Sorry, exclusive in what sense? Are you saying that individuals who play online team type games don't also play in 1v1 LAN tournaments? Ever?
Meaning that the teams that play online aren't the same teams that play team LAN tournaments. There may be some people that play online team games and 1v1 LAN tournaments, and there are people that play online team games and LAN team tournaments, but the teams that play online are not the same teams that are playing in LAN tournaments, therefore you don't see the same skill levels in both places online and LAN team tournaments. You mentioned earlier that some of the people that win 1v1 LAN tournaments often play those games 8 hours a day, and you can often find people that play team games online 8 hours a day, but you'll rarely find someone that plays an online team game that much and then even wants to play a 1v1 LAN game (although it happens, I'm sure).
Finally, I don't see how any of that pertains to were the most skills are found. I believe that the few professionals must be the best or they wouldn't be winning. That seems so obvious to me at least. So, when I want to see the best FPS players, I watch the 1v1 finals.
Again, they would be the best people playing in that environment. There may be better FPS players out there, but those players may not be playing 1v1 FPS games, or 1v1 tournaments. I'm making the distinction between the best 1v1 players and the best FPS players, because I believe that not only is it nearly impossible to find the best FPS players, but that some (if not most) of the best FPS players are not playing in the tournaments that the best 1v1 players are winning, and that there may even be better 1v1 players that are simply not playing 1v1.
Personally, I don't see how this has anything to do with your preference for teamplay. I'm just pleased you managed to find something that makes your day. Really, I can only encourage you to do more of that and, perhaps, less of this.:~)
It really doesn't have anything to do with my preference, especially since I haven't played any online games in 6-9 months (ok, I played PlanetSide for a week). I'd even say that I'm probably NOT a good FPS player at the moment, as I haven't played a PC FPS (again, except PlanetSide) in just as long (oh, I played RtCW single player for a couple days, too).
Oh, ABTW, yes, I play CTF, but hey, I do a lot of stuff, and it's all fun... for awhile.
Personally, I'm waiting for Doom3 more than HL2 or UT2K4. But then again, that's no surprise, as I'm partial to the Id engine.
I'm waiting for Doom 3 more because Doom is the best single player FPS I have played, and I can only hope that id won't disappoint. HL was like mixing an FPS with Tomb Raider, with a better story, but wasn't fun, to me, so I don't really look forward to HL2 (and wtf is TF2 you bastards?!~@@!~), though I might pick it up anyway. UT2k4 is just more of the same, imo, though I may pick it up because I like the bots and some of the map designs the UT series has used (not to mention mixing a sniper rifle with the above 2 items).
The sequels to Secret of Mana are Legend of Mana (PS1) and Sword of Mana (GBA).
The Final Fantasy Legends games are the first 3 games of the SaGa series (before Romancing SaGa 1-3, SaGa Frontier 1+2, and Unlimited SaGa). http://www.allrpg.com/editorials/sagahisto ry.php3
You mean like this: http://www.overclockers.com/tips1084/
ummm... yeah, not much of a difference if your screen size gets bigger, the whole thing gets bigger, of course, and while the clamshell design makes things bulkier, it also reduces at least one dimension.
Of course, the GBA SP fits in your pocket (well, in my pocket, maybe not a small child's pocket), while we can't really say whether or not the PSP will, yet.
While both the PSP and the GBA are "handhelds," the cost/features/size suggest that rather than competing in the same market at the GBA, this device is going into it's own market.
The markets overlap, at the very least, though, and therefore it will compete on some level, unless it's simply priced out of the GBA's market (which is very possible, and has killed every other handheld gaming device before it).
Just like the SUV doesn't compete in the same market as "trucks" or "station wagons," the SUV created it's own market. And unlike the in the car industry, the PSP and GBA will not be chasing the same dollars nearly as much.
Except that, in my parents' neighborhood, and the parking lot here at work, those SUVs replaced a number of station wagons, minivans, and trucks (actually, most of the station wagons were replaced with minivans in the 80's). They don't completely replace the markets for those items because they're more expensive, but they certainly compete with them.
In fact, there may instead be three classes here as the NGage seems to lie somewhere between the GBA and the PSP in terms of cost and capabilities.
Perhaps, though they seem to have shit on their primary market as a game machine, and the gamers seem to have in turn said no thanks. Whether or not there's a market for the NGage or the PSP remains to be seen, though I'm betting the PSP will find a market somewhere, even if Sony has to buy the market, while the NGage will probably be a showpiece for those people willing to spend a large amount of money on a phone for features they don't really use.
The 4 color games were mostly trash, but at least nintendo got Tetris, Super Mario, and a wonderful Zelda. Nintendo at the time WAS the name for videogames.
Unfortunately, I never had the 4 colour system (or maybe not unfortunately, because I loved my Lynx), but I remember a handful of games that just about everyone had, which is pretty much all that matters for any system, even a handheld. Nintendo's kept this up pretty well through the GBC and now the GBA, except maybe for Tetris, though Dr Mario is passable for many Tetris fans. Still got Zelda games (I've just recently picked up the Zelda GBC games), and a boatload of SNES games that some of us missed out on by not having an SNES (something about having a Genesis and TG16 that lead to not getting an SNES when I was a kid, or maybe it was the fact that high school hit soon after and my interests left console gaming for a while). Pokemon can carry just about anything, except maybe toilet paper (actually, Pokemon toilet paper might do pretty well, too, in some groups).
Sony now is in the same position as Nintendo was at the time: Sony has got way too many companies behind its back. I expect Square using the 1.8 gb dvd to do a Final Fantasy 7 PSP, and that would be the killer application.
Square's no longer exclusive to Sony, though, and we'll soon have FF:TA and FF:CC to prove that. The idea of a portable FF7 is one of the reasons I'm not looking forward to seeing Sony's game lineup, especially after seeing the N-Gage lineup (old PS1 games on a handheld, if I wanted those games I've got a PS1, I really don't play my GameBoy games away from home THAT much, which is why I have a GB Player).
Sony is experienced in rechargeable batteries. If Sony wants to put a DVD player with a portable, it will surely use rechargeable lithium batteries, like a cellphone. Recharge time will be enough for one DVD I think, if not more.
I would hope it's more, as I don't recharge my GBA-SP every 2 hours. People won't take the fact that it's spinning a disc into consideration when looking at battery life, they'll compare it to what's already out there to play games (unless they're in the market for buying a portable DVD player that doesn't play standard DVDs).
IMO, Nintendo has succeeded in the portable market because they had a time lead, and they had a brand name. Sony is not going to be able to compete on price, but thats like comparing a Porsche to a Honda, price isn't the point. The only way I feel I may not be correct is if it has a big enough impact on the market of the smallest children, whose parents would never trust them with a 600 dollar, easily droppable or lost piece of equipment.
The point the post was trying to make, I believe, was that the other systems (Turbo Express, GameGear, Lynx (I had a Lynx, it owned, my best friend and I were the only people that had them it seemed)) were superior in every way except 2: price and titles. It wasn't even that the titles for the other games sucked, it was that Nintendo had the titles you had to have, and that was before Pokemon.
Today, Nintendo still has the titles people want on their handhelds, and we haven't seen the titles for the PSP or the price. The GameGear, Lynx, and TurboExpress were 16-bit (or pseudo-16-bit) handhelds when the GameBoy was just a half-step above monochrome, and all of them (except the GB) were backlit. The electricity went out at my family's house and I played my Lynx and laughed at my step-brothers with their gameboys they couldn't play in the dark. I had Blue Lightning and they had ummm Excitebike. They had Tetris, and I had some 3D top-down version that I can't remember the name of (and yes, it was cool, and obviously doesn't matter any more). In the end, the GB won because it was about 1/3rd the price and that was it, because the games and the systems were all sold in the same store (come on, how many stores were there besides Toys 'R Us that sold games back then?). I think I even owned more Lynx games than I had for any console at that time except the NES, because they started selling for next to nothing when they finally realized the GameBoy had them beat.
Currently, between my girlfriend and myself, we have a GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, GBA SP, and GB Player. When the black GBA SP is available, I'm trading in the GBA (then my GC, GB Player, and GBA SP will all match, umm did I just say that? *cough*). My gf also has Pokemon Red, Gold, and Ruby, and she's played through all 3 of them (and I can't get her to play anything else besides Pokemon, Tetris, and Dr. Wario, I think I need to buy Dr. Mario just so I can get Wario Ware back). Her little brother has a GBC, GBA, and GBA-SP (and GC), and would have a GB if it weren't for the fact that the GBC came out before he was really old enough to care about handheld games (he's only ~9, yeah there's about a 13 year difference in their ages).
Will I buy a PSP? I don't really know. I've owned enough off-the-radar game hardware in my time that even if the PSP fails it would still have a place in my home. The question is, will it have titles I want to play that I don't already have on my PS1/2, and will the price be reasonable enough that I don't wait for it to fail before I buy it (or for the inevitable price drops to bring it down to the GBA-SP's current $100 price point). The next obvious question is also whether or not a mini-DVD based handheld will even work well in a car, especially considering the performance of many handheld CD players.
So the fucking Open-d20 system changes what is already set in the DnD manuals? They should fucking print a new version of the DnD manuals that have pictures and shit in it, based on 3.5 for fuck's sake. Everything's a fucking cross reference.
The Open-d20 system is simply the information in the books available for everyone's use, think of it as the source code for D&D, without the artwork and the elements that are specific to D&D (ie the names that are trademarks). The 3.5 manuals were already printed and released, and announced on Slashdot.
Well, just make sure you buy a brand of speakers that's good and keep the line around for awhile... this pretty much precludes anything from a big box store. You want timbrally matched speakers in all 5 positions -- preferably the same speaker in all 5, but that's not realistic for most people.
Fortunately, the speakers I'm looking at, though definitely not cheap, have been around for a while, and their primary line is almost exactly the same as it was when my dad bought them over 10 years ago. The only things they've really added are horizontal and corner-mount speakers. http://www.magnepan.com/ (actually, I am not completely sure those are the same speakers as I haven't asked my dad about his yet, but they appear to be the same ones).
I still haven't decided on the subwoofer and receiver, yet, but again, it's not something I'm doing right away (and really, with the price of those speakers and the receivers I've looked at so far, it's not like I can afford to do it right away anyway). A better television is still a long way in the future, too, but then again the prices will only come down on the tv anyway;)
heh, I own all 4 systems (3 + DC), I just hadn't found much good information on how the GC uses it's RAM (or how developers use it). When it comes down to it, if a game is released on multiple consoles, I try to get a look at it running on the GC and XBox (and check the features) to decide which version I want, and rarely bother with the PS2 versions. It's good to hear the GC's 16MB RAM is usable for other applications, as it seemed like quite a bit to be dedicated to audio. I realized the PS2 was in a sorry position when I saw Tekken Tag after playing Soul Calibur (on the DC), but the developers have learned how to pull a lot more out of the system (not that they've been able to surpass it's limitations, but they've done quite well with those limitations).
Lately my PS2 has gotten far more time playing PS1 games than PS2 games, and I've even considered buying a PSOne to save the wear on my PS2 (not to mention the hassle of swapping PS1 and PS2 memory cards; never should've sold that PS1 in the first place).
I'm looking at buying a good A/V receiver in the not-too-distant future and will probably pick up one capable of 7.1, but like you said, I have no intention of setting it up that way. Maybe, someday, I will work my way up to 7.1, but I'll be perfectly happy to work with 2.1 at the start. I'd much rather have 2 good speakers and a good subwoofer than 5 so-so speakers and a good subwoofer (ok, the simple fact is that no matter what I won't go without a good subwoofer, even if I have to hook up the output to my bass amp). Hell, I have 4.1 on my home computer, but the satellites are all on the desk in front of me because of space limitations.
The PS2 is the only one of the three current set-top consoles with dedicated video RAM, though (XBox has 64MB shared RAM and GC has 24MB shared RAM (GC also has 16MB RAM dedicated to audio)).
If Moore's law even applied, SNES technology would still be decreasing in size at the same rate, so PS2 technology would always be larger (which isn't completely the case, as there are limits on how small something can be made).
From what I've read, the PS2 can be reduced to about 2 or 3 chips, plus the interfaces for the controllers and memory cards, and then the drive itself. However, the specs of the PSP seem to show that they've decided not to use the chips from the PS2, probably due to cooling issues with the form factor (when it comes to using the chips for the set-top unit in a smaller box), not to mention that there are quite a few changes to what needs to be accessed (ie the difference in media, and the fact that it probably won't use PS2 memory cards, either, which brings another question, save files for the PSP, since it's using optical media... maybe it will use a memory card after all).
The point is that Moore's law (revised) states that the number of transistors on an IC doubles every 18 months. Therefore, the SNES technology would be significantly smaller than the PS2 technology at any given time. The only way the PS2 technology could reach the size of the GBA in a lesser timeframe would be if Nintendo strung out the time for some other reason (whether to leverage the GBC longer, or to reduce the cost, the latter of which is much more likely). Nintendo probably could've put the SNES in a GBA-SP package 4 years ago, but it probably would've cost significantly more to do so. Also, if Nintendo had wanted to sell the GBA at a loss, they probably could've done it a year earlier at the same price point.
Hardly, I see no evidence that 1v1 is any less popular than it ever has been. If you can point to some evidence that shows 1v1 is declining in popularity, then I'll consider looking at it that way.
Deathmatch itself has been on a long decline, from the day that TF became more popular than QuakeDM. A lot of people stuck with Quake when Q2 came out because of the changes in physics and weapons balance (but personally, I preferred Q2DM to QuakeDM), which fragmented things a bit, but TF remained the most popular game online until TFC came out, and in turn CS. As DM in general declines, 1v1 tends to decline in proportion, although there is a hardcore 1v1 crowd much like there's a hardcore TF crowd, in that the number can only drop so low, even if the number of DMers in general continues to decline.
Actually, I suspect that physical location is not as unimportant to teams as you consider. I'd bet that many teams balance skills and locale. After all, what good are skills if attendance and network performance are issues? Besides, there are enough good gamers that you needn't necessarily recruit far away people. Most teams seem fairly regional to me. Europeans, Americans, etc...
Europeans and Americans is a bit larger a grouping than I was considering, since most leagues already more or less follow those regions. Of course, there are exceptions, I have played against 2 European teams in one league, and before I stopped playing I noticed that there were more Europeans playing in US clans. Many clans start out regional (as in localized to a particular city/county), but eventually expand to bring in more players or to combat latency issues on opponents' servers. CE was considered a primarily west coast clan by many people because it was where our servers were located, but the reality was that we had players from (literally) all over the world, and utilized the people best prepared for the particular match and did what we could to let everyone that showed up play (and often that could mean letting more San Diego-area players play on the home server and more of the outside-area players play on the away server). The clan had started in the San Diego area, but it didn't take long for it to expand outwards, and the last count I remember included 4 or 5 countries and a dozen or so US States.
as more people game, I expect we will see city teams. My point is that physical LAN's will be more common and then I expect to see equal interest in personal and team FPS. Perhaps it won't be equal, after all, who really knows?
At various times it's also been more or less common for teams to have some members playing together on a LAN. This has become less common with the increased use of voice communications, but still gives some advantages to those players that are on the LAN. LAN tournaments will likely become more common, but I still believe it will take quite an increase in prize money for team-based games before you'll see online teams attending as a team. I'm sure it's more common for an online team to play in CS LAN tournaments, though, as the teams are both smaller and more localized (CS leagues divide into geographic divisions in most cases, whereas TFC leagues rarely have).
However, at the moment, it doesn't seem so to me. I remember watching the CPL Quake finals and thinking, "this is it." I have never seen better games, nor more intensity. These guys were fighting for thier "lives" and it showed,... big time. Anyways, that's just what I experienced, I guess YMMV. (shrug)
Perhaps it's just a different way of looking at things. After all, the game I played most tends to lean more towards the excitement of inching a flag out, rather than fear for your life. CS tries to blend the two a bit (getting closer to the objective while every life counts). One of my fondest memories was pulling a flag from a tough defense, conc-jumping over the wall in the middle of the map to bring it home with 3 enemy defenders trying to
If you have to compare Sony to someone it would be the pre playstation nintendo.
You mean the pre - playstation - pre - genesis Nintendo or the pre - playstation - post - getting - their - asses - kicked - by - genesis - somehow - managing - to - regain - market - share - after - being - relegated - to - number - 2 - Nintendo?
Too many hyphens. Sega was on top once, too, which I think was their point. Nintendo had a comeback, Sega didn't (though the Dreamcast might've been under the right management).
Terminator 1 - Kick-ass movie, kick-ass ending, and it even has a NON-cheap knock-off awesome sequel (I didn't see T3)
With one of the most annoying characters/actors (You can't just go around killing people) ever placed in a good movie.
T3 was an expensive knock-off crappy sequel that shouldn't have been made.
Sixth Sense: I mean, come on... that ending was sick! (oh wait, it's cool to now say that this movie sucked, or that you saw the ending a mile away, right?):)
Actually, I saw it coming from about 1/2 way through the movie, but it was cool anyway. It was even better to watch the movie again and see how well they pulled it off from the very start. Most of the people that say they saw it coming from a mile away just didn't see it before they heard about the 'awesome twist', and were looking too hard for something.
Best twist ever, imo, was Memento, but then the whole movie was twisted.
Except that Sony probably isn't losing money on PS2s anymore (if they ever did).
Of course, it's possible that they make more money on each disc sold than they do on each console sold, in which case gaining 4 million disc sales and losing 4 million console sales is pretty much a good thing, unless developers look at it as a bad sign (though really, with how many PS2s already sold, who cares if they stop selling?). Maybe I'll buy another one when they're selling at $100 a pop, maybe, if I already have a 2nd GameCube by then.
There's another point there, as well. The PS2's last price drop was expected to bring it down to $150, but only brought it down to $180 or so. How many people are really biting now because it's $20-30 cheaper? It'll probably speed up again if they bring another price drop during the XMas buying season. Increasing games sales is enough good news for any company during the summer anyway.
Read the news page: 08-07-03: The v0.5.0 source code has been released. This is for Linux actually, though you can make it work on Mac/Windows as well. This is the last source version I will release for Racer (but the executables will still be free as normal).
If the author claims it's not open source, and then the author stops distributing the source, I think that qualifies it as not open source.
I'm surprised it took THIS long for someone to make one.
I think they cancelled the title a long time ago, and then revived it after the LotR movie(s) did so well. I know they were originally working on it around the same time Half-Life was released...
PS. Yes, prizes equal skills. The best players win the most money. If you want to see the best FPS gamers and games, check out Quakecon.
I'm just going to say it one more time, because obviously you don't care to listen anyway.
Eventually the 1v1 stuff is going to die out in tournaments just like it has been online. The best online teams are not located in the same area for the simple reason that the best teams will seek the best players, regardless of where they are (Counterstrike actually focuses more on location, though, even when they're playing online), and because in online leagues you have to diversify locations to prevent a single router problem from bringing down the whole team (for example one round of a match could cause everyone in a specific area to have pings in excess of 400).
Once tournaments are willing to shell out the money to make it worthwhile for a team to play, they will come, just as the 1v1 players already do (for more money than the tournaments usually offer to a full team at the moment).
I agree with your views regarding cheating causing a lot of issues with whether or not people can really be considered the best from their play online, but the simple fact is that it's what we've had to deal with for a very long time, and until the tournaments adapt, the best teams will remain online.
Like I said, there're a number of ways you could look at it. In what way does ATI's AA look better? It's something that you can't easily measure, because it could look better simply because the algorithms are faster, or because the algorithms do less (or because the edge cases, as in the centroid algorithm's case, are harder to see flaws with).
nVidia's newest cards also do FSAA in a significantly different manner from their previous cards (ie FX cards vs. non-FX cards), utilizing buffers from other operations to perform the AA instead of rebuilding their buffers (whether or not ATI does this I don't know). For higher level AA (6x and 8x) they actually use the 2x and 4x AA methods on portions of the screen and then combine the results in the buffer, which may also lead to ATI's results looking better.
Of course, to me FSAA never looks better than rendering at a higher resolution, because none of the current cards do FSAA by simply rendering at the higher resolution and then scaling down to the displayed resolution (which would give better image quality, but causes bigger performance hits).
In the end, if one card (nVidia) shows artifacts on the polygon edges because they don't use centroid algorithms in their AA and another card (ATI) does use the centroid algorithms, many people will say that the card that uses centroid 'looks' better, especially in a game that causes a lot of problems in those edge cases. It doesn't mean that those edge cases are more accurate in terms of antialiasing algorithms, simply that the eye doesn't catch them as easily.
Is that anything like Murderball? I'm pretty sure that came out of QuakeTF, but it was more recent than the vast majority of things most people think of as coming from QuakeTF (though not so much more recent that UT2k3 could've beaten it).
Slashdot Mirror
oops, I knew I'd get the Secret of Mana series wrong if I commented on it.
FFA (being remade as Sword of Mana)
Secret of Mana
SD3
Legend of Mana
Sorry, exclusive in what sense? Are you saying that individuals who play online team type games don't also play in 1v1 LAN tournaments? Ever?
:~)
... for awhile.
Meaning that the teams that play online aren't the same teams that play team LAN tournaments. There may be some people that play online team games and 1v1 LAN tournaments, and there are people that play online team games and LAN team tournaments, but the teams that play online are not the same teams that are playing in LAN tournaments, therefore you don't see the same skill levels in both places online and LAN team tournaments. You mentioned earlier that some of the people that win 1v1 LAN tournaments often play those games 8 hours a day, and you can often find people that play team games online 8 hours a day, but you'll rarely find someone that plays an online team game that much and then even wants to play a 1v1 LAN game (although it happens, I'm sure).
Finally, I don't see how any of that pertains to were the most skills are found. I believe that the few professionals must be the best or they wouldn't be winning. That seems so obvious to me at least. So, when I want to see the best FPS players, I watch the 1v1 finals.
Again, they would be the best people playing in that environment. There may be better FPS players out there, but those players may not be playing 1v1 FPS games, or 1v1 tournaments. I'm making the distinction between the best 1v1 players and the best FPS players, because I believe that not only is it nearly impossible to find the best FPS players, but that some (if not most) of the best FPS players are not playing in the tournaments that the best 1v1 players are winning, and that there may even be better 1v1 players that are simply not playing 1v1.
Personally, I don't see how this has anything to do with your preference for teamplay. I'm just pleased you managed to find something that makes your day. Really, I can only encourage you to do more of that and, perhaps, less of this.
It really doesn't have anything to do with my preference, especially since I haven't played any online games in 6-9 months (ok, I played PlanetSide for a week). I'd even say that I'm probably NOT a good FPS player at the moment, as I haven't played a PC FPS (again, except PlanetSide) in just as long (oh, I played RtCW single player for a couple days, too).
Oh, ABTW, yes, I play CTF, but hey, I do a lot of stuff, and it's all fun
Personally, I'm waiting for Doom3 more than HL2 or UT2K4. But then again, that's no surprise, as I'm partial to the Id engine.
I'm waiting for Doom 3 more because Doom is the best single player FPS I have played, and I can only hope that id won't disappoint. HL was like mixing an FPS with Tomb Raider, with a better story, but wasn't fun, to me, so I don't really look forward to HL2 (and wtf is TF2 you bastards?!~@@!~), though I might pick it up anyway. UT2k4 is just more of the same, imo, though I may pick it up because I like the bots and some of the map designs the UT series has used (not to mention mixing a sniper rifle with the above 2 items).
The sequels to Secret of Mana are Legend of Mana (PS1) and Sword of Mana (GBA).
o ry.php3
The Final Fantasy Legends games are the first 3 games of the SaGa series (before Romancing SaGa 1-3, SaGa Frontier 1+2, and Unlimited SaGa).
http://www.allrpg.com/editorials/sagahist
You mean like this:
http://www.overclockers.com/tips1084/
ummm... yeah, not much of a difference if your screen size gets bigger, the whole thing gets bigger, of course, and while the clamshell design makes things bulkier, it also reduces at least one dimension.
Of course, the GBA SP fits in your pocket (well, in my pocket, maybe not a small child's pocket), while we can't really say whether or not the PSP will, yet.
While both the PSP and the GBA are "handhelds," the cost/features/size suggest that rather than competing in the same market at the GBA, this device is going into it's own market.
The markets overlap, at the very least, though, and therefore it will compete on some level, unless it's simply priced out of the GBA's market (which is very possible, and has killed every other handheld gaming device before it).
Just like the SUV doesn't compete in the same market as "trucks" or "station wagons," the SUV created it's own market. And unlike the in the car industry, the PSP and GBA will not be chasing the same dollars nearly as much.
Except that, in my parents' neighborhood, and the parking lot here at work, those SUVs replaced a number of station wagons, minivans, and trucks (actually, most of the station wagons were replaced with minivans in the 80's). They don't completely replace the markets for those items because they're more expensive, but they certainly compete with them.
In fact, there may instead be three classes here as the NGage seems to lie somewhere between the GBA and the PSP in terms of cost and capabilities.
Perhaps, though they seem to have shit on their primary market as a game machine, and the gamers seem to have in turn said no thanks. Whether or not there's a market for the NGage or the PSP remains to be seen, though I'm betting the PSP will find a market somewhere, even if Sony has to buy the market, while the NGage will probably be a showpiece for those people willing to spend a large amount of money on a phone for features they don't really use.
The 4 color games were mostly trash, but at least nintendo got Tetris, Super Mario, and a wonderful Zelda. Nintendo at the time WAS the name for videogames.
Unfortunately, I never had the 4 colour system (or maybe not unfortunately, because I loved my Lynx), but I remember a handful of games that just about everyone had, which is pretty much all that matters for any system, even a handheld. Nintendo's kept this up pretty well through the GBC and now the GBA, except maybe for Tetris, though Dr Mario is passable for many Tetris fans. Still got Zelda games (I've just recently picked up the Zelda GBC games), and a boatload of SNES games that some of us missed out on by not having an SNES (something about having a Genesis and TG16 that lead to not getting an SNES when I was a kid, or maybe it was the fact that high school hit soon after and my interests left console gaming for a while). Pokemon can carry just about anything, except maybe toilet paper (actually, Pokemon toilet paper might do pretty well, too, in some groups).
Sony now is in the same position as Nintendo was at the time: Sony has got way too many companies behind its back. I expect Square using the 1.8 gb dvd to do a Final Fantasy 7 PSP, and that would be the killer application.
Square's no longer exclusive to Sony, though, and we'll soon have FF:TA and FF:CC to prove that. The idea of a portable FF7 is one of the reasons I'm not looking forward to seeing Sony's game lineup, especially after seeing the N-Gage lineup (old PS1 games on a handheld, if I wanted those games I've got a PS1, I really don't play my GameBoy games away from home THAT much, which is why I have a GB Player).
Sony is experienced in rechargeable batteries. If Sony wants to put a DVD player with a portable, it will surely use rechargeable lithium batteries, like a cellphone. Recharge time will be enough for one DVD I think, if not more.
I would hope it's more, as I don't recharge my GBA-SP every 2 hours. People won't take the fact that it's spinning a disc into consideration when looking at battery life, they'll compare it to what's already out there to play games (unless they're in the market for buying a portable DVD player that doesn't play standard DVDs).
IMO, Nintendo has succeeded in the portable market because they had a time lead, and they had a brand name. Sony is not going to be able to compete on price, but thats like comparing a Porsche to a Honda, price isn't the point. The only way I feel I may not be correct is if it has a big enough impact on the market of the smallest children, whose parents would never trust them with a 600 dollar, easily droppable or lost piece of equipment.
The point the post was trying to make, I believe, was that the other systems (Turbo Express, GameGear, Lynx (I had a Lynx, it owned, my best friend and I were the only people that had them it seemed)) were superior in every way except 2: price and titles. It wasn't even that the titles for the other games sucked, it was that Nintendo had the titles you had to have, and that was before Pokemon.
Today, Nintendo still has the titles people want on their handhelds, and we haven't seen the titles for the PSP or the price. The GameGear, Lynx, and TurboExpress were 16-bit (or pseudo-16-bit) handhelds when the GameBoy was just a half-step above monochrome, and all of them (except the GB) were backlit. The electricity went out at my family's house and I played my Lynx and laughed at my step-brothers with their gameboys they couldn't play in the dark. I had Blue Lightning and they had ummm Excitebike. They had Tetris, and I had some 3D top-down version that I can't remember the name of (and yes, it was cool, and obviously doesn't matter any more). In the end, the GB won because it was about 1/3rd the price and that was it, because the games and the systems were all sold in the same store (come on, how many stores were there besides Toys 'R Us that sold games back then?). I think I even owned more Lynx games than I had for any console at that time except the NES, because they started selling for next to nothing when they finally realized the GameBoy had them beat.
Currently, between my girlfriend and myself, we have a GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, GBA SP, and GB Player. When the black GBA SP is available, I'm trading in the GBA (then my GC, GB Player, and GBA SP will all match, umm did I just say that? *cough*). My gf also has Pokemon Red, Gold, and Ruby, and she's played through all 3 of them (and I can't get her to play anything else besides Pokemon, Tetris, and Dr. Wario, I think I need to buy Dr. Mario just so I can get Wario Ware back). Her little brother has a GBC, GBA, and GBA-SP (and GC), and would have a GB if it weren't for the fact that the GBC came out before he was really old enough to care about handheld games (he's only ~9, yeah there's about a 13 year difference in their ages).
Will I buy a PSP? I don't really know. I've owned enough off-the-radar game hardware in my time that even if the PSP fails it would still have a place in my home. The question is, will it have titles I want to play that I don't already have on my PS1/2, and will the price be reasonable enough that I don't wait for it to fail before I buy it (or for the inevitable price drops to bring it down to the GBA-SP's current $100 price point). The next obvious question is also whether or not a mini-DVD based handheld will even work well in a car, especially considering the performance of many handheld CD players.
So the fucking Open-d20 system changes what is already set in the DnD manuals? They should fucking print a new version of the DnD manuals that have pictures and shit in it, based on 3.5 for fuck's sake. Everything's a fucking cross reference.
The Open-d20 system is simply the information in the books available for everyone's use, think of it as the source code for D&D, without the artwork and the elements that are specific to D&D (ie the names that are trademarks). The 3.5 manuals were already printed and released, and announced on Slashdot.
Well, just make sure you buy a brand of speakers that's good and keep the line around for awhile... this pretty much precludes anything from a big box store. You want timbrally matched speakers in all 5 positions -- preferably the same speaker in all 5, but that's not realistic for most people.
;)
Fortunately, the speakers I'm looking at, though definitely not cheap, have been around for a while, and their primary line is almost exactly the same as it was when my dad bought them over 10 years ago. The only things they've really added are horizontal and corner-mount speakers.
http://www.magnepan.com/
(actually, I am not completely sure those are the same speakers as I haven't asked my dad about his yet, but they appear to be the same ones).
I still haven't decided on the subwoofer and receiver, yet, but again, it's not something I'm doing right away (and really, with the price of those speakers and the receivers I've looked at so far, it's not like I can afford to do it right away anyway). A better television is still a long way in the future, too, but then again the prices will only come down on the tv anyway
heh, I own all 4 systems (3 + DC), I just hadn't found much good information on how the GC uses it's RAM (or how developers use it). When it comes down to it, if a game is released on multiple consoles, I try to get a look at it running on the GC and XBox (and check the features) to decide which version I want, and rarely bother with the PS2 versions. It's good to hear the GC's 16MB RAM is usable for other applications, as it seemed like quite a bit to be dedicated to audio. I realized the PS2 was in a sorry position when I saw Tekken Tag after playing Soul Calibur (on the DC), but the developers have learned how to pull a lot more out of the system (not that they've been able to surpass it's limitations, but they've done quite well with those limitations).
Lately my PS2 has gotten far more time playing PS1 games than PS2 games, and I've even considered buying a PSOne to save the wear on my PS2 (not to mention the hassle of swapping PS1 and PS2 memory cards; never should've sold that PS1 in the first place).
I'm looking at buying a good A/V receiver in the not-too-distant future and will probably pick up one capable of 7.1, but like you said, I have no intention of setting it up that way. Maybe, someday, I will work my way up to 7.1, but I'll be perfectly happy to work with 2.1 at the start. I'd much rather have 2 good speakers and a good subwoofer than 5 so-so speakers and a good subwoofer (ok, the simple fact is that no matter what I won't go without a good subwoofer, even if I have to hook up the output to my bass amp). Hell, I have 4.1 on my home computer, but the satellites are all on the desk in front of me because of space limitations.
Unfortunately, Konami can't seem to decide what the Konami code is on the PSX controller, it's:
UUDDLRLROX
UUDDLRLRXO
UUDDL1R1L2R2L3R3
I believe the ps2 has 32 mb of ram and 8 mb of video ram (wow even that sounds small).
32MB RDRAM (system)
4MB VRAM (video)
2MB RAM (audio)
The PS2 is the only one of the three current set-top consoles with dedicated video RAM, though (XBox has 64MB shared RAM and GC has 24MB shared RAM (GC also has 16MB RAM dedicated to audio)).
If Moore's law even applied, SNES technology would still be decreasing in size at the same rate, so PS2 technology would always be larger (which isn't completely the case, as there are limits on how small something can be made).
From what I've read, the PS2 can be reduced to about 2 or 3 chips, plus the interfaces for the controllers and memory cards, and then the drive itself. However, the specs of the PSP seem to show that they've decided not to use the chips from the PS2, probably due to cooling issues with the form factor (when it comes to using the chips for the set-top unit in a smaller box), not to mention that there are quite a few changes to what needs to be accessed (ie the difference in media, and the fact that it probably won't use PS2 memory cards, either, which brings another question, save files for the PSP, since it's using optical media... maybe it will use a memory card after all).
The point is that Moore's law (revised) states that the number of transistors on an IC doubles every 18 months. Therefore, the SNES technology would be significantly smaller than the PS2 technology at any given time. The only way the PS2 technology could reach the size of the GBA in a lesser timeframe would be if Nintendo strung out the time for some other reason (whether to leverage the GBC longer, or to reduce the cost, the latter of which is much more likely). Nintendo probably could've put the SNES in a GBA-SP package 4 years ago, but it probably would've cost significantly more to do so. Also, if Nintendo had wanted to sell the GBA at a loss, they probably could've done it a year earlier at the same price point.
Hardly, I see no evidence that 1v1 is any less popular than it ever has been. If you can point to some evidence that shows 1v1 is declining in popularity, then I'll consider looking at it that way.
...
... big time. Anyways, that's just what I experienced, I guess YMMV. (shrug)
Deathmatch itself has been on a long decline, from the day that TF became more popular than QuakeDM. A lot of people stuck with Quake when Q2 came out because of the changes in physics and weapons balance (but personally, I preferred Q2DM to QuakeDM), which fragmented things a bit, but TF remained the most popular game online until TFC came out, and in turn CS. As DM in general declines, 1v1 tends to decline in proportion, although there is a hardcore 1v1 crowd much like there's a hardcore TF crowd, in that the number can only drop so low, even if the number of DMers in general continues to decline.
Actually, I suspect that physical location is not as unimportant to teams as you consider. I'd bet that many teams balance skills and locale. After all, what good are skills if attendance and network performance are issues? Besides, there are enough good gamers that you needn't necessarily recruit far away people. Most teams seem fairly regional to me. Europeans, Americans, etc
Europeans and Americans is a bit larger a grouping than I was considering, since most leagues already more or less follow those regions. Of course, there are exceptions, I have played against 2 European teams in one league, and before I stopped playing I noticed that there were more Europeans playing in US clans. Many clans start out regional (as in localized to a particular city/county), but eventually expand to bring in more players or to combat latency issues on opponents' servers. CE was considered a primarily west coast clan by many people because it was where our servers were located, but the reality was that we had players from (literally) all over the world, and utilized the people best prepared for the particular match and did what we could to let everyone that showed up play (and often that could mean letting more San Diego-area players play on the home server and more of the outside-area players play on the away server). The clan had started in the San Diego area, but it didn't take long for it to expand outwards, and the last count I remember included 4 or 5 countries and a dozen or so US States.
as more people game, I expect we will see city teams. My point is that physical LAN's will be more common and then I expect to see equal interest in personal and team FPS. Perhaps it won't be equal, after all, who really knows?
At various times it's also been more or less common for teams to have some members playing together on a LAN. This has become less common with the increased use of voice communications, but still gives some advantages to those players that are on the LAN. LAN tournaments will likely become more common, but I still believe it will take quite an increase in prize money for team-based games before you'll see online teams attending as a team. I'm sure it's more common for an online team to play in CS LAN tournaments, though, as the teams are both smaller and more localized (CS leagues divide into geographic divisions in most cases, whereas TFC leagues rarely have).
However, at the moment, it doesn't seem so to me. I remember watching the CPL Quake finals and thinking, "this is it." I have never seen better games, nor more intensity. These guys were fighting for thier "lives" and it showed,
Perhaps it's just a different way of looking at things. After all, the game I played most tends to lean more towards the excitement of inching a flag out, rather than fear for your life. CS tries to blend the two a bit (getting closer to the objective while every life counts). One of my fondest memories was pulling a flag from a tough defense, conc-jumping over the wall in the middle of the map to bring it home with 3 enemy defenders trying to
If you have to compare Sony to someone it would be the pre playstation nintendo.
You mean the pre - playstation - pre - genesis Nintendo or the pre - playstation - post - getting - their - asses - kicked - by - genesis - somehow - managing - to - regain - market - share - after - being - relegated - to - number - 2 - Nintendo?
Too many hyphens. Sega was on top once, too, which I think was their point. Nintendo had a comeback, Sega didn't (though the Dreamcast might've been under the right management).
'Analysts' also expected them to drop the PS2 price to $150 here in the US on the last price drop.
As it said right in your quote: Sony has not set a price for the PSP.
Terminator 1 - Kick-ass movie, kick-ass ending, and it even has a NON-cheap knock-off awesome sequel (I didn't see T3)
:)
With one of the most annoying characters/actors (You can't just go around killing people) ever placed in a good movie.
T3 was an expensive knock-off crappy sequel that shouldn't have been made.
Sixth Sense: I mean, come on... that ending was sick! (oh wait, it's cool to now say that this movie sucked, or that you saw the ending a mile away, right?)
Actually, I saw it coming from about 1/2 way through the movie, but it was cool anyway. It was even better to watch the movie again and see how well they pulled it off from the very start. Most of the people that say they saw it coming from a mile away just didn't see it before they heard about the 'awesome twist', and were looking too hard for something.
Best twist ever, imo, was Memento, but then the whole movie was twisted.
Except that Sony probably isn't losing money on PS2s anymore (if they ever did).
Of course, it's possible that they make more money on each disc sold than they do on each console sold, in which case gaining 4 million disc sales and losing 4 million console sales is pretty much a good thing, unless developers look at it as a bad sign (though really, with how many PS2s already sold, who cares if they stop selling?). Maybe I'll buy another one when they're selling at $100 a pop, maybe, if I already have a 2nd GameCube by then.
There's another point there, as well. The PS2's last price drop was expected to bring it down to $150, but only brought it down to $180 or so. How many people are really biting now because it's $20-30 cheaper? It'll probably speed up again if they bring another price drop during the XMas buying season. Increasing games sales is enough good news for any company during the summer anyway.
and Payne Killer
phew, I'm safe, just 2 letters...
Err, wait, he'd probably sue Judas Priest and Painkiller before he got to me anyway, since they probably have more money.
Read the news page:
08-07-03: The v0.5.0 source code has been released. This is for Linux actually, though you can make it work on Mac/Windows as well. This is the last source version I will release for Racer (but the executables will still be free as normal).
If the author claims it's not open source, and then the author stops distributing the source, I think that qualifies it as not open source.
I'm surprised it took THIS long for someone to make one.
I think they cancelled the title a long time ago, and then revived it after the LotR movie(s) did so well. I know they were originally working on it around the same time Half-Life was released...
PS. Yes, prizes equal skills. The best players win the most money. If you want to see the best FPS gamers and games, check out Quakecon.
I'm just going to say it one more time, because obviously you don't care to listen anyway.
Eventually the 1v1 stuff is going to die out in tournaments just like it has been online. The best online teams are not located in the same area for the simple reason that the best teams will seek the best players, regardless of where they are (Counterstrike actually focuses more on location, though, even when they're playing online), and because in online leagues you have to diversify locations to prevent a single router problem from bringing down the whole team (for example one round of a match could cause everyone in a specific area to have pings in excess of 400).
Once tournaments are willing to shell out the money to make it worthwhile for a team to play, they will come, just as the 1v1 players already do (for more money than the tournaments usually offer to a full team at the moment).
I agree with your views regarding cheating causing a lot of issues with whether or not people can really be considered the best from their play online, but the simple fact is that it's what we've had to deal with for a very long time, and until the tournaments adapt, the best teams will remain online.
Like I said, there're a number of ways you could look at it. In what way does ATI's AA look better? It's something that you can't easily measure, because it could look better simply because the algorithms are faster, or because the algorithms do less (or because the edge cases, as in the centroid algorithm's case, are harder to see flaws with).
nVidia's newest cards also do FSAA in a significantly different manner from their previous cards (ie FX cards vs. non-FX cards), utilizing buffers from other operations to perform the AA instead of rebuilding their buffers (whether or not ATI does this I don't know). For higher level AA (6x and 8x) they actually use the 2x and 4x AA methods on portions of the screen and then combine the results in the buffer, which may also lead to ATI's results looking better.
Of course, to me FSAA never looks better than rendering at a higher resolution, because none of the current cards do FSAA by simply rendering at the higher resolution and then scaling down to the displayed resolution (which would give better image quality, but causes bigger performance hits).
In the end, if one card (nVidia) shows artifacts on the polygon edges because they don't use centroid algorithms in their AA and another card (ATI) does use the centroid algorithms, many people will say that the card that uses centroid 'looks' better, especially in a game that causes a lot of problems in those edge cases. It doesn't mean that those edge cases are more accurate in terms of antialiasing algorithms, simply that the eye doesn't catch them as easily.
Is that anything like Murderball? I'm pretty sure that came out of QuakeTF, but it was more recent than the vast majority of things most people think of as coming from QuakeTF (though not so much more recent that UT2k3 could've beaten it).