His post was made 10 mins after my post, but his statement implies that the conversation that I had with my coworkers is with him - inferring to him being my coworker.
I laughed out loud after reading it. Unfortunately I was mod-bombed so I was hidden underneath while someone stole my post (check his parent's post), but it's cool, I have karma to burn.
I had a quick discussion about this with my coworkers a few mins ago. Most of us generally agreed that there were certain things that google would definately want from youtube, but we were unable to put a finger on it.
Some of us concluded that it was mostly going to be:
a. the users and more importantly
b. the usage pattern of these users
While google has been picking up little things here and there, essentially this is google's first real "social networking" site that they have purchased. I say it in quotes because youtube isn't really a social networking site, but there are certainly aspects of it that cannot be denied.
I say youtube lucked out and google really made a stupid purchase, it appears to me like it was an attrition attempt against the competition in internet space (yahoo? microsoft? myspace? - whoever they think their competition is atm, because I can't tell). I don't know.. I'm curious to see where this goes. Google definately wants to go into the multimedia distribution area, that's for sure. How they go about doing it, we'll have to see..
Try doing something that involves physical activity for once. It's not pretentious. It's a fun and actually normal activity as opposed to slowly killing yourself over increasing some useless number another few points.
Physical activity is not pretentious. Just your attitude on stereotyping ppl that play mmos. Oh, and GP's attitude as well - that is if you are not the same person trying to dodge the monsoon of karma coming your way. Good call posting as AC.
People that play multiplayer games competitively turn off all of the features that they can to make the visuals simpler and easier to compete in.
I disagree
People turn of all the features not becuase it simplifies visuals, but rather to optimize PC performance by giving you a faster framerate allowing you to react faster, since most people don't have the latest and greatest hardware. I attest to this because this is what I do when I pvp. Trying to deathmatch at 17fps is much more difficult than trying to do it at 90fps. If I could deathmatch with all visuals on and at 90fps and the highest resolution, then I totally would. But I can't afford it.:-)
Today's consoles are capable of pushing much more pixels that are comparable to current computers, than consoles 10 years ago compared to comptuers 10 years ago. And think of the price difference as well for consoles to computers back then as well. Not everybody is going to spend thousands of dollars so they can get the latest GeForce2 (!) to play quake or halflife.
That said, I beleive the PC Game Market has always been a niche. Yes, including the Sims despite the huge market penetration (that's more an exception rather than the rule)
And now the current king of the hill is WoW. Even with the millions of subscribers, how many people outside of WoW know anything about it? You spit out terms like MC, dots, nef, raid mob, AQ40 and melting faces (TM), nobody outside of wow will have a clue of what you are talking about. Wouldn't you call that a niche?
I beleive PC gaming in itself is an incredibly geeky thing, complete with their own tight knit geeky community. You have the FPS gaming community that know of every fps under the sun. You have the MMORPG gaming community that's played everything from muds to UO to WoW to beta testing warhammer online. You have the modding community that loves to mess around with the internals of whatever game they are interested in, whether it be the Sims or Oblivion.
Geeks are all about the niche, whether it be Trekkies or Gamers or Browncoats - you can't really say that about your average game console owners. Almost everybody has heard of Mario, and Madden - and they have a good idea of what people are talking about. Can you say the same about MMOs, roguelikes and RTS games (argueably the 3 most popular genres in PC gaming)? or Trekkies? or Browncoats? or D20?
This doesn't sound like a bright idea. If there is literally $1 million just laying around somewhere, I think we're going to end up with a few arrests for damage to property, plus some homicides before the game ends.
Homocides and arrests? Awesome! Now that you mentioned that, Gold Rush is going to be an enormous hit!
Any kind of PR is good PR. Screw the flack, how much advertising $$ does flack bring in?:-)
What that has to do with fun games, is that Sony spend a lot of marketing and licensing dollars trying to create a market that didn't want to be created - money that could have been better spent on.. Oh, say.. games? Game development?
If Sony really wanted to break ahead from the DS, what they should have done was embrace the homebrew community - or at the very least give some kind of advantage to indy game developers to make their own games for cheap, similar to what Steam or Xbox live is doing. But back to the main subject:
I don't care about units sold. I care about how much fun games seem to be for people of either machine. If game were "no fun" on the psp, I'd expect to see reviews all in the red. That is simply not the case.
You have to think from a business perspective in order see the point the parent poster was trying to convey. NeoGeo games had some pretty high ratings too, but nobody was willing to purchase the home console and their games because it was way too expensive, with the exception of a few with deep pockets-and there was a lot of games out for that as well. While there are a number of psp games that are fun, if they aren't runaway successes, then you aren't going to be rolling in the big bucks - and if you are in the business of game development, that's where you want to be. Let's say that you are a game developer, and you see two consoles but you only have the resources to develop for one. One is clearly a superior machine with more flexible options, but the other is cheaper, and has a lot more titles selling over a million units. That 'other' console seems to have a much riper market. Which console are you going to develop for?
Sure, you *could* blame it on the game dev not being able to produce a(n) AAA title (thus the reasoning why the game isn't pushing 1M units out the door), but if you are in the business of game development, are you willing to take that chance, or are you just going to ride the "riper market" wave and see where the 'other' console takes you?
Bottom line is: how much projected $$ will you rake in if you developed for one console vs. the other? The exception being big companies that can develop for both - is there some kind of exclusivity contracting that prevents devs from producing on both (besides the obvious interface issue that is)?
Actaully, the rationale for pirating games was because I couldn't afford them:-P
I'm not going to pretend to take a moral highroad here. Back in the day, I had no money, and I had a lot of time - so I would end up doing things to spend my time, like pirating games. Oddly enough, when I did pirate games, I would actaully spend MORE time in the pirate/cracking/installation process rather than the actaul playing of said game: I could spend hours digging around trying to get the darn thing to work, and once I got it all up and running, I would play it for 10 minutes, get bored, and then search for something else better.
It's as if I was more entertained by that process than the game itself. It's what all childhood geeks do, right? Right?
Now that I'm out of school and working full time, I don't have the time to do the things I used to do. But I still have a gaming itch I want to scratch, and every once in a while I will shop for a game. With my track record of playing games that sucked (since I've played a LOT of them during my pirating youth), I'm going to be pretty fickle on which game I purchase - because it better be worth it.
Many times I'll just walk out the door of the store without purchasing anything - unless I don't have absolutely anything better to do, and some extra cash I don't mind throwing away.
I've since been spending my money on bigger things - assorted geek gadgets! I've got WoW for my gaming goodness so I havne't bought anything since, and I'm pretty much happy with that arrangement: save money from buying games, spend money on new laptop and other gadgets.
I will probably get a Wii however, but that's starting to get offtopic.:-P
Haven't they been saying that piracy's been killing the PC gaming industry for like the past decade? I used to pirate games during the 90's as a poor student, but now I have an income so I purchase everything. I think back to all the games that I've pirated back in the day - and I remember a lot of games generally being terrible.
Perhaps sales are slow because the market has started to reach critical mass - too many games! And way too many of them are crappy.
I mean, even before the advent of emails, who wrote a letter unless he ABSOLUTELY had to? Instead, people called or, if it had to be written, they faxed it. Simply because of the speed difference.
Heh, I wonder if people thought about the telephone system making the postal service obsolete when they first started coming into use a hundred years ago. But I suppose the world was too large for technology to have an immediate impact then.:-P
...Suffice it to say, Tracy and I have been working with the production team for over a year now. They've been wonderful to work with! They've allowed us to have script approval and asked for our suggestions. They've shown us all the art work and allowed us approval on that (as well as the WoTC art director in charge of Dragonlance)...
Weis and Hickman haven't lost complete control (yet), so let's reserve judgement untill we start seeing more material. They'll have a say on the script, and I don't think they are willing so mess this chance by jumping the shark on their fans.
I do think, however, that 90-100 minutes will be way too short. I'm actually more worried that the movie is animated!:-( If it looks like a Don Bluth film, I'm gonna cringe.
There is no real easy way to get both parties (Horde and Alliance) to deal with griefers diplomatically.
Just yesterday I was playing with my cousin (lvl 29 and 30), running around and trying to quest over at Hillsbrad. A pair of NE rogues would be stalking around looking for some easy ganks. After getting ganked and watching them camp us about 7 times, we've decided enough is enough: we logged on our mains, a 60 war and 60 rogue.
So we brought them over to hillsbrad, and at first, I stealthed in and stalked around some fellow horde casters trying to level. Whenever I see some NE rogues sneaking in for the kill, I would take them down in 3 hits. Easiest kills ever. Ganking gankers was about liberation. After a few minutes, it was a clear message that they weren't going to have fun, and they stopped trying and went else where.
Every once in a while some lvl 40s (clearly looking for some easy kills as they are too high for the area to get exp) would be roaming around ganking lowbies. Took them out too. After a while, they got the message as well.
After about 20 mins of that, my 60 warrior buddy was getting bored, and stopped looking for ppl to defend, and decided to have more fun rampaging around downing any alliance he could find. So him and I, we mounted up, and went lowbie hunting. Wiping out parties here and there, we did it enough times where we could clearly see that alliance were getting frustrated, shouting obscenities and whatnot. We didn't care. We were a buncha angry lvl 60's that were all caught up in the moment, when we were just trying to quietly level our way out of hillsbrad an hour before hand in the first place.
Well, about 20 minutes after that, we started seeing some alliance lvl 60's coming on in to help escort the lowbie alliance. They took us down and started camping us. We called in our guild members. We took them down. They called their guild members. And shortly after that it was a grudge match and nobody was getting anything done for about an hour.
Quite the contrary. I like my job, so I don't find it hard at all. I'm fairly efficient at my work, so I can crank out jobs faster than any of my coworkers. It drives me nuts that I have to wait around for so long to get jobs sent to me. So during the slow periods, I slack off on/.:-)
A number of times I will end up doing miscellaneous labor, like moving furniture around the office, cleaning windows and vaccuming since I literally have nothing else to do. I don't mind doing it all, unless I build up a sweat, then I just feel gross - so I try not to do too much sweat inducing activities unless I have a change of clothes (which, most likely I do not). But/, and other tech sites on my rss feed keeps me busy otherwise.
And then there are those times I cannot afford to slack off for lenghty periods of time due to crunch time. Which is fine, because I like what I do - so I don't go into periods of slashdot-withdrawl or anything of the sort when I don't keep up to date on my rss feed.
Astroturf: A manufactured grassroots movement in an attempt to gain positive momentum of a certain product/topic generally done via internet forums. Usually you have a small group of ppl that are paid to do it, and usually saavy ppl see thru it right away as an artificial endorsement of a product, not because they are praising the quality of said product, but because they are being paid to do it. It's like, spam and viral marketing rolled up in one. It's annoying as hell, but sometimes it appears so genuine that oftentimes actual genuine posts can be mistaken for astroturf.
the question in my mind is will it be worth putting up with Nintendo's shenanagans to own one?
Shenanigans? Oh, you mean their willingness to create a product that is aimed at the entertainment for consumers, and to sell them FOR MONEY?! I see the light: those types of crazy shenanigans that Nintendo is willing to pull is outrageous!...It's a sad day to discover that Nintendo is out to make a profit on our behalf.:-(
Nobody has to like it, everbody's just gonna call it 'Nintendo' anyway:
"Looks like Billy is playing something on the Nintendo."
What it appears Nintendo is aiming for is to abstract themselves away from the standardized video game console moniker. I think that was their goal for years. I know too many people that called their NES, SNES, gamecube, and even their DS simply as Nintendo. Few people called their Dreamcast or Genesis their 'Sega,' and almost nobody calls their PS1 or PS2 their 'Sony.'.
I really don't like the name. Almost nobody I know does. But I'de wager that everbody that gets it will call their friends saying that they got "the new Nintendo."
I also didn't like the name DS either. But I got used to it the longer I owned it. A name's a name. Think about it: xbox - sounds like irc slang for female genitalia. A names a name. They could have called it TD0013 - if the hardware is cool, then any name will stick.
Handheld MMOs are the future. As we begin to see more and more wifi access being readily available, what's really going to sell the handheld systems - especially in Japan - is going to be the wave of online rpgs coming forth. (I'm referring to the PSP and the DS, since those two are the only systems I am aware of with wifi connectivity). Yes yes, I am aware the DS is selling very well in Japan, but just wait untill something like pokemon the mmo comes out for the DS. You won't be able to stock the shelves fast enough. That is, of course, if they don't have any problems running their MMO servers...
Actaully I beleive the market is splitting into two: easier portable media, and higher quality home theater.
Less than a week ago we got a samsung 67" DLP, 1080p, for roughly $3300. Then we upgraded to digital cable, and got one of those HDTV cable boxes. As of right now, there are only a handful of channels in HD. We also have a 'sample' HD channel that is used strictly to show off the capabilities of HD - we call it the 'scenery channel.' The scenery channel is outrageous, we just turn it on and watch camera pans of golf courses, it's indeed that amazing.
At a screensize that big, not only can we see the difference between 480i and 720p (which is painfully obvious when we compare it side by side), but we can also see the difference between 720p and 1080p. DVDs which are all recorded in 480p look 'better' than regular television, but my parents would have never remarked how 'blurry' the dvds tested were compared to the 'scenery channel.' Dvds we tested: SW:EP1, LOTR, Pearl Harbor, Harry Potter 4, and Gladiator.
Prices for big screen televisions are going down faster than ever, and the future is headed where people will be reaching for a 50 inch television (that outputs highdef) for less than a thousand dollars. Once the market reaches there, the demand for more highdef stuff will explode (which, of course bluray or HDDVD will be there to fill some gaps). The demand for high def will cause the files for these things to be so large, that the internet will no longer be a cheap transport medium to obtain them - unless something is sacrificed, i.e. the HD signal, or surround sound, or whatever causes a high quality movie watching experience high quality.
Hence the market splits into two groups, one group that is looking for lower quality, affordable content they can put on their PMP, and the other group looking for highquality, more expensive content that supports a better overall theatergoing experience.
I put my computer underneath my desk, so I can rest my feet up on it. Perhaps what I am speaking is blasphemy, but it's just _comfortable_. Make sure you have a case wher the top is flat, so those new dells aren't gonna cut it. Also, I opted to use a trackball instead of a mouse, so I don't have to do any of that 'moving my arms around' stuff. The only hassle is me moving my arm back and forth from the keyboard to the trackball, but even that is minimized as I try to make use of all the keyboard shortcuts of whatever app I'm using.
As for my seating posture, hrm, I just lean back, but whatever I'm doing requires some actual brainpower, I kinda each forward untill I'm at the edge of my seat, staring at my screen. Generally that odesn't happen often, and mostly when that does happen, I'm usually looking for a pen and pad handy to doodle. Oh yeah, and make sure your chair has armrests. I don't actaully use the armrest to rest my arms, it's more kinda like to prevent me from falling out of my chair. *shrug*
Slashdot Mirror
His post was made 10 mins after my post, but his statement implies that the conversation that I had with my coworkers is with him - inferring to him being my coworker.
I laughed out loud after reading it. Unfortunately I was mod-bombed so I was hidden underneath while someone stole my post (check his parent's post), but it's cool, I have karma to burn.
Some of us concluded that it was mostly going to be:
a. the users and more importantly
b. the usage pattern of these users
While google has been picking up little things here and there, essentially this is google's first real "social networking" site that they have purchased. I say it in quotes because youtube isn't really a social networking site, but there are certainly aspects of it that cannot be denied.
I say youtube lucked out and google really made a stupid purchase, it appears to me like it was an attrition attempt against the competition in internet space (yahoo? microsoft? myspace? - whoever they think their competition is atm, because I can't tell). I don't know.. I'm curious to see where this goes. Google definately wants to go into the multimedia distribution area, that's for sure. How they go about doing it, we'll have to see..
Physical activity is not pretentious. Just your attitude on stereotyping ppl that play mmos. Oh, and GP's attitude as well - that is if you are not the same person trying to dodge the monsoon of karma coming your way. Good call posting as AC.
I disagree
People turn of all the features not becuase it simplifies visuals, but rather to optimize PC performance by giving you a faster framerate allowing you to react faster, since most people don't have the latest and greatest hardware. I attest to this because this is what I do when I pvp. Trying to deathmatch at 17fps is much more difficult than trying to do it at 90fps. If I could deathmatch with all visuals on and at 90fps and the highest resolution, then I totally would. But I can't afford it. :-)
That said, I beleive the PC Game Market has always been a niche. Yes, including the Sims despite the huge market penetration (that's more an exception rather than the rule)
And now the current king of the hill is WoW. Even with the millions of subscribers, how many people outside of WoW know anything about it? You spit out terms like MC, dots, nef, raid mob, AQ40 and melting faces (TM), nobody outside of wow will have a clue of what you are talking about. Wouldn't you call that a niche?
I beleive PC gaming in itself is an incredibly geeky thing, complete with their own tight knit geeky community. You have the FPS gaming community that know of every fps under the sun. You have the MMORPG gaming community that's played everything from muds to UO to WoW to beta testing warhammer online. You have the modding community that loves to mess around with the internals of whatever game they are interested in, whether it be the Sims or Oblivion.
Geeks are all about the niche, whether it be Trekkies or Gamers or Browncoats - you can't really say that about your average game console owners. Almost everybody has heard of Mario, and Madden - and they have a good idea of what people are talking about. Can you say the same about MMOs, roguelikes and RTS games (argueably the 3 most popular genres in PC gaming)? or Trekkies? or Browncoats? or D20?
I've always figured that everybody knew that Blizzard 'stole' ideas from GW. My, how times have changed.
which is why a major corporation will go straight to the source: have the site shut down - legally, or illegally.
Homocides and arrests? Awesome! Now that you mentioned that, Gold Rush is going to be an enormous hit!
Any kind of PR is good PR. Screw the flack, how much advertising $$ does flack bring in? :-)
What that has to do with fun games, is that Sony spend a lot of marketing and licensing dollars trying to create a market that didn't want to be created - money that could have been better spent on.. Oh, say.. games? Game development?
If Sony really wanted to break ahead from the DS, what they should have done was embrace the homebrew community - or at the very least give some kind of advantage to indy game developers to make their own games for cheap, similar to what Steam or Xbox live is doing. But back to the main subject:
I don't care about units sold. I care about how much fun games seem to be for people of either machine. If game were "no fun" on the psp, I'd expect to see reviews all in the red. That is simply not the case.
You have to think from a business perspective in order see the point the parent poster was trying to convey. NeoGeo games had some pretty high ratings too, but nobody was willing to purchase the home console and their games because it was way too expensive, with the exception of a few with deep pockets-and there was a lot of games out for that as well. While there are a number of psp games that are fun, if they aren't runaway successes, then you aren't going to be rolling in the big bucks - and if you are in the business of game development, that's where you want to be. Let's say that you are a game developer, and you see two consoles but you only have the resources to develop for one. One is clearly a superior machine with more flexible options, but the other is cheaper, and has a lot more titles selling over a million units. That 'other' console seems to have a much riper market. Which console are you going to develop for?
Sure, you *could* blame it on the game dev not being able to produce a(n) AAA title (thus the reasoning why the game isn't pushing 1M units out the door), but if you are in the business of game development, are you willing to take that chance, or are you just going to ride the "riper market" wave and see where the 'other' console takes you?
Bottom line is: how much projected $$ will you rake in if you developed for one console vs. the other? The exception being big companies that can develop for both - is there some kind of exclusivity contracting that prevents devs from producing on both (besides the obvious interface issue that is)?
I'm not going to pretend to take a moral highroad here. Back in the day, I had no money, and I had a lot of time - so I would end up doing things to spend my time, like pirating games. Oddly enough, when I did pirate games, I would actaully spend MORE time in the pirate/cracking/installation process rather than the actaul playing of said game: I could spend hours digging around trying to get the darn thing to work, and once I got it all up and running, I would play it for 10 minutes, get bored, and then search for something else better.
It's as if I was more entertained by that process than the game itself. It's what all childhood geeks do, right? Right?
Now that I'm out of school and working full time, I don't have the time to do the things I used to do. But I still have a gaming itch I want to scratch, and every once in a while I will shop for a game. With my track record of playing games that sucked (since I've played a LOT of them during my pirating youth), I'm going to be pretty fickle on which game I purchase - because it better be worth it.
Many times I'll just walk out the door of the store without purchasing anything - unless I don't have absolutely anything better to do, and some extra cash I don't mind throwing away.
I've since been spending my money on bigger things - assorted geek gadgets! I've got WoW for my gaming goodness so I havne't bought anything since, and I'm pretty much happy with that arrangement: save money from buying games, spend money on new laptop and other gadgets.
I will probably get a Wii however, but that's starting to get offtopic. :-P
Perhaps sales are slow because the market has started to reach critical mass - too many games! And way too many of them are crappy.
Heh, I wonder if people thought about the telephone system making the postal service obsolete when they first started coming into use a hundred years ago. But I suppose the world was too large for technology to have an immediate impact then.
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/
Check the articles by Ron Edwards
Weis and Hickman haven't lost complete control (yet), so let's reserve judgement untill we start seeing more material. They'll have a say on the script, and I don't think they are willing so mess this chance by jumping the shark on their fans.
I do think, however, that 90-100 minutes will be way too short. I'm actually more worried that the movie is animated! :-( If it looks like a Don Bluth film, I'm gonna cringe.
Just yesterday I was playing with my cousin (lvl 29 and 30), running around and trying to quest over at Hillsbrad. A pair of NE rogues would be stalking around looking for some easy ganks. After getting ganked and watching them camp us about 7 times, we've decided enough is enough: we logged on our mains, a 60 war and 60 rogue.
So we brought them over to hillsbrad, and at first, I stealthed in and stalked around some fellow horde casters trying to level. Whenever I see some NE rogues sneaking in for the kill, I would take them down in 3 hits. Easiest kills ever. Ganking gankers was about liberation. After a few minutes, it was a clear message that they weren't going to have fun, and they stopped trying and went else where.
Every once in a while some lvl 40s (clearly looking for some easy kills as they are too high for the area to get exp) would be roaming around ganking lowbies. Took them out too. After a while, they got the message as well.
After about 20 mins of that, my 60 warrior buddy was getting bored, and stopped looking for ppl to defend, and decided to have more fun rampaging around downing any alliance he could find. So him and I, we mounted up, and went lowbie hunting. Wiping out parties here and there, we did it enough times where we could clearly see that alliance were getting frustrated, shouting obscenities and whatnot. We didn't care. We were a buncha angry lvl 60's that were all caught up in the moment, when we were just trying to quietly level our way out of hillsbrad an hour before hand in the first place.
Well, about 20 minutes after that, we started seeing some alliance lvl 60's coming on in to help escort the lowbie alliance. They took us down and started camping us. We called in our guild members. We took them down. They called their guild members. And shortly after that it was a grudge match and nobody was getting anything done for about an hour.
I hate Hillsbrad. Wish I joined a pve server.
kinda offtopic, but the Lost Viking characters are in WoW, stuck inside a cave over at Uldaman. Just some neat trivia
Quite the contrary. I like my job, so I don't find it hard at all. I'm fairly efficient at my work, so I can crank out jobs faster than any of my coworkers. It drives me nuts that I have to wait around for so long to get jobs sent to me. So during the slow periods, I slack off on /. :-)
A number of times I will end up doing miscellaneous labor, like moving furniture around the office, cleaning windows and vaccuming since I literally have nothing else to do. I don't mind doing it all, unless I build up a sweat, then I just feel gross - so I try not to do too much sweat inducing activities unless I have a change of clothes (which, most likely I do not). But /, and other tech sites on my rss feed keeps me busy otherwise.
And then there are those times I cannot afford to slack off for lenghty periods of time due to crunch time. Which is fine, because I like what I do - so I don't go into periods of slashdot-withdrawl or anything of the sort when I don't keep up to date on my rss feed.
Astroturf: A manufactured grassroots movement in an attempt to gain positive momentum of a certain product/topic generally done via internet forums. Usually you have a small group of ppl that are paid to do it, and usually saavy ppl see thru it right away as an artificial endorsement of a product, not because they are praising the quality of said product, but because they are being paid to do it. It's like, spam and viral marketing rolled up in one. It's annoying as hell, but sometimes it appears so genuine that oftentimes actual genuine posts can be mistaken for astroturf.
Shenanigans? Oh, you mean their willingness to create a product that is aimed at the entertainment for consumers, and to sell them FOR MONEY?! I see the light: those types of crazy shenanigans that Nintendo is willing to pull is outrageous! ...It's a sad day to discover that Nintendo is out to make a profit on our behalf. :-(
"Looks like Billy is playing something on the Nintendo."
What it appears Nintendo is aiming for is to abstract themselves away from the standardized video game console moniker. I think that was their goal for years. I know too many people that called their NES, SNES, gamecube, and even their DS simply as Nintendo. Few people called their Dreamcast or Genesis their 'Sega,' and almost nobody calls their PS1 or PS2 their 'Sony.' .
I really don't like the name. Almost nobody I know does. But I'de wager that everbody that gets it will call their friends saying that they got "the new Nintendo."
I also didn't like the name DS either. But I got used to it the longer I owned it. A name's a name. Think about it: xbox - sounds like irc slang for female genitalia. A names a name. They could have called it TD0013 - if the hardware is cool, then any name will stick.
hey, it could have been worse. It could have been a Dodge Ram. :-P
Handheld MMOs are the future. As we begin to see more and more wifi access being readily available, what's really going to sell the handheld systems - especially in Japan - is going to be the wave of online rpgs coming forth. (I'm referring to the PSP and the DS, since those two are the only systems I am aware of with wifi connectivity). Yes yes, I am aware the DS is selling very well in Japan, but just wait untill something like pokemon the mmo comes out for the DS. You won't be able to stock the shelves fast enough. That is, of course, if they don't have any problems running their MMO servers...
Less than a week ago we got a samsung 67" DLP, 1080p, for roughly $3300. Then we upgraded to digital cable, and got one of those HDTV cable boxes. As of right now, there are only a handful of channels in HD. We also have a 'sample' HD channel that is used strictly to show off the capabilities of HD - we call it the 'scenery channel.' The scenery channel is outrageous, we just turn it on and watch camera pans of golf courses, it's indeed that amazing.
At a screensize that big, not only can we see the difference between 480i and 720p (which is painfully obvious when we compare it side by side), but we can also see the difference between 720p and 1080p. DVDs which are all recorded in 480p look 'better' than regular television, but my parents would have never remarked how 'blurry' the dvds tested were compared to the 'scenery channel.' Dvds we tested: SW:EP1, LOTR, Pearl Harbor, Harry Potter 4, and Gladiator.
Prices for big screen televisions are going down faster than ever, and the future is headed where people will be reaching for a 50 inch television (that outputs highdef) for less than a thousand dollars. Once the market reaches there, the demand for more highdef stuff will explode (which, of course bluray or HDDVD will be there to fill some gaps). The demand for high def will cause the files for these things to be so large, that the internet will no longer be a cheap transport medium to obtain them - unless something is sacrificed, i.e. the HD signal, or surround sound, or whatever causes a high quality movie watching experience high quality.
Hence the market splits into two groups, one group that is looking for lower quality, affordable content they can put on their PMP, and the other group looking for highquality, more expensive content that supports a better overall theatergoing experience.
As for my seating posture, hrm, I just lean back, but whatever I'm doing requires some actual brainpower, I kinda each forward untill I'm at the edge of my seat, staring at my screen. Generally that odesn't happen often, and mostly when that does happen, I'm usually looking for a pen and pad handy to doodle. Oh yeah, and make sure your chair has armrests. I don't actaully use the armrest to rest my arms, it's more kinda like to prevent me from falling out of my chair. *shrug*
lazy is the way to go.
Heh, a Nintendo DS would cost roughly $65 back in 1985, $100 in 1991. Sorry, I wasn't trying to make a point, I was just thinking out loud. :-P