Have you thought of trying Ethernet over power adapters instead? I'm using older Linksys Ethernet over power adapters and they work very well. I've had no problems with streaming, playing games, downloading torrents, etc.
It's not that I'm not buying Wii games deliberately out of spite. I'm not buying them because there hasn't been much that has interested me. I'm looking forward to Contra Rebirth on WiiWare and Super Mario Kart whenever the heck they decide to release it in North America.
Another annoying thing about Nintendo for me is their love of peripherals. Wii Motion Plus should be $10 max, not $25 (Here in Canada). So now if you want to buy a new Nunchuk/Wii Remote/Motion plus combo you are coming in at about $100! A tad pricey IMO. At some point I may break down and get it when a game I want warrants it, but since its rather expensive I'm not buying it without thinking twice. I think Nintendo is hurting themselves by pricing it so high. I know the high price sentiment has prevented other friends from buying it and the games that work with it, especially since so few games do at the moment. Yeah I know it is packed in with Wii Sports Resort and Tiger Woods 10, but if you get Resort you pretty much have to buy another Motion Plus since its predominately a multi player game. No thanks Nintendo, I've already blown enough on Wii peripherals for the time being.
I'm an old school Nintendo fan from way back, probably like a lot of people here on Slashdot. I still have every console from the NES to the Wii, but I doubt I will be buying Wii HD, or whatever comes next. Nintendo is now for the most part not even trying to cater to its former customers like me. I haven't bought a Wii game since Mario Kart came out last year, though Metroid Prime Trilogy is on my list since I didn't ever get Echoes. Yeah there are a few appealing games on your list above, but for the most part they don't appeal to me.
Speaking of Mario Kart Wii, another thing that Nintendo is doing is dumbing down their games for the masses and taking the skill factor out of their games. You could be leading for the whole race and someone in last gets a blue shell and knocks you down to 5th or 6th or worse. Also, the online portion of the game is very lacking in features, with basically 2 modes only. I can see they want to make it easy for all levels of video game players to get into the action, but please leave in some depth for people who have been playing your franchises since their inception!
With the tons of money they are making on the Wii and DS why doesn't Nintendo actually try to make a NEW franchise or two for core gamers, you know, the ones who kept them alive during their GameCube debacle days. Nintendo is one of the few game companies with the resources to spend making new a IP for their base of fans they've built up over he decades, but all they want to do now is pump out sequels and soccer mom fitness programs. The Metroid: Other M team up with Tecmo is a good idea, why don't they do more of that type of thing? Give funding to other game companies to create new IP or acquire companies who want to make those type of games.
At the end of the day they are a company trying to make as much money as they can, which is understandable, but ignoring or disenfranchising a large portion of you built-in fan base is leaving a lot of money on the table for Microsoft and Sony. I own a 360 and a Wii and Billy and Co. have been getting the lions share of my console gaming dollars over the past year and change and probably will for the foreseeable future.
You bought an extended warranty? Hopefully you didn't pay very much for it. The 360 has a three 3 year warranty for RRoD and E74 failures, which is what most failures are.
Last month my 2.5 year old 360 started freezing intermittently, but wouldn't red ring. I had to keep playing games and letting it die until it would finally red ring every time I started it. Its brutal that you have to do that in order to qualify for a replacement 360, but at least it only took 9 days from the day I shipped it to receive my replacement. If my 360 dies after the 3 year warranty is up I would rather spend the warranty money on a new 360 that runs cooler, draws less power, etc.
I shudder to think what the warranty process was like a few months after the 360 was released, which is why I would never buy a launch Playstation or Xbox. My 5 Nintendo based systems have never failed once (Well the NES can be a bit of pain sometimes, ha ha).
"the PC market has receded in terms of significance,"
While its true that PC gaming is sharing a larger and larger chunk of its gaming dollars with consoles, there is still money to be made on PCs IMO. For people like me I'll take mouse/keyboard over a console controller any day for FPS games. Perhaps id would make more money if their more recent PC games were actually good. Given their new found financial resources I hope id takes the time and creates something other than Doom X with shiny id Tech Y. Try adding some new, innovative game play in your next game and perhaps I might buy it.
I hope one of the "new things" they've tried is fixing the audio and graphics driver issues 9 and 10 introduced. Fedora 8 worked like a charm for me with my older PC, but installing 9 and 10 was problematic. I couldn't even install 10 until I modded the kernel arguments to use the vesa xdriver. With 10 my audio stutters and hangs during audio/video playback while in 8 using the exact same hardware I had zero issues.
I did the same thing, waited until the price drop. I already owned HL2, but not the episodes because IMO they were overpriced. With Portal and both Episodes I thought it was a fair price after the drop since. Valve makes some great games, but I'm not paying $20 for 4 - 5 hrs of game play. I think that is what the Episodes cost on their own, at least here in Canada.
I was also thinking the same with Episode 3, that Valve will package it with Portal 2, which would be fine, but prob something else I don't want, like TF2. I also don't like how with their multiplayer games they only give you a few maps. I think Half-Life 2 deathmatch had only 4, not nearly enough IMO.
Forget LFD2, where the hell is HL2: Episode 3? How about making a game for the millions of people who bought Episodes 1 and 2 Doug?
"Doug Lombardi said simply, "Trust us a little bit"." I find that somewhat difficult to do. It seems like Valve care more about milking money out of you than giving people what they want. It's probably taking so long for Episode 3 cause they are making some other stuff I don't want to throw in with Episode 3 and give them the ability to charge $60 instead of $15 - $20 for Episode 3 itself.
"What downtimes? I can only recall a few, and their planned, and usually in the wee hours of the morning during the week."
What about when Halo 3 came out? I couldn't connect to Live at all the first day it was out and my connection was hit and miss for a few days after that. How did the COD 4 launch go? I got the PC version so I don't know but I'm guessing Live took a hit then too.
Microsoft has seen this behaviour before the Christmas, they didn't expect people to play their 360s in during their holidays? My guess is that in their effort to finally make the Xbox division profitable they haven't been upgrading the Live infrastructure to keep up with the increased user numbers.
Halo 3 comes out on Sept. 25th and historically when a huge, potentially system-selling games come out competitors do something to combat the hype. My guess is that Sony will either drop the price, make some kind of software bundle or do both.
I don't believe what you saying about Tunes it 100% correct/clear. Yes it does associate your purchased content to your account, but it also associates it to the computer you've downloaded the music onto. I initally tried iTunes at work and dl'd a few songs, but found out later I cannot download those song on my home PC as well. I believe you can only download the songs again on the computer they were originally downloaded on.
Mario Kart 64!!!! Sorry SNES fans, but Mario Kart 64 has better multiplayer in my opinion.:) The racing itself is better in the SNES version, but the FOUR player battle mode in MK 64 was amazing and four player racing was pretty good too. My two roommates and I put in countless hours of battle mode. The battle mode in Double Dash for the Cube had terrible maps. I hope they put more effort into the Wii versions battle mode (more, better designed maps and online please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).
When I get my Wii (at launch if I can) I'll definitely be getting the new Zelda game, Twilight Princess. It is a "must have" for me.
From the previews I've seen it looks fanastic. It reminds me of Ocarina of Time for the N64 which was an amazing game.
Perhaps the packed in game Wii Sports will keep you occupied until something you find interesting comes out;), or maybe something on virual console you'll find some old school games to keep you interested.
"Those time estimates are totally bogus anyway. Who even looks at them?"
I do actually. I'm not going to pay $60 to play a game that lasts 5-6 hrs with no multiplayer, no matter how good that game may be. Half Life 2 only took about 13 hours to beat, but it has a fairly popular multiplayer mode;). On the other end of the time scale, I probably wouldn't want to buy a game that takes 40+ hours to beat since I don't have that much time to commit to it. BTW, I finish games pretty close to review estimates. ie Resi Evil 4, approx 20 hrs, which is a nice number I find for single player games.
The main reason I have a Windoze box (in addition to my Redhat box) is the game selection. Yes the Mac does get a few of the bigger releases at the same time as Windows or shortly after (WoW, Doom 3, UT2K4), but many games take a long time to get ported or don't even make it to the Mac. ie. Battlefield 1942 took around 2 years to make it to Mac's after the PC release.
Now, to be able to compare this with the situation with movie, imagine you've got a magic wand which let's you copy that Ferrari at the dealership with a wave of your hand, bolt-by-bolt, and then drive that copy for free.
What about if you were the owner of the Ferrari dealership who lost many sales to the wave of the hand trick, would you be able to stay in business? Even though your example isn't stealing, it is hurting the person who is spending time and money to build that business. What if it were your movie/car dealership that you poured in hundreds of hours of effort into, only to have someone make a copy of it instead of paying you for your hard work?
7. Be sure and mention Japanese and European sales numbers. If you aren't sure what those sales numbers are, go ahead and make something up. Estimate low, most people will believe you.
According to this http://game-science.com/news/001076.html/ article, the XBOX sold a whopping 169 units in Japan last week, and 6,529 for the whole year. At the other end of the spectrum, the Nintendo DS sold 67,863 units last week. Clearly the XBOX is not doing very well in Japan.
"don't just take your picture there...wait a few minutes, and hand your your new license there when it is developed."
They used to do it that way, but the new "secure" licenses are created in a central facility, in Ontario I think. I guess the thought is that it will prevent an person who works at a registry from making a fake one themselves.
I got mine a few months ago when I moved. The temporary license they give you while you wait for you new one to be mailed to you is ridiculous. It's just a piece of paper with your name on it, so you can't even go for a pint if you get ID'd because the piece of paper is not good enough.
Why don't they just send your new license to the registry and then you can go exchange your old one for the new one when it arrives?
Slashdot Mirror
Have you thought of trying Ethernet over power adapters instead? I'm using older Linksys Ethernet over power adapters and they work very well. I've had no problems with streaming, playing games, downloading torrents, etc.
http://www.linksysbycisco.com/US/en/products/PowerLine
It's not that I'm not buying Wii games deliberately out of spite. I'm not buying them because there hasn't been much that has interested me. I'm looking forward to Contra Rebirth on WiiWare and Super Mario Kart whenever the heck they decide to release it in North America.
Another annoying thing about Nintendo for me is their love of peripherals. Wii Motion Plus should be $10 max, not $25 (Here in Canada). So now if you want to buy a new Nunchuk/Wii Remote/Motion plus combo you are coming in at about $100! A tad pricey IMO. At some point I may break down and get it when a game I want warrants it, but since its rather expensive I'm not buying it without thinking twice. I think Nintendo is hurting themselves by pricing it so high. I know the high price sentiment has prevented other friends from buying it and the games that work with it, especially since so few games do at the moment. Yeah I know it is packed in with Wii Sports Resort and Tiger Woods 10, but if you get Resort you pretty much have to buy another Motion Plus since its predominately a multi player game. No thanks Nintendo, I've already blown enough on Wii peripherals for the time being.
I'm an old school Nintendo fan from way back, probably like a lot of people here on Slashdot. I still have every console from the NES to the Wii, but I doubt I will be buying Wii HD, or whatever comes next. Nintendo is now for the most part not even trying to cater to its former customers like me. I haven't bought a Wii game since Mario Kart came out last year, though Metroid Prime Trilogy is on my list since I didn't ever get Echoes. Yeah there are a few appealing games on your list above, but for the most part they don't appeal to me.
Speaking of Mario Kart Wii, another thing that Nintendo is doing is dumbing down their games for the masses and taking the skill factor out of their games. You could be leading for the whole race and someone in last gets a blue shell and knocks you down to 5th or 6th or worse. Also, the online portion of the game is very lacking in features, with basically 2 modes only. I can see they want to make it easy for all levels of video game players to get into the action, but please leave in some depth for people who have been playing your franchises since their inception!
With the tons of money they are making on the Wii and DS why doesn't Nintendo actually try to make a NEW franchise or two for core gamers, you know, the ones who kept them alive during their GameCube debacle days. Nintendo is one of the few game companies with the resources to spend making new a IP for their base of fans they've built up over he decades, but all they want to do now is pump out sequels and soccer mom fitness programs. The Metroid: Other M team up with Tecmo is a good idea, why don't they do more of that type of thing? Give funding to other game companies to create new IP or acquire companies who want to make those type of games.
At the end of the day they are a company trying to make as much money as they can, which is understandable, but ignoring or disenfranchising a large portion of you built-in fan base is leaving a lot of money on the table for Microsoft and Sony. I own a 360 and a Wii and Billy and Co. have been getting the lions share of my console gaming dollars over the past year and change and probably will for the foreseeable future.
You bought an extended warranty? Hopefully you didn't pay very much for it. The 360 has a three 3 year warranty for RRoD and E74 failures, which is what most failures are.
Last month my 2.5 year old 360 started freezing intermittently, but wouldn't red ring. I had to keep playing games and letting it die until it would finally red ring every time I started it. Its brutal that you have to do that in order to qualify for a replacement 360, but at least it only took 9 days from the day I shipped it to receive my replacement. If my 360 dies after the 3 year warranty is up I would rather spend the warranty money on a new 360 that runs cooler, draws less power, etc.
I shudder to think what the warranty process was like a few months after the 360 was released, which is why I would never buy a launch Playstation or Xbox. My 5 Nintendo based systems have never failed once (Well the NES can be a bit of pain sometimes, ha ha).
I haven't tried this myself, but I heard you can fix this issue by using pbsetup and refreshing your punkbuster definitions that way.
http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=pbsetup.php
The EA UK Battlefields forums are pretty good and DICE's devs pop in their quite frequently. This thread contains some good info about resolving the Win 7/Punkbuster issue.
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-2/598895-windows-7-bf2.html
"the PC market has receded in terms of significance,"
While its true that PC gaming is sharing a larger and larger chunk of its gaming dollars with consoles, there is still money to be made on PCs IMO. For people like me I'll take mouse/keyboard over a console controller any day for FPS games. Perhaps id would make more money if their more recent PC games were actually good. Given their new found financial resources I hope id takes the time and creates something other than Doom X with shiny id Tech Y. Try adding some new, innovative game play in your next game and perhaps I might buy it.
I hope one of the "new things" they've tried is fixing the audio and graphics driver issues 9 and 10 introduced. Fedora 8 worked like a charm for me with my older PC, but installing 9 and 10 was problematic. I couldn't even install 10 until I modded the kernel arguments to use the vesa xdriver. With 10 my audio stutters and hangs during audio/video playback while in 8 using the exact same hardware I had zero issues.
I did the same thing, waited until the price drop. I already owned HL2, but not the episodes because IMO they were overpriced. With Portal and both Episodes I thought it was a fair price after the drop since. Valve makes some great games, but I'm not paying $20 for 4 - 5 hrs of game play. I think that is what the Episodes cost on their own, at least here in Canada.
I was also thinking the same with Episode 3, that Valve will package it with Portal 2, which would be fine, but prob something else I don't want, like TF2. I also don't like how with their multiplayer games they only give you a few maps. I think Half-Life 2 deathmatch had only 4, not nearly enough IMO.
Forget LFD2, where the hell is HL2: Episode 3? How about making a game for the millions of people who bought Episodes 1 and 2 Doug? "Doug Lombardi said simply, "Trust us a little bit"." I find that somewhat difficult to do. It seems like Valve care more about milking money out of you than giving people what they want. It's probably taking so long for Episode 3 cause they are making some other stuff I don't want to throw in with Episode 3 and give them the ability to charge $60 instead of $15 - $20 for Episode 3 itself.
"What downtimes? I can only recall a few, and their planned, and usually in the wee hours of the morning during the week."
What about when Halo 3 came out? I couldn't connect to Live at all the first day it was out and my connection was hit and miss for a few days after that. How did the COD 4 launch go? I got the PC version so I don't know but I'm guessing Live took a hit then too.
Microsoft has seen this behaviour before the Christmas, they didn't expect people to play their 360s in during their holidays? My guess is that in their effort to finally make the Xbox division profitable they haven't been upgrading the Live infrastructure to keep up with the increased user numbers.
"I *hate* Microsoft now." New here? ;)
Halo 3 comes out on Sept. 25th and historically when a huge, potentially system-selling games come out competitors do something to combat the hype. My guess is that Sony will either drop the price, make some kind of software bundle or do both.
Nice list but you missed a few: 5) blah blah iTunes blah blah 6) blah Soviet blah Russia blah 7) ? 8) profit!!!!!
I don't believe what you saying about Tunes it 100% correct/clear. Yes it does associate your purchased content to your account, but it also associates it to the computer you've downloaded the music onto. I initally tried iTunes at work and dl'd a few songs, but found out later I cannot download those song on my home PC as well. I believe you can only download the songs again on the computer they were originally downloaded on.
Mario Kart 64!!!! Sorry SNES fans, but Mario Kart 64 has better multiplayer in my opinion. :) The racing itself is better in the SNES version, but the FOUR player battle mode in MK 64 was amazing and four player racing was pretty good too. My two roommates and I put in countless hours of battle mode. The battle mode in Double Dash for the Cube had terrible maps. I hope they put more effort into the Wii versions battle mode (more, better designed maps and online please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).
When I get my Wii (at launch if I can) I'll definitely be getting the new Zelda game, Twilight Princess. It is a "must have" for me. From the previews I've seen it looks fanastic. It reminds me of Ocarina of Time for the N64 which was an amazing game.
;), or maybe something on virual console you'll find some old school games to keep you interested.
Perhaps the packed in game Wii Sports will keep you occupied until something you find interesting comes out
"Those time estimates are totally bogus anyway. Who even looks at them?"
;). On the other end of the time scale, I probably wouldn't want to buy a game that takes 40+ hours to beat since I don't have that much time to commit to it. BTW, I finish games pretty close to review estimates. ie Resi Evil 4, approx 20 hrs, which is a nice number I find for single player games.
I do actually. I'm not going to pay $60 to play a game that lasts 5-6 hrs with no multiplayer, no matter how good that game may be. Half Life 2 only took about 13 hours to beat, but it has a fairly popular multiplayer mode
hockey season is near, so Go Oilers Go! Waits for off topic mod down.... :)
The main reason I have a Windoze box (in addition to my Redhat box) is the game selection. Yes the Mac does get a few of the bigger releases at the same time as Windows or shortly after (WoW, Doom 3, UT2K4), but many games take a long time to get ported or don't even make it to the Mac. ie. Battlefield 1942 took around 2 years to make it to Mac's after the PC release.
Now, to be able to compare this with the situation with movie, imagine you've got a magic wand which let's you copy that Ferrari at the dealership with a wave of your hand, bolt-by-bolt, and then drive that copy for free.
What about if you were the owner of the Ferrari dealership who lost many sales to the wave of the hand trick, would you be able to stay in business? Even though your example isn't stealing, it is hurting the person who is spending time and money to build that business. What if it were your movie/car dealership that you poured in hundreds of hours of effort into, only to have someone make a copy of it instead of paying you for your hard work?
7. Be sure and mention Japanese and European sales numbers. If you aren't sure what those sales numbers are, go ahead and make something up. Estimate low, most people will believe you.
;)
According to this http://game-science.com/news/001076.html/ article, the XBOX sold a whopping 169 units in Japan last week, and 6,529 for the whole year. At the other end of the spectrum, the Nintendo DS sold 67,863 units last week. Clearly the XBOX is not doing very well in Japan.
*** Disclaimer - I own a xb0KZzzz
They used to do it that way, but the new "secure" licenses are created in a central facility, in Ontario I think. I guess the thought is that it will prevent an person who works at a registry from making a fake one themselves.
I got mine a few months ago when I moved. The temporary license they give you while you wait for you new one to be mailed to you is ridiculous. It's just a piece of paper with your name on it, so you can't even go for a pint if you get ID'd because the piece of paper is not good enough.
Why don't they just send your new license to the registry and then you can go exchange your old one for the new one when it arrives?
if you do have a compact high density power source then the sky is the limit.
They have one already, energon cubes silly!
It was at McD's, so I think we can narrow down it to what it was promoting. Most likely either:
...
1. Fries
2. Burgers
3. Shakes
4. Burgers and Shakes
5. Fries and Shakes
6. Burgers and Fries
7. Burgers and Fries and Shakes
8. Profit!!!