Name one which was a traditional subscription-based MMORPG with regular updates. Since the "next-gen" consoles have hard drives, we might see a traditional subscription-based MMORPG with continuous updates, but it's the subscription-based and the continued updates that help curb piracy.
I'll name two PS2 games: Everquest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy XI, both with montly fees and both with regular updates. EQOA saved it's patches to the memory card, FFXI on the PS2 requires and came installed on the PS2 HD
okay, but how do you "know" that RTS's and strategy titles are "unplayable" on a console. Are you absolutely 100% sure that the interfaces couldn't be changed to work on a console controller?
Third, they're not always cheaper. Most of us need a computer for something or another, so if your main box doubles as your gaming box, the appropriate way to look at it is how much more you spent on the gaming box than what you would have needed. If all you do is word process and surf the Internet, you can get by great with a $500 computer. If you want to game, you can put together something modest for about $200 more than that, or a very good system for $600 more (the cost of a PS3).
Ahh, but you forget, the PS3 can run Linux, thus replacing that $500 PC.
Which games did you try using a console controller with? Personally I find that the controller works better for those FPS's (and third person shooters) that were designed with the console in mind, and not as well with ports of PC FPS's. For example I have no problem with using a Dual Shock with say SOCOM or Star Wars Battlefront, but with the PSone port of Quake II I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with it. So I plugged in the PSone mouse. When I play games like Deus Ex or Half-Life on the PS2, I plug in a USB optical wireless mouse. But I still move with the stick. I can't stand keyboard movement in action games, ugh I couldn't stand it back in the 80's and I can't stand it now.. I loathe WASD. Using the dual shock combined with a mouse may seem kludgy but it works well, for me anyway.
As for MMORPG's I played EQOA and FFXI on te PS2 before I quit because I couldn't justify paying the monthly fee for games I couldn't devote the necessary time to.
Serious players of EQOA and FFXI had keyboards. In EQOA the keyboard was used mostly for chat, you could control the game entirely with it but no one did because moving and camera adjusting worked better with the dual shock.
In FFXI, PS2 players mostly used their keyboards for chat and macros and again, movement was easier with the dual shock. Not even the PC players used their mice very much and most of them acknowledged that having a dual shock style controller for the game was a necessity.
Tons of art students in SL, as well as other artistic types, those who design things like jewelry or costumes in RL. Which explains the higher than average number of female players than your average online game.
SL is what the "player" makes of it. It has no goal, other than what you set for yourself.
Me, I hang with the SL fashionistas. I've done a bit of scripting with gadgets for the SL fashionistas in mind. I wander around and visit interesting places now and then, go listen to music now and then.
To this day I prefer the boxed set rules (and Mystara, the D&D gameworld) to any of the AD&D rulessets and worlds. The game system is streamlined, plays fast and you don't get bogged down in rules. And if you have the rules Cyclopedia, you have all the "standard" rules (for non-immortal charcters)in one book. And Mystara rocks! It's Hollow! Most of the cultures inside and outside are based on real-world cultures so players and DM's have an idea of what they're like, none of this Hegemony of Iggywiggyzorgleplop like in Greyhawk.
Poor people don't want to admit being poor, especially to a stranger, so might lie. saying they don't want internet access rather than saying they want it but feel they can't afford it/spare the money for a computer and ISP fees.
Mostly because nobody at work really believes that a toy could be cost effective for scientific compute. I disagree.
As well you should. Don't your colleagues know about the NCSA PS2 cluster? They proved that scientific work was feasible on game machines, especially with optimized code.
Planned outages (the wednesday downtimes) don't bother me, the unplanned stuff does, but they tend not to last as long as they used to, so that's an improvement.
Rolling restarts tend not to take too long, I don't consider them a major annoyance.
As for the recent reported inventory stuff, I haven't experienced that at all. Someone was reporting issues in a group IM once about their problems and everything was just fine for me. I'm using the First Look viewer
The client does need more work, but each newer major version has worked better overall than the previous one for me..
I don't do the Beta Grid, it's useless to me for what I do in SL. If I was a serious scripter/builder I'd think differently.
PS2's have temp sensors of some kind as I found out once. The thing started beeping and the red light started flashing, I was trying to figure out what was wrong, touched the thing noticed it was hot and then saw that the fan was blocked by an object behind it. (I can't remember what it was may have been a quilt).
Are you running the same SL I am? I remember the inventory troubles I used to have when SL hit over 10000 simultaneous users. They don't happen now even when it hits 30000. The client used to crash in the 1.10 days when I tried to run anything else, firefox, notepad, anything. Nowadays I could even run GIMP (I'm running the Windows version)
As for griefers I have this to say: What griefers? Maybe I don't hang in the places griefers do but I don't see them. Besides, griefers tend to avoid cultural/educational events.
Lets get this straight, Second Life is not a game. It's not WoW. It's a 3D virtual environment. You can play games within SL, but itself is not a game, but a platform. You can play games via IRC, but no one calls IRC a game, right?
g. I can't see how playing any game would help programming in the same way. If you play MS Flight Sim, you might actually learn something about airplanes, but if you click around a virtual classroom in Second Life, all you've learned from there is to click around in a game. Maybe a valuable skill for something else, but it won't make you a better programmer no matter how you want to slice it.
I take it you've not heard of LSL, the built in scripting language. From the LSL Wiki http://www.lslwiki.net///From the script library//Writen by Strife Onizuka//http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=Lib raryTextureSwitcher
float time = 30;//give me a value if you want time based shifting otherwise set to zero
That changes textures on a prim, it can easily be altered to do so by touch or by chat command. Slap this in a prim and it's a simple slideshow tool.
I'm guessing it would take a lot more than a week or two, including dealing with disruptions, pranks and whatnot. The pink flying penises aren't just a wisecrack, that's just what happened to someone's press release in SL.
If the host of the event had been competent, the attack wouldn't have happened. Turning off the creation of objects would have done the trick. Such attacks don't happen very often, the only reason that one was notable is because it was done to Anshe Chung a Land Baron who is disliked in certain segments of the SL community.
Your ordinary educational/scholarly event wouldn't experience such a thing.
Second Life is open source, official clients exist for Windows, OSX and Linux. It does require good 3D hardware but will run (sluggishly) on at least some integrated graphics chipsets.
Elf's a class in what I think of as "Classic" D&D, the Mentzer boxed sets, Basic to Immortal. There were optional rules in the Princess Ark series articles that let elves go Paladin and I think some optional stuff in the Rules Cyclopedia (which put the rules from teh boxed sets into one book)
You're forgetting the PS3, though it's not a media extender yet. It can play media from USB storage though. It's got that built in web browser too, so you could download content directly to it and bypass the PC. It's also a PC too.
Sony is a Japanese company, they have small houses in Japan, so integrated devices sell, like the PS2/DVR combo device called the PSX.
Also these multimedia functions supplied with the PS3 were actually promised for the PS2. They got them in Japan with the BBN, which was not released outside of Japan. The rest of us are just catching up to what they've had for years.
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I'll name two PS2 games: Everquest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy XI, both with montly fees and both with regular updates. EQOA saved it's patches to the memory card, FFXI on the PS2 requires and came installed on the PS2 HD
Ahh, but you forget, the PS3 can run Linux, thus replacing that $500 PC.
Which games did you try using a console controller with? Personally I find that the controller works better for those FPS's (and third person shooters) that were designed with the console in mind, and not as well with ports of PC FPS's. For example I have no problem with using a Dual Shock with say SOCOM or Star Wars Battlefront, but with the PSone port of Quake II I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with it. So I plugged in the PSone mouse. When I play games like Deus Ex or Half-Life on the PS2, I plug in a USB optical wireless mouse. But I still move with the stick. I can't stand keyboard movement in action games, ugh I couldn't stand it back in the 80's and I can't stand it now.. I loathe WASD. Using the dual shock combined with a mouse may seem kludgy but it works well, for me anyway.
As for MMORPG's I played EQOA and FFXI on te PS2 before I quit because I couldn't justify paying the monthly fee for games I couldn't devote the necessary time to.
Serious players of EQOA and FFXI had keyboards. In EQOA the keyboard was used mostly for chat, you could control the game entirely with it but no one did because moving and camera adjusting worked better with the dual shock.
In FFXI, PS2 players mostly used their keyboards for chat and macros and again, movement was easier with the dual shock. Not even the PC players used their mice very much and most of them acknowledged that having a dual shock style controller for the game was a necessity.
Isn't UT3 being released for the PS3 and Xbox360 too? Why yes, yes they are.
As for Blizzard, turning their backs on the console market that gave them their start is rather short-sighted.
Think about all those Diablo clones that have been and are being sold for the PS2, PS3, and PSP. A market that Blizzard doesn't have a piece of.
I Iremember it, but I'm a former WebTV user.
Tons of art students in SL, as well as other artistic types, those who design things like jewelry or costumes in RL. Which explains the higher than average number of female players than your average online game.
I have said this before:
SL is what the "player" makes of it. It has no goal, other than what you set for yourself.
Me, I hang with the SL fashionistas. I've done a bit of scripting with gadgets for the SL fashionistas in mind. I wander around and visit interesting places now and then, go listen to music now and then.
PST/PDT is that standard time of SL, events are listed in that timezone, the client constantly shows the time in that timezone.
To this day I prefer the boxed set rules (and Mystara, the D&D gameworld) to any of the AD&D rulessets and worlds. The game system is streamlined, plays fast and you don't get bogged down in rules. And if you have the rules Cyclopedia, you have all the "standard" rules (for non-immortal charcters)in one book. And Mystara rocks! It's Hollow! Most of the cultures inside and outside are based on real-world cultures so players and DM's have an idea of what they're like, none of this Hegemony of Iggywiggyzorgleplop like in Greyhawk.
the grandparent has a point because:
Poor people don't want to admit being poor, especially to a stranger, so might lie. saying they don't want internet access rather than saying they want it but feel they can't afford it/spare the money for a computer and ISP fees.
It's a fat PS2 of course, with an HD in it. I've had uptimes of over a month easy. IIRC I hit 100 days once.
As well you should. Don't your colleagues know about the NCSA PS2 cluster? They proved that scientific work was feasible on game machines, especially with optimized code.
Planned outages (the wednesday downtimes) don't bother me, the unplanned stuff does, but they tend not to last as long as they used to, so that's an improvement.
Rolling restarts tend not to take too long, I don't consider them a major annoyance.
As for the recent reported inventory stuff, I haven't experienced that at all. Someone was reporting issues in a group IM once about their problems and everything was just fine for me. I'm using the First Look viewer
The client does need more work, but each newer major version has worked better overall than the previous one for me..
I don't do the Beta Grid, it's useless to me for what I do in SL. If I was a serious scripter/builder I'd think differently.
PS2's have temp sensors of some kind as I found out once. The thing started beeping and the red light started flashing, I was trying to figure out what was wrong, touched the thing noticed it was hot and then saw that the fan was blocked by an object behind it. (I can't remember what it was may have been a quilt).
If the PS2 had it, I bet the PS3 does too.
Shit no, Sony builds them to take a lot of punishment (at least CPU wise) Let's see how long is midgar's (my ps2 Linux kit's) uptime
3:34pm up 11 days, 23:20, 2 users, (I've telnetted in from the windows box, I was running Second Life) load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
Would be longer if it wasn't for the damn power outages, thing runs 24/7 otherwise.
Autodownload feature? I'd not heard of that, is it similar to the ability to set the PSP to download audio/video via RSS at a specific time?
SL on Vista with ATI cards is still a problem that was just mentioned on the blog, don't know about Nvidia
.
Are you running the same SL I am? I remember the inventory troubles I used to have when SL hit over 10000 simultaneous users. They don't happen now even when it hits 30000. The client used to crash in the 1.10 days when I tried to run anything else, firefox, notepad, anything. Nowadays I could even run GIMP (I'm running the Windows version)
As for griefers I have this to say: What griefers? Maybe I don't hang in the places griefers do but I don't see them. Besides, griefers tend to avoid cultural/educational events.
I take it you've not heard of LSL, the built in scripting language. From the LSL Wiki http://www.lslwiki.net/
float time = 30;
integer total;
integer counter;
next()
{
string name = llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_TEXTURE,counter);
if(name == "")
{
total = llGetInventoryNumber(INVENTORY_TEXTURE);
counter = 0;
if(total = total)
total = llGetInventoryNumber(INVENTORY_TEXTURE);
llSetTexture(name
if(total)
counter = (counter + 1) % total;
}
default
{
state_entry()
{
total = llGetInventoryNumber(INVENTORY_TEXTURE);
next();
llSetTimerEvent(time);
}
timer()
{
next();
}
}
That changes textures on a prim, it can easily be altered to do so by touch or by chat command. Slap this in a prim and it's a simple slideshow tool.
If the host of the event had been competent, the attack wouldn't have happened. Turning off the creation of objects would have done the trick. Such attacks don't happen very often, the only reason that one was notable is because it was done to Anshe Chung a Land Baron who is disliked in certain segments of the SL community.
Your ordinary educational/scholarly event wouldn't experience such a thing.
Second Life is open source, official clients exist for Windows, OSX and Linux. It does require good 3D hardware but will run (sluggishly) on at least some integrated graphics chipsets.
Elf's a class in what I think of as "Classic" D&D, the Mentzer boxed sets, Basic to Immortal. There were optional rules in the Princess Ark series articles that let elves go Paladin and I think some optional stuff in the Rules Cyclopedia (which put the rules from teh boxed sets into one book)
You're forgetting the PS3, though it's not a media extender yet. It can play media from USB storage though. It's got that built in web browser too, so you could download content directly to it and bypass the PC. It's also a PC too.
Shouldn't SDL be enough for most kids games? I've ran SDL based stuff on a PS2 Linux kit (which also doesn't have hardware 3D)
Sony is a Japanese company, they have small houses in Japan, so integrated devices sell, like the PS2/DVR combo device called the PSX.
Also these multimedia functions supplied with the PS3 were actually promised for the PS2. They got them in Japan with the BBN, which was not released outside of Japan. The rest of us are just catching up to what they've had for years.
They ask the G.A.P. of course (Gamer Advisory Panel) aren't you a member? They ask G.A.P. members lots of surveys.