The game shops in my town just installed their 360 demo pods (the UK launch isn't until December 2nd). All of them were running Medal Of Duty: Fuck You Adolf, or whatever the WW2 shooter is called.
Ironically, the store guys showing them off were more impressed by the HD screens on the pods than the actual games themselves. Every time somebody new came along to check it out, the store guy at GameStation took the opportunity to say something like, "This screen's great! Look, you can really see where they haven't anti-aliased this object!"
As yet, I personally don't see any compelling reason to buy a 360. It's all about the gameplay, not the visuals (I'd rather play Puyo Puyo or Robotron 2084 than Doom 3 any day), and the 360's launch titles are mostly graphical upgrades of games that are already out on PS2 and Xbox. There are no killer - or even severely wounding - apps yet (and after being stung by the disappointment that was Halo 2, I won't be blindly rushing to the shops when Halo 3 turns up).
On the other hand, I, Robot was the first 'real' book I ever read (as opposed to one with pictures in it), at the age of five, so that undoubtedly started me along the path to geekdom. And I was very disappointed to learn that the robots weren't real. It's now over 30 years later and I'm still waiting, damn it!
Isn't Blockbuster on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection? Doesn't sound like they're doing that great right now...
Re:I am not a conspiracy theorist, but...
on
HAARP Amping It Up
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· Score: 1
The blacked-out area is about 3 miles wide and 25 miles long (!). A VLF antenna array for submarine communications? (It runs right through a mountain range, so it's not some big-ass runway for Aurora, if you want to bring another conspiracy theory into it...)
Hamlet: My dad's died and my mum's married my uncle. Bummer.
Ghost: Actually, your uncle murdered me. Get revenge.
Hamlet: Grr! I'll pretend to be mad. Ophelia! I hate you! Oh, and I just killed your dad.
Ophelia: Wah! Wibble! [glub]
Laertes: You bastard! I challenge you to a duel!
Claudius: Psst! Laertes, use this poisoned sword.
Hamlet: Ow!
Laertes: Damn, we both dropped our swords. Which is mine - ow!
Claudius: Crap! Here, Hamlet, have this poisoned wine.
Gertrude: Actually, I'm a bit thirsty too. GAK!
Laertes: GAK!
Claudius: GAK!
Hamlet: GAK!
Fortinbras: Ha! I rule.
Come on, I've seen them decrypt files and hard drives in a matter of minutes on 24. What are the pommy police up to, maybe they need to start watching it for tips.
But CTU has a secret weapon not available in the UK: Chloe!
She can decrypt my hard drive any time, baby, yeah!
Pah! In my former employment, the one thing that united all the people in my department was their utter loathing of one of the senior managers. Without him and his horrible, rude, aggressive, belittling, vindictive and arbitrary behaviour to bring the workers together in their detestation of him, nobody would have had anything in common!
Inignot: You and your third dimension.
Frylock: What about it?
Inignot: Oh, nothing, it's cute. We have five.
Err: Th... thousand.
Inignot: Yes, five thousand.
Err: Don't question it.
Frylock: Oh, yeah? Well, I only see two.
Inignot: Well, that sounds like a personal problem.
The article wasn't exactly in-depth - I was hoping for something more like the retrospectives found in Edge or GamesTM or whatever where they actually talk to the people involved.
Had it even mentioned Body Harvest (N64, 1998), which was also made by DMA Design, as a direct ancestor of the modern GTA games I would have been more impressed. Body Harvest might have been a different genre (sci-fi shooter), but it had a lot in common with GTA (large landscapes, loads of vehicles, wacky characters giving you missions, twisted humour) - and even a lot of the same flaws (clumsy main character, crappy targeting, instant death if you land in water)!
...where they keep running for so long beyond their expected design limits that the beancounters want to shut off the funding and close the project down even though they're still providing data. In the case of the Voyagers, the thinking seems to be along the lines of, "Well, they're now outside the solar system and we know there's nothing else there, so let's sell the bandwidth to Verizon! Screw the mysteries of the universe, people want Crazy Frog ringtones!"
In the case of Spirit and Opportunity, they'll probably close down the project the day before the rovers valiantly climb over a crater rim to see a vast Martian city spread out beneath them. Some nerd with a low-power radio telescope made from a Pringles can will pick up the data, but nobody will believe him...
Everyone laughed at the Star Trek episode 'Spock's Brain' for its claim that you could control a person's body with nothing more than electronic headgear and a remote control.
And if you go too far, and you try to change the category altogether and we give you a wacky controller, or I'm going to give you wacky games that you don't really understand, and we're going to market it or price it in a wacky way, I think we would have been very much a failure.
I woNder If the geNTlEmaN DOes have somebody in mind with that statement?
Basically what happens when you get final hardware late, you're sloppy. With all deference to the developers, you've got to take every out you can and so they're not applying all their talents, as they will next year and the year after to get every little bit they can out of it. They're being a little sloppy with the CPU, they're being a little sloppy with the discs, they're being a little sloppy with their formats and compression to make launch. And next year, you'll see that they tighten that up so they can get more out of the system using the same disc capacity, using the same compression, and the same art tools, and so they'll get a lot more out of the system next year.
Way to sell your new system. I don't know about anyone else, but I read that as 'We're really rushing this thing to market to beat Sony, and the early games might be as botched as that EA football game on the PSP, but hey! In a year from now, we'll probably have figured out how to do some really neat stuff!' And then adding on the next page, 'In the meantime, you can buy all these cool customised fascias! That's gotta be worth something, right?'
Mmm... yeah. Now, I'm sure that NASA is hoping that's what they'll get, but all it will take will be one mission failure, a new war somewhere for the US to fight, or just a change in the political wind, and they'll be back to square one. Again.
Maybe NASA wants to use the 'but we can't give up now - look at all the money we've already spent!' argument. Personally I'd love there to be a moonbase, and Mars missions, and all the other cool stuff, but boring reality (and the shrill, tedious cries of the 'how DARE we spend money on space when somewhere a child is starving?' brigade) tends to smack down the dreams far too quickly.
Every piece of consumer electronics I've ever bought has acquired scratches. Sometimes I have no idea *how* - I'm not in the habit of wiping abrasives across my laptop screen, but there's a big-ass scratch on it anyway - but it happens. Unless they want the cases to be made from diamond or something, and pay the premium for that, maybe they should grasp the concept that if they put a small, smooth-faced object in a pocket with other items and walk around all day, there's a chance said object may come out with some superficial surface damage. Otherwise, spend the five bucks on a screen protector and shut the fuck up.
The eMac is still available on the UK Apple Store. I bought one last week (rather an a Mac Mini, since I didn't have a 'spare' monitor as I was upgrading from an iMac DV and I wanted the eMac's bigger HDD and faster video card) and so far it's been a delight. But if Apple are phasing it out, I guess I bought it at the right time!
After reading TFA, it's clear that the person who loses out the most in the BR/HD battle is... the consumer. Because the fight to win over the content providers will seemingly be won by the company that can place the most restrictions on what the consumer can do with the product that they've bought and paid for.
It's confirming all the stuff we've known (and worried) about for a while. No backups. Controlled streaming over a home network. Phoning home, and all that implies. All backed up by DMCA or DMCA-like legislation as it spreads around the globe at the behest of the media corporations (hello, Finland!).
Fuck 'em. I already own pretty much all of my favourite films and TV shows on DVD already. They can't force me to go hi-def and re-buy everything I've already paid for... can they?
Humans have that inner-ear thing, and this tells us many things: if we are vertical, falling, rising, moving forward or sideways...
Great! So in the next Grand Challenge, someone can just hook up a Nintendo Revolution controller to the car and be guaranteed a win! Better pre-order my console now...
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, the store guys showing them off were more impressed by the HD screens on the pods than the actual games themselves. Every time somebody new came along to check it out, the store guy at GameStation took the opportunity to say something like, "This screen's great! Look, you can really see where they haven't anti-aliased this object!"
As yet, I personally don't see any compelling reason to buy a 360. It's all about the gameplay, not the visuals (I'd rather play Puyo Puyo or Robotron 2084 than Doom 3 any day), and the 360's launch titles are mostly graphical upgrades of games that are already out on PS2 and Xbox. There are no killer - or even severely wounding - apps yet (and after being stung by the disappointment that was Halo 2, I won't be blindly rushing to the shops when Halo 3 turns up).
On the other hand, I, Robot was the first 'real' book I ever read (as opposed to one with pictures in it), at the age of five, so that undoubtedly started me along the path to geekdom. And I was very disappointed to learn that the robots weren't real. It's now over 30 years later and I'm still waiting, damn it!
Isn't Blockbuster on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection? Doesn't sound like they're doing that great right now...
The blacked-out area is about 3 miles wide and 25 miles long (!). A VLF antenna array for submarine communications? (It runs right through a mountain range, so it's not some big-ass runway for Aurora, if you want to bring another conspiracy theory into it...)
Hamlet: My dad's died and my mum's married my uncle. Bummer.
Ghost: Actually, your uncle murdered me. Get revenge.
Hamlet: Grr! I'll pretend to be mad. Ophelia! I hate you! Oh, and I just killed your dad.
Ophelia: Wah! Wibble! [glub]
Laertes: You bastard! I challenge you to a duel!
Claudius: Psst! Laertes, use this poisoned sword.
Hamlet: Ow!
Laertes: Damn, we both dropped our swords. Which is mine - ow!
Claudius: Crap! Here, Hamlet, have this poisoned wine.
Gertrude: Actually, I'm a bit thirsty too. GAK!
Laertes: GAK!
Claudius: GAK!
Hamlet: GAK!
Fortinbras: Ha! I rule.
...by the wealthy, for the corporations. Yay capitalism!
But CTU has a secret weapon not available in the UK: Chloe!
She can decrypt my hard drive any time, baby, yeah!
Just rename your super-powerful character with '$sys$' at the start of his/her/its name!
Pah! In my former employment, the one thing that united all the people in my department was their utter loathing of one of the senior managers. Without him and his horrible, rude, aggressive, belittling, vindictive and arbitrary behaviour to bring the workers together in their detestation of him, nobody would have had anything in common!
Inignot: You and your third dimension.
Frylock: What about it?
Inignot: Oh, nothing, it's cute. We have five.
Err: Th... thousand.
Inignot: Yes, five thousand.
Err: Don't question it.
Frylock: Oh, yeah? Well, I only see two.
Inignot: Well, that sounds like a personal problem.
So your CD collection is actually one CD, singular?
Had it even mentioned Body Harvest (N64, 1998), which was also made by DMA Design, as a direct ancestor of the modern GTA games I would have been more impressed. Body Harvest might have been a different genre (sci-fi shooter), but it had a lot in common with GTA (large landscapes, loads of vehicles, wacky characters giving you missions, twisted humour) - and even a lot of the same flaws (clumsy main character, crappy targeting, instant death if you land in water)!
In the case of Spirit and Opportunity, they'll probably close down the project the day before the rovers valiantly climb over a crater rim to see a vast Martian city spread out beneath them. Some nerd with a low-power radio telescope made from a Pringles can will pick up the data, but nobody will believe him...
Who's laughing now? [Tick... tick... tick...]
I woNder If the geNTlEmaN DOes have somebody in mind with that statement?
Way to sell your new system. I don't know about anyone else, but I read that as 'We're really rushing this thing to market to beat Sony, and the early games might be as botched as that EA football game on the PSP, but hey! In a year from now, we'll probably have figured out how to do some really neat stuff!' And then adding on the next page, 'In the meantime, you can buy all these cool customised fascias! That's gotta be worth something, right?'
Mmm... yeah. Now, I'm sure that NASA is hoping that's what they'll get, but all it will take will be one mission failure, a new war somewhere for the US to fight, or just a change in the political wind, and they'll be back to square one. Again.
Maybe NASA wants to use the 'but we can't give up now - look at all the money we've already spent!' argument. Personally I'd love there to be a moonbase, and Mars missions, and all the other cool stuff, but boring reality (and the shrill, tedious cries of the 'how DARE we spend money on space when somewhere a child is starving?' brigade) tends to smack down the dreams far too quickly.
Ahem. So, where do I sign up for this Mars thing?
Every piece of consumer electronics I've ever bought has acquired scratches. Sometimes I have no idea *how* - I'm not in the habit of wiping abrasives across my laptop screen, but there's a big-ass scratch on it anyway - but it happens. Unless they want the cases to be made from diamond or something, and pay the premium for that, maybe they should grasp the concept that if they put a small, smooth-faced object in a pocket with other items and walk around all day, there's a chance said object may come out with some superficial surface damage. Otherwise, spend the five bucks on a screen protector and shut the fuck up.
Is that like a 'moo point'?
Joey Tribbiani: "It's like a cow's opinion. It just doesn't matter. It's moo."
"180, you stupid, spaghetti-slurping cretin - 180! If I did a 360, I'd go completely around and end up back where I started!"
The eMac is still available on the UK Apple Store. I bought one last week (rather an a Mac Mini, since I didn't have a 'spare' monitor as I was upgrading from an iMac DV and I wanted the eMac's bigger HDD and faster video card) and so far it's been a delight. But if Apple are phasing it out, I guess I bought it at the right time!
It's confirming all the stuff we've known (and worried) about for a while. No backups. Controlled streaming over a home network. Phoning home, and all that implies. All backed up by DMCA or DMCA-like legislation as it spreads around the globe at the behest of the media corporations (hello, Finland!).
Fuck 'em. I already own pretty much all of my favourite films and TV shows on DVD already. They can't force me to go hi-def and re-buy everything I've already paid for... can they?
Enter 'Santa Clara County' into Google. See the #1 result:
"THAT'S NOT OUR FUCKING PROBLEM!"
Great! So in the next Grand Challenge, someone can just hook up a Nintendo Revolution controller to the car and be guaranteed a win! Better pre-order my console now...