I personally see no problem in restricting the sale of "adult" material to minors. Neither does the Supreme court.
If the freakin' game lobby would get a clue and do what the movie industry did, and actually hype that angle up rather than being adamantly opposed to any fines for the sale of this material to minors, then maybe you wouldn't need to worry about Jack Thompson.
A few "Gamestop fires employee for selling GTA w/o ID check" headlines would do it. But nooo...
I also fail to see how restricting the sale of violent(and or/sexual) games to minors in any way infringes on the right to free speech as held by the SCOTUS, nor how it would: A. Keep the games out of the hands of minors whose parents allow them to play such things. B. Keep adults from playing these games. C. Keep these games from being made if the guys pushing for the legislation really DON'T have a point.
If gamers don't give up the 12-yos should be allowed to go into Gamestop and buy a copy of Tentacle-fucker 3 - Revenge of the Overfiend(at the extreme end) angle with no fines for the store OR the guy that sold it then they're not going to get a voice in how the law is constructed and the chances it's going to be whacked out insane increase. Because it's GOING to happen.
And there are upshots to it you probably can't even fathom.
I don't recall the arcadia, but both the Vectrex and Atari 5200 used analog joysticks. The analog stick(the analog thumbstick) as we know it today is a bit of a different beast.
Because here in the western world we have this thing called a patent system. Which means if I think of a really cool idea for something, I get to profit off of it exclusively for 25 years.
In the case of the rev's controller, those patents are owned by Nintendo and their partners(such as gyration, which nintendo both owns an unspecified amount of and has an exclusive licensing deal with). This means no one is going to be able to rip this thing off flat out, they'd have to figure out a way to do it in a completely different way.
The company Nintendo invested heavily in and partnered up with around 4 years ago?
I don't think MS will pull the type of crap they're known for in the gaming market. Nor do I think they can. Nintendo actually has the cash reserves, IP portfolio and investments/partnerships to fight a rather protracted legal battle. They're not small-fry like most of MS's victims have been.
I doubt either MS, Sony or a third party can legally make a revolution knock-off. After everyone rushed to get an analog in when they announced it pre-64 release, Nintendos been both secretive and protective as hell of their stuff.
I think they own a controlling interest in Gyration, which has a lot of patents on this kind of tech, as well as having patented large swaths of it in regards to console gaming.
So, like the d-pad, they may be able to find ways around the IP, but it's not going to be as easy as just flat-out copying the thing for at least another couple decades.
Geddon's living bomb. Yup. But that was over in one explosion, it didn't linger around for hours upon hours. You could only "legitimately" do it once every 6 days. And it only did 2000 fire damage and tossed you almost as far as screwing up reloading the Goblin Mortar does.
I full and well realize what sony makes, and w/o getting into an argument on tastes, I don't think you can honestly say Sony is a Capcom, Konami, Square, Nintendo, SEGA, or Namco. Sony's stuff, with a few exceptions has always felt to me like a cheap knockoff you'd pick up in the shady part of town. There's just no polish to it. There are some exceptions but not many. I mean, stuff like Okage was only OK.
People buy Nintendo products for Nintendo software, are you honestly asserting that you would pick up say a PS4 *just* to play Sony's limited first party titles like people by and large did with the Cube?
Cripe, what is this, some sort of religion? Do you set up a shrine to your DS or PSP or whatever and light a candle every night? These are game consoles. You get them because you can play the games you like on them. Despite what fanboys might want you to believe, they're not a religion you have to convert to.
No, but I do mainly pull the portables out in the presense of a porcelin goddess. Does that count?
Holy wars now? I suspect we'll see serious numbers of consoles move this holiday. If I were you, I'd be hoping both portables fly off the shelves, because it'd help kick up the competition a bit; something Nintendo seriously needs.
Possibly. I don't know. Sony lost any advocate work I would ever do for them after my 2nd PS2 broke. And Nintendo pretty much does their own thing regardless of sanity, market pressures, or what every screaming gamer on the face of the earth has to say about it. So the whole competition thing, in light of nintendo, has always seemed kind of silly to me. They're going to do what they're going to do no matter what.
Right, because Sony has no vested interest or much money involved, they'll just pull it off the market. Same with all those developers. (Incidentally, same with the DS.)
Ahhh, but Sony by and large isn't a developer. W/o third party support they're less than nothing. They can't limp along on first party titles anywhere near like Nintendo can. And devs can and will kill a title or switch the platform on it(say to the PS2) if it doesn't look like it's going to sell(I've always thought that was stupid, you've sunk 90%+ of the devwork in and you kill a title. WTF?). That's not to say Sony will kill the platform, hell, the Ngage is still limping along, but it would go down the lines of the GameGear and Wonderswan. Not a joke, but not a gameboy killer.
Part of this is backlash from all the Sony fans claiming the PSP was going to slaughter the GBA(and neither it nor the DS have even made a DENT there).
Funny, sounds like another console I know too. It's called the PS2.
The PS2 has the marketshare, despite being the most difficult console to develop for, it's financially worth it because it's got an enormous installed base versus it's cheaper competition. It doesn't make business sense to take a big financial risk on a higher development cost platform without the marketshare. Especially if you have a lower cost platform that has more marketshare, wider margins and costs 25% as much to make games for. The GBA was/is AWESOME for that, quick turnaround, and cheap to dev for. Art comes into play a bit, but still.
OK first I haven't heard anything about 1.8 million DS's being sold; maybe I just hadn't heard. That is what you get when you multiply 185k by 10. That is also pretty good when you consider a new, high-priced item, released during the low salespoint of the year, with a production shortage, and not a lot of advertising. Hopefully with the holiday season we will see them step things up.
Ehh, I rounded up for effect. It's about half that in the UK. 1 mil DSes to 185k PSPs. US is tough to nail down. Japan is > 2 mil DSes to 1 mil PSPs.
They're also using them to play SNES games. And PSX games. And some homebrew games (yay tetris). And browse the web. And watch movies. And read comics.
Didn't I say decade old nintendo games? I think that covers the SNES. Apart from the web browsing, and effectively movie playing(I mean comeon, get a portable DVD player or something), the DS can do all of this(and will eventually have a far better web browser).
Ah yes because mouse-like menus are required...
It's *incredibly* nice to be able to click select an entry or screen position versus having to scroll down to it and select it. Especially for name-entry, chat, RTSes like Starcraft, web-browsing, etc. Text-based browsers are all well and good, but comeon, who really prefers them over a gui-based browser.
In all seriousness, if GTA: Liberty City Stories doesn't start moving units off the shelves(and it's going to be going up against the XBox 360 for peoples cash), the PSP *is* dead. You need look no further than this year's PAX to see that, where in an incredibly heavy gamer area, I think 5 PSPs were seen of which 3-4 were being given away. Even here, where you'd think people would be most impressed by whiz-bang tech, the PSP faithful are drastically outnumbered by the DS converts.
It's not settled yet, but it will be all but settled by the end of the holiday season.
Even if it's a bang-up smash in Europe if it doesn't seriously start moving here and in Japan it's gonna get dropped like a rock. It's almost as expensive as a console to develop for(while the DS, being so low-powered with only 1Gb of storage is by far cheaper), and it has a really small userbase atm. It would(assuming it pulls a master system) end up as the most expensive portable to develop for in the most expensive market to release in. That means death. It also only has another year or two as the high-end portable before the actual GBA sequel hits.
Add into that that: 1. You have Sony pulling a Baghdad Bob and claiming "HAPPY-FUN" success when they sell out a 185,000 unit launch alottment in a market the DS has already sold almost 10 times that. Then they stick to units shipped as opposed to sold in their marketing. It just looks sad from this camp. 2. A lot of people on forums are using their PSPs mainly to play decade-old Nintendo games(which just strikes me as perversely wrong for some reason, yet I had no trouble using my GBA for pocketNES, go fig). At least to hear them talk. That's not much of a selling point when to play new PSP games you need to kill that functionality. 3. For any menu-driven or mouse-approximation interface, that touchscreen on the DS makes an analog feel like it came from the 19th century. I can't stand any situation where I need to move a cursor with an analog anymore. I never had much tolerance for it to begin with however.
That interface advantage is a biggy. Advance Wars: DS(beats Metal Gear Acid for depth of tactics and multiplayer by far) controls smooth as silk, and the whole RTS/FPS/RPG genres are infinately improved by having that touchscreen there. The PSP has the DS for platformers and probably racers, you instantly get that if you ever play Mario 64, but that's about it.
Granted, I don't see the appeal of Nintendogs, but most of the girls in my life do. It's a non-gamer, mass-market game, something the PSP doesn't really have yet.
If you want homebrew, pick up a DS/flash cart+passthrough package(or SD reader cart + passthrough). They already have a mostly-working SNES emulator(Super Metroid works), a touchscreen-enabled version of ScummVM, and a bunch of cool little tech-demo apps(calculators and what not). Doesn't break DS game-capabality or GBA game-capability either. You also get that huge-back-catalog of GBA homebrew(which includes completely working emulators for everything pre-SNES/Genesis, Nethack, Ebooks, tons of craziness).
After using that touch screen, pointing with an analog is just so... primitive. About the only thing the PSP does better than the DS is graphics and platformers/racers.
Coast Guard response was excellent. They got there exceptionally quickly, and really put forth a hell of a lot of effort. I think they were rescuing something like 100 people an hour. Same with the depleted national guard and local first responders. Army corps or Engineers was also there extremely quickly.
We know there was no real coordination in other areas from the people on the ground. They started working areas because they looked like good places to start. Then we have guys getting admonished for going off-mission to conduct S&R and relief efforts.
FEMA is supposed to provide that coordination. Instead we have a croney who's main qualification is he's a friend of the president and once headed up a horse association. And the president himself, literally FIDDLING while New Orleans drowns.
Then we have the rest of the military. Who weren't mobilized for days. Or do you mean to tell me the 82nd airborne can deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours EXCEPT New Orleans.
It took 7 days post-hurricane and 5-days post levee breach to get the guard and army down there. If that's a realistic case of mobilization and response time, that's simply unacceptable. It makes "Red Dawn" look plausible. The only way that could happen, in my mind, is if people had their thumbs up their asses waiting on orders.
120 hours post-levee breach, 168 post-hurricane, 216 hours since we knew it was going to hit and it was probably going to be really bad. That is unarguably pathetic. So, who is to blame for that, the army, or the civilian administrators?
Your typical city holds enough supplies for three days. A 72 hour mobilization and deployment time in the face of a disaster is not some far off unreachable goal. It should be expected. Not instantly there supplies in hand, but comeon, 72 hours is more than enough time. Exceed that timeframe and PEOPLE DIE.
As to local/state. They may very well have failed, they're not my principle concern however. I am not a resident of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, or New Orleans. The people of those locales CAN and WILL hold their own leader's asses to the fire. I am however a citizen of these United States and I full and well expect the fed to be able to manage disasters they know about days in advance. Because if they can't do that, how the fuck are they going to defend against an invasion or respond to a terrorist attack? Issues that MAY effect me in the future.
Yea, they're down there now, and they're working their asses off, but what took so many of them so long?
Check the history of the red cross from WW2 through to today. Some of it isn't pretty.
On the upside, donations to the red cross tend to really get the political wheels moving and shoehorn actual relief in even if they don't provide it. So donations to the Red Cross help a lot, no matter how corrupt they may be.
OTOH, If you want a good christian themed organization that has probably the lowest overhead and least amount of corruption(from a charity standpoint) you go to the Salvation Army.
Out of my last $400, I put $300 to the SA and $100 to the ARC.
Huh? You don't need Live to play XBox games. Or rather you don't need Live Gold(and Live Silver which is crippled as far as we know is free).
I don't think Live is worth the cost(coming from PC gaming where I have to put a bit more work in, but I don't need to pay), but jesus, get some perspective.
All we know about the Revolution's internet play is mainly speculation(apart from it being free for first party games). All we know about the PS3s is that the PS2's online play was a joke you only treat as less of a joke because the Gamecube's online play was even MORE of a joke.
If you were tempted to shell out the launch costs retailers are asking for the 360(I'm not btw) and the cost of Live scares you off you're just being downright silly.
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I personally see no problem in restricting the sale of "adult" material to minors. Neither does the Supreme court.
If the freakin' game lobby would get a clue and do what the movie industry did, and actually hype that angle up rather than being adamantly opposed to any fines for the sale of this material to minors, then maybe you wouldn't need to worry about Jack Thompson.
A few "Gamestop fires employee for selling GTA w/o ID check" headlines would do it. But nooo...
I also fail to see how restricting the sale of violent(and or/sexual) games to minors in any way infringes on the right to free speech as held by the SCOTUS, nor how it would:
A. Keep the games out of the hands of minors whose parents allow them to play such things.
B. Keep adults from playing these games.
C. Keep these games from being made if the guys pushing for the legislation really DON'T have a point.
If gamers don't give up the 12-yos should be allowed to go into Gamestop and buy a copy of Tentacle-fucker 3 - Revenge of the Overfiend(at the extreme end) angle with no fines for the store OR the guy that sold it then they're not going to get a voice in how the law is constructed and the chances it's going to be whacked out insane increase. Because it's GOING to happen.
And there are upshots to it you probably can't even fathom.
I don't recall the arcadia, but both the Vectrex and Atari 5200 used analog joysticks. The analog stick(the analog thumbstick) as we know it today is a bit of a different beast.
WoW is out for OSX as well. It is not... as you say... windows-only.
Because here in the western world we have this thing called a patent system. Which means if I think of a really cool idea for something, I get to profit off of it exclusively for 25 years.
In the case of the rev's controller, those patents are owned by Nintendo and their partners(such as gyration, which nintendo both owns an unspecified amount of and has an exclusive licensing deal with). This means no one is going to be able to rip this thing off flat out, they'd have to figure out a way to do it in a completely different way.
You mean like gyration's products?
The company Nintendo invested heavily in and partnered up with around 4 years ago?
I don't think MS will pull the type of crap they're known for in the gaming market. Nor do I think they can. Nintendo actually has the cash reserves, IP portfolio and investments/partnerships to fight a rather protracted legal battle. They're not small-fry like most of MS's victims have been.
Hey, lots of people like me you insensitive clod.
I doubt either MS, Sony or a third party can legally make a revolution knock-off. After everyone rushed to get an analog in when they announced it pre-64 release, Nintendos been both secretive and protective as hell of their stuff.
I think they own a controlling interest in Gyration, which has a lot of patents on this kind of tech, as well as having patented large swaths of it in regards to console gaming.
So, like the d-pad, they may be able to find ways around the IP, but it's not going to be as easy as just flat-out copying the thing for at least another couple decades.
New Zealand may be Australia's equivalent to our Canada, but they were seperate countries last I checked. Had flags and everything.
Geddon's living bomb. Yup. But that was over in one explosion, it didn't linger around for hours upon hours. You could only "legitimately" do it once every 6 days. And it only did 2000 fire damage and tossed you almost as far as screwing up reloading the Goblin Mortar does.
It's also been fixed for quite a while.
Even with the wriststrap it's an inferior control method to the analog nub.
I wouldn't call it a bug. It was a complete lack of foresight.
Of course, the unintended consequence of that is probably the most amusing unintentional world event yet.
I full and well realize what sony makes, and w/o getting into an argument on tastes, I don't think you can honestly say Sony is a Capcom, Konami, Square, Nintendo, SEGA, or Namco. Sony's stuff, with a few exceptions has always felt to me like a cheap knockoff you'd pick up in the shady part of town. There's just no polish to it. There are some exceptions but not many. I mean, stuff like Okage was only OK.
People buy Nintendo products for Nintendo software, are you honestly asserting that you would pick up say a PS4 *just* to play Sony's limited first party titles like people by and large did with the Cube?
Cripe, what is this, some sort of religion? Do you set up a shrine to your DS or PSP or whatever and light a candle every night? These are game consoles. You get them because you can play the games you like on them. Despite what fanboys might want you to believe, they're not a religion you have to convert to.
No, but I do mainly pull the portables out in the presense of a porcelin goddess. Does that count?
Holy wars now? I suspect we'll see serious numbers of consoles move this holiday. If I were you, I'd be hoping both portables fly off the shelves, because it'd help kick up the competition a bit; something Nintendo seriously needs.
Possibly. I don't know. Sony lost any advocate work I would ever do for them after my 2nd PS2 broke. And Nintendo pretty much does their own thing regardless of sanity, market pressures, or what every screaming gamer on the face of the earth has to say about it. So the whole competition thing, in light of nintendo, has always seemed kind of silly to me. They're going to do what they're going to do no matter what.
Right, because Sony has no vested interest or much money involved, they'll just pull it off the market. Same with all those developers. (Incidentally, same with the DS.)
Ahhh, but Sony by and large isn't a developer. W/o third party support they're less than nothing. They can't limp along on first party titles anywhere near like Nintendo can. And devs can and will kill a title or switch the platform on it(say to the PS2) if it doesn't look like it's going to sell(I've always thought that was stupid, you've sunk 90%+ of the devwork in and you kill a title. WTF?). That's not to say Sony will kill the platform, hell, the Ngage is still limping along, but it would go down the lines of the GameGear and Wonderswan. Not a joke, but not a gameboy killer.
Part of this is backlash from all the Sony fans claiming the PSP was going to slaughter the GBA(and neither it nor the DS have even made a DENT there).
Funny, sounds like another console I know too. It's called the PS2.
The PS2 has the marketshare, despite being the most difficult console to develop for, it's financially worth it because it's got an enormous installed base versus it's cheaper competition. It doesn't make business sense to take a big financial risk on a higher development cost platform without the marketshare. Especially if you have a lower cost platform that has more marketshare, wider margins and costs 25% as much to make games for. The GBA was/is AWESOME for that, quick turnaround, and cheap to dev for. Art comes into play a bit, but still.
OK first I haven't heard anything about 1.8 million DS's being sold; maybe I just hadn't heard. That is what you get when you multiply 185k by 10. That is also pretty good when you consider a new, high-priced item, released during the low salespoint of the year, with a production shortage, and not a lot of advertising. Hopefully with the holiday season we will see them step things up.
Ehh, I rounded up for effect. It's about half that in the UK. 1 mil DSes to 185k PSPs. US is tough to nail down. Japan is > 2 mil DSes to 1 mil PSPs.
They're also using them to play SNES games. And PSX games. And some homebrew games (yay tetris). And browse the web. And watch movies. And read comics.
Didn't I say decade old nintendo games? I think that covers the SNES. Apart from the web browsing, and effectively movie playing(I mean comeon, get a portable DVD player or something), the DS can do all of this(and will eventually have a far better web browser).
Ah yes because mouse-like menus are required...
It's *incredibly* nice to be able to click select an entry or screen position versus having to scroll down to it and select it. Especially for name-entry, chat, RTSes like Starcraft, web-browsing, etc. Text-based browsers are all well and good, but comeon, who really prefers them over a gui-based browser.
Depth of tactics?
In all seriousness, if GTA: Liberty City Stories doesn't start moving units off the shelves(and it's going to be going up against the XBox 360 for peoples cash), the PSP *is* dead. You need look no further than this year's PAX to see that, where in an incredibly heavy gamer area, I think 5 PSPs were seen of which 3-4 were being given away. Even here, where you'd think people would be most impressed by whiz-bang tech, the PSP faithful are drastically outnumbered by the DS converts.
It's not settled yet, but it will be all but settled by the end of the holiday season.
Even if it's a bang-up smash in Europe if it doesn't seriously start moving here and in Japan it's gonna get dropped like a rock. It's almost as expensive as a console to develop for(while the DS, being so low-powered with only 1Gb of storage is by far cheaper), and it has a really small userbase atm. It would(assuming it pulls a master system) end up as the most expensive portable to develop for in the most expensive market to release in. That means death. It also only has another year or two as the high-end portable before the actual GBA sequel hits.
Add into that that:
1. You have Sony pulling a Baghdad Bob and claiming "HAPPY-FUN" success when they sell out a 185,000 unit launch alottment in a market the DS has already sold almost 10 times that. Then they stick to units shipped as opposed to sold in their marketing. It just looks sad from this camp.
2. A lot of people on forums are using their PSPs mainly to play decade-old Nintendo games(which just strikes me as perversely wrong for some reason, yet I had no trouble using my GBA for pocketNES, go fig). At least to hear them talk. That's not much of a selling point when to play new PSP games you need to kill that functionality.
3. For any menu-driven or mouse-approximation interface, that touchscreen on the DS makes an analog feel like it came from the 19th century. I can't stand any situation where I need to move a cursor with an analog anymore. I never had much tolerance for it to begin with however.
That interface advantage is a biggy. Advance Wars: DS(beats Metal Gear Acid for depth of tactics and multiplayer by far) controls smooth as silk, and the whole RTS/FPS/RPG genres are infinately improved by having that touchscreen there. The PSP has the DS for platformers and probably racers, you instantly get that if you ever play Mario 64, but that's about it.
Granted, I don't see the appeal of Nintendogs, but most of the girls in my life do. It's a non-gamer, mass-market game, something the PSP doesn't really have yet.
And the DS version lets you use the touch screen, which is 2 billion times better than an analog stick in terms of annoyance factor and control.
Keyboard arrows. Hah. Come on in to the 20th century. It's nice here.
If you want homebrew, pick up a DS/flash cart+passthrough package(or SD reader cart + passthrough). They already have a mostly-working SNES emulator(Super Metroid works), a touchscreen-enabled version of ScummVM, and a bunch of cool little tech-demo apps(calculators and what not). Doesn't break DS game-capabality or GBA game-capability either. You also get that huge-back-catalog of GBA homebrew(which includes completely working emulators for everything pre-SNES/Genesis, Nethack, Ebooks, tons of craziness).
After using that touch screen, pointing with an analog is just so... primitive. About the only thing the PSP does better than the DS is graphics and platformers/racers.
Are you aware they have ScummVM working on the DS?
And here's the answer.
Coast Guard response was excellent. They got there exceptionally quickly, and really put forth a hell of a lot of effort. I think they were rescuing something like 100 people an hour. Same with the depleted national guard and local first responders. Army corps or Engineers was also there extremely quickly.
We know there was no real coordination in other areas from the people on the ground. They started working areas because they looked like good places to start. Then we have guys getting admonished for going off-mission to conduct S&R and relief efforts.
FEMA is supposed to provide that coordination. Instead we have a croney who's main qualification is he's a friend of the president and once headed up a horse association. And the president himself, literally FIDDLING while New Orleans drowns.
Then we have the rest of the military. Who weren't mobilized for days. Or do you mean to tell me the 82nd airborne can deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours EXCEPT New Orleans.
It took 7 days post-hurricane and 5-days post levee breach to get the guard and army down there. If that's a realistic case of mobilization and response time, that's simply unacceptable. It makes "Red Dawn" look plausible. The only way that could happen, in my mind, is if people had their thumbs up their asses waiting on orders.
120 hours post-levee breach, 168 post-hurricane, 216 hours since we knew it was going to hit and it was probably going to be really bad. That is unarguably pathetic. So, who is to blame for that, the army, or the civilian administrators?
Your typical city holds enough supplies for three days. A 72 hour mobilization and deployment time in the face of a disaster is not some far off unreachable goal. It should be expected. Not instantly there supplies in hand, but comeon, 72 hours is more than enough time. Exceed that timeframe and PEOPLE DIE.
As to local/state. They may very well have failed, they're not my principle concern however. I am not a resident of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, or New Orleans. The people of those locales CAN and WILL hold their own leader's asses to the fire. I am however a citizen of these United States and I full and well expect the fed to be able to manage disasters they know about days in advance. Because if they can't do that, how the fuck are they going to defend against an invasion or respond to a terrorist attack? Issues that MAY effect me in the future.
Yea, they're down there now, and they're working their asses off, but what took so many of them so long?
It's a christian themed organization, with all that that entails. Your point sir?
Check the history of the red cross from WW2 through to today. Some of it isn't pretty.
On the upside, donations to the red cross tend to really get the political wheels moving and shoehorn actual relief in even if they don't provide it. So donations to the Red Cross help a lot, no matter how corrupt they may be.
OTOH, If you want a good christian themed organization that has probably the lowest overhead and least amount of corruption(from a charity standpoint) you go to the Salvation Army.
Out of my last $400, I put $300 to the SA and $100 to the ARC.
Or they're reporting units shipped to retailers. Sony generally does that.
Oh... I dunno... Maybe because Visual Studio is a pretty damn good Windows development IDE and every real programmer knows it?
MFC is a load of shit, but VS isn't to blame for that.
Huh? You don't need Live to play XBox games. Or rather you don't need Live Gold(and Live Silver which is crippled as far as we know is free).
I don't think Live is worth the cost(coming from PC gaming where I have to put a bit more work in, but I don't need to pay), but jesus, get some perspective.
All we know about the Revolution's internet play is mainly speculation(apart from it being free for first party games). All we know about the PS3s is that the PS2's online play was a joke you only treat as less of a joke because the Gamecube's online play was even MORE of a joke.
If you were tempted to shell out the launch costs retailers are asking for the 360(I'm not btw) and the cost of Live scares you off you're just being downright silly.
PS2 yes(online PS2 play is a freakin' joke). PC no.