You obviously haven't played many console games recently. There have been many examples of games with serious bugs that needed patching immediately or glitches in games like Gears of War 2 which meant the multiplayer was dominated by cheaters for months after release before a patch came out.
Other games have been patched but still have issues Saints Row 2 is full of bugs which vary from falling through the world into other areas to hard locking the console requiring a reset.
Some of these bugs are hard to spot without exhaustive playtesting but some are obviously a result of a rushed release schedule and should never have seen the light of day.
Well, components as a rule use less energy but it depends on the system. 1000Watt PSUs may seem ridiculous but if you are running two high spec graphics cards then they suck up a lot of juice. Couple that with a RAID array of 10000rpm drives and it all starts adding up.
My point: $40 for a PSU would be overpriced to me. and, since decades of experience has shown me that spending more money than you have to for components is foolish
It only seems foolish until the day your cheap PSU blows, frying your motherboard, graphics card, RAM and processor.
Even without that possibility cheap power supplies generally do a terrible job of regulating the power which can cause all kinds of stability problems when for instance it can't maintain the correct voltage for your RAM.
Yes the DVDs are used for retrieving individual files as well as a last ditch way of recovering corrupted data.
I suppose if we had some kind of data corruption that we didn't notice then we could be in trouble (I don't relish the idea of retrieving 2TB of data off hundreds of DVDs) but it is really a case of keeping the data as safe as possible without throwing too much money or time into the routine.
Having a larger set of drives for the offsite backups would give more protection but to get a meaningful increase in protection would need a lot more drives which increases the cost and logisitics of the whole thing.
I think the idea of achievements like the pistols only one is that everyone in the team goes for it at once. Thereby creating a new kind of mode. A bit like the WoW achievements where you have to complete a fight in a certain way that makes it more challenging.
I don't think that achievements are related to how addictive a game is. I see them as acknowledgement of your time spent with a game. I like them because after playing a game for a few hours there is recognition of my time spent and what I have done in that time.
This is especially true in multiplayer games, or puzzle games that you play over and over. With a single player story you can measure achievement by how far through you are. But after 100 games of Settlers of Catan, or Gears of War you aren't any further forward. Achievements very simply show what you achieved in a game.
Now I don't subscribe to the whole 'collect every last X' type achievements that require players to scour levels for every last bit of junk. But when they are used properly they reward players for playing well, and for doing things over and above in the game. A good example of this is in Left 4 Dead. A lot of the achievements are given when you take a risk and pull it off. For instance there is one for leaving the safe room to help another player, rewarding the kind of play that makes the game more exciting and enjoyable for the whole team.
A small business can buy two Terabyte external drives, and make a complete backup every Friday evening, alternating between the drives, take the drive home.
This is pretty much what my company does. There are only 5 full time staff so things like tape backup procedures are too expensive for our needs. We do have a lot of data though.
We have everything on a NAS running RAID 5, at the end of each day anything that has been changed that day gets written to a DVD, which goes offsite. Normally chucked into someones bag on the way out of the door, but the DVDs are only for quick file recovery so not crucial.
At the end of each week we do a complete backup of the NAS onto a 2TB external drive (which is actually 2 x 1TB drives running JBOD in an enclosure). That goes offsite, then at the end of the next week a second drive is used for the offsite. So we always have 2 copies of everything offsite max 1week or 2weeks old respectively.
Not a completely fool proof system but good enough to give me peace of mind with respect to hardware failure, theft, fire and penetration of the office network.
A lot is a huge stretch. I doubt you can name more than a half dozen.
Off the top of my head without much thought:
Doom, Quake, Quake II, Quake 3, Half-life, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Civ 4, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Battlefield 1942, World of Warcraft, STALKER, Oblivion, Morrowind, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Unreal Tournament (all) , Rainbow 6 (all), Warcraft III, The Sims
I'm sure if I put my mind to it I could come up with another hundred or so. While with some games the availability of mods is just a bit of icing on the cake of a good game with others like Neverwinter Nights or Oblivion the mods form a massive part of the experience.
Adventures created by the modding community kept NWN alive for years after release, paving the way for the sequel to be the success that it was. The Elder Scrolls games have also always had a very active modding community and knowing that when Oblivion came out made all the difference. Knowing that you can customise a game to your playing style, or that it will last months opposed to days due to player made maps and modifications can really sell a game. As well as extending the life of sales past the first couple of weeks after release.
For those who need an ill formed & flawed car analogy: It is like taking a new car for a test drive only to return to the dealership to discover that your old car has been crushed into a cube.
It is clearly stated on the site where the Release Candidate is downloaded from that it is not recommended to install on your main machine as it will be necessary to reinstall a different OS at the end of the evaluation period. It is intended to be used on a testing machine, or by people who don't mind reinstalling after March next year.
It amazes me that Microsoft give away a trial version of their new OS for anyone to try out for almost a year and there are so many people whose response is negative. If you don't want to have to reinstall next year then don't use it. Or wait for the retail release and buy a copy.
If I gave you a house on a rent-free 12 month lease would you piss and whine about how inconvenient moving out would be?
Why would people hate Microsoft for making available a free release candidate of their new OS that can be used with no restriction for the next 11 months?
At that point users of the release candidate can either pay for a license or reinstall their old OS.
This isn't some nefarious move by Microsoft it is just the end of the evaluation period of the release candidate.
I thought the days of having to disassemble and clean mice were over when everyone moved to optical! Ah the days of picking fluff out of a ball mouse how I am glad you are over.
Don't get me started on the lack of USB ports on laptops. It surprises me that the MacBook Pro only has two USB ports. I suppose it is due to Apple's new found love of putting all of the ports on one side of the laptop. I would imagine that most laptops have more (a quick look tells me that most of Dell's laptops have two on each side). But for a laptop using built in bluetooth is probably still less hassle than having to carry extra dongles about for RF wireless.
For a laptop then a mouse with replaceable batteries makes sense but for a desktop it is so much more convenient just to drop it on the charging dock when you aren't using it.
Don't most computers have loads of free USB ports though? I know the computer i'm using currently has 4 on the back and 2 on the front and it is a basic Dell box. My system at home with a fairly standard motherboard has 6 on the back and 2 on the front.
The benefit of a USB mouse for me is that the RF receiver that is plugged into the USB port is also a charging dock so I don't have to worry about batteries. I had considered that the battery life of the internal batteries might degrade over time but 4 years later it is still going strong. (Logitech MX 1000).
We have a few bluetooth mice in the office and they are a real pain. They are forever pairing with the wrong computer. So you change the batteries and it pops up the pairing dialog on a computer 2 offices away while you sit there with a mouse that doesn't work.
Of course to compound matters they are wireless Mighty mice which have to be the worst mouse i've used. They are too heavy, don't slide well across the mouse mat and the left click / right click has very dodgy detection. The only good thing about them is the mouse ball instead of a wheel with tilt that most use for vertical and horizontal screen. But even that gets gummed up quickly and stops rolling freely.
Both Crysis and one of the new Battlefield games allow you to blow up buildings. Driving jeeps through houses in Crysis is a great tactic. But the kind of physics required to model knocking a house down require powerful processors and graphics cards.
Limited ammo brings back the issue of getting stuck. If you use all of your rockets blowing holes in the wrong walls then you can't progress in the game.
Don't get me wrong I don't think all games need to be big blockbusters. I have got a lot of fun out of stuff like Spectromancer, Defense Grid and World of Goo and I think smaller games have a definite place in the market. But I wouldn't want the industry to move away from AAA titles entirely as games like Call of Duty 4 and Fable offer something that smaller titles don't.
See what I remember about Red Faction is that the deformable levels were just a gimmick and most of the time there were steel walls beneath the rock stopping you from creating shortcuts between areas. This turned the game into a hunt to find the specific areas that the level designers wanted you to destroy.
Deformable terrain in games is fun for a while but the inevitable restraints sap the fun from it. These restraints are necessary so you don't destroy the stairs you need to get to the next area and end up stuck in the basement having to reload.
I've heard many people make this claim before but I've never ever seen it in practise
A lot of keygens and cracks have trojans in them, less so with releases from major groups but often the cracks the groups release are altered and reposted with trojans tacked on. There was a trend at one point for hiding trojans in fake keygens that sniffed the registry for cd keys. These cd keys were then added into new versions of the 'key-gens' that were actually just a static list of keys pretending to be generated by the program.
As you say the people who actually crack the games have their own ethics so their releases are normally free of malware but it is trivial for someone with no such ethics to download their release and add malware to it.
do a favor for all of us: download it, then seed a new torrent on TPB
I would be wary about downloading content like game patches from a torrent site. There is a long history of crackers using altered versions of patches and keygens to spread malware.
I have always thought that having to go to a third party site like FileFront to download a patch for a game was ridiculous. If a publisher is releasing a patch they should host it themselves not make their customers jump through hoops registering on a third party site and queueing for a download. And the same goes for games that rely on P2P based updater programs to patch the game.
WoW is one of the worst for this, I don't want to have to download patches using their custom BitTorrent client when it would be 10 times faster from a direct download. I realise that using BitTorrent spreads the load when a new patch comes out but it also hands the bandwidth bill to their customers, some of whom are on low cap connections and just want the patch they need not to burn through a GB of their bandwidth uploading it to other people.
Internet services are even further out of the question, since I
a: Get nothing out of it,
b: I can do it myself better
What is the problem then? If you get nothing out of Last.FM as an internet service, and can do better yourself then create your own streaming music service.
The contradiction of saying that you get nothing out of a service while at the same time complaining you don't have access to it is clear. As is the arrogance of saying that internet services have no worth because 'I can do it myself better'. If you can then why don't you?
Your argument that a service has no value because it doesn't offer something you can keep is rather flawed. Would you not buy a hotdog because you can only eat it once? Would you not go to the theatre or cinema because it is a finite experience?
The Witcher Enhanced Edition came with a short story and a making of DVD. Some people are still doing it but it has moved to a collector's edition model so sometimes costs extra.
I do remember being bitterly dissapointed when I found that Neverwinter Nights 2 didn't come with a real manual. For RPGs the manual is often an essential reference for things like skills and spells.
Photoshop CS4 costs $699.00 in the US for direct download from Adobe, or EUR 887.12, the equivalent of $1115.00. That's considerably more than 30%.
Comparing prices that are charged in countries that use different currencies is fairly meaningless at the moment. The Euro is much weaker against the dollar than it was a few years ago so naturally if you convert the price into dollars it seems really expensive. But the people who are buying Photoshop for 887 euros aren't affected by the change in exchange rates. The 887 euro cost stays the same no matter how many dollars it is equivalent to.
I suppose you could be implying that EU businesses can get a better deal buying the downloadable version from Adobe's US website but I am fairly sure the licensing won't allow this. No point in getting a great deal on genuine software when the license isn't valid so you may as well have pulled it off Pirate Bay.
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You obviously haven't played many console games recently. There have been many examples of games with serious bugs that needed patching immediately or glitches in games like Gears of War 2 which meant the multiplayer was dominated by cheaters for months after release before a patch came out.
Other games have been patched but still have issues Saints Row 2 is full of bugs which vary from falling through the world into other areas to hard locking the console requiring a reset.
Some of these bugs are hard to spot without exhaustive playtesting but some are obviously a result of a rushed release schedule and should never have seen the light of day.
Well, components as a rule use less energy but it depends on the system. 1000Watt PSUs may seem ridiculous but if you are running two high spec graphics cards then they suck up a lot of juice. Couple that with a RAID array of 10000rpm drives and it all starts adding up.
It only seems foolish until the day your cheap PSU blows, frying your motherboard, graphics card, RAM and processor.
Even without that possibility cheap power supplies generally do a terrible job of regulating the power which can cause all kinds of stability problems when for instance it can't maintain the correct voltage for your RAM.
As far as I can remember the colouring in cola is caramel.
Not that I subscribe to the 'artificial == bad' meme.
Yes the DVDs are used for retrieving individual files as well as a last ditch way of recovering corrupted data.
I suppose if we had some kind of data corruption that we didn't notice then we could be in trouble (I don't relish the idea of retrieving 2TB of data off hundreds of DVDs) but it is really a case of keeping the data as safe as possible without throwing too much money or time into the routine.
Having a larger set of drives for the offsite backups would give more protection but to get a meaningful increase in protection would need a lot more drives which increases the cost and logisitics of the whole thing.
I think the idea of achievements like the pistols only one is that everyone in the team goes for it at once. Thereby creating a new kind of mode. A bit like the WoW achievements where you have to complete a fight in a certain way that makes it more challenging.
I don't think that achievements are related to how addictive a game is. I see them as acknowledgement of your time spent with a game. I like them because after playing a game for a few hours there is recognition of my time spent and what I have done in that time.
This is especially true in multiplayer games, or puzzle games that you play over and over. With a single player story you can measure achievement by how far through you are. But after 100 games of Settlers of Catan, or Gears of War you aren't any further forward. Achievements very simply show what you achieved in a game.
Now I don't subscribe to the whole 'collect every last X' type achievements that require players to scour levels for every last bit of junk. But when they are used properly they reward players for playing well, and for doing things over and above in the game. A good example of this is in Left 4 Dead. A lot of the achievements are given when you take a risk and pull it off. For instance there is one for leaving the safe room to help another player, rewarding the kind of play that makes the game more exciting and enjoyable for the whole team.
This is pretty much what my company does. There are only 5 full time staff so things like tape backup procedures are too expensive for our needs. We do have a lot of data though.
We have everything on a NAS running RAID 5, at the end of each day anything that has been changed that day gets written to a DVD, which goes offsite. Normally chucked into someones bag on the way out of the door, but the DVDs are only for quick file recovery so not crucial.
At the end of each week we do a complete backup of the NAS onto a 2TB external drive (which is actually 2 x 1TB drives running JBOD in an enclosure). That goes offsite, then at the end of the next week a second drive is used for the offsite. So we always have 2 copies of everything offsite max 1week or 2weeks old respectively.
Not a completely fool proof system but good enough to give me peace of mind with respect to hardware failure, theft, fire and penetration of the office network.
Off the top of my head without much thought:
Doom, Quake, Quake II, Quake 3, Half-life, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Civ 4, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Battlefield 1942, World of Warcraft, STALKER, Oblivion, Morrowind, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Unreal Tournament (all) , Rainbow 6 (all), Warcraft III, The Sims
I'm sure if I put my mind to it I could come up with another hundred or so. While with some games the availability of mods is just a bit of icing on the cake of a good game with others like Neverwinter Nights or Oblivion the mods form a massive part of the experience.
Adventures created by the modding community kept NWN alive for years after release, paving the way for the sequel to be the success that it was. The Elder Scrolls games have also always had a very active modding community and knowing that when Oblivion came out made all the difference. Knowing that you can customise a game to your playing style, or that it will last months opposed to days due to player made maps and modifications can really sell a game. As well as extending the life of sales past the first couple of weeks after release.
It is clearly stated on the site where the Release Candidate is downloaded from that it is not recommended to install on your main machine as it will be necessary to reinstall a different OS at the end of the evaluation period. It is intended to be used on a testing machine, or by people who don't mind reinstalling after March next year.
It amazes me that Microsoft give away a trial version of their new OS for anyone to try out for almost a year and there are so many people whose response is negative. If you don't want to have to reinstall next year then don't use it. Or wait for the retail release and buy a copy.
If I gave you a house on a rent-free 12 month lease would you piss and whine about how inconvenient moving out would be?
Why would people hate Microsoft for making available a free release candidate of their new OS that can be used with no restriction for the next 11 months?
At that point users of the release candidate can either pay for a license or reinstall their old OS.
This isn't some nefarious move by Microsoft it is just the end of the evaluation period of the release candidate.
Well technically a USB port can serve a number of devices if you use a hub but it all gets a bit clumsy.
The Macbook air only has one, which is a completely baffling design choice.
I thought the days of having to disassemble and clean mice were over when everyone moved to optical! Ah the days of picking fluff out of a ball mouse how I am glad you are over.
Don't get me started on the lack of USB ports on laptops. It surprises me that the MacBook Pro only has two USB ports. I suppose it is due to Apple's new found love of putting all of the ports on one side of the laptop. I would imagine that most laptops have more (a quick look tells me that most of Dell's laptops have two on each side). But for a laptop using built in bluetooth is probably still less hassle than having to carry extra dongles about for RF wireless.
For a laptop then a mouse with replaceable batteries makes sense but for a desktop it is so much more convenient just to drop it on the charging dock when you aren't using it.
Don't most computers have loads of free USB ports though? I know the computer i'm using currently has 4 on the back and 2 on the front and it is a basic Dell box. My system at home with a fairly standard motherboard has 6 on the back and 2 on the front.
The benefit of a USB mouse for me is that the RF receiver that is plugged into the USB port is also a charging dock so I don't have to worry about batteries. I had considered that the battery life of the internal batteries might degrade over time but 4 years later it is still going strong. (Logitech MX 1000).
We have a few bluetooth mice in the office and they are a real pain. They are forever pairing with the wrong computer. So you change the batteries and it pops up the pairing dialog on a computer 2 offices away while you sit there with a mouse that doesn't work.
Of course to compound matters they are wireless Mighty mice which have to be the worst mouse i've used. They are too heavy, don't slide well across the mouse mat and the left click / right click has very dodgy detection. The only good thing about them is the mouse ball instead of a wheel with tilt that most use for vertical and horizontal screen. But even that gets gummed up quickly and stops rolling freely.
The other really annoying thing with Mac Keyboards is that there isn't a # key. Makes it a pain to write code when you have to press alt-3 every time.
Both Crysis and one of the new Battlefield games allow you to blow up buildings. Driving jeeps through houses in Crysis is a great tactic. But the kind of physics required to model knocking a house down require powerful processors and graphics cards.
Limited ammo brings back the issue of getting stuck. If you use all of your rockets blowing holes in the wrong walls then you can't progress in the game.
Don't get me wrong I don't think all games need to be big blockbusters. I have got a lot of fun out of stuff like Spectromancer, Defense Grid and World of Goo and I think smaller games have a definite place in the market. But I wouldn't want the industry to move away from AAA titles entirely as games like Call of Duty 4 and Fable offer something that smaller titles don't.
See what I remember about Red Faction is that the deformable levels were just a gimmick and most of the time there were steel walls beneath the rock stopping you from creating shortcuts between areas. This turned the game into a hunt to find the specific areas that the level designers wanted you to destroy.
Deformable terrain in games is fun for a while but the inevitable restraints sap the fun from it. These restraints are necessary so you don't destroy the stairs you need to get to the next area and end up stuck in the basement having to reload.
A lot of keygens and cracks have trojans in them, less so with releases from major groups but often the cracks the groups release are altered and reposted with trojans tacked on. There was a trend at one point for hiding trojans in fake keygens that sniffed the registry for cd keys. These cd keys were then added into new versions of the 'key-gens' that were actually just a static list of keys pretending to be generated by the program.
As you say the people who actually crack the games have their own ethics so their releases are normally free of malware but it is trivial for someone with no such ethics to download their release and add malware to it.
I would be wary about downloading content like game patches from a torrent site. There is a long history of crackers using altered versions of patches and keygens to spread malware.
I have always thought that having to go to a third party site like FileFront to download a patch for a game was ridiculous. If a publisher is releasing a patch they should host it themselves not make their customers jump through hoops registering on a third party site and queueing for a download. And the same goes for games that rely on P2P based updater programs to patch the game.
WoW is one of the worst for this, I don't want to have to download patches using their custom BitTorrent client when it would be 10 times faster from a direct download. I realise that using BitTorrent spreads the load when a new patch comes out but it also hands the bandwidth bill to their customers, some of whom are on low cap connections and just want the patch they need not to burn through a GB of their bandwidth uploading it to other people.
What is the problem then? If you get nothing out of Last.FM as an internet service, and can do better yourself then create your own streaming music service.
The contradiction of saying that you get nothing out of a service while at the same time complaining you don't have access to it is clear. As is the arrogance of saying that internet services have no worth because 'I can do it myself better'. If you can then why don't you?
Your argument that a service has no value because it doesn't offer something you can keep is rather flawed. Would you not buy a hotdog because you can only eat it once? Would you not go to the theatre or cinema because it is a finite experience?
I don't know how it works in the US but certainly in the UK iTunes gift cards are activated at the checkout to prevent shoplifting.
The Witcher Enhanced Edition came with a short story and a making of DVD. Some people are still doing it but it has moved to a collector's edition model so sometimes costs extra.
I do remember being bitterly dissapointed when I found that Neverwinter Nights 2 didn't come with a real manual. For RPGs the manual is often an essential reference for things like skills and spells.
Comparing prices that are charged in countries that use different currencies is fairly meaningless at the moment. The Euro is much weaker against the dollar than it was a few years ago so naturally if you convert the price into dollars it seems really expensive. But the people who are buying Photoshop for 887 euros aren't affected by the change in exchange rates. The 887 euro cost stays the same no matter how many dollars it is equivalent to.
I suppose you could be implying that EU businesses can get a better deal buying the downloadable version from Adobe's US website but I am fairly sure the licensing won't allow this. No point in getting a great deal on genuine software when the license isn't valid so you may as well have pulled it off Pirate Bay.