"Games Announced, Dated, and Delayed" has nothing to do with what platform they are running on. You'll notice that the only platform listed in the summary is the 360 but that's only to point out that the title (SFII) will be on the XBox Live Arcade. If they didn't mention that, it would look a bit silly since SFII is over 10 years old. Not to sound harsh or anything since I do enjoy not having to reboot just to play a game, but whether or not the game runs Linux is probably best left to another discussion.
Can't build a computer?! They still have PCB etching kits at some locations. Sure you can build a computer. You'll just have to do it from the ground up. Oh, and you might have to solder some components directly in since I'm pretty sure they don't carry PCI sockets or and modern CPU sockets. Now they won't let you take off the shelf mobo's, video cards, etc and let you assemble a computer but you can certainly build one.
Since nobody else is going to, I'd like to take a moment to defend my local and "Very slimey" (wording borrowed from sibling post) RS's cell phone unit. They are a Cingular shop and when I got my new phone, I got it through them. Last summer, I lost my phone at the lake and then the next day had an unplanned driving trip half way across the country (funeral). I went to the Shack to get a warrantied phone replacement. The guy there told me that the policy for replacements has changed and that I'd have to have one shipped now. I told him my situation and that I'd really like to have that phone on the car trip from GA to TX in case of an emergency. He called the warranty center for me and after he got nowhere with them, he gave me one of the refurb phones he had in stock and a brand new car charger. He then set me up with a SIM card and just told me to bring everything back to him once I got back into town. I doubt a Best Buy or Cingular Store would've done the same for me.
Now this doesn't mean I'm not upset with RS for their continuining decline of general electronic components. I still don't like that I've had to special order a DB-15 male solder-type connector from them. I use online stores now instead of special order from RS. And I sure don't like that they don't have PCB etching kits in stock anymore at my local shop (though they do still have that sort of thing at the mall store). At least I can still get project boxes and bread boards from them.
Quads? No way. We're too confederate for that. We have North Campus and South Campus. North is for all the artsy-fartsy folks and business majors. South is the science and ag majors.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying the research is wrong or anything. I'm just curious how they came up with such a number as.3% and the article was a little less than clear on that. Until I see it explained, I'm going to take that number with a grain of salt.
"Your own post contains the answer to your skepticism"
Not really, AC. It's not the actual assessment that bothers me. It's the scoring of the assessment. Suppose we have categories A and B that we're testing against. Now suppose that one test subject scores higher on A and lower on B than another test subject. Which patient has really lost more brain function as a whole? Is A more important than B? Is the baseline for sccoring even comparable between A and B? I'd much rather see the results of these different tests and make my own assesments than see some generic 0.3% blanket scoring difference.
"What makes this event interesting is not the huge size and extra side acts, but the integration with Swedish super-LAN, Dreamhack, whose dates and time will coincide. The release states that "American and European teams will have the ability to compete against each other from these two events," indicating that international travel might not be required and that online play might determine the winner. Let's hope their server is somewhere in the Atlantic!"
This brings the concept of home field advantage to a whole new level.
So how exactly is this being measured? From what I can find, all the story mentions is:
"All the patients underwent around four neurological assessments, each of which comprised a dozen separate tests of brain function."
Given that Alzheimers affects everyone in different ways, I guess I'm just a little leery of a study that's claiming that it can quantitatively compare the mental facilities of one victim to another.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft seriously discounts their products to universities. At my Alma Mater (and workplace for a while), individual departments paid nothing for Windows licenses. The only restrictions they had were that you had to go to a training class provided by Microsoft before you were allowed to copy the media the University provided. If the University is paying a lump sum anyways, the departments have little reason to worry about it. It's not coming out of their departmental budget. We had a similar deal with Novell.
And for what it's worth, our Computer Science lab workstations were mostly Sun, a few Linux boxes, and a very few Windows boxes (MAYBE 10 out of 150 computers). And I'd say that at least 80% of the research computers were running Linux, Irix, or Solaris.
Also, the general purpose computer labs tended to be 60% Windows and 40% MAC. A lot of us got very used to using the MAC since you could usually walk up and get a MAC right away instead of waiting for a Windows box. I wonder if Linux boxes would be treated the same way as the MAC boxes.
Miniguns? That's a silly thing to even try to acquire until you get to the Atlantic Accelerator. If you don't research them, usually you only have to deal with one or two odd enemies having miniguns in Syndicate. I usually stock up on defensive upgrades and research and then just try to overwhelm the few enemy agents with miniguns and bring them to our side. Then I get the miniguns (albeit with little ammo) and hardly anyone else in the game has them. Sometimes, I have enough stray miniguns to take the Accelerator (never tried the force field idea). If not, I go ahead and research them since the Accelerator's agents will have miniguns whether you do or not. And afterwards I always make the Accelerator a LOW tax zone since I sure don't want a revolt later in the game and then have to retake it. I can ususally get to within 4 or 5 coutries left before I need to research offensive weapons and I ALWAYS take the Accelerator as soon as possible after my first campaign stalled out with the Accelerator as my last target.
But back to your orginial point, I also always took 4 people in on one-man sniper missions but I usually armed them with 3 shotguns and one long range rifle that I always manage to pick often enought to never research. The sniper would take the high ground with one shotgunner for safety and the other two would flush whatever enemy we're sniping into the sniper's path. If there was an escape vehicle involved, I'd just take 4 shotgunners and try to hose the vehicle.
Your own link lumps the Great Leap Forward in with "significant events that are not often mention in the history books." If it's not even in many books, I doubt many history teachers are going to go out of their way to teach it. I never learned about this in school. I had to read up on it on my own.
"Don't listen to big business who say it harms the economy"
Ok, then I'll listen to the 8%-10% unemployment rate in most parts of Europe.
If these game developers want to unionize (even if they don't call it a union), I'm all for that. I hope for them that they can pull it off since they are in an industry with seemingly more workers than demand for workers. However, I wouldn't neccesarily use Europe as an example of how to set work policy.
Then why is ANY form of Cruisin' on there? That's about as obscure as a version of Street Fighter II on the SNES. (I know. I know. You're just the messenger.)
Fond memories are one thing. Actually picking the game up and playing it again is something else entirely. If we were putting together a Top 10 list of N64 games, I would be very surprised if Goldeneye didn't at least make #2 (MAYBE behind Zelda). I picked up Goldeneye and played it just under a year ago. It's not nearly as good as you remember it being. It's probably best left firmly in the past even though it was extrememly important in bringing FPS multiplayer to consoles.
"Isn't that a downloadable game? not a full release title that you buy on the shelves from a store?"
Yes, it's a downloadable game. Are you suggesting that I should have to go to the store and buy a game that will probably take up negligible disk space?
"Some quick game that they threw together for download is going to be pretty cheap for the user."
Maybe cheap as in "It doesn't cost much."I'd agree but if you're talking cheap as in "Not as good as store bought." I think the owners of Geometry Wars would strongly disagree. From what I hear, a lot of them are playing it more than their fancy schmancy $60 games.
"Something that they create as a full game for the system is going to cost a lot more."
Do you really consider Tetris to be a full game anymore? Maybe a full game for the Game Boy but I didn't even really think that the NES version warranted the $30 they wanted for it when it first came out. I like Tetris and all, but it does fit into the "not good enough for $60 release but good enough for $5 download" category quite nicely.
"Why throw together something quick when you can just rerelease something that's already been programmed."
Why stick with an older game emulating on new hardware when it would be fairly trivial to take a Tetris engine and build targeted at the Revolution?
Ok, so N64's version of Tetris did finally add some elements to their game that the Tengen NES version had already put in years earlier on a much less powerful system, but come on now. Why the N64 version? Why not just have a Revolution version. Is there really that much a difference between versions? Would it matter if it were the 64 version or one made specifically for the Revolution?
I'll turn off my Tetris rant for long enough to point out that the thing I'm looking forward to the most out of the Revolution's backlog are the NES and SNES games. TO be honest, a lot of the 64 games didn't really stand the test of time IMHO. I used to LOVE Goldeneye, but it's just not the same playing it anymore. On the other hand, I can still pop in Metroid or Super Metroid and thoroughly enjoy them.
The Jaguar probably would've been fine if they didn't try to retrofit their Panther games for the system and if they bothered to market the system in a sane manner and/or price it competitively. I for one thoroughly enjoyed Cybermorph, Alien vs. Predator, Tempest 2000, and a most excellent port of Raiden but I didn't buy the system until they were clearing them out for $40 apiece.
Rest assured that they would've found a way to botch the NES launch. Nintendo had to send their own reps into the toy stores to sell their system at first. I imagine that made a BIG difference in moving the units. I doubt Atari would've been as rigorous. It's really a non-issue anyways since if Atari were seriously going to try to push a hardware unit at the time, they would've already rolled out their 7800 instead of holding onto it until after the NES was popular.
So if you were going to peg them down as a specific type of rockstar, they'd probably be the type with one or two hits who resent their fans for asking to hear those big songs at concerts instead of their new stuff. A good example would be Dexy's Midnight Runners who when I went to see them didn't even bother to play "Come On Eileen" last. They played it right at the beginning and told everyone they can go home now if that's all they came to hear. Sadly for the band, a lot of people did indeed leave shortly after.
This is kind of like Intel promising how the Internet would be so much better with their Pentium III. Unless it was going to rip my modem out of the wall and replace it with a T1, I sure wasn't going to notice a difference.
"really, you should just simplify you complaints then. you hate the fact that DVD's give you more options."
No, I hate the fact that I can't do something as simple as watch a movie without selecting a series of options that don't really matter to most people.
"you were the idiot who didn't realize what side you put it in( or forgot what you wanted to do in the first place)."
You're assuming I cared. I just want to watch a movie. I don't care if it's widescreened or fullscreened or THX ro Dolby Digital. I just want the thing to play. Why not just play what's there? Why even ask if the other format isn't even available without getting up to flip the disc? I put in a disc and the player plays its content. I think that's a pretty reasonable expectation.
"DVD menus are a different beast all together. They are not supposed to be like a VCR."
Then why did they bolt a navigation control (arrows and a button) onto a standard VCR control system?
"Now it wouldnt' make much sense for me to hit play when wanting to go into the scene selection option, would it? Or hitting play to change the language settings? That would be a fundamental contradiction."
Nobody is asking for that. That's entirely the realm of an OK/confirm button. However, with all the extra options DVDs have, I find it odd that they took away the option of playing the main feature of DVD using the "Play" button. You can have both the OK button and the Play button play the movie. That's what most of the better menu designers do.
The options are fine (Since you mentioned the movie, I LOVE the text commentary on Ghostbusters.) but I don't think it would've been a bad idea to set up and enforce some standards that go along with those options. Maybe next time...
Is anyone really surprised by this? The UMD format is not catching on all that well because only one hardware platform on earth uses it. It's a reasonably popular platform but not popular enough to support its own video disc. Sony can't exactly abondon the video format on the PSP since they promised to give PSP customers a good video player in addition to a game player and I imagine they don't want to outright support playing ripped movies via memory stick for possible lack of selling the same movie 12 times (the marketspeak for this is "piracy concerns").
So now Sony has to bungle (oops, I mean bundle) UMD videos with the DVDs if they have any prayer of establishing UMD as a vaiable format. Too bad they didn't think to do that with VHS and Betamax tapes.
"after it goes to the main menu just hit ok because the default choice is always "play""
You've inadvertantly hit on the exact source of confusion on some of my grandmother's DVDs. Not being a user interface expert but having sat least taken a few classes on the subject, the "Play" button should be the button that causes the movie to play. The "Play" button affords the action of playing. Having to use the OK button to Play a movie is counterintuitive when there is actually a "Play" button on the remote that does NOT play the movie on all DVDs. (I'm pretty sure the newer "Willy Wonka" movie is an example of this. If not, just grab 20 random DVDs and I'll bet you run accross at least one.) Not only is this confusing but it also prevents you from playing the DVD without the use of the remote since most boxes do not have an "OK" button on the box. (Silly hardware guys. They probably expect you to use the "play" to play movies. What were they thinking?) It's not that my grandmother can't learn it. It's that she shouldn't have to learn that the "Play" button doesn't actually play the movie because the OK button does that. WTF?
That's not even as bad as the discs that ask you if you want to view in widescreen or fullscreen right after you choose to play the movie and then when you pick the one that's not on that side of the disc, asks you to turn it over (at least one So I Married an Axe Murderer realease was like this and I'm pretty sure Snatch did the same thing). Why don't you just not waste my time and play the f'ing version I put in the player?
VCRs aren't the greatest examples of user interface ever produced (in my introductory UI class the VCR was a constant example of what not to do in most cases), but the lack of abstraction kept everything relatively simple. There was a tracking knob for tracking, a play button for playing and so on. With the GUI aspects of DVDs, the DVD designers have trampled all over this simplicity and don't even seem to care. Play doesn't always play, fast forward doesn't always fast forward (check the Whoopi Goldberg intro for the Looney Tunes collection for this one), and depending on the remote the next chapter/previous chapter, and fast forward/rewind buttons are oriented differently and labeled such that it is not always obvious which one is which (Sony vs. Magnavox remotes).
And don't even get me started on the DVD/VCR combo that requires you to manually specify which input you're wanting to see instead of doing the smart thing and just give the device that is actually playing the output.
Hi, Inflation. My name is hal2814 and I buy stuff. Since I can't tell the difference between DVDs and BDs on my TV (which has the same resolution as almost everyone else's TV in the US), I'm not going to buy the $27.64 BDs whe I can get a perfectly good $15 DVD. In fact, if the movie is old or doesn't rely a whole lot on special effects, I'll go ahead and buy the bargain basement $3 VHS of it if available since it looks almost as good and costs a WHOLE lot less.
"Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2005 and 1997, they would cost you $23.45 and $19.90 respectively."
And you're wrong here because you're assuming everything keeps its value over time. I just bought that EXACT SAME James Bond DVD they were selling for $30 back in 1997 (to be fair, it might've been 98) new for about $10 a few weeks ago. Now if you do your Inflation magic, I think that means I just spent like $.36 1997 dollars for it or something.
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"Games Announced, Dated, and Delayed" has nothing to do with what platform they are running on. You'll notice that the only platform listed in the summary is the 360 but that's only to point out that the title (SFII) will be on the XBox Live Arcade. If they didn't mention that, it would look a bit silly since SFII is over 10 years old. Not to sound harsh or anything since I do enjoy not having to reboot just to play a game, but whether or not the game runs Linux is probably best left to another discussion.
Can't build a computer?! They still have PCB etching kits at some locations. Sure you can build a computer. You'll just have to do it from the ground up. Oh, and you might have to solder some components directly in since I'm pretty sure they don't carry PCI sockets or and modern CPU sockets. Now they won't let you take off the shelf mobo's, video cards, etc and let you assemble a computer but you can certainly build one.
Since nobody else is going to, I'd like to take a moment to defend my local and "Very slimey" (wording borrowed from sibling post) RS's cell phone unit. They are a Cingular shop and when I got my new phone, I got it through them. Last summer, I lost my phone at the lake and then the next day had an unplanned driving trip half way across the country (funeral). I went to the Shack to get a warrantied phone replacement. The guy there told me that the policy for replacements has changed and that I'd have to have one shipped now. I told him my situation and that I'd really like to have that phone on the car trip from GA to TX in case of an emergency. He called the warranty center for me and after he got nowhere with them, he gave me one of the refurb phones he had in stock and a brand new car charger. He then set me up with a SIM card and just told me to bring everything back to him once I got back into town. I doubt a Best Buy or Cingular Store would've done the same for me.
Now this doesn't mean I'm not upset with RS for their continuining decline of general electronic components. I still don't like that I've had to special order a DB-15 male solder-type connector from them. I use online stores now instead of special order from RS. And I sure don't like that they don't have PCB etching kits in stock anymore at my local shop (though they do still have that sort of thing at the mall store). At least I can still get project boxes and bread boards from them.
Quads? No way. We're too confederate for that. We have North Campus and South Campus. North is for all the artsy-fartsy folks and business majors. South is the science and ag majors.
Very useful. Thank you.
.3% and the article was a little less than clear on that. Until I see it explained, I'm going to take that number with a grain of salt.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying the research is wrong or anything. I'm just curious how they came up with such a number as
"Your own post contains the answer to your skepticism"
Not really, AC. It's not the actual assessment that bothers me. It's the scoring of the assessment. Suppose we have categories A and B that we're testing against. Now suppose that one test subject scores higher on A and lower on B than another test subject. Which patient has really lost more brain function as a whole? Is A more important than B? Is the baseline for sccoring even comparable between A and B? I'd much rather see the results of these different tests and make my own assesments than see some generic 0.3% blanket scoring difference.
"What makes this event interesting is not the huge size and extra side acts, but the integration with Swedish super-LAN, Dreamhack, whose dates and time will coincide. The release states that "American and European teams will have the ability to compete against each other from these two events," indicating that international travel might not be required and that online play might determine the winner. Let's hope their server is somewhere in the Atlantic!"
This brings the concept of home field advantage to a whole new level.
So how exactly is this being measured? From what I can find, all the story mentions is:
"All the patients underwent around four neurological assessments, each of which comprised a dozen separate tests of brain function."
Given that Alzheimers affects everyone in different ways, I guess I'm just a little leery of a study that's claiming that it can quantitatively compare the mental facilities of one victim to another.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft seriously discounts their products to universities. At my Alma Mater (and workplace for a while), individual departments paid nothing for Windows licenses. The only restrictions they had were that you had to go to a training class provided by Microsoft before you were allowed to copy the media the University provided. If the University is paying a lump sum anyways, the departments have little reason to worry about it. It's not coming out of their departmental budget. We had a similar deal with Novell.
And for what it's worth, our Computer Science lab workstations were mostly Sun, a few Linux boxes, and a very few Windows boxes (MAYBE 10 out of 150 computers). And I'd say that at least 80% of the research computers were running Linux, Irix, or Solaris.
Also, the general purpose computer labs tended to be 60% Windows and 40% MAC. A lot of us got very used to using the MAC since you could usually walk up and get a MAC right away instead of waiting for a Windows box. I wonder if Linux boxes would be treated the same way as the MAC boxes.
Miniguns? That's a silly thing to even try to acquire until you get to the Atlantic Accelerator. If you don't research them, usually you only have to deal with one or two odd enemies having miniguns in Syndicate. I usually stock up on defensive upgrades and research and then just try to overwhelm the few enemy agents with miniguns and bring them to our side. Then I get the miniguns (albeit with little ammo) and hardly anyone else in the game has them. Sometimes, I have enough stray miniguns to take the Accelerator (never tried the force field idea). If not, I go ahead and research them since the Accelerator's agents will have miniguns whether you do or not. And afterwards I always make the Accelerator a LOW tax zone since I sure don't want a revolt later in the game and then have to retake it. I can ususally get to within 4 or 5 coutries left before I need to research offensive weapons and I ALWAYS take the Accelerator as soon as possible after my first campaign stalled out with the Accelerator as my last target.
But back to your orginial point, I also always took 4 people in on one-man sniper missions but I usually armed them with 3 shotguns and one long range rifle that I always manage to pick often enought to never research. The sniper would take the high ground with one shotgunner for safety and the other two would flush whatever enemy we're sniping into the sniper's path. If there was an escape vehicle involved, I'd just take 4 shotgunners and try to hose the vehicle.
Your own link lumps the Great Leap Forward in with "significant events that are not often mention in the history books." If it's not even in many books, I doubt many history teachers are going to go out of their way to teach it. I never learned about this in school. I had to read up on it on my own.
Prostitutes and religious zealots are both against the GTA series. What stange bedfellows...
"Don't listen to big business who say it harms the economy"
Ok, then I'll listen to the 8%-10% unemployment rate in most parts of Europe.
If these game developers want to unionize (even if they don't call it a union), I'm all for that. I hope for them that they can pull it off since they are in an industry with seemingly more workers than demand for workers. However, I wouldn't neccesarily use Europe as an example of how to set work policy.
Then why is ANY form of Cruisin' on there? That's about as obscure as a version of Street Fighter II on the SNES. (I know. I know. You're just the messenger.)
Fond memories are one thing. Actually picking the game up and playing it again is something else entirely. If we were putting together a Top 10 list of N64 games, I would be very surprised if Goldeneye didn't at least make #2 (MAYBE behind Zelda). I picked up Goldeneye and played it just under a year ago. It's not nearly as good as you remember it being. It's probably best left firmly in the past even though it was extrememly important in bringing FPS multiplayer to consoles.
"Isn't that a downloadable game? not a full release title that you buy on the shelves from a store?"
Yes, it's a downloadable game. Are you suggesting that I should have to go to the store and buy a game that will probably take up negligible disk space?
"Some quick game that they threw together for download is going to be pretty cheap for the user."
Maybe cheap as in "It doesn't cost much."I'd agree but if you're talking cheap as in "Not as good as store bought." I think the owners of Geometry Wars would strongly disagree. From what I hear, a lot of them are playing it more than their fancy schmancy $60 games.
"Something that they create as a full game for the system is going to cost a lot more."
Do you really consider Tetris to be a full game anymore? Maybe a full game for the Game Boy but I didn't even really think that the NES version warranted the $30 they wanted for it when it first came out. I like Tetris and all, but it does fit into the "not good enough for $60 release but good enough for $5 download" category quite nicely.
"Why throw together something quick when you can just rerelease something that's already been programmed."
Why stick with an older game emulating on new hardware when it would be fairly trivial to take a Tetris engine and build targeted at the Revolution?
"A new tetris game designed specifically for the Revo wouldn't actually add anything new, but would end up costing the user $60."
How much did Geometry Wars cost? I'm pretty sure it wasn't $60.
Ok, so N64's version of Tetris did finally add some elements to their game that the Tengen NES version had already put in years earlier on a much less powerful system, but come on now. Why the N64 version? Why not just have a Revolution version. Is there really that much a difference between versions? Would it matter if it were the 64 version or one made specifically for the Revolution?
I'll turn off my Tetris rant for long enough to point out that the thing I'm looking forward to the most out of the Revolution's backlog are the NES and SNES games. TO be honest, a lot of the 64 games didn't really stand the test of time IMHO. I used to LOVE Goldeneye, but it's just not the same playing it anymore. On the other hand, I can still pop in Metroid or Super Metroid and thoroughly enjoy them.
"Are there really any examples of "homebrew" games for modern systems?"
The only ones I can think of are emulators which run (you guessed it) pirated games for the most part.
As far as semi-modern systems go, there is BattleSphere for the Atari Jaguar.
It is important to note though that as a PVR the 360 could in theory record playback an HD signal so it might be worth the $400 for that.
The Jaguar probably would've been fine if they didn't try to retrofit their Panther games for the system and if they bothered to market the system in a sane manner and/or price it competitively. I for one thoroughly enjoyed Cybermorph, Alien vs. Predator, Tempest 2000, and a most excellent port of Raiden but I didn't buy the system until they were clearing them out for $40 apiece.
Rest assured that they would've found a way to botch the NES launch. Nintendo had to send their own reps into the toy stores to sell their system at first. I imagine that made a BIG difference in moving the units. I doubt Atari would've been as rigorous. It's really a non-issue anyways since if Atari were seriously going to try to push a hardware unit at the time, they would've already rolled out their 7800 instead of holding onto it until after the NES was popular.
So if you were going to peg them down as a specific type of rockstar, they'd probably be the type with one or two hits who resent their fans for asking to hear those big songs at concerts instead of their new stuff. A good example would be Dexy's Midnight Runners who when I went to see them didn't even bother to play "Come On Eileen" last. They played it right at the beginning and told everyone they can go home now if that's all they came to hear. Sadly for the band, a lot of people did indeed leave shortly after.
This is kind of like Intel promising how the Internet would be so much better with their Pentium III. Unless it was going to rip my modem out of the wall and replace it with a T1, I sure wasn't going to notice a difference.
"really, you should just simplify you complaints then. you hate the fact that DVD's give you more options."
No, I hate the fact that I can't do something as simple as watch a movie without selecting a series of options that don't really matter to most people.
"you were the idiot who didn't realize what side you put it in( or forgot what you wanted to do in the first place)."
You're assuming I cared. I just want to watch a movie. I don't care if it's widescreened or fullscreened or THX ro Dolby Digital. I just want the thing to play. Why not just play what's there? Why even ask if the other format isn't even available without getting up to flip the disc? I put in a disc and the player plays its content. I think that's a pretty reasonable expectation.
"DVD menus are a different beast all together. They are not supposed to be like a VCR."
Then why did they bolt a navigation control (arrows and a button) onto a standard VCR control system?
"Now it wouldnt' make much sense for me to hit play when wanting to go into the scene selection option, would it? Or hitting play to change the language settings? That would be a fundamental contradiction."
Nobody is asking for that. That's entirely the realm of an OK/confirm button. However, with all the extra options DVDs have, I find it odd that they took away the option of playing the main feature of DVD using the "Play" button. You can have both the OK button and the Play button play the movie. That's what most of the better menu designers do.
The options are fine (Since you mentioned the movie, I LOVE the text commentary on Ghostbusters.) but I don't think it would've been a bad idea to set up and enforce some standards that go along with those options. Maybe next time...
Is anyone really surprised by this? The UMD format is not catching on all that well because only one hardware platform on earth uses it. It's a reasonably popular platform but not popular enough to support its own video disc. Sony can't exactly abondon the video format on the PSP since they promised to give PSP customers a good video player in addition to a game player and I imagine they don't want to outright support playing ripped movies via memory stick for possible lack of selling the same movie 12 times (the marketspeak for this is "piracy concerns").
So now Sony has to bungle (oops, I mean bundle) UMD videos with the DVDs if they have any prayer of establishing UMD as a vaiable format. Too bad they didn't think to do that with VHS and Betamax tapes.
"after it goes to the main menu just hit ok because the default choice is always "play""
You've inadvertantly hit on the exact source of confusion on some of my grandmother's DVDs. Not being a user interface expert but having sat least taken a few classes on the subject, the "Play" button should be the button that causes the movie to play. The "Play" button affords the action of playing. Having to use the OK button to Play a movie is counterintuitive when there is actually a "Play" button on the remote that does NOT play the movie on all DVDs. (I'm pretty sure the newer "Willy Wonka" movie is an example of this. If not, just grab 20 random DVDs and I'll bet you run accross at least one.) Not only is this confusing but it also prevents you from playing the DVD without the use of the remote since most boxes do not have an "OK" button on the box. (Silly hardware guys. They probably expect you to use the "play" to play movies. What were they thinking?) It's not that my grandmother can't learn it. It's that she shouldn't have to learn that the "Play" button doesn't actually play the movie because the OK button does that. WTF?
That's not even as bad as the discs that ask you if you want to view in widescreen or fullscreen right after you choose to play the movie and then when you pick the one that's not on that side of the disc, asks you to turn it over (at least one So I Married an Axe Murderer realease was like this and I'm pretty sure Snatch did the same thing). Why don't you just not waste my time and play the f'ing version I put in the player?
VCRs aren't the greatest examples of user interface ever produced (in my introductory UI class the VCR was a constant example of what not to do in most cases), but the lack of abstraction kept everything relatively simple. There was a tracking knob for tracking, a play button for playing and so on. With the GUI aspects of DVDs, the DVD designers have trampled all over this simplicity and don't even seem to care. Play doesn't always play, fast forward doesn't always fast forward (check the Whoopi Goldberg intro for the Looney Tunes collection for this one), and depending on the remote the next chapter/previous chapter, and fast forward/rewind buttons are oriented differently and labeled such that it is not always obvious which one is which (Sony vs. Magnavox remotes).
And don't even get me started on the DVD/VCR combo that requires you to manually specify which input you're wanting to see instead of doing the smart thing and just give the device that is actually playing the output.
Hi, Inflation. My name is hal2814 and I buy stuff. Since I can't tell the difference between DVDs and BDs on my TV (which has the same resolution as almost everyone else's TV in the US), I'm not going to buy the $27.64 BDs whe I can get a perfectly good $15 DVD. In fact, if the movie is old or doesn't rely a whole lot on special effects, I'll go ahead and buy the bargain basement $3 VHS of it if available since it looks almost as good and costs a WHOLE lot less.
"Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2005 and 1997, they would cost you $23.45 and $19.90 respectively."
And you're wrong here because you're assuming everything keeps its value over time. I just bought that EXACT SAME James Bond DVD they were selling for $30 back in 1997 (to be fair, it might've been 98) new for about $10 a few weeks ago. Now if you do your Inflation magic, I think that means I just spent like $.36 1997 dollars for it or something.