I mean, we had a great proof of concept on the first Xbox that running games from the HD ON A CONSOLE was possible, with people hacking their console to copy games to the hard disk. I'd be really surprised if the 360 can't do that out of the box now. I mean, they could have Halo 1 as a download on MarketPlace and people would download and run it. Xbox games ship on DVD9 anyway so you could fit almost two games on the HD (the game cache takes about 6 gigs IIRC). Considering that a game from SquareEnix on the PS3 is going to fill a Blu-Ray with FMVs (let's assume two layers filled with the game and 1080p FMVs), people with the 500$ version won't even be able to copy it to their hard drive, while people with the 600$ model will barely be able to fit the game on the HD. This "advantage" Sony speaks of actually is more of a 360 advantage, especially with the 60gig HD coming out someday for he 360.
A lot of people have spent good money on HDTVs, and they're starving for content. As someone who watched Prison Break, 24, House, Lost, Alias, Invasion, Bones, American Idol and Tout le monde en parle last season, totalling 10 hours of HDTV shows a week, and considering I don't watch Desperate Housewife, Boston Legal, West Wing, most HBO shows, ABC/NBC/CBS sitcoms, CSI (all three versions), Las Vegas and just about any other american TV show right now, I wouldn't say that people are starving for content. Sure, we might not have news in HD, but most entertainment shows are (even Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live are in HD!).
Now, wether this content is actually GOOD or NOT is another debate.
There's a single rule that should be applied with any project. If management chooses a feature set, the development team should be in charge of choosing a shipping date and if management chooses a shipping date, then the development team gets to choose the features that will be in by that date. Any attemps to choose both by the higher management will result in failure.
o do 4xAA for free Explain me the part where processing four 4 times the number of pixels, thus applying 4 times more often each shader, make 4xAA for free?
Huh? I don't see anything really bad about this. I mean, the cats were tested for their degree of allergy inducing-ness, and those with the lowest "scores" were left to breed together. There's nothing really unethical in this. If it were dogs cats living together, mass hysteria (Thanks Ghostbusters:)), sure, but it's simply picking the less allergic cats and have them breed. It's not as if they had done gene splicing and inserted lemon gene or genes from galapagos island giant turtles in the cats to make them hypoallergic. Actually, I'm really happy that someone decided to go the natural (as natural as it can get anyway) route to do this.
As for medecine, you do realize that each time you take medication, there are side-effects, which can be detrimental or not to your health, not counting the fact that nature always has a tendency to adapt and make cures useless at some point? Some of these product induce drowsiness and can be dangerous if taken with alchool. You don't want people always being on drugs. Besides, I'm pretty sure than through the lifetime of a cat, an allergic can owner would spend more on medication that on the 4000$ cat.
Actually, what I'd really like to see, is more games with the "New Game +" features. Personally, when I'm done with an RPG which took me about 50 hours to complete, I don't really feel like playing throught it for one major reason : grinding.
I already completed the game once, I would just love to restart the game and experience the story again (or side-quests I didn't complete on the first try, or go dark side) without all the grinding involved. I like when games like Chrono Trigger or Ninja Gaiden allow you to simply restart the game with all your stuff so you can just blast your way through the game. This means I can enjoy it a second time without going through the hassle of finding everything. Plus, I get to cast the most powerful spell on an imp, which always a funny thing to do.:)
Or do like Diablo 2 did, and have you restart the game with all your stuff but now everything is harder. I'd prefer solution one, but solution 2 is nice also.
... anybody notice how Microsoft sold for 2.9 billion and made 2 billion profit in one quarter alone? Where's the missing 900 millions? Did they really spend 900 million in 3 months in R&D and marketting for Office? Really??? Something must be wrong in those numbers. Even if they were for the whole year instead of 3 months... still.... 900 million for R&D and marketting? This is soooo weird...
It's not that I been living under a rock, I mean, I've been closely following the console space for years, but due to money, I have held on buying a console until the Xbox in 2003. I knew that the a lot of the games were rehashing ideas from the previous years, I'm not deluded at all, and I wouldn't consider myself a casual gamer, as I've gamed pretty much everyday since I got the original Xbox, bought over 20 games in diverse genre and even got a DS right after launch, tough my experience to it is lukewarm (I have way more GBA games than DS games... 6 GBA games to the only DS game I have, Castlevania DS (another rehash I am sure, but fun nonetheless ) ). As for not buying a Wii, I would love nothing more than buying a Wii, but I've already invested over 750CAN$ on the 360 (the premium console, an extra controller, and a extra two year warranty) and I can't feel that I can justify a Wii for at least a year, since I've already spent so much so far. I'll probably have a wait and see approach with the Wii and try it out at a Nintendo fanboy's place first.
Why would people be tired of the games we have right now with Sony and MS? My Xbox was the first console I owned since my NES more than 10 years before. I played a bit on the PC for a few years, but mostly FPSes and Blizzard games. When I got the Xbox, I got back a bit in RPGs with Knights of the Old Republic (I followed the Final Fantasies over the years, waching friends play them and except for the FMVs I couldn't care less), started playing 3rd person games like Ninja Gaiden, got into Burnout, played innovative titles like Kingdom Under Fire.
All those game were new to me, and so were they to MILLION of other people who had been out of gaming for years or just started playing for the first time. We are definitely not blasé about the current crop of games. I'll gladly play Kotor 3, Ninja Gaiden 2 (well, technically, that would be 5), Halo 3 and Dead or Alive 4. That's why I got a 360 a month after it came out. I knew it would be more of the stuff that got me back into console gaming. I have no problem playing a game like Ghost Recon : Advance Warfighter, I never even played a tactical FPS before this one. While this game may only be Ghost Recon 2 + pretty graphics + better AI (tough, I'm not impressed about the AI... anyway) to a lot of people, to me it was a fresh new experience that got me into that genre. I'll probably take a look at Rainbow Six Vegas when it comes out.
Why would I even want a Wii for it's groundbreaking new controller? Most of the stuff I played on my Xbox and now the 360 are maybe not ground breaking to others, but they are to me. Sure I could experience new ways of controlling the game, but I'm already experiencing so much new with the 360.
I get if you've been playing games for the last 20 years through every generations, you might feel the need for Nintendo's Wii controller. I really respect what they are trying to accomplish and I'll probably have fun playing with it at a friend's house. Me personnally, I'll probably have fun discovering genres that are new to me. Even with my "primitive controller" (which, btw, feels like the nicest controller I've ever held in my hand. Give me an Xbox controller over a dual shock any day.)
I totally agree with you. I live in Québec, Canada, and I speak french. When I was in school, we started learning english in fourth grade, and boy did I suck. I don't even know how I passed my english courses in 4rth and 5h grade.
I played a lot of video games back then, but mostly Mega Man, Mario, Ninja Turtles, Contra, Baseball Stars, etc. Text-less games. Then I started playing Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy I and coupled with an english immersion class for a few months, I got a LOT better in english. Eventually, I would skip an entire year of english by polishing my reading abilities playing games like Final Fantasy on the gameboy and the Super Nes. Oh, and the Zelda cartoons.
Actually. No. I have the exact setup at home and it doesn't work at all for me. That is, I have a PC connected via component cables in 720p on my TV monitor.
First, don't even think people can use anything less than an HD signal to browse the web. You can't use a computer on a TV monitor for anything else than watching video or images or singing karaoke songs (all time favorite:)). Reading fonts on webpage is really hard, unless you blow up the font, and that causes other problems like layout issues.
You'll probably want to use a wireless mouse also. I have a 100CAN$ Logitech mouse, the MX1000, which is a very nice wireless mouse, and I can't get away more than ~4 feet from my TV before the cursor starts acting weird. I don't know how other mouse fare, but my experience has been bad. My el cheapo keyboard that I paid 15 bucks does the job perfectly, but then, it certainly needs less bandwidth. Also, there is the whole problem of posture. I mostly sit on the floor with my legs under the table and a cushion under my backside, hardly ideal. Anyway, point is, you need a cordless solution that has a better range than what you normally buy for your computer.
Then, there's the price you wish to invest on your TV (remember, 720p minimum, 1080p ideal). I have a Sony Wega 34 inch TV (cathodic) which supports 1080i and the text is nowhere are crisp as on a PC monitor. I'd recommend a LCD instead, but that costs even more than a cathodic monitor. And make sure the resolution is really 720p, not some HD ready LCD which is actually 854x480 like some of them are. Oh, and don't use interlaced resolutions, it will gave you a headache because of the flickering caused by UI features which are 1 pixel thick.
There's a lot of work to be done in order to have a nice looking sytem that browses the web, chats and everything on the TV without sacrifying real-estate by blowing everyting up to be readable. And a sizable investment too. Considering you can get a cheap PC that works way better than the setup you are proposing (and more versatile), I don't see why I would shell 600$ for a PS3, plus an HDTV and some very good optical mouse and keyboard.
on Vista as any use of it outside full screen rendering effectively turns off the entire Aero interface. Users are going to notice this, and apps using OpenGL will get bad feedback for "breaking the interface when they run". Yeah, I've heard about this too. The weird thing is, I work on a software that has it's own widget toolkit implemented in OpenGL and we loaded it on Windows Vista Beta to see if it would even run and strangely the Aero interface didn't go away when we launched our app. The team was pretty confused about this because we were away of the vanilla switch.
Oh my god... Terminal Velocity... I still have the original CD right next to be in my library. That was such a great game. I first tried that game on the demo CD that came with my gravis gamepad when my parents boughts a Pentium 133 back in 1995. I loved the demo so much that I bought the full version of the game. Fond memories... Thanks for trip down the memory lane.
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I mean, we had a great proof of concept on the first Xbox that running games from the HD ON A CONSOLE was possible, with people hacking their console to copy games to the hard disk. I'd be really surprised if the 360 can't do that out of the box now. I mean, they could have Halo 1 as a download on MarketPlace and people would download and run it. Xbox games ship on DVD9 anyway so you could fit almost two games on the HD (the game cache takes about 6 gigs IIRC). Considering that a game from SquareEnix on the PS3 is going to fill a Blu-Ray with FMVs (let's assume two layers filled with the game and 1080p FMVs), people with the 500$ version won't even be able to copy it to their hard drive, while people with the 600$ model will barely be able to fit the game on the HD. This "advantage" Sony speaks of actually is more of a 360 advantage, especially with the 60gig HD coming out someday for he 360.
True, but I'm worried about the other kind. And I'm pretty sure a truck full of civilians might blow the thing up anyway.
I bet they still blow up a truck full of Red Cross Equipement. Think before insulting people.
Maybe he's talking about the Library of Congress's index?
... they actually build a landmine that doesn't blow up when a child, woman or innocent civilian steps on it.
A lot of people have spent good money on HDTVs, and they're starving for content.
As someone who watched Prison Break, 24, House, Lost, Alias, Invasion, Bones, American Idol and Tout le monde en parle last season, totalling 10 hours of HDTV shows a week, and considering I don't watch Desperate Housewife, Boston Legal, West Wing, most HBO shows, ABC/NBC/CBS sitcoms, CSI (all three versions), Las Vegas and just about any other american TV show right now, I wouldn't say that people are starving for content. Sure, we might not have news in HD, but most entertainment shows are (even Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live are in HD!).
Now, wether this content is actually GOOD or NOT is another debate.
his was before he was dead, of course :)
Then, it appears you are also safe with Jesus then, depending on your beliefs.
You should see the retail cost for an Inferno system in Japan.
Apparently they have removed support for network cards and wireless.
There's a single rule that should be applied with any project. If management chooses a feature set, the development team should be in charge of choosing a shipping date and if management chooses a shipping date, then the development team gets to choose the features that will be in by that date. Any attemps to choose both by the higher management will result in failure.
You mean like another name for "amyl nitrate"?
You mean it's possible to rush Duke Nukem Forever at this point????
o do 4xAA for free
Explain me the part where processing four 4 times the number of pixels, thus applying 4 times more often each shader, make 4xAA for free?
Huh? I don't see anything really bad about this. I mean, the cats were tested for their degree of allergy inducing-ness, and those with the lowest "scores" were left to breed together. There's nothing really unethical in this. If it were dogs cats living together, mass hysteria (Thanks Ghostbusters :)), sure, but it's simply picking the less allergic cats and have them breed. It's not as if they had done gene splicing and inserted lemon gene or genes from galapagos island giant turtles in the cats to make them hypoallergic. Actually, I'm really happy that someone decided to go the natural (as natural as it can get anyway) route to do this.
As for medecine, you do realize that each time you take medication, there are side-effects, which can be detrimental or not to your health, not counting the fact that nature always has a tendency to adapt and make cures useless at some point? Some of these product induce drowsiness and can be dangerous if taken with alchool. You don't want people always being on drugs. Besides, I'm pretty sure than through the lifetime of a cat, an allergic can owner would spend more on medication that on the 4000$ cat.
Actually, what I'd really like to see, is more games with the "New Game +" features. Personally, when I'm done with an RPG which took me about 50 hours to complete, I don't really feel like playing throught it for one major reason : grinding.
:)
I already completed the game once, I would just love to restart the game and experience the story again (or side-quests I didn't complete on the first try, or go dark side) without all the grinding involved. I like when games like Chrono Trigger or Ninja Gaiden allow you to simply restart the game with all your stuff so you can just blast your way through the game. This means I can enjoy it a second time without going through the hassle of finding everything. Plus, I get to cast the most powerful spell on an imp, which always a funny thing to do.
Or do like Diablo 2 did, and have you restart the game with all your stuff but now everything is harder. I'd prefer solution one, but solution 2 is nice also.
Just pray their next Starcraft release is not World or Starcraft. That's the "second time around"-squared!
... anybody notice how Microsoft sold for 2.9 billion and made 2 billion profit in one quarter alone? Where's the missing 900 millions? Did they really spend 900 million in 3 months in R&D and marketting for Office? Really??? Something must be wrong in those numbers. Even if they were for the whole year instead of 3 months... still.... 900 million for R&D and marketting? This is soooo weird...
It's not that I been living under a rock, I mean, I've been closely following the console space for years, but due to money, I have held on buying a console until the Xbox in 2003. I knew that the a lot of the games were rehashing ideas from the previous years, I'm not deluded at all, and I wouldn't consider myself a casual gamer, as I've gamed pretty much everyday since I got the original Xbox, bought over 20 games in diverse genre and even got a DS right after launch, tough my experience to it is lukewarm (I have way more GBA games than DS games... 6 GBA games to the only DS game I have, Castlevania DS (another rehash I am sure, but fun nonetheless ) ). As for not buying a Wii, I would love nothing more than buying a Wii, but I've already invested over 750CAN$ on the 360 (the premium console, an extra controller, and a extra two year warranty) and I can't feel that I can justify a Wii for at least a year, since I've already spent so much so far. I'll probably have a wait and see approach with the Wii and try it out at a Nintendo fanboy's place first.
Why would people be tired of the games we have right now with Sony and MS? My Xbox was the first console I owned since my NES more than 10 years before. I played a bit on the PC for a few years, but mostly FPSes and Blizzard games. When I got the Xbox, I got back a bit in RPGs with Knights of the Old Republic (I followed the Final Fantasies over the years, waching friends play them and except for the FMVs I couldn't care less), started playing 3rd person games like Ninja Gaiden, got into Burnout, played innovative titles like Kingdom Under Fire.
All those game were new to me, and so were they to MILLION of other people who had been out of gaming for years or just started playing for the first time. We are definitely not blasé about the current crop of games. I'll gladly play Kotor 3, Ninja Gaiden 2 (well, technically, that would be 5), Halo 3 and Dead or Alive 4. That's why I got a 360 a month after it came out. I knew it would be more of the stuff that got me back into console gaming. I have no problem playing a game like Ghost Recon : Advance Warfighter, I never even played a tactical FPS before this one. While this game may only be Ghost Recon 2 + pretty graphics + better AI (tough, I'm not impressed about the AI... anyway) to a lot of people, to me it was a fresh new experience that got me into that genre. I'll probably take a look at Rainbow Six Vegas when it comes out.
Why would I even want a Wii for it's groundbreaking new controller? Most of the stuff I played on my Xbox and now the 360 are maybe not ground breaking to others, but they are to me. Sure I could experience new ways of controlling the game, but I'm already experiencing so much new with the 360.
I get if you've been playing games for the last 20 years through every generations, you might feel the need for Nintendo's Wii controller. I really respect what they are trying to accomplish and I'll probably have fun playing with it at a friend's house. Me personnally, I'll probably have fun discovering genres that are new to me. Even with my "primitive controller" (which, btw, feels like the nicest controller I've ever held in my hand. Give me an Xbox controller over a dual shock any day.)
I totally agree with you. I live in Québec, Canada, and I speak french. When I was in school, we started learning english in fourth grade, and boy did I suck. I don't even know how I passed my english courses in 4rth and 5h grade.
:)
I played a lot of video games back then, but mostly Mega Man, Mario, Ninja Turtles, Contra, Baseball Stars, etc. Text-less games. Then I started playing Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy I and coupled with an english immersion class for a few months, I got a LOT better in english. Eventually, I would skip an entire year of english by polishing my reading abilities playing games like Final Fantasy on the gameboy and the Super Nes. Oh, and the Zelda cartoons.
"Good luck ma' boy!!!"
... drool over Boxx's APEXX 8 machine. It's 8 dual core AMDs with up to 128 gigs of ram. Got one at the office. We can't wait to try our app on it. :)
Actually. No. I have the exact setup at home and it doesn't work at all for me. That is, I have a PC connected via component cables in 720p on my TV monitor.
:)). Reading fonts on webpage is really hard, unless you blow up the font, and that causes other problems like layout issues.
First, don't even think people can use anything less than an HD signal to browse the web. You can't use a computer on a TV monitor for anything else than watching video or images or singing karaoke songs (all time favorite
You'll probably want to use a wireless mouse also. I have a 100CAN$ Logitech mouse, the MX1000, which is a very nice wireless mouse, and I can't get away more than ~4 feet from my TV before the cursor starts acting weird. I don't know how other mouse fare, but my experience has been bad. My el cheapo keyboard that I paid 15 bucks does the job perfectly, but then, it certainly needs less bandwidth. Also, there is the whole problem of posture. I mostly sit on the floor with my legs under the table and a cushion under my backside, hardly ideal. Anyway, point is, you need a cordless solution that has a better range than what you normally buy for your computer.
Then, there's the price you wish to invest on your TV (remember, 720p minimum, 1080p ideal). I have a Sony Wega 34 inch TV (cathodic) which supports 1080i and the text is nowhere are crisp as on a PC monitor. I'd recommend a LCD instead, but that costs even more than a cathodic monitor. And make sure the resolution is really 720p, not some HD ready LCD which is actually 854x480 like some of them are. Oh, and don't use interlaced resolutions, it will gave you a headache because of the flickering caused by UI features which are 1 pixel thick.
There's a lot of work to be done in order to have a nice looking sytem that browses the web, chats and everything on the TV without sacrifying real-estate by blowing everyting up to be readable. And a sizable investment too. Considering you can get a cheap PC that works way better than the setup you are proposing (and more versatile), I don't see why I would shell 600$ for a PS3, plus an HDTV and some very good optical mouse and keyboard.
on Vista as any use of it outside full screen rendering effectively turns off the entire Aero interface. Users are going to notice this, and apps using OpenGL will get bad feedback for "breaking the interface when they run".
Yeah, I've heard about this too. The weird thing is, I work on a software that has it's own widget toolkit implemented in OpenGL and we loaded it on Windows Vista Beta to see if it would even run and strangely the Aero interface didn't go away when we launched our app. The team was pretty confused about this because we were away of the vanilla switch.
... I bet if this was the Ninja Bay instead the police would have never been able to penetrate their fortress and arrest them.
Oh my god... Terminal Velocity... I still have the original CD right next to be in my library. That was such a great game. I first tried that game on the demo CD that came with my gravis gamepad when my parents boughts a Pentium 133 back in 1995. I loved the demo so much that I bought the full version of the game. Fond memories... Thanks for trip down the memory lane.