Of course String Theory makes testable predictions. Just like General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics make testable predictions.
The bad news is that they are the same predictions that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics make, many of which we've already tested, and is thus indistinguishable from them.
The good news is that String theory makes the same predictions as GR and QM while still being only one theory.
It is the non-compatability of GR and QM that creates the need for something like ST. If ST doesn't make a single unique prediction, but is able to explain both the quantum and relativistic worlds, then not only is that a theory, it's a great theory.
If you have ever been in the Military you would know that a Soldiers are trained to Critly Wound people not out right "KILL"
True, but that's not really the point. To train a soldier to fire in order to wound, you have to get over the resistance to firing which holds the possibility of killing.
I dont blame the game makers i blame the kids parents for allowing a child to become so obsesed with such a violent video game
Based on TFA, I would blame the kid's parents for beating the kid so that he harbored a suppressed desire to kill them. I doubt it was really the video game he was obsessed with. That whole line of reasoning is Thompson's made-up story anyway -- the police merely said they found the game in his room.
Parents need to teach their children the difference between video games and reality. This is the fault of the parents, not the video game company.
Actually, I have a suspicion they already did:
"Posey had told police he shot his family after his father, the ranch foreman, slapped him for not cleaning horse stalls fast enough. Prosecutors described Posey as a ruthless killer, but his lawyers claimed his father had abused him for years. "
Reality is where your dad hits you, and you can't do anything about it. Fantasy is where you have the power to strike out at those who hurt you.
If he really was abused, then I'd wager he was quite aware of the difference between reality and fantasy, and it was a deliberate choice he made to turn his fantasies into his reality. Obviously, the parents would be muchly to blame in the case also.
I'm sure you are familiar with the anecdote regarding the percentage of soldiers in WWI that couldn't bring themselves to shoot another human being. Target practice at that time was a simple bullseye. When the target was changed to the sillouitte of a human, the percentage of those able to fire a gun at another human increased greatly.
Yes, but there's an important distinction: The soldiers knew they were training to kill other people, knew that the silhouette that was their target was designed to represent the real humans they were training to kill, and thus were consciously building an association between those targets and the real humans they would eventually shoot.
Sane people are easily able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Training a soldier to kill involves deliberately and consciously eroding that barrier to allow them to train on fake targets. And don't forget to say that while the percentage went up, indicating that the training was better, there was still a large percentage of soldiers who were still unable to shoot on real targets.
Soldiers -- professional killers, deliberately trying to gain the ability to fire on real humans with the full encouragement of their superiors, still find it difficult. But video games do this automatically and subconsciously in normal teenagers? Whatever.
If you deliberately use a video game with human-esque targets to train yourself to be able to shoot real humans, then sure it can have the same effect. But so could drawing a cutout of a human torso, handing it on the wall, and pointing at it while saying "Bang!" because it's pretty much the same level of realism and real connection. At the point at which someone is using video games to train themselves to kill in real life, then they're already lost.
Now, instead of a sillouitte, we have a highly graphic representation of what killing someone is really like.
Emphasis mine, and you've got to be kidding me. Have you ever actually touched GTA, or even seen a screenshot?! You'd have to be insane to think any depiction of death in a video game is what it is really like. There is no video game in existence that approaches the reality of something like Saving Private Ryan, but apparently that isn't responsible for training our teens to murder.
But don't say that violent video games can't and don't cause ANY harm, because I will just right you off as biased, unreasoning, and ignorant.
Oh please. Neither you nor anyone else has shown that violent video games cause ANY harm in someone not already intent on violence and that any other form of stimulation wouldn't have caused equally. It doesn't matter if it's a video game, a book, a movie, or a silhouette they paint on the side of the barn -- a person with murderous intent will find a way to steel themselves for it, GTA or no.
Saying otherwise because you just assume video games are different and magical means you're just biased, unreasoning, and ignorant.
"[Grand Theft Auto: Vice City] trained him ''how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer."
Bwa ha ha ha ha!
This is one of those real nice litmus test statements. If someone for even a millisecond considers that this statement might be true, much more so if someone actually utters it themselves, then they clearly have no idea what they are talking about, they have never touched the game, and quite probably have never touched any video game except maybe Pac Man twenty years ago. They're just making shit up because it sounds nice in their lawsuit.
Seriously. There is no way GTA teaches you how to shoot a gun. You hold down the target button until the guy you want to shoot has a green reticle over him, then you press fire. There's no aiming involved, there's no skill in holding a gun, hell you usually can't even see your character's hands since it's a 3rd person view from behind him. This game teaches you nothing.
At least when some ambulence-chasing retard claims video games train people to kill, they at least pick one which involves aiming.
'The $600 million lawsuit names several companies and Cody Posey, who it alleges played the game ''obsessively'' for several months before he shot his father, stepmother and stepsister in July 2004.
So he was obsessed with the game and played for months before killing his family, eh? Well there's no family killing in GTA; if he was truly inspired by GTA he would have gone after cops, mobsters, or hookers. Sounds to me like adorable little Cody already had a target in mind and his obsession revolved around that!
There's really only two options here.
One: Cody was a perfectly innocent fourteen year old boy with no thoughts of violence until he witnessed them in GTA. In this case he may have been innocent but he was also batshit insane, and had he been exposed to the baneful influence of Warner Brothers cartoons he would have killed his family by dropping an anvil on their heads then saying "Th-th-th-th-that's all folks!"
Two: Cody was not an innocent fourteen year old boy, he wasn't obsessed with GTA he was obsessed with slaying his family and GTA was just his focus/outlet. If GTA never existed, it would have been Natural Born Killers, and if not for that it would have been something else. A book, a movie, a play, a song, whatever, it doesn't matter, because that's not what drove him. His own motivations drove him.
Let's see if TFA can help us distinguish which of these might be the case:
Posey had told police he shot his family after his father, the ranch foreman, slapped him for not cleaning horse stalls fast enough. Prosecutors described Posey as a ruthless killer, but his lawyers claimed his father had abused him for years.
Oh, lookie here! Seems like ol' Mr. Posey may have been slapping his boy around for years! So let's consider this again, which sounds more likely: Video games drove Codey Posey to kill his family, and without video games he never would have committed violence. Or recurrent child abuse drove Codey Posey to kill his family, and without recurrent child abuse he never would have committed violence.
And now the boy's extended family -- who were either astoundingly ignorant of what went on, or knew and never did anything -- have enlisted Jack Thompson to help them get $600 million from a video game maker who is only tangentially related to a case about teen violence and child abuse. That's just low. That's a disgusting, sick way of cashing in on a broken family that nobody else tried to fix.
Does that work when you're creating a dynamic pose rather than them just standing straight up? Most artists recommend drawing the body first, then the clothes on top of it, so you can get the clothes right. Going from zero to trenchcoat doesn't sound easier to me, if you want it to look right, but that's me.
Honestly? I highly doubt it. I think the extra power of the PS3 is going to be used to show more models/textures at the same time, not the same number of super-detailed models/textures.
The cell processor doesn't help with texture detail, by the way. That's more an issue of graphics memory bandwidth -- which I can't determine exactly without knowing the interface width to the vram which the Wikipedia article doesn't show, but which may not be 6x larger than the PS2's 47GB/s. The cell will be helpfull for geometry transformation, pixel shaders, than kind of thing, which is fine. Look at Doom 3 -- it's textures are not very much more detailed than any other similar game. It's the lighting effects and other processing done to those textures that makes the game look so good.
Remember too that increasing the texture and model detail that much also means a lot more work for the art department. Much less work (and disk space) to develop a shader that can be applied to many textures by the Cell SPEs than to add 6x the detail to every single texture.
So my prediction is that on the PS3 you'll see somewhat (from my butt: 2x) more detailed textures and models, but with more of them on the screen at once and with much more sophisticated shaders and effects that in the end add more to the scene than texture detail would anyway.
For the cost of a PS3, I could buy an XBOX 360 and a couple of prostitutes to pleasure me while I play Geometry Wars! Clearly this is a superior value.
You're right, all of these "[non-PS3 console] + [something else] = PS3!" comparisons are pretty dang silly. If I can't afford a PS3, what makes you think I can afford "Wii60"? Not to mention the games you'd have to buy to justify having two consoles -- whether the combo cost the same as a PS3 or not, it would be dumb to have a $250/$400 console with one or two games.
It does make some sense though if you're the kind of person who would buy two consoles -- MS is basically making the case that you would have more money left over to buy the best games of theirs + nintendo's. Lucky for MS that the Wii almost fits in the price delta between the 360 and PS3. That's the only group I can see buying into this.
With the HD-DVD coming out for X360 at $200, doesn't that put it pretty much in the same ballpark as PS3?
Yup! Thus further confirming that it is the Blu-Ray drive that makes the PS3 so expensive. If Blu-Ray were an optional feature for the PS3 and the console cost the same as the 360, do you think most people would opt for the more expensive Blu-Ray equipped version or not?
Also, a superhero game with a license is the silliest idea ever. Either you have 200 spidermans zipping around (beyond silly), or you can't allow players to play 'name' characters, at which point the whole point of a license goes out of the window. People play license games to 'be the hero' so to speak, and that doesn't work in a MMO. The concept is just broken out of the gate.
Expect a weak ripoff of City of Heroes with marvel (tm)(R)'s added all around, with some weak license-tieins like 'name' heroes giving missions to the player characters, and maybe villains as bosses to whack. With zero endgame gameplay at launch and nearly zero post-launch content.
If Spidey and Wolverine are just hanging around handing out quests and tossing out catch phrases, it will be stupid.
However if they involve these characters in the actual gameplay, it could be pretty fun.
Imagine taking your original hero character, working your way through the ranks, proving your mettle, such that you become a full-fledged X-Man and get to go on missions with Wolverine. Would that satisfy the desire to "be the hero"? It sounds like it to me. Best of both worlds: My own creation, my personal avatar, I am a bad-ass super-hero, and look there's my favorite Marvel characters kicking ass beside me!
Of course practically speaking I'm not expecting anything that involved. It will probably be as you describe, and be crappy. Yet it is possible, if Marvel decides to give Cryptic a serious up-front cash injection so they have enough developers to handle it. Hopefully Cryptic made money of Co(H|V) themselves and can afford more developers. If they take it seriously, spend the money, and do it right, a Marvel MMO could be great.
I'd couldn't prove it, but my thought is that the skin tight suits is a result of the historical necessity to keep art costs down in comics.
Drawing clothes is extra work. First you draw the body, then you have to draw the clothes over that body such that they appear to hang naturally.
Or you could just draw the body, and then color it to look like the hero is wearing clothes, maybe add a couple pieces of flair. It's faster, ergo cheaper. Add fifty years and maybe it isn't financially necessary for publishers like Marvel but it has basically become a tradition.
I understand there's a similar explanation for why characters in Japanese comics have crazy-colored hair. Everyone in Japan has black hair, so in B&W comics it made sense to just leave the hair blank to save money and prevent printing problems and their readers just naturally filled it in with the expected color. When they started using color printing, the artists thought why fill in that blank space with black when you could use pink or blue? This, too, then becomes a tradition.
How many Windows users would submit a report to the WGA Problems Forum if they had a problem?
I can't say, but I'm imagining it's a very small fraction of total users.
The point though is to make sure you're comparing like to like. Problem Reports is not the same as Total Problems, just as Potential Problem Reports is not the same as Total Windows Users.
Most game textures I believe today are 8-bit because they do not need a lot of tonal range.
I don't believe that since game consoles have been doing better than 256 color since the Playstation, and a normal TV can do better than that as well. I went to the trouble to look it up, and the Gamecube has a 24 bpp frame buffer, and presumeably 24bpp textures to match. The PS2 uses 16 or 32 bpp, and the Xbox uses 32.
I'm not convinced that pixel depth will end up having any effect on data size, relative to the last generation.
I'm not discounting increased detail in textures, I mentioned it. Yet the fact is you don't need to scale the textures linearly with the increase in resolution. If you didn't increase the texture data at all, you still benefit from having the textures look good on polygons that are farther away from the viewer. This is what you see when going from 800x600 to 1600x1200 in a PC game. Having higher resolution on the same textures makes them look better. With the higher resolution screen you can add more detail to the textures and expect it to be worth something, but you still don't need to multiply the texture data to match screen resolution.
I didn't consider increased bit depth, but I'd have to know what a typical bit depth is for a current console game to guess at whether it would need to be increased.
Playing a game IS full-screen video - it's just rendered.
Um, yeah, that was my point. It's rendered from data that does not have to multiply 6 times over just because the output resolution of the rendering pipeline has multiplied 6 times over. There is not a 1:1 correspondence between vertex/texture data and screen resolution.
For future reference "full screen video" generally refers to the source.
Running at 1080p widescreen instead of 480p standard means that there's 6.75 times more data (1920x1080 vs 640x480).
Only if all your "data" is full screen video.
Most of the time, just like with PC games, all the higher resolution will mean in practice is that you see the same image but with higher resolution. Obviously there will be more data due to the higher capacity of the machine, more vertex data and more detailed texture data, but not 6.75 times as much because you don't need to fill the entire screen with a single texture.
Off the top of my head, Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask use the rumble for certain puzzles.
Which is true, but what's interesting is you didn't need rumble because the rumble pack was an optional piece of equipment that you plugged into the N64 controller's expansion port. So there were puzzles in Ocarina of Time that required rumble, but they were optional puzzles. I don't know about Majora's Mask since I didn't play much past the opening dungeon, but I would reason it too didn't require a rumble pack in order to complete the game.
That makes 360$ for console and roughly 80$ for a controller, so think about that before you think it's god damn expensive in the U.S. So how about the poor people here?
That sucks for sure. You guys always get shafted that way, too.
They may be turned off by it, and they're welcome to go the competition, who will be happy to take twice as much money, or more.
Who cares? Yes the other consoles are more, but stop thinking about it in terms of the console wars for two seconds, and actually think about that family that can barely afford their three kids and want to get them something for christmas. It isn't a choice between the Wii and the Xbox 360, it's a choice between the Wii and something that isn't a console. It's great that you think people who don't want to pay an extra $60 per controller just shouldn't have had the kid who needs a controller in the first place, that's really nice. Regardless, people are in this situation and they have kids and a limited budget. Of course they know kids are expensive; this is why they have a limited budget for gifts in the first place. The price of controllers may put the Wii outside that budget. That's an issue, ignore it if you want to, but it exists.
Let's face it, there's a lot of stuff in the controllers in the first place.
Which I acknowledged in the first post you replied to. That doesn't make the $60 controller any cheaper, it just means they aren't blatantly gouging you. This doesn't make the controller more affordable. That's all I'm saying. You can make whatever justification you want, compare it to anything you want, but $60 is a lot to be able to let one other person play with you.
Yeah, I mean, if you have to buy 3 more controllers to play 4-player multiplayer, the Wii is $490!
Which is a lot of money. The base console is $250, and you've basically doubled that price so you can play Mario Party the way it was intended.
Yeah, it's about the same as an Xbox or Ps3 without anything else, but I'm not buying either of those consoles exactly because they cost so much. I don't give a fuck if I could get a Wii, seven controllers, eight copies of Zelda, and a jewel encrusted chalice for the price of a PS3; the PS3 price is crazy, so "about the same price as PS3" isn't exactly a great argument for how cheap something is!
$60 is a lot for an extra controller, especially if the idea is you're trying to attract people with your low priced console. A family on a budget that wants their three kids to be able to play at once is going to be put off by a $250 price tag now turned $330-$370. That's all there is to it, comparisons to other consoles notwithstanding.
I'm reminded of two Penny-Arcade comics:
You seem to be mistaking me for the guy in the PS3 hat in that amusing PA comic.
This is amusing too, because I'm a big Nintendo fan* who is going to be buying a Wii and nothing else this generation, and wrong, because I did not and am not trying to compare the price to the PS3 or any other console.
Oh, and you seem to have missed the point of the second comic. You seem to think it's something like "complaining about having to pay for accessories to play a game is dumb". Actually, the point was that the GBA is something like 1,000 times more popular than the Gamecube, so requiring a GBA is like requiring a house, or clothing, or friends -- they're things you should already have, not extra expenses. To quote Tycho: "The fact of the matter is that it's going to be much harder to find a GameCube than it is to find four people who own GBAs".
* The difference between a fan and a fanboy is that while both are highly enamored with whatever it is they are fan[boy]s of, the fan is able to recognize flaws, failings, and weaknesses while the fanboy blows them off and ignores them as though it were an emotional imperative. For example, a Nintendo fanboy might blow off the high price of an extra controller by saying that you'd have to buy four more controllers to approach the price of a PS3 which he never intended to buy anyway.
So when the game eventually ends or goes under because no one is playing any more not only will Ms. LaRoche not have a job she won't have any marketable skills either.
Um, whatever. At the very least she will have skills doing 3D design. Creating models and skins for someone else's game for free (in this case, a Quake mod) was how one of my friends launched a career in the gaming industry doing 3D modelling and such. It's definitely a marketable skill. Not saying she's got a golden ticket or anything, but it certainly isn't useless experience.
Wii Sports looks like it would be rather dull as a 1 player set of games but $60 is a lot.
It looks like Wii Sports, and possibly a lot of multi-player and party games, won't require the nunchuck attachment. So I think you can get the needed extra controllers for Wii Sports for $40.
I agree though that $60 is a lot. I understand the controller may be pretty sophisticated as controllers go, but that doesn't make $60 less than $60. I was really hoping for 2 controllers in the bundle... If my speculation about multiplayer games and the nunchuck is true, then it would have made sense to include two wiimotes and one nunchuck in the bundle. Give the buyer the controllers needed to enjoy Wii Sports, and demonstrate that the wiimote and nunchuck are separate with the latter not always needed.
But we'll see if that turns out to be true. If most multiplayer games do need the nunchuck (any mp fps game would, I would assume), then that will be expensive.
DT is not a BAD game, just a mediocre one. I could easily name a dozen NES titles which were an order of magnitude worse, and that's not even counting anything by Color Dreams.
I disagree. DT is a terrible game. No it isn't the worst NES game, in particular because unlike a lot of the truly shitty NES games, the makers of Deadly Towers seem to have been trying to make a good game. Instead they made one of the most annoying, frustrating, and utterly pointless RPG/adventures I've ever seen. Perhaps it's that obvious attempt with failed delivery that makes the suckiness of DT that much more poignant.
Or maybe it was the fact that I traded Spy Hunter for Deadly Towers, and regretted the decision within a couple of weeks. I'd sure be a lot more likely to dust off Spy Hunter and jiggle it around in my NES until it worked than I would Deadly Towers. And I wouldn't pay money for the chance to play DT again, unless it was $0.25 for 30 seconds, more than long enough to "show off" the game to a friend.
Speaking of games SeanBaby has made fun of and I've played, Athena isn't the worst NES game ever, but is still extremely bad, for a lot of the same reasons as Deadly Towers.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course String Theory makes testable predictions. Just like General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics make testable predictions.
The bad news is that they are the same predictions that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics make, many of which we've already tested, and is thus indistinguishable from them.
The good news is that String theory makes the same predictions as GR and QM while still being only one theory.
It is the non-compatability of GR and QM that creates the need for something like ST. If ST doesn't make a single unique prediction, but is able to explain both the quantum and relativistic worlds, then not only is that a theory, it's a great theory.
If you have ever been in the Military you would know that a Soldiers are trained to Critly Wound people not out right "KILL"
True, but that's not really the point. To train a soldier to fire in order to wound, you have to get over the resistance to firing which holds the possibility of killing.
I dont blame the game makers i blame the kids parents for allowing a child to become so obsesed with such a violent video game
Based on TFA, I would blame the kid's parents for beating the kid so that he harbored a suppressed desire to kill them. I doubt it was really the video game he was obsessed with. That whole line of reasoning is Thompson's made-up story anyway -- the police merely said they found the game in his room.
Parents need to teach their children the difference between video games and reality. This is the fault of the parents, not the video game company.
Actually, I have a suspicion they already did:
"Posey had told police he shot his family after his father, the ranch foreman, slapped him for not cleaning horse stalls fast enough. Prosecutors described Posey as a ruthless killer, but his lawyers claimed his father had abused him for years. "
Reality is where your dad hits you, and you can't do anything about it.
Fantasy is where you have the power to strike out at those who hurt you.
If he really was abused, then I'd wager he was quite aware of the difference between reality and fantasy, and it was a deliberate choice he made to turn his fantasies into his reality. Obviously, the parents would be muchly to blame in the case also.
I'm sure you are familiar with the anecdote regarding the percentage of soldiers in WWI that couldn't bring themselves to shoot another human being. Target practice at that time was a simple bullseye. When the target was changed to the sillouitte of a human, the percentage of those able to fire a gun at another human increased greatly.
Yes, but there's an important distinction: The soldiers knew they were training to kill other people, knew that the silhouette that was their target was designed to represent the real humans they were training to kill, and thus were consciously building an association between those targets and the real humans they would eventually shoot.
Sane people are easily able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Training a soldier to kill involves deliberately and consciously eroding that barrier to allow them to train on fake targets. And don't forget to say that while the percentage went up, indicating that the training was better, there was still a large percentage of soldiers who were still unable to shoot on real targets.
Soldiers -- professional killers, deliberately trying to gain the ability to fire on real humans with the full encouragement of their superiors, still find it difficult. But video games do this automatically and subconsciously in normal teenagers? Whatever.
If you deliberately use a video game with human-esque targets to train yourself to be able to shoot real humans, then sure it can have the same effect. But so could drawing a cutout of a human torso, handing it on the wall, and pointing at it while saying "Bang!" because it's pretty much the same level of realism and real connection. At the point at which someone is using video games to train themselves to kill in real life, then they're already lost.
Now, instead of a sillouitte, we have a highly graphic representation of what killing someone is really like.
Emphasis mine, and you've got to be kidding me. Have you ever actually touched GTA, or even seen a screenshot?! You'd have to be insane to think any depiction of death in a video game is what it is really like. There is no video game in existence that approaches the reality of something like Saving Private Ryan, but apparently that isn't responsible for training our teens to murder.
But don't say that violent video games can't and don't cause ANY harm, because I will just right you off as biased, unreasoning, and ignorant.
Oh please. Neither you nor anyone else has shown that violent video games cause ANY harm in someone not already intent on violence and that any other form of stimulation wouldn't have caused equally. It doesn't matter if it's a video game, a book, a movie, or a silhouette they paint on the side of the barn -- a person with murderous intent will find a way to steel themselves for it, GTA or no.
Saying otherwise because you just assume video games are different and magical means you're just biased, unreasoning, and ignorant.
"[Grand Theft Auto: Vice City] trained him ''how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer."
Bwa ha ha ha ha!
This is one of those real nice litmus test statements. If someone for even a millisecond considers that this statement might be true, much more so if someone actually utters it themselves, then they clearly have no idea what they are talking about, they have never touched the game, and quite probably have never touched any video game except maybe Pac Man twenty years ago. They're just making shit up because it sounds nice in their lawsuit.
Seriously. There is no way GTA teaches you how to shoot a gun. You hold down the target button until the guy you want to shoot has a green reticle over him, then you press fire. There's no aiming involved, there's no skill in holding a gun, hell you usually can't even see your character's hands since it's a 3rd person view from behind him. This game teaches you nothing.
At least when some ambulence-chasing retard claims video games train people to kill, they at least pick one which involves aiming.
'The $600 million lawsuit names several companies and Cody Posey, who it alleges played the game ''obsessively'' for several months before he shot his father, stepmother and stepsister in July 2004.
So he was obsessed with the game and played for months before killing his family, eh? Well there's no family killing in GTA; if he was truly inspired by GTA he would have gone after cops, mobsters, or hookers. Sounds to me like adorable little Cody already had a target in mind and his obsession revolved around that!
There's really only two options here.
One: Cody was a perfectly innocent fourteen year old boy with no thoughts of violence until he witnessed them in GTA. In this case he may have been innocent but he was also batshit insane, and had he been exposed to the baneful influence of Warner Brothers cartoons he would have killed his family by dropping an anvil on their heads then saying "Th-th-th-th-that's all folks!"
Two: Cody was not an innocent fourteen year old boy, he wasn't obsessed with GTA he was obsessed with slaying his family and GTA was just his focus/outlet. If GTA never existed, it would have been Natural Born Killers, and if not for that it would have been something else. A book, a movie, a play, a song, whatever, it doesn't matter, because that's not what drove him. His own motivations drove him.
Let's see if TFA can help us distinguish which of these might be the case:
Posey had told police he shot his family after his father, the ranch foreman, slapped him for not cleaning horse stalls fast enough. Prosecutors described Posey as a ruthless killer, but his lawyers claimed his father had abused him for years.
Oh, lookie here! Seems like ol' Mr. Posey may have been slapping his boy around for years! So let's consider this again, which sounds more likely: Video games drove Codey Posey to kill his family, and without video games he never would have committed violence. Or recurrent child abuse drove Codey Posey to kill his family, and without recurrent child abuse he never would have committed violence.
And now the boy's extended family -- who were either astoundingly ignorant of what went on, or knew and never did anything -- have enlisted Jack Thompson to help them get $600 million from a video game maker who is only tangentially related to a case about teen violence and child abuse. That's just low. That's a disgusting, sick way of cashing in on a broken family that nobody else tried to fix.
Fuck you, Jack Thompson.
Good point. I'm going to have to go with kfg's theory.
Does that work when you're creating a dynamic pose rather than them just standing straight up? Most artists recommend drawing the body first, then the clothes on top of it, so you can get the clothes right. Going from zero to trenchcoat doesn't sound easier to me, if you want it to look right, but that's me.
I like your answer better.
Honestly? I highly doubt it. I think the extra power of the PS3 is going to be used to show more models/textures at the same time, not the same number of super-detailed models/textures.
The cell processor doesn't help with texture detail, by the way. That's more an issue of graphics memory bandwidth -- which I can't determine exactly without knowing the interface width to the vram which the Wikipedia article doesn't show, but which may not be 6x larger than the PS2's 47GB/s. The cell will be helpfull for geometry transformation, pixel shaders, than kind of thing, which is fine. Look at Doom 3 -- it's textures are not very much more detailed than any other similar game. It's the lighting effects and other processing done to those textures that makes the game look so good.
Remember too that increasing the texture and model detail that much also means a lot more work for the art department. Much less work (and disk space) to develop a shader that can be applied to many textures by the Cell SPEs than to add 6x the detail to every single texture.
So my prediction is that on the PS3 you'll see somewhat (from my butt: 2x) more detailed textures and models, but with more of them on the screen at once and with much more sophisticated shaders and effects that in the end add more to the scene than texture detail would anyway.
For the cost of a PS3, I could buy an XBOX 360 and a couple of prostitutes to pleasure me while I play Geometry Wars! Clearly this is a superior value.
You're right, all of these "[non-PS3 console] + [something else] = PS3!" comparisons are pretty dang silly. If I can't afford a PS3, what makes you think I can afford "Wii60"? Not to mention the games you'd have to buy to justify having two consoles -- whether the combo cost the same as a PS3 or not, it would be dumb to have a $250/$400 console with one or two games.
It does make some sense though if you're the kind of person who would buy two consoles -- MS is basically making the case that you would have more money left over to buy the best games of theirs + nintendo's. Lucky for MS that the Wii almost fits in the price delta between the 360 and PS3. That's the only group I can see buying into this.
With the HD-DVD coming out for X360 at $200, doesn't that put it pretty much in the same ballpark as PS3?
Yup! Thus further confirming that it is the Blu-Ray drive that makes the PS3 so expensive. If Blu-Ray were an optional feature for the PS3 and the console cost the same as the 360, do you think most people would opt for the more expensive Blu-Ray equipped version or not?
Also, a superhero game with a license is the silliest idea ever. Either you have 200 spidermans zipping around (beyond silly), or you can't allow players to play 'name' characters, at which point the whole point of a license goes out of the window. People play license games to 'be the hero' so to speak, and that doesn't work in a MMO. The concept is just broken out of the gate.
Expect a weak ripoff of City of Heroes with marvel (tm)(R)'s added all around, with some weak license-tieins like 'name' heroes giving missions to the player characters, and maybe villains as bosses to whack. With zero endgame gameplay at launch and nearly zero post-launch content.
If Spidey and Wolverine are just hanging around handing out quests and tossing out catch phrases, it will be stupid.
However if they involve these characters in the actual gameplay, it could be pretty fun.
Imagine taking your original hero character, working your way through the ranks, proving your mettle, such that you become a full-fledged X-Man and get to go on missions with Wolverine. Would that satisfy the desire to "be the hero"? It sounds like it to me. Best of both worlds: My own creation, my personal avatar, I am a bad-ass super-hero, and look there's my favorite Marvel characters kicking ass beside me!
Of course practically speaking I'm not expecting anything that involved. It will probably be as you describe, and be crappy. Yet it is possible, if Marvel decides to give Cryptic a serious up-front cash injection so they have enough developers to handle it. Hopefully Cryptic made money of Co(H|V) themselves and can afford more developers. If they take it seriously, spend the money, and do it right, a Marvel MMO could be great.
I'll start holding my breath right... now.
I'd couldn't prove it, but my thought is that the skin tight suits is a result of the historical necessity to keep art costs down in comics.
Drawing clothes is extra work. First you draw the body, then you have to draw the clothes over that body such that they appear to hang naturally.
Or you could just draw the body, and then color it to look like the hero is wearing clothes, maybe add a couple pieces of flair. It's faster, ergo cheaper. Add fifty years and maybe it isn't financially necessary for publishers like Marvel but it has basically become a tradition.
I understand there's a similar explanation for why characters in Japanese comics have crazy-colored hair. Everyone in Japan has black hair, so in B&W comics it made sense to just leave the hair blank to save money and prevent printing problems and their readers just naturally filled it in with the expected color. When they started using color printing, the artists thought why fill in that blank space with black when you could use pink or blue? This, too, then becomes a tradition.
How many Windows users would submit a report to the WGA Problems Forum if they had a problem?
I can't say, but I'm imagining it's a very small fraction of total users.
The point though is to make sure you're comparing like to like. Problem Reports is not the same as Total Problems, just as Potential Problem Reports is not the same as Total Windows Users.
Most game textures I believe today are 8-bit because they do not need a lot of tonal range.
I don't believe that since game consoles have been doing better than 256 color since the Playstation, and a normal TV can do better than that as well. I went to the trouble to look it up, and the Gamecube has a 24 bpp frame buffer, and presumeably 24bpp textures to match. The PS2 uses 16 or 32 bpp, and the Xbox uses 32.
I'm not convinced that pixel depth will end up having any effect on data size, relative to the last generation.
I'm not discounting increased detail in textures, I mentioned it. Yet the fact is you don't need to scale the textures linearly with the increase in resolution. If you didn't increase the texture data at all, you still benefit from having the textures look good on polygons that are farther away from the viewer. This is what you see when going from 800x600 to 1600x1200 in a PC game. Having higher resolution on the same textures makes them look better. With the higher resolution screen you can add more detail to the textures and expect it to be worth something, but you still don't need to multiply the texture data to match screen resolution.
I didn't consider increased bit depth, but I'd have to know what a typical bit depth is for a current console game to guess at whether it would need to be increased.
Playing a game IS full-screen video - it's just rendered.
Um, yeah, that was my point. It's rendered from data that does not have to multiply 6 times over just because the output resolution of the rendering pipeline has multiplied 6 times over. There is not a 1:1 correspondence between vertex/texture data and screen resolution.
For future reference "full screen video" generally refers to the source.
Running at 1080p widescreen instead of 480p standard means that there's 6.75 times more data (1920x1080 vs 640x480).
Only if all your "data" is full screen video.
Most of the time, just like with PC games, all the higher resolution will mean in practice is that you see the same image but with higher resolution. Obviously there will be more data due to the higher capacity of the machine, more vertex data and more detailed texture data, but not 6.75 times as much because you don't need to fill the entire screen with a single texture.
Off the top of my head, Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask use the rumble for certain puzzles.
Which is true, but what's interesting is you didn't need rumble because the rumble pack was an optional piece of equipment that you plugged into the N64 controller's expansion port. So there were puzzles in Ocarina of Time that required rumble, but they were optional puzzles. I don't know about Majora's Mask since I didn't play much past the opening dungeon, but I would reason it too didn't require a rumble pack in order to complete the game.
That makes 360$ for console and roughly 80$ for a controller, so think about that before you think it's god damn expensive in the U.S. So how about the poor people here?
That sucks for sure. You guys always get shafted that way, too.
They may be turned off by it, and they're welcome to go the competition, who will be happy to take twice as much money, or more.
Who cares? Yes the other consoles are more, but stop thinking about it in terms of the console wars for two seconds, and actually think about that family that can barely afford their three kids and want to get them something for christmas. It isn't a choice between the Wii and the Xbox 360, it's a choice between the Wii and something that isn't a console. It's great that you think people who don't want to pay an extra $60 per controller just shouldn't have had the kid who needs a controller in the first place, that's really nice. Regardless, people are in this situation and they have kids and a limited budget. Of course they know kids are expensive; this is why they have a limited budget for gifts in the first place. The price of controllers may put the Wii outside that budget. That's an issue, ignore it if you want to, but it exists.
Let's face it, there's a lot of stuff in the controllers in the first place.
Which I acknowledged in the first post you replied to. That doesn't make the $60 controller any cheaper, it just means they aren't blatantly gouging you. This doesn't make the controller more affordable. That's all I'm saying. You can make whatever justification you want, compare it to anything you want, but $60 is a lot to be able to let one other person play with you.
Yeah, I mean, if you have to buy 3 more controllers to play 4-player multiplayer, the Wii is $490!
Which is a lot of money. The base console is $250, and you've basically doubled that price so you can play Mario Party the way it was intended.
Yeah, it's about the same as an Xbox or Ps3 without anything else, but I'm not buying either of those consoles exactly because they cost so much. I don't give a fuck if I could get a Wii, seven controllers, eight copies of Zelda, and a jewel encrusted chalice for the price of a PS3; the PS3 price is crazy, so "about the same price as PS3" isn't exactly a great argument for how cheap something is!
$60 is a lot for an extra controller, especially if the idea is you're trying to attract people with your low priced console. A family on a budget that wants their three kids to be able to play at once is going to be put off by a $250 price tag now turned $330-$370. That's all there is to it, comparisons to other consoles notwithstanding.
I'm reminded of two Penny-Arcade comics:
You seem to be mistaking me for the guy in the PS3 hat in that amusing PA comic.
This is amusing too, because I'm a big Nintendo fan* who is going to be buying a Wii and nothing else this generation, and wrong, because I did not and am not trying to compare the price to the PS3 or any other console.
Oh, and you seem to have missed the point of the second comic. You seem to think it's something like "complaining about having to pay for accessories to play a game is dumb". Actually, the point was that the GBA is something like 1,000 times more popular than the Gamecube, so requiring a GBA is like requiring a house, or clothing, or friends -- they're things you should already have, not extra expenses. To quote Tycho: "The fact of the matter is that it's going to be much harder to find a GameCube than it is to find four people who own GBAs".
* The difference between a fan and a fanboy is that while both are highly enamored with whatever it is they are fan[boy]s of, the fan is able to recognize flaws, failings, and weaknesses while the fanboy blows them off and ignores them as though it were an emotional imperative. For example, a Nintendo fanboy might blow off the high price of an extra controller by saying that you'd have to buy four more controllers to approach the price of a PS3 which he never intended to buy anyway.
So when the game eventually ends or goes under because no one is playing any more not only will Ms. LaRoche not have a job she won't have any marketable skills either.
Um, whatever. At the very least she will have skills doing 3D design. Creating models and skins for someone else's game for free (in this case, a Quake mod) was how one of my friends launched a career in the gaming industry doing 3D modelling and such. It's definitely a marketable skill. Not saying she's got a golden ticket or anything, but it certainly isn't useless experience.
Wii Sports looks like it would be rather dull as a 1 player set of games but $60 is a lot.
It looks like Wii Sports, and possibly a lot of multi-player and party games, won't require the nunchuck attachment. So I think you can get the needed extra controllers for Wii Sports for $40.
I agree though that $60 is a lot. I understand the controller may be pretty sophisticated as controllers go, but that doesn't make $60 less than $60. I was really hoping for 2 controllers in the bundle... If my speculation about multiplayer games and the nunchuck is true, then it would have made sense to include two wiimotes and one nunchuck in the bundle. Give the buyer the controllers needed to enjoy Wii Sports, and demonstrate that the wiimote and nunchuck are separate with the latter not always needed.
But we'll see if that turns out to be true. If most multiplayer games do need the nunchuck (any mp fps game would, I would assume), then that will be expensive.
DT is not a BAD game, just a mediocre one. I could easily name a dozen NES titles which were an order of magnitude worse, and that's not even counting anything by Color Dreams.
I disagree. DT is a terrible game. No it isn't the worst NES game, in particular because unlike a lot of the truly shitty NES games, the makers of Deadly Towers seem to have been trying to make a good game. Instead they made one of the most annoying, frustrating, and utterly pointless RPG/adventures I've ever seen. Perhaps it's that obvious attempt with failed delivery that makes the suckiness of DT that much more poignant.
Or maybe it was the fact that I traded Spy Hunter for Deadly Towers, and regretted the decision within a couple of weeks. I'd sure be a lot more likely to dust off Spy Hunter and jiggle it around in my NES until it worked than I would Deadly Towers. And I wouldn't pay money for the chance to play DT again, unless it was $0.25 for 30 seconds, more than long enough to "show off" the game to a friend.
Speaking of games SeanBaby has made fun of and I've played, Athena isn't the worst NES game ever, but is still extremely bad, for a lot of the same reasons as Deadly Towers.