Yes and thats exactly why the third party support is less then stunning. If a console wants multiplatform titles it has to be able to keep up with the others, the Wii can't, so he sees only a tiny few of those and most the time it will be PS2 ports, not Xbox360/PS3 ports.
The Wii has been outpacing the competition in console sales,
Yeah, it also taught us that great sales don't mean a great many of good games. As a Nintendo stockholder you can celebrate the Wii all day long, as a gamer there really isn't all that much to cheer about.
Well, the Wii is pretty much exactly like the last two Nintendo consoles.
The difference is that the N64 and Gamecube could keep up with the competition and thus got plenty of third party support and multiplatform titles, the Wii on the other side can't keep up and is largely ignored by third party companies, except for those mini/party-games. Also the N64 had Rare, while the Gamecube had Capcom and Silicon Knights, those mature second party companies are what is mostly missing on the Wii.
What you describe is the "best case" scenario. What you completly ignore is that the "best case" scenario doesn't quite work all the time and that there simply isn't a soft fallback for the average user. For more details about the hotplug mess see my other reply.
Two weeks ago and basically on a constant basis whenever I install a new box. Sure Xorg can guess a lot of things today, but when it fails you are down "vi xorg.conf" because there is no standard way to change stuff any other way. And yes, every now and then I have to still calculate modelines manually because the VGA input of my Plasma is a little picky about what it can handle.
The most recent big issue I have and still have, is Xorgs way to handle hotplugging, which leaves *NO* way to properly tune things. You can tweak a bit with/etc/hal/fdi/policy/, but thats even more aweful then just editing plain Xorg and more importantly it doesn't even work. A Wacom tablet today doesn't fully work in Xorg with hotplugging, the meachnism of hotplugging simply can't handle that a single/dev/input/eventX device needs multiple devices entries in Xorg. Only work around I know so far is to disable the whole hotplugging and do it the old "vi xorg.conf" way. Other fun that hotpluggin does is handling *all* input devices as mice, no matter if its a gamepad, spacenavigator or whatever, which renders those devices unusable, workaround I use is to kick them out manually with "hal-device -r".
Oh, and my graphic tablet gets handled as joystick by recent kernels, moving all real joysticks back to js1, etc. where many games won't find them, not Xorgs fault, but one of those issue that you can't fix with anything GUI in Linux (Windows is able to change joystick ids for at least a decade).
I can't believe that, given the same amount of time and familiarity, that users will find Gnome or KDE less user friendly than Windows.
The problem isn't Gnome or KDE, but the underlying system. Installing hardware drivers can be a huge annoyance, when the kernel doesn't have support or only outdated support and configuring Xorg is also a huge piece of junk. Even after 10 years of Linux "vi xorg.conf" is not fun and not trivial, I much prefer clicking through a GUI to set some parameter for my graphics card right. There is slowly progress in that area, but something simple has hot plugging a mouse is still not exactly solvable in a pretty way.
As a developer I have to say that packing for multiple distribution is a major annoyance, so much that I have given up even trying it, because it never really works and is a huge amount of work. And as a user of course, third party debs seldom work in harmony with what the distribution provides, conflicts on dist-upgrades are pretty much unavoidable and that assumes that they work in the first place, which they quite frequently don't (old Ubuntu deb doesn't work on new Ubuntu, Debian deb doesn't work on Ubuntu, etc.).
Distributing third party software outside of Linux is one big ugly non-functional hack.
That might be true, but if you recycle the paper instead of dumping it in the landfill you would have that CO2 that is trapped in the paper left out in the air.
People normally don't report when their devices work as expected, so you will have a hard time finding reports on how the Playstation did not scratch their disc, you however have a easy time finding stories how Xbox360 scratches discs.
Little anecdote: A workaround for a Playtation1 bug that causes overheading was to turn the console upside down, used by many people, yet I have not heard a single story of destroyed discs on PS1.
Anyway, if you browse this thread or others you will hear plenty of plausible explanation why people would move their console (note: scratching does not require full 90 degree rotation, little nudge seems to be often enough). Things range from just rearranging equipment, to short controller cables that require a move of the console, trying to see if the Xbox360 status LED rotate 90 degree if the console is rotated, tripping over wires, searching for a location for the console after unboxing, trying to read labels on console, look at ports, whatever. There are tons of reason why a console might be moved in its life, its a consumer device after all, not something you screw into a 19" rack.
Considering adventure games just as a series of puzzles is really missing the whole point. The main objective of adventure game is to tell a story, the puzzles are merely a way to engage the player into the world, not a means to an end. And the important part isn't really if you have one or three verbs, but how well the puzzles integrate into the gaming world and how believable they are, many of todays games fail at that, leaving the player with awkward puzzles (tape mobile phone to cat).
Another thing is that the three verb interface didn't just reduce the number of verbs, but it made the verbs more organic. In The Longest Journey or Full Throttle for example you don't have explicit verbs, but body parts. You have a "hand" action, a "mouth" action and a "eye" action for example. "Mouth" is not only used for talking, but also for drinking potions or sucking on a hose to get fuel out of a tank. So the whole game becomes a matter of combining objects instead of applying specific verbs to objects.
Build a DVD drive that doesn't destroy discs? The CD is over 20 years old, everybody else seems to be able to build drives that work just fine without destroying discs, except Microsoft of course.
Name another non-portable console device that says it is okay to reorient it while the disc is spinning.
Bullshit argument. A device doesn't have to say its ok to move it around, it just has to not destroy discs or itself while doing so and well, except the Xbox360, most of them seem to do that just fine.
what's their "need" to move it around while its on?
It is not that one needs to do it, its that it happens in normal use every now an then, in many cases it will be by accident (tripping over a wire), in other cases it might be so they can reach stuff behind it (TV cabling), in some cases it might be just to see where it fit best next to the TV after unboxing. There are lots of reason why you might want to rearrange electronics and good reasons why you don't want to power it of (long load times, lack of savepoints, every other device can handle it without destroying the disc, etc.).
The stupid people are people like you who still don't want to admit that Microsoft fucked up big time when it comes to Xbox360 hardware. Just for the record, Xbox360 does not only destroy discs while being moved, many also destroy discs while not being moved and of course many of them of course just RROD after a while, and this doesn't just happen to a tiny fraction, but to a pretty damn large fractions of Xbox360.
Yes, thats why we call the Xbox360 broken by design.
Games are crap, most of the time
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 1
I can understand why having games show torture and demonstrate their consequences would be a good thing in theory, but seriously, games are for most part total crap when it comes to handling serious topics and most of them would be better of when they would move their settings into fantasy land then into real historical war scenarios, since they really only distort reality into a fun wack-a-nazi/iraq/guy-with-differnt-skin-color game instead of giving you an impression what was really going on. I seriously doubt that torture would be any different.
Now that of course doesn't mean that a game couldn't handle torture seriously, I just have zero hope that it would ever happen in a commercial game and the freeware ones will likely suffer a lack of budget to get things realistic enough to be engaging.
The problem isn't these "new cool games coming out", but those new cool games being cloned and sequeled to death. Resident Evil 4 made the over the shoulder view popular, Gears of War added cover mechanics and all that was cool and fresh. But then we got Uncharted, GTAIV, Dead Space, Gears of War 2, Resident Evil 5 and so on, all repeating that *exact* mechanic. I don't care about playing "Gears in the City" and "Gears in the Jungle" and "Gears in Space with Zombies", I already have played Gears. Game mechanics don't get any fresher when they are repeated over and over again, especially not when that repetition happens in the same year or even in the same month.
The same thing happened with Guitar Hero, rhythm games weren't anything new by then, but it added a nice twist and gained mass appeal, that was cool, but then you got endless sequels, a fork with drums, a sequel that cloned the fork with drums and another game that did the drum thing and then of course a sequel to the first drum one and so on. I don't need that many games that focus around the exact same topic.
In the Resident Evil 4 case there is also another problem: What once was survival horror is now a shooter, sure its a third person shooter, but still a friggin shooter, as if we didn't already have enough first person ones floating around. So instead of more genres, we now have less.
I'd call that dying if most of what made that genre is gone. Sure, RE4 has still the zombies and herbs, but none of the suspense and none of the puzzles. Its a shooter with zombie theme, not a survival game with better controls.
There is of course still evolution going on, newer games reuse older concept, improve on some of them and stuff, but there is just to much being left out to be ignored.
Well it's not dirt cheap for 500GB - that's $75/month. But who really has 500GB of critical data.
Who can tell what data what data will be critical in 25 years down the road? Especially with random stuff from a home user things that you might consider random junk today might very well turn out to be the things that you want back most a quarter decade later.
Thats why I mentioned copying stuff around. Even if you do it only every 5 or 10 years you will have zero problem with the interface. And in case of a harddrive its really trivial since its a single command without any extra manual work, no disk swapping required as with floppies, CD or DVD.
I also find it a little hard to image that USB will go out of fashion anytime soon, after all almost *everything* external these days uses it, which wasn't the case for 5.25" drive interfaces.
But a) what's the odds of your current WinUx or iHoloTablet having a usb connector in 30 years?
I don't know, but the odds of being able to connect USB will be close to 1 I would say. USB is all over the place today and it is so far backward compatible all the way down to the serial port or 3.5" drives, thanks to adapters. It won't just blip out of existence because Apple or whoever says so. USB also is used by tons of stuff, keyboard, mice, webcams and whatever, which will make it even harder to get rid of. And of course it doesn't really have a successor these days, which given how slowly PCs evolve will mean at least a decade of native USB slots in the box. Even if it becomes one day incompatible, you can bet that adapters will be available. And you also have to keep in mind that today almost every device speaks TCP/IP, which makes it very easy to copy stuff around, so even if the USB port is missing on your main device, it will very likely be present on another device and thus allow you to copy stuff around.
The whole incompatibility data format thing is easily solved by emulation and really not much an issue if you just want to access the data. If you want of course transfer the data into whatever new system or format you are using you have to do some manual work, but that is hardly avoidable.
Overall I find the whole compatibility issue to be really blown out of proportions. NASA certainly had issues reading old tapes, but that wasn't so much because they were old, but because the readers were *rare*. USB is not rare, there are likely more USB ports then people on the planet, they won't die out anytime soon.
If you need storage for 500GB I would go with harddrives, they certainly won't last forever, but they can last quite a long long while and they also happen to be cheap and in the case of USB drives they are also very easy to use if you want to check stuff and also highly compatible with every OS out there. Duo to their cheapness you can simply use lots of them, copy data from one drive to another every year or so and in not much time you will have plenty of drives with redundant data sitting around. And in a year or two you might be able to switch to SSD drives instead of spinning plattern for more reliability.
If that isn't enough I would also suggest to go multiple routes if possible, i.e. you might want to backup your emails and other stuff that is small enough to CD or DVD in addition to the harddrive.
Another important issue to worry about is data integrity, since data that is still readable might still be trashed. So keep MD5 checksums or Parchives around for checking and recovery.
In the end the most important point simply is to keep multiple copies of the data around and if possible off-site, so that a burned down house doesn't kill it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't keep up in what respect? Graphical power?
Yes and thats exactly why the third party support is less then stunning. If a console wants multiplatform titles it has to be able to keep up with the others, the Wii can't, so he sees only a tiny few of those and most the time it will be PS2 ports, not Xbox360/PS3 ports.
The Wii has been outpacing the competition in console sales,
Yeah, it also taught us that great sales don't mean a great many of good games. As a Nintendo stockholder you can celebrate the Wii all day long, as a gamer there really isn't all that much to cheer about.
The Wii's got no shortage of great games.
Relative to other consoles it has, a look at Metacritic shows that:
Wii has 66 games above 75%
PS3 has 125 games above 75%
Xbox360 has 212 games above 75%
Now given, there are still a few cool games for the Wii, but hardly enough to satisfy a seasoned gamer.
Well, the Wii is pretty much exactly like the last two Nintendo consoles.
The difference is that the N64 and Gamecube could keep up with the competition and thus got plenty of third party support and multiplatform titles, the Wii on the other side can't keep up and is largely ignored by third party companies, except for those mini/party-games. Also the N64 had Rare, while the Gamecube had Capcom and Silicon Knights, those mature second party companies are what is mostly missing on the Wii.
What you describe is the "best case" scenario. What you completly ignore is that the "best case" scenario doesn't quite work all the time and that there simply isn't a soft fallback for the average user. For more details about the hotplug mess see my other reply.
Two weeks ago and basically on a constant basis whenever I install a new box. Sure Xorg can guess a lot of things today, but when it fails you are down "vi xorg.conf" because there is no standard way to change stuff any other way. And yes, every now and then I have to still calculate modelines manually because the VGA input of my Plasma is a little picky about what it can handle.
The most recent big issue I have and still have, is Xorgs way to handle hotplugging, which leaves *NO* way to properly tune things. You can tweak a bit with /etc/hal/fdi/policy/, but thats even more aweful then just editing plain Xorg and more importantly it doesn't even work. A Wacom tablet today doesn't fully work in Xorg with hotplugging, the meachnism of hotplugging simply can't handle that a single /dev/input/eventX device needs multiple devices entries in Xorg. Only work around I know so far is to disable the whole hotplugging and do it the old "vi xorg.conf" way. Other fun that hotpluggin does is handling *all* input devices as mice, no matter if its a gamepad, spacenavigator or whatever, which renders those devices unusable, workaround I use is to kick them out manually with "hal-device -r".
Oh, and my graphic tablet gets handled as joystick by recent kernels, moving all real joysticks back to js1, etc. where many games won't find them, not Xorgs fault, but one of those issue that you can't fix with anything GUI in Linux (Windows is able to change joystick ids for at least a decade).
I can't believe that, given the same amount of time and familiarity, that users will find Gnome or KDE less user friendly than Windows.
The problem isn't Gnome or KDE, but the underlying system. Installing hardware drivers can be a huge annoyance, when the kernel doesn't have support or only outdated support and configuring Xorg is also a huge piece of junk. Even after 10 years of Linux "vi xorg.conf" is not fun and not trivial, I much prefer clicking through a GUI to set some parameter for my graphics card right. There is slowly progress in that area, but something simple has hot plugging a mouse is still not exactly solvable in a pretty way.
As a developer I have to say that packing for multiple distribution is a major annoyance, so much that I have given up even trying it, because it never really works and is a huge amount of work. And as a user of course, third party debs seldom work in harmony with what the distribution provides, conflicts on dist-upgrades are pretty much unavoidable and that assumes that they work in the first place, which they quite frequently don't (old Ubuntu deb doesn't work on new Ubuntu, Debian deb doesn't work on Ubuntu, etc.).
Distributing third party software outside of Linux is one big ugly non-functional hack.
This looks like flight to me, sure not space flight, but flight none the less. Now Pathfinder on the other side comes much closer to a movie prop.
That might be true, but if you recycle the paper instead of dumping it in the landfill you would have that CO2 that is trapped in the paper left out in the air.
[citation required]
People normally don't report when their devices work as expected, so you will have a hard time finding reports on how the Playstation did not scratch their disc, you however have a easy time finding stories how Xbox360 scratches discs.
Little anecdote: A workaround for a Playtation1 bug that causes overheading was to turn the console upside down, used by many people, yet I have not heard a single story of destroyed discs on PS1.
Anyway, if you browse this thread or others you will hear plenty of plausible explanation why people would move their console (note: scratching does not require full 90 degree rotation, little nudge seems to be often enough). Things range from just rearranging equipment, to short controller cables that require a move of the console, trying to see if the Xbox360 status LED rotate 90 degree if the console is rotated, tripping over wires, searching for a location for the console after unboxing, trying to read labels on console, look at ports, whatever. There are tons of reason why a console might be moved in its life, its a consumer device after all, not something you screw into a 19" rack.
Considering adventure games just as a series of puzzles is really missing the whole point. The main objective of adventure game is to tell a story, the puzzles are merely a way to engage the player into the world, not a means to an end. And the important part isn't really if you have one or three verbs, but how well the puzzles integrate into the gaming world and how believable they are, many of todays games fail at that, leaving the player with awkward puzzles (tape mobile phone to cat).
Another thing is that the three verb interface didn't just reduce the number of verbs, but it made the verbs more organic. In The Longest Journey or Full Throttle for example you don't have explicit verbs, but body parts. You have a "hand" action, a "mouth" action and a "eye" action for example. "Mouth" is not only used for talking, but also for drinking potions or sucking on a hose to get fuel out of a tank. So the whole game becomes a matter of combining objects instead of applying specific verbs to objects.
Name another non-portable console device that it is okay to reorient while the disc is spinning.
All of them, except Xbox360.
But what else could Microsoft have done?
Build a DVD drive that doesn't destroy discs? The CD is over 20 years old, everybody else seems to be able to build drives that work just fine without destroying discs, except Microsoft of course.
Name another non-portable console device that says it is okay to reorient it while the disc is spinning.
Bullshit argument. A device doesn't have to say its ok to move it around, it just has to not destroy discs or itself while doing so and well, except the Xbox360, most of them seem to do that just fine.
what's their "need" to move it around while its on?
It is not that one needs to do it, its that it happens in normal use every now an then, in many cases it will be by accident (tripping over a wire), in other cases it might be so they can reach stuff behind it (TV cabling), in some cases it might be just to see where it fit best next to the TV after unboxing. There are lots of reason why you might want to rearrange electronics and good reasons why you don't want to power it of (long load times, lack of savepoints, every other device can handle it without destroying the disc, etc.).
The stupid people are people like you who still don't want to admit that Microsoft fucked up big time when it comes to Xbox360 hardware. Just for the record, Xbox360 does not only destroy discs while being moved, many also destroy discs while not being moved and of course many of them of course just RROD after a while, and this doesn't just happen to a tiny fraction, but to a pretty damn large fractions of Xbox360.
Yes, thats why we call the Xbox360 broken by design.
I can understand why having games show torture and demonstrate their consequences would be a good thing in theory, but seriously, games are for most part total crap when it comes to handling serious topics and most of them would be better of when they would move their settings into fantasy land then into real historical war scenarios, since they really only distort reality into a fun wack-a-nazi/iraq/guy-with-differnt-skin-color game instead of giving you an impression what was really going on. I seriously doubt that torture would be any different.
Now that of course doesn't mean that a game couldn't handle torture seriously, I just have zero hope that it would ever happen in a commercial game and the freeware ones will likely suffer a lack of budget to get things realistic enough to be engaging.
DUH! Don't do that!
Name another console that destroys disc on a regular basis.
One difference is that the Firefox pages often features screenshots, while the application installer in Ubuntu is plain text.
Then, we get some really cool games coming out.
The problem isn't these "new cool games coming out", but those new cool games being cloned and sequeled to death. Resident Evil 4 made the over the shoulder view popular, Gears of War added cover mechanics and all that was cool and fresh. But then we got Uncharted, GTAIV, Dead Space, Gears of War 2, Resident Evil 5 and so on, all repeating that *exact* mechanic. I don't care about playing "Gears in the City" and "Gears in the Jungle" and "Gears in Space with Zombies", I already have played Gears. Game mechanics don't get any fresher when they are repeated over and over again, especially not when that repetition happens in the same year or even in the same month.
The same thing happened with Guitar Hero, rhythm games weren't anything new by then, but it added a nice twist and gained mass appeal, that was cool, but then you got endless sequels, a fork with drums, a sequel that cloned the fork with drums and another game that did the drum thing and then of course a sequel to the first drum one and so on. I don't need that many games that focus around the exact same topic.
In the Resident Evil 4 case there is also another problem: What once was survival horror is now a shooter, sure its a third person shooter, but still a friggin shooter, as if we didn't already have enough first person ones floating around. So instead of more genres, we now have less.
The genre is changing, not dying.
I'd call that dying if most of what made that genre is gone. Sure, RE4 has still the zombies and herbs, but none of the suspense and none of the puzzles. Its a shooter with zombie theme, not a survival game with better controls.
There is of course still evolution going on, newer games reuse older concept, improve on some of them and stuff, but there is just to much being left out to be ignored.
Well it's not dirt cheap for 500GB - that's $75/month. But who really has 500GB of critical data.
Who can tell what data what data will be critical in 25 years down the road? Especially with random stuff from a home user things that you might consider random junk today might very well turn out to be the things that you want back most a quarter decade later.
Thats why I mentioned copying stuff around. Even if you do it only every 5 or 10 years you will have zero problem with the interface. And in case of a harddrive its really trivial since its a single command without any extra manual work, no disk swapping required as with floppies, CD or DVD.
I also find it a little hard to image that USB will go out of fashion anytime soon, after all almost *everything* external these days uses it, which wasn't the case for 5.25" drive interfaces.
But a) what's the odds of your current WinUx or iHoloTablet having a usb connector in 30 years?
I don't know, but the odds of being able to connect USB will be close to 1 I would say. USB is all over the place today and it is so far backward compatible all the way down to the serial port or 3.5" drives, thanks to adapters. It won't just blip out of existence because Apple or whoever says so. USB also is used by tons of stuff, keyboard, mice, webcams and whatever, which will make it even harder to get rid of. And of course it doesn't really have a successor these days, which given how slowly PCs evolve will mean at least a decade of native USB slots in the box. Even if it becomes one day incompatible, you can bet that adapters will be available. And you also have to keep in mind that today almost every device speaks TCP/IP, which makes it very easy to copy stuff around, so even if the USB port is missing on your main device, it will very likely be present on another device and thus allow you to copy stuff around.
The whole incompatibility data format thing is easily solved by emulation and really not much an issue if you just want to access the data. If you want of course transfer the data into whatever new system or format you are using you have to do some manual work, but that is hardly avoidable.
Overall I find the whole compatibility issue to be really blown out of proportions. NASA certainly had issues reading old tapes, but that wasn't so much because they were old, but because the readers were *rare*. USB is not rare, there are likely more USB ports then people on the planet, they won't die out anytime soon.
If you need storage for 500GB I would go with harddrives, they certainly won't last forever, but they can last quite a long long while and they also happen to be cheap and in the case of USB drives they are also very easy to use if you want to check stuff and also highly compatible with every OS out there. Duo to their cheapness you can simply use lots of them, copy data from one drive to another every year or so and in not much time you will have plenty of drives with redundant data sitting around. And in a year or two you might be able to switch to SSD drives instead of spinning plattern for more reliability.
If that isn't enough I would also suggest to go multiple routes if possible, i.e. you might want to backup your emails and other stuff that is small enough to CD or DVD in addition to the harddrive.
Another important issue to worry about is data integrity, since data that is still readable might still be trashed. So keep MD5 checksums or Parchives around for checking and recovery.
In the end the most important point simply is to keep multiple copies of the data around and if possible off-site, so that a burned down house doesn't kill it all.