I thought the reason it wasn't selling well was because there was a demo version you could download before buying them game to realize that you really shouldn't waste your money.
Tomb Raider legend on the 360 surprised me. Finally the game doesn't play like Lara Croft is walking (slowly) on some unseen grid. The controls are actually pretty good this time around. Crystal Dynamics has done well and to be honest this is the first Tomb Raider game I've ever liked. I bought the first one, and I tried many of the others, but since every complaint I had about the original continued to come back time and time again I had long since written the series off as trash.
One thing I will say, though, is that having played by the original XBox version and the 360 version I'm shocked at the difference. Viewing the 360 version alone you think to yourself "This really isn't THAT much better than what is possible on the PS2/GC/XBox" but then going back and playing the XBox version you can't help but believe that they intentionally cut back on quality to make the XBox 360 version look that much better. And it's not just because the 360 version looks that great, since there are PS2 games that easily look almost as good (God of War/Shadow of the Collosus, etc). I believe it's simply a matter of Crystal Dynamics spending more time on the 360 version than ther others.
Either way, if you have a 360 and like platformer/adventure types then skip TR:L on the PS2/XBox and get it for the 360. The difference in quality is substantial even though there isn't a good reason for it (except maybe convincing people to pay the higher price).
A few years back my Dell Insperon 5000e was one of the ones that was supposed to have a recall on the batteries.
I recieved several letters in the mail telling me that their records showed that my system was one of those believed to be part of the recall and I was instructed to go to the web-site and confirm it by putting the model numbers of my batteries into a web-form. Or something like.
EIther way, everytime I did it or checked it or whatever it would say my battery was not one of the types recalled.
All I all I think I was sent several letters about that issue. Someone apparently thought it applied to me, but the web-site disagreed.
Either way, my Laptop hasn't exploded yet... so I guess the web-site was right.
The fact is, employers don't want to work with people who publicly admit using drugs and dirty sex as their recreational time.
HR: What about that one gal you said you gathered lots of information about? From Myspace, was it? DRONE: Ah yes, this one. *flips through the folder* She says she likes to "get drunk and have sex in an office setting." HR: She's hired.
The PS2 made money in the middle of it's lifetime. That much I know. Sony as a whole has lost money as of late with the whole PSP thing and pouring so much into the PS3, not to mention many other markets the company is involved in. I would never say the PS2 was not a success, but when we talk about Sony/SCEA we need to remember that their business as it relates to games is not just the PS2. We now get to include the PSP and the upcoming PS3 in the discussion. Yay.
Microsoft on the other hand is a different situation. The company as a whole is making money of course. The Xbox has lost money and continues to lose money. Wether the 360 changes that or not will probably depend more on how Sony plays their cards with the PS3. Microsoft did say they're focusing on the 360 and not going to venture into the portable gaming market just yet, which means maybe they are becoming more profit-oriented with their games division.
Nintendo's "bad" quarters are the ones where their profits aren't as high as they had forcast. I do believe they actually posted one quarterly loss. Once. One time in over 100 years of business, and that was mostly the fault of the declining value of the Yen.
I do admit it's difficult to compare these three companies since they are all very different, but when it comes to games Nintendo has been consistantly profitable.
We don't need hard numbers to back up the claim that Nintendo was #1 in profit.
You see, it kind of works like this. Nintendo made money. It could have been one cent, and it was still more than Microsoft and Sony made together. They lost money. Lots of money. They hemoraged huge bloody soaked piles of cash out of their spend-happy assholes.
So yes, Nintendo was #1 in profit. They make tons of money off of their first party software sales for the Gamecube, because let's face it, the best games on the the 'cube are all first party anyway. They sell GBA's at an insane rate. They're selling DS's faster than they can make them. And they don't even take a loss on the sale of hardware.
So while they're market share might be just under even with Microsoft's, and a distant third compared to Sony, they're profit margins are all that really matters from a business stand point.
I think we can safely assume that the feature will be optional.
Nintendo's attitude towards online services has been pretty conservative which tells me they're not doing anything without thinking it through.
I also firmly beleive Nintendo may very well consider the online abilities of the Wii second to it's main features. I would also expect to see Virtual Console collections for sell at retail simply because Nintendo knows not all of thier fans have broadband.
This may sound silly but yesterday sometime around lunch-time I was thinking to myself...
"You know, Sony really has fucked themselves pretty good. First they pulled this whole embarassing PSP trick, now they're trying to sell the average person a $600 game machine."
Then suddenly I thought of something. With a hard drive, Linux, broadband, keyboard, mouse and HDTV and or a VGA display, the PS3 is a pretty nice little computer.
Maybe Sony will be attempting to not exclusively compete for space under the television but ALSO on the desk?
Once upon a time there were people who had their Commodore 64's hooked up to televisions because they couldn't afford monitors or because they really didn't see the need since they only used them to play games anyway.
If the PS3 finds itself being purchased by people who want a "powerful computer" but don't need the full range of computing accessories (printers, desks, computer chairs, etc) the days of the living room computer may be making a come back.
I can easily see poeple with a PS3 in their living room, browsing the web, downloading music, playing games, and even possibly chatting/blogging/emailing on a PS3.
On the other hand, the PS3 might just do piss poorly and make Sony rethink their strategy for the PS4.
The use of the "n00b" bit was used because he's exactly the sort of dude who would normally use it himself. I normally wouldn't, and that may in fact be the first time I've ever typed it in a post at all. A failed attempt at humor or irony, I guess.
But yes, I agree. A real hardcore gamer would try anything in spite of it's graphical style, control scheme, or platform. Crazy Taxi would have been a good suggestion, actually. I never even thought to bring that one up. Shenmue I wouldn't have thought to suggest, but I may try exposing some poeple I know to it to see how they react.
Poorly designed sites may delete the entire content of your post if you fail the captcha
If it makes you feel any better, most of those women on Yahoo Personals are either Russians looking for American husbands or Bots. So the message you lost wasn't going to that hot, rich, and single girl you thought it was anwyay.
But thanks to recent advances in Captcha defeating technologies, that Bot will soon be sending you a link to a "Live" Cam-Show. So not all is lost.
Some people prefer fun and playability, but mostly only people who either aren't hardcore gamers or people who have been gaming for over 20 years and have since become very jaded.
I was recently talking to a co-worker of mine who thinks he's an old school hardcore gamer because he has been playing games "Ever since back in the day of the old Playstation 1" as he said. He knows I have all of the systems, and including some obscure old ones from back when, as he says, "not many people really played video games."
While having our discussion, he asked me if there were any games I had that he could borrow that I thought he could play and perhaps get his girlfriend interested. She normally gets bothered by him when he plays games and he wanted something he thought they could both enjoy.
My first suggestion was Katamari Damacy. He asked what it was, and I told him. His next question really bothered me. "How are the graphics?"
I admit this almost took me by surprise. I tried my best to describe the graphics and he seemed to lose interest in it. He said he didn't want to play something "so cartoony". We went back and forth overy several more titles and he kept reminding me about his tastes in games and what he liked, and was hoping I had some ideas for something that they both might enjoy.
I said "Dude, trust me, women love Katamari." But he kept trying to shift my suggestions more towards games with realistic graphics and he wanted war and sports.
Is it any wonder his girlfriend hates it when he plays games?
Oddly enough, I'm slowly starting to suspect that his tastes in gaming reflect a large portion of the non-tech-savvy, average joe gamer of today that think they're hard-core. "The Playstation Generation". What bothers me even more is they're probably soon to be replaced with a new "Xbox Generation" of kids who think games not only must look realistic but have to be online play to be any good.
This same thing happened in several places back with the Nintendo 64 release. Many stores were letting them out a few days early, to include Toys'R'Us and Babbages.
As I recall there were some asses chewed up over it, but I don't know anyone who lost their job, at least not at the retail outlet level anyway. Higher up, perhaps.
This isn't exactly an answer to the question, but it could be interesting while we're on the topic.
One of my domains hosts a site that really was just something a friend and I put together back around 1999 or so. It was just a little project that we figured we would play with. We mostly neglected the site, as anyone who has ever visited it can tell you.
We had considered just giving up on it all but over the years people kept offering us money for the name. The highest offer we ever had was for over $4000 and for the life of me I don't know why we didn't take it.
In the end I'm glad we didn't.
We're about to shut the site down in it's current form and actually do something "real" with it. It's no-so-humorous humor is old and the site's popularity is long past it's prime. But we're both older and wiser now and we think we can actually make a site with content of value to readers. We have a somewhat recognized name that's been on the web a long time, we have both expanded our skills, and we both have a wee-bit more time than we did back then.
So what's my point?
Our site has been around a while and is more or less a cobweb site now. But it's a simple name that is easy to remember, it's established in the search engines, there are links to us from all over the place, and all in all we kind of like it.
So I'm glad we didn't sell. It would have been easy to take the money and run a long time ago, but if we were going to try to find a good domain today things would be a lot harder.
Needless to say it would take a lot more than $4000 to pry this domain out of our hands now.
As a side not, over the years it appears that businesses in other countries that operate under the name Tagor have started showing up on the web. Some might say we're squatting the name from them, but we don't see it that way. We had the name before we knew it meant anything to anyone and we actually have plans for the site.
A warranty that long on a hard drive is kind of silly anyway.
Let's say you buy a hard drive today for $300. In 2 years it dies. A replacement of that drive is probably less than $100, but your data is still lost.
And the price of data recovery is sky high for most users. I haven't found a service that will touch a mechanically failed drive for under $500.
In a couple of years when your hard disk crashes (if it does) if you don't have back-ups the last thing on earth you're going to worry about is a hard drive warranty.
Granted, backups of course mean your data is safe and all you need is a replacement hard drive. But if you think about it, the time spent recovering from backups, turning in the warranty claim, and getting a replacement is probably worth more than the value of that exact same drive. And while having your device replaced after a failure is nice, if you do have a hard disk failure the most important thing for you will be getting your data back either off of backups or from a data recovery service.
And while we're on the subject, how well do data recovery services fare when attempting to rescue information off of these new perpendicular drives? Does anyone know?
I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song.
That's what Smart Playlists are for. Playlists for different types of music. Playlists that choose based on rating. Playlists that play songs that haven't been played recently or very often. With the right software(ahem, iTunes) that problem is more under your control. Sure, you'll listen to each song less often, but the diversity is good and you can take greater control of the music it is you're likely to hear given your current mood.
While I agree they should focus on implimenting OpenGL more tightly, there's no reason to stop "bothering" with DirectX. Like it or not it's a very mature API and it provides a lot of things beyond what simply expanding on their support for OpenGL would provide.
Without something even remotely as good as DirectX that increasingly popular "other" operating system doesn't stand a chance of having nearly as much game developer support as Windows.
That isn't to say something opened that parallels the features of DirectX couldn't be developed, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean round 2D Pac Man, or the cartoonified happy face Pac Man of Pac Man World fame?
Either way, that would be interesting, though his attack style is almost identical to Sonic's if you think about it.
Oh, is that why it wasn't selling well?
I thought the reason it wasn't selling well was because there was a demo version you could download before buying them game to realize that you really shouldn't waste your money.
It worked for me. Thanks, John!
The top is actually two buttons and the side has two more buttons. The scroll-ball in the middle is also a button.
Modern games are expensive to make. Music is cheap to make.
A modern CD costs about $20 and a modern game costs about $60.
Music sells better than games.
You make a good point, but there are factors other than that at play here.
Tomb Raider
I will second this.
Tomb Raider legend on the 360 surprised me. Finally the game doesn't play like Lara Croft is walking (slowly) on some unseen grid. The controls are actually pretty good this time around. Crystal Dynamics has done well and to be honest this is the first Tomb Raider game I've ever liked. I bought the first one, and I tried many of the others, but since every complaint I had about the original continued to come back time and time again I had long since written the series off as trash.
One thing I will say, though, is that having played by the original XBox version and the 360 version I'm shocked at the difference. Viewing the 360 version alone you think to yourself "This really isn't THAT much better than what is possible on the PS2/GC/XBox" but then going back and playing the XBox version you can't help but believe that they intentionally cut back on quality to make the XBox 360 version look that much better. And it's not just because the 360 version looks that great, since there are PS2 games that easily look almost as good (God of War/Shadow of the Collosus, etc). I believe it's simply a matter of Crystal Dynamics spending more time on the 360 version than ther others.
Either way, if you have a 360 and like platformer/adventure types then skip TR:L on the PS2/XBox and get it for the 360. The difference in quality is substantial even though there isn't a good reason for it (except maybe convincing people to pay the higher price).
Where are they getting these magic hyphens and slashes from?
I'd tell you where they come from, but you'd probably never eat another one afterwards.
A few years back my Dell Insperon 5000e was one of the ones that was supposed to have a recall on the batteries.
I recieved several letters in the mail telling me that their records showed that my system was one of those believed to be part of the recall and I was instructed to go to the web-site and confirm it by putting the model numbers of my batteries into a web-form. Or something like.
EIther way, everytime I did it or checked it or whatever it would say my battery was not one of the types recalled.
All I all I think I was sent several letters about that issue. Someone apparently thought it applied to me, but the web-site disagreed.
Either way, my Laptop hasn't exploded yet... so I guess the web-site was right.
The fact is, employers don't want to work with people who publicly admit using drugs and dirty sex as their recreational time.
HR: What about that one gal you said you gathered lots of information about? From Myspace, was it?
DRONE: Ah yes, this one. *flips through the folder* She says she likes to "get drunk and have sex in an office setting."
HR: She's hired.
The PS2 made money in the middle of it's lifetime. That much I know. Sony as a whole has lost money as of late with the whole PSP thing and pouring so much into the PS3, not to mention many other markets the company is involved in. I would never say the PS2 was not a success, but when we talk about Sony/SCEA we need to remember that their business as it relates to games is not just the PS2. We now get to include the PSP and the upcoming PS3 in the discussion. Yay.
Microsoft on the other hand is a different situation. The company as a whole is making money of course. The Xbox has lost money and continues to lose money. Wether the 360 changes that or not will probably depend more on how Sony plays their cards with the PS3. Microsoft did say they're focusing on the 360 and not going to venture into the portable gaming market just yet, which means maybe they are becoming more profit-oriented with their games division.
Nintendo's "bad" quarters are the ones where their profits aren't as high as they had forcast. I do believe they actually posted one quarterly loss. Once. One time in over 100 years of business, and that was mostly the fault of the declining value of the Yen.
I do admit it's difficult to compare these three companies since they are all very different, but when it comes to games Nintendo has been consistantly profitable.
We don't need hard numbers to back up the claim that Nintendo was #1 in profit.
You see, it kind of works like this. Nintendo made money. It could have been one cent, and it was still more than Microsoft and Sony made together. They lost money. Lots of money. They hemoraged huge bloody soaked piles of cash out of their spend-happy assholes.
So yes, Nintendo was #1 in profit. They make tons of money off of their first party software sales for the Gamecube, because let's face it, the best games on the the 'cube are all first party anyway. They sell GBA's at an insane rate. They're selling DS's faster than they can make them. And they don't even take a loss on the sale of hardware.
So while they're market share might be just under even with Microsoft's, and a distant third compared to Sony, they're profit margins are all that really matters from a business stand point.
Dollars and cents, Nintendo kicked ass.
Nintendo has stated that they want everyone to have some kind of personal attachment to their own Wiimote.
Having said that, I think we can safely assume there will be some kind of aftermarket for either Wiimote skins or possibly whole new cases.
This of course assumes Nintendo doesn't make them available in a whole slew of colors and patterns in a first party form.
Hmm. Tie-Dyed Wiimote.
I think we can safely assume that the feature will be optional.
Nintendo's attitude towards online services has been pretty conservative which tells me they're not doing anything without thinking it through.
I also firmly beleive Nintendo may very well consider the online abilities of the Wii second to it's main features. I would also expect to see Virtual Console collections for sell at retail simply because Nintendo knows not all of thier fans have broadband.
This is all spectulation of course.
I wouldn't use that setup either, but I already have a PC.
:)
Also, see the last line of text in my post.
This may sound silly but yesterday sometime around lunch-time I was thinking to myself...
"You know, Sony really has fucked themselves pretty good. First they pulled this whole embarassing PSP trick, now they're trying to sell the average person a $600 game machine."
Then suddenly I thought of something. With a hard drive, Linux, broadband, keyboard, mouse and HDTV and or a VGA display, the PS3 is a pretty nice little computer.
Maybe Sony will be attempting to not exclusively compete for space under the television but ALSO on the desk?
Once upon a time there were people who had their Commodore 64's hooked up to televisions because they couldn't afford monitors or because they really didn't see the need since they only used them to play games anyway.
If the PS3 finds itself being purchased by people who want a "powerful computer" but don't need the full range of computing accessories (printers, desks, computer chairs, etc) the days of the living room computer may be making a come back.
I can easily see poeple with a PS3 in their living room, browsing the web, downloading music, playing games, and even possibly chatting/blogging/emailing on a PS3.
On the other hand, the PS3 might just do piss poorly and make Sony rethink their strategy for the PS4.
The use of the "n00b" bit was used because he's exactly the sort of dude who would normally use it himself. I normally wouldn't, and that may in fact be the first time I've ever typed it in a post at all. A failed attempt at humor or irony, I guess.
But yes, I agree. A real hardcore gamer would try anything in spite of it's graphical style, control scheme, or platform. Crazy Taxi would have been a good suggestion, actually. I never even thought to bring that one up. Shenmue I wouldn't have thought to suggest, but I may try exposing some poeple I know to it to see how they react.
As for Brain Age, it wasn't out back then.
You know, I'm ALL for boobs in video games. But bounce and volume impress me more than flop.
When video game designers start putting floppy titties in games I think they're going way too far.
Granny-Sag is just one feature NVidia really should hold off on. The market just isn't ready for it.
Not all Co-Workers are friends. :)
Poorly designed sites may delete the entire content of your post if you fail the captcha
If it makes you feel any better, most of those women on Yahoo Personals are either Russians looking for American husbands or Bots. So the message you lost wasn't going to that hot, rich, and single girl you thought it was anwyay.
But thanks to recent advances in Captcha defeating technologies, that Bot will soon be sending you a link to a "Live" Cam-Show. So not all is lost.
Some people prefer fun and playability, but mostly only people who either aren't hardcore gamers or people who have been gaming for over 20 years and have since become very jaded.
I was recently talking to a co-worker of mine who thinks he's an old school hardcore gamer because he has been playing games "Ever since back in the day of the old Playstation 1" as he said. He knows I have all of the systems, and including some obscure old ones from back when, as he says, "not many people really played video games."
While having our discussion, he asked me if there were any games I had that he could borrow that I thought he could play and perhaps get his girlfriend interested. She normally gets bothered by him when he plays games and he wanted something he thought they could both enjoy.
My first suggestion was Katamari Damacy. He asked what it was, and I told him. His next question really bothered me. "How are the graphics?"
I admit this almost took me by surprise. I tried my best to describe the graphics and he seemed to lose interest in it. He said he didn't want to play something "so cartoony". We went back and forth overy several more titles and he kept reminding me about his tastes in games and what he liked, and was hoping I had some ideas for something that they both might enjoy.
I said "Dude, trust me, women love Katamari." But he kept trying to shift my suggestions more towards games with realistic graphics and he wanted war and sports.
Is it any wonder his girlfriend hates it when he plays games?
Oddly enough, I'm slowly starting to suspect that his tastes in gaming reflect a large portion of the non-tech-savvy, average joe gamer of today that think they're hard-core. "The Playstation Generation". What bothers me even more is they're probably soon to be replaced with a new "Xbox Generation" of kids who think games not only must look realistic but have to be online play to be any good.
n00bs.
Nah. The co-author of the site works for ISDN.Net. :)
There's just no telling what that's all about.
It's only temporary, though.
This same thing happened in several places back with the Nintendo 64 release. Many stores were letting them out a few days early, to include Toys'R'Us and Babbages.
As I recall there were some asses chewed up over it, but I don't know anyone who lost their job, at least not at the retail outlet level anyway. Higher up, perhaps.
This isn't exactly an answer to the question, but it could be interesting while we're on the topic.
One of my domains hosts a site that really was just something a friend and I put together back around 1999 or so. It was just a little project that we figured we would play with. We mostly neglected the site, as anyone who has ever visited it can tell you.
We had considered just giving up on it all but over the years people kept offering us money for the name. The highest offer we ever had was for over $4000 and for the life of me I don't know why we didn't take it.
In the end I'm glad we didn't.
We're about to shut the site down in it's current form and actually do something "real" with it. It's no-so-humorous humor is old and the site's popularity is long past it's prime. But we're both older and wiser now and we think we can actually make a site with content of value to readers. We have a somewhat recognized name that's been on the web a long time, we have both expanded our skills, and we both have a wee-bit more time than we did back then.
So what's my point?
Our site has been around a while and is more or less a cobweb site now. But it's a simple name that is easy to remember, it's established in the search engines, there are links to us from all over the place, and all in all we kind of like it.
So I'm glad we didn't sell. It would have been easy to take the money and run a long time ago, but if we were going to try to find a good domain today things would be a lot harder.
Needless to say it would take a lot more than $4000 to pry this domain out of our hands now.
As a side not, over the years it appears that businesses in other countries that operate under the name Tagor have started showing up on the web. Some might say we're squatting the name from them, but we don't see it that way. We had the name before we knew it meant anything to anyone and we actually have plans for the site.
Wow, thought those days were gone.
A warranty that long on a hard drive is kind of silly anyway.
Let's say you buy a hard drive today for $300. In 2 years it dies. A replacement of that drive is probably less than $100, but your data is still lost.
And the price of data recovery is sky high for most users. I haven't found a service that will touch a mechanically failed drive for under $500.
In a couple of years when your hard disk crashes (if it does) if you don't have back-ups the last thing on earth you're going to worry about is a hard drive warranty.
Granted, backups of course mean your data is safe and all you need is a replacement hard drive. But if you think about it, the time spent recovering from backups, turning in the warranty claim, and getting a replacement is probably worth more than the value of that exact same drive. And while having your device replaced after a failure is nice, if you do have a hard disk failure the most important thing for you will be getting your data back either off of backups or from a data recovery service.
And while we're on the subject, how well do data recovery services fare when attempting to rescue information off of these new perpendicular drives? Does anyone know?
I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song.
That's what Smart Playlists are for. Playlists for different types of music. Playlists that choose based on rating. Playlists that play songs that haven't been played recently or very often. With the right software(ahem, iTunes) that problem is more under your control. Sure, you'll listen to each song less often, but the diversity is good and you can take greater control of the music it is you're likely to hear given your current mood.
While I agree they should focus on implimenting OpenGL more tightly, there's no reason to stop "bothering" with DirectX. Like it or not it's a very mature API and it provides a lot of things beyond what simply expanding on their support for OpenGL would provide.
Without something even remotely as good as DirectX that increasingly popular "other" operating system doesn't stand a chance of having nearly as much game developer support as Windows.
That isn't to say something opened that parallels the features of DirectX couldn't be developed, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.