I think it's worth noting that the general consensus of Nintendo's Wavebird (their 1st party wireless controller) is that it is a very good controller. Perhaps you are thinking of old-school wireless controllers that used IR? If that's the case you should try a Wavebird out - only when the batteries get low have I experienced any sort of transmission problems, and when it works right (probably 95%+ of the time) the fact that it's wireless makes it very appealing to me. Still prefer the controller-s layout, though.
Wireless has always had some appeal to me, as well, but the problems with them in terms of gaming don't even seem to be something that most people have been looking at. I know 2 people that have wireless controllers for their gamecubes that noticed the same latency issues I'm talking about (note: not dropouts, latency, the time between pressing the button and the action being performed on-screen), but I don't know if they have the controller you're talking about or not. I definitely have had problems with wireless controllers on the PS2 (my step-brother bought one), and wireless keyboards/mice on the PC (my dad and my roommate both have wireless keyboard/mouse combos that are less than a year old).
At least the XBox controllers have longer cables than the Sony controllers. I had to buy extension cables for my PS2 controllers, whereas the XBox controllers get from beside the TV to the couch with no problems. I've considered putting my consoles next to the couch to alleviate all of the problems associated with the cables streamed across the room when playing, but then I'll have to route the video & audio cables under the carpet or through the walls & attic, either of which seems a bit much at the moment.
Also, if MS goes with wireless controllers, how will the Xbox live headsets hook up? Seems like connecting them through the controller as now would push too much data wirelessly, though I'll grant I have no real sense of the limits to how much data a wireless controller can transmit simultaneously.
It depends a lot on how it's handled by the transmitter. Many wireless standards such as bluetooth will shift frequencies to avoid interference, which I'd imagine the Live headset would do as well (I'm not sure what wireless standards it uses, or the specs if it's a proprietary protocol). The amount of data is generally not an issue, as long as they chose their specifications properly in the first place.
I would think increasing realism is detrimental to sales mainly because cars are somewhat difficult to drive properly at speed. I like Gotham because I can use real-world braking and cornering techniques to improve my time and speed. Most people, though, just wouldn't know what to do.
The biggest problem I have with most racing games is that they (including GT3 and Project Gotham) tend to overdo the types of handling problems associated with rear-wheel drive, and also tend to give all of the cars unrealistic acceleration and speed characteristics. If I can pick cars that I've actually driven in real life in the game, it should handle like those cars. Of course, I understand that the cars handle differently at 150-200 mph, but the majority of tracks in both games that I race them on rarely get higher than 80-100 mph.
I'm on the fence about upgrades. Generally their impact is blown way out of proportion to their real-life counterparts, which to me makes it less fun to pick and choose among your options. If everything is flat-out awesome, then it's just a matter of trying to collect as many of them as you can.
I agree on that point. I'd rather have the impact be a little more realistic. For instance, opening up the exhaust and intake on a car that is already pretty much optimized should negatively impact the performance, until the engine is upgraded in some way so that it needs the increased air flow. Of course, this would have to be indicated visually so that you know it's going to do that beforehand, otherwise people would get a bit irritated that they spent X number of points/money and made their car worse. The point is simply that in reality I'm not limited to the car that I picked up off the lot, and people racing cars certainly aren't leaving them completely stock (even in 'stock car' racing, in which cars are basically nothing like what they're supposed to represent in many cases (ie Nascar)).
We are considering using wireless controllers (no specifics). We are also considering using two TV-outs (our focus group voiced that 4 people crunched together on one TV wasn't too enjoyable). The DVD will be front tray loading rather than on the top. Remote control on/off a possibility (from controller probably). It will be backwards compatible. The controller will be smaller. There will be an expansion slot.
Assuming any of this is true: wireless controllers suck. They could be useful for games that don't require quick input, but fighting games, fps games, and even most platformers and 3rd person games take a hit. Until latency on wireless is the same as with wires, this will continue to be a problem for at least some people.
2 TV outs seems like a good idea, but I doubt many people would actually use it. As someone else said, how many people are going to have 2 TVs in the same room in the first place. Although, now that I think about it, that could probably be pretty common in college dorms.
Tray-loading DVD is best, imo, but it's also important to make sure the tray comes out far enough so that you don't have to tilt the disc to put it in the tray. Over time, if you're not extremely careful with games/DVDs when the tray doesn't come out all the way, the DVD will get some wear either on the top where the case hits it, or the bottom where the edge of the tray hits it.
I'm not sure what you mean by remote control on/off, maybe because I don't own the remote control for my XBox ($30? bite me).
Backwards compatible is good, obviously. Smaller controller is only good if the design is good. Otherwise, I'd like to be able to continue using the original large XBox controller I had to buy seperately in the first place (because it came with that damned S controller). I can think of one sidewinder gamepad that had a good feel to it, it came in silver, and it's no longer listed on the MS Sidewinder website. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact name it was marketed under.
Actually, I took the spelling directly from the ISO website. Normally I would spell it with an s.
That's not the part I was referring to;) That's a simple difference between US and UK English. It was the fact that your post contained: Organziation The i and the z were swapped in order, hence I called it a typo rather than a spelling issue;)
I, for one, always figured that they could've at least made the English name International Standardization Organisation, which would take care of the problem of ordering the words, at least in one language.
You are absolutely right. I think I misrepresented my opinion. I was in fact attempting to suggest my preference, not condemn the opinions of those who enjoy more simulation-oriented driving games.
I probably misread it slightly, as well. My main point was that being a 'hardcore gamer' is pretty much meaningless in terms of racing game preferences. The most hardcore gamers in the world are probably the guys that play ultra-realistic flight sims or massive turn-based games via email anyway. Some of those people can be freakishly obsessive about their games;)
I do, however, believe that there is more profit to be made (and more fun for me to have) in making unrealistic (fantastic?) racing games than in spending money to license the name of a real racing franchise and then simulating it.
According to actual sales data, the most profit in racing games is made by being the developers and publishers of the GT series. The least money is most likely made by whoever holds the F1 license. The Nascar license tends to do well in the US, but probably doesn't do so well elsewhere. The arcade games seem to be a pretty tight market to be in (since the best selling games in that market don't really make the best-selling lists very often and probably don't outsell all other games in the category for very long), and the more unusual racing games tend to come along fairly rarely. The only one I can think of recently that did pretty well would probably be something like Twisted Metal, assuming you don't count GTA.
Personally, I think GT3 is more of an addictive style of gameplay for me than anything else. They could trash most of the realism and I'd probably still like it, as long as the ability to make plenty of upgrades to each car was available and the game had tons of locations and cars. I liked Project Gotham Racing, too, but I didn't play it nearly as long because there weren't many cars and locations, and you couldn't upgrade the cars in any way.
Lately the most important thing for me has become a combination of gameplay and the amount of time it can keep me playing. I don't think I'll ever knowingly buy another game like Max Payne that I can blow through in 6-8 hours and then never care less about playing again. Luckily, I bought that one from a friend for $20 after making sure my system didn't show the same problems with it that his did.
As a hardcore gamer, I have always found that the best part of racing games is a feeling of liberation. Because of that, I feel that racing game developers in general should focus not on making games more realistic, but on making them less realistic, open-ended, and with wildness packed into every crack
It has nothing to do with being a hardcore gamer, and everything to do with the type of racing games you like. Some people like hardcore racing sims, tweaking every little thing on the car and having everything look and feel like they think it does in real life, or GT (which is different in that there's no crash damage). Other people like the more arcade-like games, or GTA.
That's why both types of games are available. Personally, I like GT3, but I think it has more to do with the ability to tweak the cars and get more cars than the driving part of it. OTOH, I also thoroughly enjoyed Mario Kart on the SNES, and like driving around in GTA3/VC doing whatever comes to mind. I won't touch 99% of the arcade racers, though.
Convenience? Most console games don't play well in my CD player, and even most PC games don't, either. In the best case scenario, assuming that a PC game ships with red book audio (or red book quality audio, which is at least as rare as red book audio any more), I could copy it to a CD-R, which some of my CD-playing devices can handle, while others can not (because they're the CD player equivalent of stonehenge).
I know a lot of gamers are into their game music but am I the only one who goes into sound prefrences and turns that crap off so I can listen to my own MP3s?
It depends on the game for me, and the music in the game. The first time I play through a game I almost always leave the soundtrack intact. If I'm playing online I usually turn the music off completely, and only play my own music if I'm not trying very hard to do well in the game. The only game I can think of at the moment in which I've replaced the music when I'm playing single-player is Project Gotham Racing, which was just screaming for a good rock/metal soundtrack, and allowed me to run the songs from the hard drive so I don't have to choose between the game and the music for the stereo.
Some games have soundtracks that add to the games, and those I rarely change, others detract from the game, and quickly get the shaft;)
Still, I think any game developer that accepts a royalty agreement for music on their games is getting shafted, because obviously some percentage (if not all) of the gamers are going to give the music the boot. The people that really like the music and can track it down will most likely buy it on a CD, for which the artist should be paid royalties. The article even quotes industry people discussing releasing game soundtrack CDs, and the (sometimes disgusting) practice of releasing 'special edition' versions with the sound track CD bundled with the game after the game has shown to be a good seller (I call this sometimes disgusting because it's often the only way to get the CD and some amount of gamers will buy the special edition even if they already have the original; note that I have no problems at all with developers/publishers releasing a special edition along side the original release, only the whole 'after its successful' part, which the movie industry seems to have really jumped on, especially with XMen 1.5 and the new Fast and the Furious release to promote sequels).
I know lots of people with Playstation 1's and 2's. It's hard not to. Almost all of these people have modded a system for various reasons, import games, piracy, etc.
I know a lot of people with Playstation 2s (and one person that only has a Playstation 1). I have never seen, first-hand, a modded PS1 or PS2. I know one person I work with that has a modded PS2.
If I went by the people I knew, the XBox would be the #1 console, because that is the console that most of the people I work with own (most of those people are using their XBox on an HDTV as well, I own a DC, PS2, and XBox, and will be buying a GC in the next couple of weeks, once the GB Player is bundled with it). So, XBox would be the #1 console, modded consoles would be in the 1% range, and 30-50% of homes would have at least 1 HDTV. Oh, and 99% of people that own consoles would spend 80% of the time they use the console playing Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid 2, or sports and giant robot games on XBox Live. Never mind the 100% DSL/cable connection rate, either, for those that have computers or consoles in their homes. Personal experience can't always be used to generalize, but I bet the modded consoles part is the most correct of the assumptions I can make on my experience.
However, they all have one thing in common. They bought the hardware legitimately, and they all have at least a few legitimate games. Everyone who owns a gamecube has had to buy all of their games and hardware legitimately. People who can't afford to do so, don't buy a cube.
The price I paid for my PS2 console alone would've paid for a GC and 2 games today (1 of those being free w/ the console), and in a week or two you could add the GB Player to that, and GBA games run ~$30/each instead of the $50/each for new PS2/GC/XBox games. The other consoles only came close to price in terms of hardware costs very recently, with Sony dropping the PS2 to $150 to clear the shelves for the revised PS2 consoles. Most of the stores around here are only carrying the PS2 in bundles, though, so you'd have to get pre-owned hardware to make the price comparison (and then compare with a pre-owned GC).
OTOH, I do understand the 'play-before-you-pay' justification, but believe that 90% of the people using it are just deluding themselves or outright lying. I rarely rent anything because I believe that any time I rent something that I eventually buy I wasted the money I spent renting it (and I don't buy used games because I'd rather spend the $5 (that most stores deduct for used games) than have a disc that may be defective and/or damaged/non-existent manuals). The only time renting something comes out as a good deal for me is when the movie/game sucks, and in that case I just wasted the money and time on something that sucked;p
By switching to a pirateable media format like CD or DVD Nintendo will lose some money to decreased software sales to suburban kids and college students. But they will make that money back by selling hardware to low income households who will pirate all their software.
Most companies don't make enough money from hardware sales (short of accessories) to make up anything from pirated games. The only thing that really matters in this equation is that they only lost potential sales to piracy, though a potential sale is never a guaranteed sale, and therefore even 1% of potential sales cannot be counted as any real 'loss to piracy'. If your game sucked and you depended on copy protection to keep people from finding out until they sank $50 into it, then you do have a loss to piracy, but fuck you anyway. The people that made the games that people are pirating widely and actually playing are the ones losing something, but how much is an unknown.
In summary. No piracy causes lower market share, but higher software sales figures. 2 million copies of Zelda as opposed to 1.5 million otherwise. Pirating allows higher market share through more hardware sales, but causes fewer software sales.
Firstly: ISO stands for the 'International Organsiation of Standardization'.
As already stated by another poster, that's not quite right. Even your own statement shows it, in that International Organisation of Standardization would be IOS (you have to dig a little deeper on iso.org to find the isos->equals explanation). Puzzled looks abound at ISO meetings here when someone asks what ISO stands for, and those meetings are regarding ISO 9000:2001 (to be more descriptive but still not completely accurate), though it's still called ISO.
Some people seem to have co-opted the term to mean an image of an ISO 9660 CD.
And as time goes on, more and more programs use.iso as the extension for these image files, which means that it's only going to continue.
However, the gamecube has its own propietary format which is on no way an international standard, therefore the term 'ISO' cannot possibly apply.
However, the format is based on the ISO format for DVDs, although modified as some people have already mentioned. Many standards allow for modification, and since the modification was actually done by the company that originally put the DVD format into ECMA for standardization (and then fast-tracked to ISO), it's likely that this is the case as well (though unlikely that the modifications were submitted to the standard).
Finally, the ISO standard for DVDs is not the same number as the ISO standard for CDs. DVDs would be covered under 16448:2002 (120mm DVDs) and 16449 (80mm DVDs), with writable/rewritable discs coming under 16824:1999, 16825:1999, and 20563:2001 (note: the number after the : is the year of the most recent revision, meaning the first two rewritable standards listed are mostly dead, but don't really predate the DVD-ROM standards previously mentioned, as those are in 3rd revision iirc).
Oh, and you have a bit of a typo in Organisation up there.
If you check a box that says that you refuse to use your seatbelt (remember, it's your personal choice) then they can change you a higher rate because, odds are, you are going to cost more to treat after your accident.
My gf gave me some line saying that EMS people are full of shit when they say that seatbelts reduce injuries in most accidents because of her own experience: she got in an accident while she was not wearing her seatbelt, but told the paramedics/officers she was wearing her seatbelt. The paramedics told her she would've been killed if she hadn't worn it (note she was not wearing it).
I told her that their statement was most likely based on the extent of her injuries (rather than the condition of the car, which was totalled, the accident was not her fault, though, and only the car that hit her and her own car were damaged, as well as the tree her car was forced into). She looked at me as if she had never even thought of that (hey, if you hit your head on the windshield while wearing your seatbelt (the airbag didnt deploy), what would've happened while not wearing it?).
I keep bugging her about it because it's important to me (and really it doesn't take much time to put on a seatbelt, especially once you've been doing it most of your life), and in the year I've known her she's been in 1 accident and I've heard about a couple of others. It's a little disturbing to me since I've had my license about the same amount of time and haven't been in a single accident.
FFVIII was a pretty half-assed port, as well. In the end, I think the PS1 versions of all of the (available) FF games will probably be the longest-lasting of them. FF7 worked pretty well on my computer until the Voodoo 2 cards had to go, and FF8 always had some problem or another (let's see, the cutscenes are upside down, but the characters in the cutscenes are rightside up...).
Who really cares about the graphics in FF games? All I care about is that they work on hardware I have. As long as Sony maintains backwards compatibility with their consoles I'll be happy with the FF games that are already on my shelf.
Almost every tech school I've ever been to (mostly because my company has a training budget and these are the types of schools they send us to most of the time (not game development schools, tech school)). It pretty much goes like this: if the school charges an excessive amount of money to teach you how to use a specific application (or operating system) to perform a specific task, they almost always offer free retaking of the courses that you originally took (or the program that you originally completed if the courses changed).
However, I found most of those schools to be just what they were meant to be: training for a specific application. They weren't education in the sense of learning broadly applicable information and techniques.
Then again, most 4-year degrees in CS leave you with a minimum 6 months of training at your first (and nearly every later) job to teach you exactly how they do things at that particular company, and the tools they use (which are rarely the same tools you learned to use in school).
While most people hit on the graphics vs. gameplay angle, I'm just wondering what prison cell the guy lives in where American games never have better graphics than Japanese games. Maybe in a portion of the console market this is the case, but American game developers have tended to be further out on the bleeding edge of graphics in video games.
Then again, I guess if you're mostly looking at RPGs then American games tend to seem a slight bit behind the Japanese games, but I think even that has a lot to do with the differences in style rather than the graphics capabilities of the engines they build/use.
When you see a lvl 4 character in Nightmare Act V expecting you to do all of the work to get him to Hell mode, you might start to think differently about the matter.
Then again, I like watching them die, over and over and over again while the 2 or 3 people that actually play the game work on clearing the area.
Hell, people have been known to miss with cruise missiles.
So yeah, ye manufacturers. Stop commercialising war. Make good products for the sake of making good products. Make them well.
Unfortunately, most of those cruise missles haven't been manufactured since the late 80's. We're just lucky that Reagan ordered so many of them that the government has a huge stockpile.
As for the knife, BFD, or maybe I just don't care because I don't play CS.
I think it's an interesting idea to allow real-world manufacturers to pay for a good model of their product to be included in a game. I think it'd suck if it became overdone. I also think the latter is almost impossible once the former shows effectiveness.
But the dialogue was nothing special, the plot mediocre, and, most importantly for me, the characters just didn't grab you the way they do in Square's games.
I think it's the difference between a game and a movie. In the games, you get wrapped up in the plot and the characters because you're interacting with them (even in something that tends to be fairly linear like most FF games). The movie plays out like it was written by the same people that write the FF games' storylines, but no one cares because they have no time and interaction invested in the movie, and you can't affect the outcome.
I just tend to get exceedingly tired of people predicting the end of the PC as a gaming platform. It is also tiresome to have to listen to console gamers running around at every new product launch attempting to convince everyone that this console or that is more powerful than a high end PC.
I agree on both points. In the end, it's always possible to get a more powerful PC. There are configurations available that most people never see. At the least, even if a console comes out that gets a 6-month lead on consumer PCs, the workstations that the high-end game artists (especially model designers) are using will blow away the console they're developing for (at least in graphics performance).
I wish people could just understand that all the various paltforms have their advantages and disadvantages.
The hardware flexibility on the PC is both an advantage and a disadvantage, though, in that games are rarely designed for the high end of what's available (and even when they are, within a couple months of release the high end gets higher). On the other hand, the only way a console will ever catch up with the mouse + keyboard input is to sell a USB adapter or use standard USB connectors that allow standard PC mice + keyboards to be attached. There's basically a snowball's chance in hell that a console developer will release a keyboard and mouse that meet my needs.
If you are a true gamer you're going to want to play the best games, regardless of the platform their on. And if you're hardcore you will want to play them on whichever platform gives you the greatest performance. When choosing between HL2 on a PC or the Xbox, I'm going to go with the PC.
I agree there, but not for performance reasons. The XBox should, at least, supply stability that you may or may not see on the PC. The PC offers expandability, though, which is a place where the XBox is more limited (I'm sorry, an 8-10 GB hard disk probably couldn't hold my HL folder when I was actively playing TFC matches).
Of course, as long as HL2 is just what it claims to be, I won't be buying it anyway. WTF is TF2 anyway?
I live in a very non-rural area;) Anyway, I got my GBA SP last week, so I'm good in that department. I'm waiting for the GameBoy Player to come packaged with the GameCube before I get that, and I most likely will order it. I'm going to Costco tonite to pick up some stuff we need at the apartment, so I'll probably walk by the game stuff for the hell of it, but it'd be pretty amazing for them to actually have the SP there (it's one of only 2 Costcos in the area, and the other one's on the other side of a very nasty (traffic-wise) tunnel).
Still, I've had a great time with mine, and the blue has actually grown on me;)
Personally, I just like my arcade-type racing to be really over the top (Mario Kart for example), and my simulation-type to be more about the driving and earning cars/tracks/upgrades (the upgrades part being very important to me, because having to get that next car can suck ass if you can't upgrade your existing car). One of the best parts of GT3 that seems often understated is the controls, imo. I've never played a racing game that I felt responded as well to the controls (without buying a wheel) as GT3. Then again, Super Mario Kart did pretty well, also, but I was drunk and didn't really care most of the time I played that, so I could be wrong.
Unfortunately, my local Costco only has the GBA (non-SP) packs. They also have the PS2, XBox, and GC packs, but the GC is the only one I'm looking for atm, and their pack has a game in it that I don't particularly want. I actually bought the Zelda and Metroid games for the GBA SP before I bought the handheld anyway, because I found them at decent prices before I found the system.
There's a review here: http://gear.ign.com/articles/393/393518p1.h tml?fro mint=1&submit.x=82&submit.y=8 which also has a link to the official site, http://www.nakiusa.com/ and a bit of comparison to the other set of grips I saw when I was looking at accessories (I bought a crapload of extra junk for next to nothing trying to get a headphone adapter and cases for the gba sp and the games, in most cases it was cheaper to buy a bundle than the individual items, but I didn't find the grips in any of the bundles).
hmm... For me it was Metroid and Zelda (and Castlevania), but the real killer seems to be just another iteration of Pokemon games (Ruby and Saphire), plus the fact that you can still play the old Pokemon games on it, and the old Tetris (and I believe there's a new Tetris, which would be Tetris Worlds, which I bought for my gf for the PC, it won't be selling many GBAs...).
I bought a pair of hand-grips that mount to the thing and make it roughly the same width as a PSX controller. It seems to help out quite a bit, at least for me (and I bought the old larger XBox controller because the S controller that came with my XBox just isn't comfortable to me).
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I think it's worth noting that the general consensus of Nintendo's Wavebird (their 1st party wireless controller) is that it is a very good controller. Perhaps you are thinking of old-school wireless controllers that used IR? If that's the case you should try a Wavebird out - only when the batteries get low have I experienced any sort of transmission problems, and when it works right (probably 95%+ of the time) the fact that it's wireless makes it very appealing to me. Still prefer the controller-s layout, though.
Wireless has always had some appeal to me, as well, but the problems with them in terms of gaming don't even seem to be something that most people have been looking at. I know 2 people that have wireless controllers for their gamecubes that noticed the same latency issues I'm talking about (note: not dropouts, latency, the time between pressing the button and the action being performed on-screen), but I don't know if they have the controller you're talking about or not. I definitely have had problems with wireless controllers on the PS2 (my step-brother bought one), and wireless keyboards/mice on the PC (my dad and my roommate both have wireless keyboard/mouse combos that are less than a year old).
At least the XBox controllers have longer cables than the Sony controllers. I had to buy extension cables for my PS2 controllers, whereas the XBox controllers get from beside the TV to the couch with no problems. I've considered putting my consoles next to the couch to alleviate all of the problems associated with the cables streamed across the room when playing, but then I'll have to route the video & audio cables under the carpet or through the walls & attic, either of which seems a bit much at the moment.
Also, if MS goes with wireless controllers, how will the Xbox live headsets hook up? Seems like connecting them through the controller as now would push too much data wirelessly, though I'll grant I have no real sense of the limits to how much data a wireless controller can transmit simultaneously.
It depends a lot on how it's handled by the transmitter. Many wireless standards such as bluetooth will shift frequencies to avoid interference, which I'd imagine the Live headset would do as well (I'm not sure what wireless standards it uses, or the specs if it's a proprietary protocol). The amount of data is generally not an issue, as long as they chose their specifications properly in the first place.
I would think increasing realism is detrimental to sales mainly because cars are somewhat difficult to drive properly at speed. I like Gotham because I can use real-world braking and cornering techniques to improve my time and speed. Most people, though, just wouldn't know what to do.
The biggest problem I have with most racing games is that they (including GT3 and Project Gotham) tend to overdo the types of handling problems associated with rear-wheel drive, and also tend to give all of the cars unrealistic acceleration and speed characteristics. If I can pick cars that I've actually driven in real life in the game, it should handle like those cars. Of course, I understand that the cars handle differently at 150-200 mph, but the majority of tracks in both games that I race them on rarely get higher than 80-100 mph.
I'm on the fence about upgrades. Generally their impact is blown way out of proportion to their real-life counterparts, which to me makes it less fun to pick and choose among your options. If everything is flat-out awesome, then it's just a matter of trying to collect as many of them as you can.
I agree on that point. I'd rather have the impact be a little more realistic. For instance, opening up the exhaust and intake on a car that is already pretty much optimized should negatively impact the performance, until the engine is upgraded in some way so that it needs the increased air flow. Of course, this would have to be indicated visually so that you know it's going to do that beforehand, otherwise people would get a bit irritated that they spent X number of points/money and made their car worse. The point is simply that in reality I'm not limited to the car that I picked up off the lot, and people racing cars certainly aren't leaving them completely stock (even in 'stock car' racing, in which cars are basically nothing like what they're supposed to represent in many cases (ie Nascar)).
We are considering using wireless controllers (no specifics). We are also considering using two TV-outs (our focus group voiced that 4 people crunched together on one TV wasn't too enjoyable). The DVD will be front tray loading rather than on the top. Remote control on/off a possibility (from controller probably). It will be backwards compatible. The controller will be smaller. There will be an expansion slot.
Assuming any of this is true:
wireless controllers suck. They could be useful for games that don't require quick input, but fighting games, fps games, and even most platformers and 3rd person games take a hit. Until latency on wireless is the same as with wires, this will continue to be a problem for at least some people.
2 TV outs seems like a good idea, but I doubt many people would actually use it. As someone else said, how many people are going to have 2 TVs in the same room in the first place. Although, now that I think about it, that could probably be pretty common in college dorms.
Tray-loading DVD is best, imo, but it's also important to make sure the tray comes out far enough so that you don't have to tilt the disc to put it in the tray. Over time, if you're not extremely careful with games/DVDs when the tray doesn't come out all the way, the DVD will get some wear either on the top where the case hits it, or the bottom where the edge of the tray hits it.
I'm not sure what you mean by remote control on/off, maybe because I don't own the remote control for my XBox ($30? bite me).
Backwards compatible is good, obviously. Smaller controller is only good if the design is good. Otherwise, I'd like to be able to continue using the original large XBox controller I had to buy seperately in the first place (because it came with that damned S controller). I can think of one sidewinder gamepad that had a good feel to it, it came in silver, and it's no longer listed on the MS Sidewinder website. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact name it was marketed under.
Actually, I took the spelling directly from the ISO website. Normally I would spell it with an s.
;) That's a simple difference between US and UK English. It was the fact that your post contained: ;)
That's not the part I was referring to
Organziation
The i and the z were swapped in order, hence I called it a typo rather than a spelling issue
I, for one, always figured that they could've at least made the English name International Standardization Organisation, which would take care of the problem of ordering the words, at least in one language.
You are absolutely right. I think I misrepresented my opinion. I was in fact attempting to suggest my preference, not condemn the opinions of those who enjoy more simulation-oriented driving games.
;)
I probably misread it slightly, as well. My main point was that being a 'hardcore gamer' is pretty much meaningless in terms of racing game preferences. The most hardcore gamers in the world are probably the guys that play ultra-realistic flight sims or massive turn-based games via email anyway. Some of those people can be freakishly obsessive about their games
I do, however, believe that there is more profit to be made (and more fun for me to have) in making unrealistic (fantastic?) racing games than in spending money to license the name of a real racing franchise and then simulating it.
According to actual sales data, the most profit in racing games is made by being the developers and publishers of the GT series. The least money is most likely made by whoever holds the F1 license. The Nascar license tends to do well in the US, but probably doesn't do so well elsewhere. The arcade games seem to be a pretty tight market to be in (since the best selling games in that market don't really make the best-selling lists very often and probably don't outsell all other games in the category for very long), and the more unusual racing games tend to come along fairly rarely. The only one I can think of recently that did pretty well would probably be something like Twisted Metal, assuming you don't count GTA.
Personally, I think GT3 is more of an addictive style of gameplay for me than anything else. They could trash most of the realism and I'd probably still like it, as long as the ability to make plenty of upgrades to each car was available and the game had tons of locations and cars. I liked Project Gotham Racing, too, but I didn't play it nearly as long because there weren't many cars and locations, and you couldn't upgrade the cars in any way.
Lately the most important thing for me has become a combination of gameplay and the amount of time it can keep me playing. I don't think I'll ever knowingly buy another game like Max Payne that I can blow through in 6-8 hours and then never care less about playing again. Luckily, I bought that one from a friend for $20 after making sure my system didn't show the same problems with it that his did.
As a hardcore gamer, I have always found that the best part of racing games is a feeling of liberation. Because of that, I feel that racing game developers in general should focus not on making games more realistic, but on making them less realistic, open-ended, and with wildness packed into every crack
It has nothing to do with being a hardcore gamer, and everything to do with the type of racing games you like. Some people like hardcore racing sims, tweaking every little thing on the car and having everything look and feel like they think it does in real life, or GT (which is different in that there's no crash damage). Other people like the more arcade-like games, or GTA.
That's why both types of games are available. Personally, I like GT3, but I think it has more to do with the ability to tweak the cars and get more cars than the driving part of it. OTOH, I also thoroughly enjoyed Mario Kart on the SNES, and like driving around in GTA3/VC doing whatever comes to mind. I won't touch 99% of the arcade racers, though.
Convenience? Most console games don't play well in my CD player, and even most PC games don't, either. In the best case scenario, assuming that a PC game ships with red book audio (or red book quality audio, which is at least as rare as red book audio any more), I could copy it to a CD-R, which some of my CD-playing devices can handle, while others can not (because they're the CD player equivalent of stonehenge).
I know a lot of gamers are into their game music but am I the only one who goes into sound prefrences and turns that crap off so I can listen to my own MP3s?
;)
It depends on the game for me, and the music in the game. The first time I play through a game I almost always leave the soundtrack intact. If I'm playing online I usually turn the music off completely, and only play my own music if I'm not trying very hard to do well in the game. The only game I can think of at the moment in which I've replaced the music when I'm playing single-player is Project Gotham Racing, which was just screaming for a good rock/metal soundtrack, and allowed me to run the songs from the hard drive so I don't have to choose between the game and the music for the stereo.
Some games have soundtracks that add to the games, and those I rarely change, others detract from the game, and quickly get the shaft
Still, I think any game developer that accepts a royalty agreement for music on their games is getting shafted, because obviously some percentage (if not all) of the gamers are going to give the music the boot. The people that really like the music and can track it down will most likely buy it on a CD, for which the artist should be paid royalties. The article even quotes industry people discussing releasing game soundtrack CDs, and the (sometimes disgusting) practice of releasing 'special edition' versions with the sound track CD bundled with the game after the game has shown to be a good seller (I call this sometimes disgusting because it's often the only way to get the CD and some amount of gamers will buy the special edition even if they already have the original; note that I have no problems at all with developers/publishers releasing a special edition along side the original release, only the whole 'after its successful' part, which the movie industry seems to have really jumped on, especially with XMen 1.5 and the new Fast and the Furious release to promote sequels).
I know lots of people with Playstation 1's and 2's. It's hard not to. Almost all of these people have modded a system for various reasons, import games, piracy, etc.
;p
I know a lot of people with Playstation 2s (and one person that only has a Playstation 1). I have never seen, first-hand, a modded PS1 or PS2. I know one person I work with that has a modded PS2.
If I went by the people I knew, the XBox would be the #1 console, because that is the console that most of the people I work with own (most of those people are using their XBox on an HDTV as well, I own a DC, PS2, and XBox, and will be buying a GC in the next couple of weeks, once the GB Player is bundled with it). So, XBox would be the #1 console, modded consoles would be in the 1% range, and 30-50% of homes would have at least 1 HDTV. Oh, and 99% of people that own consoles would spend 80% of the time they use the console playing Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid 2, or sports and giant robot games on XBox Live. Never mind the 100% DSL/cable connection rate, either, for those that have computers or consoles in their homes. Personal experience can't always be used to generalize, but I bet the modded consoles part is the most correct of the assumptions I can make on my experience.
However, they all have one thing in common. They bought the hardware legitimately, and they all have at least a few legitimate games. Everyone who owns a gamecube has had to buy all of their games and hardware legitimately. People who can't afford to do so, don't buy a cube.
The price I paid for my PS2 console alone would've paid for a GC and 2 games today (1 of those being free w/ the console), and in a week or two you could add the GB Player to that, and GBA games run ~$30/each instead of the $50/each for new PS2/GC/XBox games. The other consoles only came close to price in terms of hardware costs very recently, with Sony dropping the PS2 to $150 to clear the shelves for the revised PS2 consoles. Most of the stores around here are only carrying the PS2 in bundles, though, so you'd have to get pre-owned hardware to make the price comparison (and then compare with a pre-owned GC).
OTOH, I do understand the 'play-before-you-pay' justification, but believe that 90% of the people using it are just deluding themselves or outright lying. I rarely rent anything because I believe that any time I rent something that I eventually buy I wasted the money I spent renting it (and I don't buy used games because I'd rather spend the $5 (that most stores deduct for used games) than have a disc that may be defective and/or damaged/non-existent manuals). The only time renting something comes out as a good deal for me is when the movie/game sucks, and in that case I just wasted the money and time on something that sucked
By switching to a pirateable media format like CD or DVD Nintendo will lose some money to decreased software sales to suburban kids and college students. But they will make that money back by selling hardware to low income households who will pirate all their software.
Most companies don't make enough money from hardware sales (short of accessories) to make up anything from pirated games. The only thing that really matters in this equation is that they only lost potential sales to piracy, though a potential sale is never a guaranteed sale, and therefore even 1% of potential sales cannot be counted as any real 'loss to piracy'. If your game sucked and you depended on copy protection to keep people from finding out until they sank $50 into it, then you do have a loss to piracy, but fuck you anyway. The people that made the games that people are pirating widely and actually playing are the ones losing something, but how much is an unknown.
In summary. No piracy causes lower market share, but higher software sales figures. 2 million copies of Zelda as opposed to 1.5 million otherwise. Pirating allows higher market share through more hardware sales, but causes fewer software sales.
Firstly: ISO stands for the 'International Organsiation of Standardization'.
.iso as the extension for these image files, which means that it's only going to continue.
As already stated by another poster, that's not quite right. Even your own statement shows it, in that International Organisation of Standardization would be IOS (you have to dig a little deeper on iso.org to find the isos->equals explanation). Puzzled looks abound at ISO meetings here when someone asks what ISO stands for, and those meetings are regarding ISO 9000:2001 (to be more descriptive but still not completely accurate), though it's still called ISO.
Some people seem to have co-opted the term to mean an image of an ISO 9660 CD.
And as time goes on, more and more programs use
However, the gamecube has its own propietary format which is on no way an international standard, therefore the term 'ISO' cannot possibly apply.
However, the format is based on the ISO format for DVDs, although modified as some people have already mentioned. Many standards allow for modification, and since the modification was actually done by the company that originally put the DVD format into ECMA for standardization (and then fast-tracked to ISO), it's likely that this is the case as well (though unlikely that the modifications were submitted to the standard).
Finally, the ISO standard for DVDs is not the same number as the ISO standard for CDs. DVDs would be covered under 16448:2002 (120mm DVDs) and 16449 (80mm DVDs), with writable/rewritable discs coming under 16824:1999, 16825:1999, and 20563:2001 (note: the number after the : is the year of the most recent revision, meaning the first two rewritable standards listed are mostly dead, but don't really predate the DVD-ROM standards previously mentioned, as those are in 3rd revision iirc).
Oh, and you have a bit of a typo in Organisation up there.
Enough of the pedant crap for now.
From the source code (yes, I was bored, but it really is a rather elaborate joke):
button =
gtk_button_new_with_label
("You are a moron. Want to play GameCube games ? Buy one.");
If you check a box that says that you refuse to use your seatbelt (remember, it's your personal choice) then they can change you a higher rate because, odds are, you are going to cost more to treat after your accident.
My gf gave me some line saying that EMS people are full of shit when they say that seatbelts reduce injuries in most accidents because of her own experience:
she got in an accident while she was not wearing her seatbelt, but told the paramedics/officers she was wearing her seatbelt. The paramedics told her she would've been killed if she hadn't worn it (note she was not wearing it).
I told her that their statement was most likely based on the extent of her injuries (rather than the condition of the car, which was totalled, the accident was not her fault, though, and only the car that hit her and her own car were damaged, as well as the tree her car was forced into). She looked at me as if she had never even thought of that (hey, if you hit your head on the windshield while wearing your seatbelt (the airbag didnt deploy), what would've happened while not wearing it?).
I keep bugging her about it because it's important to me (and really it doesn't take much time to put on a seatbelt, especially once you've been doing it most of your life), and in the year I've known her she's been in 1 accident and I've heard about a couple of others. It's a little disturbing to me since I've had my license about the same amount of time and haven't been in a single accident.
FFVIII was a pretty half-assed port, as well. In the end, I think the PS1 versions of all of the (available) FF games will probably be the longest-lasting of them. FF7 worked pretty well on my computer until the Voodoo 2 cards had to go, and FF8 always had some problem or another (let's see, the cutscenes are upside down, but the characters in the cutscenes are rightside up...).
Who really cares about the graphics in FF games? All I care about is that they work on hardware I have. As long as Sony maintains backwards compatibility with their consoles I'll be happy with the FF games that are already on my shelf.
How many schools can you name that do that?
Almost every tech school I've ever been to (mostly because my company has a training budget and these are the types of schools they send us to most of the time (not game development schools, tech school)). It pretty much goes like this: if the school charges an excessive amount of money to teach you how to use a specific application (or operating system) to perform a specific task, they almost always offer free retaking of the courses that you originally took (or the program that you originally completed if the courses changed).
However, I found most of those schools to be just what they were meant to be: training for a specific application. They weren't education in the sense of learning broadly applicable information and techniques.
Then again, most 4-year degrees in CS leave you with a minimum 6 months of training at your first (and nearly every later) job to teach you exactly how they do things at that particular company, and the tools they use (which are rarely the same tools you learned to use in school).
While most people hit on the graphics vs. gameplay angle, I'm just wondering what prison cell the guy lives in where American games never have better graphics than Japanese games. Maybe in a portion of the console market this is the case, but American game developers have tended to be further out on the bleeding edge of graphics in video games.
Then again, I guess if you're mostly looking at RPGs then American games tend to seem a slight bit behind the Japanese games, but I think even that has a lot to do with the differences in style rather than the graphics capabilities of the engines they build/use.
Rushes"? Hehe, sounds like fun!
When you see a lvl 4 character in Nightmare Act V expecting you to do all of the work to get him to Hell mode, you might start to think differently about the matter.
Then again, I like watching them die, over and over and over again while the 2 or 3 people that actually play the game work on clearing the area.
Hell, people have been known to miss with cruise missiles.
So yeah, ye manufacturers. Stop commercialising war. Make good products for the sake of making good products. Make them well.
Unfortunately, most of those cruise missles haven't been manufactured since the late 80's. We're just lucky that Reagan ordered so many of them that the government has a huge stockpile.
As for the knife, BFD, or maybe I just don't care because I don't play CS.
I think it's an interesting idea to allow real-world manufacturers to pay for a good model of their product to be included in a game. I think it'd suck if it became overdone. I also think the latter is almost impossible once the former shows effectiveness.
But the dialogue was nothing special, the plot mediocre, and, most importantly for me, the characters just didn't grab you the way they do in Square's games.
I think it's the difference between a game and a movie. In the games, you get wrapped up in the plot and the characters because you're interacting with them (even in something that tends to be fairly linear like most FF games). The movie plays out like it was written by the same people that write the FF games' storylines, but no one cares because they have no time and interaction invested in the movie, and you can't affect the outcome.
I just tend to get exceedingly tired of people predicting the end of the PC as a gaming platform. It is also tiresome to have to listen to console gamers running around at every new product launch attempting to convince everyone that this console or that is more powerful than a high end PC.
I agree on both points. In the end, it's always possible to get a more powerful PC. There are configurations available that most people never see. At the least, even if a console comes out that gets a 6-month lead on consumer PCs, the workstations that the high-end game artists (especially model designers) are using will blow away the console they're developing for (at least in graphics performance).
I wish people could just understand that all the various paltforms have their advantages and disadvantages.
The hardware flexibility on the PC is both an advantage and a disadvantage, though, in that games are rarely designed for the high end of what's available (and even when they are, within a couple months of release the high end gets higher). On the other hand, the only way a console will ever catch up with the mouse + keyboard input is to sell a USB adapter or use standard USB connectors that allow standard PC mice + keyboards to be attached. There's basically a snowball's chance in hell that a console developer will release a keyboard and mouse that meet my needs.
If you are a true gamer you're going to want to play the best games, regardless of the platform their on. And if you're hardcore you will want to play them on whichever platform gives you the greatest performance. When choosing between HL2 on a PC or the Xbox, I'm going to go with the PC.
I agree there, but not for performance reasons. The XBox should, at least, supply stability that you may or may not see on the PC. The PC offers expandability, though, which is a place where the XBox is more limited (I'm sorry, an 8-10 GB hard disk probably couldn't hold my HL folder when I was actively playing TFC matches).
Of course, as long as HL2 is just what it claims to be, I won't be buying it anyway. WTF is TF2 anyway?
I live in a very non-rural area ;) Anyway, I got my GBA SP last week, so I'm good in that department. I'm waiting for the GameBoy Player to come packaged with the GameCube before I get that, and I most likely will order it. I'm going to Costco tonite to pick up some stuff we need at the apartment, so I'll probably walk by the game stuff for the hell of it, but it'd be pretty amazing for them to actually have the SP there (it's one of only 2 Costcos in the area, and the other one's on the other side of a very nasty (traffic-wise) tunnel).
;)
Still, I've had a great time with mine, and the blue has actually grown on me
Personally, I just like my arcade-type racing to be really over the top (Mario Kart for example), and my simulation-type to be more about the driving and earning cars/tracks/upgrades (the upgrades part being very important to me, because having to get that next car can suck ass if you can't upgrade your existing car). One of the best parts of GT3 that seems often understated is the controls, imo. I've never played a racing game that I felt responded as well to the controls (without buying a wheel) as GT3. Then again, Super Mario Kart did pretty well, also, but I was drunk and didn't really care most of the time I played that, so I could be wrong.
Unfortunately, my local Costco only has the GBA (non-SP) packs. They also have the PS2, XBox, and GC packs, but the GC is the only one I'm looking for atm, and their pack has a game in it that I don't particularly want. I actually bought the Zelda and Metroid games for the GBA SP before I bought the handheld anyway, because I found them at decent prices before I found the system.
There's a review here:h tml?fro mint=1&submit.x=82&submit.y=8
http://gear.ign.com/articles/393/393518p1.
which also has a link to the official site,
http://www.nakiusa.com/
and a bit of comparison to the other set of grips I saw when I was looking at accessories (I bought a crapload of extra junk for next to nothing trying to get a headphone adapter and cases for the gba sp and the games, in most cases it was cheaper to buy a bundle than the individual items, but I didn't find the grips in any of the bundles).
hmm... For me it was Metroid and Zelda (and Castlevania), but the real killer seems to be just another iteration of Pokemon games (Ruby and Saphire), plus the fact that you can still play the old Pokemon games on it, and the old Tetris (and I believe there's a new Tetris, which would be Tetris Worlds, which I bought for my gf for the PC, it won't be selling many GBAs...).
I bought a pair of hand-grips that mount to the thing and make it roughly the same width as a PSX controller. It seems to help out quite a bit, at least for me (and I bought the old larger XBox controller because the S controller that came with my XBox just isn't comfortable to me).