Got the Warcraft II box set several years back (it includes WC, WC2, and WC2:expansion). Honestly, I thought it was okay but hadn't really had the urge to play more RTS after that. The fact that they didn't make it...well maybe the RTS genre is worth more credit than I gave it.
I'll explain the angle that I'm arguing from;
I just didn't want to break the flow of my post by adding in a two paragraph tangent.
To start off...200? I don't think I own more than 15 games for any system. Having 20 quality games is more important than having 200 fairly good games.
What are the "good games" on the X-Box supposedly? Halo, another First Person Shooter. My first complaint is that shooters tend to be more or less all the same these days. My second complaint is that I've heard repeatedly that Half Life is better anyway. So...not being a diehard shooter fan I just can't bring myself to care.
So...the second game that's been spouted at me a good repeatedly is KotOR. Well that's all dandy and everything, except everyone seems to be more keen about the PC version. Same with Morrowind which an X-Box fan was trying to sell to me a while back. Don't get me wrong, I want to play KotOR and all that, but why buy a whole console for it?
By contrast, the PS2 and the GameCube both have nice exclusives to pull them along. In the case of the PS2, the Squaresoft games, along with any developer who's too lazy to develop for multiple systems and just picks the one in the lead. The GameCube has several uniques, and not having played most myself I can't do it justice, but the ones which make me vaguely want to buy the system personally are SSB:M, Metroid Prime, Viewtiful Joe, Eternal Darkness, and a few others to a lesser extent. Well, the others are games I might buy if I had the system lying around, but aren't system-buy material, which I can't personally say for any XBox-unique title in particular despite the ones I've been exposed to.
He plays it as much as Crash Team Racing? Silly kid; Loderunner is a FAR better game. (Speaking of which, I should get back to Zelda 2 one of these days; still need to find the key to the fifth dungeon...).
And yes, PS1s break down; I've seen the basic shipment of PSXs conjectured as more fragile than the NES (which generally needs to be beaten into working these days...literally: most people I know really do smack the ol' box just to load a game). PS1s are presumably more durable than PSXs, but there's only so much you can do to the casing to prolong breakdown.
Point 1: the GBA is backward compatible, and indisputably a massive success.
Point 2: The PSX breaks down. Want to keep playing your old games? Fork out the cash. This is why my friend bought a PS2. More to the point, the PS2 memory card can be used to store hundreds of PS1 memory slots; when I get a PS2 I'll basically have all the PS1 memory space I'll ever need, and I'm tempted to get one purely for this purpose.
Point 3: X-Box backward compatibility would offer...what, exactly? The X-Box has essentially no good games (yes I'm exaggerating a little) and was bought primarily by people who wanted the newest, shinest, most powerful console. In addition, extra storage just isn't a bonus (though I hear that hard drives don't last forever). In the case of the X-Box, why would you want backwards compatibility?
A lot of privacy issues, videocameras in stores, monitoring what IPs have visited a certain site, et c. are already universal to everyone in the territory. I'm curious as to which privacies are unequally shared; most that I can think of depend purely on where you tread.
Puzzle games as a genre jump to mind; Tetris has very little grounding in reality, and neither do more modern ones I've seen like Zoo Cube. Mario and Luigi was often completely off the wall, and I'm sure there's games that beat it in silliness (I've never played Space Chanel 5, for instance). And Wario Ware, of course, is about as near to random as it gets; imagine playing pong with a watermelon as a ball and a human as a paddle...that's only the beginning for Wario Ware....
The article is about exclusive games FROM NINTENDO. Roughly two thirds of your list is published by third parties.
And? Viewtiful Joe nearly made me buy a GameCube. Furthermore, to complain that Pikmin 2 and Metroid Prime 2, say, aren't comming out within the next three months is kind of silly. I mean when's FFXII comming out on the PS2? Clearly Squaresoft isn't supporting them well-enough (to say nothing of Sony's internal development studios which are off the radar, and the fact that FFCC is coming out for the GameCube soon).
As for removing the HD? Well assuming of course it is true then the PC will once again be the ultimate platform.
I'm not sure what you mean by "once again". Hardware-wise the PC was already ahead at system-launch (or that's what I remember from E3 reports). Game-wise, I honestly can't say it's caught as much interest for me as the PS2, or the GC, or the GBA, and I'm notalone. If anything the XBox has been offering some kind of middle-ground as a cheap PC and a powerful platform.
A large storage medium allows you to store stuff for later. Things like save games vs save points, patches, upgrades, extra content, user made content etc etc to your hearts content.
That said, I don't know anybody who has managed to fill up a PS2 memory card, and the idea behind consoles is that you don't need patches because you have a finished product. Upgrades, extra content, and user made content are all good in theory; how many XBox games impliment them?
Remember Kotor? On the x-box a simple game. The moment it came out on the PC people were hacking it.
And do you think that any console can ever match the PC in that regard? Heck, I hear a lot about Metroid and FF6 mods, but again those are obviously PC-based. These are all (legal or not) essentially open-source projects...which MS tends to loathe. I'm too cynical to see them intentionally encouraging such projects, but feel free to prove me wrong.
For example, they could ship their XBox Live kits with HDs, which wouldn't increase the price too much (if Microsoft soaked the first year costs), but would serve well enough for downloadable content. Alternately, they could sell it separately, bundled with a game (or offer 3-6 months of online service free with it, etc).
Good idea in theory, but statistics I've heard is that any given add-on to a console (the extra RAM for the N64, the 32X for the Genesis, the Super Scope for the SNES and all that) tends to sell 1/10 as much as the console itself. Granted, these statistics are old and vague, but you're not going to sell XBox2s as backwards compatible XBoxs when people could just buy an XBox (which by that time will cost $99)
Chocolate Cake I can only eat once before needing to buy more. Good shooters, on the other hand, (say Goldeneye) I can continue to reuse essentially endlessly. I've easily spent more than 400 hours on the games I've liked that are unique, whereas games which are overly similar to past ones I've played, and not significant improvements, tend to get the once-through 10-20 hour treatments. Think about it--how many times have you played Poker, Chess, Bridge, or Monopoly? Now have you even tried "Missile Chess" and do you feel any remorse that you have not? Exactly my point.
Furthermore, this circulating claim that games are about fun *period* is something I'd like to dispel. Games have more potential as an art-form than either novels or movies. The PSX game Koudelka, for instance, blew me away from a literary-analysis perspective (and I did a Minor in English in undergrad so I'm not illiterate). It, however, isn't a terribly "fun" game per se. Similarly Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, and G is for Gumshoe are more fun to read than Wuthering Heights, War and Peace, and Villette. Why do we read the latter? Depth. In the case of Villette, which I am currently reading, I can say that I'm just finding it fascinating on an intellectual level....To use a less obscure example, can you look me straight in the eye and say you found The Fellowship of the Rings more fun to read than Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone? I'd be shocked if you could. So is Harry Potter better than Lord of the Rings? (Actually...I'd be willing to argue that, but I'm one of those people who think LotR characters to have less depth than HP characters so I'm not arguing entirely from the "fun" perspective).
Er...yeah summing up: innovation matters (otherwise Microsoft could release 16 versions of Halo with different levels and we'd buy all 16) and "fun" isn't the sole goal of art forms (otherwise Paradise Lost would have been burned as firewood centuries ago).
I'll admit I'm a bit gullible when it comes to Crichtons fiction in general (I bought a lot of the "science" in Timeline, Terminal Man, Airframe, Congo, and the Jurassic Parks...though I at least see a lot of the situations as being highly improbable). However, *SPOILERS FOR PREY*
The possibility of nanobots influencing human behaviour, and the getting tacked by a clump of nanobots, and the whole "I'm melting" stuff when they got sprayed with the antibacterial sprinklers was just ridiculous. Especially the latter point; I mean suppose you're being assaulted, and say you shine radiation at that person's Gonads rendering him sterile (and...heck, let's take out his immune system and liver at the same time). Does he whither and twitch on the ground screaming "noooooooo!"? No, he mugs you as normal, and doesn't notice until a couple months later when hormone deficiencies set in. Even my science-illiterate mother was commenting on how unrealistic it was.
Though, I'll openly admit that I was duped by the first half of the book when they were dealing with the "wild" nanobots. My mind still shelves it under the "improbable" section along with most of Crichton's fiction.
The GB was also forwards-compatible for a number of games. Granted, there were a few that would only play on the GBC and not GB, but I can't say any of those games really grabbed my attention.
The first thing I learned on Linux (over the past three or four months) is that KDE Applications are bad (despite it being the best GUI). kpaint? The version that comes with RH 7.5 is the worst paint program I have EVER seen; this includes MSPaint and some programs I've seen written in a two-week "learn to program" course. kIconEdit? Better, but still worse than MSPaint. Kit? Simply didn't work as near as I can tell, whereas I've never had a hitch with Gaim. Konqueror? Both Ghaleon and Mozilla are clearly better. kspread? I far prefer Gnumeric, and that's already been blasted by another commentator as worse than OpenOffice.
Fortunately, KDE auto-loads a lot of programs not made by them like Emacs, Gaim, Mozilla, GIMP, et c. This is the beauty of Open Source; KDE doesn't have to be great at applications (and IMO it's horrid) since it can just borrow other open-source applications and just provide the best base GUI.
The Harry Potter moves were as close as I've seen. They changed the location of one or two scenes, took out a few scenes for pacing, and changed the occasional line from one person to another. They still felt like watching the books unaltered, which LotR...didn't really.
Why do people keep going back to SMB3? It only outsold SMB1 in North America, and the North American record was broken by Final Fantasy VII (and Ocarena of Time for those who look only at Nintendo sales records).
Worldwide I'm fairly sure Pokemon beats the lot of them, but it depends on whether you split them into versions or not (which is a debate in and of itself, since there are people who own both the near identical red and blue versions).
That said, I hesitate to count generations before the NES. The Atari 5200 couldn't compete sales-wise with the 2600, so that continued to dominate up to and including the crash (much like how the NES outstripped the SNES for quite a while). So...is that a separate generation, or is that still 2600-land? Furthermore, releases before that time just seem more randomly distributed so that they don't divide well into generations, the industry was much smaller, and the crash just provides a convenient place to start counting. This, I believe, is why most videogame sites basically start counting with Nintendo, i.e.:
Generation 1: NES
Generation 2: SNES, Genesis
Generation 3: N64, Playstation
Generation 4: PS2, GC, XBox
(With all other consoles not being worried about too much as they never gained significant market share).
Nintendo Gameboy 1989
Nintendo Gameboy Advance 2001
Avg Time Bet. Releases : 11 years
(Granted, I'm leaving out Virtual Boy, which hardly counts, and Gameboy Color, which was essentially a mod to the old Gameboy)
Sega Gamegear 1991
Sega Nomad 1995
Avg Time Bet. Releases : 4 years
Also worthy of note, the Nintendo system released most quickly after it's predicessor (N64) is also the most maligned. Sega did fine with the Genesis, then spiralled into obscurity with Sega CD, Sega 32x, Sega Saturn, all in a short period.
Please, stop. This is demonstrably false. Xbox was officially announced in March of 2000, specs and all. PlayStation 2 shipped in North America in October of 2000.
That is correct; in fact if I remember correctly stores were paid by Microsoft as much as a year in advance to advise people to hold off buying a console until the X-Box came out. Nintendo denounced the practice saying it was bad for the industry as a whole.
That said, releasing early is hardly a precedent for winning any console wars. The Genesis released early and lost. the PSX and Saturn released fairly early, but neither could compete with the Super Nintendo (but gladly took over when Nintendo prematurely jumped to a new system). Dreamcast released early and simply died despite adoration by the critics.
Another issue is that people don't like upgrading systems too often. Screw what developers want, a lot of the Super Nintendo's most popular games were released in 1994 and 1995; that system could have easily lasted another couple years, and the good ol' Gameboy is a testament to that having dominated for 10.
Don't let the Slashdot community distort your vision of the general populace. Upgrading electronic components regularly isn't a normal part of contemporary entertainment (which includes things like CD players and VCRs). Most people don't buy a new VCR every four years, and tend to think "why should this videogame stuff be any different?"
And as it happens, in -20 weather I actually seem to prefer my basic rain jacket which has a very solid well-constructed hood over my thick down jacket which has a sewed on headcover. So in short: yeah, I basically do choose earmuffs over my coat.
As someone who lives in a cold climate, I have to say covering your ears (and generally your head) is generally more important than covering your torso. The brain controls where heat flow goes, and it's a very self-centered organ.
It's also trespassing if you walk onto someone's lawn. Granted, nobody should care, and you wouldn't call the cops unless some total stranger starts throwing a barbeque or something.
Still, I've lived for brief periods of time in towns where nobody locks their doors. I don't think it's dumb at all that this is treaspassing; most people wouldn't care if you randomly wandered in for a friendly chat, but they have the right to toss you out if you're being a bastard, and a right to their privacy.
If you're getting something over the internet it should be free, period. If you can't find an open-source version in this day and age (or an illegal ripped copy depending on what you're looking for) then...well search harder; it will be out there. The power of nerds on the internet is just that strong.
On the other hand, I will gladly pay for anything physical (provided I think it's worth the price).
Thus, pay to download honestly sounds fairly silly to me; do they honestly think they can beat the pirates?
Do take note that it seems to be compiled from a list of 2003 games only. Yes, Animal Crossing should probably be on there. Yes, it is odd that they mention an X-Box version of GtA when far more people have access to one of the PS2 versions released one-two years earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
Got the Warcraft II box set several years back (it includes WC, WC2, and WC2:expansion). Honestly, I thought it was okay but hadn't really had the urge to play more RTS after that. The fact that they didn't make it...well maybe the RTS genre is worth more credit than I gave it.
To start off...200? I don't think I own more than 15 games for any system. Having 20 quality games is more important than having 200 fairly good games.
What are the "good games" on the X-Box supposedly? Halo, another First Person Shooter. My first complaint is that shooters tend to be more or less all the same these days. My second complaint is that I've heard repeatedly that Half Life is better anyway. So...not being a diehard shooter fan I just can't bring myself to care.
So...the second game that's been spouted at me a good repeatedly is KotOR. Well that's all dandy and everything, except everyone seems to be more keen about the PC version. Same with Morrowind which an X-Box fan was trying to sell to me a while back. Don't get me wrong, I want to play KotOR and all that, but why buy a whole console for it?
By contrast, the PS2 and the GameCube both have nice exclusives to pull them along. In the case of the PS2, the Squaresoft games, along with any developer who's too lazy to develop for multiple systems and just picks the one in the lead. The GameCube has several uniques, and not having played most myself I can't do it justice, but the ones which make me vaguely want to buy the system personally are SSB:M, Metroid Prime, Viewtiful Joe, Eternal Darkness, and a few others to a lesser extent. Well, the others are games I might buy if I had the system lying around, but aren't system-buy material, which I can't personally say for any XBox-unique title in particular despite the ones I've been exposed to.
And yes, PS1s break down; I've seen the basic shipment of PSXs conjectured as more fragile than the NES (which generally needs to be beaten into working these days...literally: most people I know really do smack the ol' box just to load a game). PS1s are presumably more durable than PSXs, but there's only so much you can do to the casing to prolong breakdown.
Point 2: The PSX breaks down. Want to keep playing your old games? Fork out the cash. This is why my friend bought a PS2. More to the point, the PS2 memory card can be used to store hundreds of PS1 memory slots; when I get a PS2 I'll basically have all the PS1 memory space I'll ever need, and I'm tempted to get one purely for this purpose.
Point 3: X-Box backward compatibility would offer...what, exactly? The X-Box has essentially no good games (yes I'm exaggerating a little) and was bought primarily by people who wanted the newest, shinest, most powerful console. In addition, extra storage just isn't a bonus (though I hear that hard drives don't last forever). In the case of the X-Box, why would you want backwards compatibility?
A lot of privacy issues, videocameras in stores, monitoring what IPs have visited a certain site, et c. are already universal to everyone in the territory. I'm curious as to which privacies are unequally shared; most that I can think of depend purely on where you tread.
The difference between the past story and this one is that the past story was "rumors" whereas this is "leaked"....
Puzzle games as a genre jump to mind; Tetris has very little grounding in reality, and neither do more modern ones I've seen like Zoo Cube. Mario and Luigi was often completely off the wall, and I'm sure there's games that beat it in silliness (I've never played Space Chanel 5, for instance). And Wario Ware, of course, is about as near to random as it gets; imagine playing pong with a watermelon as a ball and a human as a paddle...that's only the beginning for Wario Ware....
And? Viewtiful Joe nearly made me buy a GameCube. Furthermore, to complain that Pikmin 2 and Metroid Prime 2, say, aren't comming out within the next three months is kind of silly. I mean when's FFXII comming out on the PS2? Clearly Squaresoft isn't supporting them well-enough (to say nothing of Sony's internal development studios which are off the radar, and the fact that FFCC is coming out for the GameCube soon).
I'm not sure what you mean by "once again". Hardware-wise the PC was already ahead at system-launch (or that's what I remember from E3 reports). Game-wise, I honestly can't say it's caught as much interest for me as the PS2, or the GC, or the GBA, and I'm not alone. If anything the XBox has been offering some kind of middle-ground as a cheap PC and a powerful platform.
A large storage medium allows you to store stuff for later. Things like save games vs save points, patches, upgrades, extra content, user made content etc etc to your hearts content.
That said, I don't know anybody who has managed to fill up a PS2 memory card, and the idea behind consoles is that you don't need patches because you have a finished product. Upgrades, extra content, and user made content are all good in theory; how many XBox games impliment them?
Remember Kotor? On the x-box a simple game. The moment it came out on the PC people were hacking it.
And do you think that any console can ever match the PC in that regard? Heck, I hear a lot about Metroid and FF6 mods, but again those are obviously PC-based. These are all (legal or not) essentially open-source projects...which MS tends to loathe. I'm too cynical to see them intentionally encouraging such projects, but feel free to prove me wrong.
Good idea in theory, but statistics I've heard is that any given add-on to a console (the extra RAM for the N64, the 32X for the Genesis, the Super Scope for the SNES and all that) tends to sell 1/10 as much as the console itself. Granted, these statistics are old and vague, but you're not going to sell XBox2s as backwards compatible XBoxs when people could just buy an XBox (which by that time will cost $99)
Furthermore, this circulating claim that games are about fun *period* is something I'd like to dispel. Games have more potential as an art-form than either novels or movies. The PSX game Koudelka, for instance, blew me away from a literary-analysis perspective (and I did a Minor in English in undergrad so I'm not illiterate). It, however, isn't a terribly "fun" game per se. Similarly Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, and G is for Gumshoe are more fun to read than Wuthering Heights, War and Peace, and Villette. Why do we read the latter? Depth. In the case of Villette, which I am currently reading, I can say that I'm just finding it fascinating on an intellectual level. ...To use a less obscure example, can you look me straight in the eye and say you found The Fellowship of the Rings more fun to read than Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone? I'd be shocked if you could. So is Harry Potter better than Lord of the Rings? (Actually...I'd be willing to argue that, but I'm one of those people who think LotR characters to have less depth than HP characters so I'm not arguing entirely from the "fun" perspective).
Er...yeah summing up: innovation matters (otherwise Microsoft could release 16 versions of Halo with different levels and we'd buy all 16) and "fun" isn't the sole goal of art forms (otherwise Paradise Lost would have been burned as firewood centuries ago).
The possibility of nanobots influencing human behaviour, and the getting tacked by a clump of nanobots, and the whole "I'm melting" stuff when they got sprayed with the antibacterial sprinklers was just ridiculous. Especially the latter point; I mean suppose you're being assaulted, and say you shine radiation at that person's Gonads rendering him sterile (and...heck, let's take out his immune system and liver at the same time). Does he whither and twitch on the ground screaming "noooooooo!"? No, he mugs you as normal, and doesn't notice until a couple months later when hormone deficiencies set in. Even my science-illiterate mother was commenting on how unrealistic it was.
Though, I'll openly admit that I was duped by the first half of the book when they were dealing with the "wild" nanobots. My mind still shelves it under the "improbable" section along with most of Crichton's fiction.
The GB was also forwards-compatible for a number of games. Granted, there were a few that would only play on the GBC and not GB, but I can't say any of those games really grabbed my attention.
Fortunately, KDE auto-loads a lot of programs not made by them like Emacs, Gaim, Mozilla, GIMP, et c. This is the beauty of Open Source; KDE doesn't have to be great at applications (and IMO it's horrid) since it can just borrow other open-source applications and just provide the best base GUI.
The Harry Potter moves were as close as I've seen. They changed the location of one or two scenes, took out a few scenes for pacing, and changed the occasional line from one person to another. They still felt like watching the books unaltered, which LotR...didn't really.
Worldwide I'm fairly sure Pokemon beats the lot of them, but it depends on whether you split them into versions or not (which is a debate in and of itself, since there are people who own both the near identical red and blue versions).
That said, I hesitate to count generations before the NES. The Atari 5200 couldn't compete sales-wise with the 2600, so that continued to dominate up to and including the crash (much like how the NES outstripped the SNES for quite a while). So...is that a separate generation, or is that still 2600-land? Furthermore, releases before that time just seem more randomly distributed so that they don't divide well into generations, the industry was much smaller, and the crash just provides a convenient place to start counting. This, I believe, is why most videogame sites basically start counting with Nintendo, i.e.:
Generation 1: NES
Generation 2: SNES, Genesis
Generation 3: N64, Playstation
Generation 4: PS2, GC, XBox
(With all other consoles not being worried about too much as they never gained significant market share).
Nintendo Gameboy 1989
Nintendo Gameboy Advance 2001
Avg Time Bet. Releases : 11 years
(Granted, I'm leaving out Virtual Boy, which hardly counts, and Gameboy Color, which was essentially a mod to the old Gameboy)
Sega Gamegear 1991
Sega Nomad 1995
Avg Time Bet. Releases : 4 years
Also worthy of note, the Nintendo system released most quickly after it's predicessor (N64) is also the most maligned. Sega did fine with the Genesis, then spiralled into obscurity with Sega CD, Sega 32x, Sega Saturn, all in a short period.
That is correct; in fact if I remember correctly stores were paid by Microsoft as much as a year in advance to advise people to hold off buying a console until the X-Box came out. Nintendo denounced the practice saying it was bad for the industry as a whole.
That said, releasing early is hardly a precedent for winning any console wars. The Genesis released early and lost. the PSX and Saturn released fairly early, but neither could compete with the Super Nintendo (but gladly took over when Nintendo prematurely jumped to a new system). Dreamcast released early and simply died despite adoration by the critics.
Another issue is that people don't like upgrading systems too often. Screw what developers want, a lot of the Super Nintendo's most popular games were released in 1994 and 1995; that system could have easily lasted another couple years, and the good ol' Gameboy is a testament to that having dominated for 10.
Don't let the Slashdot community distort your vision of the general populace. Upgrading electronic components regularly isn't a normal part of contemporary entertainment (which includes things like CD players and VCRs). Most people don't buy a new VCR every four years, and tend to think "why should this videogame stuff be any different?"
It's designed as a gaming system only, so they can make it cheap.
And as it happens, in -20 weather I actually seem to prefer my basic rain jacket which has a very solid well-constructed hood over my thick down jacket which has a sewed on headcover. So in short: yeah, I basically do choose earmuffs over my coat.
As someone who lives in a cold climate, I have to say covering your ears (and generally your head) is generally more important than covering your torso. The brain controls where heat flow goes, and it's a very self-centered organ.
Still, I've lived for brief periods of time in towns where nobody locks their doors. I don't think it's dumb at all that this is treaspassing; most people wouldn't care if you randomly wandered in for a friendly chat, but they have the right to toss you out if you're being a bastard, and a right to their privacy.
On the other hand, I will gladly pay for anything physical (provided I think it's worth the price).
Thus, pay to download honestly sounds fairly silly to me; do they honestly think they can beat the pirates?
Do take note that it seems to be compiled from a list of 2003 games only. Yes, Animal Crossing should probably be on there. Yes, it is odd that they mention an X-Box version of GtA when far more people have access to one of the PS2 versions released one-two years earlier.