No, it's just the post of a frustrated slashdotter of someone who is sick of stupid fucking Microsoft bashing at every turn. Don't get me wrong, they're not infalable, but seeing the entierty of slashdot shit all over every single Xbox-related news release since day 1 with strawman logic and stupid rhetoric is grating on my nerves.
Good plan. I didn't wait as long as you did, (I got mine at 199), but a good rule of thumb with buying video game systems is to wait until they drop in price and have a decent library of games. I made the mistake of buying my Gamecube almost at launch (I was a Nintendo fanboy once, though my posting history certainly doesn't reflect that). It's now collecting dust, since the library just didn't pan out like I had expected it to.
What is preventing the patches to the game from being streamed and stored in memory? FF XI has been out for a really long time, so I assume that most of the major patching has already gotten out of the way anyway. A lack of hard drive might make it kind of wonky, but I don't think it's totally infeasable.
Not necissarily, since so few games made use of the hard drive anyway beyond cacheing. But I already have a +4 insightful on this subject, scroll down.
Slightly a different scenario with the PS2. There was no version of the system that came with a mem card much less a hard drive. In other words everyone that bought a system had to buy a memory card, there was no other option.
So, your argument that there were no bundled packages with a memory card follows that....Microsoft is evil for releasing a bundle with a memory card and a bunch of other things at much less cost than it would cost to buy each seporately? Your second statement would have still been true had someone gotten a launch PS2. I don't get it.
Load times are not vital to a game, and as posted elsewhere in this thread can easily be abstracted out from a game (if harddrive found use caching, else don't bother). In addition, the XBox has tons of really fast RAM to work with, so it can use what is left of RAM for caching AS WELL AS using a hard drive, if avalable.
And yes, the hard drive was used for awesome and unique things....but it seemed that almost every game that did it had a lot of Microsoft involvement in it (Ninja Gaiden, DoA 3, Halo 2), or was a Microsoft Game Studios project itself (Project Gotham 2, MechAssault). A chilling parallel to the application of the two screens on the Nintendo DS, if you ask me...it only seemed to be used to its fullest potential by Nintendo iteself or by studios with Nintendo's backing.
The Xbox 360's hard drive isn't on the same level as a disc drive. Those 'hard drives' are essentially the same hard drives they put in portable computers. Think of it as a hard drive that's really really easy to remove, not as an abysmally slow disc drive with a lot of storage.
Also, caching is not a vital part of a gane. You can still play a game without caching to a hard drive, you'll just have longer load times becuase it's having to read stuff off of the DVD drive again and again instead of reading it off of a hard drive. Real cache on a processor works by grabbing a bunch of data that was recently accessed on the assumption that it will be accessed again within a short period of time. When it comes time to find something, it will check RAM, then the cache, then lastly the DVD itself for the data. Why would removing cache from this equation break the game? All it would do is just skip moving data to cache and looking in the cache for data.
Grand Theft Auto has to do this because of the abysmal amount of memory present in the PS2, which was part of the reason why it was so 'hard to develop for'. Therefore, it streamed stuff from the DVD drive to RAM. The Xbox360 has 512MB of really fucking fast RAM, and since you don't have nearly as much operating system overhead as you do on a PC, that means that a very sizeable portion of said RAM is avalable for...say...caching.
Easy example. Micorosft Windows likes to assume, for the most part, that all software is inherantly good, that it's something that you want to run on your computer. Since limited access user accounts in Windows XP are so damn limited, and you don't have a lot of control over what they can and can't do, most people don't even bother with them and run in privilaged accounts 100% of the time. Heck, it's the default, even in Windows XP, for the primary user account to be privilaged. It's like running as root 100% of the time.
On the other hand, Unix assumes that all software it out to murder your machine. It's unheard of for someone to use their system as root 100% of the time, because 99% of non-setup activities can be done as an unprivilaged user. Any potentially damaging piece of software can't spill over and harm the operating system, about the worst it can do is damage that local users data.
Because of this fundamental design philosiphy difference, it's the reason why Windows is so damn vulnerable to viruses, spyware, malware, and other nasty things. However, it's also the reason that certain tasks that were pretty simple in Windows are a major pain in the ass in Unix. An ease-of-use tradeoff for security.
On a third hand, from what I have read, operating systems like OS-X seem to marry the philosiphy of not running as a privilaged user with ease of use quite nicely.
Of course, this is only the begining. Netscape introduced us to Javascript, a way of creating dynamic content. Microsoft decided to pull a trump card and say "Hey, we will allow OUR scripting to do stuff that yours can't by tying into the windows API itself.". In a perfect world, that would be absolutely brilliant, since it would essentially turn web pages into programs. However, in our non-perfect world, does giving a web page access to vital API's seem like a good idea? At all?
It seems that Microsoft's philosiphy seems to be to put flexability over security. And of course, I mean flexability within their own product lines, not flexability as in being able to use it well on anything other than Microsoft products. A Word document can contain VBScript. A IE web page can be a virus scanner. But all of this comes at the price of security from bored teenagers or overseas malicious mega-marketing firms.
BUT, if ALL systems DID have the hard drive... that allows the game developers to utilize it to it's max potential.
All Xbox's came with a hard drive. Hardly any developers took any real advantage of it other than being a giant memory card. Frankly, I don't blame Microsoft, why include something standard that a very few games make use of anyway?
Exactly correct. Thank you for responding to my troll with a well thought out argument.
Surprise. I'm actually an Xbox fanboy, and was wondering if anyone seriously thought that the Xbox was a failure anymore. As you can tell from some of the other replies, some people just love living in denial.
Here I may be crossing into treasonous territory, but I feel pretty much the same about the PS3 as well. Lots of cool pics, awesome specs, but no game that I really care about has me marking Xs on my calendar till launch date.
No, thank you for being honest instead of another MICROSOFT IS DOOMED LOLZ fanboy. I disagree with you, but at least your opinion is well founded, unlike 99% of Slashdot's.
I play mine all the time. My Gamecube is sitting at home collecting dust and my Playstation 2 is sitting somewhere at home as well as a result of a botched mod job because there wasn't a bunch of titles on it domesticly that interested me.
Let me know just as soon as you're able to take out a battleship with your frigate, or even survive an attack by a hostile battleship. Frigates are cogs. More like support systems for battleships when it comes to combat. They serve useful functions, but they aren't the ones that do the killing.
Not one, but if you join a corperation and get into a cordinated group of frigates it's very possible to take out a BATTLECRUISER for much less than the cost of the possible firgates lost.
If you're a fan of Trade Wars style games or Elite style games, or if you miss the days of old Ultima Online where you could PvP to your hearts content without being screamed at by the playerbase, this is the game you have been waiting for.
That said, it's not for everyone, and it has a steep learning curve. However, that hasn't detered away their playerbase, and while it doesn't grow at exponential rates, it's stable and growning enough for them to afford the resouces to provide a new free expansion every six months. EVE is CCP's only game. They have no other priorities than EVE, and it's their job to make sure it's a great game...not necissarily one that appeals to the masses, but a great game nontheless.
As far as I know, the XBox 360 still only has limited backwards compatibility- only the more popular XBox games will be playable on the 360. There will be no XBox games within four months of the 360's release.
Perhaps, but to clarify things I think it was stated that the major hurdle for the Xbox360 was the graphics side of things. Microsoft finally threw their hands up and licenced the approprite tech from nVidia instead of reverse-engineering it so decent backwards-compatability is more likely.
And lack of hard drive is not going to be a problem. You're going to need one to save data anyway, unless they are also selling those flash memory device 'memory cards' as well like they did for the origional Xbox.
First of all, transporation. No more paying a griffen rider to get from one place to another, you can go anywhere you've already been instantly.
Secondly, it's a lot easier to get together a group for an instance, mainly because you can have fairly competant NPC players take the place of people who you are missing.
Next is skills. Your account stores the lock and unlock status of all of your abilities for all of your classes (in addition to lock and unlcok status of runes, which you can put in items). Once you learn a skill or rune within the game, it's unlocked for your account. Unlocked means that when you create a PvP-only max level charactor, your new charactor can use that skill or rune.
Next is how you use these skills. Imagine being limited to only being able to use 8 skills at any one time. You can swap them out in town, but once you're on a mission, you can't change them out. This forces you to pick and choose your abilities wisely.
Next is charactors. Imagine selecting a Warrior in World of Warcraft, and being able to select a secondary class such as a preist. Your primary profession being a warrior, you would have all your warrior skills and you would wear warrior armor, but you would also have preist spells at your disposal. Guild Wars is like that.
Next is attributes. No skill trees in Guild Wars. You have a attribute points system that's most like the skill points from Diablo 2. However, unlike Diablo 2, your attributes are not as simple as 'attack', 'defense' or anything like that, your attributes vary depending on what two classes you picked. If I could generalize them, they pump up a certain number skills (Fire Magic, for example) to make them more effective, though there is the occational "increase my stats in general" attribute, such as Energy Storage Attribute for the elementalist.
Next is crafting. It's almost non-existant, except for either collecing X number of items to deliver to Y collector or collecting X number of items and using a salvage kit to turn it into Y number of crafting materials that you give to Z crafter to get him to create you stuff.
Next is charactor customization. There are a lot fewer unique looking pieces of clothing per charactor, but unlike WoW, you can dye every piece of it. Dye drops off of enemies very rarely, and you can also buy dye for a (in the case of black, obscene) amount of gold.
Next is instances. You have lobbies in towns. You can see other people in the lobby. However, once you exit town, you and everyone else in your party are the only people in there. The 'main' instances, the ones that advance the storyline, are called missions, and they are a lot more interesting than "go from one instance boss to the next". They even have a 'bonus' in each mission that you can complete for extra experience. The missiosn are the best way to advance in the game and get from one place to another (ie, if you want to get the hell out of the place you are in, just do the missions and you'll advance the storyline to the point where you move on to somewhere else). Of course, you can go to town and wander outside the town for another instance where you do local quests, without the direction of the main missions.
Next is the continent. You have a lot less freedom to explore in Guild Wars than you do in WoW. WoW had a jump button and very few, if any invidisble walls. Guild Wars is full of them, it's less of a 'land mass' and more of a 'network of roads'. Also, while you start out in pre-searing Ascalon which is relatively pretty to look at, Ascalon post-searing is the most boring place to be, ever. Think Desolace, except with mountains and much bigger. Once you get to Yak's Bend, you're getting into much more interesting territory.
Next is end game. The end game in World of Warcraft is either running the endgame instances over and over again for phat lewt or doing battlegrounds over and over again for phat honor (which you exchange f
This article isn't about end users. It's about large corperations who probably buy equipment in bulk.
However, what is so special about this upgrade to Vista compared to when the whole upgrade-o-rama for XP and 2000 respectivly? Since a good portion of Vista features are being backported to XP, this is even less of an incentive to upgrade.
There was no need to AC that. I've had similar bad epxeriences installing Linux, ranging from sound to my mouse. (Yes, I can't get my mouse to work in X11. Works in GPM, but it borks when I start X)
If everything worked as laid out, I do say that Linux WOULD be easy to install. But there are still, even after all the impvoement made in the last couple of years, way too many 'odd cases' that work in Windows that don't work in Linux.
Re:KDE Zealots: A vocal minority of a dying DE
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
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· Score: 1
Read SA's front page. The *only* reason Lowtax used PayPal was so that he could get donaters' shipping addresses to ship free merchandise to them as a thanks for their donations.
I don't see the connection here. How is this a bad thing?
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's just the post of a frustrated slashdotter of someone who is sick of stupid fucking Microsoft bashing at every turn. Don't get me wrong, they're not infalable, but seeing the entierty of slashdot shit all over every single Xbox-related news release since day 1 with strawman logic and stupid rhetoric is grating on my nerves.
Moral of the story? Wait.
Thank you for bringing a shred of sanity to Slashdot.
Man, you guys are really desporate. How's that "Xbox is a failure" rhetoric you guys repeat to yourself every night working out?
This is the same PS2 horseshit launch all over again.
What is preventing the patches to the game from being streamed and stored in memory? FF XI has been out for a really long time, so I assume that most of the major patching has already gotten out of the way anyway. A lack of hard drive might make it kind of wonky, but I don't think it's totally infeasable.
Not necissarily, since so few games made use of the hard drive anyway beyond cacheing. But I already have a +4 insightful on this subject, scroll down.
So, your argument that there were no bundled packages with a memory card follows that....Microsoft is evil for releasing a bundle with a memory card and a bunch of other things at much less cost than it would cost to buy each seporately? Your second statement would have still been true had someone gotten a launch PS2. I don't get it.
And yes, the hard drive was used for awesome and unique things....but it seemed that almost every game that did it had a lot of Microsoft involvement in it (Ninja Gaiden, DoA 3, Halo 2), or was a Microsoft Game Studios project itself (Project Gotham 2, MechAssault). A chilling parallel to the application of the two screens on the Nintendo DS, if you ask me...it only seemed to be used to its fullest potential by Nintendo iteself or by studios with Nintendo's backing.
Also, caching is not a vital part of a gane. You can still play a game without caching to a hard drive, you'll just have longer load times becuase it's having to read stuff off of the DVD drive again and again instead of reading it off of a hard drive. Real cache on a processor works by grabbing a bunch of data that was recently accessed on the assumption that it will be accessed again within a short period of time. When it comes time to find something, it will check RAM, then the cache, then lastly the DVD itself for the data. Why would removing cache from this equation break the game? All it would do is just skip moving data to cache and looking in the cache for data.
Grand Theft Auto has to do this because of the abysmal amount of memory present in the PS2, which was part of the reason why it was so 'hard to develop for'. Therefore, it streamed stuff from the DVD drive to RAM. The Xbox360 has 512MB of really fucking fast RAM, and since you don't have nearly as much operating system overhead as you do on a PC, that means that a very sizeable portion of said RAM is avalable for...say...caching.
On the other hand, Unix assumes that all software it out to murder your machine. It's unheard of for someone to use their system as root 100% of the time, because 99% of non-setup activities can be done as an unprivilaged user. Any potentially damaging piece of software can't spill over and harm the operating system, about the worst it can do is damage that local users data.
Because of this fundamental design philosiphy difference, it's the reason why Windows is so damn vulnerable to viruses, spyware, malware, and other nasty things. However, it's also the reason that certain tasks that were pretty simple in Windows are a major pain in the ass in Unix. An ease-of-use tradeoff for security.
On a third hand, from what I have read, operating systems like OS-X seem to marry the philosiphy of not running as a privilaged user with ease of use quite nicely.
Of course, this is only the begining. Netscape introduced us to Javascript, a way of creating dynamic content. Microsoft decided to pull a trump card and say "Hey, we will allow OUR scripting to do stuff that yours can't by tying into the windows API itself.". In a perfect world, that would be absolutely brilliant, since it would essentially turn web pages into programs. However, in our non-perfect world, does giving a web page access to vital API's seem like a good idea? At all?
It seems that Microsoft's philosiphy seems to be to put flexability over security. And of course, I mean flexability within their own product lines, not flexability as in being able to use it well on anything other than Microsoft products. A Word document can contain VBScript. A IE web page can be a virus scanner. But all of this comes at the price of security from bored teenagers or overseas malicious mega-marketing firms.
BUT, if ALL systems DID have the hard drive... that allows the game developers to utilize it to it's max potential.
All Xbox's came with a hard drive. Hardly any developers took any real advantage of it other than being a giant memory card. Frankly, I don't blame Microsoft, why include something standard that a very few games make use of anyway?
Surprise. I'm actually an Xbox fanboy, and was wondering if anyone seriously thought that the Xbox was a failure anymore. As you can tell from some of the other replies, some people just love living in denial.
No, thank you for being honest instead of another MICROSOFT IS DOOMED LOLZ fanboy. I disagree with you, but at least your opinion is well founded, unlike 99% of Slashdot's.
I play mine all the time. My Gamecube is sitting at home collecting dust and my Playstation 2 is sitting somewhere at home as well as a result of a botched mod job because there wasn't a bunch of titles on it domesticly that interested me.
Not one, but if you join a corperation and get into a cordinated group of frigates it's very possible to take out a BATTLECRUISER for much less than the cost of the possible firgates lost.
If you're a fan of Trade Wars style games or Elite style games, or if you miss the days of old Ultima Online where you could PvP to your hearts content without being screamed at by the playerbase, this is the game you have been waiting for.
That said, it's not for everyone, and it has a steep learning curve. However, that hasn't detered away their playerbase, and while it doesn't grow at exponential rates, it's stable and growning enough for them to afford the resouces to provide a new free expansion every six months. EVE is CCP's only game. They have no other priorities than EVE, and it's their job to make sure it's a great game...not necissarily one that appeals to the masses, but a great game nontheless.
Perhaps, but to clarify things I think it was stated that the major hurdle for the Xbox360 was the graphics side of things. Microsoft finally threw their hands up and licenced the approprite tech from nVidia instead of reverse-engineering it so decent backwards-compatability is more likely.
And lack of hard drive is not going to be a problem. You're going to need one to save data anyway, unless they are also selling those flash memory device 'memory cards' as well like they did for the origional Xbox.
You're really missing out. Once the Xbox title's drop in price, you might have a rummage through the bargin bin to see just what you've beem missing.
To draw a few lines from WoW to Guild Wars.
First of all, transporation. No more paying a griffen rider to get from one place to another, you can go anywhere you've already been instantly.
Secondly, it's a lot easier to get together a group for an instance, mainly because you can have fairly competant NPC players take the place of people who you are missing.
Next is skills. Your account stores the lock and unlock status of all of your abilities for all of your classes (in addition to lock and unlcok status of runes, which you can put in items). Once you learn a skill or rune within the game, it's unlocked for your account. Unlocked means that when you create a PvP-only max level charactor, your new charactor can use that skill or rune.
Next is how you use these skills. Imagine being limited to only being able to use 8 skills at any one time. You can swap them out in town, but once you're on a mission, you can't change them out. This forces you to pick and choose your abilities wisely.
Next is charactors. Imagine selecting a Warrior in World of Warcraft, and being able to select a secondary class such as a preist. Your primary profession being a warrior, you would have all your warrior skills and you would wear warrior armor, but you would also have preist spells at your disposal. Guild Wars is like that.
Next is attributes. No skill trees in Guild Wars. You have a attribute points system that's most like the skill points from Diablo 2. However, unlike Diablo 2, your attributes are not as simple as 'attack', 'defense' or anything like that, your attributes vary depending on what two classes you picked. If I could generalize them, they pump up a certain number skills (Fire Magic, for example) to make them more effective, though there is the occational "increase my stats in general" attribute, such as Energy Storage Attribute for the elementalist.
Next is crafting. It's almost non-existant, except for either collecing X number of items to deliver to Y collector or collecting X number of items and using a salvage kit to turn it into Y number of crafting materials that you give to Z crafter to get him to create you stuff.
Next is charactor customization. There are a lot fewer unique looking pieces of clothing per charactor, but unlike WoW, you can dye every piece of it. Dye drops off of enemies very rarely, and you can also buy dye for a (in the case of black, obscene) amount of gold.
Next is instances. You have lobbies in towns. You can see other people in the lobby. However, once you exit town, you and everyone else in your party are the only people in there. The 'main' instances, the ones that advance the storyline, are called missions, and they are a lot more interesting than "go from one instance boss to the next". They even have a 'bonus' in each mission that you can complete for extra experience. The missiosn are the best way to advance in the game and get from one place to another (ie, if you want to get the hell out of the place you are in, just do the missions and you'll advance the storyline to the point where you move on to somewhere else). Of course, you can go to town and wander outside the town for another instance where you do local quests, without the direction of the main missions.
Next is the continent. You have a lot less freedom to explore in Guild Wars than you do in WoW. WoW had a jump button and very few, if any invidisble walls. Guild Wars is full of them, it's less of a 'land mass' and more of a 'network of roads'. Also, while you start out in pre-searing Ascalon which is relatively pretty to look at, Ascalon post-searing is the most boring place to be, ever. Think Desolace, except with mountains and much bigger. Once you get to Yak's Bend, you're getting into much more interesting territory.
Next is end game. The end game in World of Warcraft is either running the endgame instances over and over again for phat lewt or doing battlegrounds over and over again for phat honor (which you exchange f
However, what is so special about this upgrade to Vista compared to when the whole upgrade-o-rama for XP and 2000 respectivly? Since a good portion of Vista features are being backported to XP, this is even less of an incentive to upgrade.
If everything worked as laid out, I do say that Linux WOULD be easy to install. But there are still, even after all the impvoement made in the last couple of years, way too many 'odd cases' that work in Windows that don't work in Linux.
No, screw you, vi for life. :rolleyes:
I don't see the connection here. How is this a bad thing?