The estimated release price of the next generation of high-end consoles (PS/3, neXtBox) is looking to be just shy of $1,000 (ONE THOUSAND US DOLLARS) (sorry, got nigerian for a minute there). It'll drop sharply in the months following release as the console makers finish milking the rich and desperate console gamers.
That'll buy you a very nice gaming PC, nonetheless. And the PC will probably include a very nice monitor.
I was under the impression that x86 emulation has never been better on the Mac. Wasn't there an article about someone booting WinXP on a Mac the other day?
Unfortunately for the parent, even though I'm not a mac fan myself, you have to remember, Macs are computers, not consoles (in the functional sense), and hence they're capable of some extraordinary things.
Prince of Persia is a great console game. Really pushes the consoles to the limits.
I found it to be a godawful PC game. The control scheme was so awkward it would been easier to balance the clumsiness with a clumsy gamepad (though I am not about to rush out and buy one).
Furthermore you can't even control the camera angles! How linear can you get? The reason of course is twofold: Firstly, the developers don't need to do as much content generation because they can "hide" most of the detail that would otherwise be needed by limiting camera angles. Secondly, the camera angles ensure that the developers can optimise FPS for the weak and underpowered consoles by preventing the user from "seeing" any complicated scenes.
With a PC the developers can just, well, "do it" and let the user go where they want and see what they want.
This is in line with many posters in this thread who see what is coming. The lowest common denominator is winning. Games are getting worse because consoles are becoming king. This is what publishers want. They do less work for the same return by producing inferior product and selling it to people who don't know better because they're not PC gamers.
You're omitting the camp of people who prefer to play games on a PC/Mac instead of a console because the overall quality and experience of playing a decent game on a correctly configured system is far superior to anything possible on todays consoles.
PC (including Mac, the Macintosh is a personal computer with an IBM/Motorola joint venture CPU) gaming is already a side-market. About 90% of new games on the market today are halfarsed console ports.
What was going on with Deus Ex 2? Why don't these developers actually learn?
"Hey Bob, did you see how we dumbed down game x?" "Yeah that totally killed the sales. The reviewers savaged it and all the fans hate us now." "Great! How should we go ahead with DX2?" "Let's dumb it down."
Hiptop. $20/month for unlimited kb (plus all other data services, IM, email, Terminal), and the web browser actually works and looks like a computer screen.
I'm sorry. I neglected to mention I'm in Australia. Australian ISPs would rather string you up and bleed you dry than give you any more bandwidth than they absolutely had to by contract and competition law, thanks to the tithe requirements of Telstra and Ziggy. Nice to know you americans still get really great, cheap internet access unlike us third world types.
Anyway, the reason I said Nokia has a good chance of succeeding eventually is because they've seen the writing on the ground and they're working to change their design to meet what the market is really looking for. Although of course with really untried technology like phone-gaming, it's really hit and miss. Either way the stakes are much higher given the number of players in the phone market now. I remember once it used to be you had a nokia or you had a bad phone.
I've got a 3G smartphone, a Motorola A920. The phone is great. I've installed java games, I use Opera to read books in HTML, I keep a few MP3's to listen to, I can take photos and pretty much anything else you might want to do. The only thing missing is a TV tuner.
The reason I got a smartphone instead of a PDA is that I carry my phone around everywhere, always. It makes sense to. It doesn't make sense to try and juggle a PDA and a phone and a gameboy and a camera around. So games might be better/easier on the dedicated hardware of a gameboy, but I guarantee if I owned both, the games on my phone would get much more playtime, because I have it with me, always. This is why eventually Nokia have a good chance of succeeding.
Likewise, in case you think web browsing on a phone is cool, I have to tell you it is. But 3 charges me 1c/kb downloaded. So it's absolutely prohibitive to even bother despite the fact that I'm carrying Opera in my pocket. Maybe in the future web browsing will happen. The technology is there, but there's more greed than need.
Assuming a couple of things: a) Microsoft never existed b) All else in history is more or less unchanged before MS moved in
The server market in the high end was controlled by mainframes and big tin servers running *nix. Without Windows to replace these systems, the companies that ran them (Sun, HP, IBM) would keep doing so for longer. Eventually the rise of the powerful small end server would still leave these older big tin servers by the wayside, as we are seeing today.
The small end market was completely owned by Novell. Novell would progress at the same rate from 3.12 up to 6, but market penetration in their segment would be phenomenally higher than even Windows over a long enough period.
IBM's OS/2 completely dominates the desktop market. Intel and AMD continue a fierce price war, although Intel's market share is damaged as IBM is a more cosmopolitan company than MS, and so offers support for AMD and Cyrix processors quite happily. For this reason Via never acquires Cyrix, making Cyrix dominate the market segment at the cheap and cheery level. Likewise, as Cyrix has a much stronger hand, Transmeta never gets the Crusoe off the ground.
Apple is relegated to its current niche as higher than OS/2 pricing and interoperability difficulties with Novell servers push the Macintosh away from the corporate spotlight. Apple nonetheless is a much stronger company and is presumably embroiled in near eternal court battles with IBM over antitrust issues.
Assuming the Linux movement begins to attempt to thwart IBM's OS/2 (the dominant desktop OS) offering seamless compatibility with Novell Netware on the server side. A few niche groups attempt to weedle market share away from Novell, but Novell's interoperability with Linux and more open software philosophies make the advantages of Linux appear much smaller than when compared with Windows.
OpenOffice and StarOffice are the first to compete heavily with IBM's 123 Suite that has held the market captive for over a decade.
Lotus Notes is much more pervasive and dominates several custom business flows in most major corporations across the world. People recognise that Novell is the most stable and solid platform for Notes deployment, and the Linux equivalents are shaping up and looking promising but still aren't viewed as "Ready for business".
With a sufficient amount of experience with actual gaming, you'll find that your FPS are limited severely by the ability of your gaming rig to supply information to that graphics adapter. Overall gaming experience relies solidly on the efficient performance of each component that contributes to the game.
Generally the only real benefits gained from a better GPU are sustaining framerates at higher resolutions and graphics quality enhancements such as anisotropic filtering and antialiasing.
The reason for all this is mainly because there is a severe lack of optimisation in modern computer games. The CPUs and GPUs are so powerful that developers just throw code at them and hope it comes out quickly. The only optimisations that are done now are done for consoles because consoles don't have the power to pull it off otherwise.
This is probably the first almost-reasonable post I've ever seen in favour of console gaming. Let's take a look.
If I were to make a list of great console games worth playing
Completely subjective. If I assume that no console games are worth playing and all PC games are worth playing, I can make a really really long list of games that are "worth playing". Also remember that not all gamers want to play pokemon or platformers or awkwardly controlled third person shooters or oversimplified "RPGs" like FF(x) (did I miss any console game types there?). This makes your list really, really biased and not a good argument.
Not to mention the awful stagnation in PC games recently
Not to mention the awful stagnation in console games recently. A few years ago, the Xbox and PS/2 made 3D games a reality for the console. What have they done with it? A few variations of tomb raider, a few ripoffs from PC games of the time, and they fancied up the Final Fantasy franchise a bit. Nothing innovative there. They still make "shooters" for consoles, too! Just like space invaders but 3D! But seriously, no innovation there.
If you don't like twitch shooters
Isn't this about, oh, 70% of console games on the market? The other 30% being simplistic RPG's, pseudo-RTS games, and other pseudo strategy games like "Wrath"?
mindless real-time "strategy" games
This comment makes no sense. It's either strategy, in which case it needs a little intellectual horsepower, or it's not, and then it doesn't. Why use the "'s? Did the author find a game he wasn't sure about like Giants, which has strategy elements but is a TPS? Oh wait sorry, that would be innovation in a PC game. Can't go there. Maybe Natural Selection... no wait, that's innovative too.
I only have a limited amount of time to play games.
This casts a small amount of doubt on the quality of information we're getting from the parent post. Much like Microsoft telling you the dangers of Linux. Who can you trust?
Hey, I resemble that remark. I'm a gamer, but I'm also employed. In I/T. And I'm not in India. This isn't "News for Nerds". This article represents "Stuff that Matters." Why does it matter? It's an indication that geek-stuff (like really small hard drives) is becoming accepted into mainstream, by means of its inclusion into a coffee-table book of all things. Yes the small hard drive in question has been covered before. But not by Guinness.
Also I hadn't seen the picture of that hard drive before. It's sooo cute. And it would fit quite handily into a mobile phone. Or even better, a smartphone. I'm ready to throw all my SD cards away! (Not really).
Pick up just about any magazine from the shelves in your local newsagent. You'll find slim, scantily clad women in photos. Be it cosmo, womens day, auto, PC Gamer, whatever you get, they'll be using pretty women to sell copy.
And they were doing it years before today. I have some original Zap!64 magazines at home (for the commodore 64). You bet, there are chicks in there too.
The fact of the matter is, and the marketing guys have known this for a long time, women are more pleasing to the eye than men (even to women). Therefore, women sell magazines and cars and PC games and cosmetics. Go look at the covers in your local agency. You'll find around 90% of the magazines have a woman on the front.
This is a pretty wild topic, when you consider the wider scheme of things, and the events that are taking place in the world.
I find it amazing that people here are considering how to improve Linux gaming, when PC gaming itself is beginning to fade away completely. I have never seen so many mediocre games being released for PC before, and the market is suffering a major downturn.
The reason? Console gaming. The big production houses want money. They get more money from McDonalds happy meal console games than from a five course PC game sized dinner. They squeeze a tiny bit of extra revenue by porting these games (badly) to the PC and making a godawful product, which in turn makes PC gaming look even worse.
Oh, there are still some big games coming out for PC, but there won't be any more big PC exclusives. Fallout 3 was canned. DooM3, the so-called "pinnacle" of the 3D realtime gaming engine religion, is being clumsily hacked down so it can work on a three year old console platform. How sophisticated is that? If they'd have written the original DooM so it could run on the Sega Master System, I hardly think the FPS revolution would ever have occurred.
If they start porting console games to Linux, you guys will be wishing you never even thought of Linux as a gaming platform. With the games that are available now, you could almost say anything like Wolverines Revenge would be pollution in a pristine environment.
I say, lets worry about PC games in general before we get down to the specifics of the O/S. PC gamers have grown up on filet mignon and fine red wine. Get used to value meals and fat fried chicken nuggets.
I hear you, but what can we possibly do? America is so big, powerful, and aggressive, there's no standing up to them. Australia is following the USA out of a mix of political greed and national fear.
Kinda makes you understand Italys position in WWII. You don't like any of it, but you start understand it.
Quite a few multiplayer-only games mentioned in your list there. I tell you what. I *can* argue with your list. It's quite easy. Multiplayer only games, while FPS's, are lacking a lot of the important work that makes the difference between a *good* FPS and an outstanding one.
One of the reasons Half-Life was so successful was because of the powerful (for the time) AI. Without that people would have forgotten it easily. If it was multiplayer only, the AI would have been left in the dirt. In fact, if it was multiplayer only, the counterstrike developers probably would have been less enamoured of it and written CS in Quake or Unreal or something.
I consider Unreal to be a truly great game. Unreal 2 was too little too late, but it had some good features nonetheless. What are the qualities you mention that are lacking in Unreal? Graphic quality? No. Sound? No. Weapon choices? Definately not. Plotline? The plot was reasonable enough. Multiplayer? Can't be, UT2K4 demo is making enormous waves at the moment. Engine? The Unreal Engine is very close in fame to the Quake engine, you don't get fame through mediocrity. Originality? Can't be, you included Doom2 on your top ten list. The only original thing about Doom 2 was one (1) additional weapon!
Get it? No, no I don't get it. Your post seems a little baseless in fact. If you want to bag something, you'll need to come up with a few supporting arguments first.
I imagine the Gamespot reviewers were mostly concerned with the PC games, as FPS games are at "home" on the PC where the interface is most intuitive and the platform has the most power to meet the demands. Including console FPS games in a "top 10" scenario would be like including the PC port of Mortal Kombat in a "top 10" fighting games list.
In that case I really think the authors had the right idea.
Actually, if you think about it, Slashdot is in fact a fanboy rant. It's just a really big, long ongoing one from a fanboy with multiple personalities, which explains the whole windows vs. linux vs. OS/X vs. Unixware vs. RIAA debate.
I believe that they left Descent out because it's more of a flight simulator than a FPS.
I understand that the perspective puts you in the "first person", so people are inclined to call it an FPS because of that, however. In Descent, you are the pilot of a vehicle designed to traverse mining installations. You don't walk, run, jump, or even wheel yourself around. You fly, with thrusters, and steer your vehicle. You can even set a constant forward velocity.
Which really makes Descent a flight/space combat simulator. Descent deserves no more recognition in the annals of first person shooters than Microsoft's Flight Simulator, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Baldurs Gate.
Also, if you're really sure it's faded, I suggest you check out the Freespace games, which is where Descent evolved into a full-blown open-space space combat sim in the same universe.
Apple doesnt make an OS that only works on their "lock-in hardware". They make an OS that ONLY SUPPORTS Power PC Systems that run with official Apple Firmware.
Sorry, my mistake. Apple makes an OS that only works on Apple "approved" hardware that's using Apple Firmware. So it's a hardware and firmware lockin.
Why, just take that legal copy of windows XP you own and have run on your 1GHz Athlon for all of these years, and try installing it on that 500MHz thinkpad you just got off eBay
Chances are the thinkpad already has Windows on it, or it has an OEM license. But heck, you don't see many thinkpads running OS/X, now, do ya? Hardware not good enough for Apple... or is it just Apple's lock-in is more restrictive than Microsofts?
Either way, I know you can quite easily install MS software or Linux on machines built by major OEM's or even build your own system from off-the-rack parts. You can choose a Sony DVD-Rom and a canadian graphics card, you even get a choice of CPU from transmeta, via, intel, or AMD. You can get parts from the USA or Japan or China or Taiwan. That's not lock in. And given that style of architecture is running the vast majority of desktops around the world, I'd suggest market forces indicate what customers want quite well.
Just remember, if you have a product activated license for MS Windows, and it's an OEM license locked to a particular set of hardware, it's a breach of the terms and conditions of the EULA to try install it on other hardware. Microsoft, evil, stupid company that they are, maintains a right to ensure that the licenses they provide are used correctly. But trust the advice of most slashdotters - if MS licensing is getting to you, install Linux.
With the Motorola A920 and A925, the firmware is locked to only accept a Hutchinson SIM card. I'd call that lock-in.
Please review your facts before posting. Please also review the definition of "informed opinion" before you post. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Very true. American law is culturally the only law for most commoners in western nations. In Australia, many people believe that they have a right to a telephone call when arrested. This is what they see people asking for on television all the time. Australia's constitution has no such requirement. Police don't need to give you a phone call if they don't want to.
Slashdot Mirror
The estimated release price of the next generation of high-end consoles (PS/3, neXtBox) is looking to be just shy of $1,000 (ONE THOUSAND US DOLLARS) (sorry, got nigerian for a minute there). It'll drop sharply in the months following release as the console makers finish milking the rich and desperate console gamers.
That'll buy you a very nice gaming PC, nonetheless. And the PC will probably include a very nice monitor.
I was under the impression that x86 emulation has never been better on the Mac. Wasn't there an article about someone booting WinXP on a Mac the other day?
Unfortunately for the parent, even though I'm not a mac fan myself, you have to remember, Macs are computers, not consoles (in the functional sense), and hence they're capable of some extraordinary things.
Prince of Persia is a great console game. Really pushes the consoles to the limits.
I found it to be a godawful PC game. The control scheme was so awkward it would been easier to balance the clumsiness with a clumsy gamepad (though I am not about to rush out and buy one).
Furthermore you can't even control the camera angles! How linear can you get? The reason of course is twofold: Firstly, the developers don't need to do as much content generation because they can "hide" most of the detail that would otherwise be needed by limiting camera angles. Secondly, the camera angles ensure that the developers can optimise FPS for the weak and underpowered consoles by preventing the user from "seeing" any complicated scenes.
With a PC the developers can just, well, "do it" and let the user go where they want and see what they want.
This is in line with many posters in this thread who see what is coming. The lowest common denominator is winning. Games are getting worse because consoles are becoming king. This is what publishers want. They do less work for the same return by producing inferior product and selling it to people who don't know better because they're not PC gamers.
You're omitting the camp of people who prefer to play games on a PC/Mac instead of a console because the overall quality and experience of playing a decent game on a correctly configured system is far superior to anything possible on todays consoles.
PC (including Mac, the Macintosh is a personal computer with an IBM/Motorola joint venture CPU) gaming is already a side-market. About 90% of new games on the market today are halfarsed console ports.
What was going on with Deus Ex 2? Why don't these developers actually learn?
"Hey Bob, did you see how we dumbed down game x?"
"Yeah that totally killed the sales. The reviewers savaged it and all the fans hate us now."
"Great! How should we go ahead with DX2?"
"Let's dumb it down."
Hiptop. $20/month for unlimited kb (plus all other data services, IM, email, Terminal), and the web browser actually works and looks like a computer screen.
I'm sorry. I neglected to mention I'm in Australia. Australian ISPs would rather string you up and bleed you dry than give you any more bandwidth than they absolutely had to by contract and competition law, thanks to the tithe requirements of Telstra and Ziggy. Nice to know you americans still get really great, cheap internet access unlike us third world types.
Anyway, the reason I said Nokia has a good chance of succeeding eventually is because they've seen the writing on the ground and they're working to change their design to meet what the market is really looking for. Although of course with really untried technology like phone-gaming, it's really hit and miss. Either way the stakes are much higher given the number of players in the phone market now. I remember once it used to be you had a nokia or you had a bad phone.
But you're willing to carry around game cartridges?
Nope, this is why I keep the games in my phone's memory. It's a smartphone, not a portable playstation.
I've got a 3G smartphone, a Motorola A920. The phone is great. I've installed java games, I use Opera to read books in HTML, I keep a few MP3's to listen to, I can take photos and pretty much anything else you might want to do. The only thing missing is a TV tuner.
The reason I got a smartphone instead of a PDA is that I carry my phone around everywhere, always. It makes sense to. It doesn't make sense to try and juggle a PDA and a phone and a gameboy and a camera around. So games might be better/easier on the dedicated hardware of a gameboy, but I guarantee if I owned both, the games on my phone would get much more playtime, because I have it with me, always. This is why eventually Nokia have a good chance of succeeding.
Likewise, in case you think web browsing on a phone is cool, I have to tell you it is. But 3 charges me 1c/kb downloaded. So it's absolutely prohibitive to even bother despite the fact that I'm carrying Opera in my pocket. Maybe in the future web browsing will happen. The technology is there, but there's more greed than need.
Assuming a couple of things:
a) Microsoft never existed
b) All else in history is more or less unchanged before MS moved in
The server market in the high end was controlled by mainframes and big tin servers running *nix. Without Windows to replace these systems, the companies that ran them (Sun, HP, IBM) would keep doing so for longer. Eventually the rise of the powerful small end server would still leave these older big tin servers by the wayside, as we are seeing today.
The small end market was completely owned by Novell. Novell would progress at the same rate from 3.12 up to 6, but market penetration in their segment would be phenomenally higher than even Windows over a long enough period.
IBM's OS/2 completely dominates the desktop market. Intel and AMD continue a fierce price war, although Intel's market share is damaged as IBM is a more cosmopolitan company than MS, and so offers support for AMD and Cyrix processors quite happily. For this reason Via never acquires Cyrix, making Cyrix dominate the market segment at the cheap and cheery level. Likewise, as Cyrix has a much stronger hand, Transmeta never gets the Crusoe off the ground.
Apple is relegated to its current niche as higher than OS/2 pricing and interoperability difficulties with Novell servers push the Macintosh away from the corporate spotlight. Apple nonetheless is a much stronger company and is presumably embroiled in near eternal court battles with IBM over antitrust issues.
Assuming the Linux movement begins to attempt to thwart IBM's OS/2 (the dominant desktop OS) offering seamless compatibility with Novell Netware on the server side. A few niche groups attempt to weedle market share away from Novell, but Novell's interoperability with Linux and more open software philosophies make the advantages of Linux appear much smaller than when compared with Windows.
OpenOffice and StarOffice are the first to compete heavily with IBM's 123 Suite that has held the market captive for over a decade.
Lotus Notes is much more pervasive and dominates several custom business flows in most major corporations across the world. People recognise that Novell is the most stable and solid platform for Notes deployment, and the Linux equivalents are shaping up and looking promising but still aren't viewed as "Ready for business".
With a sufficient amount of experience with actual gaming, you'll find that your FPS are limited severely by the ability of your gaming rig to supply information to that graphics adapter. Overall gaming experience relies solidly on the efficient performance of each component that contributes to the game.
Generally the only real benefits gained from a better GPU are sustaining framerates at higher resolutions and graphics quality enhancements such as anisotropic filtering and antialiasing.
The reason for all this is mainly because there is a severe lack of optimisation in modern computer games. The CPUs and GPUs are so powerful that developers just throw code at them and hope it comes out quickly. The only optimisations that are done now are done for consoles because consoles don't have the power to pull it off otherwise.
This is probably the first almost-reasonable post I've ever seen in favour of console gaming. Let's take a look.
If I were to make a list of great console games worth playing
Completely subjective. If I assume that no console games are worth playing and all PC games are worth playing, I can make a really really long list of games that are "worth playing". Also remember that not all gamers want to play pokemon or platformers or awkwardly controlled third person shooters or oversimplified "RPGs" like FF(x) (did I miss any console game types there?). This makes your list really, really biased and not a good argument.
Not to mention the awful stagnation in PC games recently
Not to mention the awful stagnation in console games recently. A few years ago, the Xbox and PS/2 made 3D games a reality for the console. What have they done with it? A few variations of tomb raider, a few ripoffs from PC games of the time, and they fancied up the Final Fantasy franchise a bit. Nothing innovative there. They still make "shooters" for consoles, too! Just like space invaders but 3D! But seriously, no innovation there.
If you don't like twitch shooters
Isn't this about, oh, 70% of console games on the market? The other 30% being simplistic RPG's, pseudo-RTS games, and other pseudo strategy games like "Wrath"?
mindless real-time "strategy" games
This comment makes no sense. It's either strategy, in which case it needs a little intellectual horsepower, or it's not, and then it doesn't. Why use the "'s? Did the author find a game he wasn't sure about like Giants, which has strategy elements but is a TPS? Oh wait sorry, that would be innovation in a PC game. Can't go there. Maybe Natural Selection... no wait, that's innovative too.
I only have a limited amount of time to play games.
This casts a small amount of doubt on the quality of information we're getting from the parent post. Much like Microsoft telling you the dangers of Linux. Who can you trust?
Hey, I resemble that remark. I'm a gamer, but I'm also employed. In I/T. And I'm not in India. This isn't "News for Nerds". This article represents "Stuff that Matters." Why does it matter? It's an indication that geek-stuff (like really small hard drives) is becoming accepted into mainstream, by means of its inclusion into a coffee-table book of all things. Yes the small hard drive in question has been covered before. But not by Guinness.
Also I hadn't seen the picture of that hard drive before. It's sooo cute. And it would fit quite handily into a mobile phone. Or even better, a smartphone. I'm ready to throw all my SD cards away! (Not really).
Pick up just about any magazine from the shelves in your local newsagent. You'll find slim, scantily clad women in photos. Be it cosmo, womens day, auto, PC Gamer, whatever you get, they'll be using pretty women to sell copy.
And they were doing it years before today. I have some original Zap!64 magazines at home (for the commodore 64). You bet, there are chicks in there too.
The fact of the matter is, and the marketing guys have known this for a long time, women are more pleasing to the eye than men (even to women). Therefore, women sell magazines and cars and PC games and cosmetics. Go look at the covers in your local agency. You'll find around 90% of the magazines have a woman on the front.
This is a pretty wild topic, when you consider the wider scheme of things, and the events that are taking place in the world.
I find it amazing that people here are considering how to improve Linux gaming, when PC gaming itself is beginning to fade away completely. I have never seen so many mediocre games being released for PC before, and the market is suffering a major downturn.
The reason? Console gaming. The big production houses want money. They get more money from McDonalds happy meal console games than from a five course PC game sized dinner. They squeeze a tiny bit of extra revenue by porting these games (badly) to the PC and making a godawful product, which in turn makes PC gaming look even worse.
Oh, there are still some big games coming out for PC, but there won't be any more big PC exclusives. Fallout 3 was canned. DooM3, the so-called "pinnacle" of the 3D realtime gaming engine religion, is being clumsily hacked down so it can work on a three year old console platform. How sophisticated is that? If they'd have written the original DooM so it could run on the Sega Master System, I hardly think the FPS revolution would ever have occurred.
If they start porting console games to Linux, you guys will be wishing you never even thought of Linux as a gaming platform. With the games that are available now, you could almost say anything like Wolverines Revenge would be pollution in a pristine environment.
I say, lets worry about PC games in general before we get down to the specifics of the O/S. PC gamers have grown up on filet mignon and fine red wine. Get used to value meals and fat fried chicken nuggets.
"Grapefruit". Is that some kind of apple mac thing?
I was under the impression we got bent over during the last round of trade talks. Must be some new kind of "favour".
I hear you, but what can we possibly do? America is so big, powerful, and aggressive, there's no standing up to them. Australia is following the USA out of a mix of political greed and national fear.
Kinda makes you understand Italys position in WWII. You don't like any of it, but you start understand it.
I love that song!
A long time ago in the land of the Shire
Lived a brave little hobbit that we all admire!
Quite a few multiplayer-only games mentioned in your list there. I tell you what. I *can* argue with your list. It's quite easy. Multiplayer only games, while FPS's, are lacking a lot of the important work that makes the difference between a *good* FPS and an outstanding one.
One of the reasons Half-Life was so successful was because of the powerful (for the time) AI. Without that people would have forgotten it easily. If it was multiplayer only, the AI would have been left in the dirt. In fact, if it was multiplayer only, the counterstrike developers probably would have been less enamoured of it and written CS in Quake or Unreal or something.
I consider Unreal to be a truly great game. Unreal 2 was too little too late, but it had some good features nonetheless. What are the qualities you mention that are lacking in Unreal? Graphic quality? No. Sound? No. Weapon choices? Definately not. Plotline? The plot was reasonable enough. Multiplayer? Can't be, UT2K4 demo is making enormous waves at the moment. Engine? The Unreal Engine is very close in fame to the Quake engine, you don't get fame through mediocrity. Originality? Can't be, you included Doom2 on your top ten list. The only original thing about Doom 2 was one (1) additional weapon!
Get it? No, no I don't get it. Your post seems a little baseless in fact. If you want to bag something, you'll need to come up with a few supporting arguments first.
I imagine the Gamespot reviewers were mostly concerned with the PC games, as FPS games are at "home" on the PC where the interface is most intuitive and the platform has the most power to meet the demands. Including console FPS games in a "top 10" scenario would be like including the PC port of Mortal Kombat in a "top 10" fighting games list.
In that case I really think the authors had the right idea.
Holy cow. Don't ever post like that again. You had my life flashing before my eyes.
Actually, if you think about it, Slashdot is in fact a fanboy rant. It's just a really big, long ongoing one from a fanboy with multiple personalities, which explains the whole windows vs. linux vs. OS/X vs. Unixware vs. RIAA debate.
I believe that they left Descent out because it's more of a flight simulator than a FPS.
I understand that the perspective puts you in the "first person", so people are inclined to call it an FPS because of that, however. In Descent, you are the pilot of a vehicle designed to traverse mining installations. You don't walk, run, jump, or even wheel yourself around. You fly, with thrusters, and steer your vehicle. You can even set a constant forward velocity.
Which really makes Descent a flight/space combat simulator. Descent deserves no more recognition in the annals of first person shooters than Microsoft's Flight Simulator, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Baldurs Gate.
Also, if you're really sure it's faded, I suggest you check out the Freespace games, which is where Descent evolved into a full-blown open-space space combat sim in the same universe.
Apple doesnt make an OS that only works on their "lock-in hardware". They make an OS that ONLY SUPPORTS Power PC Systems that run with official Apple Firmware.
Sorry, my mistake. Apple makes an OS that only works on Apple "approved" hardware that's using Apple Firmware. So it's a hardware and firmware lockin.
Why, just take that legal copy of windows XP you own and have run on your 1GHz Athlon for all of these years, and try installing it on that 500MHz thinkpad you just got off eBay
Chances are the thinkpad already has Windows on it, or it has an OEM license. But heck, you don't see many thinkpads running OS/X, now, do ya? Hardware not good enough for Apple... or is it just Apple's lock-in is more restrictive than Microsofts?
Either way, I know you can quite easily install MS software or Linux on machines built by major OEM's or even build your own system from off-the-rack parts. You can choose a Sony DVD-Rom and a canadian graphics card, you even get a choice of CPU from transmeta, via, intel, or AMD. You can get parts from the USA or Japan or China or Taiwan. That's not lock in. And given that style of architecture is running the vast majority of desktops around the world, I'd suggest market forces indicate what customers want quite well.
Just remember, if you have a product activated license for MS Windows, and it's an OEM license locked to a particular set of hardware, it's a breach of the terms and conditions of the EULA to try install it on other hardware. Microsoft, evil, stupid company that they are, maintains a right to ensure that the licenses they provide are used correctly. But trust the advice of most slashdotters - if MS licensing is getting to you, install Linux.
With the Motorola A920 and A925, the firmware is locked to only accept a Hutchinson SIM card. I'd call that lock-in.
Please review your facts before posting. Please also review the definition of "informed opinion" before you post. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Very true. American law is culturally the only law for most commoners in western nations. In Australia, many people believe that they have a right to a telephone call when arrested. This is what they see people asking for on television all the time. Australia's constitution has no such requirement. Police don't need to give you a phone call if they don't want to.
What was that tism song again??