From the sound of it, it seems that De Pretto wrote the equation and had no idea what it meant. I'm a total layman when it comes to physics, but it seems entirely possible to come up with something profound and not have a clue if it's true or not. So Einstein might not have written the equation, but he obviously figured out what it meant and that's really more important, isn't it?
I know from years of experience arguing with my parents over which computers they should buy (because they refused to let me build one at half the cost..) that they will:
look at the price of the deluxe package first, and THEN they will see the cheap one and say "I save $100 for skipping out on these parts? Ring me up!"
The answer is obvious. Game developers will make sure that those players with no hard drive notice the difference as little as possible, so that their game will hit the larger audience. This is basically guaranteeing that the X-Box 360 hard drive support in games is going to be almost useless aside from X-Box Live! content. And THAT means that the people who shelled out the extra $100 for the big package basically got screwed out of $100...
I've actually seen evidence of this in a Japanese game!
In Devil May Cry 3 (Capcom, PS2 2005) the Japanese vesrion is easier.
In the Japanese version, when you die, you can use an item to bring yourself back to full life right where you are in the middle of the fight. In the US version, using the item pushes you back to before you entered the room, and you have to redo the entire fight over.
The Japanese version's difficulty modes are easier. Normal is America's easy. Hard is America's normal. Dante Must Die is America's hard.
Is this just a cultural thing? Americans are more willing to put up with more challenges? OR maybe Japanese players just want to enjoy a gaming experience and not worry so much about dying? But then I have to wonder why Resident Evil is so popular in Japan x.x
Look at it this way: If your 1.6 ghz P4 can calculate Pi in less than 7 seconds using QPi, how much room is there to show improvement? You can never shave off more than 6.68 seconds (or even that much, realistically) no matter how fast you've overclocked.
Until last year most PC gaming magazines were still using Quake3 as a benchmark, getting 200 to 300 frames per second.... But at that point you actually --SEE-- no improvement. At least in this case you can tell a significantly higher number is much better than other hardware.
"My 7 ghz P4 can do QPi to 1 million digits in 3 [arbitrary number 6] seconds... That kinda sucks compared to the 1.6 ghz 6.6 seconds..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you download a file that's bad, you'll most likely delete it, right? And BitTorrent really doesn't work very until several users have the files... And since everybody who gets a bad file deletes it sooner or later (usually sooner) it would be kind of pointless to put up spoofed files over a torrent... Right?
While I agree that a multiplayer component is a good thing to have in a game, I think that making a strong single player experience should be the first and biggest priority for any game designers.
Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2 for example, were built as multiplayer first and foremost, and the single player was just the multiplayer game with bots. As far as I'm concerned, these games (and Star Wars Battlefront, the shameless clone) are pretty crappy. And then we look at Call of Duty, which is essentially just another WWII shooter, but the single player is incredibly deep, even if it is somewhat linear. That was a good game.
"But they know that they'll produce more shock by killing kids on the way to school, and moms on the way to work."
I don't think that's true. Example:
"20 children were killed on a bus in Ameritown when a terrorist rammed an SUV into it and exploded. Town officials say this is an 'unprecedented tragedy.' President Bush is expected to arrive to offer his condolences soon. In other news...."
Compared to:
"Hyper Megastar was assassinated today at his Hollywood estate. The attack has caused many other famous people to cry out for better law enforcement. A national service will be held in Hyper's honor, and Congress is awarding him with a post-mortem Medal of Honor for being a casualty of war. We'll continue reporting on the story for the next week."
Okay, so I may have exaggerated. A little bit. But remember when Princess Diana died? CNN and NBC both had up-to-the-minute news going for hours. And that was just here in America, imagine what it was like in England. PLUS that wasn't even a terrorist attack, it was just an idiot papparazzi driver. An attack on our soil that hits a single high profile person is much much much higher priority (media wise) than any number of school children, provided they couldn't be rescued. If a rescue attempt was possible you can bet you'd never hear the end of it.
Mel Gibson tried to see Terri Schiavo the day she died. Four weeks prior, he had never heard of her. See what I'm getting at?
Okay, guess I didn't quite get that. I'd mod you insightful if I had points =/
But for the 2D games I'm talking actual new games, like Makai Kingdom, Atelier Iris.. pretty much anything from Nippon Ichi Software, really. Sprite graphics, just like gaming should be -_-
It's about the engine, is it? Lots of current generation games on the PS2 and GameCube had their graphics engines made and used once, then never used again or completely overhauled for a sequel.
The graphics engine for Dynasty Warriors 3, for example, was updated for Dynasty Warriors 4, and updated again for DW4:Empires. A later release, Samurai Warriors, used a different engine capable of more detail and more characters onscreen. After that, the Samurai Warriors engine was used in Dynasty Warriors 5 after making more changes.
As far as I know, Final Fantasy VII-X all had different graphics engines, and it looks like XII is going to have another new engine.
On the GameCube, look at WindWaker, than then the footage/screenshots of the new Zelda game.
What I'm saying is that graphics engines can be overhauled, edited, changed, or totally scrapped in favor of something completely different. You can't judge every game by its' engine. Dynasty Warriors 5 is going to be released on the X-Box 360. Do you think it won't have engine enhancements from the PS2 version?
And why are we focusing so much on how a game looks, anyway? I know some perfectly good PS2 games that have almost no 3D graphics in them. I'd love to see more! A good story with an equally good game system is better than Halo any day.
You know, I own a lot of games that I haven't played in a long time. My PS1 memory cards are full of games that are complete or damn-near it. My PS2 memory cards are in the same predicament. I own a peripheral that would let me get my saves onto my PC harddrive, and from there I can probably work out some way to get them onto a memory stick. But I don't think I'm going to do that. Those games just sitting around in my room are classics, and it would be a CRIME not to want to play them again.
There's an FPS crap game coming out called Hellgate London you might be interested in. It's made by a company whose staff escaped from Blizzard after having worked on StarCraft and Diablo. It was in PCGamer a few months back. Should be worth investigating at least.
The engineers behind this experiment (and that's what it is) should've taken into account the fact that these are people with little knowledge of electronic devices whatsoever. The book UI is apparently easy to navigate, and I'm sure it's got all kinds of nifty features that even a computer illiterate would be able to figure out. That's awesome for the use of the 'book.' But what about the physical piece of equipment? It's probably quite a bit heavier than a normal textbook, and certainly much more breakable. The batteries need recharging often, and there's an issue that probably can't be addressed easily.
A better candidate for this sort of thing would've been a small town highschool in the US or some other less third world country where technology is widely available and electricity is as common as indoor plumbing.
A very simple way around the problem of the systems being broken or stolen is to have them integrated into the students' desks. So instead of a piece of wood used for the sole purpose of holding your book and paper and stuff, you'll have a touchscreen computer with all your easy to use GUI features and can even have a fullsize keyboard roll out underneath.
But even this would be an experiment that would be ultimately doomed to fail, because if every student has a powerchugging computer (even a rechargeable battery driven one) there won't be enough electricity to go around. It's becoming more and more of an issue as computers become more of an everyday thing and processors get faster and have more transistors and all that rubish.
I seem to have gone off on a wild tangent and completely missed the point that Kenyan students are playing with computers to learn. I wish I'd had that when I was in school, I can tell you that. But these kids probably would've appreciated a better use for that money. Like getting a power infrastructure built, thereby new jobs, electricity, and a better all-around economy.
The damage being done to the music industry is:
Spending lots of money on antipiracy protection on CDs (that don't work, and cost the artists extra)
Decreasing the number of songs per CD
Increasing the price of CDs because piracy is hurting sales
So, we have the music industry making you pay more for less for no benefit whatsoever, because the execs think they're losing money.
I've seen reports that go both ways on the issue. Lots of people who pirate music go out and buy the CDs after listening to the songs.
Personally I think the real issue is that artists get paid too much. People in the music industry, especially after "hitting it big" so to speak, get rich very quickly. The more one artist is getting paid, another artist will notice and want more money too. Same deal in professional sports and acting. These people certainly work dilligently (actors and athletes, only some music artists) but I don't think they deserve multi million dollar salaries. Especially not when important social jobs that are NEEDED for our (US) society get paid so little.
If you call 10% of the market (that is, the mainstream commercial market) a 'decent amount,' then yes, they have a decent amount. Unfortunately Intel dominates a good 70-75% with IBM and the likes taking whatever bits are left. And barring any significant changes from the Intel/AMD lawsuit, Intel can still bully OEMs into keeping 90% Intel stock and not advertising AMD products. If AMD went solely dual core, OEMs would most likely drop them entirely because costs would be too high and Intel could backhand them for carrying cooler stuff than Pentium Ds. AMD just doesn't have the economic sway that would allow them to do what you propose.
The 360 controllers are going to be wireless, using bluetooth technology if I'm not mistaken.
The PS3 controllers have a USB connector for recharging their batteries, so it's possible that the 360 will have something similar too.
As for driver support, I don't think anything they can do will make it seamless. The 360 runs on PowerPC for one, and the OS is a mangled version of the already mangled version of Win2000 that they used for the original X-box OS.
I like your idea for older PC support, but it would be so much work that Microsoft would never get around to finishing it. I think they wanted to kill off DOS for so long that they would really hate to have to put it back in their OS just for crazy people like us that want to play games from the flint+steel age... And I don't know about you, but I wouldn't shell out money and time installing Windows Server to have a dedicated x-box server. I'd rather buy the innevitable PC version of Halo3 and play it with better online support and mods.
That's because FF:MQ was made by Square, not Squaresoft. Square was Squaresoft's American branch back in the Nintendo days. Mystic Quest was made because Squaresoft thought FFIV was too hard for American audiences. Funny, huh?
It's different for Apple. If Apple had stuck with PowerPC, there'd be no choice for your PPC chip other than what Apple decided to put in their G# PCs.
For AMD to only offer SMP processors would be suicide. With as low market share as they have, they simply can't afford to drop more than half their product line in order to push the technological envelope. Intel, with money literally falling out of their assholes, can stand to take this risk and can probably bully enough OEMs to only carry dual core chips that it would make a significant difference. AMD doesn't have that kind of power at this time. Their main market is the tech enthusiast, the hobby guy who likes to build computers, and the guy with too much money who buys everything on the bleeding edge. They have almost no OEM support, and retailers carry very few AMD powered products as well.
In short, if AMD were Intel, they could do it, and it could work. If AMD were Apple, they could do it, and it could work. If AMD is in fact AMD, however, it just isn't a viable option.
The time difference makes the 13th in the US the same day as the 14th in Japan. Silly people. Like Square would release something in the US first *shakes head*
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In other news, the war in East Asia has nearly come to a conclusion.
From the sound of it, it seems that De Pretto wrote the equation and had no idea what it meant. I'm a total layman when it comes to physics, but it seems entirely possible to come up with something profound and not have a clue if it's true or not.
So Einstein might not have written the equation, but he obviously figured out what it meant and that's really more important, isn't it?
I know from years of experience arguing with my parents over which computers they should buy (because they refused to let me build one at half the cost..) that they will:
look at the price of the deluxe package first, and THEN they will see the cheap one and say "I save $100 for skipping out on these parts? Ring me up!"
The answer is obvious. Game developers will make sure that those players with no hard drive notice the difference as little as possible, so that their game will hit the larger audience. This is basically guaranteeing that the X-Box 360 hard drive support in games is going to be almost useless aside from X-Box Live! content. And THAT means that the people who shelled out the extra $100 for the big package basically got screwed out of $100...
You do know that the PSP has no region coding, right? So every PSP is 'region free.'
I've actually seen evidence of this in a Japanese game! In Devil May Cry 3 (Capcom, PS2 2005) the Japanese vesrion is easier. In the Japanese version, when you die, you can use an item to bring yourself back to full life right where you are in the middle of the fight. In the US version, using the item pushes you back to before you entered the room, and you have to redo the entire fight over. The Japanese version's difficulty modes are easier. Normal is America's easy. Hard is America's normal. Dante Must Die is America's hard. Is this just a cultural thing? Americans are more willing to put up with more challenges? OR maybe Japanese players just want to enjoy a gaming experience and not worry so much about dying? But then I have to wonder why Resident Evil is so popular in Japan x.x
Look at it this way: If your 1.6 ghz P4 can calculate Pi in less than 7 seconds using QPi, how much room is there to show improvement? You can never shave off more than 6.68 seconds (or even that much, realistically) no matter how fast you've overclocked. Until last year most PC gaming magazines were still using Quake3 as a benchmark, getting 200 to 300 frames per second.... But at that point you actually --SEE-- no improvement. At least in this case you can tell a significantly higher number is much better than other hardware. "My 7 ghz P4 can do QPi to 1 million digits in 3 [arbitrary number 6] seconds... That kinda sucks compared to the 1.6 ghz 6.6 seconds..."
If fucking people are the problem, perhaps the solution is to stop people from fucking >.>
IDE and SATA are not a choice for anything but a low end low speed/load server.
And of course home users machines >.>
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you download a file that's bad, you'll most likely delete it, right? And BitTorrent really doesn't work very until several users have the files... And since everybody who gets a bad file deletes it sooner or later (usually sooner) it would be kind of pointless to put up spoofed files over a torrent... Right?
The original Doom presented this behavior as well. It was always fun to make Hell Barons fight eachother...
While I agree that a multiplayer component is a good thing to have in a game, I think that making a strong single player experience should be the first and biggest priority for any game designers.
Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2 for example, were built as multiplayer first and foremost, and the single player was just the multiplayer game with bots. As far as I'm concerned, these games (and Star Wars Battlefront, the shameless clone) are pretty crappy. And then we look at Call of Duty, which is essentially just another WWII shooter, but the single player is incredibly deep, even if it is somewhat linear. That was a good game.
"But they know that they'll produce more shock by killing kids on the way to school, and moms on the way to work."
I don't think that's true. Example:
"20 children were killed on a bus in Ameritown when a terrorist rammed an SUV into it and exploded. Town officials say this is an 'unprecedented tragedy.' President Bush is expected to arrive to offer his condolences soon. In other news...."
Compared to:
"Hyper Megastar was assassinated today at his Hollywood estate. The attack has caused many other famous people to cry out for better law enforcement. A national service will be held in Hyper's honor, and Congress is awarding him with a post-mortem Medal of Honor for being a casualty of war. We'll continue reporting on the story for the next week."
Okay, so I may have exaggerated. A little bit. But remember when Princess Diana died? CNN and NBC both had up-to-the-minute news going for hours. And that was just here in America, imagine what it was like in England. PLUS that wasn't even a terrorist attack, it was just an idiot papparazzi driver. An attack on our soil that hits a single high profile person is much much much higher priority (media wise) than any number of school children, provided they couldn't be rescued. If a rescue attempt was possible you can bet you'd never hear the end of it.
Mel Gibson tried to see Terri Schiavo the day she died. Four weeks prior, he had never heard of her. See what I'm getting at?
Okay, guess I didn't quite get that. I'd mod you insightful if I had points =/ But for the 2D games I'm talking actual new games, like Makai Kingdom, Atelier Iris.. pretty much anything from Nippon Ichi Software, really. Sprite graphics, just like gaming should be -_-
It's about the engine, is it? Lots of current generation games on the PS2 and GameCube had their graphics engines made and used once, then never used again or completely overhauled for a sequel.
The graphics engine for Dynasty Warriors 3, for example, was updated for Dynasty Warriors 4, and updated again for DW4:Empires. A later release, Samurai Warriors, used a different engine capable of more detail and more characters onscreen. After that, the Samurai Warriors engine was used in Dynasty Warriors 5 after making more changes.
As far as I know, Final Fantasy VII-X all had different graphics engines, and it looks like XII is going to have another new engine.
On the GameCube, look at WindWaker, than then the footage/screenshots of the new Zelda game.
What I'm saying is that graphics engines can be overhauled, edited, changed, or totally scrapped in favor of something completely different. You can't judge every game by its' engine. Dynasty Warriors 5 is going to be released on the X-Box 360. Do you think it won't have engine enhancements from the PS2 version?
And why are we focusing so much on how a game looks, anyway? I know some perfectly good PS2 games that have almost no 3D graphics in them. I'd love to see more! A good story with an equally good game system is better than Halo any day.
You know, I own a lot of games that I haven't played in a long time. My PS1 memory cards are full of games that are complete or damn-near it. My PS2 memory cards are in the same predicament.
I own a peripheral that would let me get my saves onto my PC harddrive, and from there I can probably work out some way to get them onto a memory stick. But I don't think I'm going to do that. Those games just sitting around in my room are classics, and it would be a CRIME not to want to play them again.
There's an FPS crap game coming out called Hellgate London you might be interested in. It's made by a company whose staff escaped from Blizzard after having worked on StarCraft and Diablo. It was in PCGamer a few months back. Should be worth investigating at least.
The engineers behind this experiment (and that's what it is) should've taken into account the fact that these are people with little knowledge of electronic devices whatsoever. The book UI is apparently easy to navigate, and I'm sure it's got all kinds of nifty features that even a computer illiterate would be able to figure out. That's awesome for the use of the 'book.' But what about the physical piece of equipment? It's probably quite a bit heavier than a normal textbook, and certainly much more breakable. The batteries need recharging often, and there's an issue that probably can't be addressed easily.
A better candidate for this sort of thing would've been a small town highschool in the US or some other less third world country where technology is widely available and electricity is as common as indoor plumbing.
A very simple way around the problem of the systems being broken or stolen is to have them integrated into the students' desks. So instead of a piece of wood used for the sole purpose of holding your book and paper and stuff, you'll have a touchscreen computer with all your easy to use GUI features and can even have a fullsize keyboard roll out underneath.
But even this would be an experiment that would be ultimately doomed to fail, because if every student has a powerchugging computer (even a rechargeable battery driven one) there won't be enough electricity to go around. It's becoming more and more of an issue as computers become more of an everyday thing and processors get faster and have more transistors and all that rubish.
I seem to have gone off on a wild tangent and completely missed the point that Kenyan students are playing with computers to learn. I wish I'd had that when I was in school, I can tell you that. But these kids probably would've appreciated a better use for that money. Like getting a power infrastructure built, thereby new jobs, electricity, and a better all-around economy.
The damage being done to the music industry is: Spending lots of money on antipiracy protection on CDs (that don't work, and cost the artists extra) Decreasing the number of songs per CD Increasing the price of CDs because piracy is hurting sales So, we have the music industry making you pay more for less for no benefit whatsoever, because the execs think they're losing money. I've seen reports that go both ways on the issue. Lots of people who pirate music go out and buy the CDs after listening to the songs. Personally I think the real issue is that artists get paid too much. People in the music industry, especially after "hitting it big" so to speak, get rich very quickly. The more one artist is getting paid, another artist will notice and want more money too. Same deal in professional sports and acting. These people certainly work dilligently (actors and athletes, only some music artists) but I don't think they deserve multi million dollar salaries. Especially not when important social jobs that are NEEDED for our (US) society get paid so little.
If you call 10% of the market (that is, the mainstream commercial market) a 'decent amount,' then yes, they have a decent amount. Unfortunately Intel dominates a good 70-75% with IBM and the likes taking whatever bits are left.
And barring any significant changes from the Intel/AMD lawsuit, Intel can still bully OEMs into keeping 90% Intel stock and not advertising AMD products. If AMD went solely dual core, OEMs would most likely drop them entirely because costs would be too high and Intel could backhand them for carrying cooler stuff than Pentium Ds.
AMD just doesn't have the economic sway that would allow them to do what you propose.
The 360 controllers are going to be wireless, using bluetooth technology if I'm not mistaken. The PS3 controllers have a USB connector for recharging their batteries, so it's possible that the 360 will have something similar too. As for driver support, I don't think anything they can do will make it seamless. The 360 runs on PowerPC for one, and the OS is a mangled version of the already mangled version of Win2000 that they used for the original X-box OS. I like your idea for older PC support, but it would be so much work that Microsoft would never get around to finishing it. I think they wanted to kill off DOS for so long that they would really hate to have to put it back in their OS just for crazy people like us that want to play games from the flint+steel age. .. And I don't know about you, but I wouldn't shell out money and time installing Windows Server to have a dedicated x-box server. I'd rather buy the innevitable PC version of Halo3 and play it with better online support and mods.
That's because FF:MQ was made by Square, not Squaresoft. Square was Squaresoft's American branch back in the Nintendo days. Mystic Quest was made because Squaresoft thought FFIV was too hard for American audiences. Funny, huh?
It's different for Apple. If Apple had stuck with PowerPC, there'd be no choice for your PPC chip other than what Apple decided to put in their G# PCs. For AMD to only offer SMP processors would be suicide. With as low market share as they have, they simply can't afford to drop more than half their product line in order to push the technological envelope. Intel, with money literally falling out of their assholes, can stand to take this risk and can probably bully enough OEMs to only carry dual core chips that it would make a significant difference. AMD doesn't have that kind of power at this time. Their main market is the tech enthusiast, the hobby guy who likes to build computers, and the guy with too much money who buys everything on the bleeding edge. They have almost no OEM support, and retailers carry very few AMD powered products as well. In short, if AMD were Intel, they could do it, and it could work. If AMD were Apple, they could do it, and it could work. If AMD is in fact AMD, however, it just isn't a viable option.
The time difference makes the 13th in the US the same day as the 14th in Japan. Silly people. Like Square would release something in the US first *shakes head*
Advent Children's US release is going to be on the same day as Japan. This is actually not new information.