The first mass market PC's that people actually played games on in any real numbers to really count were the Apple II, TRS 80 1, Commodore PET. Even the big name "home computers of the 80's" that were often used pretty similarly as game consoles came long after the 2600, Intellivision, Bally Arcade, Fairchild Channel F, Odyssey 2, etc. Sure a lot of C64's were sold of machines, but the 2600 still sold MORE.
And it didn't matter if a 1981 IBM PC was more powerful, it cost so much more that it was out of reach for many families....even the C64 was out of reach for many. It was mostly a toy of the upper middle class in my area.
But the PS3 already does Netflix and Facebook and casual games, plus a fuckton of PSone games either on disk or from PSN (PS2 games on disk as wel, if you have an older model), and if you don't want a PS3 there's the various Roku boxes, the higher end ones can do Angry Birds (and other games too I think)
Correct, but then what happend 3 or 4 years later...all those gamers who plugged joysticks into their C64 to play arcade games jumped to the easier to use NES which didn't have the disadvantages of the C64 disk drive, leaving only the larger disked game market behind (RPG's, Strategy games, various kinds of simulations) You have to remember, a bunch of those people who jumped to the 8-bit computers from the 2600, basically treated them EXACTLY as if they were consoles, just plugging in cartridge games or only knowing enough commands to be able to type load "#",8,1 on a c64 with a 1541.
And when tepples says multiple gamepads, he means more than 2.
(Japanese developers in general seem to have difficulty with the concept of a "game designer", as opposed to "game director" or "producer").
Yep, and it's not just Square-Enix. Raiden in MGS2 is what we get when someone doesn't tell Kojima, NO. Bait and switch heroes with whiny emo guy is NOT FUN. Lollipop Chainsaw is what we get when someone doesn't tell Suda51..NO Saga Frontier is what we get when someone doesn't tell that insane Koichi Ishii guy that Square should have got rid of sooner,...NO.
That's one reason Phil Fish made his "You Suck" comments at Japanese developers. He's right to a certain extent, their practices most certainly do suck, they just got away with it in the past in the console market because they had no real competition. Starting with the PSone, they had to compete on a more level playing field with US, UK and European developers. That's when their weaknesses started to show.
But Square doesn't get that. Mr. Miyamoto (of Nintendo) has a well-known personal mantra: "find the fun".
But even the Shiggy has his faults. In some ways, both The original Zelda and SMB3 are badly designed. Also, we have Shiggy to blame for the suckitude that is the N64 controller, since they let him have input into it's design. Never let Shiggy near hardware people.
[quote]They don't seem to see games as games, but as interactive stories. [/quote]
Yes, intereactive stories meant for conformist play that everyone is supposed to play the same way and have the exact same experience. They're playing a game alone, but playing the same game the same way every other japanese person is playing and not being the nail that sticks up.
That's partly what ruined FFXI, the conformism of the heavily japanese player base.
Personally, I blame Nomura. The latest Square games are about what you would expect from putting a character designer in charge of the game.
Why the hell would you put Nomura in charge of a game? Whose idea was that? He'd be likely to add some stupid "Belt Buckle Active Paradigm Ginsu-Gaiden Change System" or something.
Their portable division does much better -
of course, because making a PSP or DS game is like making a PSone or PS2 game, it means they don't have to adapt or change. You KNOW slow the Japanese developers are to adapt to new hardware. They'd rather keep making the same old tired niche grindfest 2D SRPG's for the otaku and their "excessively japanaphilic gaijin" counterparts in America, with the usual tropes and Moe stereotypes, than try something new.
We got Vaan and Penelo in FFXII because of that "moe obsession" and S-E's perception that a game with an adult hero wouldn't sell to the Japanese. (Because of Vagrant Story)
can recite both versions of "One Winged Angel" in two languages from memory)
That's easy all you need to know is a few lines of Latin and one of Japanese:
Estuans interius ira vehementi, estuans interius ira vehementi sephiroth.....sephiroth
Sons immanis, et innanis, sons immanis, et innanis
veni veni venias, ne me mori facias, veni veni venias ne me mori facias
The PSone easily has a better lineup than the N64. It even has better platform games than the N64 does. Yes that's right, I think any Spyro game is a better game than Mario 64. And if you want RPG's...well...you don't want the N64.
and hardware.
Ha Ha, no. Yes the N64 has more polygons and mip mapping and hardware z-buffering but that doesn't matter because of the limits of cartridges. Those cartridges also limit the music and sound. I can't stand the sound in N64 games. Also the massive amount of storage space let companies simply put more "stuff" in games. Not just FMV or Music but actual gameplay.
Oh lets say you have a portable gaming device with a web browser that does let you save stuff, a SNES emulator, but no unrar or unzip application....save as will do you no good. Now if said sight hosted the.smc or.nes directly, why then it wouldn't matter. Besides, zip or unrar isn't really necessary for such small files.
Oh I know it's essentially mainframes and terminals all over again. Didn't say otherwise. But it's what works, and advances in our technology have made that model more useful again.
most tablets I see are acting as wireless remotes for workstations.
You are a nerd who posts to slashdot, of course you're going to see that...and not realize that you and those people you are around who do that with their iPads are an edge case,
They don't seem to, remember they're not Slashdot nerds, they're happy playing Fruit Ninja, or Farmville, or Angry Birds, or some match 3 jewels game, or Garden of time. You get the picture.
But, every time I tried to download it, it prompted me for what program to open it in. And it only listed the ones that had registered themselves as being able to open.ZIP filesl the emulator was not among them. There was no option for "save the file locally, I'll handle opening it". None at all.
So in order to actually get it to work, I had to hook it up to my computer and copy the file over. Such a simple task, but it couldn't do it.
Maybe you should blame the ROM hosting site for putting dinky little GB/NES/SNES ROMs in a ZIP file instead of letting you just download the ROM directly, ZIPless, or at least give you the optoin to do so. There are devices with web browsers, that don't do ZIP.
No, but look what a PS Vita can do. Most users don't need a 300W GPU in a phone because they don't play games that would need one. Not everybody plays the "Manly Brown Personal Computer Shooter of the Week"
You, are a niche market. Sure they can make money off of you, but you are a niche and without the commodotization of PC's due to selling them to to the mass market and who would have been better served with something like an improved webtv device, or soupled up game console....your hardware will cost more.
You'll still be able to buy your traditional PC....from speciality manufactures that will charge you a price premium.
but PCs are going nowhere in the office where you need a large screen or two to efficiently do your job and a decent keyboard to do accurate typing.
Haven't been paying close attention in some offices these days, have you. Those thiny little boxes attached to the backs of monitors, or off to the side? Thin clients, not PC's.
while many devices have transcievers, we aren't hooking up morse code keys and tapping out CQ QSX on them as the equivalent of the Slashdot nerds of early hobbyist radio thought everyone would be doing. While a cell phone has a transciever it acts like a telephone....not a ham radio setup.
no, vim. Sure in the old days vi was guaranteed and vim wasn't, especially on the more obscure 'nixes. And yes, maybe using vi instead of vim was more important when 'nix boxes had 8MB of RAM or less and when every speck of HD space mattered. But for modern Linux, you can almost guarantee vim, unless the user actually went to the trouble of uninstalling it.
In fact, on Fedora, vi is provided by the vim-minimal package.
An inherent problem with zombie-based plots, is that no-one in them is allowed to have ever seen a zombie film, read a zombie comic, played House of the Dead etc. So they act stupid, which gets them killed, and if you're acting stupider than a zombie, that's pretty damn stupid.
In the TV shows aftershow, it was once mentioned by Kirkland that the TV show takes place in an alternate Walking Dead universe where George Romero never made the original Night of the Living Dead, so they don't have the "zombie movie/game" genre. That's why in the TV show they never call them zombies but always call them Walkers, while in the comic book they are sometimes called zombies.
The hero finds a perfect location - a police station with its own generator, hot water supply, a supply of guns and ammo, and the closest thing to an actual fortress that you'll find in a modern city. Eminently defensible. So he leaves after taking a shower. And wanders among the zombies wearing a short-sleeved shirt.
Yeah, I mentioned to a family member that the police station would have made a great place to set up a "base" and then slowly extend the "area of control" around it as they find more survivors. But he did leave it to find his family, though when he DID find them he should have rounded everyone up and took them back there....or found another police/sheriff/fire station or national guard armory close by the base camp.
Oh please, there's a big difference in the edge cases "you" are so single-minded on, like same-screen multiplayer games on the PC, and historic preservation or the Holocaust. You should know better.
I agree, but I must admit that it is rather funny to have someone who's slashdot username is inspired by "Master Control Program" to speak out for the "Users"
Sure it is! I am very lazy and one of the things I like about Linux is that I don't have to fuss with it. I set things up the way I like and they stay that way. And it's also nice that if I really wanted to go to the effort, I could set up cron to do certain things automatically for me.
Heck, I was as pleased as punch when I attached a printer to my first X86 Linux install and it configured it without me doing anything. Sure it might have been a little less fun than actually pulling up cups or whatever, but it was nice to not have to even bother.
And let me point you to an IBM page called "Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for the admins":
As a long-time Linux user, why would I feel a need for the masses to join me? Why does Linux need tons of non-technical users who are unlikely to appreciate and understand the Open Source ethic?
Because non-technical users deserve to use a quality free as in beer and speech computing experience too. In fact, there weas a time when computers themselves were only for technical users.
there's an old Jack Tramiel quote:
Computers for the masses not the classes.
I believe in the following:
Linux is also for the masses not just those who've taken programming classes.
Now you and I might dispute the quality of Linux or whether it's good enough for the masses to use, but that's another issue entirely.
Personally my first LInux was SCE's bastardized Kondara-ized Red Hat for the PS2. I'd been reading slashdot for a while and thought the Linux kit would be an interesting way to dip my toe into Linux and add more functionality to my PS2.
Now this was 2002, with what was essentially a Red Hat 6 or 6.1. I was smart enough to pick up some beginner LInux books before the kit arrived. I had the kit up and running for what most would consider basic computing needs within a day. I first compiled some downloaded source within a week, it was either Abiword or Gaim. My GPG key, was created on that PS2 Linux kit, and I have configuration files that originated from that kit. I am not a programmer and I learned to use a Linux that was LESS user-friendly than modern distros are, so why can't Linux be used by the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
The first mass market PC's that people actually played games on in any real numbers to really count were the Apple II, TRS 80 1, Commodore PET. Even the big name "home computers of the 80's" that were often used pretty similarly as game consoles came long after the 2600, Intellivision, Bally Arcade, Fairchild Channel F, Odyssey 2, etc. Sure a lot of C64's were sold of machines, but the 2600 still sold MORE.
And it didn't matter if a 1981 IBM PC was more powerful, it cost so much more that it was out of reach for many families....even the C64 was out of reach for many. It was mostly a toy of the upper middle class in my area.
But the PS3 already does Netflix and Facebook and casual games, plus a fuckton of PSone games either on disk or from PSN (PS2 games on disk as wel, if you have an older model), and if you don't want a PS3 there's the various Roku boxes, the higher end ones can do Angry Birds (and other games too I think)
But the major consoles can already DO casual games like Bejeweled, Panda Craze, Peggle, Angry Birds, etc.
Correct, but then what happend 3 or 4 years later...all those gamers who plugged joysticks into their C64 to play arcade games jumped to the easier to use NES which didn't have the disadvantages of the C64 disk drive, leaving only the larger disked game market behind (RPG's, Strategy games, various kinds of simulations) You have to remember, a bunch of those people who jumped to the 8-bit computers from the 2600, basically treated them EXACTLY as if they were consoles, just plugging in cartridge games or only knowing enough commands to be able to type load "#",8,1 on a c64 with a 1541.
And when tepples says multiple gamepads, he means more than 2.
(Japanese developers in general seem to have difficulty with the concept of a "game designer", as opposed to "game director" or "producer").
Yep, and it's not just Square-Enix. Raiden in MGS2 is what we get when someone doesn't tell Kojima, NO. Bait and switch heroes with whiny emo guy is NOT FUN. Lollipop Chainsaw is what we get when someone doesn't tell Suda51..NO Saga Frontier is what we get when someone doesn't tell that insane Koichi Ishii guy that Square should have got rid of sooner,...NO.
That's one reason Phil Fish made his "You Suck" comments at Japanese developers. He's right to a certain extent, their practices most certainly do suck, they just got away with it in the past in the console market because they had no real competition. Starting with the PSone, they had to compete on a more level playing field with US, UK and European developers. That's when their weaknesses started to show.
But Square doesn't get that. Mr. Miyamoto (of Nintendo) has a well-known personal mantra: "find the fun".
But even the Shiggy has his faults. In some ways, both The original Zelda and SMB3 are badly designed. Also, we have Shiggy to blame for the suckitude that is the N64 controller, since they let him have input into it's design. Never let Shiggy near hardware people.
[quote]They don't seem to see games as games, but as interactive stories. [/quote]
Yes, intereactive stories meant for conformist play that everyone is supposed to play the same way and have the exact same experience. They're playing a game alone, but playing the same game the same way every other japanese person is playing and not being the nail that sticks up.
That's partly what ruined FFXI, the conformism of the heavily japanese player base.
Personally, I blame Nomura. The latest Square games are about what you would expect from putting a character designer in charge of the game.
Why the hell would you put Nomura in charge of a game? Whose idea was that? He'd be likely to add some stupid "Belt Buckle Active Paradigm Ginsu-Gaiden Change System" or something.
Their portable division does much better -
of course, because making a PSP or DS game is like making a PSone or PS2 game, it means they don't have to adapt or change. You KNOW slow the Japanese developers are to adapt to new hardware. They'd rather keep making the same old tired niche grindfest 2D SRPG's for the otaku and their "excessively japanaphilic gaijin" counterparts in America, with the usual tropes and Moe stereotypes, than try something new.
We got Vaan and Penelo in FFXII because of that "moe obsession" and S-E's perception that a game with an adult hero wouldn't sell to the Japanese. (Because of Vagrant Story)
can recite both versions of "One Winged Angel" in two languages from memory)
That's easy all you need to know is a few lines of Latin and one of Japanese:
Estuans interius ira vehementi, estuans interius ira vehementi sephiroth.....sephiroth
Sons immanis, et innanis, sons immanis, et innanis
veni veni venias, ne me mori facias, veni veni venias ne me mori facias
Haryu no hanekata haryu no hanekata.
So the dude is "excessively japanophilic" and not just your usual FF/S=E fan's version of "limited Japanophilia"
despite Nintendo having superior games
Ha ha, no.
The PSone easily has a better lineup than the N64. It even has better platform games than the N64 does. Yes that's right, I think any Spyro game is a better game than Mario 64. And if you want RPG's...well...you don't want the N64.
and hardware.
Ha Ha, no. Yes the N64 has more polygons and mip mapping and hardware z-buffering but that doesn't matter because of the limits of cartridges. Those cartridges also limit the music and sound. I can't stand the sound in N64 games. Also the massive amount of storage space let companies simply put more "stuff" in games. Not just FMV or Music but actual gameplay.
Oh lets say you have a portable gaming device with a web browser that does let you save stuff, a SNES emulator, but no unrar or unzip application....save as will do you no good. Now if said sight hosted the .smc or .nes directly, why then it wouldn't matter. Besides, zip or unrar isn't really necessary for such small files.
Oh I know it's essentially mainframes and terminals all over again. Didn't say otherwise. But it's what works, and advances in our technology have made that model more useful again.
most tablets I see are acting as wireless remotes for workstations.
You are a nerd who posts to slashdot, of course you're going to see that...and not realize that you and those people you are around who do that with their iPads are an edge case,
They don't seem to, remember they're not Slashdot nerds, they're happy playing Fruit Ninja, or Farmville, or Angry Birds, or some match 3 jewels game, or Garden of time. You get the picture.
But, every time I tried to download it, it prompted me for what program to open it in. And it only listed the ones that had registered themselves as being able to open .ZIP filesl the emulator was not among them. There was no option for "save the file locally, I'll handle opening it". None at all.
So in order to actually get it to work, I had to hook it up to my computer and copy the file over. Such a simple task, but it couldn't do it.
Maybe you should blame the ROM hosting site for putting dinky little GB/NES/SNES ROMs in a ZIP file instead of letting you just download the ROM directly, ZIPless, or at least give you the optoin to do so. There are devices with web browsers, that don't do ZIP.
No, but look what a PS Vita can do. Most users don't need a 300W GPU in a phone because they don't play games that would need one. Not everybody plays the "Manly Brown Personal Computer Shooter of the Week"
You, are a niche market. Sure they can make money off of you, but you are a niche and without the commodotization of PC's due to selling them to to the mass market and who would have been better served with something like an improved webtv device, or soupled up game console....your hardware will cost more.
You'll still be able to buy your traditional PC....from speciality manufactures that will charge you a price premium.
but PCs are going nowhere in the office where you need a large screen or two to efficiently do your job and a decent keyboard to do accurate typing.
Haven't been paying close attention in some offices these days, have you. Those thiny little boxes attached to the backs of monitors, or off to the side? Thin clients, not PC's.
while many devices have transcievers, we aren't hooking up morse code keys and tapping out CQ QSX on them as the equivalent of the Slashdot nerds of early hobbyist radio thought everyone would be doing. While a cell phone has a transciever it acts like a telephone....not a ham radio setup.
And doesn't the N900 have an actual X server so you can use proper X11 forwarding over SSH as the goddess intended?
no, vim. Sure in the old days vi was guaranteed and vim wasn't, especially on the more obscure 'nixes. And yes, maybe using vi instead of vim was more important when 'nix boxes had 8MB of RAM or less and when every speck of HD space mattered. But for modern Linux, you can almost guarantee vim, unless the user actually went to the trouble of uninstalling it.
In fact, on Fedora, vi is provided by the vim-minimal package.
An inherent problem with zombie-based plots, is that no-one in them is allowed to have ever seen a zombie film, read a zombie comic, played House of the Dead etc. So they act stupid, which gets them killed, and if you're acting stupider than a zombie, that's pretty damn stupid.
In the TV shows aftershow, it was once mentioned by Kirkland that the TV show takes place in an alternate Walking Dead universe where George Romero never made the original Night of the Living Dead, so they don't have the "zombie movie/game" genre. That's why in the TV show they never call them zombies but always call them Walkers, while in the comic book they are sometimes called zombies.
The hero finds a perfect location - a police station with its own generator, hot water supply, a supply of guns and ammo, and the closest thing to an actual fortress that you'll find in a modern city. Eminently defensible. So he leaves after taking a shower. And wanders among the zombies wearing a short-sleeved shirt.
Yeah, I mentioned to a family member that the police station would have made a great place to set up a "base" and then slowly extend the "area of control" around it as they find more survivors. But he did leave it to find his family, though when he DID find them he should have rounded everyone up and took them back there....or found another police/sheriff/fire station or national guard armory close by the base camp.
Oh please, there's a big difference in the edge cases "you" are so single-minded on, like same-screen multiplayer games on the PC, and historic preservation or the Holocaust. You should know better.
you focus far too much thought on edge cases, it's a waste of your time.
Thats what QEMU is for.
I agree, but I must admit that it is rather funny to have someone who's slashdot username is inspired by "Master Control Program" to speak out for the "Users"
Linux is not for the lazy....plain and simple.
Sure it is! I am very lazy and one of the things I like about Linux is that I don't have to fuss with it. I set things up the way I like and they stay that way. And it's also nice that if I really wanted to go to the effort, I could set up cron to do certain things automatically for me.
Heck, I was as pleased as punch when I attached a printer to my first X86 Linux install and it configured it without me doing anything. Sure it might have been a little less fun than actually pulling up cups or whatever, but it was nice to not have to even bother.
And let me point you to an IBM page called "Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for the admins":
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-10sysadtips/
As a long-time Linux user, why would I feel a need for the masses to join me? Why does Linux need tons of non-technical users who are unlikely to appreciate and understand the Open Source ethic?
Because non-technical users deserve to use a quality free as in beer and speech computing experience too. In fact, there weas a time when computers themselves were only for technical users.
there's an old Jack Tramiel quote:
Computers for the masses not the classes.
I believe in the following:
Linux is also for the masses not just those who've taken programming classes.
Now you and I might dispute the quality of Linux or whether it's good enough for the masses to use, but that's another issue entirely.
Personally my first LInux was SCE's bastardized Kondara-ized Red Hat for the PS2. I'd been reading slashdot for a while and thought the Linux kit would be an interesting way to dip my toe into Linux and add more functionality to my PS2.
Now this was 2002, with what was essentially a Red Hat 6 or 6.1. I was smart enough to pick up some beginner LInux books before the kit arrived. I had the kit up and running for what most would consider basic computing needs within a day. I first compiled some downloaded source within a week, it was either Abiword or Gaim. My GPG key, was created on that PS2 Linux kit, and I have configuration files that originated from that kit. I am not a programmer and I learned to use a Linux that was LESS user-friendly than modern distros are, so why can't Linux be used by the masses.