Yup, Nintendo is always a safe bet if you enjoy Nintendo games and franchises. The thing is, none of the others really have that. Sony is mainly 3rd party support(with a few exceptions, like Gran Turismo, Ico, etc.), and that can fade or go cross-platform, diluting the importance of that. Everyone expected the N64 to get everything the SNES had when the PS was first released. Didn't work out that way because of cart limitations and nintendo's licensing scheme. FFVII propelled Sony into dominance, and Sony still can't stand on the strength of their first parties alone.
People here don't like the PSP's lineup because/. has a heavy oldschool gamer population(and apparently a high-proportion of us are BORED and want new stuff in our games given general reaction to stuff). I look at the PSP's lineup and I see poor console ports and basically the same old stuff(and no, I don't care if the titles are different, new brand != new game). Nothing to really get excited about outside of lumines, just your typical playstation filler-level junk. Oh, and I don't like Sony very much atm.
They seem to really skimp on optics(or I have a karmic label on my soul reading give defective Sony merchandise), and have a low amount of QA(which MS apparently is trying to copy), a lot of people got screwed by that, and I really don't think the PS3 is all that safe of a bet. Partly because of that, partly because it's just current gen, +3 pretty, and partly because, well I don't like Sony very much atm.
I agree with you that Halo is very overrated. It's maybe a B game. *BUT* the one thing it has that's awesome is LAN play. LAN play is great, only needing one box/TV per four people and an off-the shelf hub is even better. That's what elevated an average FPS up into AAA/cult status. It's Goldeneye with LAN support. Apart from that and Ninja Gaiden, the XBox didn't have much except for cross-platform releases. That's why I didn't get one, even tho my MS dislike has been on the wane since Win2k came out.
The 360, as opposed to the XBox, has one of the best features I've ever seen in the form of Live Arcade. Take the garagegames/web-games market, make it so it can actually make money, and I'm positive we're going to see a ton of stuff go through live arcade. Same with the rev's download service. If both of those pan out the way I think they will, I would honestly be happy with a 360 and Rev even if no 360/rev games ever get pressed to disc. And that means they go onto the to-buy list. The PS3 otoh, is going to need to get some impressive games actually released before it enters consideration.
Zelda has it's stealth moments. Ocarina, sneaking up to the castle past the guards, Link to the Past has a similar sequence, in Wind Waker, it's stealthing through the fortress, etc. etc. You see a move towards some stealth starting at the SNES, and the there's pretty much at least one heavy stealth sequence per major console release after that.
BG&E was probably the best non-zelda game in the zelda genre of this console generation. It had a story less convuluted than your typical japanese RPG translation of the past, it had a ton of quirky characters, and it had an interesting setting/theme. It also had it's not quite so great characteristics, you could tell it wasn't finished for example. But all in all, it was a damn great game.
The only way you can use autodidactic properly, and spell it properly, and yet follow that up by screwing up well/good is if you've gotten into a habit I used to have of taunting english majors with that very thing.
I speak english good is like nails on a chalkboard for grammer nazis.
I dunno. I thought GTA would make a difference, it hasn't seemed to. FF may pull a repeat and make a difference, but there's 2 FFs hitting the DS as well, so who knows...
Also, when the PS was released, the N64 hadn't hit yet, and SEGA had gone through the whole series of half-supported addons, then complimented that with a seeming allergy to money with the Saturn.
We'll see, it's not over yet, but things really aren't looking good for Sony.
Because it bucks Sony fan predictions that the huge lead the DS went into(over 1 million units in japan alone) this year with(because of shortages, right, the figures now say differently) would somehow be reversed. Instead the short-term trend we saw up until March(5k more PSPs per DSes sold per 2-week period) reversed drastically with Nintendogs, calmed down again(but the PSP never regained a sales lead) and is getting worse again with Animal Crossing. The game sales trend has continued(no PSP game has yet to hit the top 10 or crack 300k units), and now we're at the DS having 66% of the next-gen handheld market and sales are picking up.
In the US, the situation is similar. Not sure about Europe. But Europe has never really mattered, and even if Sony sold every last unit they claim to have shipped there it still wouldn't push them above that 33% share globally(and note that 33% figure doesn't even take into account the GBA and GBA SP, which have sold as many units as the freakin PS2)... so who cares?
When it costs an order of magnitude more to develop on a platform, and you barely sell enough to break even, you don't pump a bunch of money into new projects. Not when it's an incredibly distant 3rd place platform. You're already seeing this as title flow slows down. It doesn't make business sense to throw your weight behind a platform like that. So people aren't.
The PSP is the gamegear 2.0, Sony has horridly failed to dethrone Nintendo in the handheld space, and unless something drastic happens, soon, it's all-but-dead. Things are bleak, hope you didn't buy one.
No joke. They go from referring to units sold to units shipped.
According to the article(not the wikipedia link), Sony has sold 1.6 mil in the US. They've sold about that in Japan too. So I'm guessing they're floating at somewhere between 4 and 5 million.
You're confusing shipped with sold. The article makes the distinction.
IE: If retailers order 10 for their stock and don't sell them, you've shipped 10 units, but you're not shipping more until some of those 10 units sell.
I'm not sure how many units Nintendo has actually shipped worldwide. I'm positive it's higher than 10 mil if they've sold 8 mil.
The disc scratching problems are a combination of defect and user error.
See, you can't safely move a 360 from horizontal to vertical position(or vice versa, or give it a good shock while it's horizontal) while it's powered up w/o causing some components of the drive to make contact with the disc. This causes a 360 degree scratch(which judging by the video I saw, could be resurfaced off since there didn't seem to be topfoil damage).
As long as you keep the thing vertical or horizontal and don't walk like an elephant or play DDR or something, you should be fine. Hopefully they fix what's causing that in a later revision, because hardly anyone reads the manual(where it does warn you about that).
Ding! That's why I'll probably end up getting one around this time next year(when all the kinks are worked out, and it'll be cheaper too!). That and Live Arcade.
Between the Revolution's download services, and the 360's live arcade service, I should have enough to never ever have to put an actual Rev or 360 disc in a drive.
The PS3 has all the "meh" aspects of the 360 and no cool online service to make me even remotely interested. Plus, after going through 3 PS2s, I'm not too inclined towards buying Sony things atm.
Iwatani explained that more and more people are starting to have a PC in their own room; as a result, he believes that in the future, games will be played on PCs rather than living room TVs. Iwatani speculated that PCs may soon come with a universal gaming chip in their motherboard. The chip would have all the functions needed to play games. Users would simply download games, and they wouldn't have to worry about compatibility problems, since all hardware functions would be embedded in the chip.
Well the gamecube is no slouch, graphically. That little 400 mhZ PPC and ATI GPU can do some amazing things when the dark lords of Nintendo open up their box of secrets(RE4 on the cube is still one of the best looking games to date). 2-3 times more powerful than that, with a decent amount of system/graphics RAM, plus more storage on disc from the move to 12cm discs and it should perform beautifully at 480i and 480p.
Nintendo has yet to produce a real slouch of a console(not handheld) in a competitive market(even this gen the cube/xbox are even, each just doesn't different gpu effects better, the N64 was more powerful than the PS[but gimped by storage], the Genesis and SNES each did their own thing but were about equivalent, etc.), I doubt they're going to do it this time around.
Worst case(2-3x more powerful for the rev versus 10-20x for PS3/360), it should realistically wind up looking as good as the PS3 and 360 do, just in SD rather than HD. When you upscale from 480i/480p to 720/1080p resolutions you get an enormous increase in required processing power, which will eat up a large chunk of the HD system's increases. It may never look as good on an HD display as the other 2, but it should look as good on an SD one, plus be significantly cheaper and hey, I can live with that.
I mean, looking at the 360's games. They don't look 10x better(hell some of the ports look and play WORSE) than what's out now, even though the poly count may be 10x higher, they push out 7 times more pixels per frame, and ATI has given em some of the better effects you find on their GPUs over NVidia's. It's still early to judge there yet, but so far, color me unimpressed by the perceptable visual leap.
Anyway, none of that matters, the real hardcore set will own all 3 for each one's set of exclusives and develop a primary platform preference for cross-releases. The oldschool/lapsed gamer set may give it a shot as a second or primary console, the retros are sold on backwards compat, and the Nintendo faithful will eat it up so long as the controller idea works.
The elites, genre-whores and the PS generation are the guys who seem opposed to it.
Unlikely, but possible. They'd have to work around Nintendo's patents and licensing agreement with Gyration, or use a completely different tech, but it may be doable.
Re:Next Generation doesn't tell the whole story
on
Why Ebert Was Right
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· Score: 1
I can't really refute your opinion. I agree with it anyway. Citizen Kane is boring. But then again, at this point having any surprise over what rosebud is is akin to being shocked that Jesus gets crucified in the Passion of the Christ, so yea, that tends to sap the entertainment value unless you're a film geek. What I can refute is if you claim it's not a great piece of film, it is, I can give technical and artistic reasons why.
Ironically, Ebert is an outsider to film review(english and literature, not film background). That's why he's so good at it. Yea, he has his pet theories and his pet tastes, but he's also willing to drop the pompousness of a typical reviewer and say something is simply fun to watch. It what makes him one of the few great surviving critics. He can judge things rather fairly based both upon the entertainment and art aspects. He also tends to geek out at things. If you know Ebert, you get a lot out of his reviews about a movie.
Technically he was getting paid to watch and filter the crap. Which he, unlike most game reviewers, is actually fairly good at. So nah, it's not a waste of his time(I mean, he's getting paid to watch Deuce Bigalo 2, it's not like he's paying to watch it). I'm also pretty sure Ebert plays video games, he's an incredibly geeky SoB who likes anime and has written a game review or two in his day.
His point was, that even the best of games aren't at the level of personal enrichment that a great piece of film, music or literature are. Miyamoto, Kojima, Meier, Molyneux, etc. they have produced some great games. But let's stop and look at our reactions to them. How did, say, super mario brothers, pirates, doom, black & white, MGS, or civilization make you reflect upon the human condition(we're coming from an english lit background here, remember gotta work in that phrase, "human condition")? The medium just isn't at that level yet, and may never be able to get there. At best stories hit the level of a godzilla picture or king kong and even in the great open ended games, any such revelations or insights aren't provided by the "auteur" they're provided by the player. It's a wierd distinction, but I see it.
Are they a waste of time? Absolutely, they're pure entertainment.
Chances are you generally don't want a mechanical engineer(my dad is a mechanical engineer[MS], you don't want him doing this, trust me) doing repairs on your car, you'd probably prefer a mechanic. And the inverse is true for say, designing an engine. Same principle applies to software.
Nah, citizen kane isn't overrated. It just has a hell of a lot to live up to. You go into a movie like that expecting the greatest thing since sliced bread without a bunch of context and you're going to be disappointed.
Ebert's big thing is that he favours the 'auteur' theory of filmaking(the best movies are made under the artistic control of single individuals[Kubrick, Kurisawa, Hitchcock, etc.]). Games, well, whire there are a few designers like that, it's really too drastically different a medium to really feel the individual designer truly coming through. Passive v. Active. How much Shingeru Morimotosan is in LoZ? How much does he and the game provide vs how much you provide yourself?
That's where Ebert is coming from. Disagree with that or not(a lot of people don't buy into that), does that make more sense?
However, you have nothing besides exasperated arm waving to support your original post:
And you don't even have that. 3% btw was what was referenced in the article as being an MS figure. Which would be a failure according to the original goals of six sigma. If it's accurate and not low-balled, each point raised is a valid reason to call a company statement into question.
Accept crap if you want. Feel free. Doesn't hurt me any.
And that is a crap defect rate.
You clearly want to portray the XBox 360 as being a defective product when all the hard evidence supports average to below average failure rates. Your evidential use of individual media claims and forum postings is quite entertaining.
Really? Why should I presume it's below average? Because MS says so? Because you say so? Even a 3% defect rate as referenced in the article as coming from MS isn't "average - below average" unless you define that as relative to a Sony launch.
Prove it. I can point to things. What can you do?
As I said in my initial response, we can just wait to see how many crying kids @ christmas stories we see in 20 days.
Ayup, exactly as much value as I assign to company statements. Which is to say, not much.
Actually, forums are a bit more useful. If you can find 10,000 seperate online identities bitching about the same problem in a device that only shipped 400,000 units just before christmas, you know one of two things: It either has an enormous defect rate and people are justifiably irate about it, or a competitor is paying some viral marketers to give that impression.
We'll see how many crying children at christmas stories we see in 20 days.
Even a 3% defect rate(if it's that low, how many of these things were bought for people for christmas? Something like 10% of the initial stock was sold new-in-box on EBay, most of those are definately for christmas. And forums are showing 10-15% defect levels on the stuff that was actually opened. MS says 3%, like they have no interest in lying...) falls waaayyy outside acceptable for what six sigma originally was envisioned as.
Dude, that sucks. It's not Sony PSP/PS2-level suckage, but it still sucks. Ya know what Nintendo does? You call them up, give em a CC number, they next-day or same-day you a replacement unit and a pre-paid label to ship the defective one back. No questions asked, free of charge unless the defective bit doesn't arrive in a week or so(or you ripped the guts out or something). Total turn-around time, under a day. I think they're even doing that with software problems. And they don't generally have problems to begin with(the front-loading NES defect took YEARS to show up, and that was the 80s), it's fisher price style durable shit.
They were doing that with DSes that had a single stuck or dead pixel, it was in drastic contrast to Sony, and it's still in contrast to MS. Who apparently failed to engineer a toy for the conditions it would be used under. It's nice to see MS is trying to emulate Sony even in the "never buy a first-run product" category.
Well, it's doubtful they're perfect trappers of carbon, so no, it wouldn't be a perpetual process. If you did manage to get all the carbon from the carbon monoxide used trapped in the microbes, then burned them to release that carbon you still wouldn't end up with a perpetual motion machine because you're constantly feeding new inputs in. Heat to free the carbon, atmospheric oxygen to incompletely oxidize it, water to produce the hydrogen.
Not that that's a big deal. The microbes live in boiling water off what amounts to coal gas. And we have a shit ton of coal left in our backyard. Something like 300 years worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, Nintendo is always a safe bet if you enjoy Nintendo games and franchises. The thing is, none of the others really have that. Sony is mainly 3rd party support(with a few exceptions, like Gran Turismo, Ico, etc.), and that can fade or go cross-platform, diluting the importance of that. Everyone expected the N64 to get everything the SNES had when the PS was first released. Didn't work out that way because of cart limitations and nintendo's licensing scheme. FFVII propelled Sony into dominance, and Sony still can't stand on the strength of their first parties alone.
/. has a heavy oldschool gamer population(and apparently a high-proportion of us are BORED and want new stuff in our games given general reaction to stuff). I look at the PSP's lineup and I see poor console ports and basically the same old stuff(and no, I don't care if the titles are different, new brand != new game). Nothing to really get excited about outside of lumines, just your typical playstation filler-level junk. Oh, and I don't like Sony very much atm.
People here don't like the PSP's lineup because
They seem to really skimp on optics(or I have a karmic label on my soul reading give defective Sony merchandise), and have a low amount of QA(which MS apparently is trying to copy), a lot of people got screwed by that, and I really don't think the PS3 is all that safe of a bet. Partly because of that, partly because it's just current gen, +3 pretty, and partly because, well I don't like Sony very much atm.
I agree with you that Halo is very overrated. It's maybe a B game. *BUT* the one thing it has that's awesome is LAN play. LAN play is great, only needing one box/TV per four people and an off-the shelf hub is even better. That's what elevated an average FPS up into AAA/cult status. It's Goldeneye with LAN support. Apart from that and Ninja Gaiden, the XBox didn't have much except for cross-platform releases. That's why I didn't get one, even tho my MS dislike has been on the wane since Win2k came out.
The 360, as opposed to the XBox, has one of the best features I've ever seen in the form of Live Arcade. Take the garagegames/web-games market, make it so it can actually make money, and I'm positive we're going to see a ton of stuff go through live arcade. Same with the rev's download service. If both of those pan out the way I think they will, I would honestly be happy with a 360 and Rev even if no 360/rev games ever get pressed to disc. And that means they go onto the to-buy list. The PS3 otoh, is going to need to get some impressive games actually released before it enters consideration.
Zelda has it's stealth moments. Ocarina, sneaking up to the castle past the guards, Link to the Past has a similar sequence, in Wind Waker, it's stealthing through the fortress, etc. etc. You see a move towards some stealth starting at the SNES, and the there's pretty much at least one heavy stealth sequence per major console release after that.
BG&E was probably the best non-zelda game in the zelda genre of this console generation. It had a story less convuluted than your typical japanese RPG translation of the past, it had a ton of quirky characters, and it had an interesting setting/theme. It also had it's not quite so great characteristics, you could tell it wasn't finished for example. But all in all, it was a damn great game.
The only way you can use autodidactic properly, and spell it properly, and yet follow that up by screwing up well/good is if you've gotten into a habit I used to have of taunting english majors with that very thing.
I speak english good is like nails on a chalkboard for grammer nazis.
I dunno. I thought GTA would make a difference, it hasn't seemed to. FF may pull a repeat and make a difference, but there's 2 FFs hitting the DS as well, so who knows...
Also, when the PS was released, the N64 hadn't hit yet, and SEGA had gone through the whole series of half-supported addons, then complimented that with a seeming allergy to money with the Saturn.
We'll see, it's not over yet, but things really aren't looking good for Sony.
Because it bucks Sony fan predictions that the huge lead the DS went into(over 1 million units in japan alone) this year with(because of shortages, right, the figures now say differently) would somehow be reversed. Instead the short-term trend we saw up until March(5k more PSPs per DSes sold per 2-week period) reversed drastically with Nintendogs, calmed down again(but the PSP never regained a sales lead) and is getting worse again with Animal Crossing. The game sales trend has continued(no PSP game has yet to hit the top 10 or crack 300k units), and now we're at the DS having 66% of the next-gen handheld market and sales are picking up.
In the US, the situation is similar. Not sure about Europe. But Europe has never really mattered, and even if Sony sold every last unit they claim to have shipped there it still wouldn't push them above that 33% share globally(and note that 33% figure doesn't even take into account the GBA and GBA SP, which have sold as many units as the freakin PS2)... so who cares?
When it costs an order of magnitude more to develop on a platform, and you barely sell enough to break even, you don't pump a bunch of money into new projects. Not when it's an incredibly distant 3rd place platform. You're already seeing this as title flow slows down. It doesn't make business sense to throw your weight behind a platform like that. So people aren't.
The PSP is the gamegear 2.0, Sony has horridly failed to dethrone Nintendo in the handheld space, and unless something drastic happens, soon, it's all-but-dead. Things are bleak, hope you didn't buy one.
No joke. They go from referring to units sold to units shipped.
According to the article(not the wikipedia link), Sony has sold 1.6 mil in the US. They've sold about that in Japan too. So I'm guessing they're floating at somewhere between 4 and 5 million.
You're confusing shipped with sold. The article makes the distinction.
IE: If retailers order 10 for their stock and don't sell them, you've shipped 10 units, but you're not shipping more until some of those 10 units sell.
I'm not sure how many units Nintendo has actually shipped worldwide. I'm positive it's higher than 10 mil if they've sold 8 mil.
in Japan. Where Animal Crossing[Forest] is pulling another Nintendogs and widening the gap even further. Nov 21 - 27.
The disc scratching problems are a combination of defect and user error.
See, you can't safely move a 360 from horizontal to vertical position(or vice versa, or give it a good shock while it's horizontal) while it's powered up w/o causing some components of the drive to make contact with the disc. This causes a 360 degree scratch(which judging by the video I saw, could be resurfaced off since there didn't seem to be topfoil damage).
As long as you keep the thing vertical or horizontal and don't walk like an elephant or play DDR or something, you should be fine. Hopefully they fix what's causing that in a later revision, because hardly anyone reads the manual(where it does warn you about that).
Ding! That's why I'll probably end up getting one around this time next year(when all the kinks are worked out, and it'll be cheaper too!). That and Live Arcade.
Between the Revolution's download services, and the 360's live arcade service, I should have enough to never ever have to put an actual Rev or 360 disc in a drive.
The PS3 has all the "meh" aspects of the 360 and no cool online service to make me even remotely interested. Plus, after going through 3 PS2s, I'm not too inclined towards buying Sony things atm.
Iwatani explained that more and more people are starting to have a PC in their own room; as a result, he believes that in the future, games will be played on PCs rather than living room TVs. Iwatani speculated that PCs may soon come with a universal gaming chip in their motherboard. The chip would have all the functions needed to play games. Users would simply download games, and they wouldn't have to worry about compatibility problems, since all hardware functions would be embedded in the chip.
Umm... Ok...
Well the gamecube is no slouch, graphically. That little 400 mhZ PPC and ATI GPU can do some amazing things when the dark lords of Nintendo open up their box of secrets(RE4 on the cube is still one of the best looking games to date). 2-3 times more powerful than that, with a decent amount of system/graphics RAM, plus more storage on disc from the move to 12cm discs and it should perform beautifully at 480i and 480p.
Nintendo has yet to produce a real slouch of a console(not handheld) in a competitive market(even this gen the cube/xbox are even, each just doesn't different gpu effects better, the N64 was more powerful than the PS[but gimped by storage], the Genesis and SNES each did their own thing but were about equivalent, etc.), I doubt they're going to do it this time around.
Worst case(2-3x more powerful for the rev versus 10-20x for PS3/360), it should realistically wind up looking as good as the PS3 and 360 do, just in SD rather than HD. When you upscale from 480i/480p to 720/1080p resolutions you get an enormous increase in required processing power, which will eat up a large chunk of the HD system's increases. It may never look as good on an HD display as the other 2, but it should look as good on an SD one, plus be significantly cheaper and hey, I can live with that.
I mean, looking at the 360's games. They don't look 10x better(hell some of the ports look and play WORSE) than what's out now, even though the poly count may be 10x higher, they push out 7 times more pixels per frame, and ATI has given em some of the better effects you find on their GPUs over NVidia's. It's still early to judge there yet, but so far, color me unimpressed by the perceptable visual leap.
Anyway, none of that matters, the real hardcore set will own all 3 for each one's set of exclusives and develop a primary platform preference for cross-releases. The oldschool/lapsed gamer set may give it a shot as a second or primary console, the retros are sold on backwards compat, and the Nintendo faithful will eat it up so long as the controller idea works.
The elites, genre-whores and the PS generation are the guys who seem opposed to it.
Unlikely, but possible. They'd have to work around Nintendo's patents and licensing agreement with Gyration, or use a completely different tech, but it may be doable.
My opinion is here. But anyway, what about Vagrant Story?
Just curious, last time I played it, while it's almost as shallow as say a godzilla film, it seemed to do things you mention well.
I can't really refute your opinion. I agree with it anyway. Citizen Kane is boring. But then again, at this point having any surprise over what rosebud is is akin to being shocked that Jesus gets crucified in the Passion of the Christ, so yea, that tends to sap the entertainment value unless you're a film geek. What I can refute is if you claim it's not a great piece of film, it is, I can give technical and artistic reasons why.
Ironically, Ebert is an outsider to film review(english and literature, not film background). That's why he's so good at it. Yea, he has his pet theories and his pet tastes, but he's also willing to drop the pompousness of a typical reviewer and say something is simply fun to watch. It what makes him one of the few great surviving critics. He can judge things rather fairly based both upon the entertainment and art aspects. He also tends to geek out at things. If you know Ebert, you get a lot out of his reviews about a movie.
Technically he was getting paid to watch and filter the crap. Which he, unlike most game reviewers, is actually fairly good at. So nah, it's not a waste of his time(I mean, he's getting paid to watch Deuce Bigalo 2, it's not like he's paying to watch it). I'm also pretty sure Ebert plays video games, he's an incredibly geeky SoB who likes anime and has written a game review or two in his day.
His point was, that even the best of games aren't at the level of personal enrichment that a great piece of film, music or literature are. Miyamoto, Kojima, Meier, Molyneux, etc. they have produced some great games. But let's stop and look at our reactions to them. How did, say, super mario brothers, pirates, doom, black & white, MGS, or civilization make you reflect upon the human condition(we're coming from an english lit background here, remember gotta work in that phrase, "human condition")? The medium just isn't at that level yet, and may never be able to get there. At best stories hit the level of a godzilla picture or king kong and even in the great open ended games, any such revelations or insights aren't provided by the "auteur" they're provided by the player. It's a wierd distinction, but I see it.
Are they a waste of time? Absolutely, they're pure entertainment.
Chances are you generally don't want a mechanical engineer(my dad is a mechanical engineer[MS], you don't want him doing this, trust me) doing repairs on your car, you'd probably prefer a mechanic. And the inverse is true for say, designing an engine. Same principle applies to software.
It's more like $2.4 million for a congressman.
Nah, citizen kane isn't overrated. It just has a hell of a lot to live up to. You go into a movie like that expecting the greatest thing since sliced bread without a bunch of context and you're going to be disappointed.
Ebert's big thing is that he favours the 'auteur' theory of filmaking(the best movies are made under the artistic control of single individuals[Kubrick, Kurisawa, Hitchcock, etc.]). Games, well, whire there are a few designers like that, it's really too drastically different a medium to really feel the individual designer truly coming through. Passive v. Active. How much Shingeru Morimotosan is in LoZ? How much does he and the game provide vs how much you provide yourself?
That's where Ebert is coming from. Disagree with that or not(a lot of people don't buy into that), does that make more sense?
However, you have nothing besides exasperated arm waving to support your original post:
And you don't even have that. 3% btw was what was referenced in the article as being an MS figure. Which would be a failure according to the original goals of six sigma. If it's accurate and not low-balled, each point raised is a valid reason to call a company statement into question.
Accept crap if you want. Feel free. Doesn't hurt me any.
And that is a crap defect rate.
You clearly want to portray the XBox 360 as being a defective product when all the hard evidence supports average to below average failure rates. Your evidential use of individual media claims and forum postings is quite entertaining.
Really? Why should I presume it's below average? Because MS says so? Because you say so? Even a 3% defect rate as referenced in the article as coming from MS isn't "average - below average" unless you define that as relative to a Sony launch.
Prove it. I can point to things. What can you do?
As I said in my initial response, we can just wait to see how many crying kids @ christmas stories we see in 20 days.
Ok, then I'll ignore every last internet post saying the 360 is fine and go by the major news media.
Massively defective.
NEXT.
Ayup, exactly as much value as I assign to company statements. Which is to say, not much.
Actually, forums are a bit more useful. If you can find 10,000 seperate online identities bitching about the same problem in a device that only shipped 400,000 units just before christmas, you know one of two things: It either has an enormous defect rate and people are justifiably irate about it, or a competitor is paying some viral marketers to give that impression.
We'll see how many crying children at christmas stories we see in 20 days.
Even a 3% defect rate(if it's that low, how many of these things were bought for people for christmas? Something like 10% of the initial stock was sold new-in-box on EBay, most of those are definately for christmas. And forums are showing 10-15% defect levels on the stuff that was actually opened. MS says 3%, like they have no interest in lying...) falls waaayyy outside acceptable for what six sigma originally was envisioned as.
Dude, that sucks. It's not Sony PSP/PS2-level suckage, but it still sucks. Ya know what Nintendo does? You call them up, give em a CC number, they next-day or same-day you a replacement unit and a pre-paid label to ship the defective one back. No questions asked, free of charge unless the defective bit doesn't arrive in a week or so(or you ripped the guts out or something). Total turn-around time, under a day. I think they're even doing that with software problems. And they don't generally have problems to begin with(the front-loading NES defect took YEARS to show up, and that was the 80s), it's fisher price style durable shit.
They were doing that with DSes that had a single stuck or dead pixel, it was in drastic contrast to Sony, and it's still in contrast to MS. Who apparently failed to engineer a toy for the conditions it would be used under. It's nice to see MS is trying to emulate Sony even in the "never buy a first-run product" category.
The first paragraph has the entire name, then they switch to abbreviation:
Carboxydothermus hydrogenoformans
Well, it's doubtful they're perfect trappers of carbon, so no, it wouldn't be a perpetual process. If you did manage to get all the carbon from the carbon monoxide used trapped in the microbes, then burned them to release that carbon you still wouldn't end up with a perpetual motion machine because you're constantly feeding new inputs in. Heat to free the carbon, atmospheric oxygen to incompletely oxidize it, water to produce the hydrogen.
Not that that's a big deal. The microbes live in boiling water off what amounts to coal gas. And we have a shit ton of coal left in our backyard. Something like 300 years worth.