EA is trying anyway. You're right, they could've just released new rosters and said the old controller was enough. They didn't just phone it in. If they actually get rebounding sorta right-ish in NBALive after so many years of painfully bad results, Heck will at least be a little cooler. Maybe not Hell...
EA was among the earliest 3rd-party developers to show major projects on the Wii, and from the start they were talking about Madden and how the controller would work. It's clear they've spent some thought on what a new controller might mean for their franchises.
And yeah, they are franchise games. Go figger, EA is known for sports titles, and they will continue to make titles for the major US sports (except baseball now) and some for the rest of the world. Yes, I would personally be very interested in a Rugby title similar to their existing games, but apparently that doesn't have enough market behind it.
As for the Wii, my biggest fear is that their controller will be hard to use, which means less console sales and less games by 3rd parties. Their graphics are not on par with the other next gen consoles so that makes them look even less attractive to 3rd party developers who are in competition with each other to make the latest and greatest in a sea of games...
...The deciding facor to ANY console's future is getting the majority of GOOD 3rd party games.
The other side of the third party coin, though, is that the new HD-image games are far more expensive to develop. Nintendo is partly trying to counter that with the Wii's older tech and lower resolution; you aren't at the level of producing a Hollywood movie to crank out a game with this one, is the idea. Turning out a King Kong-level game for the Sony and MS systems is an expensive, and high-risk, proposition, in a way that won't be true for the Wii.
What Nintendo desperately needs is to make the Wii, and its funky controller, easy for the third party studios to develop for. If it's clunky to use or to develop for, yep, Nintendo may be cooked.
(My money's on: Sony and MS have overshot the HDTV market, which isn't as mature as they'd projected. This Christmas's must buy is going to be a Wii. I have 12-year-olds, I know what they're talking about at least in my kids' circle of friends. The kids who pooled their money to buy an original XBox can't afford a 360, let alone a PS3. I'm a Netflix junkie and love the idea of wide screen movies, but the HD monitor thing isn't there yet for me, not at the total cost of a monitor even before the $500 console. Sure seems like Nintendo's got the sweet spot this time around, at least in prospect.)
I bought a nice HDTV and I will only invest in a new system if it has both DVI/HDMI and HDDVD/BluRay. When CD's came out, I stopped buying cassettes. When DVD came out, I stopped buying VHS. I've already stopped buying DVD's and am saving my money for HD disks of any kind. I am a technophile, I can't help it.
Clearly you're the market for both MS's and Sony's new systems.
Those of us who haven't "invested" in an HDTV system basically look at those two products and say to ourselves, "Eh, the cost comes to maybe $1500 to see the zing in these pretty pictures. Even then I'm probably paying more for the games, too."
I wonder what percentage of the market you represent. HDTV "market penetration" is maybe something like 25% of the worldwide TV market in a couple of stories I just Googled up... My sense is that Sony and MS wanted to catch the breaking wave of HDTV, but that they've overshot me personally. And I'm a hardcore DVD lover, a Netflix junkie and so on. There's just nothing to compel me to step on this treadmill of higher costs right now.
You're right (but that applies to radios too)
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While driving, I argue that there is one task and one task alone that should be getting full spation reasoning awareness: driving.
I agree in principle that just reading off menu items to us is adding a level of abstraction, not simplifying anything. We haven't really seen how this would work, but it sounds like nothing much new. (Pre-OS X Macs certainly did this too.)
The thing about cars is, radios and cells phones are also distracting. When each of those came out people said they distracted from people's driving, and despite our unthinking acceptance even radios really do that, you know? We're not just talking about spatial reasoning to figure out where on the dial we are left to right, we're talking about a device that deliberately obscures the sounds of traffic. Those shuddering bass-heavy cars thumpa-thumping at intersections can't possibly hear an ambulance. Let's not even start on cell phones.
If they had to choose one thing to concentrate on, and okay obviously they don't, I'd tell Apple engineers to work out the stupid line-to-my-car-stereo thing. Yeah, I know there are options, and they're all too expensive and cumbersome. In reach with an easy hookup, please. In general car interiors get a ton of attention and still suck. It's amazing how the cup holders are crucially important to drivers, and turn out to be flimsy and awkward in so many cars. Just turn a little of that Apple attention to making things simpler there.
why not just go to Target, pick up a cheap football, go to a park, and...play football? Compared to the price of getting 10 gaming systems, 10 copies of the game, 10 online subscriptions, and coordinating the same time to get all 10 of your friends together it's far too much effort.
It's ironic, but anyone who's seen a "life of the big star" thing about sports players knows that, nowadays, they all play these games. Kevin Garnett actually plays himself in NBALive. Yeah, he could go dunk it any time he wants, too, just like I could go to the park in Minneaoplis and play in the snow and the stiff wind chill with my friends.
Sean Alexander knows what he's talking about partly because he plays it too -- and he and his 10 friends do have the kind of money they need for a network setup.
Basketball is a great example of this failing you point out. Depending on the game, you might find a scheme that you like okay -- but no game really gives you the flexibility you need to get things just right, and it's not like there are that many possibilities. (I always want to be in the guy with the ball. I always want to be the point guard. I always want to be X player.)
Even in soccer, otherwise excellent games often have a "switch you into the defender when you're running the opposite way" bug. Argh.
Maybe online play would actually drive some thought about how this feature works for single player, too. It could only be a good thing. There's nothing like the dork in online play who would always switch into the star, you know?
there's little motivation to innovate. We certainly haven't seen EA do much in that area...
Are you kidding? Their franchise modes lack a new conspicuous feature every year!
On the other hand, their game play -- I mean, how many NBALives has it been now where rebounding is utterly and completely unrealistic and bizarre? There's some continuity there. If they were innovating per their usual style, some years you wouldn't be able to jump, and others your arms wouldn't reach for the ball...
They wear altogether too much padding and gear nowadays for you to break ribs. A good turtle pad and the only thing you'll be breaking is your metatarsals, you tough talker you. Maybe on sub-par pads you could knock the kid's wind out if you catch her right. (Bully.)
Ironically, the one thing the Web does seem to really be offering us is trash talk... Which is the one thing we can verify you actually like to do in real life.;-)
The purpose is to gain as much marketshare as possible as quickly as possible at whatever cost necessary.
Oh yeah, that couldn't be more clear. The question I have is:
Throw money at consumer.
Next gen: throw more money at consumer.
...?
...?
"gigantic long term gains"!
Steps 3 and 4 don't quite seem to be getting off the ground, here, whatever they are. They aren't "Now that we've got businesses locked into Office Suites, we'll make them upgrade." I "got" that. Apparently we'll see in the next five years -- over which time MS plans to blow another cool few billion trying to win over fickle gamers?
Apple's approach has been different with the iPod and iTunes. The business model is profitable, and the iTunes music store was a loss leader driving iPod sales. The gains came right up front, and they got their market share by shaping an emerging market because they'd shown they understood it better than the competition. Seems like an actual viable business strategy, not dot-com logic with a monopoly keeping it alive.
But this feels like trolling -- deliberately saying or doing something controversial, to draw attention.
Oh, absolutely, this is a troll. All ads try to draw attention; this one tries to do it by shocking the viewer.
The gaming industry probably is due for an explosion of ads. It makes a lot of money, and yet the commercials I see very occasionally are running on kids' shows in the afternoon or something. If Nintendo's really trying to blow the market open and appeal to something beyond the usual gaming market, you'd think they'd want to run some prime time ads.
This is also, like beer, one of the industries that can be free wheeling with its ad strategies. Airlines can't advertise with much humor or self-deprecation without taking a big risk, so you get classy commercials -- "Rhapsody in Blue" and that United livery airliner backlit by the sun, you know? Whereas beer can be funny in offhand, goofy ways and take some risks.
I betcha we get more of this style of ad. This one is past what the U.S. would tolerate, but trolls, as John Dvorak or any sports columnist can tell you, get the eyeballs. They work.
The worst thing I've run into with Apple's DRM policy -- and I've never had it actually obstruct something I was trying to do, just noticed it -- was a change in policy so that I could only burn 7 copies of an identical playlist rather than 10.
Essentially all the WMA options selling DRM'ed files have more restrictive policies. Napster to go: pay a subscription fee, then pay per burn for each song. And so on, with many variations. They've all got similar problems with format lock-in, obviously -- with the added question of whether their various supported formats will be supported if, say, Real goes out of the business.
They are all DRM'd files, that I'll give you. To varying degrees, and iTunes is the one I've bought from and never had to think about at all.
Microsoft makes money in the Windows division. MS has lost around $7 Billion in the last four years on divisions like the XBox and MSN. They've got their essential monopoly in the PC market, and they're using it for forays into other areas -- none of which has been that successful.
Given that, this supposed plan to pay for licenses to everything you've bought on iTunes does fit MS's established M.O.... which is to lose reams of money trying to gain market share, just as you say. Xbox/360 market share today is something like 34 percent. Bought at ruinous cost.
The difference between MS and Apple here couldn't be clearer. The iPod has been out since October 2001. Five years of incredible profitability for Apple later, MS has figured out how to lose scads of money in order to attempt to catch up? Gee, can they purchase 30% of the market this way? How ambitious!
I'm not a particular fanboy of Generallissimo Steve Jobs, but he's had his own "iPod killers" more than once since 2001; the mini was their best-selling model when he replaced it...
They can't exist in third place for much longer...
Nintendo is profitable. They make money on their current consoles and games. By contrast, Microsoft's lost $7 billion in the last four years trying to gain market share with the Xbox and stuff like MSN.
It may be that Nintendo needs more market share -- I've heard arguments either way. You could make just as good an argument for MS's XBox division being in crisis as for Nintendo, though.
Soulblighter is still extremely fun, still playable and respectable after all these years.
I remember the press releases when Bungie sold out. Eck.
This industry is missing Infocom
on
Five That Fell
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Infocom did more with text inside of five years than the entire first person shooter genre has done in its lifetime.
My personal favorite was "Suspended." You were in a cryogenic state, only able to interact with remote robots to bring a group of out-of-whack computers into working shape again. Each robot had its own abilities and senses -- they rolled or walked, one could smell, and so on. The puzzles made you work at them, and this was one game where the packaging and manual and so on really helped and were necessary. I remember the laminated map vividly. It was the complete package.
The gaming industry should be looking to people like those Infocom writers and Dani Bunten as its prophets. Instead we get John Carmack opinion in nauseating detail about the latest graphic cards.
It's important to remember this is still speculation.
If the news here was in any way important, remembering it would be more important, I guess....
Still, your basic point is solid: predicting Nintendo's actions based on those of Microsoft as a precedent might be a liiiittle bit unreliable. You think? I think.
This is primarily a replacement for the eMac, aimed at the educational insitutions.
Absolutely. Apple's own page for this product has a "Learn More" sidebar about how "(t)o learn about how schools and universities are using iMac computers in their classrooms."
This is what it is -- the latest eMac, basically.
Whenever Apple releases a new system, it gets a certain amount of flak because it's not everything to everyone. BMW makes a go cart, calls it the Mini, and people don't jump on it because it doesn't carry what a Ford F-150 will... Apple makes their own Mini and a certain set of people say it won't cut it in the graphic designer market.
Personally I'm strongly considering a Mac Book, and yeah, I know it won't play games on the graphics card.
Sure does sound like the attitude that employees "suck" created the circumstances in which this little exploit was possible in the first place. First and most obvious example: a 90-day renewal policies on passwords only make your passwords more likely to be crackable, because people are choosing passwords they can more easily remember. That's exactly the sort of corrosive pressure that'll make otherwise security-conscious employees try to cut corners just to get their jobs done.
Technical support people develop the attitude you're showing when they've been in environments where the users are constantly pressuring the security mechanisms. The underlying problem isn't the users. FBI employees in general are as dedicated as anyone to their jobs. It's the security model that sucks; they perceive it, eventually, as one more obstacle to work around.
Now, if you want to ask some hard questions about why a consultant is in anything like a sensitive position, then I will be entertaining this "sucks" conversation. Again, it's gonna be a conversation about any system that requires consultants instead of full time employees for something like law enforcement on this level.
Total cost of ownership for either the Xbox 360 or the PS3 would be well over a grand for me. Remember, you have to have the HD screen too.
But then again those adults in the 20-30 area with disposable income is the target of the 360...
You're talking to a kid who played Utopia on the Intellivision, the original Civ, Ultima III, and M.U.L.E. for more hours than I could estimate accurately. I'm in my 30s, have disposable income to spare. I also have my kids eager as can be for the Wii. I've never bought a console in my life with my own money, and will probably be doing this one.
Personally I imagine both Sony and MS overreached, banking on market saturation by HD sets that isn't close to being here. You describe a target market that's in its 20s but eagerly spending $1500 on a game console, basically. Or if we assume the PS3 and 360's markets are only people who'd have an HD monitor already, how much does that cut the potential market right off the bat? I dunno... one of these three companies is trying to expand its market, and the other two seem doggedly to be trying to force their existing market to swallow bigger and bigger lumps of cost...
The stories aren't that funny. They're more... unsettling. At our University's computer labs, back before everyone was wireless and anyone used such things, we got well more than our share of people who just plain had no sense of public vs. private spaces.
The lab had a policy that said it was for academic use only. Okay, sit and chat with your friends, we understand. Just don't make too big a deal of it, or don't conspicuously do so when people are waiting to write their semester's last big paper, you know? But they were far beyond that point.
I understand looking at images over the Web. Why a person would want to not only view said pictures amid the rows of co-eds around him, but also to print out those images on a black-and-white laser printer, I do not know. We got more than a few people doing just that. They'd leave the printouts stacking up on the shared printer, and then go over after they'd run off ten or twenty to collect them from amid the History essays.
I do admit the 360 has done everything right in their launch and of course they are going to be on top for quite a while.
Personally I'm around a lot of 12-year-old kids, having 12-year-old twins myself. The 360 system has zero buzz to it. Nothing.
My son's best friend has an original X-Box. He and his older brother saved up and got one, at enormous expense for them. They're among the few families I know who have a big HD screen, too, so that's the market for the 360 and the PS3. They have no intention of buying a 360, because it's out of their price range and because their original XBox is fried now. That was a ton of money for kids to spend on a piece of hardware that can't take it, you know? They remember stuff like that. So in the case I know personally MS has lost the market, even among kids who previously bought their product.
MS also wanted to break into the Japanese market, supposedly went out of their way to encourage RPGs and so on in the release titles just to appeal there. Brzzt! A few months in they were underselling the GameCube -- not just the PS2, the GameCube -- in that market.
Sony's flak is answering a question about X-Box 360 prices and those for the PS3. He didn't actually mention Activision, but here's the paragraph you mean:
The price of video games is currently a subject of great debate in the industry, with publishers such as Activision maintaining that a price increase is needed to cover next generation development costs. Conversely, many developers feel games are too expensive, as evidenced in Gamasutra's recent podcast featuring Brian Eddy of Midway Games and Bethesda Software's Todd Howard.
Hey, Your Mileage May Vary as they say, but I don't see where that sentence about Activision lays the land out any differently. Kaz Hirai says, in so many words: 'They might be a little higher than 60 bucks, but we won't suddenly double the price.' I notice he's not responding to the other developers who say the things are already too pricey, either... No hint of his saying "Yeah, we're going to be a lot cheaper than 360 titles," or in any way softening the idea that HD titles are pricey to turn out.
It sure reads like he thinks the price of games is going up in the next gen machines, inevitably, but that he doesn't think consumers are ready for a big increase to begin with...
Pointing a flashlight at a wall and making the spot of light go up and down probably has as much right to be called a video game and it's about as much fun.
My older brother and I, back when we slept in bunk beds, used to shine flashlights and chase each other's lights around the ceiling. Come to think of it, that was before Pong rocked our world. The flashlight game was a lot of fun.
How well I remember that epochal moment when, at Grandma's house on vacation, we discovered Pong. Grandma had it connected to her remote controlled TV set. (The remote caused the physical channel dial to turn, ka-chunk ka-chunk, around.) Pong was a heck of a party game, mostly because you couldn't play it solo. The AI for a computer paddle opponent wasn't quite there yet.
On the plus side: essentially no load time! Flip the switch and it's on, baby.
Slashdot Mirror
EA is trying anyway. You're right, they could've just released new rosters and said the old controller was enough. They didn't just phone it in. If they actually get rebounding sorta right-ish in NBALive after so many years of painfully bad results, Heck will at least be a little cooler. Maybe not Hell...
EA was among the earliest 3rd-party developers to show major projects on the Wii, and from the start they were talking about Madden and how the controller would work. It's clear they've spent some thought on what a new controller might mean for their franchises.
And yeah, they are franchise games. Go figger, EA is known for sports titles, and they will continue to make titles for the major US sports (except baseball now) and some for the rest of the world. Yes, I would personally be very interested in a Rugby title similar to their existing games, but apparently that doesn't have enough market behind it.
As for the Wii, my biggest fear is that their controller will be hard to use, which means less console sales and less games by 3rd parties. Their graphics are not on par with the other next gen consoles so that makes them look even less attractive to 3rd party developers who are in competition with each other to make the latest and greatest in a sea of games...
...The deciding facor to ANY console's future is getting the majority of GOOD 3rd party games.
The other side of the third party coin, though, is that the new HD-image games are far more expensive to develop. Nintendo is partly trying to counter that with the Wii's older tech and lower resolution; you aren't at the level of producing a Hollywood movie to crank out a game with this one, is the idea. Turning out a King Kong-level game for the Sony and MS systems is an expensive, and high-risk, proposition, in a way that won't be true for the Wii.
What Nintendo desperately needs is to make the Wii, and its funky controller, easy for the third party studios to develop for. If it's clunky to use or to develop for, yep, Nintendo may be cooked.
(My money's on: Sony and MS have overshot the HDTV market, which isn't as mature as they'd projected. This Christmas's must buy is going to be a Wii. I have 12-year-olds, I know what they're talking about at least in my kids' circle of friends. The kids who pooled their money to buy an original XBox can't afford a 360, let alone a PS3. I'm a Netflix junkie and love the idea of wide screen movies, but the HD monitor thing isn't there yet for me, not at the total cost of a monitor even before the $500 console. Sure seems like Nintendo's got the sweet spot this time around, at least in prospect.)
I bought a nice HDTV and I will only invest in a new system if it has both DVI/HDMI and HDDVD/BluRay. When CD's came out, I stopped buying cassettes. When DVD came out, I stopped buying VHS. I've already stopped buying DVD's and am saving my money for HD disks of any kind. I am a technophile, I can't help it.
Clearly you're the market for both MS's and Sony's new systems.
Those of us who haven't "invested" in an HDTV system basically look at those two products and say to ourselves, "Eh, the cost comes to maybe $1500 to see the zing in these pretty pictures. Even then I'm probably paying more for the games, too."
I wonder what percentage of the market you represent. HDTV "market penetration" is maybe something like 25% of the worldwide TV market in a couple of stories I just Googled up... My sense is that Sony and MS wanted to catch the breaking wave of HDTV, but that they've overshot me personally. And I'm a hardcore DVD lover, a Netflix junkie and so on. There's just nothing to compel me to step on this treadmill of higher costs right now.
While driving, I argue that there is one task and one task alone that should be getting full spation reasoning awareness: driving.
I agree in principle that just reading off menu items to us is adding a level of abstraction, not simplifying anything. We haven't really seen how this would work, but it sounds like nothing much new. (Pre-OS X Macs certainly did this too.)
The thing about cars is, radios and cells phones are also distracting. When each of those came out people said they distracted from people's driving, and despite our unthinking acceptance even radios really do that, you know? We're not just talking about spatial reasoning to figure out where on the dial we are left to right, we're talking about a device that deliberately obscures the sounds of traffic. Those shuddering bass-heavy cars thumpa-thumping at intersections can't possibly hear an ambulance. Let's not even start on cell phones.
If they had to choose one thing to concentrate on, and okay obviously they don't, I'd tell Apple engineers to work out the stupid line-to-my-car-stereo thing. Yeah, I know there are options, and they're all too expensive and cumbersome. In reach with an easy hookup, please. In general car interiors get a ton of attention and still suck. It's amazing how the cup holders are crucially important to drivers, and turn out to be flimsy and awkward in so many cars. Just turn a little of that Apple attention to making things simpler there.
why not just go to Target, pick up a cheap football, go to a park, and...play football? Compared to the price of getting 10 gaming systems, 10 copies of the game, 10 online subscriptions, and coordinating the same time to get all 10 of your friends together it's far too much effort.
It's ironic, but anyone who's seen a "life of the big star" thing about sports players knows that, nowadays, they all play these games. Kevin Garnett actually plays himself in NBALive. Yeah, he could go dunk it any time he wants, too, just like I could go to the park in Minneaoplis and play in the snow and the stiff wind chill with my friends.
Sean Alexander knows what he's talking about partly because he plays it too -- and he and his 10 friends do have the kind of money they need for a network setup.
Even in soccer, otherwise excellent games often have a "switch you into the defender when you're running the opposite way" bug. Argh.
Maybe online play would actually drive some thought about how this feature works for single player, too. It could only be a good thing. There's nothing like the dork in online play who would always switch into the star, you know?
there's little motivation to innovate. We certainly haven't seen EA do much in that area...
Are you kidding? Their franchise modes lack a new conspicuous feature every year!
On the other hand, their game play -- I mean, how many NBALives has it been now where rebounding is utterly and completely unrealistic and bizarre? There's some continuity there. If they were innovating per their usual style, some years you wouldn't be able to jump, and others your arms wouldn't reach for the ball...
They wear altogether too much padding and gear nowadays for you to break ribs. A good turtle pad and the only thing you'll be breaking is your metatarsals, you tough talker you. Maybe on sub-par pads you could knock the kid's wind out if you catch her right. (Bully.)
Ironically, the one thing the Web does seem to really be offering us is trash talk... Which is the one thing we can verify you actually like to do in real life. ;-)
The purpose is to gain as much marketshare as possible as quickly as possible at whatever cost necessary.
Oh yeah, that couldn't be more clear. The question I have is:
Steps 3 and 4 don't quite seem to be getting off the ground, here, whatever they are. They aren't "Now that we've got businesses locked into Office Suites, we'll make them upgrade." I "got" that. Apparently we'll see in the next five years -- over which time MS plans to blow another cool few billion trying to win over fickle gamers?
Apple's approach has been different with the iPod and iTunes. The business model is profitable, and the iTunes music store was a loss leader driving iPod sales. The gains came right up front, and they got their market share by shaping an emerging market because they'd shown they understood it better than the competition. Seems like an actual viable business strategy, not dot-com logic with a monopoly keeping it alive.
But this feels like trolling -- deliberately saying or doing something controversial, to draw attention.
Oh, absolutely, this is a troll. All ads try to draw attention; this one tries to do it by shocking the viewer.
The gaming industry probably is due for an explosion of ads. It makes a lot of money, and yet the commercials I see very occasionally are running on kids' shows in the afternoon or something. If Nintendo's really trying to blow the market open and appeal to something beyond the usual gaming market, you'd think they'd want to run some prime time ads.
This is also, like beer, one of the industries that can be free wheeling with its ad strategies. Airlines can't advertise with much humor or self-deprecation without taking a big risk, so you get classy commercials -- "Rhapsody in Blue" and that United livery airliner backlit by the sun, you know? Whereas beer can be funny in offhand, goofy ways and take some risks.
I betcha we get more of this style of ad. This one is past what the U.S. would tolerate, but trolls, as John Dvorak or any sports columnist can tell you, get the eyeballs. They work.
"Just as chock full of DRM as the ipod"?
The worst thing I've run into with Apple's DRM policy -- and I've never had it actually obstruct something I was trying to do, just noticed it -- was a change in policy so that I could only burn 7 copies of an identical playlist rather than 10.
Essentially all the WMA options selling DRM'ed files have more restrictive policies. Napster to go: pay a subscription fee, then pay per burn for each song. And so on, with many variations. They've all got similar problems with format lock-in, obviously -- with the added question of whether their various supported formats will be supported if, say, Real goes out of the business.
They are all DRM'd files, that I'll give you. To varying degrees, and iTunes is the one I've bought from and never had to think about at all.
Microsoft makes money in the Windows division. MS has lost around $7 Billion in the last four years on divisions like the XBox and MSN. They've got their essential monopoly in the PC market, and they're using it for forays into other areas -- none of which has been that successful.
Given that, this supposed plan to pay for licenses to everything you've bought on iTunes does fit MS's established M.O.... which is to lose reams of money trying to gain market share, just as you say. Xbox/360 market share today is something like 34 percent. Bought at ruinous cost.
The difference between MS and Apple here couldn't be clearer. The iPod has been out since October 2001. Five years of incredible profitability for Apple later, MS has figured out how to lose scads of money in order to attempt to catch up? Gee, can they purchase 30% of the market this way? How ambitious!
I'm not a particular fanboy of Generallissimo Steve Jobs, but he's had his own "iPod killers" more than once since 2001; the mini was their best-selling model when he replaced it...
They can't exist in third place for much longer...
Nintendo is profitable. They make money on their current consoles and games. By contrast, Microsoft's lost $7 billion in the last four years trying to gain market share with the Xbox and stuff like MSN.
It may be that Nintendo needs more market share -- I've heard arguments either way. You could make just as good an argument for MS's XBox division being in crisis as for Nintendo, though.
Soulblighter is still extremely fun, still playable and respectable after all these years.
I remember the press releases when Bungie sold out. Eck.
Infocom did more with text inside of five years than the entire first person shooter genre has done in its lifetime.
My personal favorite was "Suspended." You were in a cryogenic state, only able to interact with remote robots to bring a group of out-of-whack computers into working shape again. Each robot had its own abilities and senses -- they rolled or walked, one could smell, and so on. The puzzles made you work at them, and this was one game where the packaging and manual and so on really helped and were necessary. I remember the laminated map vividly. It was the complete package.
The gaming industry should be looking to people like those Infocom writers and Dani Bunten as its prophets. Instead we get John Carmack opinion in nauseating detail about the latest graphic cards.
(Dang kids! Get off my lawn!)
It's important to remember this is still speculation.
If the news here was in any way important, remembering it would be more important, I guess....
Still, your basic point is solid: predicting Nintendo's actions based on those of Microsoft as a precedent might be a liiiittle bit unreliable. You think? I think.
This is primarily a replacement for the eMac, aimed at the educational insitutions.
Absolutely. Apple's own page for this product has a "Learn More" sidebar about how "(t)o learn about how schools and universities are using iMac computers in their classrooms."
This is what it is -- the latest eMac, basically.
Whenever Apple releases a new system, it gets a certain amount of flak because it's not everything to everyone. BMW makes a go cart, calls it the Mini, and people don't jump on it because it doesn't carry what a Ford F-150 will... Apple makes their own Mini and a certain set of people say it won't cut it in the graphic designer market.
Personally I'm strongly considering a Mac Book, and yeah, I know it won't play games on the graphics card.
Sure does sound like the attitude that employees "suck" created the circumstances in which this little exploit was possible in the first place. First and most obvious example: a 90-day renewal policies on passwords only make your passwords more likely to be crackable, because people are choosing passwords they can more easily remember. That's exactly the sort of corrosive pressure that'll make otherwise security-conscious employees try to cut corners just to get their jobs done.
Technical support people develop the attitude you're showing when they've been in environments where the users are constantly pressuring the security mechanisms. The underlying problem isn't the users. FBI employees in general are as dedicated as anyone to their jobs. It's the security model that sucks; they perceive it, eventually, as one more obstacle to work around.
Now, if you want to ask some hard questions about why a consultant is in anything like a sensitive position, then I will be entertaining this "sucks" conversation. Again, it's gonna be a conversation about any system that requires consultants instead of full time employees for something like law enforcement on this level.
Total cost of ownership for either the Xbox 360 or the PS3 would be well over a grand for me. Remember, you have to have the HD screen too.
But then again those adults in the 20-30 area with disposable income is the target of the 360...
You're talking to a kid who played Utopia on the Intellivision, the original Civ, Ultima III, and M.U.L.E. for more hours than I could estimate accurately. I'm in my 30s, have disposable income to spare. I also have my kids eager as can be for the Wii. I've never bought a console in my life with my own money, and will probably be doing this one.
Personally I imagine both Sony and MS overreached, banking on market saturation by HD sets that isn't close to being here. You describe a target market that's in its 20s but eagerly spending $1500 on a game console, basically. Or if we assume the PS3 and 360's markets are only people who'd have an HD monitor already, how much does that cut the potential market right off the bat? I dunno... one of these three companies is trying to expand its market, and the other two seem doggedly to be trying to force their existing market to swallow bigger and bigger lumps of cost...
Lab users, you say?
The stories aren't that funny. They're more... unsettling. At our University's computer labs, back before everyone was wireless and anyone used such things, we got well more than our share of people who just plain had no sense of public vs. private spaces.
The lab had a policy that said it was for academic use only. Okay, sit and chat with your friends, we understand. Just don't make too big a deal of it, or don't conspicuously do so when people are waiting to write their semester's last big paper, you know? But they were far beyond that point.
I understand looking at images over the Web. Why a person would want to not only view said pictures amid the rows of co-eds around him, but also to print out those images on a black-and-white laser printer, I do not know. We got more than a few people doing just that. They'd leave the printouts stacking up on the shared printer, and then go over after they'd run off ten or twenty to collect them from amid the History essays.
I do admit the 360 has done everything right in their launch and of course they are going to be on top for quite a while.
Personally I'm around a lot of 12-year-old kids, having 12-year-old twins myself. The 360 system has zero buzz to it. Nothing.
My son's best friend has an original X-Box. He and his older brother saved up and got one, at enormous expense for them. They're among the few families I know who have a big HD screen, too, so that's the market for the 360 and the PS3. They have no intention of buying a 360, because it's out of their price range and because their original XBox is fried now. That was a ton of money for kids to spend on a piece of hardware that can't take it, you know? They remember stuff like that. So in the case I know personally MS has lost the market, even among kids who previously bought their product.
MS also wanted to break into the Japanese market, supposedly went out of their way to encourage RPGs and so on in the release titles just to appeal there. Brzzt! A few months in they were underselling the GameCube -- not just the PS2, the GameCube -- in that market.
"Everything right" that ain't.
Sony's flak is answering a question about X-Box 360 prices and those for the PS3. He didn't actually mention Activision, but here's the paragraph you mean:
Hey, Your Mileage May Vary as they say, but I don't see where that sentence about Activision lays the land out any differently. Kaz Hirai says, in so many words: 'They might be a little higher than 60 bucks, but we won't suddenly double the price.' I notice he's not responding to the other developers who say the things are already too pricey, either... No hint of his saying "Yeah, we're going to be a lot cheaper than 360 titles," or in any way softening the idea that HD titles are pricey to turn out.
It sure reads like he thinks the price of games is going up in the next gen machines, inevitably, but that he doesn't think consumers are ready for a big increase to begin with...
1. In original retail box... For $3, if memory serves.
And yeah, turning the sound off. Oh my lord. That game made Blizzard's voice "acting" in Warcraft II sound good.
My older brother and I, back when we slept in bunk beds, used to shine flashlights and chase each other's lights around the ceiling. Come to think of it, that was before Pong rocked our world. The flashlight game was a lot of fun.
How well I remember that epochal moment when, at Grandma's house on vacation, we discovered Pong. Grandma had it connected to her remote controlled TV set. (The remote caused the physical channel dial to turn, ka-chunk ka-chunk, around.) Pong was a heck of a party game, mostly because you couldn't play it solo. The AI for a computer paddle opponent wasn't quite there yet.
On the plus side: essentially no load time! Flip the switch and it's on, baby.
When the game doesn't involve any playing, they call it an "interactive novel."