Like with Kotor2, a lot of people play through the whole game without realizing this.
Give me my damn single player game - without the idiotic party! I do not want any of that "depth".
Oh, well, nvm. NWN1 is still with us and runs just fine. And I am not forced to have party there.
dwarf... he is actually of "good" alignment in the D&D sense.
Killing == bad. Always. No good character would rush to kill somebody. Never. The guy is by my estimations is neutral chaotic. But since he is always starts brawls, he can eventually become evil. Though I'm sure that game would not allow that. Alignments are not anymore what they used to be.
Honestly, I want my good ol' rule when your opponents are identified by alignment. If you are good - then your opponents are evil. If you are evil than your opponents are good. If you are neutral, then you on right terms with anybody. To get specific quests you need specific alignment so that person giving you the quest wouldn't attack you on sight. Etc.
The only problem is that fighters are dumb and have small sight. With total absence of party formations, you have a case when archer at back (not really at back since there is no formations) of your party spots enemy first and starts shooting immediately, often provoking whole bunch of monsters to come on you.
End result, that you cannot play intelligently: first because you are forced to have dumb low-level party and second because of lacking game utility to plan moves and attacks ahead. Compare implementation of feats for example: in NWN1 you select knockdown feat and click the opponent you want to knockdown (yeah, it is really that hard), but in NWN2 you tell your character to use selected feat next time. It works fine when you have say 2 or 3 attacks, but becomes impossible to control when you have 5-6 attacks (like my current NWN1 monk of 15th level (with haste)). System of NWN1 is hard to use - but gets the job done (I can knockdown opponent, then perform combos of e.g. called shots or stunning fists). NWN2's system - it just doesn't work that way, it feels like you in no direct control of your own character. You just telling him/her what to do and s/he does it. (I personally feel disconnected from my character - so most of the RPG fun is out.)
Also, even if you would have healer in your party, it is still impossible to find a way to keep him from participating in battle on one side and on another side to defend himself (he is or healing or he is standing his ground). No middle ground. Impossible currently in NWN2. Healer who just have used up all his mana for combat - is no healer. And that's why healers sucked big time in Dungeon Siege 1 and why they would suck in NWN2. (Never played NWN with healer on party.)
+10. I'm avid NWN1 player (I'm still playing it) and I dislike NWN2. They have fixed bunch of problems of NWN1 by replacing them with new problems: camera, inventory, party, radial menu, etc.
In NWN2 you have complicated landscapes. That plus buggy camera makes you often end up with screen (e.g. right in middle of a battle) filled leaves of the tree or walls or constructs or whatever that happened to be nearby. Sometimes it's annoying. Often - during complicated quests - it's very frustrating: to suddenly loose a sight on your party.
P.S. In addition to unforgivable decision to remove radial menus, also I hate that I am forced in single player NWN2 to have party. First I do like that - I like to play alone. Second. It's buggier even beyond first Dungeon Siege. Added that NWN1 shortcuts for party commands were removed, complicated game play becomes a total bore, since you have to manually babysit every character: AI hardly guesses right feat to use and most of the time computer controlled characters dumbly engage enemies as soon as they see them.
They have basic processor there but not anything like NPU: no packet handling at wire speed. The point of the card is to really optimize not the network latencies per se - but to shorten the path packet travels through OS. FYI, the "killer NIC" bypasses network stack and firewall and send packets directly to application. (Yeah, it does that only for IP/UDP (most of game traffic) and ICMP (icmp echo aka ping).)
For gaming solution that's okay. But as to system programmer it troubles me that people bypass OS safety features: now games are directly connected to external networks what makes them additional attack vector. And from Xbox* hacking stories (as well as private experience with PC games) we learned that games' level of programming rarely (if at all) focuses on security.
As somebody living in Germany for five years, I'd rather rated the parent as "informative";-)
The thing is, that for 0.001% of violence related to video games, there is 99.99% of violence which has nothing to do with it.
If estimated gaming community is 2Mln people, that one shooting idiot make up about 1/2mln*100 = 0,00005% of gamers.
No, they do not want to invest in poor regions of Germany where neo-nazis go on rampages literally killing black people on streets (and go unpunished after that!). But the bayerns see a reason to ban all violent video games. One word: Bayern. Check one the Edmund Stoiber (head of state Bayern): with the pearls he is making up he easily beats your best of bread Republicans.
Abstract formalism? Math is just abstract as numbers are. It deals with numbers and as science inherits all from them.
Finally, your crack about mathematicians being isolated from reality just shows that you don't know any mathematicians.
Seven years in university at applied math faculty doesn't count? In top country's establishment constantly sitting in top 5 of universities of ex-USSR space? [ Plus 2+ years in math institute of national academy of sciences? ] Is that not enough to draw such conclusion?
Most unmanageable departments are algebra and phys-math. People there are at best weird. Sanest is department of probability theory. Basically the very same people worked in academy.
Okay. You got me. I am all for modern math in schools.
But. As a person being long into math and algebra, I find his claim plain "wrong". Especially as related to computers. You cannot make up problem to introduce solution. (A.K.A. solution in search of problem.) Probably that makes math easier to understand, but still he is in fact reinterpreting reality. I doubt it is good way to teach kids.
Bending reality so that it would solution: that's why mathematicians are so isolated from society. They have to deal with tasks set in weird realities - often "ideal" realities having no problems. Well, just like virtual reality of computers abused by people to get away from real world problems.
Kids need to be taught how to deal with real world problems: not how to come up with funny solutions and then stretch reality to fit the solution.
I wonder if the relatively poor graphics are going to work in Nintendo's favour here. It's really easy to distinguish a game on graphics; just throw money at it. If your target platform is the PS3 or XBox 360, just hire more texture artists, more modellers, and make something that looks shiny. People will see the demo and buy it.
The people will bring it home, unpack it, try it and bring it immediately back to shop. That's one of the points of game consoles: they are not computers, they are consumer electronics (CE). In CE you need to interest people for at least 10/14 days so that they wouldn't return package right away.
Two my friends have Xbox360: there is no good games for Xbox. The Prey still reliably hangs the machine in under half hour of game play. Xboxen are most often used as: DVD player. Sad reality.
Visual experience is adding fun, but it cannot be all the fun. It works in movies, but movies need to last for only 2-3 hours. Games have to deliver much more than that: they have to keep people in loop for several month to justify the expenses. Remember, games are about twice more expensive than movies.
That's just stupid. RTFA looks more like joke than any kind of serious science.
You cannot divide by zero by definition. It's the property. Read on. And in real life rarely need arises. (Try to divide $1Mln amongst 0 people. Good luck.)
One can also devise a number space where division by 0 would give some result. That's not a problem as it is. Per se, it's the problem of computer created to solve physical tasks and taken standard math. In fact, programmers can always disable the nasty division by zero exception. Not that it would really help: result is still undefined.
Worth to mention, that problems caused by division by zero are just superficial and incorrect. Any reliable system which requires division operation are normally do not use division at all: in many cases it's trivially replaceable with multiplication and rest of the cases it is replaced non trivially by modifying algorithms.
Most of such work is already done. In university, all numerical algorithms we have studied never relied on division by variable. More than decade into software development and I cannot really recall a single time when I have had a possibility of division by zero: zero in many situations isn't valid input anyway.
Old problem. Most of web scam works precisely because of the issue. And there is still no silver bullet solution to it. OpenID doesn't solve that problem apparently nor was intended to solve it.
What I want is a complete solution that allows me to protect my identification by a strong encryption schema and use that everywhere - maybe have a Firefox extension (or a user.js in Opera) that handles the legwork for me. I don't know, it probably doesn't exist.
It doesn't seem you really understand how to make something secure. Me understands that probably not much either, but basically any professional would tell you that making single identity is a way in other direction. That's precisely what is called "single point of failure".
In other words. What would be easier to crack: many of presumably belonging to single person identities or single one which strongly identifies single person?
Conclusion: nobody in real world would try to snatch my public house card - though that would allow them to lift lots of precious books in my name. Same goes for about 20 other cards I have. But if I would have single card for everything, once it is forged I might be set back for a large amount of money. As long as there are 20 cards - not one - the trouble of forging them outweigh any gain. But having single card opens me up to possibly infinite number of problems: single point of failure make any failure fatal compromising everything you do and did.
Re:Not the problem OpenID is trying to solve
on
The Case for OpenID
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· Score: 1
The OpenID is in no way related to e-mail address.
Though it's true that when you have well established identity on web, chances of identifying your identity in real world are big. OpenID doesn't change that fact. For example, I have to put my personal info on web so that it can be found by potential customers. And of course spammers know that info too. No way I can make info public and avoid that info being misused. More data are public - more precisely one can link web identity to real person.
As practice have showed, that's still at large not trivial. Recall case with Pamela Jones of GROKLAW when SCOG tried to identify her real identity to silence her. SCOG somewhat succeeded in identifying, but was immediately stroke back for using pretexting/etc to acquire that information. Only few of SCOG corporate shills agreed to publish that info and withdrew it off web in few days afterwards: it is plain illegal to publish private info w/o consent of the person.
Re:Complexity can be hidden, but there are costs.
on
The Case for OpenID
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· Score: 1
Read RFC 1738 to understand that there is really no technical difference from "user@service.org" and "service.org/user" and "user.service.org".
Though you raise valid point that ID protocols got to have their own scheme, for example one like userid://yada-yada-yada to differentiate it from the rest. Underneath it would be plain http, but web applications would be able to tell user ids from the rest.
P.S.
OpenID folks persist in thinking that URLs are a sensible way to identify people...
The point is not to identify people, but to establish identity for people in on-line. IOW, OpenID doesn't try to make 1:1 mapping between people and ids. You can create and use as many IDs as you like. Also you can share your ids with everybody you want (though that's not a good idea). People tried many times to map something from internet space (e.g. e-mail) to real people 1:1 and filed miserably. Even in real world the same person may have several phone numbers and several addresses. And both phone numbers and addresses are often shared. So, OpenID doesn't try to "identify people." It only provides you with on-line pass you own and manage by yourself.
The cost of game development gets "crazy" because these huge companies are falling into the common trap where they've become convinced that the answer to any development problem is "MORE RESOURCES."
Let's put names in the sentence: Micro-Soft. Wouldn't EA so insistent on getting into bed with M$, the situation might have been different. There is no real competition for game development tools for PC/Xbox: all are framed into DirectX which is updated every year so that you have to retest/redevelop games every year. You might ask why just not to use older DirectX interfaces? But that's precisely what means being in bed with M$ since it's them who demand all partners to always use latest and greatest - consequently to force consumers to upgrade Windows to get newer DirectX. That's was M$' game from the beginning.
EA of course gets special treatments from MS, but consequently the treatments are already not-a-bottom-line part of its balance sheet. In other words, unless EA abandon its business/money earning stance and switch back to game development, it wouldn't be able to quit the addition of M$ treatments.
P.S. The "MORE RESOURCES" syndrome I already once tries to describe here on a topic of how Wii compares (or not) to Xbox/PS3.
Even charging OLPC $1 for the license would hurt the budget ($1 * millions of laptops == no good). In short, there isn't really a "market" here other than trying to expose another generation to inferior software.
Talk with any sales person and he'll tell why you are wrong.
It's not a matter of license fee - $1 is just like drop in ocean. But. Even if license rounds at $0, you still have to have accounting for them. Accounting == bureaucracy. IOW, in otherwise completely technical company you suddenly need to have large amount of bureaucrats to handle the millions of licenses. And then handle all associated costs: license transfer on OS replacement, on hardware replacement, on upgrade/update, handling of returned units, etc. Also, add here more management to do nothing else but control all the bureaucracy. And then you realize even the license fee of $0 - it isn't completely gratis. The cost runs quickly high.
GPL/BSD licenses scale easily - they have no accounting overhead. That's why BSD and Linux had took over embedded market long time ago. CE device fitted with FLOSS now is something absolutely normal, though seven years ago finding embedded/real-time OS w/o per-installation fee was next to impossible.
What better graphic chip can give to a game? Not much really. It still cannot replace work of good artist. (Read on for my poorly explained pov.)
Why M$/Sony are so concerned about graphic capabilities? Let me explain. I know little about game industry - the little I'm getting from my friends working as designers for game companies (In particular, Blizzard now has a development center in my homecity).
I'll cut to the point. Expensive graphics is needed in order to allow lame/untalented game designers to produce games. Also, it allows failed game to be brought up as plain business project w/o any involvement of game developers. On cheap system, you need all the capabilities combined - and combined cleverly - to present user with best experience. On systems with abundance of resources you do not need to be a genius to make a game: just throw more 3D surfaces on the stitches and be with it.
IOW, it all goes down to development costs. If you are from little hobbyist-like company, you wouldn't spare hours thinking about how to integrate things best on screen: and Nintendo requirements are then not a limitation to you. If you are from EA/friends, you do not want to get into the issues concerning that department N1033 cannot agree with department N2066. That's business - it has to be manageable. And organizational issues are often solved by throwing more people and resources at them and consequently sacrificing performance.
That's why games developed by big companies like EA are always so demanding. And that's why many games produced by smaller companies are often just fine with your 3yo PC. Same goes for consoles.
...which is only further accented by Europe, where im pretty sure only 1 person named Wallace has an HDTV...
I'm in Europe and I have a HDTV. And I am not Wallace. Sorry to disappoint.;-)
The point is, the Wii is in part targeted at kids: the biggest gaming audience. I cannot imaging somebody forking 800€ (decent cheap 720p 32") for HDTV to put in kids room, when you can get good ol' CRT on Xmas sales for about 80€. Pairing PS3 with 80€ TV will be absolutely weird. And I hardly imaging somebody forking 2x800€ for PS3 and HDTV - all for kids.
Nintendo might have put upscaler/etc - but that would (1) have made console more expensive and (2) targeted at narrower audience. Considering that most analyst have said that Nintendo cannot afford any kind of flop and Wii has to be successful for Nintendo to not sink, sticking with plain 480i/480p seems to me wise choice.
May be in one year - when WOW factor would vanish - everybody would replace their Wiis with HD-capable PS3 or Xbox360, but the fact remains: Nintendo makes money out of every Wii they sell. And they do that w/o any next-gen graphic and HD. Business-wise it looks like good move. Consumer-wise... well consumers have already spoken - all over the thread.
As far as getting similar motion sensing interfaces on the XBox360/PS3, it won't happen.
All my friends Xbox360 owners were intrigued by rumors that M$ might be preparing similar controller targeted at FPS.
As I have understood best games for Xbox360 are FPS. So it's only logical for M$ to release something like that: people would buy it just to improve their experience.
Success would of course depend on whether that would require purchase of new games or not. If M$ would manage to add such controller to The Prey with only software update, then many many people would jump in.
Also, looking from the prospect of home entertainment hub, support for variety of controllers is must. Anyone who have tried to type in WiFi's WEP128 or WPA key with classical game controller will understand me.
Seeing usable hybrid inertial trackers in people's homes for under $250 is going to be interesting to watch.
Do NOT mess entertainment market with professional/engineering one. I'm software/hardware developer and I know who badly Wii's software/hardware sucks. But that's not the point. Technology might suck - with its underpowered graphical/main processors or with Wii controller having low sensitivity and high latencies (running into tens of milliseconds). But for the product normal human can use - and use for games - that's much more than sufficient.
P.S. Russians have proverb which goes like "poor people need to be cleverly smart". ([Russian original is skipped -/. sucks with its hardcoded iso-8859-1 charset]). Point is, Nintendo is the poor guy who has to be very clever and whenever compromise is available - take it. M$ and Sony can afford modern technology - Nintendo is forced beating them with cheaper but better fun-factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Give me my damn single player game - without the idiotic party! I do not want any of that "depth".
Oh, well, nvm. NWN1 is still with us and runs just fine. And I am not forced to have party there.
Killing == bad. Always. No good character would rush to kill somebody. Never. The guy is by my estimations is neutral chaotic. But since he is always starts brawls, he can eventually become evil. Though I'm sure that game would not allow that. Alignments are not anymore what they used to be.
Honestly, I want my good ol' rule when your opponents are identified by alignment. If you are good - then your opponents are evil. If you are evil than your opponents are good. If you are neutral, then you on right terms with anybody. To get specific quests you need specific alignment so that person giving you the quest wouldn't attack you on sight. Etc.
The only problem is that fighters are dumb and have small sight. With total absence of party formations, you have a case when archer at back (not really at back since there is no formations) of your party spots enemy first and starts shooting immediately, often provoking whole bunch of monsters to come on you.
End result, that you cannot play intelligently: first because you are forced to have dumb low-level party and second because of lacking game utility to plan moves and attacks ahead. Compare implementation of feats for example: in NWN1 you select knockdown feat and click the opponent you want to knockdown (yeah, it is really that hard), but in NWN2 you tell your character to use selected feat next time. It works fine when you have say 2 or 3 attacks, but becomes impossible to control when you have 5-6 attacks (like my current NWN1 monk of 15th level (with haste)). System of NWN1 is hard to use - but gets the job done (I can knockdown opponent, then perform combos of e.g. called shots or stunning fists). NWN2's system - it just doesn't work that way, it feels like you in no direct control of your own character. You just telling him/her what to do and s/he does it. (I personally feel disconnected from my character - so most of the RPG fun is out.)
Also, even if you would have healer in your party, it is still impossible to find a way to keep him from participating in battle on one side and on another side to defend himself (he is or healing or he is standing his ground). No middle ground. Impossible currently in NWN2. Healer who just have used up all his mana for combat - is no healer. And that's why healers sucked big time in Dungeon Siege 1 and why they would suck in NWN2. (Never played NWN with healer on party.)
+10. I'm avid NWN1 player (I'm still playing it) and I dislike NWN2. They have fixed bunch of problems of NWN1 by replacing them with new problems: camera, inventory, party, radial menu, etc.
In NWN2 you have complicated landscapes. That plus buggy camera makes you often end up with screen (e.g. right in middle of a battle) filled leaves of the tree or walls or constructs or whatever that happened to be nearby. Sometimes it's annoying. Often - during complicated quests - it's very frustrating: to suddenly loose a sight on your party.
P.S. In addition to unforgivable decision to remove radial menus, also I hate that I am forced in single player NWN2 to have party. First I do like that - I like to play alone. Second. It's buggier even beyond first Dungeon Siege. Added that NWN1 shortcuts for party commands were removed, complicated game play becomes a total bore, since you have to manually babysit every character: AI hardly guesses right feat to use and most of the time computer controlled characters dumbly engage enemies as soon as they see them.
Well, that's business as usual: they would go on extracting money as long as that would be possible.
And no worries - they pipe good chunk of profits into new media to remain competitive in long term.
It's not about artists per se. It's about viability of business.
They have basic processor there but not anything like NPU: no packet handling at wire speed. The point of the card is to really optimize not the network latencies per se - but to shorten the path packet travels through OS. FYI, the "killer NIC" bypasses network stack and firewall and send packets directly to application. (Yeah, it does that only for IP/UDP (most of game traffic) and ICMP (icmp echo aka ping).)
For gaming solution that's okay. But as to system programmer it troubles me that people bypass OS safety features: now games are directly connected to external networks what makes them additional attack vector. And from Xbox* hacking stories (as well as private experience with PC games) we learned that games' level of programming rarely (if at all) focuses on security.
As somebody living in Germany for five years, I'd rather rated the parent as "informative" ;-)
The thing is, that for 0.001% of violence related to video games, there is 99.99% of violence which has nothing to do with it.
If estimated gaming community is 2Mln people, that one shooting idiot make up about 1/2mln*100 = 0,00005% of gamers.
No, they do not want to invest in poor regions of Germany where neo-nazis go on rampages literally killing black people on streets (and go unpunished after that!). But the bayerns see a reason to ban all violent video games. One word: Bayern. Check one the Edmund Stoiber (head of state Bayern): with the pearls he is making up he easily beats your best of bread Republicans.
Abstract formalism? Math is just abstract as numbers are. It deals with numbers and as science inherits all from them.
Seven years in university at applied math faculty doesn't count? In top country's establishment constantly sitting in top 5 of universities of ex-USSR space? [ Plus 2+ years in math institute of national academy of sciences? ] Is that not enough to draw such conclusion?
Most unmanageable departments are algebra and phys-math. People there are at best weird. Sanest is department of probability theory. Basically the very same people worked in academy.
Isn't that what's called "imagination"?
Okay. You got me. I am all for modern math in schools.
But. As a person being long into math and algebra, I find his claim plain "wrong". Especially as related to computers. You cannot make up problem to introduce solution. (A.K.A. solution in search of problem.) Probably that makes math easier to understand, but still he is in fact reinterpreting reality. I doubt it is good way to teach kids.
Bending reality so that it would solution: that's why mathematicians are so isolated from society. They have to deal with tasks set in weird realities - often "ideal" realities having no problems. Well, just like virtual reality of computers abused by people to get away from real world problems.
Kids need to be taught how to deal with real world problems: not how to come up with funny solutions and then stretch reality to fit the solution.
The people will bring it home, unpack it, try it and bring it immediately back to shop. That's one of the points of game consoles: they are not computers, they are consumer electronics (CE). In CE you need to interest people for at least 10/14 days so that they wouldn't return package right away.
Two my friends have Xbox360: there is no good games for Xbox. The Prey still reliably hangs the machine in under half hour of game play. Xboxen are most often used as: DVD player. Sad reality.
Visual experience is adding fun, but it cannot be all the fun. It works in movies, but movies need to last for only 2-3 hours. Games have to deliver much more than that: they have to keep people in loop for several month to justify the expenses. Remember, games are about twice more expensive than movies.
That's just stupid. RTFA looks more like joke than any kind of serious science.
You cannot divide by zero by definition. It's the property. Read on. And in real life rarely need arises. (Try to divide $1Mln amongst 0 people. Good luck.)
One can also devise a number space where division by 0 would give some result. That's not a problem as it is. Per se, it's the problem of computer created to solve physical tasks and taken standard math. In fact, programmers can always disable the nasty division by zero exception. Not that it would really help: result is still undefined.
Worth to mention, that problems caused by division by zero are just superficial and incorrect. Any reliable system which requires division operation are normally do not use division at all: in many cases it's trivially replaceable with multiplication and rest of the cases it is replaced non trivially by modifying algorithms.
Most of such work is already done. In university, all numerical algorithms we have studied never relied on division by variable. More than decade into software development and I cannot really recall a single time when I have had a possibility of division by zero: zero in many situations isn't valid input anyway.
Old problem. Most of web scam works precisely because of the issue. And there is still no silver bullet solution to it. OpenID doesn't solve that problem apparently nor was intended to solve it.
It doesn't seem you really understand how to make something secure. Me understands that probably not much either, but basically any professional would tell you that making single identity is a way in other direction. That's precisely what is called "single point of failure".
In other words. What would be easier to crack: many of presumably belonging to single person identities or single one which strongly identifies single person?
Conclusion: nobody in real world would try to snatch my public house card - though that would allow them to lift lots of precious books in my name. Same goes for about 20 other cards I have. But if I would have single card for everything, once it is forged I might be set back for a large amount of money. As long as there are 20 cards - not one - the trouble of forging them outweigh any gain. But having single card opens me up to possibly infinite number of problems: single point of failure make any failure fatal compromising everything you do and did.
The OpenID is in no way related to e-mail address.
Though it's true that when you have well established identity on web, chances of identifying your identity in real world are big. OpenID doesn't change that fact. For example, I have to put my personal info on web so that it can be found by potential customers. And of course spammers know that info too. No way I can make info public and avoid that info being misused. More data are public - more precisely one can link web identity to real person.
As practice have showed, that's still at large not trivial. Recall case with Pamela Jones of GROKLAW when SCOG tried to identify her real identity to silence her. SCOG somewhat succeeded in identifying, but was immediately stroke back for using pretexting/etc to acquire that information. Only few of SCOG corporate shills agreed to publish that info and withdrew it off web in few days afterwards: it is plain illegal to publish private info w/o consent of the person.
Read RFC 1738 to understand that there is really no technical difference from "user@service.org" and "service.org/user" and "user.service.org".
Though you raise valid point that ID protocols got to have their own scheme, for example one like userid://yada-yada-yada to differentiate it from the rest. Underneath it would be plain http, but web applications would be able to tell user ids from the rest.
P.S.
The point is not to identify people, but to establish identity for people in on-line. IOW, OpenID doesn't try to make 1:1 mapping between people and ids. You can create and use as many IDs as you like. Also you can share your ids with everybody you want (though that's not a good idea). People tried many times to map something from internet space (e.g. e-mail) to real people 1:1 and filed miserably. Even in real world the same person may have several phone numbers and several addresses. And both phone numbers and addresses are often shared. So, OpenID doesn't try to "identify people." It only provides you with on-line pass you own and manage by yourself.
+100. I bought Nintendo DS specifically for Tetris. ;)
Let's put names in the sentence: Micro-Soft. Wouldn't EA so insistent on getting into bed with M$, the situation might have been different. There is no real competition for game development tools for PC/Xbox: all are framed into DirectX which is updated every year so that you have to retest/redevelop games every year. You might ask why just not to use older DirectX interfaces? But that's precisely what means being in bed with M$ since it's them who demand all partners to always use latest and greatest - consequently to force consumers to upgrade Windows to get newer DirectX. That's was M$' game from the beginning.
EA of course gets special treatments from MS, but consequently the treatments are already not-a-bottom-line part of its balance sheet. In other words, unless EA abandon its business/money earning stance and switch back to game development, it wouldn't be able to quit the addition of M$ treatments.
P.S. The "MORE RESOURCES" syndrome I already once tries to describe here on a topic of how Wii compares (or not) to Xbox/PS3.
Talk with any sales person and he'll tell why you are wrong.
It's not a matter of license fee - $1 is just like drop in ocean. But. Even if license rounds at $0, you still have to have accounting for them. Accounting == bureaucracy. IOW, in otherwise completely technical company you suddenly need to have large amount of bureaucrats to handle the millions of licenses. And then handle all associated costs: license transfer on OS replacement, on hardware replacement, on upgrade/update, handling of returned units, etc. Also, add here more management to do nothing else but control all the bureaucracy. And then you realize even the license fee of $0 - it isn't completely gratis. The cost runs quickly high.
GPL/BSD licenses scale easily - they have no accounting overhead. That's why BSD and Linux had took over embedded market long time ago. CE device fitted with FLOSS now is something absolutely normal, though seven years ago finding embedded/real-time OS w/o per-installation fee was next to impossible.
Me wonders why it didn't worked first time?
Again??? PIC didn't worked.
They have already tried WinCE. Recall the device from AMD also targeted at countries of 3rd world. And they - M$ and AMD - have miserably failed.
Shortly: nobody needs another closed, limited to single vendor platform.
In such comparison, you ALL miss the point.
What better graphic chip can give to a game? Not much really. It still cannot replace work of good artist. (Read on for my poorly explained pov.)
Why M$/Sony are so concerned about graphic capabilities? Let me explain. I know little about game industry - the little I'm getting from my friends working as designers for game companies (In particular, Blizzard now has a development center in my homecity).
I'll cut to the point. Expensive graphics is needed in order to allow lame/untalented game designers to produce games. Also, it allows failed game to be brought up as plain business project w/o any involvement of game developers. On cheap system, you need all the capabilities combined - and combined cleverly - to present user with best experience. On systems with abundance of resources you do not need to be a genius to make a game: just throw more 3D surfaces on the stitches and be with it.
IOW, it all goes down to development costs. If you are from little hobbyist-like company, you wouldn't spare hours thinking about how to integrate things best on screen: and Nintendo requirements are then not a limitation to you. If you are from EA/friends, you do not want to get into the issues concerning that department N1033 cannot agree with department N2066. That's business - it has to be manageable. And organizational issues are often solved by throwing more people and resources at them and consequently sacrificing performance.
That's why games developed by big companies like EA are always so demanding. And that's why many games produced by smaller companies are often just fine with your 3yo PC. Same goes for consoles.
That's beats me too: why I need to fork 600€ for PS3 which even cannot play tetris. Your truth: lame, lame, lame.
I'm in Europe and I have a HDTV. And I am not Wallace. Sorry to disappoint. ;-)
The point is, the Wii is in part targeted at kids: the biggest gaming audience. I cannot imaging somebody forking 800€ (decent cheap 720p 32") for HDTV to put in kids room, when you can get good ol' CRT on Xmas sales for about 80€. Pairing PS3 with 80€ TV will be absolutely weird. And I hardly imaging somebody forking 2x800€ for PS3 and HDTV - all for kids.
Nintendo might have put upscaler/etc - but that would (1) have made console more expensive and (2) targeted at narrower audience. Considering that most analyst have said that Nintendo cannot afford any kind of flop and Wii has to be successful for Nintendo to not sink, sticking with plain 480i/480p seems to me wise choice.
May be in one year - when WOW factor would vanish - everybody would replace their Wiis with HD-capable PS3 or Xbox360, but the fact remains: Nintendo makes money out of every Wii they sell. And they do that w/o any next-gen graphic and HD. Business-wise it looks like good move. Consumer-wise... well consumers have already spoken - all over the thread.
All my friends Xbox360 owners were intrigued by rumors that M$ might be preparing similar controller targeted at FPS.
As I have understood best games for Xbox360 are FPS. So it's only logical for M$ to release something like that: people would buy it just to improve their experience.
Success would of course depend on whether that would require purchase of new games or not. If M$ would manage to add such controller to The Prey with only software update, then many many people would jump in.
Also, looking from the prospect of home entertainment hub, support for variety of controllers is must. Anyone who have tried to type in WiFi's WEP128 or WPA key with classical game controller will understand me.
Do NOT mess entertainment market with professional/engineering one. I'm software/hardware developer and I know who badly Wii's software/hardware sucks. But that's not the point. Technology might suck - with its underpowered graphical/main processors or with Wii controller having low sensitivity and high latencies (running into tens of milliseconds). But for the product normal human can use - and use for games - that's much more than sufficient.
P.S. Russians have proverb which goes like "poor people need to be cleverly smart". ([Russian original is skipped - /. sucks with its hardcoded iso-8859-1 charset]). Point is, Nintendo is the poor guy who has to be very clever and whenever compromise is available - take it. M$ and Sony can afford modern technology - Nintendo is forced beating them with cheaper but better fun-factor.