I was about to say every one of your comments, minus the one about being a healer because I couldn't stand to play the game long enough to figure that much out. I'd like to add that I was exceptionally annoyed to hear the same old battle cries and sound effects and music as NWN1. I sold NWN2 almost immediately after buying it, and the camera was my primary reason for doing so.
I'll go one further and say that I've had fewer problems with my laptop with Vista than I ever had with XP. Most problems solved pertain to wireless connectivity, but I've had zero problems since the beta with putting my computer in suspend or hibernate modes.
A bunch of my CDRs are in cheapo binders. The plastic or vinyl or whatever the binders are made of get stuck to the CDs and kind of smear them and make them cloudy. Bummer.
Nowadays I don't even bother. I leave my CDs on spindles. I don't know whether that's better or worse.
The new Sam and Max episodic series sold very well and its next episode is due out in January. For $9 you get a new episode every 2 months, or for $35 you get all 6 (plus shipping if you want the optional CD at the end of the season). At about 2 hours per episode this works out to be quite a bargain.
Half Life 2: Episode One is the best episode/expansion/add-on for any game ever. Period. It's so great that I actually wrote my first ever game review shortly after my second run-through. HL2:E1 sells for $20 for 4-6 hours of gameplay (it took me 4.5), but I got $2 off since I preordered.
Episodic gaming (not including SIN, which sucked in my opinion) is successful and is only in its infancy. The Sam and Max game really illustrated to me just how stagnant and one-dimensional television is in the 21st century. It's time to get involved in the lives of our favourite protagonists.
I agree completely. My burned CDs from 5 years ago are quite deteriorated, and the new CDRs I buy are of even shoddier quality. It's time to put laser media to rest and start using something more resilient.
This can be done pretty easily on a Catalyst switch by configuring VLANs, but it's nice to have this feature in Windows as well. Active Directory is a handy one-stop-shopping interface for centralized administration. Presumably you'll be able to push group policies and stuff to do minute tasks like allowing a subnet a higher percentage of bandwidth at certain times of day.
I don't mean to argue that live instruments are requisite for what I consider a good soundtrack. My favourite genres of music are purely electronic. I'm just frustrated with games that rely on a console's (or Windows') onboard MIDI instrument processor like this file. Synthesized music is awesome!
I am a huge game music fan and many of my favourite soundtracks are composed with inferior audio. However, I've seen "transitional" music done successfully with digital audio. The best example of this is in Sid Meier's Pirates when you flip between screens in any port. This game was released on PC and console platforms, and it's hardly a "next gen" title.
Audio is one of the most overlooked aspects of gaming, but as the original poster pointed out, it's painfully clear to many gamers when inferior onboard MIDI instrumentation is used.
7th Guest is about the kitsch and the first generation full motion video. For those things (plus the amazing soundtrack), I love 7th Guest. The puzzles are indeed ho-hum and rather frustrating, but that's just filler to justify the sexy video.
You're 100% correct about MIDI. In this day and age it's a reasonable expectation that a 50-hour AAA title on a next-gen console will not have 80KB worth of soundtrack.
How's 7th Guest on CDI? Does the MPEG hardware make the video any more attractive than the PC version? How is the game controlled? How many discs is it on?
I watched this interview last night just because it was Will Wright. So many interesting topics were alluded to and touched upon but nothing was explored in sufficient detail. Wright is a brilliant man and a fantastic speaker, but like all of Colbert's guests he was not given enough time or flexibility to speak his mind. Having seen Wright interviews elsewhere this really frustrated me.
Will Wright is a man who speaks best without an interviewer. I look forward to the next opportunity to see him give a lecture.
I bought SimCity 4 from Walmart not long ago. I installed it and it wouldn't run. I went to download the latest patch and put up with the ordeal of having to register an account to do so. The patch didn't help. Emailed EA support but never heard back. Emailed a second time, nada. The next week I recieved an email from EA asking me to rate my tech support experience. I had choice words.
I admit that after I play a racing game and then drive my Civic I'm tempted to drive a lot faster and, if I have a CD on, even have moments where I forget whether I'm driving a real car. Violent games like Half Life or Resident Evil never make me feel like that though.
I'll consider it a discount when I see the discount. WoW is certainly no discount and they have no qualms about letting their users flounder for days while trying in vain to download a 600MB file. The movie industry sells downloadable movies on some web stores for $15 - substantially MORE expensive that burned media with nice packages that must be shipped physically.
I will be very (but pleasantly) surprised if the cost savings are passed down to the consumer.
If I'm buying a movie why do I also have to buy bandwidth to distribute it to other purchasers? These movies had best be very cheap or the ordeal won't be worth all the trouble. I very much resented Blizzard for forcing its paying customers to VERY SLOWLY distribute patches over a totally non-configurable proprietary BT client while other games provide max downrate HTTP/FTP distribution.
Make no mistake, when (not if) the networks put 24/7 ads in the corners they will compete to find the most annoying thing that doesn't scare away viewers. Expect the infancy of this experiment to be the most obnoxious.
Why do we prefer online video over television? Doy! No advertisements!
Magazines and newspapers have non-obtrusive ads that can just be flipped immediately. TV ads must be watched or channel-flipped with the risk of missing content. Most internet video has ads on the site, not in the video.
I can't wait until TV networks get smart enough to put a Pepsi ad in the corner of the screen and allow "TV pirates" to spread the show on the internet. The network is off the hook for the piracy because it's out of their hands, Pepsi gets advertised all over the world, and the audience gladly puts up with the ad being onscreen because it doesn't interrupt the show.
I felt the same way at first! I didn't like that the adventure game turned into an action game at the end so I didn't finish it my first time around. However, I drank deeply from the cup of walkthroughs and finished it not long ago (like 10 years later) and I quite enjoyed the ending! I highly recommend you do the same! There's some really bone chilling and gross stuff to be seen!
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I was about to say every one of your comments, minus the one about being a healer because I couldn't stand to play the game long enough to figure that much out. I'd like to add that I was exceptionally annoyed to hear the same old battle cries and sound effects and music as NWN1. I sold NWN2 almost immediately after buying it, and the camera was my primary reason for doing so.
I'll go one further and say that I've had fewer problems with my laptop with Vista than I ever had with XP. Most problems solved pertain to wireless connectivity, but I've had zero problems since the beta with putting my computer in suspend or hibernate modes.
Remind me not to complain to you about rush hour. You'll probably suggest I found my own city.
Seriously buddy. Bubble bath. Valium. Spliff. Repeat.
A bunch of my CDRs are in cheapo binders. The plastic or vinyl or whatever the binders are made of get stuck to the CDs and kind of smear them and make them cloudy. Bummer.
Nowadays I don't even bother. I leave my CDs on spindles. I don't know whether that's better or worse.
The new Sam and Max episodic series sold very well and its next episode is due out in January. For $9 you get a new episode every 2 months, or for $35 you get all 6 (plus shipping if you want the optional CD at the end of the season). At about 2 hours per episode this works out to be quite a bargain.
Half Life 2: Episode One is the best episode/expansion/add-on for any game ever. Period. It's so great that I actually wrote my first ever game review shortly after my second run-through. HL2:E1 sells for $20 for 4-6 hours of gameplay (it took me 4.5), but I got $2 off since I preordered. Episodic gaming (not including SIN, which sucked in my opinion) is successful and is only in its infancy. The Sam and Max game really illustrated to me just how stagnant and one-dimensional television is in the 21st century. It's time to get involved in the lives of our favourite protagonists.
I agree completely. My burned CDs from 5 years ago are quite deteriorated, and the new CDRs I buy are of even shoddier quality. It's time to put laser media to rest and start using something more resilient.
This can be done pretty easily on a Catalyst switch by configuring VLANs, but it's nice to have this feature in Windows as well. Active Directory is a handy one-stop-shopping interface for centralized administration. Presumably you'll be able to push group policies and stuff to do minute tasks like allowing a subnet a higher percentage of bandwidth at certain times of day.
I don't mean to argue that live instruments are requisite for what I consider a good soundtrack. My favourite genres of music are purely electronic. I'm just frustrated with games that rely on a console's (or Windows') onboard MIDI instrument processor like this file. Synthesized music is awesome!
I am a huge game music fan and many of my favourite soundtracks are composed with inferior audio. However, I've seen "transitional" music done successfully with digital audio. The best example of this is in Sid Meier's Pirates when you flip between screens in any port. This game was released on PC and console platforms, and it's hardly a "next gen" title.
Audio is one of the most overlooked aspects of gaming, but as the original poster pointed out, it's painfully clear to many gamers when inferior onboard MIDI instrumentation is used.
7th Guest is about the kitsch and the first generation full motion video. For those things (plus the amazing soundtrack), I love 7th Guest. The puzzles are indeed ho-hum and rather frustrating, but that's just filler to justify the sexy video.
You're 100% correct about MIDI. In this day and age it's a reasonable expectation that a 50-hour AAA title on a next-gen console will not have 80KB worth of soundtrack.
How's 7th Guest on CDI? Does the MPEG hardware make the video any more attractive than the PC version? How is the game controlled? How many discs is it on?
Colbert really tantalized with his theological questions, though. An amazing if unlikely interview was at the tip of Colbert's tongue the whole time.
I watched this interview last night just because it was Will Wright. So many interesting topics were alluded to and touched upon but nothing was explored in sufficient detail. Wright is a brilliant man and a fantastic speaker, but like all of Colbert's guests he was not given enough time or flexibility to speak his mind. Having seen Wright interviews elsewhere this really frustrated me.
Will Wright is a man who speaks best without an interviewer. I look forward to the next opportunity to see him give a lecture.
I bought SimCity 4 from Walmart not long ago. I installed it and it wouldn't run. I went to download the latest patch and put up with the ordeal of having to register an account to do so. The patch didn't help. Emailed EA support but never heard back. Emailed a second time, nada. The next week I recieved an email from EA asking me to rate my tech support experience. I had choice words.
You should go to the local K-mart after a raid marathon and start yelling "WTS underpants, bind on equip!"
I admit that after I play a racing game and then drive my Civic I'm tempted to drive a lot faster and, if I have a CD on, even have moments where I forget whether I'm driving a real car. Violent games like Half Life or Resident Evil never make me feel like that though.
I'll consider it a discount when I see the discount. WoW is certainly no discount and they have no qualms about letting their users flounder for days while trying in vain to download a 600MB file. The movie industry sells downloadable movies on some web stores for $15 - substantially MORE expensive that burned media with nice packages that must be shipped physically.
I will be very (but pleasantly) surprised if the cost savings are passed down to the consumer.
If I'm buying a movie why do I also have to buy bandwidth to distribute it to other purchasers? These movies had best be very cheap or the ordeal won't be worth all the trouble. I very much resented Blizzard for forcing its paying customers to VERY SLOWLY distribute patches over a totally non-configurable proprietary BT client while other games provide max downrate HTTP/FTP distribution.
RTFA. It's about the average scores of launch titles.
TFA reviews console launches, not consoles. The title should be "Sony Console Launch the Worst Ever".
BBC is publicly funded and not for profit so they don't count.
Make no mistake, when (not if) the networks put 24/7 ads in the corners they will compete to find the most annoying thing that doesn't scare away viewers. Expect the infancy of this experiment to be the most obnoxious.
Why do we prefer online video over television? Doy! No advertisements!
Magazines and newspapers have non-obtrusive ads that can just be flipped immediately. TV ads must be watched or channel-flipped with the risk of missing content. Most internet video has ads on the site, not in the video.
I can't wait until TV networks get smart enough to put a Pepsi ad in the corner of the screen and allow "TV pirates" to spread the show on the internet. The network is off the hook for the piracy because it's out of their hands, Pepsi gets advertised all over the world, and the audience gladly puts up with the ad being onscreen because it doesn't interrupt the show.
I felt the same way at first! I didn't like that the adventure game turned into an action game at the end so I didn't finish it my first time around. However, I drank deeply from the cup of walkthroughs and finished it not long ago (like 10 years later) and I quite enjoyed the ending! I highly recommend you do the same! There's some really bone chilling and gross stuff to be seen!