If you really wanted to get technical about it, ZIP is also somewhat superseded on Windows by the self-extracting EXE, which is frequently powered by WinZIP technology.
It's good to see that more game developers are realizing how important bundling or offering editors and tools are. Being a mapper myself, I've always thought that this is what seperates a PC game with longevity from one that will fade to the bargain bin in a few months.
Content manifests itself in many ways. In terms of FPS games, it's usually through mods or maps. In sim/"sandbox" games, the game itself self-generates new content although it can be complemented by new buildings/add-ons. In MMORPGs, again the new content writes itself.
Look at almost any popular older game available today and you'll see they all have one thing in common - the constant influx of new content. Counterstrike runs on the positively ancient Half-Life engine (we're talking Quake1/2-era here), and it's still one of the most popular multiplayer games out there. People wouldn't still be playing Counterstrike unless there were new maps and experiences to have. And that all translates to increasing Valve's bottom line as people continue to buy Half-Life to this day.
Another example is the Red Faction series. The original Red Faction shipped with the RED level editor. To this day, there are still several multiplayer maps coming out for it each week. Nowhere near the level of Unreal maps, but fairly high given the community's size. And Red Faction has a commmunity, mind you. That's something that comes with editors/modability. When Red Faction II released, it had no editor and no multiplayer whatsoever. It just collects dust on the shelves of stores nationwide now and is chastised by the community that largely feels (and rightfully so) that Volition turned their backs on them. More damaging, Red Faction has no place on the PC now. It has no name and no reputation, other than being a game you'll beat in ten hours and then collect dust in the closet.
Surely, some corporate bigwig thinks with an economic mind that a bundled editor is pointless because the vast majority of users will ignore it. And that's true. However, what they have to understand is that the 1%-2% minority that actually learns it will produce amazing content for that majority, which is ultimately a win-win scenario for everyone.
But why the resistance to something packaged? APT-GET repositories, YUM archives, and RPMs were essentially designed to overcome the problem of not recording uninstall information and resolving dependencies.
Debian-based distributions usually have built-in support for the APT-GET repository (i.e. KPackage). Literally, you select what you want to install, press install, provide the root password, and off you go. It's like having all of Download.com at your fingertips and you just point, click, and select what you want, then kick back and relax while Linux does the rest. It doesn't get any easier than that.
The majority of Windows users (who, lest we forgot constitute the vast majority of computer users) don't even know what a "tarball" is. You might notice that if you ventured oue of Linux-Land once.
I don't see what X has to do with cutting and pasting. Alas, cutting and pasting mostly works between Linux applications. The ones that don't comply are either legacy applications or ancient stalworts that refuse to change their archaic ways.
Some operating system, it might have been Windows or it might have been before it, designated ctrl-z, ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v as the hotkeys for undo, cut, copy, and paste. Because it is in Windows and true of 90%+ of today's applications, it is as good as standard. The few notable applications that insist on doing things their own way (alt-x, middle-click, auto-copy, being incompatible with KClipper) need to think more about user convenience than their own personal beliefs.
Au contraire, I think that KDE actually functions smoother than Windows XP and gives you many more configurable desktop options right at your fingertips. I actually like KDE more than Windows. The desktop end of Linux is ready for prime time, as far as I'm concerned. It's that ugly backend with the kooky directory structure and limited auto-configuration abilities that needs to be hammered out now.
Mandrake comes really close to achieving the ideal of a console-less Linux installation. I don't advocate getting rid of the console entirely, but if we really except this thing to appeal to to Joe User, it has to conceal that ugliness as well as possible and have a happy little GUI for every major function - in other words, the direction OS X has somewhat successfully taken. I don't care for the usability of OS X that much, but I feel the concept is there.
I'm sure some people like Mac OS X, but I've never been able to get used to it. The two problems I have with it:
- It appears that it sticks with the Mac convention of only allowing windows to be resized by grabbing the lower-right corner of the window, instead of on any arbitrary edge of the window. Even KDE and Gnome allow this, does Mac OS X do it at all?
The second is a corollary:
- It's too easy to get things behind the floating taskbar. You could make it smaller, it's true, but the fact that its floating over everything makes window resizing a chore because of the previous remark.
Again, if Macs allow you to resize windows on an arbitrary edge, then I stand corrected.
I think that's true in the workplace environment, but the average home user has no use for the Office document servers and whatnot. For them, OpenOffice.org will do pretty much anything you can ask for. The problem is that not enough people know about OpenOffice.org. I feel that if it were more widely publicized as a free alternative to the $200-$600 suggested MSRP of MS Office, people would start to pay attention.
It's pretty simple though. Microsoft Office "cheats" in the same way OpenOffice does. The difference is that MS Office is more discreet about it. OpenOffice generally comes up quickly if you have the quick launcher client running in the taskbar. Parts of the OO suite are preloaded and ready to launch at the press of that icon. MS Office is the same way, but its quick launcher is transparently running in the background with no fanfare.
Take that away and you'll see that the initial loading speeds are somewhat comparable.
The Nokia N-gage may suck right now, but Nintendo can't help but see that sort of device as a potential threat to their handheld gaming dominance.
How? Nintendo holds a veritable monopoly on handheld gaming devices that far, far exceeds Nokia and which I doubt wil be tempered by Sony's PSP. There has been little that has challenged Nintendo's crown. Even when Sega and Turbo-Grafx was busy pushing 16-bit portables that played Genesis and TG-16 games respectively, the ancient GB with its olive-colored monochromatic screen chugged along unfazed. Nintendo has little to fear. They continue to be the most profitable of the "big three."
As it is, the console market is moving away from them, with the next generation of consoles almost certainly focused more on media center features instead of only games.
Not necessarily. Recall that Sony recently released the PSX in Japan to lukewarm response. It was a DVD burner and played PS2 games. Rather than incorporate all of that technology into the PS3, Sony decided to test the waters. Suffice it to say, it doesn't seem as though they liked what they saw. Sony has already remarked that the PS3 would be heavily focused on gaming rather than multifunctional wizardry.
Microsoft has also announced plans to not include the built-in hard drive for the Xbox 2, potentially opting for an approach involving exchangable flash memory instead.
Nintendo can't afford to let the handheld market move away from them in a similar way.
I think this is in some part true. There's little doubt that of Nintendo's profitable ventures, the Game Boy line is probably the one on top. Nintendo would definitely be hurting if their uncontested reign in portables is lost to the extent their GameCube has. But there are reasons people like the Game Boy and consoles in general. You plop in cartridges and they work. The controls are basic. The machine is built to withstand a 2-story fall onto concrete. And it does one thing really well - it plays games. It is simple. I don't think the average consumer for a portable gaming system really thinks about having a PDA that happens to play video games. And given that the "Pokemon market" characterizes perhaps the majority of Game Boy consumers, would you want to give a 10-year old a PDA and a stylus?
I don't think the push is there for a portable gaming device so laden with additional add-ons and features. Otherwise, the N-Gage should have sold like hotcakes. Nintendo couldn't have kept Game Boy Cameras and Printers on the shelves. And we'd see a host of keyboard and mouse and storage technologies using the EXT port. I just don't see it happening. A console, especially a portable one, is not a PC and is not designed to be.
After you get through their top 10, you can go and submit your own. Each game in the Descent saga is an option, so obviously they must count it as an FPS. Write a short blurb about why you think it's so great and maybe they'll include it in the reader's choice top 10.
I used to think Descent was the top dog before I was exposed to the almighty Unreal Tournament. But I still think it deserves to be on the list because it had an inventive concept that has since rarely been done with equal skill. Also, I would argue against the GameSpot article's claim that Quake had the best lighting effects of its time. One can hardly notice them compared to their use in Descent 2. You could destroy lights and areas would go dark. Most games today can't even do that.
It was hardly an average, run-of-the-mill FPS. Since its release, there have been a handful of clones. Some decent, like Forsaken. Others shoddy, like Terracide. But the idea hasn't been touched after the disaster that was Descent 3. One hopes that after Unreal Tournament 2004 and the upcoming Battlefield resurrect interest in flying vehicles that we'll see a mod that exploits this type of gameplay, and then maybe spur enough interest for a developer to build something like it.
Ideally, I would see a modern Descent clone utilizing a control arrangement like that of Freelancer. Use mouselook and WASD and merely don't restrict movement to the ground plane. Also, enable the ability to get out and walk around on foot, possibly to explore and find other ships to pilot.
Descent 3 was a disaster in the sense that it didn't sell very well. I think a key reason, aside from the lack of good marketing, was that it was too far divorced from Descent 1 and 2. Although they had a flashy new engine, it lost the gritty, dark corridors that the old games were notorious for. The robots weren't creepy, they were almost cartoon-like. And the whole appearance of the game had a plastic, strange look (it must be the textures or the lighting). The missions were also loaded with inane puzzles that had no place in a corridor shooter like this. It's unfortunate that because of Descent 3, no one has stepped up to the plate to try again. I hope someday, some developer will.
While this is true, don't forget that Windows 95 and Windows 98 weren't tremendously different in this regard. Although it is less so, even under Windows XP, there are some operation carried out more efficiently under the command line, especially things like mass-renaming of files.
While the mainstream versions of Linux should try to divorce themselves from the command line, they shouldn't get rid of it, either.
Ashcroft will sneak these provisions into Patriot Act III.
Bush will use his patrotic propaganda to ensure its safe passage.
It will become law right under the feet of many clueless individuals.
Bush will ensure it remains with his "You must be a terrorist if you want to weaken our security forces" rhetoric.
It is a hope of mine that one day, the idiots in the government will come to realize that the Internet is supposed to be beyond any government's control. Unfortunately, I doubt the powermongers will ever let that happen.
Probably. But so long as the Hollywood movie is a giant special effect-laden thrill ride, it will be difficult for indies to keep up and turn a profit doing so. That's why the majority of indie games are puzzles or simplistic two-dimensional titles. Tetris showed that a very simplistic game can have a huge and lasting impact, but there are very few Tetrises in the world.
Nintendo has for years been by far the most profitable of the big three video game console manufacturers. It was only in the last year when earnings were less than expected. That does not imply that the GameCube was a failure.
Solitaire doesn't count. It comes with Windows and Linux. It's not really adding to any company's pocketbook and no one is going to the store to buy a copy of solitaire. It is also pre-installed, and hence is not subject to the additional hurdle one must pass to install a typical PC game.
He doesn't even make his argument clear: "Till the gaming industry supports windows, it seems unlikely to oust Windows from the Desktop computing market."
Get your facts straight. The PC gaming market is tiny compared to the console market. We're talking on the order of approximately $1B/year sales in the PC market compared to just under $12B/year in the console market. Furthermore, the PC market is shrinking. And with systems like Xbox Live, capable of multiplayer gaming and supporting new content, PCs eventually won't even have multiplayer on their side.
Which is not to say that PC gaming will vaporize or become a non-issue. However, increasing numbers of game producers have left to work on consoles - with consistent and standardized architectures - and eschewed the PC. And Joe Average, as well, does not want to deal with installing a game, using six CDs, downloading bonus content and 379.4 MB patches. He wants to put the DVD into the machine and have it work. Believe it or not, installing a game on Windows is foreign to many people.
Furthermore, I would assert that the majority of PC users don't play games beyond the simple, built-in solitaire and perhaps the bargain title they found at Office Depot on a whim.
Conquering the game domain is not Linux's problem. Providing a stable, attractive, and easy-to-use OS is the objective. The games follow.
This is one of the great things about a well-tuned Linux distribution like Mepis. When you install it, you install nearly everything. And what you don't is easily dispatched using KPackage. Point-click-install-done. Can't get any easier than that.
Comparably, Windows ships with almost nothing useful beyond Internet, e-mail, and a really stripped down word processor. Everything else is seperate. I've gotten to the point where a full Windows reinstall (games and all) takes about 4-5 hours, with at least another hour of tinkering with settings to get things to "feel" right. With Mepis, it just works. Do you know how good it feels to say that about a Linux distro?:D
Slashdot Mirror
If you really wanted to get technical about it, ZIP is also somewhat superseded on Windows by the self-extracting EXE, which is frequently powered by WinZIP technology.
Let them give the masses another reason not to buy their pathetic product.
Let them give us yet another reason to download instead of buying a CD.
Let them bury themselves in more unused CDs than AOL.
See if I care.
Content manifests itself in many ways. In terms of FPS games, it's usually through mods or maps. In sim/"sandbox" games, the game itself self-generates new content although it can be complemented by new buildings/add-ons. In MMORPGs, again the new content writes itself.
Look at almost any popular older game available today and you'll see they all have one thing in common - the constant influx of new content. Counterstrike runs on the positively ancient Half-Life engine (we're talking Quake1/2-era here), and it's still one of the most popular multiplayer games out there. People wouldn't still be playing Counterstrike unless there were new maps and experiences to have. And that all translates to increasing Valve's bottom line as people continue to buy Half-Life to this day.
Another example is the Red Faction series. The original Red Faction shipped with the RED level editor. To this day, there are still several multiplayer maps coming out for it each week. Nowhere near the level of Unreal maps, but fairly high given the community's size. And Red Faction has a commmunity, mind you. That's something that comes with editors/modability. When Red Faction II released, it had no editor and no multiplayer whatsoever. It just collects dust on the shelves of stores nationwide now and is chastised by the community that largely feels (and rightfully so) that Volition turned their backs on them. More damaging, Red Faction has no place on the PC now. It has no name and no reputation, other than being a game you'll beat in ten hours and then collect dust in the closet.
Surely, some corporate bigwig thinks with an economic mind that a bundled editor is pointless because the vast majority of users will ignore it. And that's true. However, what they have to understand is that the 1%-2% minority that actually learns it will produce amazing content for that majority, which is ultimately a win-win scenario for everyone.
Debian-based distributions usually have built-in support for the APT-GET repository (i.e. KPackage). Literally, you select what you want to install, press install, provide the root password, and off you go. It's like having all of Download.com at your fingertips and you just point, click, and select what you want, then kick back and relax while Linux does the rest. It doesn't get any easier than that.
The majority of Windows users (who, lest we forgot constitute the vast majority of computer users) don't even know what a "tarball" is. You might notice that if you ventured oue of Linux-Land once.
Some operating system, it might have been Windows or it might have been before it, designated ctrl-z, ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v as the hotkeys for undo, cut, copy, and paste. Because it is in Windows and true of 90%+ of today's applications, it is as good as standard. The few notable applications that insist on doing things their own way (alt-x, middle-click, auto-copy, being incompatible with KClipper) need to think more about user convenience than their own personal beliefs.
Mandrake comes really close to achieving the ideal of a console-less Linux installation. I don't advocate getting rid of the console entirely, but if we really except this thing to appeal to to Joe User, it has to conceal that ugliness as well as possible and have a happy little GUI for every major function - in other words, the direction OS X has somewhat successfully taken. I don't care for the usability of OS X that much, but I feel the concept is there.
I'm sure some people like Mac OS X, but I've never been able to get used to it. The two problems I have with it: - It appears that it sticks with the Mac convention of only allowing windows to be resized by grabbing the lower-right corner of the window, instead of on any arbitrary edge of the window. Even KDE and Gnome allow this, does Mac OS X do it at all? The second is a corollary: - It's too easy to get things behind the floating taskbar. You could make it smaller, it's true, but the fact that its floating over everything makes window resizing a chore because of the previous remark. Again, if Macs allow you to resize windows on an arbitrary edge, then I stand corrected.
I think that's true in the workplace environment, but the average home user has no use for the Office document servers and whatnot. For them, OpenOffice.org will do pretty much anything you can ask for. The problem is that not enough people know about OpenOffice.org. I feel that if it were more widely publicized as a free alternative to the $200-$600 suggested MSRP of MS Office, people would start to pay attention.
And this is why Claria deserves to be shut down and their assets gutted by the FCC. It's nothing more than legitimate, corporate virus writing.
Sun's stock has dropped upwards of 95% from their high of just above $60. That's not what I would call a healthy company to invest in.
Fine. Pay your $20 for the strategy guide. The rest of us will benefit from the awesome and free GameFAQs.com. :)
Take that away and you'll see that the initial loading speeds are somewhat comparable.
How? Nintendo holds a veritable monopoly on handheld gaming devices that far, far exceeds Nokia and which I doubt wil be tempered by Sony's PSP. There has been little that has challenged Nintendo's crown. Even when Sega and Turbo-Grafx was busy pushing 16-bit portables that played Genesis and TG-16 games respectively, the ancient GB with its olive-colored monochromatic screen chugged along unfazed. Nintendo has little to fear. They continue to be the most profitable of the "big three."
As it is, the console market is moving away from them, with the next generation of consoles almost certainly focused more on media center features instead of only games.
Not necessarily. Recall that Sony recently released the PSX in Japan to lukewarm response. It was a DVD burner and played PS2 games. Rather than incorporate all of that technology into the PS3, Sony decided to test the waters. Suffice it to say, it doesn't seem as though they liked what they saw. Sony has already remarked that the PS3 would be heavily focused on gaming rather than multifunctional wizardry.
Microsoft has also announced plans to not include the built-in hard drive for the Xbox 2, potentially opting for an approach involving exchangable flash memory instead.
Nintendo can't afford to let the handheld market move away from them in a similar way.
I think this is in some part true. There's little doubt that of Nintendo's profitable ventures, the Game Boy line is probably the one on top. Nintendo would definitely be hurting if their uncontested reign in portables is lost to the extent their GameCube has. But there are reasons people like the Game Boy and consoles in general. You plop in cartridges and they work. The controls are basic. The machine is built to withstand a 2-story fall onto concrete. And it does one thing really well - it plays games. It is simple. I don't think the average consumer for a portable gaming system really thinks about having a PDA that happens to play video games. And given that the "Pokemon market" characterizes perhaps the majority of Game Boy consumers, would you want to give a 10-year old a PDA and a stylus?
I don't think the push is there for a portable gaming device so laden with additional add-ons and features. Otherwise, the N-Gage should have sold like hotcakes. Nintendo couldn't have kept Game Boy Cameras and Printers on the shelves. And we'd see a host of keyboard and mouse and storage technologies using the EXT port. I just don't see it happening. A console, especially a portable one, is not a PC and is not designed to be.
I think that pointing to OS X is a great example.
I used to think Descent was the top dog before I was exposed to the almighty Unreal Tournament. But I still think it deserves to be on the list because it had an inventive concept that has since rarely been done with equal skill. Also, I would argue against the GameSpot article's claim that Quake had the best lighting effects of its time. One can hardly notice them compared to their use in Descent 2. You could destroy lights and areas would go dark. Most games today can't even do that.
It was hardly an average, run-of-the-mill FPS. Since its release, there have been a handful of clones. Some decent, like Forsaken. Others shoddy, like Terracide. But the idea hasn't been touched after the disaster that was Descent 3. One hopes that after Unreal Tournament 2004 and the upcoming Battlefield resurrect interest in flying vehicles that we'll see a mod that exploits this type of gameplay, and then maybe spur enough interest for a developer to build something like it.
Ideally, I would see a modern Descent clone utilizing a control arrangement like that of Freelancer. Use mouselook and WASD and merely don't restrict movement to the ground plane. Also, enable the ability to get out and walk around on foot, possibly to explore and find other ships to pilot.
Descent 3 was a disaster in the sense that it didn't sell very well. I think a key reason, aside from the lack of good marketing, was that it was too far divorced from Descent 1 and 2. Although they had a flashy new engine, it lost the gritty, dark corridors that the old games were notorious for. The robots weren't creepy, they were almost cartoon-like. And the whole appearance of the game had a plastic, strange look (it must be the textures or the lighting). The missions were also loaded with inane puzzles that had no place in a corridor shooter like this. It's unfortunate that because of Descent 3, no one has stepped up to the plate to try again. I hope someday, some developer will.
While this is true, don't forget that Windows 95 and Windows 98 weren't tremendously different in this regard. Although it is less so, even under Windows XP, there are some operation carried out more efficiently under the command line, especially things like mass-renaming of files.
While the mainstream versions of Linux should try to divorce themselves from the command line, they shouldn't get rid of it, either.
- Ashcroft will sneak these provisions into Patriot Act III.
- Bush will use his patrotic propaganda to ensure its safe passage.
- It will become law right under the feet of many clueless individuals.
- Bush will ensure it remains with his "You must be a terrorist if you want to weaken our security forces" rhetoric.
It is a hope of mine that one day, the idiots in the government will come to realize that the Internet is supposed to be beyond any government's control. Unfortunately, I doubt the powermongers will ever let that happen.Probably. But so long as the Hollywood movie is a giant special effect-laden thrill ride, it will be difficult for indies to keep up and turn a profit doing so. That's why the majority of indie games are puzzles or simplistic two-dimensional titles. Tetris showed that a very simplistic game can have a huge and lasting impact, but there are very few Tetrises in the world.
Nintendo has for years been by far the most profitable of the big three video game console manufacturers. It was only in the last year when earnings were less than expected. That does not imply that the GameCube was a failure.
PORNTIPSGUZZARDO. ;)
Solitaire doesn't count. It comes with Windows and Linux. It's not really adding to any company's pocketbook and no one is going to the store to buy a copy of solitaire. It is also pre-installed, and hence is not subject to the additional hurdle one must pass to install a typical PC game.
He doesn't even make his argument clear: "Till the gaming industry supports windows, it seems unlikely to oust Windows from the Desktop computing market." Get your facts straight. The PC gaming market is tiny compared to the console market. We're talking on the order of approximately $1B/year sales in the PC market compared to just under $12B/year in the console market. Furthermore, the PC market is shrinking. And with systems like Xbox Live, capable of multiplayer gaming and supporting new content, PCs eventually won't even have multiplayer on their side.
Which is not to say that PC gaming will vaporize or become a non-issue. However, increasing numbers of game producers have left to work on consoles - with consistent and standardized architectures - and eschewed the PC. And Joe Average, as well, does not want to deal with installing a game, using six CDs, downloading bonus content and 379.4 MB patches. He wants to put the DVD into the machine and have it work. Believe it or not, installing a game on Windows is foreign to many people.
Furthermore, I would assert that the majority of PC users don't play games beyond the simple, built-in solitaire and perhaps the bargain title they found at Office Depot on a whim.
Conquering the game domain is not Linux's problem. Providing a stable, attractive, and easy-to-use OS is the objective. The games follow.
The intent is, however, that the APT repository has 90% of programs any common Linux user would ever need.
Comparably, Windows ships with almost nothing useful beyond Internet, e-mail, and a really stripped down word processor. Everything else is seperate. I've gotten to the point where a full Windows reinstall (games and all) takes about 4-5 hours, with at least another hour of tinkering with settings to get things to "feel" right. With Mepis, it just works. Do you know how good it feels to say that about a Linux distro? :D