From a business perspective, if you are taking a quarterly loss on something greater than the GDP of entire nations, it is a failure. Plain and simple.
So, it's probably going to be styled like a normal GBA with an SP style clamshell above the center screen(possibly more in the top half, seems like that would thicken the unit too much...). And, if these specs are correct then that bottom/middle screen would be the touchscreen.
Lots of potential, let's see if they can do anything with it.:-P
Yo, asshole. Learn to read. Note the capital B in MB as in "poster is referring to bytes rather than bits". If I had meant Megabits I would have used Mb.
FF Tactics is 128MB. It's a big ol' ROM. Most GBA games are in the 32MB-64MB range, but the limit of the medium is currently 1GB(for a flash cart) with an addressable amount of 256MB. Nintendo's gotten one hell of a lot of use out of that old pin layout.
Few facts for ya: Next Gamecube is confirmed as backwards compatable by Nintendo. Same with the next Gameboy.
Backwards compat appeals to people who do not already own your previous console(it adds value for first-time buyers or people who didn't buy the previous console). I already own a PS2, why do I need a PS3 to play PS2&PS1 games? It's slightly nice to be able to trade in the old console to cut down some of the cost of the new one(while still being able to play the old games), but there need to be games out for the new one that are worth playing. Well providing my third PS2 doesn't up and die by then and I can trade it in(otherwise I'll need another PS2 or a PS3 to play my PS2 games).
By your logic, Sony stands no chance in the handheld market for the same reasons Nintendo/MS stand no chance in the console market. Nintendo has a back-library of literally thousands of games(designed no less for a handheld) spanning over a decade on their handheld. Including tons of excellent first party games, RPGs by square, etc. They own the market. There are more GBAs out there then ALL current consoles combined.
Another fun fact: Sony has stated they are not going to be porting PS1 and PS2 games willy nilly to the PSP. Even if they did, there is a large quantity of pure and utter crap out there for both systems. The real gems/hardware movers are few and far between.
So, how exactly is Sony going to somehow manage to overcome this and dominate the handheld market, while neither Nintendo nor Microsoft are going to be able to do it for the console market.
Considering this flaw, I'm not likely to lend much credence to your first paragraph. So I'm simply not going to address it.
Hey, it doesn't need to have fancy graphics, it doesn't need to be 3d.
Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, et all were hillarious, they're still funny today. The graphics aren't all that great now, but they don't need to be.
They could use ye old Scumm engine, or just update it to be higher resolution, release a real honest to goodness Sam and Max or Monkey Island title and I'd be happy. Ecstatically happy. I think the move to 3D really hurt a lot of the older franchises.
Not that they're going to listen to me or anything.
Me and everyone else I know who played the original were waiting for this with wallets drawn and baited breath. Even though we mostly disagreed with some of their design decisions, we were still prepared to buy the game.
Silly lucasarts. Well, I'm off to write them a letter I suggest you do the same.
What? Playing FF:CC w/o the GBA connectivity would be awful.
It would take 5 times as long to set up your command list at the start of a dungeon(there always seems to be that one guy who takes twice as long to do it), you'd have to pause whenever you wanted to swap things out, drop things, or restructure your command list.
The secret missions would no longer be reveal at your own option. The cooperative aspect of play(each person has a different map) would be gone. Plus you'd have to pause whenever you wanted to check the map. That sucks.
Shopping in towns would be a PITA and take 5 times as long.
It would(and does in D&D) make the game crawl in comparison.
Assuming you are correct(and that's a pretty big assumption judging by people I know and the headlines I read), the ITT crowd still has an investment in skills, it might be a 2 year technical degree or a certification program or something along those lines, but it is still a sunk education cost.
This contrasts with the job losses in the manufacturing sector where the company would pay to train workers on how to do their jobs. It would be like if we suddenly started losing plumber, electrician or mechanic "blue-collar" jobs at a rapid rate.
This is definately a different situation then we saw begin in the 50s. Your parallel is flawed.
I'm not debating that there is such a market, my point was that is incredibly difficult to have a mixed environment.
You can either go PK or you can go non-PK. Trying to mix the two is very, very difficult and requires an incredible amount of thought, planning and administrative intervention. If you screw it up, then you may as well have(and would be better off to have) never included PK at all.
It's also been my experience that PK MUDs are a lot more hands off then non-PK muds from an administration standpoint(well, except for some MOO styles and MUSHs but we won't get into those). You can basically set them up and then you leave them alone except for the occassional update and monitoring for cheating. Very fitting of the current MMORPG management style, but none of them have gotten it right. They may as well have never included it at all.
It's possible to make it work, you apparently did, I just don't think it's worth it to make it work.
There's a difference between manufacturing outsourcing and the current trend.
That difference is the level of education required and the cost of reeducation.
A manufactoring worker loses his job, he needs to retrain himself in another field, but he's not out previously spent education dollars for his high school diploma.
A computer programmer, electrical engineer, or another white-collar worker loses his job and he's out 30,000+ in sunk education costs(counting room and board, and even more for lost wages over a 4 year degree).
Both people are now in the same boat, but one has just wasted a vastly greater sum of money to reach that point.
Many of the people complaining about DE:IW are complaining because they feel the game isn't as good as it would have been had they not taken a wad of cash to do it for the XBox.
Not that it isn't good. It's a fairly enjoyable game, but it's a step backwards from the first one in a lot of ways, and an incremental step forwards in others. It's a shadow of what it should've been, in other words.
Doesn't work. What happens is that those who opt out of non-PvP are resented by those that don't.
You either have PvP or you don't, there is no middle ground that I've found that doesn't eventually lead to the death of an online game.
Normally, the PvP players leave, then the non-PvP players leave(killing mobs for gear only works for so long).
When we added an opt-out option our pbase began to die. Slowly at first then more rapidly as more and more non-pkers were thrown into the mix. There's not as much of an incentive to advance if the only thing to be gained by advancement is advancement itself. We experienced an initial upsurge, and then it began to die. We had to add content constantly to keep people on whereas before we didn't. The players provided their own content and all we had to do was babysit.
I abandoned the MUD circa 2002, and someone else took over, they've since axed the opt-out option and the pbase has begun to grow again. It's back up to 20-30 players online whereas with opt-out it was at 5-10 towards the end.
Having pk as an option doesn't work unless everyone is forced into it.
It's easy to resolve in MUDs. Set up two sides. A good side where players can't attack members of their own alignment and an evil side which is a free for all.
Here are the keys I've found to running a successful(100+ player online) PK MUD.
1st off have a safe point about 1/3rd of the way up (so in EQ this would be level 15), up until that point you can be attacked but you lose nothing and the pker gets nothing.
2nd off give rewards for player killing. Give them points, the more challenging the kill the more points they get. A level 35 killing a level 20 would be worth maybe 1, killing another level 35 would be worth more. You can cash these in for custom items(no more powerful than a normal item), upgrades, or remorts(reset yourself to level 1 but get a few bennies) for better stats. Let there be no other way to gain stats. Limit the number of times you can remort w/o these points to about half the max.
3rdly do not penalize exp for pk deaths, and do not make pk kills worth much if any xp.
4th have safe zones(cities), you can still attack players here, but their entry/exit points are blocked by highly powerful NPCs that require almost an entire side to kill(so in an MMORPG the town guards should only be killable by a hundred or so players working together), and respawn in no more than 15 minutes. Make them aggressive, powerful defenders that take a while to kill, and you can't run by them either. Also put guards at the entry points to each side's area, but make them half as powerful. This forces sides to coop to kill the other side, draws them together.
5th avoid linear progression! Progress in terms of power should be quick to start with and then slower in the end(after the safe point). I mean in terms of power, not exp. The difference between a level 30 and a level 20 should be nowhere near the difference between a level 20 and a level 10.
6th limit the number of players that can attack another player physically at the same time. 4 seems to be a good number for this. This allows someone who is attacked by a much larger force to run. Spells and other high powered things should have delays greater than the average time to successfully flee.
7th avoid the temptation to allow ANY physically oriented characters(warrior types) to do enough damage to kill a level 1 in a single hit consistantly. Exceptions for thief types and backstabbing/stealthy stuff.
Eventually stability comes out of the evil side.
I never had a problem with same-side pking. People generally rallied together to kill the other side, and the evil side tended to self-regulate stupidity. After a while we turned on same-side pk on the good side and still had no problems. They'd kill their own idiots and spam kill the abusive people and that was about it.
No one wanted to kill newbies en masse and loot them, there wasn't any reason to. They had next to no equipment, no money, and weren't worth anything.
Slashdot Mirror
From a business perspective, if you are taking a quarterly loss on something greater than the GDP of entire nations, it is a failure. Plain and simple.
When has MS ever hit a release date?
Better one: vi or emacs versus Visual Studio.
So, it's probably going to be styled like a normal GBA with an SP style clamshell above the center screen(possibly more in the top half, seems like that would thicken the unit too much...). And, if these specs are correct then that bottom/middle screen would be the touchscreen.
:-P
Lots of potential, let's see if they can do anything with it.
Yo, asshole. Learn to read. Note the capital B in MB as in "poster is referring to bytes rather than bits". If I had meant Megabits I would have used Mb.
Wrong on GBA cart size, it can address 256 MB.
FF Tactics is 128MB. It's a big ol' ROM. Most GBA games are in the 32MB-64MB range, but the limit of the medium is currently 1GB(for a flash cart) with an addressable amount of 256MB. Nintendo's gotten one hell of a lot of use out of that old pin layout.
Few facts for ya: Next Gamecube is confirmed as backwards compatable by Nintendo. Same with the next Gameboy.
Backwards compat appeals to people who do not already own your previous console(it adds value for first-time buyers or people who didn't buy the previous console). I already own a PS2, why do I need a PS3 to play PS2&PS1 games? It's slightly nice to be able to trade in the old console to cut down some of the cost of the new one(while still being able to play the old games), but there need to be games out for the new one that are worth playing. Well providing my third PS2 doesn't up and die by then and I can trade it in(otherwise I'll need another PS2 or a PS3 to play my PS2 games).
By your logic, Sony stands no chance in the handheld market for the same reasons Nintendo/MS stand no chance in the console market. Nintendo has a back-library of literally thousands of games(designed no less for a handheld) spanning over a decade on their handheld. Including tons of excellent first party games, RPGs by square, etc. They own the market. There are more GBAs out there then ALL current consoles combined.
Another fun fact: Sony has stated they are not going to be porting PS1 and PS2 games willy nilly to the PSP. Even if they did, there is a large quantity of pure and utter crap out there for both systems. The real gems/hardware movers are few and far between.
So, how exactly is Sony going to somehow manage to overcome this and dominate the handheld market, while neither Nintendo nor Microsoft are going to be able to do it for the console market.
Considering this flaw, I'm not likely to lend much credence to your first paragraph. So I'm simply not going to address it.
Me engineer, me speak english good.
3 times charm, me know now proper spalling is bated.
Buffer sorry he offended.
Hey, it doesn't need to have fancy graphics, it doesn't need to be 3d.
Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, et all were hillarious, they're still funny today. The graphics aren't all that great now, but they don't need to be.
They could use ye old Scumm engine, or just update it to be higher resolution, release a real honest to goodness Sam and Max or Monkey Island title and I'd be happy. Ecstatically happy. I think the move to 3D really hurt a lot of the older franchises.
Not that they're going to listen to me or anything.
Me and everyone else I know who played the original were waiting for this with wallets drawn and baited breath. Even though we mostly disagreed with some of their design decisions, we were still prepared to buy the game.
Silly lucasarts. Well, I'm off to write them a letter I suggest you do the same.
What? Playing FF:CC w/o the GBA connectivity would be awful.
It would take 5 times as long to set up your command list at the start of a dungeon(there always seems to be that one guy who takes twice as long to do it), you'd have to pause whenever you wanted to swap things out, drop things, or restructure your command list.
The secret missions would no longer be reveal at your own option. The cooperative aspect of play(each person has a different map) would be gone. Plus you'd have to pause whenever you wanted to check the map. That sucks.
Shopping in towns would be a PITA and take 5 times as long.
It would(and does in D&D) make the game crawl in comparison.
You obviously have never actually played FF:CC.
Where precisely did I say that? My only point was that the situation is different.
Assuming you are correct(and that's a pretty big assumption judging by people I know and the headlines I read), the ITT crowd still has an investment in skills, it might be a 2 year technical degree or a certification program or something along those lines, but it is still a sunk education cost.
This contrasts with the job losses in the manufacturing sector where the company would pay to train workers on how to do their jobs. It would be like if we suddenly started losing plumber, electrician or mechanic "blue-collar" jobs at a rapid rate.
This is definately a different situation then we saw begin in the 50s. Your parallel is flawed.
I'm not debating that there is such a market, my point was that is incredibly difficult to have a mixed environment.
You can either go PK or you can go non-PK. Trying to mix the two is very, very difficult and requires an incredible amount of thought, planning and administrative intervention. If you screw it up, then you may as well have(and would be better off to have) never included PK at all.
It's also been my experience that PK MUDs are a lot more hands off then non-PK muds from an administration standpoint(well, except for some MOO styles and MUSHs but we won't get into those). You can basically set them up and then you leave them alone except for the occassional update and monitoring for cheating. Very fitting of the current MMORPG management style, but none of them have gotten it right. They may as well have never included it at all.
It's possible to make it work, you apparently did, I just don't think it's worth it to make it work.
There's a difference between manufacturing outsourcing and the current trend.
That difference is the level of education required and the cost of reeducation.
A manufactoring worker loses his job, he needs to retrain himself in another field, but he's not out previously spent education dollars for his high school diploma.
A computer programmer, electrical engineer, or another white-collar worker loses his job and he's out 30,000+ in sunk education costs(counting room and board, and even more for lost wages over a 4 year degree).
Both people are now in the same boat, but one has just wasted a vastly greater sum of money to reach that point.
Many of the people complaining about DE:IW are complaining because they feel the game isn't as good as it would have been had they not taken a wad of cash to do it for the XBox.
Not that it isn't good. It's a fairly enjoyable game, but it's a step backwards from the first one in a lot of ways, and an incremental step forwards in others. It's a shadow of what it should've been, in other words.
Depends, did Microsoft give them a wad of cash to put this on the Xbox?
If so, I'm avoiding it like the plague.
Doesn't work. What happens is that those who opt out of non-PvP are resented by those that don't.
You either have PvP or you don't, there is no middle ground that I've found that doesn't eventually lead to the death of an online game.
Normally, the PvP players leave, then the non-PvP players leave(killing mobs for gear only works for so long).
When we added an opt-out option our pbase began to die. Slowly at first then more rapidly as more and more non-pkers were thrown into the mix. There's not as much of an incentive to advance if the only thing to be gained by advancement is advancement itself. We experienced an initial upsurge, and then it began to die. We had to add content constantly to keep people on whereas before we didn't. The players provided their own content and all we had to do was babysit.
I abandoned the MUD circa 2002, and someone else took over, they've since axed the opt-out option and the pbase has begun to grow again. It's back up to 20-30 players online whereas with opt-out it was at 5-10 towards the end.
Having pk as an option doesn't work unless everyone is forced into it.
It's easy to resolve in MUDs. Set up two sides. A good side where players can't attack members of their own alignment and an evil side which is a free for all.
Here are the keys I've found to running a successful(100+ player online) PK MUD.
1st off have a safe point about 1/3rd of the way up (so in EQ this would be level 15), up until that point you can be attacked but you lose nothing and the pker gets nothing.
2nd off give rewards for player killing. Give them points, the more challenging the kill the more points they get. A level 35 killing a level 20 would be worth maybe 1, killing another level 35 would be worth more. You can cash these in for custom items(no more powerful than a normal item), upgrades, or remorts(reset yourself to level 1 but get a few bennies) for better stats. Let there be no other way to gain stats. Limit the number of times you can remort w/o these points to about half the max.
3rdly do not penalize exp for pk deaths, and do not make pk kills worth much if any xp.
4th have safe zones(cities), you can still attack players here, but their entry/exit points are blocked by highly powerful NPCs that require almost an entire side to kill(so in an MMORPG the town guards should only be killable by a hundred or so players working together), and respawn in no more than 15 minutes. Make them aggressive, powerful defenders that take a while to kill, and you can't run by them either. Also put guards at the entry points to each side's area, but make them half as powerful. This forces sides to coop to kill the other side, draws them together.
5th avoid linear progression! Progress in terms of power should be quick to start with and then slower in the end(after the safe point). I mean in terms of power, not exp. The difference between a level 30 and a level 20 should be nowhere near the difference between a level 20 and a level 10.
6th limit the number of players that can attack another player physically at the same time. 4 seems to be a good number for this. This allows someone who is attacked by a much larger force to run. Spells and other high powered things should have delays greater than the average time to successfully flee.
7th avoid the temptation to allow ANY physically oriented characters(warrior types) to do enough damage to kill a level 1 in a single hit consistantly. Exceptions for thief types and backstabbing/stealthy stuff.
Eventually stability comes out of the evil side.
I never had a problem with same-side pking. People generally rallied together to kill the other side, and the evil side tended to self-regulate stupidity. After a while we turned on same-side pk on the good side and still had no problems. They'd kill their own idiots and spam kill the abusive people and that was about it.
No one wanted to kill newbies en masse and loot them, there wasn't any reason to. They had next to no equipment, no money, and weren't worth anything.
I don't know if I can do that.... after all the time I spent mocking Mac users in the early 90s and later 80s... it'd just be wrong man.
I mean they were the people that owned Sega Master Systems!
Some of us are over 20, have been playing games since before we were 10, and still like the GCN.
The people I see who really mock the GCN are the same people who like to watch wrestling and think hazing is a good idea. Or high school kids.
Let me guess, you think Nethack is a waste of time as well, right?
If for some reason they were incapable of writing I would.
Then how, pray tell, are you any more qualified to comment then any Joe off the street?
I have a debian box that's been running and serving up files since before your OS existed.
What's your point?
Oh, and there's a patch or two requiring a reboot you may want to install.
In soviet russia, dead horse beats you!