Though I'd note that they must have reviewed a different version of that particular title than the one I've seen. The review states it isn't hentai, but for most people it's at least close enough (well, unless you're the kind of person that gets off on it maybe). Of course, it also tends to be fairly well labeled as being an adult anime, but I've seen stupid people do enough stupid things.
On a weekly sales basis, the GBA-SP is selling more than the PS2, most of the time (usually ~10,000 more units per week, though it's still a little behind for the year, add in GBA sales and you have about half a million more GBA+GBA-SP units than PS2 units).
Knowing that, and how soundly the PS2 is smashing the XBox in sales, it's not nearly as surprising that the GBA is blowing away the XBox.
The thing to really ponder here is what the PSP will do in this market. The PS1 shot into a market that was being ignored, and the PS2 continued to do so (though the DC and N64/GC both tried to move into this market, the GC hasn't gained a lot of ground in terms of number of consoles sold, nor has the XBox). The question is that if Nintendo is selling more handheld consoles than Sony is home consoles, is there an untapped market for Sony to hit home, or are they just dropping a system into a market that's already been tapped (and where Nintendo's driven out all previous competitors).
Get an Xbox, get Live, and suddenly Microsoft is profiting from you *ongoing.* Oh, and you're getting a good service for your money.
MS is only profiting 'ongoing' if they can not only sell a large number of Live kits, but can also get people to resubscribe.
The number of kits they've sold is lower than any of the titles mentioned earlier. They haven't released much information on how many people have resubscribed, though at this point it would only be the earliest adopters of Live that would be resubscribing. I, for one, will not buy a Live kit until I have a significant number of titles I want to play online. Currently the number is 0, though the XBox has many online titles, they have none that appeal to me.
I love having the ability to connect my system to the network and do things of that nature, but a subscription is only worth the cost if I am going to use it, and without games I'm not going to use it.
here i am sitting with an xbox, halo and a few other games, not even giving GC an ounce of thought, when previously NES, SNES and N64 to an extent had been my favoirte of all consoles
I think it might be slightly different for those of us that didn't buy an N64. In fact, I never owned an SNES, either (but I knew many people that did). My XBox has 2 exclusive games that I really spend any time with, and I think everyone knows what games those are (and they'll both be PC games soon enough). The rest of the games that I spend any time with on the XBox are multi-platform titles that simply came out better on the XBox.
My GC, on the other hand, is getting the most play, by far, and I have more titles for it (most of which are exclusives or DC ports) than I do for the XBox, despite having bought the XBox 6 months earlier.
As for the next generation of consoles: I think I'll end up owning all of the major ones again, eventually, but I don't think Sony's going to be high on my prioritized list this time around. In any case, I'll put some cash aside for the console and wait until the first must-have (for me) game comes along before I buy a system. Unfortunately, all 3 consoles had must-have launch titles for me, and they ended up just being bought in order of priority.
From the article: In the pen and paper world, you would throw dice now or at least look at your skill table. You don't need that in a CRPG, as you can actually sneak behind the NPC, focus on his bunch of keys, watch his line of vision and then grab the keys. If the protagonist screws up, that is not due to a skill variable, but rather his shaky hands.
Frankly, if I want to play a thief in an RPG, I don't want the question of whether or not my hands are shaky to determine whether or not I pick someone's pocket, or a lock.
OTOH, if I'm playing Thief 3, those are two things I want to be able to do and I wouldn't mind at all if it depended on me rather than some character stats.
I play different types of games for different experiences, and if RPGs start to move towards other genres in terms of the experience they give us, than I'll just be playing fewer RPGs.
or basically any 'adventure' game from the 80s/early-90s.
The stats are there in RPGs to make the games easier in some ways, and to give people information they want. To remove the stats and most of the combat elements, you're back to adventure games. If people want to make adventure games, more power to them, but I think they'll find that the overlap between RPG gamers and adventure gamers is there, but not complete (in other words, while some people play both, there are also those that prefer RPGs, just as somewhere out there are people that don't like RPGs, but loved adventure games).
Personally, I'm just going to hook up a 4-port wireless router to my entertainment system and then go wireless from the living room to the computer room. Then all I need is at most 4 feet of ethernet cable from any of my consoles to the wireless router, and if I need more than 4 devices I can add a small switch. The other side can have another wireless router or a simple wireless adapter, just depends on what's cheaper (yeah, I don't have a wireless network yet, because I don't own a laptop and the computer is in the same room as the cable modem).
I'd be more worried that your keyspace will be restricted since Xbox Live!'s little keyboard will only let you enter a-zA-Z0-9 and some punctuation (instead of a full range of nul to char 255).
You can also buy them from sites like Lik-Sang, as well as USB adapters for the XBox controllers. Just because the connector's a little odd and the interface is a little different doesn't mean the XBox is much different from any other Windows PC.
Generally speaking, most of the people I know don't play games a whole lot, so the AI tends to be fairly important to me. I like a fighting game to be challenging without it being obviously cheating.
That being said, a good game vs. another player is always the best way to go. I have fond memories of drunken KI tournaments in college (and really wish more games would add a tournament mode like KI had on the SNES). I'm still not sure about online play, since timing is so critical when playing against other players (and I'd note that this is one of the issues I have with DOA, the reversals are possible in a very long time frame).
Sony Music actually had a contest not too long back where the prizes were Xbox systems and copies of Brute Force.
That's because Sony's music branch isn't too bright. They're losing money hand over fist on income that's extremely high.
Don't believe for a minute, though, that Sony corporate doesn't get involved in the development of the game platforms, otherwise we probably never would have seen CD and DVD playback in the 2 PlayStation consoles.
Good points, and fairly good research. I did some minor research of my own though and found completely different results from several different pages. Most were from NPD Intellect, which tracks game sales, and others (like the Ownt.com link) either referenced some other site or magazine or didn't bother to cite at all.
I think it's mostly because NPD Intellect is in the business of selling this kind of data, so it's not as easy to come by as we would like (similarly, try to find the best selling albums of all time, or other similar bits of information, sometimes pieces of it are available, but the whole picture is often hard to come by). I also found NPD numbers putting Myst significantly lower only 2 years ago (ie 5.5 million), which seems amazing to me, unless sales are counted in such a way that retailers might not report sales until certain numbers are reached, or other circumstances put some lag time into the process (ie retailer doesn't report sales until they run out and have to re-order). Similarly, OEM deals may effect the sales numbers. I have a copy of Riven (the first sequel to Myst), because it came with one of my DVD drives (one of the first DVD-based games I ever owned, unfortunately DVD games haven't caught on for the PC yet).
There are also two things to consider, one for each "side," when considering Doom and The Sims. First of all, Doom was highly pirated. I knew dozens of people who played it but very few who actually owned it. Moreover, it was distributed through shareware and that probably tends to deflate sales figures.
I definitely agree here. I only know a handful of people that ever owned a legal copy of Doom, but everyone I know that played PC games back then or got into PC games around that time has played Doom, as well as quite a few people that didn't touch PC games until a few years later.
On the other hand, The Sims numbers probably don't include the seven or eight add-ons which have consistently dominated recent sales charts.
Again, this is true, but then expansion sales should not be added to the original game's sales. That being said, the Sims expansions did quite well during their time periods as well. One quarter saw the Sims and 3 of it's expansions in the top 10, and Diablo 2 and it's expansion took up 2 more spots. Expansion packs, though, are easy sales if the original game sold well, especially since most of the Sims expansions hit the $20 price point either on release or fairly quickly (whereas the deluxe edition of the game is still $50 in some places today). The $20 price point being important because it's usually considered an impulse-buy point (and is why some people cried foul when Deer Hunter started topping charts, but frankly whatever sells, sells). Obviously if an expansion outsells the original, you've got a piracy problem;)
So, yeah, we can debate semantics and stats - but all the lists include The Sims and Myst on the chart, so I don't think we can readily excuse it as overrated. Sure, we can discuss whether it was good, or bad, or whether people had CD-ROMs or not, or what have you. But to suggest that they are overrated is a gross application of our FPS "worldview" to the general market. Moreover, it's very much excluding a huge market that does not fit the traditional gamer stereotype. That cannot be denied.
I'm not really sure about that. I think it depends heavily on how people view the term overrated, and personal viewpoints. In general, it's hard to overrate the need for mass-appeal, at least in some games (I would never say that all games should have mass-appeal, I don't like mass-appeal in my music, either, unless it's strictly because the masses happened upon something good, rather than someone tailoring their music to the masses). At the same time, some horrible games (Deer Hunter) have mass appeal at some level, and the games can be overrated (as in 'best selling game of XX month', yeah, because it's $10-20). I don't know if the Sims is overrat
My admonition remains: the majority of the general US population think that Doom and it's kin down to Half Life 2/Doom III are "rather trite and boring and nost just a fun thing to do." Those same people pretty much love The Sims (and loved Myst). They really do. In terms of general culture and society, we're the minority here. So in that respect, The Sims in particular is very amazing. It has done what no other game since Myst has been able to do: get "normal" people to play it. That's something that on a large scale, Doom III or Half Life 2 will never do. That deserves something, yes?
Unfortunately, before Myst came along and blew all previous PC game sales records out of the water, Doom held that record. Half-Life blew Doom's record away, and passed Myst by a million units. The Sims passed Half-Life by 2 million. (Myst: 7 million, Half-Life: 8 million, The Sims: 10 million, some side notes: GoldenEye: 8 million, Halo: 2+ million, Super Mario Kart (SNES): 8 million, FF7 (PSX): 7.8 million, GT3: 7 million, Tetris (GameBoy): 33 million, Super Mario Bros. (1): 40 million; in the top 10, besides Tetris (#2), The Sims is the top selling non-Mario game at #7, and GTA:VC and Harry Potter round out the top 10 (that's right, 6 'Super Mario' games).
As much as those people love the Sims, either there's a lot of overlap and they all love Doom and Half-Life as well, or the really good FPS games are the only ones that bring together the hard-core audience and some amount of the general audience. Also, it's important to remember that Myst's sales were amazing because PCs were just starting to get into people's homes. By the time HL and the Sims came along, most people had a PC in their house, and both games ran on pretty old PCs. Doom required some pretty cutting-edge hardware when it came out, but even my aunt had Wolfenstein and Doom (and she certainly is not a gamer by many definitions).
(The numbers above came from: http://www.ownt.com/qtakes/2003/gamestats/g amestat s.shtm because it was the first that came up in a search and the numbers line up with what I've seen elsewhere, though I don't quite understand the first couple of charts on there; note the Tetris numbers differ by ~1 million units between 2 charts, though I do like that one of the charts shows some 'classic' games selling 20,000-100,000 units, or even 500,000 for Monkey Island 2 and Deus Ex, to give some idea of the difference between gamer and mainstream appeal).
So, in some ways I agree with you (the gamers vs mainstream part), but you need to be careful about generalizations. Half-Life broke the rules in terms of selling to the masses without dumbing things down. At the same time, it built on a tradition, because a good FPS game can sell extremely well, as was shown by Doom. Doom 3 being the first sequel to the Doom franchise in a very long time, and Half-Life 2 being the sequel to the most successful FPS of all time, it would not be a good idea to count them out. At the same time, Quake 3 did not appeal to the masses and did not hurt Half-Life's sales, while Doom 3 could hurt HL2's mid- to long-term sales (where HL really kicked into gear and sold a lot of those 8 million copies, though it sold the first million fairly quickly).
The reason people believe this happened before is due to Sony announcing the PS2 for $299 while everyone else was selling higher. Right away there were shouts of dumping. (dumping is the term for selling product at a loss to destroy your competitors.)
Umm who is this everyone you refer to? The Dreamcast was the only other console on the market when the PS2 hit for $299, and the DC was $199 on launch.
The XBox launched at $299, as well, much later (~1 year), and the PS2 was still at the same price.
The shouts about dumping came when Microsoft announced they would sell the XBox at a loss, but it has often been believed that everyone was doing this anyway, and the practice is legal if the business model supports it (ie if it makes sense that selling something cheap will enable you to sell something else to make up that loss), and the product is still sold above or at cost. In other words, even though Microsoft is losing money on each XBox, it's not because of the cost of building an XBox, it's because of the huge initial (and continued) investments into R&D and advertising (among other things), just as the PS2 could only have sold at a loss initially if it's production cost was close to the sale price, even with their multi-million advertising campaign (which, iirc, Microsoft immediately doubled for their own advertising budget). Also, Sony had the added cost of their chip manufacturing plant, built specifically for the PS2 chips, something which MS didn't have to deal with directly (instead just getting chips from nVidia).
Nintendo supposedly has never taken a loss on their consoles, but that may be because they limit their advertising budget based on wanting to make money (wow, there's a concept) right away, instead of depending on huge hardware sales and massive numbers of third party titles to prop up the cost of the system.
What one might really have to worry about is that even the richest man in the world needed 10 years and who knows how much money to get a law passed that would allow him to get his car off the dock.
One little thing with a hell of a lot of restrictions (meeting EPA standards, mandatory less than 2500 miles per year, etc), and it took 10 years to make it happen.
I wonder why something like that is so hard but extending copyright into eternity seems so easy (maybe it wasn't and I just missed the fact that Disney spent 10 years working on that; I know Disney got control of their own air space after something like 40 years simply because it was slipped into anti-terrorism legislation). The most bass-ackwards laws supporting corporations seem to get in quite easily, but something to support individuals (though rich individuals, as this only really applies to extremely expensive cars) takes a decade.
With fighting games: if it's not Virtua Fighter or Street Fighter (and, to a lesser extent, Mortal Kombat, with the exception of 4), it's unlikely it'll ever be taken seriously. Even your own comment dismisses Tekken ('... or Soul Calibur series (a decent enough fighter, worlds better than Tekken, but the amount of hype it has been getting lately...'), which has become a fairly solid fighter, though the lack of reversals across the board (only some characters have them) seems to be the real complaint here (wow, you mean reversals are used as a point of balance rather than a given?). Soul Calibur itself has little to differentiate itself from Tekken in terms of it's fighting system, except that it tones down the combos and gives the reversals to everyone (basically the biggest complaints people have about the Tekken series, as said above).
As for DOA, I have 2 and 3, and play them when I need some fighting game action, but am sick of Tekken and SC, but really they just seem to fill the middle ground between Tekken and VF. VF has always felt very slow to me, and DOA feels the same, though it's faster than VF. The VF games also have the nasty habit of having crushing AI, preventing new players from even playing the game long enough to learn it, but it'd be nice to see Tekken or DOA have a decent AI at higher difficulty levels (except for that SC1-style highest difficulty level which seems more like the AI arbitrarily destroys you on a particular stage and then reverts to normal on the next play).
As for the recent SC2 hype, just look at it's competition at the moment: there's umm, maybe a couple of Capcom/SNK/whatever games out there. Not to mention that it's on all 3 consoles, and it's the first in the series to be available on any of these consoles. The GameCube doesn't even have a real fighter (not to say Smash Bros. isn't a good game, it's just not the same type of game really), and that's where it's selling best. The genre's been pretty slow lately, and this is a really solid game being released on all 3 consoles, of course that's going to cause some noise.
I think WC3 will remain much maligned by many people until long after WC4 is released. Personally, the expansion to WC3 is the first expansion to a Blizzard game I have not purchased since I got hooked on WC2 and Diablo. In every other case I was still playing the game when the expansion came out. With WC3, I'd rather play StarCraft, which is a game I considered overrated the day it was released (but still enjoyed).
short attention span after spending 35 hours on a game? I'd say that's a whole new definition of short attention spans.
It seems to me that he tried pretty hard to figure out why the game is so good.
Personally, Dragon Warrior has an appeal to me because the first game in the series was one of the first RPGs I played (right there with Final Fantasy 1 and Ultima 3). That being said, the only subsequent game in the series I have is Dragon Warrior VII, which I haven't played yet.
Yes, GTA3 had missions with time limits, but GTA1 was time limited. If your time ran out in GTA1 your game was over. In GTA3, if the time limit on a mission runs out, you just go on playing, and come back to that mission whenever you feel like it.
Many of the other replies here already said pretty much the same thing, so feel free to break out the -1 Redundant if you must;)
So, in my view, this is a luxury. People who have a real need for PGP will take the 5 minutes to figure it out. Other people simply don't need the security.
This is aimed at corporate security and/or certain areas where security must be implemented by law.
If you have a corporation with 500,000 people, each of them taking 5 minutes to figure it out is ~2,500,000 minutes, or 41,667 hours (1736 days, 4.75 years), at varying cost levels (all on your overhead). If you have say 500 IT admins in that group of 500,000, you send them to school to figure out how to set this up and make sure it's configured correctly, and then forget about it. It costs you about 8000 hours on overhead at a pretty uniform cost (you do pay all of your IT admins about the same amount, right?). In the company I work for, they're more likely to send ~10-100 people to school and have them write up the basics and maybe hold a couple of conference calls to walk the rest through setup.
The best part, though, is that you're relatively sure that your entire company's email is secured, it costs less money, and you don't have to add extra software to your baseline install, and push out the software that isn't installed on every current PC in your network. Oh, and you don't have to worry about finding different software for different operating systems and hardware platforms, as this should work regardless of what system they're using, as long as it already works with your mail server.
The guy in the warehouse over here may not know what PGP is or how to use it (and may not think he needs it), but he's going to get it anyway, and he'll enjoy the whole experience a whole lot more if he doesn't know he's using it.
Doesn't mean much if the list price is still $49.99 (as the above link said when I was there a few moments ago).
Most places are still selling it for that because it's still selling. MS isn't going to drop it to the 'Platinum Hits' games until Halo 2 comes out, more than likely.
That being said, I bought the game the same day I bought my XBox, so it has little effect on me.
I think there are a couple of things that make these problems (with MMO games) worse:
1) the low-level characters have to deal with low-level creatures that are rather rediculous. I ran around EQ killing bats. It's a freakin bat, it's about as likely to hurt me as a rat, but it's got wings so it's harder to hit. I quit playing Hexen 2 when they sent a spider after me because it was a rediculous enemy. Somehow, after dealing with these rediculous enemies off and on in several FPS games (can we say 'killing headcrabs with a crowbar'? Yeah, I didn't care for that game either, but not just because of that), I managed to get to the point where I was killing small orcs in EQ before I quit. UO it was rabbits or some crap. I got killed by a wolf when some higher level guy sat there and healed the wolf repeatedly and I tried to bail on the whole thing.
In PlanetSide it wasn't a problem of stupid enemies, it was a problem of a sparse world with a very limited progression, and very limited usefulness for the majority of the abilities in the game. To make it worse, although things like your aim and fps skills matter in the game (being an MMOFPS more or less), at the base level you're little more than cannon fodder regardless of your skill because you have extremely limited weapons and armour available to you. So, you travelled from your base to an enemy-controlled area and got killed, then you're trying to hitch a ride back. Or you could drop into 'instant action', which was basically dropping you either too close to or too far from the action, or into a hot spot that had died before you got there.
2) Since most of these games are considered RPGs, they adapt many of the typical RPG control schemes. This means that essentially you learn the interface/control scheme, and give up most of your control over the character. Each interface and each game's particularities have to be learned with each new game, but overall the reward is that you are no longer involved in the intricate details of playing the game. Either you go to the extent of scripting most of your actions, or you do a couple of minor actions (click on this, click on that, wait for the results) and watch things happen. As you said, your personal skill doesn't matter, and doesn't port well from one game to another. Additionally, it's just boring to most people, especially after you get beyond the realms of the single player RPGs people are used to playing (in terms of time spent on the game). I get bored with the combat system in a 40 hour RPG from time to time. What happens when I'm 50 hours into an MMORPG? There's no end in site, the system is going to stay the same (because I won't go play another game if I just have to start all over), and the majority of the focus is on tasks that basically take over control from the player. Combat's automated, non-combat skills tend to be automated, all I have to do is tell the computer what I want it to do, and wait. For people looking for glorified chat rooms, this is great. For someone looking to play a game, this is like listening to an audio book: it gets pretty much the same thing done, but you're better off doing it this way only if you have something else you want to do (or have to do) at the same time. I'll listen to an audio book while I'm driving on a long trip, but otherwise I'd rather read it myself (actually, I rarely listen to audio books, as they tend to put me to sleep).
In terms of software (for both computers and consoles) the term 'go gold' refers to the 'gold master' from which all retail discs are duplicated (well, more accurately, discs are made from the master which are used to make the retail discs).
In other words, software can't hit the shelves until it's gone gold. Usually, depending on the time it takes for duplication and shipping, it'll hit the shelves 1-2 weeks after it goes gold.
As for terms related to number of sales, those are pretty arbitrary, depending on platform and sometimes the publisher.
Why, by releasing movies on P2P networks, they might create a buzz of interest and get people to actually go to the theaters and buy a ticket!
I think the movie might actually have to be good first.
If no one can download the movie for themselves, they can't really tell if the movie is going to be good, so they either have to see it for themselves in the theater, or they have to rent it when it comes out on video.
I've bought at least as many movie tickets as not because of downloads, but that's just me. I've also managed to see a handful of movies that simply were not playing in my area.
All of that being said, if a movie's good, I'll buy it on DVD (which I can watch anywhere in my house I have a screen that will display video), and delete the copy from my hard drive (which is almost always significantly lesser quality than the DVD). If a movie isn't good, I'm not going to waste the hard drive space keeping it on my computer.
Regardless of what anyone says, movie reviews are almost completely useless in terms of finding out which movies are worth going to see.
Slashdot Mirror
or Urotsukidoji
Though I'd note that they must have reviewed a different version of that particular title than the one I've seen. The review states it isn't hentai, but for most people it's at least close enough (well, unless you're the kind of person that gets off on it maybe). Of course, it also tends to be fairly well labeled as being an adult anime, but I've seen stupid people do enough stupid things.
On a weekly sales basis, the GBA-SP is selling more than the PS2, most of the time (usually ~10,000 more units per week, though it's still a little behind for the year, add in GBA sales and you have about half a million more GBA+GBA-SP units than PS2 units).
Knowing that, and how soundly the PS2 is smashing the XBox in sales, it's not nearly as surprising that the GBA is blowing away the XBox.
The thing to really ponder here is what the PSP will do in this market. The PS1 shot into a market that was being ignored, and the PS2 continued to do so (though the DC and N64/GC both tried to move into this market, the GC hasn't gained a lot of ground in terms of number of consoles sold, nor has the XBox). The question is that if Nintendo is selling more handheld consoles than Sony is home consoles, is there an untapped market for Sony to hit home, or are they just dropping a system into a market that's already been tapped (and where Nintendo's driven out all previous competitors).
Get an Xbox, get Live, and suddenly Microsoft is profiting from you *ongoing.* Oh, and you're getting a good service for your money.
MS is only profiting 'ongoing' if they can not only sell a large number of Live kits, but can also get people to resubscribe.
The number of kits they've sold is lower than any of the titles mentioned earlier. They haven't released much information on how many people have resubscribed, though at this point it would only be the earliest adopters of Live that would be resubscribing. I, for one, will not buy a Live kit until I have a significant number of titles I want to play online. Currently the number is 0, though the XBox has many online titles, they have none that appeal to me.
I love having the ability to connect my system to the network and do things of that nature, but a subscription is only worth the cost if I am going to use it, and without games I'm not going to use it.
here i am sitting with an xbox, halo and a few other games, not even giving GC an ounce of thought, when previously NES, SNES and N64 to an extent had been my favoirte of all consoles
I think it might be slightly different for those of us that didn't buy an N64. In fact, I never owned an SNES, either (but I knew many people that did). My XBox has 2 exclusive games that I really spend any time with, and I think everyone knows what games those are (and they'll both be PC games soon enough). The rest of the games that I spend any time with on the XBox are multi-platform titles that simply came out better on the XBox.
My GC, on the other hand, is getting the most play, by far, and I have more titles for it (most of which are exclusives or DC ports) than I do for the XBox, despite having bought the XBox 6 months earlier.
As for the next generation of consoles: I think I'll end up owning all of the major ones again, eventually, but I don't think Sony's going to be high on my prioritized list this time around. In any case, I'll put some cash aside for the console and wait until the first must-have (for me) game comes along before I buy a system. Unfortunately, all 3 consoles had must-have launch titles for me, and they ended up just being bought in order of priority.
From the article:
In the pen and paper world, you would throw dice now or at least look at your skill table. You don't need that in a CRPG, as you can actually sneak behind the NPC, focus on his bunch of keys, watch his line of vision and then grab the keys. If the protagonist screws up, that is not due to a skill variable, but rather his shaky hands.
Frankly, if I want to play a thief in an RPG, I don't want the question of whether or not my hands are shaky to determine whether or not I pick someone's pocket, or a lock.
OTOH, if I'm playing Thief 3, those are two things I want to be able to do and I wouldn't mind at all if it depended on me rather than some character stats.
I play different types of games for different experiences, and if RPGs start to move towards other genres in terms of the experience they give us, than I'll just be playing fewer RPGs.
or basically any 'adventure' game from the 80s/early-90s.
The stats are there in RPGs to make the games easier in some ways, and to give people information they want. To remove the stats and most of the combat elements, you're back to adventure games. If people want to make adventure games, more power to them, but I think they'll find that the overlap between RPG gamers and adventure gamers is there, but not complete (in other words, while some people play both, there are also those that prefer RPGs, just as somewhere out there are people that don't like RPGs, but loved adventure games).
Personally, I'm just going to hook up a 4-port wireless router to my entertainment system and then go wireless from the living room to the computer room. Then all I need is at most 4 feet of ethernet cable from any of my consoles to the wireless router, and if I need more than 4 devices I can add a small switch. The other side can have another wireless router or a simple wireless adapter, just depends on what's cheaper (yeah, I don't have a wireless network yet, because I don't own a laptop and the computer is in the same room as the cable modem).
I'd be more worried that your keyspace will be restricted since Xbox Live!'s little keyboard will only let you enter a-zA-Z0-9 and some punctuation (instead of a full range of nul to char 255).
h tm
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/pso2/keyboardadapter.
Solution: use a real keyboard.
You can also buy them from sites like Lik-Sang, as well as USB adapters for the XBox controllers. Just because the connector's a little odd and the interface is a little different doesn't mean the XBox is much different from any other Windows PC.
Generally speaking, most of the people I know don't play games a whole lot, so the AI tends to be fairly important to me. I like a fighting game to be challenging without it being obviously cheating.
That being said, a good game vs. another player is always the best way to go. I have fond memories of drunken KI tournaments in college (and really wish more games would add a tournament mode like KI had on the SNES). I'm still not sure about online play, since timing is so critical when playing against other players (and I'd note that this is one of the issues I have with DOA, the reversals are possible in a very long time frame).
Sony Music actually had a contest not too long back where the prizes were Xbox systems and copies of Brute Force.
That's because Sony's music branch isn't too bright. They're losing money hand over fist on income that's extremely high.
Don't believe for a minute, though, that Sony corporate doesn't get involved in the development of the game platforms, otherwise we probably never would have seen CD and DVD playback in the 2 PlayStation consoles.
guy playing game boy gets hit over head with dead squireel
oooh color
SEGA!
Good points, and fairly good research. I did some minor research of my own though and found completely different results from several different pages. Most were from NPD Intellect, which tracks game sales, and others (like the Ownt.com link) either referenced some other site or magazine or didn't bother to cite at all.
;)
I think it's mostly because NPD Intellect is in the business of selling this kind of data, so it's not as easy to come by as we would like (similarly, try to find the best selling albums of all time, or other similar bits of information, sometimes pieces of it are available, but the whole picture is often hard to come by). I also found NPD numbers putting Myst significantly lower only 2 years ago (ie 5.5 million), which seems amazing to me, unless sales are counted in such a way that retailers might not report sales until certain numbers are reached, or other circumstances put some lag time into the process (ie retailer doesn't report sales until they run out and have to re-order). Similarly, OEM deals may effect the sales numbers. I have a copy of Riven (the first sequel to Myst), because it came with one of my DVD drives (one of the first DVD-based games I ever owned, unfortunately DVD games haven't caught on for the PC yet).
There are also two things to consider, one for each "side," when considering Doom and The Sims. First of all, Doom was highly pirated. I knew dozens of people who played it but very few who actually owned it. Moreover, it was distributed through shareware and that probably tends to deflate sales figures.
I definitely agree here. I only know a handful of people that ever owned a legal copy of Doom, but everyone I know that played PC games back then or got into PC games around that time has played Doom, as well as quite a few people that didn't touch PC games until a few years later.
On the other hand, The Sims numbers probably don't include the seven or eight add-ons which have consistently dominated recent sales charts.
Again, this is true, but then expansion sales should not be added to the original game's sales. That being said, the Sims expansions did quite well during their time periods as well. One quarter saw the Sims and 3 of it's expansions in the top 10, and Diablo 2 and it's expansion took up 2 more spots. Expansion packs, though, are easy sales if the original game sold well, especially since most of the Sims expansions hit the $20 price point either on release or fairly quickly (whereas the deluxe edition of the game is still $50 in some places today). The $20 price point being important because it's usually considered an impulse-buy point (and is why some people cried foul when Deer Hunter started topping charts, but frankly whatever sells, sells). Obviously if an expansion outsells the original, you've got a piracy problem
So, yeah, we can debate semantics and stats - but all the lists include The Sims and Myst on the chart, so I don't think we can readily excuse it as overrated. Sure, we can discuss whether it was good, or bad, or whether people had CD-ROMs or not, or what have you. But to suggest that they are overrated is a gross application of our FPS "worldview" to the general market. Moreover, it's very much excluding a huge market that does not fit the traditional gamer stereotype. That cannot be denied.
I'm not really sure about that. I think it depends heavily on how people view the term overrated, and personal viewpoints. In general, it's hard to overrate the need for mass-appeal, at least in some games (I would never say that all games should have mass-appeal, I don't like mass-appeal in my music, either, unless it's strictly because the masses happened upon something good, rather than someone tailoring their music to the masses). At the same time, some horrible games (Deer Hunter) have mass appeal at some level, and the games can be overrated (as in 'best selling game of XX month', yeah, because it's $10-20). I don't know if the Sims is overrat
My admonition remains: the majority of the general US population think that Doom and it's kin down to Half Life 2/Doom III are "rather trite and boring and nost just a fun thing to do." Those same people pretty much love The Sims (and loved Myst). They really do. In terms of general culture and society, we're the minority here. So in that respect, The Sims in particular is very amazing. It has done what no other game since Myst has been able to do: get "normal" people to play it. That's something that on a large scale, Doom III or Half Life 2 will never do. That deserves something, yes?
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Unfortunately, before Myst came along and blew all previous PC game sales records out of the water, Doom held that record. Half-Life blew Doom's record away, and passed Myst by a million units. The Sims passed Half-Life by 2 million. (Myst: 7 million, Half-Life: 8 million, The Sims: 10 million, some side notes: GoldenEye: 8 million, Halo: 2+ million, Super Mario Kart (SNES): 8 million, FF7 (PSX): 7.8 million, GT3: 7 million, Tetris (GameBoy): 33 million, Super Mario Bros. (1): 40 million; in the top 10, besides Tetris (#2), The Sims is the top selling non-Mario game at #7, and GTA:VC and Harry Potter round out the top 10 (that's right, 6 'Super Mario' games).
As much as those people love the Sims, either there's a lot of overlap and they all love Doom and Half-Life as well, or the really good FPS games are the only ones that bring together the hard-core audience and some amount of the general audience. Also, it's important to remember that Myst's sales were amazing because PCs were just starting to get into people's homes. By the time HL and the Sims came along, most people had a PC in their house, and both games ran on pretty old PCs. Doom required some pretty cutting-edge hardware when it came out, but even my aunt had Wolfenstein and Doom (and she certainly is not a gamer by many definitions).
(The numbers above came from:
http://www.ownt.com/qtakes/2003/gamestats/
because it was the first that came up in a search and the numbers line up with what I've seen elsewhere, though I don't quite understand the first couple of charts on there; note the Tetris numbers differ by ~1 million units between 2 charts, though I do like that one of the charts shows some 'classic' games selling 20,000-100,000 units, or even 500,000 for Monkey Island 2 and Deus Ex, to give some idea of the difference between gamer and mainstream appeal).
So, in some ways I agree with you (the gamers vs mainstream part), but you need to be careful about generalizations. Half-Life broke the rules in terms of selling to the masses without dumbing things down. At the same time, it built on a tradition, because a good FPS game can sell extremely well, as was shown by Doom. Doom 3 being the first sequel to the Doom franchise in a very long time, and Half-Life 2 being the sequel to the most successful FPS of all time, it would not be a good idea to count them out. At the same time, Quake 3 did not appeal to the masses and did not hurt Half-Life's sales, while Doom 3 could hurt HL2's mid- to long-term sales (where HL really kicked into gear and sold a lot of those 8 million copies, though it sold the first million fairly quickly).
The reason people believe this happened before is due to Sony announcing the PS2 for $299 while everyone else was selling higher. Right away there were shouts of dumping. (dumping is the term for selling product at a loss to destroy your competitors.)
Umm who is this everyone you refer to? The Dreamcast was the only other console on the market when the PS2 hit for $299, and the DC was $199 on launch.
The XBox launched at $299, as well, much later (~1 year), and the PS2 was still at the same price.
The shouts about dumping came when Microsoft announced they would sell the XBox at a loss, but it has often been believed that everyone was doing this anyway, and the practice is legal if the business model supports it (ie if it makes sense that selling something cheap will enable you to sell something else to make up that loss), and the product is still sold above or at cost. In other words, even though Microsoft is losing money on each XBox, it's not because of the cost of building an XBox, it's because of the huge initial (and continued) investments into R&D and advertising (among other things), just as the PS2 could only have sold at a loss initially if it's production cost was close to the sale price, even with their multi-million advertising campaign (which, iirc, Microsoft immediately doubled for their own advertising budget). Also, Sony had the added cost of their chip manufacturing plant, built specifically for the PS2 chips, something which MS didn't have to deal with directly (instead just getting chips from nVidia).
Nintendo supposedly has never taken a loss on their consoles, but that may be because they limit their advertising budget based on wanting to make money (wow, there's a concept) right away, instead of depending on huge hardware sales and massive numbers of third party titles to prop up the cost of the system.
What one might really have to worry about is that even the richest man in the world needed 10 years and who knows how much money to get a law passed that would allow him to get his car off the dock.
One little thing with a hell of a lot of restrictions (meeting EPA standards, mandatory less than 2500 miles per year, etc), and it took 10 years to make it happen.
I wonder why something like that is so hard but extending copyright into eternity seems so easy (maybe it wasn't and I just missed the fact that Disney spent 10 years working on that; I know Disney got control of their own air space after something like 40 years simply because it was slipped into anti-terrorism legislation). The most bass-ackwards laws supporting corporations seem to get in quite easily, but something to support individuals (though rich individuals, as this only really applies to extremely expensive cars) takes a decade.
With fighting games:
if it's not Virtua Fighter or Street Fighter (and, to a lesser extent, Mortal Kombat, with the exception of 4), it's unlikely it'll ever be taken seriously. Even your own comment dismisses Tekken ('... or Soul Calibur series (a decent enough fighter, worlds better than Tekken, but the amount of hype it has been getting lately...'), which has become a fairly solid fighter, though the lack of reversals across the board (only some characters have them) seems to be the real complaint here (wow, you mean reversals are used as a point of balance rather than a given?). Soul Calibur itself has little to differentiate itself from Tekken in terms of it's fighting system, except that it tones down the combos and gives the reversals to everyone (basically the biggest complaints people have about the Tekken series, as said above).
As for DOA, I have 2 and 3, and play them when I need some fighting game action, but am sick of Tekken and SC, but really they just seem to fill the middle ground between Tekken and VF. VF has always felt very slow to me, and DOA feels the same, though it's faster than VF. The VF games also have the nasty habit of having crushing AI, preventing new players from even playing the game long enough to learn it, but it'd be nice to see Tekken or DOA have a decent AI at higher difficulty levels (except for that SC1-style highest difficulty level which seems more like the AI arbitrarily destroys you on a particular stage and then reverts to normal on the next play).
As for the recent SC2 hype, just look at it's competition at the moment: there's umm, maybe a couple of Capcom/SNK/whatever games out there. Not to mention that it's on all 3 consoles, and it's the first in the series to be available on any of these consoles. The GameCube doesn't even have a real fighter (not to say Smash Bros. isn't a good game, it's just not the same type of game really), and that's where it's selling best. The genre's been pretty slow lately, and this is a really solid game being released on all 3 consoles, of course that's going to cause some noise.
I think WC3 will remain much maligned by many people until long after WC4 is released. Personally, the expansion to WC3 is the first expansion to a Blizzard game I have not purchased since I got hooked on WC2 and Diablo. In every other case I was still playing the game when the expansion came out. With WC3, I'd rather play StarCraft, which is a game I considered overrated the day it was released (but still enjoyed).
short attention span after spending 35 hours on a game? I'd say that's a whole new definition of short attention spans.
It seems to me that he tried pretty hard to figure out why the game is so good.
Personally, Dragon Warrior has an appeal to me because the first game in the series was one of the first RPGs I played (right there with Final Fantasy 1 and Ultima 3). That being said, the only subsequent game in the series I have is Dragon Warrior VII, which I haven't played yet.
Yes, GTA3 had missions with time limits, but GTA1 was time limited. If your time ran out in GTA1 your game was over. In GTA3, if the time limit on a mission runs out, you just go on playing, and come back to that mission whenever you feel like it.
Many of the other replies here already said pretty much the same thing, so feel free to break out the -1 Redundant if you must ;)
So, in my view, this is a luxury. People who have a real need for PGP will take the 5 minutes to figure it out. Other people simply don't need the security.
This is aimed at corporate security and/or certain areas where security must be implemented by law.
If you have a corporation with 500,000 people, each of them taking 5 minutes to figure it out is ~2,500,000 minutes, or 41,667 hours (1736 days, 4.75 years), at varying cost levels (all on your overhead). If you have say 500 IT admins in that group of 500,000, you send them to school to figure out how to set this up and make sure it's configured correctly, and then forget about it. It costs you about 8000 hours on overhead at a pretty uniform cost (you do pay all of your IT admins about the same amount, right?). In the company I work for, they're more likely to send ~10-100 people to school and have them write up the basics and maybe hold a couple of conference calls to walk the rest through setup.
The best part, though, is that you're relatively sure that your entire company's email is secured, it costs less money, and you don't have to add extra software to your baseline install, and push out the software that isn't installed on every current PC in your network. Oh, and you don't have to worry about finding different software for different operating systems and hardware platforms, as this should work regardless of what system they're using, as long as it already works with your mail server.
The guy in the warehouse over here may not know what PGP is or how to use it (and may not think he needs it), but he's going to get it anyway, and he'll enjoy the whole experience a whole lot more if he doesn't know he's using it.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1051806 595741&skuId=4225706&type=product&cmp=%20% 20
Doesn't mean much if the list price is still $49.99 (as the above link said when I was there a few moments ago).
Most places are still selling it for that because it's still selling. MS isn't going to drop it to the 'Platinum Hits' games until Halo 2 comes out, more than likely.
That being said, I bought the game the same day I bought my XBox, so it has little effect on me.
I think there are a couple of things that make these problems (with MMO games) worse:
1) the low-level characters have to deal with low-level creatures that are rather rediculous. I ran around EQ killing bats. It's a freakin bat, it's about as likely to hurt me as a rat, but it's got wings so it's harder to hit. I quit playing Hexen 2 when they sent a spider after me because it was a rediculous enemy. Somehow, after dealing with these rediculous enemies off and on in several FPS games (can we say 'killing headcrabs with a crowbar'? Yeah, I didn't care for that game either, but not just because of that), I managed to get to the point where I was killing small orcs in EQ before I quit. UO it was rabbits or some crap. I got killed by a wolf when some higher level guy sat there and healed the wolf repeatedly and I tried to bail on the whole thing.
In PlanetSide it wasn't a problem of stupid enemies, it was a problem of a sparse world with a very limited progression, and very limited usefulness for the majority of the abilities in the game. To make it worse, although things like your aim and fps skills matter in the game (being an MMOFPS more or less), at the base level you're little more than cannon fodder regardless of your skill because you have extremely limited weapons and armour available to you. So, you travelled from your base to an enemy-controlled area and got killed, then you're trying to hitch a ride back. Or you could drop into 'instant action', which was basically dropping you either too close to or too far from the action, or into a hot spot that had died before you got there.
2) Since most of these games are considered RPGs, they adapt many of the typical RPG control schemes. This means that essentially you learn the interface/control scheme, and give up most of your control over the character. Each interface and each game's particularities have to be learned with each new game, but overall the reward is that you are no longer involved in the intricate details of playing the game. Either you go to the extent of scripting most of your actions, or you do a couple of minor actions (click on this, click on that, wait for the results) and watch things happen. As you said, your personal skill doesn't matter, and doesn't port well from one game to another. Additionally, it's just boring to most people, especially after you get beyond the realms of the single player RPGs people are used to playing (in terms of time spent on the game). I get bored with the combat system in a 40 hour RPG from time to time. What happens when I'm 50 hours into an MMORPG? There's no end in site, the system is going to stay the same (because I won't go play another game if I just have to start all over), and the majority of the focus is on tasks that basically take over control from the player. Combat's automated, non-combat skills tend to be automated, all I have to do is tell the computer what I want it to do, and wait. For people looking for glorified chat rooms, this is great. For someone looking to play a game, this is like listening to an audio book: it gets pretty much the same thing done, but you're better off doing it this way only if you have something else you want to do (or have to do) at the same time. I'll listen to an audio book while I'm driving on a long trip, but otherwise I'd rather read it myself (actually, I rarely listen to audio books, as they tend to put me to sleep).
You think that's an insult? How about the fact that they're still charging $50 for the XBox version? At least they've expanded the PC version a bit.
In terms of software (for both computers and consoles) the term 'go gold' refers to the 'gold master' from which all retail discs are duplicated (well, more accurately, discs are made from the master which are used to make the retail discs).
In other words, software can't hit the shelves until it's gone gold. Usually, depending on the time it takes for duplication and shipping, it'll hit the shelves 1-2 weeks after it goes gold.
As for terms related to number of sales, those are pretty arbitrary, depending on platform and sometimes the publisher.
Why, by releasing movies on P2P networks, they might create a buzz of interest and get people to actually go to the theaters and buy a ticket!
I think the movie might actually have to be good first.
If no one can download the movie for themselves, they can't really tell if the movie is going to be good, so they either have to see it for themselves in the theater, or they have to rent it when it comes out on video.
I've bought at least as many movie tickets as not because of downloads, but that's just me. I've also managed to see a handful of movies that simply were not playing in my area.
All of that being said, if a movie's good, I'll buy it on DVD (which I can watch anywhere in my house I have a screen that will display video), and delete the copy from my hard drive (which is almost always significantly lesser quality than the DVD). If a movie isn't good, I'm not going to waste the hard drive space keeping it on my computer.
Regardless of what anyone says, movie reviews are almost completely useless in terms of finding out which movies are worth going to see.