powerful, in Y stats, with Z weapon skills, to kill the final boss (in Fire Emblem "Zero" for the GBA you COULD make Sain him an uber axe user but that only happens after you upgrade him and his axe skill starts at scratch. Meaning poor strategy.) Most people just don't realize it because video games tend to focus on the IMMEDIATE problem (getting more ammo, making that last jump, figuring out the puzzle, etc), and that immediate problem requires TACTICS.
Simply put, tactics involve finding a way to solve the first 5 steps of a problem. Strategy however worries about step number 2341 failing which would mess up step number 4230.
they probably had a negative effect on the entire gaming industry as companies were forced to tighten their security policy.
So in otherwords, its BAD that companies increase their security? Thats like saying its bad to buy new locks for your doors AFTER you've been robbed. What next? Are we gonna send little kids to jail for 'stealing' money which someone left unattended on a table? With the internet you're bound to get hacked sooner or later, no matter how big or small you are. Just don't expect someone to rob a bank and then return it saying 'well next time you should be more careful.'
Slashdot Mirror
While there will always be a market to customized software for simple things, eventually either one major type will take dominance (Winamp or iTunes for mp3's) or will completely collapse under the sheer amount of them. For an example on this, simply look at video codecs ranging from the horrid Realplayer codec, to the generally accepted Divx, to the more obscure Xvid along with new DVD designed codecs to add things such as different languages, subtitles, and DVD player like simplicities such as chapter skip/reverse, fast forward, etc... And yes, all these codecs and players are free (not to mention Xvid is open source). As it stands, no one seems to be able to establish a dominance in the mp3 software player or video codec market yet (Winamp is trying but not there yet and Divx has barely made Microsoft get serious against them.
True there will always be a market supporting software, but for how long and how much support? Microsoft and Linux may be the old Nintendo and Sega of the OS war but what about 'the next big thing'? We all consider Microsoft products to be bad but by your logic, in the event that Microsoft should ever be 'defeated' and made open source, it'll continue to exist and be supported on the net even with new future OS systems. In this case we've made a deal with the devil where the devil wins even if he loses. We'll tear down 'the evil Microsoft' only to have it continue to exist on millions of computers with no more future updates against bugs and viruses leaving them insanely vunerable to hackers for years after their downfall.
Not spend money on closed source software? Goodie! Now send a letter to the boss of a multimillion dollar corporation explaining why they should switch to Linux and then give all its employees a pay raise in order to pass the net gain down. Whoopie. Unless your a small business owner whos barely make a net gain, saving an extra one or two thousand dollars a year (a full-time month or two's pay at minimum wage including taxes) isn't worth spending years of programming to understand how to use Linux without hiring a system operator for Grandma's Corner Cookies.
On this topic, Gates is right. Open source is bad in the long run. Sure it means things are 'supposedly' safer, less buggy, and cheaper. But in the long run, who do you sue when a hacker breaks into a financial bank insitution and withdraws a couple million dollars? Who do you point the finger at when the world's international travel system is down for 2 hours and causes dozens of potential plane crashes because some jackass launched a DNS attack? Who do you tell the government to blaim when the weapon designs of the new M6 carbine (fictional) is stolen because some hacker used a backdoor exploit that was listed 'to be fixed' but was exploited 5 minutes after it was listed on the net? Programming is STILL a specialized skill, otherwise we'd see John Carmacks all over the place, Duke Nukem Forever would be out already, and Bill Gates wouldn't be stupid enough to drive a gasoline truck into a napalm bomb.
In high school, sure you could be cheap and lazy and get all your referances from the local library, but when your in college or in the real world, making an argument on a thesis written over 40 years ago you're not gonna get a good grade. Thats when you turn to the internet, for the most update to date, the easiest, and the most accessible source there is.
Does this mean we'll ever see the game outside of Japan besides from a console port or a warezed version of the game online for MAME?
True, but whos the one keeping track of pirated movies? Certainly not the rippers/uploaders/downloaders. No way in hell would the MPAA have hard evidence. The government? Cue privacy invasion lawsuits.
Even if EVERYBODY was to cease online piracy for a month, and I mean ALL piracy, do you really think some big suit executive will say 'hey, look they stopped stealing our stuff for the month. That means we can reason with them!' Or will the same suit say 'hey, look they stopped stealing our stuff for the month. But our DVD and movie sales dropped by 15%. I know! Lets make false piracy reports and complain to the government to get a tax refund or tax exemption!'
Well to be fair, think about what you're saying.
1. Double Dragon (1) on the NES was a port of an ARCADE game. Any gamer who played in an arcade knows that arcade games don't port well to consoles flat out (either they're made too easy, unlimited continues, or they're too hard, 3 continues in a game where every enemy can kill you in one hit with Ikaruga difficulty? Not cool!)
2. Prince of Persia originated on the PC and was designed to be an action/puzzle game (though more on the puzzle side), not exactly the type of game you wanna put on the NES during the days of twitch, hardcore memorization gaming.
3. Commodore 64? You're not exactly talking about CD-Rom memory sized games here. Nor are we talking about the golden age of adventure/puzzle designed games of the late 80's on the PC. (King's Quest series, Space Quest series, etc etc.)
I don't mean to bash but when you think about it, all the games you mentioned have 'cheap port' written all over them. That would be like bashing the Xbox version of GTA3 for not having Xbox Live support over the PS2 version when you know Rockstar really only did it to cash in on Xbox owners.
Well if I'm an e-commerce website and blocking off Macedonia helps protect me from thousands and thousands of bogus orders, I say blacklist them. If I live in Macedonia and I get caught in this blacklist business I'm gonna call up my ISP and tell them to get their act together. If that doesn't work, screw them I'll go get another ISP thats willing to get their act together.
As long as the majority of orders/visitors from a certain country/area/ISP are going to surf the net to cause trouble, theres no reason why business should have to put up with international bullshit in a legal system that doesn't exist.
Well about SOCOM, theres no comparison with it on the PS2 (either their far better, far worse, or developed and geared totally differently.) But Splinter Cell would be a more interesting comparison, assuming you could convince Microsoft to release the number of Xbox Live Splinter Cell : Pandora Tomorrow players (the first game flat out had no multiplayer, the second did, perfect for this type of argument.)
The very fact that there are few examples to make an argument in this situation is proof of the very lack of online games proving themselves to be successful. Sure you could say games like Madden have been doing selling wonderfully because of their new online capabilities, but where are the numbers? Can/Will EA show me the ratio of online players to number of units sold? Course not, because the ratio would be something like 1:10 which any investor would blast as 'a waste of money.'
Don't forget about Christmas bonuses at that time. Around Christmas time, lots of people have instant disposible cash and lots of reasons to blow it FAST.
The second major problem is too much media coverage on booth babes. We know they exist. We know they look hot. We know when the show ends all the makeup comes off and the costumes are presumably destroyed in an act of corporate waste. We don't need thousands of pictures of them on hundreds of different webpages in "post-E3 coverage" reports. We don't need web contests of 'which E3 babe was the hottest looking this year?' contests. I don't know about other Slashdotters but after reading my 4th or 5th E3 coverage I'm getting kinda tired of looking at pictures of women I'll never speak to, hear about ever again, let alone meet in real life.
Three guys are pulled over on an interstate highway by the police. For not wearing a seatbelt.
The police then proceeded to search the car for contraband.
Then they DISMANTLED A CAR on an INTERSTATE HIGHWAY.
The police then left them with a SCREWDRIVER.
All this in TWO hours, on an INTERSTATE HIGHWAY.
And this is 'one of a half-dozen incidents'.
Uh huh. Sure I believe this story. The police just disassemble a car on an interstate highway, one of the busiest in the country I-95, and no one notices or says a damned thing? Thats like saying a drunk obviously underage teenage wanders around downtown for two hours, never gets noticed by the police, and then sobers up and drives away safely only to have the story reported days after the incident occured. On a backroad somewhere in the countryside, maybe. But on an interstate highway? For crying out loud people are ignorant not blind.
Or theres the worst case scenario system which most people never even dream of happening. Completely locking and disconnecting servers while distrusting everyone you haven't met in real life/someone you can walk up to and punch in the face. In this scenario, there is nothing free 'free' on the net since everyone assumes it'd be abused for evil rather than good (free Yahoo/Hotmail accounts?). No one would visit Slashdot in fear of the site tanking and then having their IP addresses sold to make what little money they can to break even. Public game servers would be non-existant in fear of being hit by a /. effect causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. Online shopping would go bankrupt since no one would trust putting their credit card information online. Blogs would become non-existant since everyone would be paranoid of one another (whens the last time you gave out your real life phone number to someone you met less than 5 minutes ago on the internet?).
In otherwords, without the establishment of a 'few good guys' the internet would devolve into a hellhole of distrust, the very foundation of the internet in the first place. Its not about money, remember people did is decades ago for a fraction of what they would've gotten today (ie. billions to make Microsoft look like an internet startup). Its all about the belief that none (to few) people will ever use the software like Internet Explorer to brainwash children into believing the Holocaust never happened. Its all about the belief that Slashdot won't turn into a site where terrorists can hide and recieve secret messages to one another. Etc, etc...
If the game is so bad, why is it being reported on Slashdot? What next? Will we report on XXX because one of the ladies' armpits weren't shaved?
True, but by that logic we should be playing FFVII on our PS2s because people don't like FFX-2's girl theme. We should be playing Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 on our PS2s instead of buying a Gamecube and buying the remade versions of them. We should be playing Mega Man 8 on our PS2s instead of waiting for the remade version of Mega Man 8.
In the short run, yes, people are going to go for the system that is backward-compatible. But in the long run, when push comes to shove, gamers are not going to buy a PS3 or Xbox2 just to play FFX or Halo 1.
Yeah, thats because Grandma may be old, she may be senial, but she's not so far gone enough to remember that her grown up son/daughter can just use a credit card.
Thats like saying, 'well billions and billions of different letters and packages are sent through the postal service safely and securely daily, but that doesn't mean we can't take the 234235546234 to 1 chance that our package will be the one that will be lost/stolen.'
Probably not, but all things considered (its FIFTY BUCKS for a Dreamcast system, most people spend double that on gasoline for their car a month), for the cheap gamers, hackers, programmers, and those tired of 'remade games just with better graphics' this is excellent news.
Those clever enough to realize this beforehand, not buy a CD at all, and wait to download a copy from someone who through they were sticking it to 'the man' like you said. The ones are REALLY win through this are those who are totally cheap and wouldn't buy the CD even if they were anti-RIAA and end up downloading a 'free' copy online without a care as to how or 'why' it was ripped.
Agreed, technology goes to fast in Civ 3 (well all of them really, in easier difficulties I can get space flight before the 1850's, eariler if I focus on getting it). But another thing that bothered me was the cultural victory. Without playing on a large map with lots of land, it was nearly impossible to achieve victory that way since you'd always be warring with some other nation for some reason either for land, resources, or 'just because.'
No.
Judging someone's preferences to video games based on what they subscribe to is like judging someone's preferences on food based on what they buy. Sure a college student LOGICALLY likes instant ramen if he buys a Costco sized 48 pack of the stuff every week. But when you take other factors into consideration (budget, time, lazyness, want something to eat a 4 AM while studing for your final, etc) obviously you noticed the data is slanted.
Same with video games. When you're in college and you're stuck in a small room with 2-4 other guys you've never met until 2 months ago, you're not gonna 'break the ice' with a game like Xenosaga or Final Fantasy. No you're gonna reach for a game like Goldeneye, Halo, or Quake. But when College Calvin goes back home, he MIGHT keep playing those games, or he might go back to his old singleplayer friendly games like turn-based strategy games.
1. Merely removing the shrink wrap from the jewel case exposes it to air and airborne chemicals which will erode your disc.
2. Removing the CD, causes pressure to be FOCUSED on the center because thats really the only part of the CD thats being used to hold it in place. This leads to potential cracks and simple wear and tear.
3. USING THE CD, causes its damage. Think about it, whats the RPM (rotation per minute) of your CD player? How long do you typically use that CD at a time? How hot does the CD get when its rotated that quickly and for so long? What about the heat generated from the rest of the system (PC of stereo system?)
4. The area you live in also predict the lifetime of your CD in the longrun. If you use the CD in a closed, temperture controlled, atmosphere controlled laboratory and use the CD maybe once a week, yeah its gonna last about the estimated 10 years. But if you live in a tent, in the middle of the Sahara Desert and the sand just somehow manages to get into your air-sealed CD case and scratch it up, you'll be lucky if your CD managed to make its way into the hands of a black market dealer with 2 tracks still playable.
Well to be fair, if you take a look at some of the memory usage for PS2 games, you most of them have some serious memory usage differences. RPGs? You're fine, maybe 20-100 KBs each. But sports games? Some sports games take half the memory card! God forbid you're hardcore and you ALWAYS save and keep your memory data from older versions of football, basketball, and soccer games. A moment of silence for those who play multiple seasons at a time as well.
As for the Xbox... well I think its safe to safe MS wasn't exactly thinking short term when they settled on 8 gigs.
why are you worried about your friends asking you why they can't play with all the settings turned up?
I donno, maybe because they're computers are less than 6-months old like I said? Thats like saying, 'well you have a rocket car but you can't expect it to faster than a pickup truck because they use the same gasoline.' The moment you start telling people with top of the line hardware to turn down their settings is the moment you tell people to expect crap for their money.
With the expection of the unique cases (Planetside and Lineage 2 FOCUSING on PvP) PvP has largely be unsuccessful in MMO games. GM support is woefully outstretched with most players takings matters into their own hands (spam in a high populated area and guess how many people will mute you... and leave you muted as long they play the game.) One of the most unbelieved results was when players in Ultima Online formed anti-PK clans and went around PKing PKers.
Gee THANKS! And my friends keep asking me why their less than 6-month old, top of the line PCs have trouble playing games with all the settings turned up. You CAN draw every little, individual grass and then give it its own individual animation and whatnot, but that doesn't mean me, as a gamer, is even gonna be able to run the game in the first place. Some developers need to understand that less is more sometimes.
Admittedly there are some cool cases (in Soldier of Fortune 2 in one of the jungle parts, they used the grass to hide a tripwire connected to explosives) but after a certain point in the game, often times it goes unused after that point. (In C&C:Generals the game shows you its game engine capability by freeze framing and then rotating the camera around a guy sent into the air by an explosion. Cool, now show replay that again with 500 guys being sent into the air. What do you mean you're not gonna do that again? Wth? I gotta make my own scenario if I wanna see that? Oh forget that!)
Actually they are 'strategy' games. A 'strategy' is something thats developed over a period of time for an ultimate goal. In these games its to make X character super powerful, in Y stats, with Z weapon skills, to kill the final boss (in Fire Emblem "Zero" for the GBA you COULD make Sain him an uber axe user but that only happens after you upgrade him and his axe skill starts at scratch. Meaning poor strategy.) Most people just don't realize it because video games tend to focus on the IMMEDIATE problem (getting more ammo, making that last jump, figuring out the puzzle, etc), and that immediate problem requires TACTICS.
Simply put, tactics involve finding a way to solve the first 5 steps of a problem. Strategy however worries about step number 2341 failing which would mess up step number 4230.
So in otherwords, its BAD that companies increase their security? Thats like saying its bad to buy new locks for your doors AFTER you've been robbed. What next? Are we gonna send little kids to jail for 'stealing' money which someone left unattended on a table? With the internet you're bound to get hacked sooner or later, no matter how big or small you are. Just don't expect someone to rob a bank and then return it saying 'well next time you should be more careful.'