I don't fully agree with older games proving their worth with a story. This is true with the Final Fantasy games from the SNES. However, look at the old classics like Pacman and Galaga which people still love to play. These games are simple to play, but are still incredibly fun.
Thankfully there are new games with nice graphics that are still fun to play. ICO for the PS2 is a beautiful games and the sequel Shadow of the Coloses looks like it will also be just as great a game. Katamari Damacy was a weird but fun game. It went along with the easy to pickup, but fun to play catagory. I'm also looking forward to Okami which is going to use a Japanese paper art style to the game. It looks like it will be quirky, and I'm hoping it's as fun as it is pretty.
I have to agree that Nintendo is definately ahead of the curve with the overall crappyness of current games. They still are making fun games which might not have the best looking graphics, but are fun to play.
I'm not sure what applications you are running. But the majority of the applications are normally just sitting there waiting for user input. There is still the issue of memory, but a 512MB or higher system should be fine.
Your thinking of some wierd thing like BBCode./. uses standard HTML formatting. You can also just use the preview button if your unsure of how your post will look to make you not look like a moron.
Maybe it would happen if the game companies released SDKs for those engines. Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, Starcraft, and Warcraft have all had user created mods. But the developers released tools to let the community make mods. There have been mods for games were the developers didn't release SDKs or other toolkits like the X-Wing series of PC games. But those are few compared to what comes out if there is developer support.
They also did a good job of limiting the power level so that skill and tactics are more important than gaining another level.
I have to disagree with you on this. They didn't limit power leveling, they completely removed it as a option for PvP. You can instantly create a level 20 (max level) PvP character and jump right into the PvP content of the game. The only limitation is what skills you have unlocked for your account so that you can create different builds. This fully moves success and failure into how your build is setup and how your team works together. With skill in using your character and a little luck on the interrupters part you can form an incredibly powerful PvP team.
Do you mean something like the GP32. Sadly you can only import it and good luck on find one. But it was a cool handheld with tons of emulators and everything.
It depends on if it will work in the PS3. The PS2's HDD was a standard 40GB Maxtor with a custom firmware. You could actually use any HD that would fit on the IDE and Molex connectors on the PS2's network adapter under Linux; however, the custom firmware was required if you wanted the HD to work with games on a non-modded system. We'll have to see if Linux will require the custom firmware, and with the PS2 you needed a bootdisk to be able to launch into Linux.
You could access the DVD drive under Linux on the PS2. The problem was that unless you had a modchip it could only read game disks, and the offical Linux Disks. This was supposedly due to how disk authenication works on the PS2. I'm not entirely on the subject since I had a modchip long before the Linux Kit came out and I could read any disk on it. You could also just use an external USB2 DVD drive to read the disk if you need.
I don't know. The Playstation 2 Linux Kit had a port Red Hat distro that Sony officially released themselves. It booted to a console, included X, and had GCC so you could code your own programs.
The PS2's Linux ran in an abstracted layer where you weren't getting right down to the raw hardware, and its 32MB of RAM limitation made it run pretty slow, but it was cool none the less.
Actually this was a full-blown remake. It has the models from X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, and uses Direct3d. Try playing the old original DOS versions. They were in 320x240 and the models were very simple compared to the what is found in the remakes.
You have to remember just when these games were released. XvsTIE came out in 1997 so you can't really expect it to look as good as modern games. And the sequal game to the X-Wing and TIE series X-Wing Alliance was released in 1999. There is currently a project updating all the models at: http://www.xwaupgrade.com/.
The only major issue with the Collector's Edition is that it keeps the original systems fully intact. While this is nice since it keeps them original TIE Fighter's system of how you interfaced with the ships was a nice update to X-Wings, and XvsTIE was a major and awesome update. Going back to the old systems in kind of hard, but the games are still fun.
TIE Fighters are only flimzy IF you get hit. I still remember jumping online the day X-Wing Alliance came out, sadly it never had the community of the MSN Gaming Zone's X-Wing vs. TIE, but I schooled some kids that needed their pansy shields in their X-Wing and A-Wing.
The remake was released after Xwing vs. TIE Fighter. It uses the engine from that game and also has updated cutscenes but as far as I can tell all of the voice acting is the same as the original. Further more the package included remakes of both the X-wing and TIE fighter games along with all of the expansion packs.
And some really good news for everyone. I found it for sale for those of you that don't have it at Gogamer.com and it's selling for $27.90 + s/h. So that guy below that says he'll pay up to $200 for that can save some money or just send the $170 he didn't spend on the game to me.
Again which but a very small handful of games actually support a keyboard and mouse interface on the PS2. Also how comfortable is it to use a mouse from your couch? What if you don't have a coffee table?
Watch what card your using to do Tv input. Most TV cards will do encoding of the signal which introduces lag into the displaying of the picture which in turns will make games that require very tight controlling and twitch reflexes impossible to play.
Your missing the point. You can buy a video card today that came out a year or two ago. It will play the games that just came out today just fine. Sure you might not get 100+ fps at 1600x1200 with 16xAA with every eyecandy feature maxed. But the games will fun and they will be just as fun.
They could just allow the games to be sent to the DS wirelessly since both the Revolution and DS support WiFi. Sure the games will be lost if you power down (you have sleep mode though), but I doubt they will release a re-writable cart as that may allow the ability to pirate DS games.
Nintendo hasn't shown anything hardwarewise other than a prototype empty case for the Revolution; however, historically knowing Nintendo way of not releasing any information about new systems earily I wouldn't be surprised if they could release the system in time for the holiday season. If they actually do this they will slaughter Microsoft.
First off the Revolution will very likely be cheaper than the Xbox 360. Also picture the parent holiday shopping for their child. The clerk at the video game store says, well you can buy this Xbox 360 for $300 (Pulled the price from my ass) and then you can buy the games for it for $50-$60, or you can buy this Nintendo Revolution for $250 (again out of my ass but maybe it will also only be $200) and while the games cost $50 you can also connect it to the internet and download classic games (with some of them possibly being free). Think as a parent for a moment. Little Johnny could have a new game console with a new game or two and have the ability to play older games that he just downloads, or you could pay more without having the classic games download option? And while you might not be a fan of Nintendo you have to admit after playing some of their games that they are innovative and their games are just simply fun which is all that really matters in the end.
I'm still not convinced on the Xbox 360 media center . You'll be able to view pictures and play mp3s off usb thumb drives and samba shares, but to view videos you have to have a Windows XP Media Edition 2005 PC, and from what I've read the videos will have to be in WMV format so you have to deal with DRM. If it fully interfaces with ME2005 though, you should be able to stream live TV off the PC to the Xbox 360 which is kind of cool I guess, but it's still no where near as featureful as the current homebrew Xbox Media Center.
Also Microsoft released something called the Xbox Media Entender for the original Xbox. This allowed it to play content off of Media Edition PCs, but I never wanted to play the $80 or so dollars to check it out.
Yes FFXII will be released near the same time as the PS3; however, FFIX was released around the same time as the PS2 back in 2000. And if you want to get technical the game came out about 1/2 month after the system was released.
So far every system FF has been on has received 3 FF games, also FFIII came out in Japan for the NES the same year the SNES was released. FFVI came out in Japan the same year the PSX was released.
Complain all you want about the FF series, but it's still a decent playable story book. If you want to experience something new pickup the Saga Frontier series. It has been the testing ground for new systems since the PSX, unlike the more traditional but awesome Romancing Saga games for the SNES.
Will SE stop supporting FFXI? Not when it's pulling in several million dollars every month. Will they stop making FF games? Not when everytime they release one it sells several million copies. Will they stop the Dragon Quest series which has less entries than the FF series but has been going on for about as long? Again not while it rakes in the money.
If you stop thinking of the FF games as a continuation of one another and more as a genre of simular games, it's easier to see why people keep snatching each new one. If you like the previous FF games, there is a good chance you'll also like the new FF game that's coming out. And knowing that it's the FF series you know the production value of the game will be very high.
If you want a dual core system but don't want to wait, just built a socket 939 Athlon 64 system right now. The AMD dual core Athlons are supposed to just require a BIOS upgrade to get dual core processors running in them. Sure you'll spend money on the single core CPU, but you won't have to wait, and just buy a cheap 3000+ or something.
I don't understand where people get this "upgrade your video card every 6 months". Sure new cards revisions are coming out at a rate of about every 6 months but that doesn't mean you have to upgrade to them with each release. And noone says you have to buy the latest and greatest videocard either. Just buy the midranged hot card from last year and it should run about $100-$150 depending on how hard you look for a deal. I personnally try to upgrade every two years or so and while that runs about $200-$300 it allows be to play the latest games are high resolutions with all the pretty eye candy. It's true that right now I can't have high quality Anti-Aliasing and Isotropic Filtering but at the high resolutions I really don't notice much of a difference with the PCs I've seen with these features running.
As for upgrading your computer every 3 years whats the problem with that? The Xbox is getting replaced as a console after only 4 years and it looks aged compared to current PC games, and to me the Xbox 360 games that I've seen so far in HDTV don't look any better than games running in higher resolutions on my current PC. As for the cost of upgrading a computer, you don't need to purchase a complete sytem every single time, you can keep your monitor, speakers, case, keyboard, mouse, drives (DVD-R, Hard Drives, etc). The only thing you really need to purchase those 3 years is a Motherboard, CPU, RAM, and maybe get a Video Card upgrade every other time.
My last upgrade netted me a Athlon64 3000+ (which I o/c'd to 3200+ with the stock retail fan withou any issue), 1GB Ram, and a really nice Nforce 3 MB with built in Gigabit Ethernet. I also grabbed a DVD burner, a larger hard drive to give me a little more space, and a cool floppy drive that has memory card ports in it (Compact Flash, SD, MMC, etc). This upgrade cost me $600 back in September, sure it's not the fastest you can buy but again I can play any game I want without any issues.
This doesn't even mentiond dealing with all the incompatibility and driver issues associated with PC Games
Periods are your friend, but beyond that what funky hardware are you running that is causing these issues? I can personnally state that I have not had a driver issue for a PC game since 1999 when I had to mess with 3dfx drivers for my original 3dfx 4MB card to get Ultima IX running. I do read reports about ATI cards having the occasional issue with new games as they come out but being happy with Nvidia I can't really say much on the issue. It might also be that the year of waiting to purchase a new videocard gives the drivers enough time to mature.
In the end is PC gaming more expensive than console gaming? Yes, it sure is. Does it have to be several thousand dollars more expensive every few years? No, not if you shop around and go for the most bang for the buck. Just stay away from making your computer be the top PC is all of the benchmarks. Who cares? Sure you can say you have the fastest computer in the world but when you spend all your time tweaking it to make it run better, when do you actually play games on it?
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother trying to configure an old box to boot DOS? Just run the games in Windows 2000/XP under DOSBox.
Thankfully there are new games with nice graphics that are still fun to play. ICO for the PS2 is a beautiful games and the sequel Shadow of the Coloses looks like it will also be just as great a game. Katamari Damacy was a weird but fun game. It went along with the easy to pickup, but fun to play catagory. I'm also looking forward to Okami which is going to use a Japanese paper art style to the game. It looks like it will be quirky, and I'm hoping it's as fun as it is pretty.
I have to agree that Nintendo is definately ahead of the curve with the overall crappyness of current games. They still are making fun games which might not have the best looking graphics, but are fun to play.
I'm not sure what applications you are running. But the majority of the applications are normally just sitting there waiting for user input. There is still the issue of memory, but a 512MB or higher system should be fine.
Your thinking of some wierd thing like BBCode. /. uses standard HTML formatting. You can also just use the preview button if your unsure of how your post will look to make you not look like a moron.
Maybe it would happen if the game companies released SDKs for those engines. Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, Starcraft, and Warcraft have all had user created mods. But the developers released tools to let the community make mods. There have been mods for games were the developers didn't release SDKs or other toolkits like the X-Wing series of PC games. But those are few compared to what comes out if there is developer support.
Do you mean something like the GP32. Sadly you can only import it and good luck on find one. But it was a cool handheld with tons of emulators and everything.
It depends on if it will work in the PS3. The PS2's HDD was a standard 40GB Maxtor with a custom firmware. You could actually use any HD that would fit on the IDE and Molex connectors on the PS2's network adapter under Linux; however, the custom firmware was required if you wanted the HD to work with games on a non-modded system. We'll have to see if Linux will require the custom firmware, and with the PS2 you needed a bootdisk to be able to launch into Linux.
You could access the DVD drive under Linux on the PS2. The problem was that unless you had a modchip it could only read game disks, and the offical Linux Disks. This was supposedly due to how disk authenication works on the PS2. I'm not entirely on the subject since I had a modchip long before the Linux Kit came out and I could read any disk on it. You could also just use an external USB2 DVD drive to read the disk if you need.
The PS2's Linux ran in an abstracted layer where you weren't getting right down to the raw hardware, and its 32MB of RAM limitation made it run pretty slow, but it was cool none the less.
You have to remember just when these games were released. XvsTIE came out in 1997 so you can't really expect it to look as good as modern games. And the sequal game to the X-Wing and TIE series X-Wing Alliance was released in 1999. There is currently a project updating all the models at: http://www.xwaupgrade.com/.
The only major issue with the Collector's Edition is that it keeps the original systems fully intact. While this is nice since it keeps them original TIE Fighter's system of how you interfaced with the ships was a nice update to X-Wings, and XvsTIE was a major and awesome update. Going back to the old systems in kind of hard, but the games are still fun.
TIE Fighters are only flimzy IF you get hit. I still remember jumping online the day X-Wing Alliance came out, sadly it never had the community of the MSN Gaming Zone's X-Wing vs. TIE, but I schooled some kids that needed their pansy shields in their X-Wing and A-Wing.
And some really good news for everyone. I found it for sale for those of you that don't have it at Gogamer.com and it's selling for $27.90 + s/h. So that guy below that says he'll pay up to $200 for that can save some money or just send the $170 he didn't spend on the game to me.
http://www.gogamer.com/cgi-bin/GoGamer.storefront/ SESSIONID/Product/View/001XWIC
Again which but a very small handful of games actually support a keyboard and mouse interface on the PS2. Also how comfortable is it to use a mouse from your couch? What if you don't have a coffee table?
Watch what card your using to do Tv input. Most TV cards will do encoding of the signal which introduces lag into the displaying of the picture which in turns will make games that require very tight controlling and twitch reflexes impossible to play.
Your missing the point. You can buy a video card today that came out a year or two ago. It will play the games that just came out today just fine. Sure you might not get 100+ fps at 1600x1200 with 16xAA with every eyecandy feature maxed. But the games will fun and they will be just as fun.
They could just allow the games to be sent to the DS wirelessly since both the Revolution and DS support WiFi. Sure the games will be lost if you power down (you have sleep mode though), but I doubt they will release a re-writable cart as that may allow the ability to pirate DS games.
First off the Revolution will very likely be cheaper than the Xbox 360. Also picture the parent holiday shopping for their child. The clerk at the video game store says, well you can buy this Xbox 360 for $300 (Pulled the price from my ass) and then you can buy the games for it for $50-$60, or you can buy this Nintendo Revolution for $250 (again out of my ass but maybe it will also only be $200) and while the games cost $50 you can also connect it to the internet and download classic games (with some of them possibly being free). Think as a parent for a moment. Little Johnny could have a new game console with a new game or two and have the ability to play older games that he just downloads, or you could pay more without having the classic games download option? And while you might not be a fan of Nintendo you have to admit after playing some of their games that they are innovative and their games are just simply fun which is all that really matters in the end.
Also Microsoft released something called the Xbox Media Entender for the original Xbox. This allowed it to play content off of Media Edition PCs, but I never wanted to play the $80 or so dollars to check it out.
So far every system FF has been on has received 3 FF games, also FFIII came out in Japan for the NES the same year the SNES was released. FFVI came out in Japan the same year the PSX was released.
Complain all you want about the FF series, but it's still a decent playable story book. If you want to experience something new pickup the Saga Frontier series. It has been the testing ground for new systems since the PSX, unlike the more traditional but awesome Romancing Saga games for the SNES.
Will SE stop supporting FFXI? Not when it's pulling in several million dollars every month. Will they stop making FF games? Not when everytime they release one it sells several million copies. Will they stop the Dragon Quest series which has less entries than the FF series but has been going on for about as long? Again not while it rakes in the money.
If you stop thinking of the FF games as a continuation of one another and more as a genre of simular games, it's easier to see why people keep snatching each new one. If you like the previous FF games, there is a good chance you'll also like the new FF game that's coming out. And knowing that it's the FF series you know the production value of the game will be very high.
If you want a dual core system but don't want to wait, just built a socket 939 Athlon 64 system right now. The AMD dual core Athlons are supposed to just require a BIOS upgrade to get dual core processors running in them. Sure you'll spend money on the single core CPU, but you won't have to wait, and just buy a cheap 3000+ or something.
Check out Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. It's supposed to have everything your looking for including ungodly graphics. Elderscrolls.com
As for upgrading your computer every 3 years whats the problem with that? The Xbox is getting replaced as a console after only 4 years and it looks aged compared to current PC games, and to me the Xbox 360 games that I've seen so far in HDTV don't look any better than games running in higher resolutions on my current PC. As for the cost of upgrading a computer, you don't need to purchase a complete sytem every single time, you can keep your monitor, speakers, case, keyboard, mouse, drives (DVD-R, Hard Drives, etc). The only thing you really need to purchase those 3 years is a Motherboard, CPU, RAM, and maybe get a Video Card upgrade every other time.
My last upgrade netted me a Athlon64 3000+ (which I o/c'd to 3200+ with the stock retail fan withou any issue), 1GB Ram, and a really nice Nforce 3 MB with built in Gigabit Ethernet. I also grabbed a DVD burner, a larger hard drive to give me a little more space, and a cool floppy drive that has memory card ports in it (Compact Flash, SD, MMC, etc). This upgrade cost me $600 back in September, sure it's not the fastest you can buy but again I can play any game I want without any issues.
This doesn't even mentiond dealing with all the incompatibility and driver issues associated with PC Games Periods are your friend, but beyond that what funky hardware are you running that is causing these issues? I can personnally state that I have not had a driver issue for a PC game since 1999 when I had to mess with 3dfx drivers for my original 3dfx 4MB card to get Ultima IX running. I do read reports about ATI cards having the occasional issue with new games as they come out but being happy with Nvidia I can't really say much on the issue. It might also be that the year of waiting to purchase a new videocard gives the drivers enough time to mature.
In the end is PC gaming more expensive than console gaming? Yes, it sure is. Does it have to be several thousand dollars more expensive every few years? No, not if you shop around and go for the most bang for the buck. Just stay away from making your computer be the top PC is all of the benchmarks. Who cares? Sure you can say you have the fastest computer in the world but when you spend all your time tweaking it to make it run better, when do you actually play games on it?
Except that the realtime ballroom ffxiii scene was shown at E3 during the Launching of the PS2!!!! So ya, I hope Doom 3 looks better.