Pros
1) Except for the US and Canada.;-)
2) Depends on where you are. Eastern Canada has some STRANGE dialects
3) Yup. Can't argue with that.
4) Makes me want to go buy a flag.
5) That's mainly because everyone is too busy getting munchies to bother with much crime
6) Oh, we have plenty of bushes. We just don't have any of the George W. variety.
Cons:
1) It's only a little chilly 10 months of the year.
2) It's better than football.
3) Stay out of the east
4) Come live in the west, and you too can shake your fist at the east.
If your point is "these games are bad, have some sympathy for the North Koreans" then I think your point has backfired.
No, actually my point was that we shouldn't bash North Korea for doing something that I have a sneaking suspicion that the US would do just as easily.
I think you make a pretty compelling point. But the thing about Escape From New York and Judge Dredd is that they have a very American hero. So it's when the system falls down, and you have to revive "The American Dream". What I am trying to get at here is a game in which Americans are portrayed as greedy capitalist bastards, and not in a Command and Conquer style...
Think of it this way. You play as an Iraqi soldier. This is an adventure style game, with RPG elements. (so very story based). You start out welcoming the American invaders, but as time goes on, more and more places are bombed, people close to you are killed, beaten, whatever. you begin to actually resist after a while, eventually joining a terrorist cell after the war has been lost. Game ends when you fly a 747 into the World Trade Center.
Of course that's highly fictionalized... but I think it serves to more accurately show what I originally envisioned. I somehow think that if an Arabic country was the country responsible for producing the game, Americans would regard it as propaganda, and there would be some rather harsh words with that country.
Personally, I think it would make for an interesting game, but wouldn't be anything that I would ever want my name attached to.;-)
I'm a Canadian. I'm just curious what your reaction would be if someone in Canada made a game that depicted a revolution against a tyranical US President (just for argument's sake let's say George W), and put you in the role of a terrorist/revolutionary?
Or how about a game that let you play as Osama Bin Laden. How do you suppose Americans would like the game? Would there be a public outcry? Would the government try to censor it?
Normally I don't reply to trolls. But in this case I will make an exception.
GameCube has a pretty powerful GPU, and it CAN do hardware effects. Rebel Strike uses it to great advantage, and does a lot of stuff on hardware. The CPU is used for one HELL of a lot of AI, physics, and all that sort of jazz. I don't know why you would think that all the things Xbox does in hardware would have to be done on software on the GCN. I am not saying that the Xbox can't run Rebel Strike, I am saying that it would push the hardware just as much as it does on GameCube.
Unified memory also means unified bandwidth. Something that I know developers would appreciate more of on the Xbox.
Nintendo is second place worldwide. This is a fact. And I don't see PS2 lacking much western support.
Actually, most Xbox fans I have seen have just said that the Xbox is the most powerful without qualifying that in any way. Just looking at the specs and seeing higher numbers does NOT denote more power. GameCube is more powerful in some ways, and even PS2 is more powerful in a few areas.
Now I am going to make myself look sort of like a hypocrite by not qualifying my statement in detail, but I will say that GameCube has more efficiency going for it than the Xbox could ever hope for, and THAT is where GameCube's true power lies. For a real world example, compare Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike with Halo 2. Rebel Strike pushes an insane number of polys and does it with pretty much every effect imaginable. Halo 2 pushes about half that. Granted, the frame rate will probably be better in Halo 2, but my point is that the consoles really. do. stand on even ground. At least that's what developers for the consoles say (Factor 5 most notably), and I tend to trust them more than fans anyways.
As for the specs in the article, I have to say that it's looking like quite a machine. Unified Memory being the one exception of course. It seems that MS still hasn't learned their lesson...
But really, I think that the days of scaling up the hardware to make a better game are about over. What really counts is what games Microsoft will have on the console. Can they win over the Japanese developers? Can they take over Sony's spot in the lead this time? Or are they just going to be playing second fiddle to Nintendo again?
Well, I can see where you are coming from. But my problem with this is that if you did buy that Xbox and all the games, there's nothing to keep you from STILL playing them next generation.
As far as turning a console into a mini-PC/entertainment centre is concerned, it does bother me for a few reasons.
1) It's been tried before, and it almost killed the game console industry.
2) Adding DVD support to the PS2 resulted in an increased cost per unit of hardware. (DVD licensing)
3) In the case of the PS2, the quest for a "play-all" laser resulted in some extremely substandard products that are prone to breakage. If they had went all DVD instead of allowing both CDs and DVDs, they might have had some longer lived hardware.
Microsoft actually produced some hardware that is fairly long lived (aside from overheating problems), and since DVD playback is sold seperately, there's no built in cost for those who do not wish to play DVDs on it. THAT was the way to go if you ask me.
But I still think that a game console should be fairly cheap, and leverage every bit of its hardware to play games. Xbox just doesn't do that, given its PC style architecture.
It's actually kind of scary for me really. Probably unlike a lot of people on Slashdot... I buy consoles to play console style games, and not much more. I don't use my console to play media, I just use it to play games.
Now I have never had much interest in the Xbox, because as a CONSOLE, it's completely hopeless. The architecture is just fundamentally flawed from my viewpoint, given that it's just a scaled down PC, and attracts PC style games.
The architecture of the next Xbox seems to be a lot more in line with what a person should expect from a console. As in, it's designed to actually play games, instead of a general purpose machine. If Microsoft is actually fixing their architecture mistakes this time around, and doing it with enough conviction to actually drop backward compatability, I am getting a little on the nervous side. One of the things really wrong with Microsoft's culture is that it almost NEVER drops backward compatability, resulting in some genuinely horrid products (Windows 95 and Internet Explorer come first to mind).
I dunno, I can't help but think that Microsoft is making some good decisions here when it comes to gaming... It's almost as if they are adopting a Nintendo viewpoint, and putting the games first and the business second.
The thing is that GBA was already successful. Nokia has failed miserably, and 3rd party support is drying right up. It's like redesigning a Betamax right now and trying to sell it. There's no point.
Heh. I will admit that the thought has crossed my mind more than once that I stand to lose quite a bit if either drive fails on me. That's why I went out and bought a DVD burner. But I find that the everyday performance increase is quite nice, and that's really what matters to me. My main justification for not having a solid backup plan is that if I had a single 160GB drive, instead of a pair of 80s... then I would still lose it all if the drive failed.
Actually RAID-0 is for a striped array of disks. So you can link 2 or more hard drives together, using both simultaneously. I believe RAID-5 (but don't quote me on this) is for doing the same, but with redundant drives in the event of failure.
Yes, I realize that the name is somewhat misleading, but just because RAID was originally intended for redundancy does not mean that it does not have performance enhancing modes. I happen to have a RAID-0 array on my home PC.
Sorry. The Register says that USA Today originally reported that DS would have bluetooth. Since it was one of the first sources of information, I guess that the information I got was wrong.
Another article can be found there. It details a little more about the mixup. Sorry again for the confusion.
It should be well known by now that Nintendo is putting 802.11 and Bluetooth on the Nintendo DS. I am quite curious if this will make it there, as the DS would benefit from this GREATLY. Nintendo is downright vicious when it comes to defending battery life of their handhelds, so it's entirely possible.
I got the impression that the eyes weren't at all uncommon in prisons. It's like asking someone where they got their glasses from, and the guy saying that he paid the doctor $100 for them, or won them in a card game. I mean, you COULD go on to explain the whole scenario behind it, but honestly... what's the point?
I'm not saying that it couldn't be a nice little side story. But seeing it as one of the big selling points of the game? uh uh.
I find it very interesting that you make that first point without having seen Pitch Black. I've never played the game, and don't intend to. But I thought the movie did a pretty good job of explaining Riddick's eyes. I don't frankly see a need for making a whole game about it.
Ordinarilly, I would agree with you. But I very much enjoyed Wind Waker. I think that the man successfully encaptured the SPIRIT of the original game while improving the quality of the franchise greatly.
I would still very much like to know who the director of the new GameCube Zelda is though.
I'm glad the mods modded you up quite a ways. I would have done EXACTLY what you had done, and for the exact same reasons. In games, I always take the route which is most likely to be the wrong way. Reason being that I simply want to see what's over there, and to make sure I don't miss something important.
I have some good friends online that I value just as much as my real life friends. If I were to up and die today, I would never see them again (of course), and they would probably never know what became of me.
That thought DOES trouble me a little, but I think it might be for the best in the end. Not knowing is not a good thing at all, but I think a disappearance suddenly isn't that bad a thing either. All my passwords and such aren't hard to find, and in the cases of my IM programs and email, that information is actually saved within the programs.
I don't think any of my family or friends would go through my MSN/AIM contact lists telling my friends what happened to me, and I don't think that they should. If I had my way, my hard drive would be reformatted on my death, and all my online accounts allowed to expire. Sooner or later, my friends online would get the idea that I was no more.
Slashdot Mirror
Pros ;-)
1) Except for the US and Canada.
2) Depends on where you are. Eastern Canada has some STRANGE dialects
3) Yup. Can't argue with that.
4) Makes me want to go buy a flag.
5) That's mainly because everyone is too busy getting munchies to bother with much crime
6) Oh, we have plenty of bushes. We just don't have any of the George W. variety.
Cons:
1) It's only a little chilly 10 months of the year.
2) It's better than football.
3) Stay out of the east
4) Come live in the west, and you too can shake your fist at the east.
So says this Canuck anyways.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but isn't Flash on Internet Explorer an ActiveX Object?
If your point is "these games are bad, have some sympathy for the North Koreans" then I think your point has backfired. No, actually my point was that we shouldn't bash North Korea for doing something that I have a sneaking suspicion that the US would do just as easily.
I think you make a pretty compelling point. But the thing about Escape From New York and Judge Dredd is that they have a very American hero. So it's when the system falls down, and you have to revive "The American Dream". What I am trying to get at here is a game in which Americans are portrayed as greedy capitalist bastards, and not in a Command and Conquer style...
;-)
Think of it this way. You play as an Iraqi soldier. This is an adventure style game, with RPG elements. (so very story based). You start out welcoming the American invaders, but as time goes on, more and more places are bombed, people close to you are killed, beaten, whatever. you begin to actually resist after a while, eventually joining a terrorist cell after the war has been lost. Game ends when you fly a 747 into the World Trade Center.
Of course that's highly fictionalized... but I think it serves to more accurately show what I originally envisioned. I somehow think that if an Arabic country was the country responsible for producing the game, Americans would regard it as propaganda, and there would be some rather harsh words with that country.
Personally, I think it would make for an interesting game, but wouldn't be anything that I would ever want my name attached to.
I'm a Canadian. I'm just curious what your reaction would be if someone in Canada made a game that depicted a revolution against a tyranical US President (just for argument's sake let's say George W), and put you in the role of a terrorist/revolutionary?
Or how about a game that let you play as Osama Bin Laden. How do you suppose Americans would like the game? Would there be a public outcry? Would the government try to censor it?
Yeah. Games that are developed from the ground up on all 3 systems should be a pretty good indicator. So how about Soul Calibur II? ;-)
Normally I don't reply to trolls. But in this case I will make an exception.
GameCube has a pretty powerful GPU, and it CAN do hardware effects. Rebel Strike uses it to great advantage, and does a lot of stuff on hardware. The CPU is used for one HELL of a lot of AI, physics, and all that sort of jazz. I don't know why you would think that all the things Xbox does in hardware would have to be done on software on the GCN. I am not saying that the Xbox can't run Rebel Strike, I am saying that it would push the hardware just as much as it does on GameCube.
Unified memory also means unified bandwidth. Something that I know developers would appreciate more of on the Xbox.
Nintendo is second place worldwide. This is a fact. And I don't see PS2 lacking much western support.
Actually, most Xbox fans I have seen have just said that the Xbox is the most powerful without qualifying that in any way. Just looking at the specs and seeing higher numbers does NOT denote more power. GameCube is more powerful in some ways, and even PS2 is more powerful in a few areas.
Now I am going to make myself look sort of like a hypocrite by not qualifying my statement in detail, but I will say that GameCube has more efficiency going for it than the Xbox could ever hope for, and THAT is where GameCube's true power lies. For a real world example, compare Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike with Halo 2. Rebel Strike pushes an insane number of polys and does it with pretty much every effect imaginable. Halo 2 pushes about half that. Granted, the frame rate will probably be better in Halo 2, but my point is that the consoles really. do. stand on even ground. At least that's what developers for the consoles say (Factor 5 most notably), and I tend to trust them more than fans anyways.
As for the specs in the article, I have to say that it's looking like quite a machine. Unified Memory being the one exception of course. It seems that MS still hasn't learned their lesson...
But really, I think that the days of scaling up the hardware to make a better game are about over. What really counts is what games Microsoft will have on the console. Can they win over the Japanese developers? Can they take over Sony's spot in the lead this time? Or are they just going to be playing second fiddle to Nintendo again?
Well, I can see where you are coming from. But my problem with this is that if you did buy that Xbox and all the games, there's nothing to keep you from STILL playing them next generation.
As far as turning a console into a mini-PC/entertainment centre is concerned, it does bother me for a few reasons.
1) It's been tried before, and it almost killed the game console industry.
2) Adding DVD support to the PS2 resulted in an increased cost per unit of hardware. (DVD licensing)
3) In the case of the PS2, the quest for a "play-all" laser resulted in some extremely substandard products that are prone to breakage. If they had went all DVD instead of allowing both CDs and DVDs, they might have had some longer lived hardware.
Microsoft actually produced some hardware that is fairly long lived (aside from overheating problems), and since DVD playback is sold seperately, there's no built in cost for those who do not wish to play DVDs on it. THAT was the way to go if you ask me.
But I still think that a game console should be fairly cheap, and leverage every bit of its hardware to play games. Xbox just doesn't do that, given its PC style architecture.
It's actually kind of scary for me really. Probably unlike a lot of people on Slashdot... I buy consoles to play console style games, and not much more. I don't use my console to play media, I just use it to play games.
Now I have never had much interest in the Xbox, because as a CONSOLE, it's completely hopeless. The architecture is just fundamentally flawed from my viewpoint, given that it's just a scaled down PC, and attracts PC style games.
The architecture of the next Xbox seems to be a lot more in line with what a person should expect from a console. As in, it's designed to actually play games, instead of a general purpose machine. If Microsoft is actually fixing their architecture mistakes this time around, and doing it with enough conviction to actually drop backward compatability, I am getting a little on the nervous side. One of the things really wrong with Microsoft's culture is that it almost NEVER drops backward compatability, resulting in some genuinely horrid products (Windows 95 and Internet Explorer come first to mind).
I dunno, I can't help but think that Microsoft is making some good decisions here when it comes to gaming... It's almost as if they are adopting a Nintendo viewpoint, and putting the games first and the business second.
The thing is that GBA was already successful. Nokia has failed miserably, and 3rd party support is drying right up. It's like redesigning a Betamax right now and trying to sell it. There's no point.
Easy. What shows on TV AREN'T reality shows these days?
Yesterday when that was posted, Firefox 0.9 wasn't out yet. That review was based on RC1, which is worlds different than this build...
Try posting a story about Firefox 0.9 being out today. It has been amazing me all day that nobody has submitted a story yet.
I would... but I am a little busy right now.
Heh. I will admit that the thought has crossed my mind more than once that I stand to lose quite a bit if either drive fails on me. That's why I went out and bought a DVD burner. But I find that the everyday performance increase is quite nice, and that's really what matters to me. My main justification for not having a solid backup plan is that if I had a single 160GB drive, instead of a pair of 80s... then I would still lose it all if the drive failed.
Actually RAID-0 is for a striped array of disks. So you can link 2 or more hard drives together, using both simultaneously. I believe RAID-5 (but don't quote me on this) is for doing the same, but with redundant drives in the event of failure.
Yes, I realize that the name is somewhat misleading, but just because RAID was originally intended for redundancy does not mean that it does not have performance enhancing modes. I happen to have a RAID-0 array on my home PC.
Sorry. The Register says that USA Today originally reported that DS would have bluetooth. Since it was one of the first sources of information, I guess that the information I got was wrong.
Another article can be found there. It details a little more about the mixup. Sorry again for the confusion.
It should be well known by now that Nintendo is putting 802.11 and Bluetooth on the Nintendo DS. I am quite curious if this will make it there, as the DS would benefit from this GREATLY. Nintendo is downright vicious when it comes to defending battery life of their handhelds, so it's entirely possible.
We can always hope, right?
I feel the need to build some grey goo...
I got the impression that the eyes weren't at all uncommon in prisons. It's like asking someone where they got their glasses from, and the guy saying that he paid the doctor $100 for them, or won them in a card game. I mean, you COULD go on to explain the whole scenario behind it, but honestly... what's the point?
I'm not saying that it couldn't be a nice little side story. But seeing it as one of the big selling points of the game? uh uh.
I find it very interesting that you make that first point without having seen Pitch Black. I've never played the game, and don't intend to. But I thought the movie did a pretty good job of explaining Riddick's eyes. I don't frankly see a need for making a whole game about it.
Ordinarilly, I would agree with you. But I very much enjoyed Wind Waker. I think that the man successfully encaptured the SPIRIT of the original game while improving the quality of the franchise greatly.
I would still very much like to know who the director of the new GameCube Zelda is though.
I'm glad the mods modded you up quite a ways. I would have done EXACTLY what you had done, and for the exact same reasons. In games, I always take the route which is most likely to be the wrong way. Reason being that I simply want to see what's over there, and to make sure I don't miss something important.
That is SO going in my will. =P I'll leave my wizard hat and coat to bloodninja, who I know will put it to good use.
I have some good friends online that I value just as much as my real life friends. If I were to up and die today, I would never see them again (of course), and they would probably never know what became of me.
That thought DOES trouble me a little, but I think it might be for the best in the end. Not knowing is not a good thing at all, but I think a disappearance suddenly isn't that bad a thing either. All my passwords and such aren't hard to find, and in the cases of my IM programs and email, that information is actually saved within the programs.
I don't think any of my family or friends would go through my MSN/AIM contact lists telling my friends what happened to me, and I don't think that they should. If I had my way, my hard drive would be reformatted on my death, and all my online accounts allowed to expire. Sooner or later, my friends online would get the idea that I was no more.