I'll believe he can complete a game when, well, when sheep fly. It seems he lost his knack for COMPLETING games a long time ago, which is a real shame. I have many fond memories of llamatron.
My last purchase with EA was a BF2 booster pack through their newly christened download service. Didn't work, tech support doesn't know why and will only give me the same answer repeatedly despite telling them their canned answer doesn't work. I looked around, and this problem is experienced by numerous other users besides me but isn't addressed by EA. So of course, that taught me not to buy any more EA products. BF2142 being one I would have bought if not for my problems with the previous iteration.
EA is at that point where they think they can comfortably ignore customers' complaints and it won't matter since they have so many -other- customers. Lose a few, who cares, you're still raking in the dough based on marketshare alone. The trouble is, they upset enough people and soon there aren't enough -other- customers left to keep them afloat. Just about any company past a critical size seems to make this gamble, 'saving' money with shoddy customer service in the hopes that people continue to come back in spite of poor service.
I don't really care to hear about it every time the president of Immersion makes some pithy comment about how stupid Sony is for leaving the rumble out of the Playstation controller because he's missing the dumptruck loads of money it would have fetched him.
Frankly, I've never been 'immersed' any further in a game because the controller shook in my hands, I've always disabled it, and on the slim chance I purchase a PS3 anytime soon I definitely won't miss it.
That said, Sony has made some fantastically ridiculous statements about the rumble feature since deciding they don't want to pay for it, or rather don't want to make their customers pay for it on top of everything else they've crammed in their latest system. I mean, Blu-Ray supposedly adds hundreds of dollars to the unit cost and few gamers have been clamoring for it, but they sure as heck didn't let that stop them from adding it.
Sorry, but the pointless time limit to the missions killed whatever fun might be hidden in there for me.
Nintendo : "Are you excited to get behind the controls of an Arwing again?"
Me : "YES!"
Nintendo : "Great! You can't play for any longer than a few seconds before you have to frantically scramble to get more time in which to play!"
Me : *tears*
I really think they just lazily jammed in the time limit mechanic to try and take the player's attention from the fact that they weren't having as much fun as they did with Star Fox and Star Fox 64. A distraction tactic more than a game design decision.
If there's no free demo available, and you're shelling out 15 dollars to play the first portion of the game, you've just paid 15 dollars for a demo of the game. That would be moot if there's a demo for download, but I personally wouldn't go spending 15 bucks a pop just to see if I like a game and want to buy the whole thing.
Online distribution has become pervasive enough that even the BIGGEST names in publishing are looking for content from the smallest of developers, and Warren repeatedly goes off telling the little guy to give up? I agree with some of what he says. A small team hoping to get signed to make the next Half Life or Halo just isn't going to happen, but in reality it's a great time to be a small developer with a good idea.
I can kind of understand this remark coming from him considering that he did use dual analog sticks in an unconventional (although not entirely new) way to control the Katamari. But has he seriously never considered how the shape of ALMOST EVERY GAME WE PLAY today has been entirely, uh, controlled by the input options available to designers? When I consider it, the venerable old analog stick is just a metaphor for human locomotion. We are all creatures which, essentially, just move about in a 2-dimensional plane. Hence, our joysticks are 2-d input devices optimized for making our little avatar run around on an essentially flat plane of polygons.
Trouble is, we humans do so much more than just moving around. We pick up and manipulate things with our hands, we swing our heads around, etc. Three dimensionally complex motions like this have always just boiled down to "press a button to perform an action". Yes, just picking things up will get boring, but my point is that maybe designers can now focus on actions at a finer level of detail than just "move here and press a button". My skill at a sword fighting game can now be based on my ability to move in a way that actually mimics real swordfighting, instead of the challenge of pressing a button at the correct time. I can now play a billiards game where I actually have to move like a person playing pool would. We can now shape challenges in ways that aren't limited to a direction and a binary input.
Videogame players are comfortable with our conventions. Of course we can immerse ourselves in an experience that completely abstracts itself through joysticks and buttons, because we've grown up doing it, our minds are trained to do it. Nintendo sees the masses of people out there who can't understand this, those people who see the moving of sticks and the pressing of buttons as the central part of the experience, and who can't understand why the rest of us are so enamored of it. That's why Nintendo is pushing this, and why they'll have a 'backwards compatible' controller for the Revolution.
As bullish as I am on the controller, I still want to see it in action, use one for myself, to see if the promise pays off. But still, at least Nintendo is trying to open new doors for designers to peer through.
I didn't see a single ~gameplay~ innovation mentioned in the article apart from playing both sides (but apparently playing them through entirely conventional means). The setting did sound quite unlike the usual fantasy fare, but I don't really associate a new setting or plot with true videogame innovation.
You've clearly made games that people enjoyed and will remember. I'd hardly call that a pointless existence in a world where so many people can't make that claim. Really Jeff, if you've got a model that works for you, nobody expects you to change just for the sake of change. Sure, I'm one of those people that will complain about our tired old rehashed models. But I'm not the guy you're trying to sell old school RPG's to either.
Don't make a historical RPG unless you LOVE history, and desperately want to play a historical RPG. If you're doing it JUST to say you're doing something different, the passion won't be there and everybody will know it. Did you love making the game? Then make another one, and make it better. Listen to feedback, find out what it needs. Then do it. You of all people should know that success with something just isn't going to fall out of the sky. It may take more than one game to get your newly envisioned formula right. No, it won't be a financial cakewalk, but passion and success don't always meet with each other right away.
I guess the money men like to have some concrete metrics they can hang their hats on, but the hard truth is just that CREATIVE TEAMS make great games. Without a good vision and good creative people behind it, no amount of time will make the game great.
From TFA: "The trick would be to find ways to keep each activity as deep and fun as possible, while still maintaining the breadth of so many activities."
No kidding. Designing and implementing a game that only utilizes ONE type of gameplay, and makes that one kind fun and interesting, can consume two to three years of a team's time. And making a particular style of play fun generally means an engine specialized for that mode of play as well. And this game is supposed to have them all, and they're all still fun?
GTA displayed this trait. If it had just been a racing game, it would have compared pretty poorly to other racing games. Ditto for third person action adventures. It was the story, setting, and sandbox element that made GTA a success. I'm not saying a snow game couldn't be done well, just that it would take an astronomical amount of effort to make the game as described really come together.
I like the idea, though. I'd like to see a 'snow engine' that allowed players to sculpt snow into various forms. The Revolution controller may be a perfect fit for something like that. Scoop it down near the floor to pick up a fistful of snow. Then throw it by swinging the controller, or take it over to a growing fort to shore up a wall.
It makes sense that if someone wasn't interested in the previous iteration, that they won't be interested in the next, and thus of course customer numbers are going to decrease over time because some of your old customers just don't want to play franchise X anymore. Also, you're competing with your own previous title that's sitting there in the bargain bin with a much more attractive price.
Yeah, I didn't explain that at all. It was essentially Contra (from an overhead perspective al a NeoC) with brawling, and some very good brawling at that. The hand to hand combat designer is a hardcore 2-d fighter player and the fighting had a little depth to it once you learned all of a characters' moves. The neat part was figuring out how to best balance the hand to hand action and the gunplay. Your guns would overheat with constant use, and too much brawling might not dispatch larger swarms of enemies fast enough.
While it wasn't cancelled, Acclaim's The Red Star fell *just* short of making it to market when Acclaim finally closed the doors. It had already been approved by Sony for NTSC and was almost through Microsoft. Acclaim management didn't think the game would come to any notoriety thus nobody in power had any desire to muck about with it in an attempt to attach their name to it, which thankfully left the development team unfettered ability to do as they saw fit. I even have to commend the guys at Archangel for not trying to steer the gameplay design. Though they did throw the occasional fit when a color or shape didn't fit their vision of the license. I'm a rabid shooter fan who worked on it and trust me, rabid shooter fans everywhere were denied a pretty good game.
I heard the comic guys who held the Red Star license were shopping it around, but I never heard of any publisher taking interest in it. I noticed it was conspicuously absent from the list of Acclaim properties up for sale, I guess because of the licensing issues.
There are supposedly some fairly close-to-final ROMS of the XBox build out there, I highly recommend it if you're into shooters or brawlers.
We don't buy Game X based on whether or not it's used, we buy it because we want to play Game X! If it's not in the New Releases section anymore, not produced, not shipping, and not sold new, how the heck else are we to acquire it?
Instead of making vanilla "mainstream" stuff in an attempt to appeal to as many people as possible (as seems to be the impression here), it would be better to bring the focus in and look for niches of people who would play a videogame if it catered to their interests. Like Guitar Heroes (a game the blog writer mentions often). There are a lot of people who'd love to experience rocking out on a stage in an auditorium but who have no desire to shoot hookers or aliens or pwn noobs.
I'm probably what the demographicists would label 'hardcore', so why should I care? Because I don't want to play hardcore games. Above all else I want to experience games that are fun, and some of those games probably lie well outside what the marketers are willing to push to the hardcore crowd.
I don't think the weapons on the choppers are overpowered, I expect their weapons to be devastating. I think the choppers are just too well armored. It should never take three anti-tank rockets to take down a helicopter. Flying the choppers should be as much about limiting your exposure to enemy fire as launching rockets.
When in a vehicle you can use the surroundings to your advantage to limit aircrafts' avenues of attack. Don't expect to park an M1A1 in the middle of an open field and not attract some destructive attention.
I do agree the game needed better AA defenses overall though. One of the support classes definitely needed shoulder fired AA rockets.
As far as point-whoring, it's to be expected in any scored system. Find a server where team based play is important to everyone.
I wonder why they were wireless to begin with.
on
MS On 360 Wireless Issues
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why were wireless controllers used in the kiosks if they just had to be chained or otherwise physically attached to the kiosk anyway?
SMB2 was waaaay too difficult, with too many puzzles that just required banging your, um, monkey against for too many repetitions in the hope that by random luck you'd get through the ring. I love the basic idea of the game, I just hated the direction they took it in the sequel.
And maybe this time they'll FIX THE CAMERA! Far too many times I desperately needed to look in a different direction for precise maneuvering but couldn't because camera control was apparently not a design goal in that game. Truly frustrating to see a game go so far and then drop the ball on such an important issue.
The minigames were generally very good, but they really screwed up the racing game in SMB2 with the forests of bumper posts everywhere.
The previous game I worked on required a free roaming camera, and what I found was that players DON'T want anything fancy. Don't try to second guess what they want, because what they want is for the camera to NOT swing around while they're moving forward. Minimisation of changes in the yaw of the line of sight is far more important than the designer setting up some 'cinematic' looking swoops as far as our players were concerned. If the player ran in a direction not parallel to the line of sight, you could slowly turn the camera towards the player's direction to minimize the need for manual control without inducing complaints though. The camera did a few raycasts to try and predict when an obstacle would obscure the player (like approaching a corner) and react, but again not making sudden shifts was key to keeping people happy.
Our current game places the camera on rails and thus avoids many problems of the "3d soft" scheme. But now the fact that the avatar isn't always standing at the center of the screen coupled with the fact the designers sometimes want overhead views and sometimes want more horizontal views introduces a totally different (but much easier to fix) set of problems. Control is always camera relative, but sometimes you want "away" on the joystick to make the player run parallel to the line of sight even though this takes the player towards the center of the screen due to perspective (corridors demand this), yet other times "away" on the controller needs to mean the player's movement on screen is straight towards the top of the screen (so their x-coordinate onscreen remains constant).
Has there been any information on how many of the screens will be lit? I would hope Nintendo has learned its lesson and would now consider this such an indispensable feature that it's a given thing on any future handheld.
Or maybe lit screens will just be left for the "Nitro SP" released in 2006?
Mine did very poorly at meeting my expectations for surviving until the next generation. It started dying a slow death a few weeks back (freezing up after playing for a while), which is apparently not uncommon. I took it to a game shop that buys back consoles and will use what I got back to subsidize my purchase of...another PS2. *hangs head in shame* While I despise the lack of quality of Sony's products I still have to play those exclusive titles. My PS1 died an early death too, but wasn't expensive to replace since they'd been out for years. I guess Sony's counting on this built in self destruction mechanism to sell more consoles for the foreseeable future.
From what friends in the same boat have told me, the drives go out. I can actually understand mechanisms with moving parts failing after n hours of use, and my PS2 was a model 30001, from the first batch sold in North America. I just feel like as long as CD drives have been around they should know how to make them last longer than three years.
"It's not a surprise to us that the U.S. market needs a lot more work," she said. "[We've] still got a lot of work to do from an educational standpoint," Usina added...
Yeah, but the ones who need educating aren't your consumers. I finally tried one at a kiosk in a Gamestop the other day, and to quote a character from a recent Nintendo game: "Sloooooooow."
Slashdot Mirror
I'll believe he can complete a game when, well, when sheep fly. It seems he lost his knack for COMPLETING games a long time ago, which is a real shame. I have many fond memories of llamatron.
I just sort of glanced at it, but the bullet points sounded like a description of Second Life to me. Maybe I overlooked something.
My last purchase with EA was a BF2 booster pack through their newly christened download service. Didn't work, tech support doesn't know why and will only give me the same answer repeatedly despite telling them their canned answer doesn't work. I looked around, and this problem is experienced by numerous other users besides me but isn't addressed by EA. So of course, that taught me not to buy any more EA products. BF2142 being one I would have bought if not for my problems with the previous iteration. EA is at that point where they think they can comfortably ignore customers' complaints and it won't matter since they have so many -other- customers. Lose a few, who cares, you're still raking in the dough based on marketshare alone. The trouble is, they upset enough people and soon there aren't enough -other- customers left to keep them afloat. Just about any company past a critical size seems to make this gamble, 'saving' money with shoddy customer service in the hopes that people continue to come back in spite of poor service.
I don't really care to hear about it every time the president of Immersion makes some pithy comment about how stupid Sony is for leaving the rumble out of the Playstation controller because he's missing the dumptruck loads of money it would have fetched him. Frankly, I've never been 'immersed' any further in a game because the controller shook in my hands, I've always disabled it, and on the slim chance I purchase a PS3 anytime soon I definitely won't miss it. That said, Sony has made some fantastically ridiculous statements about the rumble feature since deciding they don't want to pay for it, or rather don't want to make their customers pay for it on top of everything else they've crammed in their latest system. I mean, Blu-Ray supposedly adds hundreds of dollars to the unit cost and few gamers have been clamoring for it, but they sure as heck didn't let that stop them from adding it.
Sorry, but the pointless time limit to the missions killed whatever fun might be hidden in there for me. Nintendo : "Are you excited to get behind the controls of an Arwing again?" Me : "YES!" Nintendo : "Great! You can't play for any longer than a few seconds before you have to frantically scramble to get more time in which to play!" Me : *tears* I really think they just lazily jammed in the time limit mechanic to try and take the player's attention from the fact that they weren't having as much fun as they did with Star Fox and Star Fox 64. A distraction tactic more than a game design decision.
If there's no free demo available, and you're shelling out 15 dollars to play the first portion of the game, you've just paid 15 dollars for a demo of the game. That would be moot if there's a demo for download, but I personally wouldn't go spending 15 bucks a pop just to see if I like a game and want to buy the whole thing.
Online distribution has become pervasive enough that even the BIGGEST names in publishing are looking for content from the smallest of developers, and Warren repeatedly goes off telling the little guy to give up? I agree with some of what he says. A small team hoping to get signed to make the next Half Life or Halo just isn't going to happen, but in reality it's a great time to be a small developer with a good idea.
I can kind of understand this remark coming from him considering that he did use dual analog sticks in an unconventional (although not entirely new) way to control the Katamari. But has he seriously never considered how the shape of ALMOST EVERY GAME WE PLAY today has been entirely, uh, controlled by the input options available to designers? When I consider it, the venerable old analog stick is just a metaphor for human locomotion. We are all creatures which, essentially, just move about in a 2-dimensional plane. Hence, our joysticks are 2-d input devices optimized for making our little avatar run around on an essentially flat plane of polygons. Trouble is, we humans do so much more than just moving around. We pick up and manipulate things with our hands, we swing our heads around, etc. Three dimensionally complex motions like this have always just boiled down to "press a button to perform an action". Yes, just picking things up will get boring, but my point is that maybe designers can now focus on actions at a finer level of detail than just "move here and press a button". My skill at a sword fighting game can now be based on my ability to move in a way that actually mimics real swordfighting, instead of the challenge of pressing a button at the correct time. I can now play a billiards game where I actually have to move like a person playing pool would. We can now shape challenges in ways that aren't limited to a direction and a binary input. Videogame players are comfortable with our conventions. Of course we can immerse ourselves in an experience that completely abstracts itself through joysticks and buttons, because we've grown up doing it, our minds are trained to do it. Nintendo sees the masses of people out there who can't understand this, those people who see the moving of sticks and the pressing of buttons as the central part of the experience, and who can't understand why the rest of us are so enamored of it. That's why Nintendo is pushing this, and why they'll have a 'backwards compatible' controller for the Revolution. As bullish as I am on the controller, I still want to see it in action, use one for myself, to see if the promise pays off. But still, at least Nintendo is trying to open new doors for designers to peer through.
I didn't see a single ~gameplay~ innovation mentioned in the article apart from playing both sides (but apparently playing them through entirely conventional means). The setting did sound quite unlike the usual fantasy fare, but I don't really associate a new setting or plot with true videogame innovation.
You've clearly made games that people enjoyed and will remember. I'd hardly call that a pointless existence in a world where so many people can't make that claim. Really Jeff, if you've got a model that works for you, nobody expects you to change just for the sake of change. Sure, I'm one of those people that will complain about our tired old rehashed models. But I'm not the guy you're trying to sell old school RPG's to either.
Don't make a historical RPG unless you LOVE history, and desperately want to play a historical RPG. If you're doing it JUST to say you're doing something different, the passion won't be there and everybody will know it. Did you love making the game? Then make another one, and make it better. Listen to feedback, find out what it needs. Then do it. You of all people should know that success with something just isn't going to fall out of the sky. It may take more than one game to get your newly envisioned formula right. No, it won't be a financial cakewalk, but passion and success don't always meet with each other right away.
I guess the money men like to have some concrete metrics they can hang their hats on, but the hard truth is just that CREATIVE TEAMS make great games. Without a good vision and good creative people behind it, no amount of time will make the game great.
From TFA: "The trick would be to find ways to keep each activity as deep and fun as possible, while still maintaining the breadth of so many activities." No kidding. Designing and implementing a game that only utilizes ONE type of gameplay, and makes that one kind fun and interesting, can consume two to three years of a team's time. And making a particular style of play fun generally means an engine specialized for that mode of play as well. And this game is supposed to have them all, and they're all still fun? GTA displayed this trait. If it had just been a racing game, it would have compared pretty poorly to other racing games. Ditto for third person action adventures. It was the story, setting, and sandbox element that made GTA a success. I'm not saying a snow game couldn't be done well, just that it would take an astronomical amount of effort to make the game as described really come together. I like the idea, though. I'd like to see a 'snow engine' that allowed players to sculpt snow into various forms. The Revolution controller may be a perfect fit for something like that. Scoop it down near the floor to pick up a fistful of snow. Then throw it by swinging the controller, or take it over to a growing fort to shore up a wall.
It makes sense that if someone wasn't interested in the previous iteration, that they won't be interested in the next, and thus of course customer numbers are going to decrease over time because some of your old customers just don't want to play franchise X anymore. Also, you're competing with your own previous title that's sitting there in the bargain bin with a much more attractive price.
Yeah, I didn't explain that at all. It was essentially Contra (from an overhead perspective al a NeoC) with brawling, and some very good brawling at that. The hand to hand combat designer is a hardcore 2-d fighter player and the fighting had a little depth to it once you learned all of a characters' moves. The neat part was figuring out how to best balance the hand to hand action and the gunplay. Your guns would overheat with constant use, and too much brawling might not dispatch larger swarms of enemies fast enough.
While it wasn't cancelled, Acclaim's The Red Star fell *just* short of making it to market when Acclaim finally closed the doors. It had already been approved by Sony for NTSC and was almost through Microsoft. Acclaim management didn't think the game would come to any notoriety thus nobody in power had any desire to muck about with it in an attempt to attach their name to it, which thankfully left the development team unfettered ability to do as they saw fit. I even have to commend the guys at Archangel for not trying to steer the gameplay design. Though they did throw the occasional fit when a color or shape didn't fit their vision of the license. I'm a rabid shooter fan who worked on it and trust me, rabid shooter fans everywhere were denied a pretty good game.
I heard the comic guys who held the Red Star license were shopping it around, but I never heard of any publisher taking interest in it. I noticed it was conspicuously absent from the list of Acclaim properties up for sale, I guess because of the licensing issues.
There are supposedly some fairly close-to-final ROMS of the XBox build out there, I highly recommend it if you're into shooters or brawlers.
I'd like to see a modern day update of Magic Carpet. Flinging meteor after meteor down on an opponent's castle was an awful lot of fun.
We don't buy Game X based on whether or not it's used, we buy it because we want to play Game X! If it's not in the New Releases section anymore, not produced, not shipping, and not sold new, how the heck else are we to acquire it?
"...gamers who play that long will end up with impressive looking forearms!" Will also enjoy spinach, and attempt to woo impossibly skinny women.
Instead of making vanilla "mainstream" stuff in an attempt to appeal to as many people as possible (as seems to be the impression here), it would be better to bring the focus in and look for niches of people who would play a videogame if it catered to their interests. Like Guitar Heroes (a game the blog writer mentions often). There are a lot of people who'd love to experience rocking out on a stage in an auditorium but who have no desire to shoot hookers or aliens or pwn noobs. I'm probably what the demographicists would label 'hardcore', so why should I care? Because I don't want to play hardcore games. Above all else I want to experience games that are fun, and some of those games probably lie well outside what the marketers are willing to push to the hardcore crowd.
I don't think the weapons on the choppers are overpowered, I expect their weapons to be devastating. I think the choppers are just too well armored. It should never take three anti-tank rockets to take down a helicopter. Flying the choppers should be as much about limiting your exposure to enemy fire as launching rockets. When in a vehicle you can use the surroundings to your advantage to limit aircrafts' avenues of attack. Don't expect to park an M1A1 in the middle of an open field and not attract some destructive attention. I do agree the game needed better AA defenses overall though. One of the support classes definitely needed shoulder fired AA rockets. As far as point-whoring, it's to be expected in any scored system. Find a server where team based play is important to everyone.
Why were wireless controllers used in the kiosks if they just had to be chained or otherwise physically attached to the kiosk anyway?
SMB2 was waaaay too difficult, with too many puzzles that just required banging your, um, monkey against for too many repetitions in the hope that by random luck you'd get through the ring. I love the basic idea of the game, I just hated the direction they took it in the sequel. And maybe this time they'll FIX THE CAMERA! Far too many times I desperately needed to look in a different direction for precise maneuvering but couldn't because camera control was apparently not a design goal in that game. Truly frustrating to see a game go so far and then drop the ball on such an important issue. The minigames were generally very good, but they really screwed up the racing game in SMB2 with the forests of bumper posts everywhere.
The previous game I worked on required a free roaming camera, and what I found was that players DON'T want anything fancy. Don't try to second guess what they want, because what they want is for the camera to NOT swing around while they're moving forward. Minimisation of changes in the yaw of the line of sight is far more important than the designer setting up some 'cinematic' looking swoops as far as our players were concerned. If the player ran in a direction not parallel to the line of sight, you could slowly turn the camera towards the player's direction to minimize the need for manual control without inducing complaints though. The camera did a few raycasts to try and predict when an obstacle would obscure the player (like approaching a corner) and react, but again not making sudden shifts was key to keeping people happy.
Our current game places the camera on rails and thus avoids many problems of the "3d soft" scheme. But now the fact that the avatar isn't always standing at the center of the screen coupled with the fact the designers sometimes want overhead views and sometimes want more horizontal views introduces a totally different (but much easier to fix) set of problems. Control is always camera relative, but sometimes you want "away" on the joystick to make the player run parallel to the line of sight even though this takes the player towards the center of the screen due to perspective (corridors demand this), yet other times "away" on the controller needs to mean the player's movement on screen is straight towards the top of the screen (so their x-coordinate onscreen remains constant).
Has there been any information on how many of the screens will be lit? I would hope Nintendo has learned its lesson and would now consider this such an indispensable feature that it's a given thing on any future handheld. Or maybe lit screens will just be left for the "Nitro SP" released in 2006?
Mine did very poorly at meeting my expectations for surviving until the next generation. It started dying a slow death a few weeks back (freezing up after playing for a while), which is apparently not uncommon. I took it to a game shop that buys back consoles and will use what I got back to subsidize my purchase of...another PS2. *hangs head in shame* While I despise the lack of quality of Sony's products I still have to play those exclusive titles. My PS1 died an early death too, but wasn't expensive to replace since they'd been out for years. I guess Sony's counting on this built in self destruction mechanism to sell more consoles for the foreseeable future. From what friends in the same boat have told me, the drives go out. I can actually understand mechanisms with moving parts failing after n hours of use, and my PS2 was a model 30001, from the first batch sold in North America. I just feel like as long as CD drives have been around they should know how to make them last longer than three years.
"It's not a surprise to us that the U.S. market needs a lot more work," she said. "[We've] still got a lot of work to do from an educational standpoint," Usina added... Yeah, but the ones who need educating aren't your consumers. I finally tried one at a kiosk in a Gamestop the other day, and to quote a character from a recent Nintendo game: "Sloooooooow."