Flamebait? Obviously the mods never tried playing a 6 player LAN game with a decent amount of units. C&C Generals is the only game I know of that has brought an XP2000 w/ a gig of DDR to it's knees.
What about Mario 64? I played it for a few hours at a friend's house when the N64 came out, and I haven't bought a Nintendo system since. It did absolutely nothing for me. I had played 3d games before (Doom, Descent, etc...) but it just made me want to play the old games.
I'm all for progression in games, but they murdered their flagship franchise.
Other overhyped games I can think of...
Final Fantasy 7 (the first PSX one)
Stunt Race FX
Metal Gear Solid 2
Gran Turisom 3/2000
Any Jaguar game (minus Tempest 2000)
Right, but the RIAA gets a cut of audio grade blank DAT media sales. I guess back in the mid to late 80's when DATs first started to hit the market, they were so concerned people were going to copy CDs to DATs, they lobbied for a blank dat tax.
Based on my use, a backlit color screen is nearly impossible to see in direct sunlight. I'm not sure how many people are using Ipods while jogging outside, as opposed to sitting in class using them. Add in the fact that it uses up more battery juice too...
Nope, I used DDS tapes fine in my Tascam audio DAT machine all the time. The Tascam deck I have (mkii20?) also defeats SCMS (serial copy management system).
Actually... I believe that the RIAA gets a cut of all 'audio grade' blank DAT sales. If you buy the DDS grade DATs (which are cheaper and statistically have less errors) you avoid the cartel.
I always DAT stuff at 44.1khz, since quite a few digital sound cards will automagically 'downsample' 48khz to 44.1khz. I can't tell the difference between 44.1 and 48khz. Maybe I'm not just competent:)
Totally agree with you on the 'flips'. Anytime you have to open up a deck at a show, it's a bad, bad idea. I've had tape jams from trying to flip too fast, dropped a tape on the beer soaked floor, etc.. etc.. See above 'not competent' comment.
If you're going DAT, don't buy the Sony D100 recorder. Look for the Sony M1 recorder. It's about $100 cheaper, about half the size of a D100, and comes with 2 rechargable batteries. I have an old Sony D8 and I'm waiting for it to die so I can replace it with the tiny M1.
DATs are expensive? Really? I usually end up paying around $2 a pop for 60 meter DDS (120 minutes in 44.1/48khz mode, 240 minutes in 32khz) and $2.60 a pop for 90 meter DDS (180min , 360 min) tapes. Check American Digital and Masterpiece AV. If you go down to your CompUSA or Micro Center, sure you're going to pay $10 to $20 for a tape, but that's why you buy online.
I've looked at some of the other alternatives to portable DAT machines, including the mostly open source project Core Sound is pushing, but I'm waiting for it to mature. A 1 gig compact flash card is still over $120 for the most part. That's only about 90 minutes of raw audio. Minidiscs never did it for me. I borrowed one from a friend, and the whole 80 minute capacity issue took me back to the days of flipping over tapes between songs. Do they have discs over 80 minutes for stereo recordings?
Yeah, I know when I moved I did inquire about SBC DSL, and I was at least 3 months out from an install date.
I have RoadRunner (cable modem) through a local cable company and it's great. I didn't even need to install their software, just plugged my cable modem into my FreeBSD box and voila. I also didn't have to agree to the TOS explicitly:)
If you've had good luck with SBC, congrats. The people in various class action lawsuits here in Ohio envy you;)
I'm going way off topic here, but has anyone else heard what's going in Northern Califorina with the college radio stations being scrambled by christian fund-raising stations? I have no problems with any religious station, even if it's for questionable practices, but they're screwing with the public college stations because of an FCC loophole. Below is a copy/paste of the situation
The Problem: A few years ago a station from Stockton, California, known as
"Your Christian Companion" (KYCC) set up a translator in the eastern suburbs of
Sacramento. They licensed a translator on 90.1FM (translator number K211DF), and
since then, the once listenable signal of KDVS has been knocked off the
spectrum there. Since then, KCJH/KYCC, the station that preaches God's word, has been
expanding, setting up stations to cause interference with other stations like
non-profit student stations similar to KDVS. In the East Bay area near
Livermore, you can hear KYCC on 2 to 4 different frequencies, covering up many Bay Area
college radio stations. The station is a fundraising tool for itself,
collecting money to go toward buying new translators to feed their programming via
automated procedure via satellite. This conservative entity is using
non-commercial educational frequencies as a loophole to rebroadcast satellite programming in
effort to gain more money for their own causes.
Because of this, listeners in some parts of Sacramento cannot tune into KDVS.
You can help try to get the FCC to move their translator from 90.1 FM to
another frequency by making your voice heard to the FCC.
Here's how you can help. Write an email stating you listen to KDVS radio, the
only college/student run station in the area. State that KDVS 90.3FM is a
Sacramento area station at 9200 watts, but it cannot be heard in some parts of
Sacramento because 90.1 FM interferes with it. The station used to be heard in all
of Sacramento, but since 90.1 FM came on the air, it causes so much
interference that it essentially blocks the signal in some areas. (You may add other
comments).
Give Your First and Last Name
Your Address
Email Address
Email your statement to todd@kdvs.org. with "INTERFERECE COMPLAINT" in the
subject heading It will then be compiled with other letters and sent to the FCC
jointly.
You may also reach the FCC at their web site: www.fcc.gov. and make comments
there
KYCC's growing station list
90.1 Stockton
89.1 Livington
89.7 Antioch/Pittburg
90.5 Livermore
91.1 Chico
90.3 Dublin
93.5 Vacaville
87.7 Benicia
90.1 Sacramento
99.5 Elk Grove
91.3 Provo Utah
89.9 Alamogordo, NM
89.1 El Paso, Texas
88.3 Reno, NV
Right on! From my understanding (and usage) RAID is only meant to deal with hardware failures (You can throw speed in there too).
RAID = to prevent downtime / data loss due to hardware malfunctioning. I'm looking at you Maxtor!
Good Backup Plan = to prevent users and/or flaky OS/App from ruining data.
I rsync the 'important' stuff on my FreeBSD box to another friend's box, and he does the same. Instead of mounting my windows drive through Samba, I just burn a CD whenever my spidey sense tells me I'm due for a meltdown. I've lost a lot of data on my Windows machines over the last 10 years;) Don't even get me started on Ghost...
They put out a Genesis/Mega Drive 'Greatest Hits' collection on the Dreamcast. 10 games including Sonic, Streets of Rage, and one of the Phantasy Stars or Shinin in the Darkness games, plus a slew of other games.
When I was cleaning out the rest of my childhood at my parents house a few years ago, I ran across some old gaming magazines from the early to mid 90's. The first 20 issues of Next Generation (my favorite video game magazine, before they went to the cheap paper), Diehard Gamefan and even some old EGMs. It's hilarious reading some of the old interviews, including the Nolan Bushnell (sp?) one where he says Atari is going to go after Sony for 'dumping' if they launched the PSX below a certain price point. Hilarity. I really do miss nextgeneration.com and dailyradar.com.
From my understanding of the whole debacle, 3D0 wanted to make their console like VHS. License the techonology to different hardware companies and to software publishers. I remember when the Goldstar 3DO came out, it was only $499, which was a huge deal (The flagship Panasonic 3DO shipped at $700).
Does anybody else have any horror stories about the daisy-chaining controllers? (instead of a multitap, each controller top had a controller in jack on it, so you could in theory hook up an infinite amount of controllers). Genius in theory, horrible in practice. Needless to say with my friends and I, it quickly turned into tripwire and unplugging controllers at the most unexpected times:)
Yeah, but Forsberg was fine in 1999-00, Pronger was okay (yet still a cheap hit master) in 2001-02. I think in hockey it's likely that you're going to get injured at some point in your career.
Danny Heatley (I think) is on the 2004 cover that comes out next month. We'll see if anything happens to him.
I remember a lot of hype at the time was for being the first real console that had 'broadcast quality' graphics. For instance, in Madden they had renders of all the stadiums in the pre-game screen. Sounds like a little detail, but at this point in gaming, people were used to seeing 256 color Sega CD full motion video.
A lot of the other hype with the 3DO (not sure about the M2, all I remember is Trip Hawkins deeming it as the savior) was due to support from Electronics Arts. Even with EA, it still died a horrible death along with the Jaguar and CD-I.
My friend had a 3DO, and we really did have a great time playing Return Fire (an RTS game), Road Rash and the original Need for Speed. Anybody else remember that annoying actor they had playing your opponent in Need for Speed? If I ever see that guy on the street, he's getting clocked. I was pretty disappointed when I played the sequels and he was no where to be found. There were some absolutely awful games at launch.. I can't remember the names of them, but Crystal Dynamics was leading the charge of poopware.
I can't remember which #'s they are, since there is no index to search through, but they mentioned two of the most important things ever to happen in computer gaming (IMO):
Myst pushes CD-ROM sales. I can't remember how many times I sat through a 5 to 20! (Return to Zork) disk install of many games in the early 90's. Not only that, but I bet the CD-ROMs helped curb casual piracy. I mean, everybody had copies of Doom and Doom2 floppies, right?;)
DirectX/Glide drivers. This is way overlooked. I was talking to a co-worker the other day and the most hated word from my youth came up. QEMM. Remeber that high memory loader for DOS? How you *needed* it to play any decent game from about 1991 to 1995? It didn't matter how much RAM yoh had in your system, you would always need to load stuff into high memory. I remember being on the verge of a mental breakdown trying to get Sim City 2000 and Aces Over Europe to run under DOS. I had 8 megs of ram, what else did I need?;)
Some of the other items on the list are pretty questionable. Sure, the 'Mortal Monday' advertising campaign was pretty cool, but all it did was stir up the hornet's nest of parents and elected officials. I think most of the kids I knew were going to buy it, even without any press. I don't think it really changed anything. Same deal with the Madden series moment. Now gaming companies expect gamers to throw down $50 a year for a few new features and updated rosters for many sports games. And gamers blindly do this.
My friend and I have this running joke about how someone should make a Big Lebowski online game. (MMORPG?, I dont know the correct abbreviation)
We say this only because everyone we know that plays EverQuest, etc.. is a pot smoking, drunk, unemployed loser. It's so perfect. People online bickering over rare creedence bootlegs and attacking with +5 ferrets. Ahhhh.
I remember reading that the car manufacturers didn't want car damage to show up realistically in the game since it would 'taint' their image or something. So the developers had no choice except to leave it out, unless they wanted to lose all the licensing. Nothing to do with crash physics, but slightly related:)
I could probably google this, but did they shrink the controllers for the asian market? I have pretty girly sized hands and I have enough problems with the Dreamcast controller. The 1st party MS controller gives me bad cramps. Hand cramps people.
Any guesses on how many of these 15 million consoles were sold in Japan? I'm guessing it's not even a million. I saw a monthly or quarterly sales report that showed the PS1 was outselling the XBox by a 2:1 ratio. That would hurt even my pride;)
Why hasn't MSFT tried to take over Square/Enix? That could move some consoles. It's not like the DOJ is going to do anything about it.
I played with freenet for about 6 hours one weekend and it just wasn't doing it for me. There was no central search function and a lot of sites with indexes weren't responding. I'm not saying that the technology behind the scenes isn't top notch, but the user interface leaves a lot to be desired if it's aiming for the mainstream or even just a blip below. It was actually infuriating me.
Summary of my experience: I found it nearly impossible to use and it was giving me massive Gopher flashbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's some edutainment!
As for when the next consoles come out, don't sweat it. Probably at least 18 to 24 months out. Enjoy the games now if you can afford them.
Flamebait? Obviously the mods never tried playing a 6 player LAN game with a decent amount of units. C&C Generals is the only game I know of that has brought an XP2000 w/ a gig of DDR to it's knees.
I'm all for progression in games, but they murdered their flagship franchise.
Other overhyped games I can think of...
Final Fantasy 7 (the first PSX one)
Stunt Race FX
Metal Gear Solid 2
Gran Turisom 3/2000
Any Jaguar game (minus Tempest 2000)
Right, but the RIAA gets a cut of audio grade blank DAT media sales. I guess back in the mid to late 80's when DATs first started to hit the market, they were so concerned people were going to copy CDs to DATs, they lobbied for a blank dat tax.
Based on my use, a backlit color screen is nearly impossible to see in direct sunlight. I'm not sure how many people are using Ipods while jogging outside, as opposed to sitting in class using them. Add in the fact that it uses up more battery juice too...
Nope, I used DDS tapes fine in my Tascam audio DAT machine all the time. The Tascam deck I have (mkii20?) also defeats SCMS (serial copy management system).
Actually... I believe that the RIAA gets a cut of all 'audio grade' blank DAT sales. If you buy the DDS grade DATs (which are cheaper and statistically have less errors) you avoid the cartel.
Totally agree with you on the 'flips'. Anytime you have to open up a deck at a show, it's a bad, bad idea. I've had tape jams from trying to flip too fast, dropped a tape on the beer soaked floor, etc.. etc.. See above 'not competent' comment.
DATs are expensive? Really? I usually end up paying around $2 a pop for 60 meter DDS (120 minutes in 44.1/48khz mode, 240 minutes in 32khz) and $2.60 a pop for 90 meter DDS (180min , 360 min) tapes. Check American Digital and Masterpiece AV. If you go down to your CompUSA or Micro Center, sure you're going to pay $10 to $20 for a tape, but that's why you buy online.
I've looked at some of the other alternatives to portable DAT machines, including the mostly open source project Core Sound is pushing, but I'm waiting for it to mature. A 1 gig compact flash card is still over $120 for the most part. That's only about 90 minutes of raw audio. Minidiscs never did it for me. I borrowed one from a friend, and the whole 80 minute capacity issue took me back to the days of flipping over tapes between songs. Do they have discs over 80 minutes for stereo recordings?
I have RoadRunner (cable modem) through a local cable company and it's great. I didn't even need to install their software, just plugged my cable modem into my FreeBSD box and voila. I also didn't have to agree to the TOS explicitly :)
If you've had good luck with SBC, congrats. The people in various class action lawsuits here in Ohio envy you ;)
Switch to SBC? Hope you never need service on the line, or have a billing question.
The Problem: A few years ago a station from Stockton, California, known as "Your Christian Companion" (KYCC) set up a translator in the eastern suburbs of Sacramento. They licensed a translator on 90.1FM (translator number K211DF), and since then, the once listenable signal of KDVS has been knocked off the spectrum there. Since then, KCJH/KYCC, the station that preaches God's word, has been expanding, setting up stations to cause interference with other stations like non-profit student stations similar to KDVS. In the East Bay area near Livermore, you can hear KYCC on 2 to 4 different frequencies, covering up many Bay Area college radio stations. The station is a fundraising tool for itself, collecting money to go toward buying new translators to feed their programming via automated procedure via satellite. This conservative entity is using non-commercial educational frequencies as a loophole to rebroadcast satellite programming in effort to gain more money for their own causes. Because of this, listeners in some parts of Sacramento cannot tune into KDVS. You can help try to get the FCC to move their translator from 90.1 FM to another frequency by making your voice heard to the FCC. Here's how you can help. Write an email stating you listen to KDVS radio, the only college/student run station in the area. State that KDVS 90.3FM is a Sacramento area station at 9200 watts, but it cannot be heard in some parts of Sacramento because 90.1 FM interferes with it. The station used to be heard in all of Sacramento, but since 90.1 FM came on the air, it causes so much interference that it essentially blocks the signal in some areas. (You may add other comments).
Give Your First and Last Name
Your Address
Email Address
Email your statement to todd@kdvs.org. with "INTERFERECE COMPLAINT" in the subject heading It will then be compiled with other letters and sent to the FCC jointly.
You may also reach the FCC at their web site: www.fcc.gov. and make comments there
KYCC's growing station list
90.1 Stockton
89.1 Livington
89.7 Antioch/Pittburg
90.5 Livermore
91.1 Chico
90.3 Dublin
93.5 Vacaville
87.7 Benicia
90.1 Sacramento
99.5 Elk Grove
91.3 Provo Utah
89.9 Alamogordo, NM
89.1 El Paso, Texas
88.3 Reno, NV
- RAID = to prevent downtime / data loss due to hardware malfunctioning. I'm looking at you Maxtor!
- Good Backup Plan = to prevent users and/or flaky OS/App from ruining data.
I rsync the 'important' stuff on my FreeBSD box to another friend's box, and he does the same. Instead of mounting my windows drive through Samba, I just burn a CD whenever my spidey sense tells me I'm due for a meltdown. I've lost a lot of data on my Windows machines over the last 10 yearsThey put out a Genesis/Mega Drive 'Greatest Hits' collection on the Dreamcast. 10 games including Sonic, Streets of Rage, and one of the Phantasy Stars or Shinin in the Darkness games, plus a slew of other games.
From my understanding of the whole debacle, 3D0 wanted to make their console like VHS. License the techonology to different hardware companies and to software publishers. I remember when the Goldstar 3DO came out, it was only $499, which was a huge deal (The flagship Panasonic 3DO shipped at $700).
Does anybody else have any horror stories about the daisy-chaining controllers? (instead of a multitap, each controller top had a controller in jack on it, so you could in theory hook up an infinite amount of controllers). Genius in theory, horrible in practice. Needless to say with my friends and I, it quickly turned into tripwire and unplugging controllers at the most unexpected times :)
Danny Heatley (I think) is on the 2004 cover that comes out next month. We'll see if anything happens to him.
A lot of the other hype with the 3DO (not sure about the M2, all I remember is Trip Hawkins deeming it as the savior) was due to support from Electronics Arts. Even with EA, it still died a horrible death along with the Jaguar and CD-I.
My friend had a 3DO, and we really did have a great time playing Return Fire (an RTS game), Road Rash and the original Need for Speed. Anybody else remember that annoying actor they had playing your opponent in Need for Speed? If I ever see that guy on the street, he's getting clocked. I was pretty disappointed when I played the sequels and he was no where to be found. There were some absolutely awful games at launch.. I can't remember the names of them, but Crystal Dynamics was leading the charge of poopware.
Myst pushes CD-ROM sales. I can't remember how many times I sat through a 5 to 20! (Return to Zork) disk install of many games in the early 90's. Not only that, but I bet the CD-ROMs helped curb casual piracy. I mean, everybody had copies of Doom and Doom2 floppies, right? ;)
DirectX/Glide drivers. This is way overlooked. I was talking to a co-worker the other day and the most hated word from my youth came up. QEMM. Remeber that high memory loader for DOS? How you *needed* it to play any decent game from about 1991 to 1995? It didn't matter how much RAM yoh had in your system, you would always need to load stuff into high memory. I remember being on the verge of a mental breakdown trying to get Sim City 2000 and Aces Over Europe to run under DOS. I had 8 megs of ram, what else did I need? ;)
Some of the other items on the list are pretty questionable. Sure, the 'Mortal Monday' advertising campaign was pretty cool, but all it did was stir up the hornet's nest of parents and elected officials. I think most of the kids I knew were going to buy it, even without any press. I don't think it really changed anything. Same deal with the Madden series moment. Now gaming companies expect gamers to throw down $50 a year for a few new features and updated rosters for many sports games. And gamers blindly do this.
We say this only because everyone we know that plays EverQuest, etc.. is a pot smoking, drunk, unemployed loser. It's so perfect. People online bickering over rare creedence bootlegs and attacking with +5 ferrets. Ahhhh.
Some people will say the Final Fantasy movie was pretty good....
I remember reading that the car manufacturers didn't want car damage to show up realistically in the game since it would 'taint' their image or something. So the developers had no choice except to leave it out, unless they wanted to lose all the licensing. Nothing to do with crash physics, but slightly related :)
I could probably google this, but did they shrink the controllers for the asian market? I have pretty girly sized hands and I have enough problems with the Dreamcast controller. The 1st party MS controller gives me bad cramps. Hand cramps people.
Why hasn't MSFT tried to take over Square/Enix? That could move some consoles. It's not like the DOJ is going to do anything about it.
Summary of my experience: I found it nearly impossible to use and it was giving me massive Gopher flashbacks.