It's called patent infringement. Nintendo owns the patents on both the gyro/acellerometer tech via a controlling interest in Gyration and numerous patents related to the interface in regards to gaming. There are very few companies that get into the HCI stuff, and if the rev controller works as well as some people say it does, none of them can approach the tech in that controller.
The only other option is outright theft/infringement and hoping you gain enough of a foothold in the interim to offset the enormous losses you're going to get from the impending lawsuit(sony and the dual-shock!). Which is fucking awful behavior to encourage.
If the controller excites you, you buy a rev. Plain and simple. It's not only the right thing to do, it's probably the only thing you can do.
Yea, except all your extra horsepower is going into upping the resolution and the innate scaling issues of that. Going from 640x480 up to 1080i means almost 10 times the amount of pixels to draw on screen per frame. That's 10 times the amount of oomph needed for every last visual effect you want to do. And you aren't going to impress the graphic whores by cutting the frame rate to compensate. It better push 60FPS, and there goes most of your resources, *poof* into the graphics/res whore den, and no the GPU does not compensate for it. Same with disk space, btw.
Plus, the PS3 in particular has no branch prediction and no out-of-order execution which drastically increases the difficulty of making decent AI(read, not going to happen for 5 years at the minimum). The 360 simply does not have the extra horse-power after the graphics increases for a big jump either.
There just isn't enough left over, and the graphics first/HD first mentality means no one is *going* to leave enough left over. If you think AI is suddenly going to be amazing, you're absolutely fucking delusional.
Yea, and they can jack in to your wireless network regardless of whether you use WPA or WEP. It's not like WPA is unbreakable, or takes much longer to break. All wireless gets torn apart like tissue paper, it's the nature of the freakin' beast. You encrypt at the application layer and for the most part go, eh, fuck it and leave your wireless ap pretty much open apart from maybe some MAC filtering. And you don't do that to secure it from people who know what they're doing(because you can't!), you do that to secure it from the people that don't.
They're selling their time. I'm paying them to spend their time playing this game and generating this resource, not for the resource itself.
And please leave the freakin' lawyers out of it. We have too many as is. I mean, comeon, we're talking about a freakin' game here and people bust out the lawyer and I ANAL talk.
We might be. I'm guessing the next gaming crash will happen when an end-of-cycle title on an older system looks and plays better than a next-gen title. Oh.. shit... wait... yea, almost there.
Oh well, if history repeats that means Nintendo(or an upstart) and PCs usher in another golden age within a year or so. And it shall last for 10 years, and be declared good, and all shall play that era's games on the next electronics company turned console company's handheld in another 10 years, for there shall be no good games for it bar one, and the older generation shall be saddened and look upon the younger, and sigh.
Survivability is why Paladins can not be allowed to deal decent damage. It would just be positively retarded. About all they needed was a revamp of the judgement system to make it not suck, and a few convienance things. And that's what they got, pretty much. Oh and a few consistancy tweaks so SoC isn't a holy damage version of the windfury lottery kill system.
Imagine Shamans(and their totems need fixed to bring them in line with blessings for raiding, and that's about it) with immunity shields. Gahhh..
Red Octane is the publisher, and I think had some say in the development process, like controller design or something like that.
Oh, and Harmonix also made an eye-toy game. Apart from frequency and amplitude, they're pretty big on peripherals, so I'm hoping they do something for the rev with the modular controller. But just about everything about Nintendo's new console is sewn up by a web of NDAs and thousands of bits of speculation.
And RE: the PSP. Part of the problem is game/UMD pricing. I'll be damned if I'm paying > $20 for a movie or > $35 for a portable title(that's only going to get used in the bathroom and on MAYBE 1-2 business trips a year).
I'd love to go test it on a PS2, but PS2 #3 is dead. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-console. Killed before it's time by bargain bin optics.
I don't remember any of my PS2s ever scratching disks like the 360 does(although I did once have a PC CD-ROM literally shatter a disk). Of course I also never reoriented the console while it was running, nor did I invite a circus through my house. I don't think it would cause as much damage if I did do those things however. The PS2's drive assembly is like 99% bargain bin plastic. I'd be more worried about the CD damaging the drive than the other way around.
I think the original Master of Magic/Orion dev ended up heading up Nintendo's retro studios for a short stint. No idea where they hell he ended up, or even who has control over the property now. Maybe Hasbro? Who did they sell all that old Microprose stuff to?
It's kinda funny tho, MoM had countless bugs, and it's still a cult classic.
Re:Thoughts on necessity of rogues in a group.
on
Rogues Get Some Respect
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, we always had a rogue or rogue-like in every PnP D&D game. There is a certain percentage of people that like the way of the stabbity.
There's also race/class combos, since certain races get certain default abilities, a good substitute for a rogue would be an elven ranger or a bard(the gods of shmoozing, bard's were the UBER class in D&D 3.0, you had to throw deaf-dumb-blind-senseless things at them by the time they hit level 6 if you went strictly by the book, and they didn't entirely fix that in 3.5). And casters have various detect spells, but that'll consume spell points. And I have no idea how they're doing Sorcerers.
I'm not sure how they're doing things. If they manage to recreate the PnP experience, then you can get past anything with anything just by being clever. By their nature, MMOs are much more confined though. Can you cast "detect traps" and then chuck a loose stone at the trigger plate for example?
The PSP just doesn't have any momentum, and hasn't really had any. If every past situation like that is any indication, there's no way it can catch up to the DS, and the self-fufilling cycle begins. So a must-own system-selling title seems kind of out there. I'd think if you were a dev and you had something like that, you'd have pushed it onto the PS3 or DS(depending upon how far into dev you were) by now.
Harmonix(Guitar Hero, Amplitude, Frequency) is interested in making a Rev game. That should be interesting if it manifests. The Rev launch lineup should be interesting as well.
I'm also guessing Nintendo will put Rev kiosks in McDonalds as part of their launch, loaded with some tech-demo esque simple games and demos, mainly because they've already done a partnership with the fast food giant for the DS, and it'd be a win-win.
And I'd also guess we'll start seeing more PC RTS ports to the DS. Probably not Starcraft because blizzard is busy with WoW, but something. And there seems to be a ressurection of the adventure game brewing on the platform.
The PS3 doesn't really have me speculating at all. It's a PS2 with updated graphics. Not interesting at all. The things to watch this year imo are: 1. Take Two, can the company that was once so desperate they funded Derek Smart(may he not be summoned) get something out there other than GTA? They failed with "The Warriors", will they succeed with something else this year? Or is Take Two going to go back to being desperate and widely derided when we all get sick of GTA? 2. Live Arcade, and the revolution's download service, if online takes off this year, I'm guessing these two will be why and online play will be incidental. 3. The Revolution controller. Is it going to work? What features are games going to use? Is the modularity of the remote going to be a factor?
No, from what I've seen, the 360 doesn't cause any topfoil damage, so resurfacing should fix the disc.
The problem is a defect in what I presume to be all 360s, in the drive. If you rotate it from horizontal to vertical, vertical to horizontal, or give it a good bounce while it's horizontal, the disc makes contact with one of the drive components and it puts a nice scratch into it. There's a warning in the manual. Do not rotate 360 while it's in operation or something like that.
So long as you're aware of the problem, it's fairly easy to work around. Keep your 360 vertical, or if you have it horizontal don't lead a circus through your house while it's running.
They'll hopefully have it fixed by V2, but it's not that huge of a deal atm, so long as you're aware of the problem and what causes it.
Try this: Nintendo DS - $130 PassMe - $25 or some time and a parts order(plans are freely available) Compatable Game Card - $0 - $10 (Hunters works and caps out on EBay at about $10 including shipping) 32MB Flash Cart or SD cart - $60 Not having to worry about tracking down previous firmware versions or future games killing your ability to run homebrew - Priceless ScummVM with touchscreen support - Truly abso-fucking-lutely priceless
It comes out cheaper, it takes less time and aggravation, gets better battery life, and you get a better legit game library that's not a bunch of console games in a portable format at console prices.
You ignore the legacy aspect. The fame, acclaim and legacy from curing diseases like cancer or developing an AIDS vaccine would be enormous. No researcher would just sit on it, and very few wealthy "evil" pharma heads would sit on it either. There are things money can't buy, being able to say "I cured AIDs, what did you do?" at the country club and really burning the joneses is one of them. That and the fact that the concept of noblisse oblige isn't entirely dead in this country is why so much money goes into research.
And there is definately money in both cancer cures and an AIDs vaccine. For cancer, if you cure it, you keep the person alive and chances are they're going to need to be cured again. For vaccines, they're only effective for a certain period of time and then you need boosters.
Ok, well, the people who see using unimplanted embryos that would otherwise be incinerated to perform possibly life-saving medical treatments as murder are completely whacked out. As in miscarriages or failed implantation(both of which happen quite frequently, naturally) are murder whacked out. As in of the opinion that women commit one murder a month if they fail to get knocked up and any male who's ever had a wet dream or masturbated is guilty of genocide whacked out.
So yea, we ignore those nutjobs. Because they're freakin' crazy. Anyone who thinks they know when life begins and bases an argument on that should be ignored, and that includes you skippy.
Especially given that the ethical issues inherant in stem-cell research have NOTHING to do with abortion. We're talking about taking the left-over embryos from fertility clinics that would otherwise be destroyed and using them to potentially save lives. Being opposed to it is like being morally opposed to organ donation.
Microsoft actually tends to do the opposite with their platforms. Office is sort-of a compatability miscreant(and it's all backwards compatable).
It causes all sorts of problems, because tons of legacy stuff is supported across OS versions and patches for exactly that. You could still run almost all DOS stuff as late as Windows 98. You can still run 95/98 stuff on 2k/XP. Etc. Etc.
What? Dragon Quest IV was released here, 13 years ago, biggest NES cart to ever be produced, only the series was called Dragon WARRIOR here until the release of 8. I played it, it was good. Think I still have the huge map foldout that came with it.
In fact, the only Dragon Quests we didn't get were the SNES ones(5&6). 1-4 came out on the NES. 7 came out on the PS. 8 just came out.
Every real non-johnny come lately RPG fan knows Seiken Densetsu 3. It's the sequel to one of the great SNES action RPGS, Secret of Mana(which is a sequel to FF Adventure AKA Sword of Mana). Not knowing about it is like not knowing what the Mother series is. We're not into obscure territory here at all.
There are real problems with outsourcing. It involves labor, which unlike everything else "traded" on the global market, isn't a true commodity. Different countries have different labor laws, there are barriers to the free exchange of it in the form of immigration laws, etc. It's not like ball-bearings for example.
I agree with the other guy, I hated it when it had the starfox brand, why would I suddenly like it now?
Rare hasn't produced anything noteworthy since the N64. There was a reason they were sold, and Kameo/PD0 aren't even A level, much less AAA level. It's the same old shit rut they've been in for what seems like forever. Pretty, but crap.
Yea, but the stealth in BGE wasn't, by and large, poorly done or all that difficult. It played out more like the Forbidden Fortress section of Wind Waker than the guard-sneaking segment of OoT.
I dunno, I didn't mind it for it most part. It never really got me into a controller-throwing state.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called patent infringement. Nintendo owns the patents on both the gyro/acellerometer tech via a controlling interest in Gyration and numerous patents related to the interface in regards to gaming. There are very few companies that get into the HCI stuff, and if the rev controller works as well as some people say it does, none of them can approach the tech in that controller.
The only other option is outright theft/infringement and hoping you gain enough of a foothold in the interim to offset the enormous losses you're going to get from the impending lawsuit(sony and the dual-shock!). Which is fucking awful behavior to encourage.
If the controller excites you, you buy a rev. Plain and simple. It's not only the right thing to do, it's probably the only thing you can do.
Yea, except all your extra horsepower is going into upping the resolution and the innate scaling issues of that. Going from 640x480 up to 1080i means almost 10 times the amount of pixels to draw on screen per frame. That's 10 times the amount of oomph needed for every last visual effect you want to do. And you aren't going to impress the graphic whores by cutting the frame rate to compensate. It better push 60FPS, and there goes most of your resources, *poof* into the graphics/res whore den, and no the GPU does not compensate for it. Same with disk space, btw.
Plus, the PS3 in particular has no branch prediction and no out-of-order execution which drastically increases the difficulty of making decent AI(read, not going to happen for 5 years at the minimum). The 360 simply does not have the extra horse-power after the graphics increases for a big jump either.
There just isn't enough left over, and the graphics first/HD first mentality means no one is *going* to leave enough left over. If you think AI is suddenly going to be amazing, you're absolutely fucking delusional.
Yea, and they can jack in to your wireless network regardless of whether you use WPA or WEP. It's not like WPA is unbreakable, or takes much longer to break. All wireless gets torn apart like tissue paper, it's the nature of the freakin' beast. You encrypt at the application layer and for the most part go, eh, fuck it and leave your wireless ap pretty much open apart from maybe some MAC filtering. And you don't do that to secure it from people who know what they're doing(because you can't!), you do that to secure it from the people that don't.
If you seriously care about security you shouldn't be using wireless. Period.
They're selling their time. I'm paying them to spend their time playing this game and generating this resource, not for the resource itself.
And please leave the freakin' lawyers out of it. We have too many as is. I mean, comeon, we're talking about a freakin' game here and people bust out the lawyer and I ANAL talk.
Bear in mind statistics are one of the most important components in baseball. More so than any other sport.
Not going to weigh in either way here, but thought that was worth bringing up.
Not really all that sad if you've played what's come out of Rare this generation.
I don't know if they had a major developer shift or what, but Rare is a shadow of what it once was. The new rare is Retro Studios.
We might be. I'm guessing the next gaming crash will happen when an end-of-cycle title on an older system looks and plays better than a next-gen title. Oh.. shit... wait... yea, almost there.
Oh well, if history repeats that means Nintendo(or an upstart) and PCs usher in another golden age within a year or so. And it shall last for 10 years, and be declared good, and all shall play that era's games on the next electronics company turned console company's handheld in another 10 years, for there shall be no good games for it bar one, and the older generation shall be saddened and look upon the younger, and sigh.
Survivability is why Paladins can not be allowed to deal decent damage. It would just be positively retarded. About all they needed was a revamp of the judgement system to make it not suck, and a few convienance things. And that's what they got, pretty much. Oh and a few consistancy tweaks so SoC isn't a holy damage version of the windfury lottery kill system.
Imagine Shamans(and their totems need fixed to bring them in line with blessings for raiding, and that's about it) with immunity shields. Gahhh..
Red Octane is the publisher, and I think had some say in the development process, like controller design or something like that.
Oh, and Harmonix also made an eye-toy game. Apart from frequency and amplitude, they're pretty big on peripherals, so I'm hoping they do something for the rev with the modular controller. But just about everything about Nintendo's new console is sewn up by a web of NDAs and thousands of bits of speculation.
And RE: the PSP. Part of the problem is game/UMD pricing. I'll be damned if I'm paying > $20 for a movie or > $35 for a portable title(that's only going to get used in the bathroom and on MAYBE 1-2 business trips a year).
I'd love to go test it on a PS2, but PS2 #3 is dead. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-console. Killed before it's time by bargain bin optics.
I don't remember any of my PS2s ever scratching disks like the 360 does(although I did once have a PC CD-ROM literally shatter a disk). Of course I also never reoriented the console while it was running, nor did I invite a circus through my house. I don't think it would cause as much damage if I did do those things however. The PS2's drive assembly is like 99% bargain bin plastic. I'd be more worried about the CD damaging the drive than the other way around.
I think the original Master of Magic/Orion dev ended up heading up Nintendo's retro studios for a short stint. No idea where they hell he ended up, or even who has control over the property now. Maybe Hasbro? Who did they sell all that old Microprose stuff to?
It's kinda funny tho, MoM had countless bugs, and it's still a cult classic.
Well, we always had a rogue or rogue-like in every PnP D&D game. There is a certain percentage of people that like the way of the stabbity.
There's also race/class combos, since certain races get certain default abilities, a good substitute for a rogue would be an elven ranger or a bard(the gods of shmoozing, bard's were the UBER class in D&D 3.0, you had to throw deaf-dumb-blind-senseless things at them by the time they hit level 6 if you went strictly by the book, and they didn't entirely fix that in 3.5). And casters have various detect spells, but that'll consume spell points. And I have no idea how they're doing Sorcerers.
I'm not sure how they're doing things. If they manage to recreate the PnP experience, then you can get past anything with anything just by being clever. By their nature, MMOs are much more confined though. Can you cast "detect traps" and then chuck a loose stone at the trigger plate for example?
The PSP just doesn't have any momentum, and hasn't really had any. If every past situation like that is any indication, there's no way it can catch up to the DS, and the self-fufilling cycle begins. So a must-own system-selling title seems kind of out there. I'd think if you were a dev and you had something like that, you'd have pushed it onto the PS3 or DS(depending upon how far into dev you were) by now.
Harmonix(Guitar Hero, Amplitude, Frequency) is interested in making a Rev game. That should be interesting if it manifests. The Rev launch lineup should be interesting as well.
I'm also guessing Nintendo will put Rev kiosks in McDonalds as part of their launch, loaded with some tech-demo esque simple games and demos, mainly because they've already done a partnership with the fast food giant for the DS, and it'd be a win-win.
And I'd also guess we'll start seeing more PC RTS ports to the DS. Probably not Starcraft because blizzard is busy with WoW, but something. And there seems to be a ressurection of the adventure game brewing on the platform.
The PS3 doesn't really have me speculating at all. It's a PS2 with updated graphics. Not interesting at all. The things to watch this year imo are:
1. Take Two, can the company that was once so desperate they funded Derek Smart(may he not be summoned) get something out there other than GTA? They failed with "The Warriors", will they succeed with something else this year? Or is Take Two going to go back to being desperate and widely derided when we all get sick of GTA?
2. Live Arcade, and the revolution's download service, if online takes off this year, I'm guessing these two will be why and online play will be incidental.
3. The Revolution controller. Is it going to work? What features are games going to use? Is the modularity of the remote going to be a factor?
No, from what I've seen, the 360 doesn't cause any topfoil damage, so resurfacing should fix the disc.
The problem is a defect in what I presume to be all 360s, in the drive. If you rotate it from horizontal to vertical, vertical to horizontal, or give it a good bounce while it's horizontal, the disc makes contact with one of the drive components and it puts a nice scratch into it. There's a warning in the manual. Do not rotate 360 while it's in operation or something like that.
So long as you're aware of the problem, it's fairly easy to work around. Keep your 360 vertical, or if you have it horizontal don't lead a circus through your house while it's running.
They'll hopefully have it fixed by V2, but it's not that huge of a deal atm, so long as you're aware of the problem and what causes it.
Try this:
Nintendo DS - $130
PassMe - $25 or some time and a parts order(plans are freely available)
Compatable Game Card - $0 - $10 (Hunters works and caps out on EBay at about $10 including shipping)
32MB Flash Cart or SD cart - $60
Not having to worry about tracking down previous firmware versions or future games killing your ability to run homebrew - Priceless
ScummVM with touchscreen support - Truly abso-fucking-lutely priceless
It comes out cheaper, it takes less time and aggravation, gets better battery life, and you get a better legit game library that's not a bunch of console games in a portable format at console prices.
You ignore the legacy aspect. The fame, acclaim and legacy from curing diseases like cancer or developing an AIDS vaccine would be enormous. No researcher would just sit on it, and very few wealthy "evil" pharma heads would sit on it either. There are things money can't buy, being able to say "I cured AIDs, what did you do?" at the country club and really burning the joneses is one of them. That and the fact that the concept of noblisse oblige isn't entirely dead in this country is why so much money goes into research.
And there is definately money in both cancer cures and an AIDs vaccine. For cancer, if you cure it, you keep the person alive and chances are they're going to need to be cured again. For vaccines, they're only effective for a certain period of time and then you need boosters.
Ok, well, the people who see using unimplanted embryos that would otherwise be incinerated to perform possibly life-saving medical treatments as murder are completely whacked out. As in miscarriages or failed implantation(both of which happen quite frequently, naturally) are murder whacked out. As in of the opinion that women commit one murder a month if they fail to get knocked up and any male who's ever had a wet dream or masturbated is guilty of genocide whacked out.
So yea, we ignore those nutjobs. Because they're freakin' crazy. Anyone who thinks they know when life begins and bases an argument on that should be ignored, and that includes you skippy.
Especially given that the ethical issues inherant in stem-cell research have NOTHING to do with abortion. We're talking about taking the left-over embryos from fertility clinics that would otherwise be destroyed and using them to potentially save lives. Being opposed to it is like being morally opposed to organ donation.
Next time firestone puts out bogus tires that cause a few deaths, let's charge all the shareholders with murder.
After all, they had control.
And yet you read slashdot, and have for a while. I am confused. This comment was sarcastic, right?
Microsoft actually tends to do the opposite with their platforms. Office is sort-of a compatability miscreant(and it's all backwards compatable).
It causes all sorts of problems, because tons of legacy stuff is supported across OS versions and patches for exactly that. You could still run almost all DOS stuff as late as Windows 98. You can still run 95/98 stuff on 2k/XP. Etc. Etc.
What? Dragon Quest IV was released here, 13 years ago, biggest NES cart to ever be produced, only the series was called Dragon WARRIOR here until the release of 8. I played it, it was good. Think I still have the huge map foldout that came with it.
In fact, the only Dragon Quests we didn't get were the SNES ones(5&6). 1-4 came out on the NES. 7 came out on the PS. 8 just came out.
Every real non-johnny come lately RPG fan knows Seiken Densetsu 3. It's the sequel to one of the great SNES action RPGS, Secret of Mana(which is a sequel to FF Adventure AKA Sword of Mana). Not knowing about it is like not knowing what the Mother series is. We're not into obscure territory here at all.
There are real problems with outsourcing. It involves labor, which unlike everything else "traded" on the global market, isn't a true commodity. Different countries have different labor laws, there are barriers to the free exchange of it in the form of immigration laws, etc. It's not like ball-bearings for example.
I agree with the other guy, I hated it when it had the starfox brand, why would I suddenly like it now?
Rare hasn't produced anything noteworthy since the N64. There was a reason they were sold, and Kameo/PD0 aren't even A level, much less AAA level. It's the same old shit rut they've been in for what seems like forever. Pretty, but crap.
Yea, but the stealth in BGE wasn't, by and large, poorly done or all that difficult. It played out more like the Forbidden Fortress section of Wind Waker than the guard-sneaking segment of OoT.
I dunno, I didn't mind it for it most part. It never really got me into a controller-throwing state.