Now get your sodding rose tinted glasses off and look properly. Old games were simplistic, they had almost no depth of gameplay and while they had refined that gameplay very, very well, they're in no way objectively better (or worse) than newer games. If all you do is whine that the next Call of Duty isn't your cup of tea and games were "so much better back in my day", then it's your problem entirely.
For each Call of Duty, there's a gem of a game to be found. FTL. Minecraft. VVVVVV. Terraria. Don't Starve. Stardrive. AI War. Torchlight. World of Goo. Mark of the Ninja. Magicka. SpaceChem. Frozen Synapse. Heck, even AAA games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Far Cry 3 or Company of Heroes. Figure out what you like and play it, instead of just complaining about it on the internet.
The games of the 90ies were simpler but that doesn't mean they had no depth. Take for instance something like Lemmings. You had(if memory serves right) 10 different types of Lemmings and you had to use them to get them from A to B. Doesn't get simpler than that. Yet the gameplay had a lot of depth because there usually were a couple of ways to beat a level.
On the other hand you have games like the later Assassins Creed, Arkham City, LA Noire...
These games do not have more depth than the simpler ones. They have more activities. It's like they wanted to build a theme park for their gamers. Have a tower defense minigame in your murder simulator. Have badly done car chases in your point&click adventure. Have a Superman64 inspired fly-through-hoops thing in your action brawler. I don't see where they offer more depth. Rather more width, so to speak. And in some cases the multitude of activities do work and in other cases you can simply ignore them.
I've seen the tower defense thing in AssCred3 only once and decided against having anything to do with it. At first I LOVED the idea of training assassins and sending them all over the place for missions. But it was completely uninteractive. Pick one guy, assign him to a mission, game rolls the dice and tells you of the outcome. Basically they integrated a badly done version of Risk into the game. This doesn't create depth. And in many cases it takes it away.
How often have you seen a mission in a game that has to be played EXACTLY like the designers wanted you to? Mostly those are stealth missions. Be discovered and return to the last checkpoint. The option of simply going in guns blazing simply doesn't exist even tho you did it in the rest of the game. There is one strategy(ie stealth) because we told you so. That's the opposite of depth. And I didn't even go for the low hanging fruit of turret sections.
Or the current state of 1st person manshooters. Aw, what the heck. Too many of these seem to have cutscenes that are interupted by pesky gameplay. They will actually shoot you for not triggering a cutscene. But let's not go there. Let's take a look at regenerating health. In Doom1 if you lost a lot of health and armor in one level you might be very well borked in the next level. You had to plan ahead. There was a strategic element to this. It arguably had more depth than most modern FPS.
I see you mentioned Deus Ex. That was a GREAT game. Good writing. Interesting mechanics. You had conversation bosses. You could battle enemies with words. Yet they did something that reduced depth. You couldn't go fully charismatic to talk everybody down. You couldn't go full stealth to take them down one by one. You couldn't go full hacker and use their defenses against them. If you didn't go heavily on the combat skills you were borked. There were a couple of things you had to take because otherwise you would be screwed in the boss battles. These limited your choice of approach and arguably limited the depth of the gameplay.
World of Goo is the premiere snot stacking simulator. It has only that mechanic and it executes that brilliantly. Simplistic? Not past the tutorial levels.
tl;dr:
Depth is not the same as complexity. Depth does not automatically increase with the number of gameplay mechanics. Having only one gameplay mechanic and have that executed properly. Don't dress people down when they have a point.
I'm weary of AAA games. They mostly are overproduced, overpriced and unfocused. For some weird reason the simpler games we used to play in the 90ies would be considered casual games nowadays. There was nothing casual trying to complete all levels in Lemming(or Populous...if you were mad).
Now I prefer mostly indie titles to the latest and greatest hype. In my opinion Orks Must Die is better than the later Assassins Creeds. Bastion is better than Arkham City(tho not Asylum...that would be heresy). Warlock: Master of the Arcane is better than HoMM6 especially after all the patches. If you play AAA for the story you just might as well watch a Let's Play on Youtube. What's it with all the game designers who want to be movie directors? That didn't work out too well for Chris Roberts.
The only AAA game I bought at release and that I was nearly entirely happy with was the new XCOM.
Maybe they will even sell versions that detect ivory.
But black powder was popular in Guy Fawke's days. Nobody has caused significant damage with minor quantities of black powder for the past 50 years. Nevertheless politicos will go into headless chicken mode an money bins will be built.
Also the infection vector is just a little bit less bad than common malware. You have to be extra hawkeyed to spot all the checkboxes it might lurk beneath. It ranks just there with browser toolbars and monkey punchers.
Actually this is a story about stupidity.
They didn't have virus protection or anything security related. So the taxoffice watchdog told them to come forward with a security plan.
This is just as stupid as it sounds. I've not heard if they were close to a Windows 7 induced hardware upgrade cycle anyway. But there is absolutely no excuse for having no security whatsoever.
They are rapidly losing relevance already. Android is something an aweful lot of people are already familiar with, software is dirt cheap and now Microsoft started to sell touchscreen tablet/netbook hybrids themselves.
I don't know if this will actually eat into the desktop market but the laptop market is under threat by this. MS will propably keep the corporate PC for a couple of years but they are currently losing the casual home market.
ANECDOTE ALERT:
I got my mother a 3G tablet complete with a dirt cheap bluethooth keyboard/mouse. When her PC died she said she didn't need a new one since she was perfectly happy with her Xoom and I get less support calls due to Windows trouble, WLAN shenanigans and DSL troubles. All she does is web surfing, organize pictures of her grandchildren and write the odd letter. Before she retired she worked as a secretary and lived through all stages of word processing. She swore by Word/Windows since everything else she knew was worse. My OpenOffice/Linux experiments did not work on her but she happily lives with a seriously outdated Xoom.
There was that EA bloke(who has now formed a queue for all the other EA people for dole money) who wondered what all this outrage over the always online thing was. He quite helpfully ignored the MEEELLIONS Sony had to pay over the PSN outage, the SimCity brouhaha and the hot water Blizzard found themselves in in Germany and Korea. And he wore a corporate EA suit as a product manager.
If you see that kind of ignorance at that level then you do not find it hard to believe they really want to stick to the always online shenanigans that have gone on lately.
Meanwhile in the real world engineers tell people that relying on internet conncetivity with custom mobile software is a bad idea when it mostly is used to record electircity metering data in cellars and that they might want to take this into consideration.
Nowadays the suits(of which I'm a card carrying member) want computers not to copy data(hardyhar) and always be connected to the internet to transfer huge amounts of data while every carrier puts caps on what they transfer. If the chips are down and the lights are out complete ignorance of recent events will see us through. And that's why everybody with a modicum of technical understanding is up in arms. Me, I could simply ignore that. I do not plan to own a PS720 or XBox4. Nothing EA tries so hard to sell to me tickles my fancy. But shoddy workmanship for dubious business reasons is a step backwards and that simply gets my heckles up.
It's not only Steam. Basically any game may require a constant internet connection on PC. But at least it isn't baked into the only distribution channel available on the plattform...because there are a lot of them. GoG springs to mind.
Let's not forget that Blizzard ran afoul of a German consumer watchdog because they hadn't printed the always-on requirement prominently on the box of Diablo 3. If this is done consequently we are able to avoid inacceptable sales conditions and vote with our wallets.
If the new XBox has an always-on requirement let me be the millionth person to predict a PSN level of brouhaha in the near future. It seems stupid to integrate such a massive single point of failure into your product. If anything goes wrong with that it will be entirely your fault. Even an Act of God would be your fault since you designed the system in such a vulnerable way.
Who indeed is so stupid to include such a massive liability into their system?
In recent history Blizzard, Sony and EA have fallen into that trap. Repeating the same mistake over and over again is madness.
Did he get evicted from a bunker? Don't you need grenades, flamethrowers and lots of cannonfodder for this?
The anecdote of him ignoring a stern knock at the door by the police is true even if the foto on the webpage is fake.
Please let me join your absolute shock and amazement that the guy who gloated the most about this has been identified as the prime suspect.
Also why was he nabbed in sunny Spain instead of being holed up in his SWAT-repellant yet slightly less sunny anti-everything bunker? Fighting the good fight against evil Spamhaus at the side of every Legitimate Businessman propably was a bit of a hassle? He must have brought a note from his mother as the dark dampness disrupted the punctuality of his often broadcasted latest bowel movement.
Let me be your complete lack of surprise situated just north of your favourite kidney.
It's got a nice keyboard and is very Linuxy. I had also considered to replace my E61 with a N900.
Do not underestimate a hackable phone with a decentish keyboard. In a pinch I have quite often used my E61 to take down notes for a meeting and writing lengthy Emails. The N900 was a lot nicer.
I'd buy an updated N900(with a proper battery, an easily unlocked bootloader, HDMI out, SDXC support and a nice display) in a heartbeat. Touchscreen typing is inferior to a keyboard no matter how limited.
I also wondered how this was newsworthy. I'm quite used to buying a phone that's not locked and not worry about a carrier. We've got 3 carriers busily beavering away at this LTE thing with and they have achieved some kind of coverage. Yet none of them offer a data plan that makes some sense. At least I got some choice.
Isn't LTE godawful for a phone? Wasn't there that thing where phones had to be switched down to GSM/UMTS to make voice calls? I'd like LTE for a tablet, but on a phone it makes very little sense. But please with a data plan that doesn't start throttling after 2GB a month. Just this month I got a separate SIM card for my Nexus 7 with a separate data plan. 1GB per month. With no option to upgrade that. But I would be entitled to use LTE. Hardeehar.
Do the carriers even have an interest to sell LTE? To whom? Are they aware that all the stuff LTE would be nice for also implies huge download volumes? Which they don't sell. 2GB is just about one high-res movie. A month. Nope. Best stick to the good old Pirate Bay/SD card combo. Not as limited and a bit cheaper.
A lot of their tablets get charged by an USB compatible plug. Yet they need 15V to charge. So what ASUS did was cross a couple of wires in the cable and have their chargers detect those crossed wires to serve up 15V. Which basically means that while the plug fits their stuff doesn't charge when connected to a computer or a lot of standard USB wall warts/external battery packs. And that is annoying. There are standards for 15V chargers and they simply don't use them.
Annoyingly they haven't really fixed this for the Nexus 7. That 7incher has similar specs to their Transformer line(apart from the awesome IPS displays; compared to my Prime the Nexus 7 quite dark) but it does charge at 5V. Yet on a standard USB charger it charges so little that if the display is turned on all it does is keep its current charge.
This is where I truly like my old Moto Xoom 1. It needs 15V. It has a 15V charger and it uses a stock 15V DC charging connector.
I do understand that tablets have an awefully big battery and people still expect them to be fully charged in less than 2 hours. But it is abundantly clear that USB doesn't quite cut it. So this new spec is a good thing if it removes the neccessity of such annoying shenanigans. Given how long it took to get USB3 out in the wild we may not want to hold our breath waiting for this and this change is at least 3 years late. USB primarily was meant to transfer data to peripherals and sufficiently power them to be functional. That has shifted to transferring data and supplying enough delicious electricity within 2 hours to run the device for 8 hours. Even if you want to be naive and overly simplistic about that you could say that USB might be underspecced by a factor of 4.
A lot of computer power supplies will need to be specced up. Otherwise our new 100W mice and keyboards might fry them. But at least we will not have to worry about heating our rooms in the winter:p
The API to get optimization for Tegra 3 is proprietary. I guess it's also a matter of software/driver support. Then there also is power consumption(which is a biggie on cell phones), availability of specs/dev chips, price when bought in bulk, availability when bought in bulk and so on.
You always have to remember that it takes a lot of time to properly design your hardware around your components, make sure the component drivers behave well, test the stuff, go into production, test again...
Computing power is just a small factor when you hope to sell in the millions.
I can't personally speak for Snapdragon 800. But let's take a look at what nVidia did with Tegra 3. They built an SoC without any 3G capabilities. So if you wanted to put it into your cell phone you'd have to buy extra components for 3G. That made Tegra 3 absolutely unattractive for phones. The tablet market is growing but it is phones that carry a SoC. Number of cores/computing power is the least of your worries. The only thing that really taxes the top of the currently available line SoCs is benchmarks. I know that because I'm constantly looking for games where my Tegra3 based rooted&overclocked tablet simply doesn't cut it anymore. And ATM there is to my knowledge nothing that runs natively that really screams for a faster SoC.
tl;dr: Don't look at the benchmarks. Look at the business side of things.
It also seems like a couple of AAA games haven't sold as much as expected. Amongst them new Tomb Raider and Bioshock. Given the hype one would think they would've sold better. Perhaps they'll do better in the long tail which now exists in form of sales on digital plattforms. The times are gone when you only got the latest and greatest which a month later got replaced in the shelves by the new hotness.
I only know I'm interested in neither and will propably pass even when they go on sale. My Steam library has yet to recover from my Christmas sale buying spree.
They will also make money by having shops listed on Google Maps.
Rumor has it that they want to sell the consumer version at 750 bucks. If they sell enough of them then they won't be selling at a loss, I guess. If they somewhat make that price point I will get one. After I have sorted out how to deal with my prescription glasses, that is.
This also means that users can simply uninstall the app. Since it isn't Google that's doing the ads it shhould be fairly easy to get rid of the offender.
People will not ever get used to having apps constantly and without provocation pushed into their face. You know what you get when you load a website. You know what you get when your turn on your TV or radio. But walking down the street just to have the latest Amazon sale pushed into your peripheral vision will mean that the app will be deinstalled.
What it won't prevent is showing those email notifications of that shop you once did business with and that has been pestering you ever since. And you will get solicited ads when you ask where to go for lunch. These informations will propably be pulled right off Google Maps and I highly suspect that this is where Google will be making its money.
Also bear in mind that this thing isn't always on. You will either have to wake it up by fondling it or sloooowly lifting your head. So shoving unsolicited ads into your vision wouldn't work most of the time since it most likely will be turned off. Battery life isn't that good on that thing to have it turned on the whole day.
The Sims is the best selling gaming franchise ever. And it has been made abundantly clear that SimCity is more of a The Sims spinoff then the continuination of the original series.
So yes, I'm with you on the The Sims DLC. They could get some street cred back by having a "Mecha-Streisand" desaster. The Katy Perry thing was really odd. I saw the boxes for it at the supermarket and thought to myself htat no sane person would want to have that whig in his life. Clearly I was wrong...
Isn't that the girl who caused some uproar due to having breasts at Sesame street?
I wonder if Crest wanted their money back after EA caused SimCity to be the biggest flop of the year.
What gives you the impression SimCity was a flow? People still buy it in droves. People still play it and enjoy it. The always-on DRM is over, people got their free consolation game and everything is hunky-dory again. The game had a negative response in closed nerd circles(which is why I don't pick it up...mostly for city size and flawed simulation) but the target demographic of The Sims players got over it.
The demographic that plays "The Sims" now plays SimCity as it was designed specifically for them. Those are non-geeks.
The geeks are those who are pissed off because the claim that "we do computational intensive stuff on our servers with ABSOLUTELY no network overhead whatsoever" has been proven a lie and that it is indeed always-on DRM.*
The geeks who actually played the game and know what they are talking about complain about city sizes and the new agent-based simulation model being crap.
The brief desaster after launch should come as no surprise to anybody who has lived through launch of any other massively internet-dependent megaseller. It was brief and it is over. The gameplay remains and it still sucks.
* I do not actually own the game and only watched through a couple of Let's Play videos on Youtube by people who actually try to have fun with it. Small city sizes, unattractive "multiplayer", no terraforming, it's all there. Won't buy it because not being able to build efficient and self-contained cities is to my OCD like fingernails scraping over a blackboard.
It is in no way shape or form intended to provide any type of AR whatsoever. It saves you the trouble to rummage through your pockets, take out your cell phone and hold it to eye level. The demo videos on Google have been confirmed to be fairly accurate by journos who actually had the chance to try the glasses.
The screen is just inside your peripheral view so you will have to lift your eye up to see what's going on. Chances are you will have to turn the screen on first, by slowly lifting your head or touching the touch thingie at its side.
Most of the comments here are wild speculation based on rumor, very little research, confirmation bias and baseless idiocy. Demo videos, writeups and preliminary reviews have been floating around the net for a couple of months.
The camera is sort of a turnoff. It also has a neat "On Air" LED that notifies everybody around you that you are recording them.
I would also prefer cell phones without a camera. They are costly, not that good and I never use them. ATM I carry around 4 unused cameras. Front&back on both my tablet and my phone. The Glass camera might be a bit more useful since it is hands free.
With voice activation all you need to do is shout "Ok Glasses, start recording and upload to YouTube" into the ear of the guy in the stall next to you when taking a leak and tell the authorities to take the perv away for gross indecency.
I might to be unto something. Our first app for the camear on the glasses could be a penis comparison app. Which means the device needs a thermometer. Extra points for upload to a statistical database with geo data. Make millions by selling camera confusing vajazzles!
Slashdot Mirror
Now get your sodding rose tinted glasses off and look properly. Old games were simplistic, they had almost no depth of gameplay and while they had refined that gameplay very, very well, they're in no way objectively better (or worse) than newer games. If all you do is whine that the next Call of Duty isn't your cup of tea and games were "so much better back in my day", then it's your problem entirely. For each Call of Duty, there's a gem of a game to be found. FTL. Minecraft. VVVVVV. Terraria. Don't Starve. Stardrive. AI War. Torchlight. World of Goo. Mark of the Ninja. Magicka. SpaceChem. Frozen Synapse. Heck, even AAA games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Far Cry 3 or Company of Heroes. Figure out what you like and play it, instead of just complaining about it on the internet.
The games of the 90ies were simpler but that doesn't mean they had no depth. Take for instance something like Lemmings. You had(if memory serves right) 10 different types of Lemmings and you had to use them to get them from A to B. Doesn't get simpler than that. Yet the gameplay had a lot of depth because there usually were a couple of ways to beat a level.
On the other hand you have games like the later Assassins Creed, Arkham City, LA Noire...
These games do not have more depth than the simpler ones. They have more activities. It's like they wanted to build a theme park for their gamers. Have a tower defense minigame in your murder simulator. Have badly done car chases in your point&click adventure. Have a Superman64 inspired fly-through-hoops thing in your action brawler. I don't see where they offer more depth. Rather more width, so to speak. And in some cases the multitude of activities do work and in other cases you can simply ignore them.
I've seen the tower defense thing in AssCred3 only once and decided against having anything to do with it. At first I LOVED the idea of training assassins and sending them all over the place for missions. But it was completely uninteractive. Pick one guy, assign him to a mission, game rolls the dice and tells you of the outcome. Basically they integrated a badly done version of Risk into the game. This doesn't create depth. And in many cases it takes it away.
How often have you seen a mission in a game that has to be played EXACTLY like the designers wanted you to? Mostly those are stealth missions. Be discovered and return to the last checkpoint. The option of simply going in guns blazing simply doesn't exist even tho you did it in the rest of the game. There is one strategy(ie stealth) because we told you so. That's the opposite of depth. And I didn't even go for the low hanging fruit of turret sections.
Or the current state of 1st person manshooters. Aw, what the heck. Too many of these seem to have cutscenes that are interupted by pesky gameplay. They will actually shoot you for not triggering a cutscene. But let's not go there. Let's take a look at regenerating health. In Doom1 if you lost a lot of health and armor in one level you might be very well borked in the next level. You had to plan ahead. There was a strategic element to this. It arguably had more depth than most modern FPS.
I see you mentioned Deus Ex. That was a GREAT game. Good writing. Interesting mechanics. You had conversation bosses. You could battle enemies with words. Yet they did something that reduced depth. You couldn't go fully charismatic to talk everybody down. You couldn't go full stealth to take them down one by one. You couldn't go full hacker and use their defenses against them. If you didn't go heavily on the combat skills you were borked. There were a couple of things you had to take because otherwise you would be screwed in the boss battles. These limited your choice of approach and arguably limited the depth of the gameplay.
World of Goo is the premiere snot stacking simulator. It has only that mechanic and it executes that brilliantly. Simplistic? Not past the tutorial levels.
tl;dr:
Depth is not the same as complexity. Depth does not automatically increase with the number of gameplay mechanics. Having only one gameplay mechanic and have that executed properly. Don't dress people down when they have a point.
I'm weary of AAA games. They mostly are overproduced, overpriced and unfocused. For some weird reason the simpler games we used to play in the 90ies would be considered casual games nowadays. There was nothing casual trying to complete all levels in Lemming(or Populous...if you were mad).
Now I prefer mostly indie titles to the latest and greatest hype. In my opinion Orks Must Die is better than the later Assassins Creeds. Bastion is better than Arkham City(tho not Asylum...that would be heresy). Warlock: Master of the Arcane is better than HoMM6 especially after all the patches. If you play AAA for the story you just might as well watch a Let's Play on Youtube. What's it with all the game designers who want to be movie directors? That didn't work out too well for Chris Roberts.
The only AAA game I bought at release and that I was nearly entirely happy with was the new XCOM.
Maybe they will even sell versions that detect ivory.
But black powder was popular in Guy Fawke's days. Nobody has caused significant damage with minor quantities of black powder for the past 50 years. Nevertheless politicos will go into headless chicken mode an money bins will be built.
Also the infection vector is just a little bit less bad than common malware. You have to be extra hawkeyed to spot all the checkboxes it might lurk beneath. It ranks just there with browser toolbars and monkey punchers.
Actually this is a story about stupidity.
They didn't have virus protection or anything security related. So the taxoffice watchdog told them to come forward with a security plan.
This is just as stupid as it sounds. I've not heard if they were close to a Windows 7 induced hardware upgrade cycle anyway. But there is absolutely no excuse for having no security whatsoever.
They are rapidly losing relevance already. Android is something an aweful lot of people are already familiar with, software is dirt cheap and now Microsoft started to sell touchscreen tablet/netbook hybrids themselves.
I don't know if this will actually eat into the desktop market but the laptop market is under threat by this. MS will propably keep the corporate PC for a couple of years but they are currently losing the casual home market.
ANECDOTE ALERT:
I got my mother a 3G tablet complete with a dirt cheap bluethooth keyboard/mouse. When her PC died she said she didn't need a new one since she was perfectly happy with her Xoom and I get less support calls due to Windows trouble, WLAN shenanigans and DSL troubles. All she does is web surfing, organize pictures of her grandchildren and write the odd letter. Before she retired she worked as a secretary and lived through all stages of word processing. She swore by Word/Windows since everything else she knew was worse. My OpenOffice/Linux experiments did not work on her but she happily lives with a seriously outdated Xoom.
This is the market MS is losing.
There was that EA bloke(who has now formed a queue for all the other EA people for dole money) who wondered what all this outrage over the always online thing was. He quite helpfully ignored the MEEELLIONS Sony had to pay over the PSN outage, the SimCity brouhaha and the hot water Blizzard found themselves in in Germany and Korea. And he wore a corporate EA suit as a product manager.
If you see that kind of ignorance at that level then you do not find it hard to believe they really want to stick to the always online shenanigans that have gone on lately.
Meanwhile in the real world engineers tell people that relying on internet conncetivity with custom mobile software is a bad idea when it mostly is used to record electircity metering data in cellars and that they might want to take this into consideration.
Nowadays the suits(of which I'm a card carrying member) want computers not to copy data(hardyhar) and always be connected to the internet to transfer huge amounts of data while every carrier puts caps on what they transfer. If the chips are down and the lights are out complete ignorance of recent events will see us through. And that's why everybody with a modicum of technical understanding is up in arms. Me, I could simply ignore that. I do not plan to own a PS720 or XBox4. Nothing EA tries so hard to sell to me tickles my fancy. But shoddy workmanship for dubious business reasons is a step backwards and that simply gets my heckles up.
It's not only Steam. Basically any game may require a constant internet connection on PC. But at least it isn't baked into the only distribution channel available on the plattform...because there are a lot of them. GoG springs to mind.
Let's not forget that Blizzard ran afoul of a German consumer watchdog because they hadn't printed the always-on requirement prominently on the box of Diablo 3. If this is done consequently we are able to avoid inacceptable sales conditions and vote with our wallets.
If the new XBox has an always-on requirement let me be the millionth person to predict a PSN level of brouhaha in the near future. It seems stupid to integrate such a massive single point of failure into your product. If anything goes wrong with that it will be entirely your fault. Even an Act of God would be your fault since you designed the system in such a vulnerable way.
Who indeed is so stupid to include such a massive liability into their system?
In recent history Blizzard, Sony and EA have fallen into that trap. Repeating the same mistake over and over again is madness.
Did he get evicted from a bunker? Don't you need grenades, flamethrowers and lots of cannonfodder for this?
The anecdote of him ignoring a stern knock at the door by the police is true even if the foto on the webpage is fake.
Please let me join your absolute shock and amazement that the guy who gloated the most about this has been identified as the prime suspect.
Also why was he nabbed in sunny Spain instead of being holed up in his SWAT-repellant yet slightly less sunny anti-everything bunker? Fighting the good fight against evil Spamhaus at the side of every Legitimate Businessman propably was a bit of a hassle? He must have brought a note from his mother as the dark dampness disrupted the punctuality of his often broadcasted latest bowel movement.
Let me be your complete lack of surprise situated just north of your favourite kidney.
It's got a nice keyboard and is very Linuxy. I had also considered to replace my E61 with a N900.
Do not underestimate a hackable phone with a decentish keyboard. In a pinch I have quite often used my E61 to take down notes for a meeting and writing lengthy Emails. The N900 was a lot nicer.
I'd buy an updated N900(with a proper battery, an easily unlocked bootloader, HDMI out, SDXC support and a nice display) in a heartbeat. Touchscreen typing is inferior to a keyboard no matter how limited.
I also wondered how this was newsworthy. I'm quite used to buying a phone that's not locked and not worry about a carrier. We've got 3 carriers busily beavering away at this LTE thing with and they have achieved some kind of coverage. Yet none of them offer a data plan that makes some sense. At least I got some choice.
Isn't LTE godawful for a phone? Wasn't there that thing where phones had to be switched down to GSM/UMTS to make voice calls? I'd like LTE for a tablet, but on a phone it makes very little sense. But please with a data plan that doesn't start throttling after 2GB a month. Just this month I got a separate SIM card for my Nexus 7 with a separate data plan. 1GB per month. With no option to upgrade that. But I would be entitled to use LTE. Hardeehar.
Do the carriers even have an interest to sell LTE? To whom? Are they aware that all the stuff LTE would be nice for also implies huge download volumes? Which they don't sell. 2GB is just about one high-res movie. A month. Nope. Best stick to the good old Pirate Bay/SD card combo. Not as limited and a bit cheaper.
And then there is ASUS.
:p
A lot of their tablets get charged by an USB compatible plug. Yet they need 15V to charge. So what ASUS did was cross a couple of wires in the cable and have their chargers detect those crossed wires to serve up 15V. Which basically means that while the plug fits their stuff doesn't charge when connected to a computer or a lot of standard USB wall warts/external battery packs. And that is annoying. There are standards for 15V chargers and they simply don't use them.
Annoyingly they haven't really fixed this for the Nexus 7. That 7incher has similar specs to their Transformer line(apart from the awesome IPS displays; compared to my Prime the Nexus 7 quite dark) but it does charge at 5V. Yet on a standard USB charger it charges so little that if the display is turned on all it does is keep its current charge.
This is where I truly like my old Moto Xoom 1. It needs 15V. It has a 15V charger and it uses a stock 15V DC charging connector.
I do understand that tablets have an awefully big battery and people still expect them to be fully charged in less than 2 hours. But it is abundantly clear that USB doesn't quite cut it. So this new spec is a good thing if it removes the neccessity of such annoying shenanigans. Given how long it took to get USB3 out in the wild we may not want to hold our breath waiting for this and this change is at least 3 years late. USB primarily was meant to transfer data to peripherals and sufficiently power them to be functional. That has shifted to transferring data and supplying enough delicious electricity within 2 hours to run the device for 8 hours. Even if you want to be naive and overly simplistic about that you could say that USB might be underspecced by a factor of 4.
A lot of computer power supplies will need to be specced up. Otherwise our new 100W mice and keyboards might fry them. But at least we will not have to worry about heating our rooms in the winter
The API to get optimization for Tegra 3 is proprietary. I guess it's also a matter of software/driver support. Then there also is power consumption(which is a biggie on cell phones), availability of specs/dev chips, price when bought in bulk, availability when bought in bulk and so on.
You always have to remember that it takes a lot of time to properly design your hardware around your components, make sure the component drivers behave well, test the stuff, go into production, test again...
Computing power is just a small factor when you hope to sell in the millions.
I can't personally speak for Snapdragon 800. But let's take a look at what nVidia did with Tegra 3. They built an SoC without any 3G capabilities. So if you wanted to put it into your cell phone you'd have to buy extra components for 3G. That made Tegra 3 absolutely unattractive for phones. The tablet market is growing but it is phones that carry a SoC. Number of cores/computing power is the least of your worries. The only thing that really taxes the top of the currently available line SoCs is benchmarks. I know that because I'm constantly looking for games where my Tegra3 based rooted&overclocked tablet simply doesn't cut it anymore. And ATM there is to my knowledge nothing that runs natively that really screams for a faster SoC.
tl;dr: Don't look at the benchmarks. Look at the business side of things.
It also seems like a couple of AAA games haven't sold as much as expected. Amongst them new Tomb Raider and Bioshock. Given the hype one would think they would've sold better. Perhaps they'll do better in the long tail which now exists in form of sales on digital plattforms. The times are gone when you only got the latest and greatest which a month later got replaced in the shelves by the new hotness.
I only know I'm interested in neither and will propably pass even when they go on sale. My Steam library has yet to recover from my Christmas sale buying spree.
They will also make money by having shops listed on Google Maps.
Rumor has it that they want to sell the consumer version at 750 bucks. If they sell enough of them then they won't be selling at a loss, I guess. If they somewhat make that price point I will get one. After I have sorted out how to deal with my prescription glasses, that is.
This also means that users can simply uninstall the app. Since it isn't Google that's doing the ads it shhould be fairly easy to get rid of the offender.
People will not ever get used to having apps constantly and without provocation pushed into their face. You know what you get when you load a website. You know what you get when your turn on your TV or radio. But walking down the street just to have the latest Amazon sale pushed into your peripheral vision will mean that the app will be deinstalled.
What it won't prevent is showing those email notifications of that shop you once did business with and that has been pestering you ever since. And you will get solicited ads when you ask where to go for lunch. These informations will propably be pulled right off Google Maps and I highly suspect that this is where Google will be making its money.
Also bear in mind that this thing isn't always on. You will either have to wake it up by fondling it or sloooowly lifting your head. So shoving unsolicited ads into your vision wouldn't work most of the time since it most likely will be turned off. Battery life isn't that good on that thing to have it turned on the whole day.
The Sims is the best selling gaming franchise ever. And it has been made abundantly clear that SimCity is more of a The Sims spinoff then the continuination of the original series.
So yes, I'm with you on the The Sims DLC. They could get some street cred back by having a "Mecha-Streisand" desaster. The Katy Perry thing was really odd. I saw the boxes for it at the supermarket and thought to myself htat no sane person would want to have that whig in his life. Clearly I was wrong...
Isn't that the girl who caused some uproar due to having breasts at Sesame street?
*flop
I wonder if Crest wanted their money back after EA caused SimCity to be the biggest flop of the year.
What gives you the impression SimCity was a flow? People still buy it in droves. People still play it and enjoy it. The always-on DRM is over, people got their free consolation game and everything is hunky-dory again. The game had a negative response in closed nerd circles(which is why I don't pick it up...mostly for city size and flawed simulation) but the target demographic of The Sims players got over it.
Money talks, bullshit walks. Money has spoken.
Abathur is the MAN! He can make everybody better.
Bras not efficient. Lingerie not efficient. Increased structural rigidity instead.
The demographic that plays "The Sims" now plays SimCity as it was designed specifically for them. Those are non-geeks.
The geeks are those who are pissed off because the claim that "we do computational intensive stuff on our servers with ABSOLUTELY no network overhead whatsoever" has been proven a lie and that it is indeed always-on DRM.*
The geeks who actually played the game and know what they are talking about complain about city sizes and the new agent-based simulation model being crap.
The brief desaster after launch should come as no surprise to anybody who has lived through launch of any other massively internet-dependent megaseller. It was brief and it is over. The gameplay remains and it still sucks.
* I do not actually own the game and only watched through a couple of Let's Play videos on Youtube by people who actually try to have fun with it. Small city sizes, unattractive "multiplayer", no terraforming, it's all there. Won't buy it because not being able to build efficient and self-contained cities is to my OCD like fingernails scraping over a blackboard.
I know, I should not have read it. Rookie mistake.
What, both of them?
No, it's just the one guy. The other guy lives in a country where Crest isn't a brand he could buy.
So this DLC is completely free, I take it? I mean who would buy ads disguised as DLC?
Is their new CEO as confused why EA has so little standing in the public opinion as the old CEO?
It is in no way shape or form intended to provide any type of AR whatsoever. It saves you the trouble to rummage through your pockets, take out your cell phone and hold it to eye level. The demo videos on Google have been confirmed to be fairly accurate by journos who actually had the chance to try the glasses.
The screen is just inside your peripheral view so you will have to lift your eye up to see what's going on. Chances are you will have to turn the screen on first, by slowly lifting your head or touching the touch thingie at its side.
Most of the comments here are wild speculation based on rumor, very little research, confirmation bias and baseless idiocy. Demo videos, writeups and preliminary reviews have been floating around the net for a couple of months.
The camera is sort of a turnoff. It also has a neat "On Air" LED that notifies everybody around you that you are recording them.
I would also prefer cell phones without a camera. They are costly, not that good and I never use them. ATM I carry around 4 unused cameras. Front&back on both my tablet and my phone. The Glass camera might be a bit more useful since it is hands free.
With voice activation all you need to do is shout "Ok Glasses, start recording and upload to YouTube" into the ear of the guy in the stall next to you when taking a leak and tell the authorities to take the perv away for gross indecency.
I might to be unto something. Our first app for the camear on the glasses could be a penis comparison app. Which means the device needs a thermometer. Extra points for upload to a statistical database with geo data. Make millions by selling camera confusing vajazzles!