I simply wonder how many they would've sold if they could keep up with the demand. It took me 3 weeks to get a GBA SP, and then I had to get the blue one (I wanted the silver one), or face another 2-3 weeks unless I got lucky (and no, I haven't seen a silver one in the ~1 week since I got mine). The worst part is that everyone I asked pretty much knew what I was going to say by the time I got the words Game Boy out of my mouth, but they had to wait for the SP because they have so many of the old GBAs on the shelf and would love to get rid of them.
Everyone pretty much said that they get a shipment of 12 of them every couple of weeks, 6 of each colour, although sometimes they come in seperate shipments. They also have no idea when they will receive them (except for a couple of the larger retailers like WalMart which gets more regular shipments, though the shipments are the same size).
This isn't simply technophilic self-indulgence. This is a matter of needing complete, current contact lists integrated with the phone. It's a matter of needing to be at irregularly scheduled meetings on time. It's cheaper to buy the phones than to miss business opportunities.
I've been thinking about hunting down the ever-elusive USB cable for my cell phone (elusive because it didn't come with the phone and the phone isn't really produced any more, though I've only had it about 3-4 months) and trying to synch it to Outlook here at work. I wonder how long it would go before it gives up?
Unfortunately, there is no such phone available these days. With Technology the way it is, Motorola could make a kick ass $20 (retail) cell phone with great reception, is tiny, and looks cool. They don't because they think (and, unfortunately, they're mostly correct) no one wants a phone that just works as a phone. It has to have at least one game preinstalled, if not 5-6, a calculator, instant messenger, Internet access... I don't need that crap, but if I want a phone I have to buy a $150 one because that's all there is.
Personally, the only reason I have a cell phone is because the plan I got (which is unbelievably good) is significantly cheaper than it would've been to have a phone installed in my apartment, especially with the amount of long distance calls I sometimes have to make. I only use it for three things: making calls, keeping time (I haven't worn a watch in a couple of years, so it's essentially performing a function I didn't really want, but use anyway), and as an alarm to wake me up in the morning (essentially a function of the other two, but since I can't program my alarm clock to go off Monday-Friday at 5:40AM without turning it on every nite...).
Besides that, it has 4 games, a calendar that synchs with Outlook, voice recognition, text messaging (which costs a certain amount per message to use or an extra $5/month, so I never send them) and probably a crapload of other stuff I'm forgetting (I only use about 60% of the top-level menu items, and I could limit that to 20% because 1 of the 3 items I use (out of 5) is a customizable menu which is linked to the alarm clock so I can tell it not to go off on a particular day if I dont have to work), and an even smaller percentage of the lower-level menus.
Why do I bother having a phone with so much crap I don't use? It was free with the plan and I really had no other choices. The added bonus is that it's an older model phone with almost no accessories available for it, though it came with the earphone/mic for hands-free use.
The only basic phones really made any more are the disposable ones. As the price of the high-end phones gets lower and lower (woohoo, more features for the same price! Oh, wait, I didn't need/want those features), the low-end phones are simply phased out because no one wants to be in the market of selling $5 phones that do what everyone really wants to do: make and receive phone calls.
Realistic car damage in car racing games is quite important, but at least some car damage (like in CMR 2.0) is better than none at all. I'm quite surprised that such a well-respected brand as the Gran Turismo series has still failed to put this in.
I think it's simply a matter of the audience they're going for. There are many games out there that have significant car damage features. The GT series seems to go more towards the appearances and variety of the game, while still allowing for more of an arcade type of play by not hindering the driver with car damage (well, whether or not that hinders you is up to you).
The only people I've seen that complained about the lack of car damage but still liked GT at all, were the people that had almost played the game out and would have liked it as an option to give the game more replay value (in other words, now that they've played the game through a couple times, they'd like to try it with damage, especially if the AI cars take damage as well, since the AI can be such a bitch about doing stupid things that would destroy their cars).
It's a slightly older (~1 year, possibly older because I remember seeing it in the print version around the time XBox was released) article, but it is free. You could probably price out the major parts for yourself from the listing, but overall it's still going to be an estimate without MS releasing the prices they're getting for the parts. Then there's the whole manufacturing process itself...
IANAL, but I believe the same thing is true in the US. But it wouldn't be Sony or Nintendo's responsibility to bring about the lawsuit. The Federal Government would probably have to file the suit, and since the DoJ is much nicer to MS then in the Clinton administration, I doubt a case would be brought about.
It's not illegal in the US if the market strategy in use shows a return based on the ownership of the item being sold at a loss. In other words, MS (and every major console maker) expects to make $X per every copy of every game produced/sold for their product, and by producing/selling Y number of games per console sold, they can recover $Z lost on the console itself. Now, in the long run everyone wants to make a profit on each console sold as well, but in the short term it pays to sell below cost, because getting people to produce Y number of games requires market penetration (people won't produce games for consoles no one owns).
Razor manufacturers (Gilette, Schick, etc) use the same business model, sell the handle for next to nothing, then sell the razors at $2/each to bring in the big bucks. Hell, Gilette's been sending handles w/ 2-4 blades to people in the mail free for years. It's a much smaller investment for an individual to change razors, which means the initial cost of consoles much more important in the same market model, but overall the model applies equally to both markets (and iirc MS even stated when they went into consoles that they were based on the model of disposable razors).
While chips and drives have come down in the last two years, you really haven't seen a significant decrease in the cost of 700MHz CPUs and 8GB hard drives, because neither was cutting-edge at the time. The 700MHz CPUs probably are only being manufactured for MS, both because they are not the same as the off-the-shelf 700MHz P3 that people might have bought a couple years ago, and because they simply aren't producing chips that far from their highest clock-cycles. There might still be a few companies producing 8 GB hard drives, but frankly, most of them aren't even producing platters that small any more (and I wouldn't be surprised if the XBox hard drives had larger platters than they are using, at least in the newer ones). Hell, I haven't bought a hard drive that small in almost 5 years. The graphics chip is a special build as well, though it's possible that nVidia is still producing comparable chips for the general market.
A lot of it comes down to the more common components, like IDE controllers, USB, and so on. The RAM in the system has probably come down in price as well. Other than that, they could've found a more efficient manufacturing process, or some chips that helped make it more efficient. Reducing the size and/or number of layers of the backplane would usually help in the long term, as well.
Re:Half-Life is a 3D Video Game SDK - and a game t
on
Half-Life 2 Not On Xbox?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's not why it sold well initially. The reason it was immediately successful (and it was) was that it was an excellent single-player game.
It also received a significant sales boost because Valve bought the team that created the most popular Quake mod, Team Fortress (which surpassed QuakeDM in players long before Half-life came around, and surpassed many (if not most) of Quake2's multiplayer mods), and they had announced that TF2 would be either a mod or an expansion for Half-life. In the long run it didn't account for nearly as many sales as Counterstrike, but it certainly accounted for a significant number of the pre-orders and initial sales of the game. While many people liked the single player portion of Half-life, I did not, even though I own 3 copies of the game (pre-order, the 'everyone loves the single player I cant wait for the pre-order to get here even though its already shipped' purchase, and the one I got from Sierra for moderating their HL boards). It had some interesting elements to it, but overall was a simplistic puzzler with a first-person perspective. The story-line was definitely better than Quake, but the gameplay was mediocre.
Over time it has had longevity beyond that of most single-player first-person shooters because of modifications, but it would have been successful even if there had never been a single mod.
We'll never really know, because Valve hyped it from day one as a mod platform AND a strong single-player game. If it hadn't been hyped as a mod platform, we can't really say if it would've sold well or not. I certainly know that many people were severely pissed about the game's multiplayer performance upon release, and that for them the only thing that redeemed the game were the eventual patches to fix the multiplayer code (and I'm not talking about the much later releases that changed the network code significantly after TFC and CS had already been released).
The PS2 has a fairly unique architecture, but he GameCube is a Power PC with an ATI Radeon 8500 (ish) graphics chipset. The Cube is not supposed to be a big pain to write for.
PowerPC is sometimes a simple port, sometimes a complete rewrite. Remember, there was never a port of HL to the Mac, either (though they did have someone working on it for some time before they trashed it).
However it is highly unlikely that HL2 could be ported to ANY of the consoles without major reduction in capabilities. Remember the Xbox is about equivalent to a 1GHz Celeron running a GeForce 3 Reference (pre-Ti) chipset. (its actual clock is 700Mhz but it gains some speed advantage due to some mainboard and memory enchancements)
Celerons lose their speed in the same places where the XBox gains it's speed, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Also, it's important to remember that a console port doesn't have to run at the highest PC resolutions (although most XBox games are supposed to support 1080i iirc). You also don't have nearly as much overhead on the XBox as you do on a normal PC, and don't have to worry about what people are running in addition to your game.
HL2's absolute minimum requirements (with nearly every detail setting lowered all the way) has been rumored to be in the 900Mhz GeForce 3 range. To play at anything remotely similar to the detail level of the E3 demonstration is going to require systems 2-3 times as powerful.
Someone else quoted something different elsewhere in this thread, and that at least seemed more substantiated, though I don't trust what Gabe says for much. We'll see when the game comes out what it requires on the PC. Consider, though, that the original HL had pretty low system requirements for it's time (in part due to the engine it was based on, even though they did a significant rewrite of that engine), while still having superior AI to every other FPS game that was out at the time, or even most of the games since.
It's time for a new generation of console players to learn what the last one did. Consoles will always fall behind top end PCs in terms of graphics performance. And given the delay between new console products you will generally have one year in which you can attempt to claim your console is more powerful than any PC when it comes to games (you'd be wrong, but you can get away with it) followed by 2-3 years of being obviously less advanced.
I've always been a huge PC gamer, but there's always going to be an advantage to playing on a console: the system is a known environment for the developer. What runs on a 700MHz PC w/ a high-end GF3 card is going to run significantly better ported to the XBox. PC game developers write games knowing that to get the widest possible audience they'll have to make their game flexible enough to run on the lowest possible system requirements, while still gaining something from higher-powered systems. Meanwhile, console developers only have to write their software to the restrictions of a fixed specification.
As someone that's done both semi-official and unofficial support for the first Half-life (first for Sierra through their message boards for Half-life, TFC, and the first HL expansion, second for PlanetFortress through their website (maintaining a technicallly-oriented FAQ and answering emails to the game-support email address)), there are so many things an end-user can have on their PC that affects game performance that it can get tiresome. If you have an AMD processor, an ATI graphics card, a non-Intel chipset with an Intel CPU, or Norton Anti-Virus is running, I wish you luck playing games (because all of these caused significant problems with Half-life at one time or another).
Of course you won't be spending as much money on hardware as PC gamers so there are some benefits.;)
Oh, and that, too. Instead of buying a graphics card every 6 months I've bought a new console every 6 months since the DreamCast started to fad
They had one near where I lived in San Diego County (called Wonderland iirc). They also tended to have games that were new (or at least nearly new), and the games ranged from free (for the old games like Pac-Man and such) to $0.20 (for the newest games, especially the racers and others that take up excessive floor space). Over time they stopped getting new games as quickly, though, and raised the price for adults (and everyone over 13 iirc).
It was a nice place when I was in high school, but it kindof died out after a few years. I think it's still there, but unless they've changed some things they probably still don't have Tekken 4 and Soul Calibur 2, and aren't seeing a lot of business.
Supposedly, an adapter is available for $5 that restores the headphone jack.
Over lunch today I picked up a pack with the headphone adapter, a pair of earphones, a metal GBA SP case, and a car adapter for $15 (made by MadCatz I believe, and while I don't normally care for their stuff, I don't think it'll be much of a problem in this case). There was another package there with the adapter, a nylon GBA SP case, and a couple of other things (a few cases for games, a GBA link cable, and a magnifier iirc) for $20. Overall, it seems it'll probably be easier to find in packs like this than alone, but for someone like me (who just bought a GBA SP last nite), it's probably worthwhile. There're still a couple of other things I want to buy, but this package took care of the major items.
A game like GTA3, with it's violence and glamorization of criminal acts has no place in the hands of a toddler, or a young child.
I'm still wondering how it is that GTA3 (or Vice City) glamorizes criminal acts. I haven't quite figured this one out yet, because the more I go off on wild killing frenzies in the game the more likely it is that the cops will escalate their violence against me. If anything, the game is a little more strict on violence than real life (because, after all, it would take the cops much longer to find out who did what, although in GTA they tend to be completely ignorant of traffic violations), except for the simple fact that, in the end, whether you're killed or arrested, you do get to walk out with very little penalty.
For the most part, the game is what you make of it. The only exception being that to expand the game world (allow access to more areas) you have to go through the storyline a bit, which is a story taken from the point of view of a criminal, yet I have yet to see something that I would consider glamorous about this story.
Gaming may have used to be a solo activity, but as it heads more and more into the mainstream, it's becoming a group activity. More importantly, it's becoming a point of reference among people, where people can share experiences, and find a common frame of reference.
Maybe I'm just lucky, or possibly too young (25), but for me gaming was mostly a group (or at least 2 player) activity for most of my life. Even when a game didn't really offer a 2-player mode (ie Punch-Out), my friends and I would watch each other play the game and/or offer tips on how to get through certain portions of the game.
As time goes on it's become more of a solo thing, at least for the single-player portion of games (play them more often alone than with friends), but at the same time internet gaming came into my life a few years ago (well, quite a few years ago now), and while I may be alone in front of the computer much of the time, there are a lot of other people playing the games with me.
Still, there's nothing like a LAN party or even just a bunch of people playing hot-seat console games. Social interaction tends to be centered around something, and in my opinion it's far better that it's something interactive like gaming than just yelling at the ref (or the players) while you sit around watching football or baseball.
As a kid we went outside and played games, rode our bikes around, did whatever kids did, but we didn't play games in isolation. Hell, I didn't even have a television in my room until I was 10 anyway, and the NES didn't join it until I was about 12. My parents didn't keep me from watching certain movies or playing certain games, at least not overtly, but they knew what I was watching and playing.
Half-life didn't (in OpenGL or Direct3D) for about 2 years (it did at release, one of the patches took it out, a more recent patch put it back in).
It's not hard to support 1600x1200, so I would guess the only reason to even mention it would be the fact that the XBox (and therefore the XBox version of Halo) does not support it.
As for widescreen/surround sound, I'm pretty sure that support was in the XBox code, so it shouldn't take much to port it...
Besides the issues with the different versions having different content (these can be overcome by only allowing X-Box content to be used in cross-platform play), as I understand it X-Box Live is a proprietary network.
However, iirc, Halo isn't an X-Box Live title anyway. The only way to get multiplayer over the internet in the first place is to trick the game into thinking it's playing a LAN game.
Epic's idea was to make the UT line like sports games, with a new release each year (though iirc UT2k3 was late). The problem with this idea, though, is that they really don't have anything to drive the yearly releases the way sports games do (adding new players and updating stats).
Personally, I prefer to buy sports titles shortly after the new version comes out (buying the older version), because they're dirt cheap and there's usually little change between each year's title (it's only over the long term that the biggest changes happen, and even then the first year of a new feature is not usually the best year for that feature). If UT keeps up this format, I may simply do the same thing here, especially since I prefer playing against the bots for the most part anyway.
And as all you married men out there know, it's ALL about control.
Shit, you don't even have to be married, just live with her a few months. My girlfriend freaked out yesterday because I want to track the money I'm spending on bills a bit differently.
As I recently wrote in an essay, the problem lies with the generation that made these video games, not with the children who play them.
As the video game making generation obviously weren't fucked up by video games, we have to assume it was something else that did.
Perhaps your wording is a bit off, but there don't really seem to be a lot of problems with the generation that's making these games (except for the fact that they seem a bit obsessed with excessive violence). The reason people are worried about the contents of video games, although in part due to the excessive nature of some video games, is because they feel that kids are becoming too violent. There wasn't a school shooting in the district I attended for over 20 years (and the girl that committed the earlier shooting was only recently even reviewed for parole, and didn't receive it), and then all of a sudden there were 2 in 2 weeks. Columbine received nation-wide coverage, and Doom (and KMFDM and Marilyn Manson) got the blame (and all of us gamers wondered why Doom was the only violent game they found on their systems, given that the game was nearly ancient by PC technology standards).
Is it the perception of parents (the pervasiveness of media)? Is it the actual parenting? Is it the games/music/movies (my feelings are that it's not, probably because I was raised with nearly unlimited exposure and haven't killed anyone)?
Either way, I don't think there's anything wrong with the people making the video games. In one sense they're making what the market asks for (which in part is games for their own generation, GTA isn't marketed to kids as far as I have seen), in another sense they tend to try to go over the top just for the sake of it (like Stephen King once said, when you can't scare your reader, go for the gross-out).
Heck, the Atari 2600 went through NUMEROUS hardware revisions throughout its life (revisions that didn't impact gameplay/compatibility) and managed to sell just fine until the NES finally killed it. Even the NES and SNES had hardware revisions to make them more "sleek," just as the Xbox is getting.
But, as pointed out, the most visible revisions were often 'end-of-life' revisions. The NES still looked the same until long after the 16-bit systems had taken over, and the SNES looked the same until after the PS1 had taken over. Even the Atari 2600 was still that wood-panel+switches design until a very late revision that caused a (very short) resurgance in it's popularity, mostly allowing retailers to dump a lot of those cartridges they hadn't sent to the dump in the early 80's, when console sales took a dive.
Face it, Nintendo does it right the first time and sticks with it - don't doubt for a second that this helps them financially.
Not to be an ass about this, but the changes Sony makes sometimes makes it cost them less money per console in the production lines. For instance, they recently combined the two primary chips in the PS2 into one smaller chip, which not only should decrease production costs, but should allow for more room inside the existing box (or smaller boxes, or more things in the box, hence the PS3 could easily have backwards compatibility, the PSP handheld could be more likely to have PS2 capabilities, though it will be using smaller discs, and the PSX could probably fit in the same size box as the PS2). It may be possible (but isn't likely) that this (decreasing production costs) would be the case with the 1.5 revision of the XBox, as well.
Personally, though, I'm not too worried about how many revisions are made to a system. While Sony's made some good revisions, 1 or 2 of them were to fix significant problems (ie DVD playback was screwed in the initial release, which had an even bigger impact when the first DVD-based games came along). Nintendo seems to have really put some thought into the GameCube's design in terms of long term expandability, especially when you look at the GameBoy Player and the link to the GBA. The XBox, on the other hand, was built more so that the system wouldn't need expansion (hard drive and ethernet built in, for example), but that upgrades would be a reasonable possibility (at least on the production side). I think Sony may have planned everything they're doing now well in advance, but it isn't as easy to see in the existing units (at least to me). Hell, I'd just like to have another controller port or two, so I don't have to unplug the second controller to add the remote control. Another memory port or two wouldn't hurt, either.
So what's the moral of this post? People (me, my mother, joe user, whomever) buy software because (they percieve that) it's the best in it's particular field.
Which is why I have not purchased either of those products, and only use one of them. As another poster already mentioned, WinZip is a rather horrid product to use as an unregistered user. I don't reward people for giving me nag screens unless their product is truly exceptional, and WinZip is not (I use WinRar myself, although the interface isn't much different, it did have context menu shortcuts before WinZip).
mIRC really just happens to be one of the only fully-featured IRC clients for Windows that is still maintained to some degree. I've used much better IRC clients that simply had small problems that got worse with lack of continued development (ie problems with Xircon such as memory leaks which became crippling as I moved to 2k and started leaving my system running for months instead of weeks). The only thing I really like about mIRC that I haven't seen in most other IRC clients (on Windows) is the floating window mode for chat windows (separating the chat windows from the main interface), but even then it doesn't handle the interface very well (as far as managing the floating windows).
Perhaps it is all about perception. However, I consistantly see the same perception that these two programs are the best, when in fact they're simply the most widely used and recommended. Many people don't even know that there are other IRC clients (and many frequently refer to IRC itself as mIRC), just as many people are willing to put up with WinZip's nag screens when there are so many other options (many of which support more compression formats and easier interfaces).
I guess I can't compare my experience directly to his, I never had a N64; I don't think I'd be as disenchanted as he is anyhow.
I think that may be why the GC looks so good to me, as well. Hell, I didn't even have an SNES, I went straight from NES to Turbo Grafx-16 and the Genesis, and then took a few years away from console gaming (mostly my teenage years) to come back for the PS1 when FFVII came out (though I played quite a bit of Killer Instinct and Mario Kart on my roommate's SNES in college).
Who cares which system has a higher concentration? Since it's simple to ignore games you don't want to play, the absolute number is the only one that matters.
Not that I really care all that much, but a higher concentration of quality games would mean that someone picking up a game at random would have a better chance of getting a good game.
That being said, who picks up $50 games at random? Maybe (and that's a big one) when they're in the bargain bin, but even then I'd rather know what I'm getting into before I put my money down.
I think the model that justifies charging for old stuff (rather than new stuff, or rather than not charging at all) comes down to this: the new stuff is going to attract a somewhat predictable number of hits each week, and generate a fairly predictable amount of ad revenue. The old stuff, on the other hand, will only see occasional use and generate very little ad revenue. Additionally, the longer the site runs, the more old stuff there is to keep around, and the more hard drive space that takes up.
Information on older games has a tendency to be harder to come by, so a site could do fairly well by charging for access to well-written material for older games, assuming people want to play those games. Hell, try looking up the prices on one of the Final Fantasy strategy guides (don't remember if it's Anthology or Chronicles). It's out of print, so people are selling used copies for $30+ (actually makes me wish I had put my Nintendo Power Final Fantasy 1 strategy guide up for sale before FF Origins was released). The cost of the book could easily pay for a subscription to one of these sites (and in most cases the cost of one or two books could pay for the subscription anyway).
With new stuff, in any case, there will usually be some source of information available somewhere online for free. It just becomes a little harder to find it if the sites people are used to going to get sent into the model of charging for it.
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I simply wonder how many they would've sold if they could keep up with the demand. It took me 3 weeks to get a GBA SP, and then I had to get the blue one (I wanted the silver one), or face another 2-3 weeks unless I got lucky (and no, I haven't seen a silver one in the ~1 week since I got mine). The worst part is that everyone I asked pretty much knew what I was going to say by the time I got the words Game Boy out of my mouth, but they had to wait for the SP because they have so many of the old GBAs on the shelf and would love to get rid of them.
Everyone pretty much said that they get a shipment of 12 of them every couple of weeks, 6 of each colour, although sometimes they come in seperate shipments. They also have no idea when they will receive them (except for a couple of the larger retailers like WalMart which gets more regular shipments, though the shipments are the same size).
This isn't simply technophilic self-indulgence. This is a matter of needing complete, current contact lists integrated with the phone. It's a matter of needing to be at irregularly scheduled meetings on time. It's cheaper to buy the phones than to miss business opportunities.
I've been thinking about hunting down the ever-elusive USB cable for my cell phone (elusive because it didn't come with the phone and the phone isn't really produced any more, though I've only had it about 3-4 months) and trying to synch it to Outlook here at work. I wonder how long it would go before it gives up?
Unfortunately, there is no such phone available these days. With Technology the way it is, Motorola could make a kick ass $20 (retail) cell phone with great reception, is tiny, and looks cool. They don't because they think (and, unfortunately, they're mostly correct) no one wants a phone that just works as a phone. It has to have at least one game preinstalled, if not 5-6, a calculator, instant messenger, Internet access... I don't need that crap, but if I want a phone I have to buy a $150 one because that's all there is.
Personally, the only reason I have a cell phone is because the plan I got (which is unbelievably good) is significantly cheaper than it would've been to have a phone installed in my apartment, especially with the amount of long distance calls I sometimes have to make. I only use it for three things: making calls, keeping time (I haven't worn a watch in a couple of years, so it's essentially performing a function I didn't really want, but use anyway), and as an alarm to wake me up in the morning (essentially a function of the other two, but since I can't program my alarm clock to go off Monday-Friday at 5:40AM without turning it on every nite...).
Besides that, it has 4 games, a calendar that synchs with Outlook, voice recognition, text messaging (which costs a certain amount per message to use or an extra $5/month, so I never send them) and probably a crapload of other stuff I'm forgetting (I only use about 60% of the top-level menu items, and I could limit that to 20% because 1 of the 3 items I use (out of 5) is a customizable menu which is linked to the alarm clock so I can tell it not to go off on a particular day if I dont have to work), and an even smaller percentage of the lower-level menus.
Why do I bother having a phone with so much crap I don't use? It was free with the plan and I really had no other choices. The added bonus is that it's an older model phone with almost no accessories available for it, though it came with the earphone/mic for hands-free use.
The only basic phones really made any more are the disposable ones. As the price of the high-end phones gets lower and lower (woohoo, more features for the same price! Oh, wait, I didn't need/want those features), the low-end phones are simply phased out because no one wants to be in the market of selling $5 phones that do what everyone really wants to do: make and receive phone calls.
Realistic car damage in car racing games is quite important, but at least some car damage (like in CMR 2.0) is better than none at all. I'm quite surprised that such a well-respected brand as the Gran Turismo series has still failed to put this in.
I think it's simply a matter of the audience they're going for. There are many games out there that have significant car damage features. The GT series seems to go more towards the appearances and variety of the game, while still allowing for more of an arcade type of play by not hindering the driver with car damage (well, whether or not that hinders you is up to you).
The only people I've seen that complained about the lack of car damage but still liked GT at all, were the people that had almost played the game out and would have liked it as an option to give the game more replay value (in other words, now that they've played the game through a couple times, they'd like to try it with damage, especially if the AI cars take damage as well, since the AI can be such a bitch about doing stupid things that would destroy their cars).
IE and Firebird display it properly on Win2k, I'm not sure what OS/browser combinations would choke on it, but 2k/XP should be fine.
http://www.eetimes.com/sys/uth/OEG20020326S0044
It's a slightly older (~1 year, possibly older because I remember seeing it in the print version around the time XBox was released) article, but it is free. You could probably price out the major parts for yourself from the listing, but overall it's still going to be an estimate without MS releasing the prices they're getting for the parts. Then there's the whole manufacturing process itself...
IANAL, but I believe the same thing is true in the US. But it wouldn't be Sony or Nintendo's responsibility to bring about the lawsuit. The Federal Government would probably have to file the suit, and since the DoJ is much nicer to MS then in the Clinton administration, I doubt a case would be brought about.
It's not illegal in the US if the market strategy in use shows a return based on the ownership of the item being sold at a loss. In other words, MS (and every major console maker) expects to make $X per every copy of every game produced/sold for their product, and by producing/selling Y number of games per console sold, they can recover $Z lost on the console itself. Now, in the long run everyone wants to make a profit on each console sold as well, but in the short term it pays to sell below cost, because getting people to produce Y number of games requires market penetration (people won't produce games for consoles no one owns).
Razor manufacturers (Gilette, Schick, etc) use the same business model, sell the handle for next to nothing, then sell the razors at $2/each to bring in the big bucks. Hell, Gilette's been sending handles w/ 2-4 blades to people in the mail free for years. It's a much smaller investment for an individual to change razors, which means the initial cost of consoles much more important in the same market model, but overall the model applies equally to both markets (and iirc MS even stated when they went into consoles that they were based on the model of disposable razors).
While chips and drives have come down in the last two years, you really haven't seen a significant decrease in the cost of 700MHz CPUs and 8GB hard drives, because neither was cutting-edge at the time. The 700MHz CPUs probably are only being manufactured for MS, both because they are not the same as the off-the-shelf 700MHz P3 that people might have bought a couple years ago, and because they simply aren't producing chips that far from their highest clock-cycles. There might still be a few companies producing 8 GB hard drives, but frankly, most of them aren't even producing platters that small any more (and I wouldn't be surprised if the XBox hard drives had larger platters than they are using, at least in the newer ones). Hell, I haven't bought a hard drive that small in almost 5 years. The graphics chip is a special build as well, though it's possible that nVidia is still producing comparable chips for the general market.
A lot of it comes down to the more common components, like IDE controllers, USB, and so on. The RAM in the system has probably come down in price as well. Other than that, they could've found a more efficient manufacturing process, or some chips that helped make it more efficient. Reducing the size and/or number of layers of the backplane would usually help in the long term, as well.
That's not why it sold well initially. The reason it was immediately successful (and it was) was that it was an excellent single-player game.
It also received a significant sales boost because Valve bought the team that created the most popular Quake mod, Team Fortress (which surpassed QuakeDM in players long before Half-life came around, and surpassed many (if not most) of Quake2's multiplayer mods), and they had announced that TF2 would be either a mod or an expansion for Half-life. In the long run it didn't account for nearly as many sales as Counterstrike, but it certainly accounted for a significant number of the pre-orders and initial sales of the game. While many people liked the single player portion of Half-life, I did not, even though I own 3 copies of the game (pre-order, the 'everyone loves the single player I cant wait for the pre-order to get here even though its already shipped' purchase, and the one I got from Sierra for moderating their HL boards). It had some interesting elements to it, but overall was a simplistic puzzler with a first-person perspective. The story-line was definitely better than Quake, but the gameplay was mediocre.
Over time it has had longevity beyond that of most single-player first-person shooters because of modifications, but it would have been successful even if there had never been a single mod.
We'll never really know, because Valve hyped it from day one as a mod platform AND a strong single-player game. If it hadn't been hyped as a mod platform, we can't really say if it would've sold well or not. I certainly know that many people were severely pissed about the game's multiplayer performance upon release, and that for them the only thing that redeemed the game were the eventual patches to fix the multiplayer code (and I'm not talking about the much later releases that changed the network code significantly after TFC and CS had already been released).
The PS2 has a fairly unique architecture, but he GameCube is a Power PC with an ATI Radeon 8500 (ish) graphics chipset. The Cube is not supposed to be a big pain to write for.
;)
PowerPC is sometimes a simple port, sometimes a complete rewrite. Remember, there was never a port of HL to the Mac, either (though they did have someone working on it for some time before they trashed it).
However it is highly unlikely that HL2 could be ported to ANY of the consoles without major reduction in capabilities. Remember the Xbox is about equivalent to a 1GHz Celeron running a GeForce 3 Reference (pre-Ti) chipset. (its actual clock is 700Mhz but it gains some speed advantage due to some mainboard and memory enchancements)
Celerons lose their speed in the same places where the XBox gains it's speed, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Also, it's important to remember that a console port doesn't have to run at the highest PC resolutions (although most XBox games are supposed to support 1080i iirc). You also don't have nearly as much overhead on the XBox as you do on a normal PC, and don't have to worry about what people are running in addition to your game.
HL2's absolute minimum requirements (with nearly every detail setting lowered all the way) has been rumored to be in the 900Mhz GeForce 3 range. To play at anything remotely similar to the detail level of the E3 demonstration is going to require systems 2-3 times as powerful.
Someone else quoted something different elsewhere in this thread, and that at least seemed more substantiated, though I don't trust what Gabe says for much. We'll see when the game comes out what it requires on the PC. Consider, though, that the original HL had pretty low system requirements for it's time (in part due to the engine it was based on, even though they did a significant rewrite of that engine), while still having superior AI to every other FPS game that was out at the time, or even most of the games since.
It's time for a new generation of console players to learn what the last one did. Consoles will always fall behind top end PCs in terms of graphics performance. And given the delay between new console products you will generally have one year in which you can attempt to claim your console is more powerful than any PC when it comes to games (you'd be wrong, but you can get away with it) followed by 2-3 years of being obviously less advanced.
I've always been a huge PC gamer, but there's always going to be an advantage to playing on a console: the system is a known environment for the developer. What runs on a 700MHz PC w/ a high-end GF3 card is going to run significantly better ported to the XBox. PC game developers write games knowing that to get the widest possible audience they'll have to make their game flexible enough to run on the lowest possible system requirements, while still gaining something from higher-powered systems. Meanwhile, console developers only have to write their software to the restrictions of a fixed specification.
As someone that's done both semi-official and unofficial support for the first Half-life (first for Sierra through their message boards for Half-life, TFC, and the first HL expansion, second for PlanetFortress through their website (maintaining a technicallly-oriented FAQ and answering emails to the game-support email address)), there are so many things an end-user can have on their PC that affects game performance that it can get tiresome. If you have an AMD processor, an ATI graphics card, a non-Intel chipset with an Intel CPU, or Norton Anti-Virus is running, I wish you luck playing games (because all of these caused significant problems with Half-life at one time or another).
Of course you won't be spending as much money on hardware as PC gamers so there are some benefits.
Oh, and that, too. Instead of buying a graphics card every 6 months I've bought a new console every 6 months since the DreamCast started to fad
They had one near where I lived in San Diego County (called Wonderland iirc). They also tended to have games that were new (or at least nearly new), and the games ranged from free (for the old games like Pac-Man and such) to $0.20 (for the newest games, especially the racers and others that take up excessive floor space). Over time they stopped getting new games as quickly, though, and raised the price for adults (and everyone over 13 iirc).
It was a nice place when I was in high school, but it kindof died out after a few years. I think it's still there, but unless they've changed some things they probably still don't have Tekken 4 and Soul Calibur 2, and aren't seeing a lot of business.
Supposedly, an adapter is available for $5 that restores the headphone jack.
Over lunch today I picked up a pack with the headphone adapter, a pair of earphones, a metal GBA SP case, and a car adapter for $15 (made by MadCatz I believe, and while I don't normally care for their stuff, I don't think it'll be much of a problem in this case). There was another package there with the adapter, a nylon GBA SP case, and a couple of other things (a few cases for games, a GBA link cable, and a magnifier iirc) for $20. Overall, it seems it'll probably be easier to find in packs like this than alone, but for someone like me (who just bought a GBA SP last nite), it's probably worthwhile. There're still a couple of other things I want to buy, but this package took care of the major items.
A game like GTA3, with it's violence and glamorization of criminal acts has no place in the hands of a toddler, or a young child.
I'm still wondering how it is that GTA3 (or Vice City) glamorizes criminal acts. I haven't quite figured this one out yet, because the more I go off on wild killing frenzies in the game the more likely it is that the cops will escalate their violence against me. If anything, the game is a little more strict on violence than real life (because, after all, it would take the cops much longer to find out who did what, although in GTA they tend to be completely ignorant of traffic violations), except for the simple fact that, in the end, whether you're killed or arrested, you do get to walk out with very little penalty.
For the most part, the game is what you make of it. The only exception being that to expand the game world (allow access to more areas) you have to go through the storyline a bit, which is a story taken from the point of view of a criminal, yet I have yet to see something that I would consider glamorous about this story.
Gaming may have used to be a solo activity, but as it heads more and more into the mainstream, it's becoming a group activity. More importantly, it's becoming a point of reference among people, where people can share experiences, and find a common frame of reference.
Maybe I'm just lucky, or possibly too young (25), but for me gaming was mostly a group (or at least 2 player) activity for most of my life. Even when a game didn't really offer a 2-player mode (ie Punch-Out), my friends and I would watch each other play the game and/or offer tips on how to get through certain portions of the game.
As time goes on it's become more of a solo thing, at least for the single-player portion of games (play them more often alone than with friends), but at the same time internet gaming came into my life a few years ago (well, quite a few years ago now), and while I may be alone in front of the computer much of the time, there are a lot of other people playing the games with me.
Still, there's nothing like a LAN party or even just a bunch of people playing hot-seat console games. Social interaction tends to be centered around something, and in my opinion it's far better that it's something interactive like gaming than just yelling at the ref (or the players) while you sit around watching football or baseball.
As a kid we went outside and played games, rode our bikes around, did whatever kids did, but we didn't play games in isolation. Hell, I didn't even have a television in my room until I was 10 anyway, and the NES didn't join it until I was about 12. My parents didn't keep me from watching certain movies or playing certain games, at least not overtly, but they knew what I was watching and playing.
What? Don't all DirectX games run at 1600x1200?
Half-life didn't (in OpenGL or Direct3D) for about 2 years (it did at release, one of the patches took it out, a more recent patch put it back in).
It's not hard to support 1600x1200, so I would guess the only reason to even mention it would be the fact that the XBox (and therefore the XBox version of Halo) does not support it.
As for widescreen/surround sound, I'm pretty sure that support was in the XBox code, so it shouldn't take much to port it...
Besides the issues with the different versions having different content (these can be overcome by only allowing X-Box content to be used in cross-platform play), as I understand it X-Box Live is a proprietary network.
However, iirc, Halo isn't an X-Box Live title anyway. The only way to get multiplayer over the internet in the first place is to trick the game into thinking it's playing a LAN game.
Epic's idea was to make the UT line like sports games, with a new release each year (though iirc UT2k3 was late). The problem with this idea, though, is that they really don't have anything to drive the yearly releases the way sports games do (adding new players and updating stats).
Personally, I prefer to buy sports titles shortly after the new version comes out (buying the older version), because they're dirt cheap and there's usually little change between each year's title (it's only over the long term that the biggest changes happen, and even then the first year of a new feature is not usually the best year for that feature). If UT keeps up this format, I may simply do the same thing here, especially since I prefer playing against the bots for the most part anyway.
And as all you married men out there know, it's ALL about control.
Shit, you don't even have to be married, just live with her a few months. My girlfriend freaked out yesterday because I want to track the money I'm spending on bills a bit differently.
As I recently wrote in an essay, the problem lies with the generation that made these video games, not with the children who play them.
As the video game making generation obviously weren't fucked up by video games, we have to assume it was something else that did.
Perhaps your wording is a bit off, but there don't really seem to be a lot of problems with the generation that's making these games (except for the fact that they seem a bit obsessed with excessive violence). The reason people are worried about the contents of video games, although in part due to the excessive nature of some video games, is because they feel that kids are becoming too violent. There wasn't a school shooting in the district I attended for over 20 years (and the girl that committed the earlier shooting was only recently even reviewed for parole, and didn't receive it), and then all of a sudden there were 2 in 2 weeks. Columbine received nation-wide coverage, and Doom (and KMFDM and Marilyn Manson) got the blame (and all of us gamers wondered why Doom was the only violent game they found on their systems, given that the game was nearly ancient by PC technology standards).
Is it the perception of parents (the pervasiveness of media)? Is it the actual parenting? Is it the games/music/movies (my feelings are that it's not, probably because I was raised with nearly unlimited exposure and haven't killed anyone)?
Either way, I don't think there's anything wrong with the people making the video games. In one sense they're making what the market asks for (which in part is games for their own generation, GTA isn't marketed to kids as far as I have seen), in another sense they tend to try to go over the top just for the sake of it (like Stephen King once said, when you can't scare your reader, go for the gross-out).
Heck, the Atari 2600 went through NUMEROUS hardware revisions throughout its life (revisions that didn't impact gameplay/compatibility) and managed to sell just fine until the NES finally killed it. Even the NES and SNES had hardware revisions to make them more "sleek," just as the Xbox is getting.
But, as pointed out, the most visible revisions were often 'end-of-life' revisions. The NES still looked the same until long after the 16-bit systems had taken over, and the SNES looked the same until after the PS1 had taken over. Even the Atari 2600 was still that wood-panel+switches design until a very late revision that caused a (very short) resurgance in it's popularity, mostly allowing retailers to dump a lot of those cartridges they hadn't sent to the dump in the early 80's, when console sales took a dive.
Face it, Nintendo does it right the first time and sticks with it - don't doubt for a second that this helps them financially.
Not to be an ass about this, but the changes Sony makes sometimes makes it cost them less money per console in the production lines. For instance, they recently combined the two primary chips in the PS2 into one smaller chip, which not only should decrease production costs, but should allow for more room inside the existing box (or smaller boxes, or more things in the box, hence the PS3 could easily have backwards compatibility, the PSP handheld could be more likely to have PS2 capabilities, though it will be using smaller discs, and the PSX could probably fit in the same size box as the PS2). It may be possible (but isn't likely) that this (decreasing production costs) would be the case with the 1.5 revision of the XBox, as well.
Personally, though, I'm not too worried about how many revisions are made to a system. While Sony's made some good revisions, 1 or 2 of them were to fix significant problems (ie DVD playback was screwed in the initial release, which had an even bigger impact when the first DVD-based games came along). Nintendo seems to have really put some thought into the GameCube's design in terms of long term expandability, especially when you look at the GameBoy Player and the link to the GBA. The XBox, on the other hand, was built more so that the system wouldn't need expansion (hard drive and ethernet built in, for example), but that upgrades would be a reasonable possibility (at least on the production side). I think Sony may have planned everything they're doing now well in advance, but it isn't as easy to see in the existing units (at least to me). Hell, I'd just like to have another controller port or two, so I don't have to unplug the second controller to add the remote control. Another memory port or two wouldn't hurt, either.
So what's the moral of this post? People (me, my mother, joe user, whomever) buy software because (they percieve that) it's the best in it's particular field.
Which is why I have not purchased either of those products, and only use one of them. As another poster already mentioned, WinZip is a rather horrid product to use as an unregistered user. I don't reward people for giving me nag screens unless their product is truly exceptional, and WinZip is not (I use WinRar myself, although the interface isn't much different, it did have context menu shortcuts before WinZip).
mIRC really just happens to be one of the only fully-featured IRC clients for Windows that is still maintained to some degree. I've used much better IRC clients that simply had small problems that got worse with lack of continued development (ie problems with Xircon such as memory leaks which became crippling as I moved to 2k and started leaving my system running for months instead of weeks). The only thing I really like about mIRC that I haven't seen in most other IRC clients (on Windows) is the floating window mode for chat windows (separating the chat windows from the main interface), but even then it doesn't handle the interface very well (as far as managing the floating windows).
Perhaps it is all about perception. However, I consistantly see the same perception that these two programs are the best, when in fact they're simply the most widely used and recommended. Many people don't even know that there are other IRC clients (and many frequently refer to IRC itself as mIRC), just as many people are willing to put up with WinZip's nag screens when there are so many other options (many of which support more compression formats and easier interfaces).
I guess I can't compare my experience directly to his, I never had a N64; I don't think I'd be as disenchanted as he is anyhow.
I think that may be why the GC looks so good to me, as well. Hell, I didn't even have an SNES, I went straight from NES to Turbo Grafx-16 and the Genesis, and then took a few years away from console gaming (mostly my teenage years) to come back for the PS1 when FFVII came out (though I played quite a bit of Killer Instinct and Mario Kart on my roommate's SNES in college).
Who cares which system has a higher concentration? Since it's simple to ignore games you don't want to play, the absolute number is the only one that matters.
Not that I really care all that much, but a higher concentration of quality games would mean that someone picking up a game at random would have a better chance of getting a good game.
That being said, who picks up $50 games at random? Maybe (and that's a big one) when they're in the bargain bin, but even then I'd rather know what I'm getting into before I put my money down.
I think the model that justifies charging for old stuff (rather than new stuff, or rather than not charging at all) comes down to this:
the new stuff is going to attract a somewhat predictable number of hits each week, and generate a fairly predictable amount of ad revenue. The old stuff, on the other hand, will only see occasional use and generate very little ad revenue. Additionally, the longer the site runs, the more old stuff there is to keep around, and the more hard drive space that takes up.
Information on older games has a tendency to be harder to come by, so a site could do fairly well by charging for access to well-written material for older games, assuming people want to play those games. Hell, try looking up the prices on one of the Final Fantasy strategy guides (don't remember if it's Anthology or Chronicles). It's out of print, so people are selling used copies for $30+ (actually makes me wish I had put my Nintendo Power Final Fantasy 1 strategy guide up for sale before FF Origins was released). The cost of the book could easily pay for a subscription to one of these sites (and in most cases the cost of one or two books could pay for the subscription anyway).
With new stuff, in any case, there will usually be some source of information available somewhere online for free. It just becomes a little harder to find it if the sites people are used to going to get sent into the model of charging for it.