Sony's Playstation 2 problems had to do with a) using lousy equipment and b) lousy quality control, probably because they were racing to meet demand due to a bad launch plan. Blaming DVD video playback for PS2 hardware failures is like blaming audio CD playback for a failure of a computer CD-ROM - the device should be able to handle the different formats without problems.
Exactly. The majority of the disc read errors appear to be related to a plastic gear being worn down by a metal gear (yes, really). DVD playback functionality can cause this to become a problem more quickly (by using the device for multiple functions you'll be using it more), but it doesn't cause the device to break down with less use than it normally would. If you played games on it for 1000 hours instead of playing games for 500 hours and movies for 500 hours, it'd still wear out. The best anyone could offer would be that games spin the disc less (than movies), but since there's not much RAM on the system and no hard drive to cache data, most developers probably leave the drive spinning.
The biggest issue I can see with continuing to maintain these types of features on the hardware, beyond the additional price (which is worthwhile to Sony as a corporation since they produce CDs and DVDs), is that it may limit the hardware designers from looking at other media types in the future which may be beneficial to them, simply because the media types aren't backwards compatible and/or have no other content available. Most decisions to date to go with some other optical media (GD-ROM in the DC, the mini-DVDs in the GC) have more to do with copy protection than anything else, but there could easily be a point in the future where a 30 or 40GB optical disc is available but has no other entertainment uses. While 30 or 40GB games seem rediculous today, it's only a matter of time if developers start using the power of the hardware and the space on the DVDs to their advantage, using uncompressed data for music and art (since most compression formats are lossy).
In other words, if developers start producing games that span multiple DVDs and other technologies are available to Sony and others for their Nth-generation console, will they stick with DVDs simply because the movie industry is reluctant to move forward (because consumers would be as well, at least for another 15 or so years)? Alternatively, would they push new optical media formats into being backwards compatible (like DVD) simply to allow future components (and consoles) to play older disc formats?
How about you and the other script kiddiez continue obsessing over your "l33t gaming rigs", and I will play video games on a video game system and use my actual real normal computer to get actual real work done on.
Or even better, I'll keep playing PC games on my PC and console games on my console and refuse to buy PC-centric genres (FPS, RTS, etc) on my console until I've played them first and know that they actually redesigned the interface rather than shoe-horning it onto the box, and refuse to buy console-centric genres (platformers, Japanese RPGs) on my PC until I've tried it first (much less likely to actually happen) to make sure they didn't just hack it onto the console and expect everyone to plug in a PS2 controller with a USB adapter to play it.
Consoles work best for console games and PCs work best for PC games and we don't need to make it easier for people to move the games back and forth without considering the system at hand. There's nothing worse than an emulator without gamepad support, and that's essentially what a lot of ports end up feeling like.
and that experience probably taught them pretty well that they were in the right place in the console business. Manufacture the parts (or license technology), cash the fat check, and sit back while the company that owns the consoles tries to sell them at a profit, or sell them at a loss and profit from games sales. As it stands, IBM makes a profit from all 3 consoles, regardless of which ones do well, and they have no need to put out a bunch of their own money to make sure that one console does make money.
I'm also pretty sure that IBM's big enough (and smart enough) not to get into the kind of problems nVidia had with the XBox production, getting stuck trying to produce yields high enough for MS' (or Nintendo's or Sony's) demands to the detriment of the rest of their products.
So they're developing a new xbox platform already?
They have to be ready when Nintendo and Sony release their next platforms, even though Sony's platform is the oldest of the 3. Most people are looking at 2005/2006 for the next generation, though it's hard to say as no one's announced a release date yet (though everyone's made some sort of announcement regarding some of their hardware partners).
I thought one of the nice things about consoles was that they didn't become obsolete technology as quickly as PCs.
New PC technology is released almost constantly, though video cards probably move the fastest with new products approximately every 6 months. New CPUs come out all the time, but they're usually incremental upgrades, with the big changes coming every 2 years or so. On the other hand, the XBox is coming up on 2 years and the XBox 2 will probably not be out for another 2-3 years. The PS2 should have the longest life-span of the 3, but only because it came out about a year earlier. Additionally, if the past is any indicator, the PS3 and the next Nintendo console probably won't hit the US for 6-12 months after their Japanese releases, whereas MS may or may not decide to wait for the US release to put out the XBox 2.
If they release a new xbox soon, 1)They're going to lose sales of their current xbox (oh wait, they already are).
Which is why they aren't releasing information like release dates, yet. If people get the idea that it's coming soon, then of course they're going to lose some sales, especially to people that will wait for the new console before buying the old one (when the prices drop). As it stands, though, they're simply talking about technology licensing, which should be done well before the console is even close to shipping. Sony announced their partnership with IBM quite a while ago, despite the fact that Nintendo and MS have both pretty much promised that if they don't beat Sony out, they won't be far behind.
But more importantly, 2) if consoles are going to start becoming obsolete in just a few years, it seems to me that it's just going to cause a huge market fragmentation if new consoles come out too soon.
This console generation may be a year (or maybe close to 2 years) shorter than others, but more than likely the only people that will really feel it are the people that must have the newest console right away. I'm more of the mind that I'll wait to see titles before buying another console, much as I did with this current generation. Additionally, since the current generation started with the Dreamcast, which had a year's head-start on the PS2, it's probably longer than most people think, especially since the PS2 had a lot of availability problems in it's first 6 months or so (in the US). I got my DreamCast 4 years ago (the day after launch iirc), but my PS2's only now getting close to 2 years old, my XBox is getting close to a year old, and my GC is still a couple months short of 6 months. Needless to say, I find buying a new console every once in a while a better deal than buying video cards every 6 months (or even every year with the high end pushing into the $400-500 range).
Besides, if all the developers jump ship to the next generation within a month of release, I'll have plenty of cheap games to check out until the good games start coming on the new consoles.
The word processor is mentioned exactly twice before you get to the 'About IBM' blurb, which is tacked onto the end of every press release that has anything to do with IBM.
The first time it's mentioned, it's in the context of processor technology, the blurb most-cited so far in this thread. The second time is as follows:
According to Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and chief technologist for IBM's Technology Group, the new Xbox technologies will be based on the latest in IBM's family of state-of-the-art processors.
Regardless, it states nowhere in the release that MS will be using processors from IBM, simply that they licensed processor technology from them, which could mean anything in this day when IP is more valuable to most companies than actual property. They could simply license certain portions of IBM's technology and then have Intel or AMD manufacture the chips, or open their own chip manufacturing plant (or have any number of other manufacturers stamp out processors).
The best reason for designing their own chip with technology licensed from other companies is that they actually get the full benefit of increased yields and any optimizations that can be made to decrease the price of the chips. The current XBox can't take advantage of these types of things because they basically have to pay extra for Intel to keep spitting out chips that they would've stopped manufacturing months (or even 2 years) ago, because their current CPUs are running with different footprints at higher MHz (and bus speeds).
Just a minor nit, the XBox is Win2k based, not CE based (as the DreamCast was), so it's more than likely that the XBox 2 would be XP-based, especially with XP Embedded having taken a lot of the hype away from CE-based devices in the last couple years.
And that was my point - aside from the way in which this particular bit of trash talk is utterly illogical, I don't understand why they're going after Nintendo with such vigor - it's far from their major competitor, and it's not as though Nintendo's audience is going to go XBox anytime soon
I think it's because, when it all comes down to it, Nintendo are the only ones Microsoft is really competing with, even though their lineup targets Sony more than Nintendo.
The fact is that Nintendo's outselling Microsoft worldwide, and that Nintendo's recent price-drop means they could start outselling Microsoft in the US, as well. This puts Microsoft in direct competition with Nintendo, rather than Sony, which is far ahead of both companies in terms of sales (though Nintendo occasionally passes Sony in home console sales in Japan).
The XBox and the Cube are squaring off for the 2nd console slot, but Microsoft is trying not to give people that image (with their pricing and by aiming their titles towards Sony's user base, though the latter gives it away pretty well). People that already own a PS2 are a much larger market than people that don't own a PS2 but are currently interested in a current-generation console. Nintendo might be pulling in a few customers that haven't bought a PS2 just because of their price, but overall the majority of their customers already own a PS2. The number of people willing to put down the money for an XBox that don't already own a PS2 is dwindling daily, and has been since the box was released. The XBox is riding on a handful of exclusive titles and it's Live play, and this differentiates it from Nintendo much more than Sony. Both Sony and Nintendo have more exclusive titles than Microsoft, and Sony's getting advertising from EA just because EA won't go online with anyone but Sony (and they mention it in all of their ads for their online games now). Therefore, Sony and Microsoft are clearly slugging it out in the online space, which is an even smaller market (the segment of people that own consoles that want to play online), but the online angle is really what would bring players to XBox over the Cube as a second console, because based on exclusive titles, unless you're really hurting for Halo, KOTOR, and Crimson Skies (1 of which is and 1 of which will be a PC title), you'll probably have a better selection on the Cube, and the multi-platform stuff from EA is only online on the PS2 (negating the Live bonus for EA fans).
If Microsoft was even close to the sales numbers of Sony, it's much more likely that Sony would get a mention on every one of MS' interviews, even if it seems fairly innocent the way this one appears to be on the surface. MS knows that as long as Nintendo's in play they won't have much room to compete for the #1 spot, because Nintendo's the type of company that can pull themselves back up to #1 if they get things right, and they are making money on their system, which gives them a leg up with shareholders that Microsoft isn't going to have for some time.
2) The controller was certainly the cause of much mirth among the press, but I think the level of vitriol was out of all proportion to the actual weakness of the device. Believe it or not, there are some people (myself included) who prefer the bigger controller, and yes, I own all three major consoles, and have both the original and (smaller) controller-S for Xbox - I choose to use the bigger controller when I can.
Exactly. I get sick of people assuming that everyone's hands are the same size, that I, for some reason, would want to play games with a controller made for a child's hands. I had to buy the larger controller for my XBox because it came with the controller-S. Thankfully, I had already played co-op Halo with a friend of mine, and used the full-sized controller (because he, unlike most men I know, has very small hands and prefers the S), and knew that I would prefer it. If I hadn't, I'd be complaining about the S to no end, which has some really poor choices for button placement.
3) That cost is amortized across every Live game you play, of course. So unless your customer is going to be buying Live just to play your game, it's not really a factor.
Exactly (again). I don't have Live for pretty much this reason, as I have few (or no) games that use it. On the other hand, MS seems to be willing to bundle trial subscriptions now, so when I pick up Crimson Skies it may be time to put the consoles on the network to give it a try. Since I plan on getting a 2nd GameCube if/when the Zelda bundle comes out (I wanted a 2nd Cube for the bedroom anyway, Zelda only sweetens the deal) I'll have another reason to put the consoles on the network (can just see it now playing Mario Kart over the network for more players or just to get away from split-screen).
As for voice acting, I see it as a simple matter of the two companies (MS and Nintendo) looking at it differently. MS may see it as necessary for their titles, and in many ways they might be right. Nintendo probably sees more of the bad side of voice acting, and realizes that there's a significant cost to doing it well. Additionally, look at how many titles MS didn't even bother translating for Japan. It's not like MS is actually bothering with the cost of translation, let alone Japanese voice acting, for all of their games, so they shouldn't expect someone else to do the same for MS' native market. At the very least, Nintendo has been doing a great job on their translations, regardless of whether or not their games have any voice acting (and as has been said many times, who really thinks putting voices on classic characters is a good idea?).
I think they should just subtitle when they bring games over to America, not that it really affects me anyway...
Or at least give the option to the player. I know a handful of people that can't stand being in the room when I'm wathing anime or playing Japanese RPGs that allow this option, but imo the English dubs are usually so bad that I only give them about 15 minutes to prove their worth before switching to Japanese w/ subtitles.
I don't see how you could tell good and bad voice acting in another language, because how they pronounce their words will be vastly different to how we do it, especially Japanese. To me, a Japanese person may sound angry when in fact they are not.
I don't speak a bit of Japanese, but I can usually tell whether or not the voice acting is good. It only takes a short while to be able to distinguish emotion from voices, and there are always context clues that can be picked up from the combination of the subtitles and the characters on-screen.
The best bet to really get a good idea of what good voice acting sounds like in Japanese, though, is to pick up some of the better anime and watch it sub-titled rather than dubbed. I learned this fairly early on because the dubs seem to be particularly bad with some anime (probably due to American disregard for animation in general, despite shows like the Simpsons being on the air for so long), and the Japanese is much easier to listen to once you get used to reading subtitles.
The.hack series of games is very similar in this regard, as the English voice acting seems fairly terrible, yet the Japanese is much easier to listen to.
The only show that gave me a wow factor this year is Carnivale from HBO, which IMHO is a fantasticly twisted show.
I love that show, it's one of only about 2 shows I actually care about watching at the moment.
The other is Smallville.
The last few episodes of Angel I've just found myself wandering out of the room to find something to do. Something's very wrong with the show this season.
I watched Tru Calling last nite and it came in slightly better than Angel, but not up there as something I need to see. Maybe I'll give it another run next week, since there isn't anything else on Thursday nites.
ABC, well, I think the only channels I watch less are CBS and whatever spanish-language channels they carry here. I probably watch QVC more.
You have NO IDEA what fucking pain it is to switch a machine from modem-connected to LAN-connected without getting the fucker to stop searching for his modem !
You're right, I have no idea, because I bought my first PC in 1996 and have never owned a modem;) Then again, I've never had a problem configuring my network, either.
As for a network configuration assistant, I'd rather see them just make it straight-forward. There's no point to assistants for all of this crap, I shouldn't have to go through a damned wizard when my network's already setup just because I launched IE to download my video drivers (since I've been using an Intel NIC for the last 4 years that always connects perfectly to my cable router via DHCP on installation of any version of Windows since 98).
I do have one simple idea for getting it to stop searching for the modem, though, disable it in the Device Mangler, or setup different hardware profiles if you still want to be able to use it (I didn't say I'd never used a computer with a modem in it;).
Is that why GTA is doing so well? Is that why Halo just won an award?
Right, anyway, I think that's why Microsoft's been working on getting more Japanese developed titles on the box, but of course they're still fighting a much more uphill battle in Japan than they have had anywhere else. Their hope at this point is to gain enough traction and prove themselves for the XBox 2.
Similarly, I think Nintendo's coming on pretty strong for the last leg of this generation to try to bring third parties into the fold for their next console, along with more US and European market share for the current one (which helps with the developers, of course).
Both the XBox and the Cube have some pretty impressive titles on the 'coming soon' or 'new release' lists, so the next year should be very interesting, and good for those of us that have all 3 consoles;)
Well in that case it's a darn good thing its integrated into the OS
Well, it's a darn good thing Explorer's about as integrated into Windows as the glasses I'm wearing are integrated into my body (in other words, not at all), so replacements aren't a big deal, except that some of them are more or less optimal than they should be.
and our chips are more efficient (~1.75:1) isn't it?
1.75:1 sounds a bit like the numbers Apple published, but doesn't hold close to anything else I've seen. Of course, that all assumes you have a shiny new G5.
MS has a seperate research division that isn't beholden to developing products, though. It's not like everything MSR comes up with goes into a product, nor is it necessary for MSR to apply money and time to something that MS wants for their next OS. SO, part of that $6.8 billion is just MSR's funding (which increases substantially every few years), while the rest of it is the R&D required for their products.
without going to far into it, heres what apple has to say about their technology. Any MacOSX user can attest to this providing real tangible benifits on their system From the Apple link in the parent post: (yea it's marketing, but it's not false) "Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on screen..." "Quartz Extreme uses a supported graphics card built into your Mac to relieve the main PowerPC chip of on screen calculations. This dramatically improves system performance..." Of course the CPU is involved however, QE is CPU independent as the requirements are for a GPU...
You do realize, of course, that what you just described is a 2D graphics system that actually uses more CPU time to display standard graphics, and then uses the GPU to apply effects, right? Essentially, what they're saying is that they get all of the information you would normally need to display a 2D GUI, convert the various windows on the screen into textures (which is the part that takes more CPU power than the usual display methods), and then sends all of the information and textures to the GPU for processing and adding effects like shadows. The only increase in speed is with things like resizing and moving windows, where the GPU can easily resize or move an existing texture fairly quickly, as well as little effects like spinning and flipping windows around. Essentially you get a slower interface, but when you add QE you get a lot of effects for free (so the effects don't slow the system down).
This is all moot, since no windows user will have longhorn (legally) in their hands for another 12+ months or so, please let me know when some Linux distro gets around to it too
There are a handful of Explorer replacements (and add-ons) for Windows and various X11 and DE replacements for *nix that utilize various GPUs to utilize OpenGL or DirectX in various manners for the GUI of the operating systems in question. In some cases they go all out and make the environment a 3D space, while in others they just accelerate the rendering or add effects that would otherwise be too slow.
The closest thing to unique that the gaming industry has spit out in the past couple of years is Morrowind
A sequel...
Fallout would be my runner-up pick, and I wish they would produce another one.
A sequel in everything but name...
Don't get me wrong, I love those particular games, but unique isn't quite the right word. Unfortunately, it looks like the Fallout series is doomed to yet another sequel in a completely different genre with little to no gameplay in common with the original 2 games.
This will ensure that your users think it's hip and that using it makes them badasses.
Yes, because the target demographic of 3.5 to 6.5 year olds is in extreme need of things that make them feel like badasses, it drives their lives forward like nothing else.
Think about it. If someone released pong/mario 64 today and tried to sell it for full price (or anything at all) it'd be the laughing stock. We have come a long way, just not in all areas, and unsurprisingly its gameplay, the hardest one to pin down that is lagging the most.
Yet Nintendo has been selling 4 of the Super Mario titles (SMB2, SMB3, SMW, Yoshi's Island) for $35/each in the last year or so and they're selling quite well. They are planning on releasing most of the old Zelda games as a bundle with the Cube in a month or so.
The games aren't getting any better or any worse, and the best games of the past are still good. It's just that as we gain some distance from the games of the past, we forget more and more of the crap and remember the games we had fondly. In some cases we realize that some of the old games we enjoyed were crap, too, but for the most part we just forget the bad ones existed.
Seriously, there's nothing wrong with actually liking modern games. Personally I enjoyed Final Fantasy X. I don't wish that all games worked in exactly the same way, mainly 'cos I likes FFX as it wasn't like any game I'd perosnally encountered before.
There's nothing wrong with modern games. There's just an increased signal-to-noise ratio in people's perceptions when they've been playing games for a while. Everyone tends to forget how many bad games were on the shelves in the past, primarily because only the absolute worst games get talked about (of the bad ones). As for Final Fantasy X, I haven't formed an opinion myself, but the arguments given in the article were rediculous, basically a strawman because he couldn't argue against the real points anyone might've given.
Plus you don't need to diss all current popular culture. Besides, what's wrong with Linkin Park? I happen to like them. I hate that most 13-year-olds tend to like them as "they're cool", but that doesn't stop me from liking the band on their own merit.
As the previous poster stated, it's either an RIAA thing or the fact that a Vietnam vet with only one finger left on his fret hand could play better, which, as I've found in the last 10-15 years, is probably why 13-year-olds tend to like them.
That was C&C:Generals, and they had to change the cover art because the whole storyline (and thus the game) revolved around terrorists.
It was Red Alert 2, which revolved around the standard Red Alert storyline of an alternate universe where time had been altered during WW2. The game allows you to destroy (or defend) many well-known locations in the US as the Russians invade the country, and the cover art depicted the towers burning. My copy of RA2 has that cover art because it shipped some time before 9/11. C&C:Generals, on the other hand, shipped early this year and features the terrorist-heavy plotline, despite 9/11 and everything that's happened since then.
As for the recent Canadian outrage, the fact that the developers were specific about the terrorist organization and the location isn't saying much. Unless you can show me another game which PURPOSELY took a sensitive topic and published the game knowing the risks, I'm just going to classify the Syphon Filter Online incident as 'from the shoot-yourself-in-the-foot department.'
You named C&C Generals yourself, and then any number of terrorist/counterterrorist games that have come out in the last few years, from Rainbow 6 on down the list. SoF, which had other problems in Canada, and the original Syphon Filter. There were even people complaining about the fact that all of the terrorists in some of these games tend to be Arabic, yet when you put Canadian terrorists in a game you get public outcry and it gets removed.
And political correctness is a result of real criticism.
So why is it that real game criticism doesn't exist, yet political correctness does? I'm certainly not saying that it is a dominant force in games, but it is a growing force.
When a politician get criticized for making a sexist remark, doesn't he get corrected to fit the 'politically correct' views of the public?
Politicians are just that, politicians, public servants. They're expected to uphold a particular image for their constituents. That's exactly where the idea of political correctness comes from, but goes even deeper, to the fact that politicians today are afraid to go against polls, to take extreme stances, to be a Democrat or Republican rather than just sitting in the middle.
Win98 went into the 'extended support phase' as of June of this year, which basically means there will be hotfixes as needed, but there will be no free assisted support for users. In June of 2005 support drops completely.
98SE is a year after 98. 2000 is ~9 months after 98SE. Me is ~9 months after 2000. XP goes into the extended phase within a year or so of Longhorn's expected release.
There's even a slight possibility, with XP's expected retail availability to end in 2005, that you won't be able to find a Microsoft OS on the shelf for a few months without buying a computer.
I get slightly confused sometimes when I look at the charts on MS' page, but it basically comes down to 5 years of normal support and 2 years of extended support, plus whatever the chart says for availability of licenses (in other words, when you can buy the software), which is generally (but not always) 4 years.
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Sony's Playstation 2 problems had to do with a) using lousy equipment and b) lousy quality control, probably because they were racing to meet demand due to a bad launch plan. Blaming DVD video playback for PS2 hardware failures is like blaming audio CD playback for a failure of a computer CD-ROM - the device should be able to handle the different formats without problems.
Exactly. The majority of the disc read errors appear to be related to a plastic gear being worn down by a metal gear (yes, really). DVD playback functionality can cause this to become a problem more quickly (by using the device for multiple functions you'll be using it more), but it doesn't cause the device to break down with less use than it normally would. If you played games on it for 1000 hours instead of playing games for 500 hours and movies for 500 hours, it'd still wear out. The best anyone could offer would be that games spin the disc less (than movies), but since there's not much RAM on the system and no hard drive to cache data, most developers probably leave the drive spinning.
The biggest issue I can see with continuing to maintain these types of features on the hardware, beyond the additional price (which is worthwhile to Sony as a corporation since they produce CDs and DVDs), is that it may limit the hardware designers from looking at other media types in the future which may be beneficial to them, simply because the media types aren't backwards compatible and/or have no other content available. Most decisions to date to go with some other optical media (GD-ROM in the DC, the mini-DVDs in the GC) have more to do with copy protection than anything else, but there could easily be a point in the future where a 30 or 40GB optical disc is available but has no other entertainment uses. While 30 or 40GB games seem rediculous today, it's only a matter of time if developers start using the power of the hardware and the space on the DVDs to their advantage, using uncompressed data for music and art (since most compression formats are lossy).
In other words, if developers start producing games that span multiple DVDs and other technologies are available to Sony and others for their Nth-generation console, will they stick with DVDs simply because the movie industry is reluctant to move forward (because consumers would be as well, at least for another 15 or so years)? Alternatively, would they push new optical media formats into being backwards compatible (like DVD) simply to allow future components (and consoles) to play older disc formats?
Yeah, I thought about that after I hit post and figured I'd just take the nit when it came ;)
How about you and the other script kiddiez continue obsessing over your "l33t gaming rigs", and I will play video games on a video game system and use my actual real normal computer to get actual real work done on.
Or even better, I'll keep playing PC games on my PC and console games on my console and refuse to buy PC-centric genres (FPS, RTS, etc) on my console until I've played them first and know that they actually redesigned the interface rather than shoe-horning it onto the box, and refuse to buy console-centric genres (platformers, Japanese RPGs) on my PC until I've tried it first (much less likely to actually happen) to make sure they didn't just hack it onto the console and expect everyone to plug in a PS2 controller with a USB adapter to play it.
Consoles work best for console games and PCs work best for PC games and we don't need to make it easier for people to move the games back and forth without considering the system at hand. There's nothing worse than an emulator without gamepad support, and that's essentially what a lot of ports end up feeling like.
and that experience probably taught them pretty well that they were in the right place in the console business. Manufacture the parts (or license technology), cash the fat check, and sit back while the company that owns the consoles tries to sell them at a profit, or sell them at a loss and profit from games sales. As it stands, IBM makes a profit from all 3 consoles, regardless of which ones do well, and they have no need to put out a bunch of their own money to make sure that one console does make money.
I'm also pretty sure that IBM's big enough (and smart enough) not to get into the kind of problems nVidia had with the XBox production, getting stuck trying to produce yields high enough for MS' (or Nintendo's or Sony's) demands to the detriment of the rest of their products.
So they're developing a new xbox platform already?
They have to be ready when Nintendo and Sony release their next platforms, even though Sony's platform is the oldest of the 3. Most people are looking at 2005/2006 for the next generation, though it's hard to say as no one's announced a release date yet (though everyone's made some sort of announcement regarding some of their hardware partners).
I thought one of the nice things about consoles was that they didn't become obsolete technology as quickly as PCs.
New PC technology is released almost constantly, though video cards probably move the fastest with new products approximately every 6 months. New CPUs come out all the time, but they're usually incremental upgrades, with the big changes coming every 2 years or so. On the other hand, the XBox is coming up on 2 years and the XBox 2 will probably not be out for another 2-3 years. The PS2 should have the longest life-span of the 3, but only because it came out about a year earlier. Additionally, if the past is any indicator, the PS3 and the next Nintendo console probably won't hit the US for 6-12 months after their Japanese releases, whereas MS may or may not decide to wait for the US release to put out the XBox 2.
If they release a new xbox soon, 1)They're going to lose sales of their current xbox (oh wait, they already are).
Which is why they aren't releasing information like release dates, yet. If people get the idea that it's coming soon, then of course they're going to lose some sales, especially to people that will wait for the new console before buying the old one (when the prices drop). As it stands, though, they're simply talking about technology licensing, which should be done well before the console is even close to shipping. Sony announced their partnership with IBM quite a while ago, despite the fact that Nintendo and MS have both pretty much promised that if they don't beat Sony out, they won't be far behind.
But more importantly, 2) if consoles are going to start becoming obsolete in just a few years, it seems to me that it's just going to cause a huge market fragmentation if new consoles come out too soon.
This console generation may be a year (or maybe close to 2 years) shorter than others, but more than likely the only people that will really feel it are the people that must have the newest console right away. I'm more of the mind that I'll wait to see titles before buying another console, much as I did with this current generation. Additionally, since the current generation started with the Dreamcast, which had a year's head-start on the PS2, it's probably longer than most people think, especially since the PS2 had a lot of availability problems in it's first 6 months or so (in the US). I got my DreamCast 4 years ago (the day after launch iirc), but my PS2's only now getting close to 2 years old, my XBox is getting close to a year old, and my GC is still a couple months short of 6 months. Needless to say, I find buying a new console every once in a while a better deal than buying video cards every 6 months (or even every year with the high end pushing into the $400-500 range).
Besides, if all the developers jump ship to the next generation within a month of release, I'll have plenty of cheap games to check out until the good games start coming on the new consoles.
The word processor is mentioned exactly twice before you get to the 'About IBM' blurb, which is tacked onto the end of every press release that has anything to do with IBM.
The first time it's mentioned, it's in the context of processor technology, the blurb most-cited so far in this thread. The second time is as follows:
According to Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and chief technologist for IBM's
Technology Group, the new Xbox technologies will be based on the latest in
IBM's family of state-of-the-art processors.
Regardless, it states nowhere in the release that MS will be using processors from IBM, simply that they licensed processor technology from them, which could mean anything in this day when IP is more valuable to most companies than actual property. They could simply license certain portions of IBM's technology and then have Intel or AMD manufacture the chips, or open their own chip manufacturing plant (or have any number of other manufacturers stamp out processors).
The best reason for designing their own chip with technology licensed from other companies is that they actually get the full benefit of increased yields and any optimizations that can be made to decrease the price of the chips. The current XBox can't take advantage of these types of things because they basically have to pay extra for Intel to keep spitting out chips that they would've stopped manufacturing months (or even 2 years) ago, because their current CPUs are running with different footprints at higher MHz (and bus speeds).
the OS will be Windows based (Windows CE).
Just a minor nit, the XBox is Win2k based, not CE based (as the DreamCast was), so it's more than likely that the XBox 2 would be XP-based, especially with XP Embedded having taken a lot of the hype away from CE-based devices in the last couple years.
And that was my point - aside from the way in which this particular bit of trash talk is utterly illogical, I don't understand why they're going after Nintendo with such vigor - it's far from their major competitor, and it's not as though Nintendo's audience is going to go XBox anytime soon
I think it's because, when it all comes down to it, Nintendo are the only ones Microsoft is really competing with, even though their lineup targets Sony more than Nintendo.
The fact is that Nintendo's outselling Microsoft worldwide, and that Nintendo's recent price-drop means they could start outselling Microsoft in the US, as well. This puts Microsoft in direct competition with Nintendo, rather than Sony, which is far ahead of both companies in terms of sales (though Nintendo occasionally passes Sony in home console sales in Japan).
The XBox and the Cube are squaring off for the 2nd console slot, but Microsoft is trying not to give people that image (with their pricing and by aiming their titles towards Sony's user base, though the latter gives it away pretty well). People that already own a PS2 are a much larger market than people that don't own a PS2 but are currently interested in a current-generation console. Nintendo might be pulling in a few customers that haven't bought a PS2 just because of their price, but overall the majority of their customers already own a PS2. The number of people willing to put down the money for an XBox that don't already own a PS2 is dwindling daily, and has been since the box was released. The XBox is riding on a handful of exclusive titles and it's Live play, and this differentiates it from Nintendo much more than Sony. Both Sony and Nintendo have more exclusive titles than Microsoft, and Sony's getting advertising from EA just because EA won't go online with anyone but Sony (and they mention it in all of their ads for their online games now). Therefore, Sony and Microsoft are clearly slugging it out in the online space, which is an even smaller market (the segment of people that own consoles that want to play online), but the online angle is really what would bring players to XBox over the Cube as a second console, because based on exclusive titles, unless you're really hurting for Halo, KOTOR, and Crimson Skies (1 of which is and 1 of which will be a PC title), you'll probably have a better selection on the Cube, and the multi-platform stuff from EA is only online on the PS2 (negating the Live bonus for EA fans).
If Microsoft was even close to the sales numbers of Sony, it's much more likely that Sony would get a mention on every one of MS' interviews, even if it seems fairly innocent the way this one appears to be on the surface. MS knows that as long as Nintendo's in play they won't have much room to compete for the #1 spot, because Nintendo's the type of company that can pull themselves back up to #1 if they get things right, and they are making money on their system, which gives them a leg up with shareholders that Microsoft isn't going to have for some time.
2) The controller was certainly the cause of much mirth among the press, but I think the level of vitriol was out of all proportion to the actual weakness of the device. Believe it or not, there are some people (myself included) who prefer the bigger controller, and yes, I own all three major consoles, and have both the original and (smaller) controller-S for Xbox - I choose to use the bigger controller when I can.
Exactly. I get sick of people assuming that everyone's hands are the same size, that I, for some reason, would want to play games with a controller made for a child's hands. I had to buy the larger controller for my XBox because it came with the controller-S. Thankfully, I had already played co-op Halo with a friend of mine, and used the full-sized controller (because he, unlike most men I know, has very small hands and prefers the S), and knew that I would prefer it. If I hadn't, I'd be complaining about the S to no end, which has some really poor choices for button placement.
3) That cost is amortized across every Live game you play, of course. So unless your customer is going to be buying Live just to play your game, it's not really a factor.
Exactly (again). I don't have Live for pretty much this reason, as I have few (or no) games that use it. On the other hand, MS seems to be willing to bundle trial subscriptions now, so when I pick up Crimson Skies it may be time to put the consoles on the network to give it a try. Since I plan on getting a 2nd GameCube if/when the Zelda bundle comes out (I wanted a 2nd Cube for the bedroom anyway, Zelda only sweetens the deal) I'll have another reason to put the consoles on the network (can just see it now playing Mario Kart over the network for more players or just to get away from split-screen).
As for voice acting, I see it as a simple matter of the two companies (MS and Nintendo) looking at it differently. MS may see it as necessary for their titles, and in many ways they might be right. Nintendo probably sees more of the bad side of voice acting, and realizes that there's a significant cost to doing it well. Additionally, look at how many titles MS didn't even bother translating for Japan. It's not like MS is actually bothering with the cost of translation, let alone Japanese voice acting, for all of their games, so they shouldn't expect someone else to do the same for MS' native market. At the very least, Nintendo has been doing a great job on their translations, regardless of whether or not their games have any voice acting (and as has been said many times, who really thinks putting voices on classic characters is a good idea?).
I think they should just subtitle when they bring games over to America, not that it really affects me anyway...
Or at least give the option to the player. I know a handful of people that can't stand being in the room when I'm wathing anime or playing Japanese RPGs that allow this option, but imo the English dubs are usually so bad that I only give them about 15 minutes to prove their worth before switching to Japanese w/ subtitles.
I don't see how you could tell good and bad voice acting in another language, because how they pronounce their words will be vastly different to how we do it, especially Japanese.
.hack series of games is very similar in this regard, as the English voice acting seems fairly terrible, yet the Japanese is much easier to listen to.
To me, a Japanese person may sound angry when in fact they are not.
I don't speak a bit of Japanese, but I can usually tell whether or not the voice acting is good. It only takes a short while to be able to distinguish emotion from voices, and there are always context clues that can be picked up from the combination of the subtitles and the characters on-screen.
The best bet to really get a good idea of what good voice acting sounds like in Japanese, though, is to pick up some of the better anime and watch it sub-titled rather than dubbed. I learned this fairly early on because the dubs seem to be particularly bad with some anime (probably due to American disregard for animation in general, despite shows like the Simpsons being on the air for so long), and the Japanese is much easier to listen to once you get used to reading subtitles.
The
The only show that gave me a wow factor this year is Carnivale from HBO, which IMHO is a fantasticly twisted show.
I love that show, it's one of only about 2 shows I actually care about watching at the moment.
The other is Smallville.
The last few episodes of Angel I've just found myself wandering out of the room to find something to do. Something's very wrong with the show this season.
I watched Tru Calling last nite and it came in slightly better than Angel, but not up there as something I need to see. Maybe I'll give it another run next week, since there isn't anything else on Thursday nites.
ABC, well, I think the only channels I watch less are CBS and whatever spanish-language channels they carry here. I probably watch QVC more.
You have NO IDEA what fucking pain it is to switch a machine from modem-connected to LAN-connected without getting the fucker to stop searching for his modem !
;) Then again, I've never had a problem configuring my network, either.
;).
You're right, I have no idea, because I bought my first PC in 1996 and have never owned a modem
As for a network configuration assistant, I'd rather see them just make it straight-forward. There's no point to assistants for all of this crap, I shouldn't have to go through a damned wizard when my network's already setup just because I launched IE to download my video drivers (since I've been using an Intel NIC for the last 4 years that always connects perfectly to my cable router via DHCP on installation of any version of Windows since 98).
I do have one simple idea for getting it to stop searching for the modem, though, disable it in the Device Mangler, or setup different hardware profiles if you still want to be able to use it (I didn't say I'd never used a computer with a modem in it
Is that why GTA is doing so well? Is that why Halo just won an award?
;)
Right, anyway, I think that's why Microsoft's been working on getting more Japanese developed titles on the box, but of course they're still fighting a much more uphill battle in Japan than they have had anywhere else. Their hope at this point is to gain enough traction and prove themselves for the XBox 2.
Similarly, I think Nintendo's coming on pretty strong for the last leg of this generation to try to bring third parties into the fold for their next console, along with more US and European market share for the current one (which helps with the developers, of course).
Both the XBox and the Cube have some pretty impressive titles on the 'coming soon' or 'new release' lists, so the next year should be very interesting, and good for those of us that have all 3 consoles
Well in that case it's a darn good thing its integrated into the OS
Well, it's a darn good thing Explorer's about as integrated into Windows as the glasses I'm wearing are integrated into my body (in other words, not at all), so replacements aren't a big deal, except that some of them are more or less optimal than they should be.
and our chips are more efficient (~1.75:1) isn't it?
1.75:1 sounds a bit like the numbers Apple published, but doesn't hold close to anything else I've seen. Of course, that all assumes you have a shiny new G5.
MS has a seperate research division that isn't beholden to developing products, though. It's not like everything MSR comes up with goes into a product, nor is it necessary for MSR to apply money and time to something that MS wants for their next OS. SO, part of that $6.8 billion is just MSR's funding (which increases substantially every few years), while the rest of it is the R&D required for their products.
without going to far into it, heres what apple has to say about their technology. Any MacOSX user can attest to this providing real tangible benifits on their system From the Apple link in the parent post: (yea it's marketing, but it's not false) "Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on screen..." "Quartz Extreme uses a supported graphics card built into your Mac to relieve the main PowerPC chip of on screen calculations. This dramatically improves system performance..." Of course the CPU is involved however, QE is CPU independent as the requirements are for a GPU...
You do realize, of course, that what you just described is a 2D graphics system that actually uses more CPU time to display standard graphics, and then uses the GPU to apply effects, right? Essentially, what they're saying is that they get all of the information you would normally need to display a 2D GUI, convert the various windows on the screen into textures (which is the part that takes more CPU power than the usual display methods), and then sends all of the information and textures to the GPU for processing and adding effects like shadows. The only increase in speed is with things like resizing and moving windows, where the GPU can easily resize or move an existing texture fairly quickly, as well as little effects like spinning and flipping windows around. Essentially you get a slower interface, but when you add QE you get a lot of effects for free (so the effects don't slow the system down).
This is all moot, since no windows user will have longhorn (legally) in their hands for another 12+ months or so, please let me know when some Linux distro gets around to it too
There are a handful of Explorer replacements (and add-ons) for Windows and various X11 and DE replacements for *nix that utilize various GPUs to utilize OpenGL or DirectX in various manners for the GUI of the operating systems in question. In some cases they go all out and make the environment a 3D space, while in others they just accelerate the rendering or add effects that would otherwise be too slow.
The closest thing to unique that the gaming industry has spit out in the past couple of years is Morrowind
A sequel...
Fallout would be my runner-up pick, and I wish they would produce another one.
A sequel in everything but name...
Don't get me wrong, I love those particular games, but unique isn't quite the right word. Unfortunately, it looks like the Fallout series is doomed to yet another sequel in a completely different genre with little to no gameplay in common with the original 2 games.
This will ensure that your users think it's hip and that using it makes them badasses.
Yes, because the target demographic of 3.5 to 6.5 year olds is in extreme need of things that make them feel like badasses, it drives their lives forward like nothing else.
Think about it. If someone released pong/mario 64 today and tried to sell it for full price (or anything at all) it'd be the laughing stock. We have come a long way, just not in all areas, and unsurprisingly its gameplay, the hardest one to pin down that is lagging the most.
Yet Nintendo has been selling 4 of the Super Mario titles (SMB2, SMB3, SMW, Yoshi's Island) for $35/each in the last year or so and they're selling quite well. They are planning on releasing most of the old Zelda games as a bundle with the Cube in a month or so.
The games aren't getting any better or any worse, and the best games of the past are still good. It's just that as we gain some distance from the games of the past, we forget more and more of the crap and remember the games we had fondly. In some cases we realize that some of the old games we enjoyed were crap, too, but for the most part we just forget the bad ones existed.
While it's not the newest game anymore, there's also a 2D Castlevania game for PlayStation 1 (called Symphony of the Night, IIRC).
and it's a 'Greatest Hits' title, so there should be quite a few more copies available now. I picked it up at Costco a couple months ago.
On the other hand, the GBA games with the GB Player seem to look better to me, and the gameplay is roughly the same.
Seriously, there's nothing wrong with actually liking modern games. Personally I enjoyed Final Fantasy X. I don't wish that all games worked in exactly the same way, mainly 'cos I likes FFX as it wasn't like any game I'd perosnally encountered before.
There's nothing wrong with modern games. There's just an increased signal-to-noise ratio in people's perceptions when they've been playing games for a while. Everyone tends to forget how many bad games were on the shelves in the past, primarily because only the absolute worst games get talked about (of the bad ones). As for Final Fantasy X, I haven't formed an opinion myself, but the arguments given in the article were rediculous, basically a strawman because he couldn't argue against the real points anyone might've given.
Plus you don't need to diss all current popular culture. Besides, what's wrong with Linkin Park? I happen to like them. I hate that most 13-year-olds tend to like them as "they're cool", but that doesn't stop me from liking the band on their own merit.
As the previous poster stated, it's either an RIAA thing or the fact that a Vietnam vet with only one finger left on his fret hand could play better, which, as I've found in the last 10-15 years, is probably why 13-year-olds tend to like them.
That was C&C:Generals, and they had to change the cover art because the whole storyline (and thus the game) revolved around terrorists.
It was Red Alert 2, which revolved around the standard Red Alert storyline of an alternate universe where time had been altered during WW2. The game allows you to destroy (or defend) many well-known locations in the US as the Russians invade the country, and the cover art depicted the towers burning. My copy of RA2 has that cover art because it shipped some time before 9/11. C&C:Generals, on the other hand, shipped early this year and features the terrorist-heavy plotline, despite 9/11 and everything that's happened since then.
As for the recent Canadian outrage, the fact that the developers were specific about the terrorist organization and the location isn't saying much. Unless you can show me another game which PURPOSELY took a sensitive topic and published the game knowing the risks, I'm just going to classify the Syphon Filter Online incident as 'from the shoot-yourself-in-the-foot department.'
You named C&C Generals yourself, and then any number of terrorist/counterterrorist games that have come out in the last few years, from Rainbow 6 on down the list. SoF, which had other problems in Canada, and the original Syphon Filter. There were even people complaining about the fact that all of the terrorists in some of these games tend to be Arabic, yet when you put Canadian terrorists in a game you get public outcry and it gets removed.
And political correctness is a result of real criticism.
So why is it that real game criticism doesn't exist, yet political correctness does? I'm certainly not saying that it is a dominant force in games, but it is a growing force.
When a politician get criticized for making a sexist remark, doesn't he get corrected to fit the 'politically correct' views of the public?
Politicians are just that, politicians, public servants. They're expected to uphold a particular image for their constituents. That's exactly where the idea of political correctness comes from, but goes even deeper, to the fact that politicians today are afraid to go against polls, to take extreme stances, to be a Democrat or Republican rather than just sitting in the middle.
yeah, I was reading the table incorrectly. They'll simply stop selling XP around the time Longhorn is supposed to come out.
Win98 went into the 'extended support phase' as of June of this year, which basically means there will be hotfixes as needed, but there will be no free assisted support for users. In June of 2005 support drops completely.
98SE is a year after 98.
2000 is ~9 months after 98SE.
Me is ~9 months after 2000.
XP goes into the extended phase within a year or so of Longhorn's expected release.
There's even a slight possibility, with XP's expected retail availability to end in 2005, that you won't be able to find a Microsoft OS on the shelf for a few months without buying a computer.
I get slightly confused sometimes when I look at the charts on MS' page, but it basically comes down to 5 years of normal support and 2 years of extended support, plus whatever the chart says for availability of licenses (in other words, when you can buy the software), which is generally (but not always) 4 years.