So what you're really saying is that more games should have a quest-log which tells you what tasks you've completed & what tasks you can choose to do.
Sounds to me more like a design flaw than a problem specific to casual gamers
True. Baldur's Gate II is very good in this aspect. Every time you accept quest, it gets written in the log, every time you accomplish an important step in that quest, it also gets written in the log.
So then yeah, it's a design flaw. Which means that many games are badly designed, or simply designed without the casual gamer in mind. Many games are designed for the hardcore gamer and the hardcore gamer only, which is why the casual gamer feels left behind. That is probably what the Wii is hoping to be solving, although the choice of console won't necessarily change the way third parties design their games. Time will tell, 52 days left...
Personally, I didn't find much value in the rumble packs in the PS2. I've always hated how they call it "Force Feedback" too, since it's no such thing. I usually leave them on, but it's not like having the controller vibrate in my hands has really enhanced the game experiance.
True, and I never saw how a vibrating controller could enhance immersion. Immersion is different reactions for different actions, with the rumble, if my character gets shot, my controller vibrates, if my car runs into a wall, my controller vibrates, if I summon an aeon, my controller vibrates, if something explodes nearby, my controller vibrates... heck, just make it "if something happens on screen, my controller vibrates", and put the controller to auto-vibrate all the time.
I remember (rose-tinted glasses ahoy!) when games were FAR harder than they were now. Perhaps I was just less good at games, but it took me about a year to complete the first C&C game, and 2 months to complete Red Alert.
I'd say you're better today that you were back then. Try the C&C game again, and see if it takes a year to complete. Back when I was 6 and Super Mario Bros. was all new and shiny, it took months before I finally finished it. Today, 30 minutes could do it. Did the game get easier? No, it's the same, I just got better at it, developped better reflexes, better cognitive ability, etc. I evolved and got better at games.
The key difference is likely that when you play a game here and there it takes you awhile to get back into it and get your groove back. If its summer break and you play for twelve straight hours, well, its not going tot ake as long.
And that's what makes it hard for casual gamers to enjoy story-based games with quests.
If I read a long novel say, one chapter at a time, then I get busy at work and have to put the book down for two weeks, I can pick it up two weeks later and start from where I left the bookmark. I might not remember all the details of the intrigue at the moment, but the story will continue one page at a time, and eventually I'll remember and continue to enjoy the book.
If I start a long story-based game, then I get busy at work and have to stop playing for two weeks, when I come back, I might be totally unable to progress because I forgot that I need to deliver a plucked blue chicken to a one legged chiropractor three villages away in order to trigger the rest of the story. That is what turns a nice 40 hours game into a boring 60 hours game, because you wasted 10 hours running around and talking to every villager you met (most of them saying useless things, and not even "What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?") until you figured out what you forgot.
And where's the central repository of knowledge that tells me what's the best text editor of the 9,000 available for Linux? The best media player, the best burning software? How do I know how stable they are? Will they have the functions I need? These aren't hits against Linux at all, but it's a lot easier for me to ask the guy next to me what he uses to burn CD's rather than look it up online.
I just asked the guy next to me what he uses to burn CD's, and he said he used K3B. So I launched synaptic, and installed K3B. What's your point?
Note: if sound doesn't work in Flash Player (for example on YouTube): sudo apt-get install alsa-oss gksudo gedit/etc/firefox/firefoxrc Change: FIREFOX_DSP="" To: FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" Restart Mozilla Firefox. Now sound should work in Flash Player.
If that's all it takes to have sound in Flash Player, why isn't that the default configuration? Is it again a licence thing that the default install requires broken sound?
So there should be one for me in there somewhere. You guys can fight over the other 999,999.
The summary is off by a couple (tens? hundreds?) units though. It's not 1 million for USA, it's 1 million for North America, which means they'll send maybe 100k to Canada and 2 or 3 to Mexico. USA ain't alone in America.
I'm still not sure why Microsoft has such a hard-on for losing in Japan. The original XBox was a dismal failure in Japan, but it was a pretty solid yet distant second place in just about every other major market in the world. The ONLY reason why there's this pointless debate about "which console was #2 last generation" was because the XBox failed so miserably in Japan.
I'm still not sure why Nintendo has such a hard-on for losing in the US. The original GameCube was a dismal failure in the US, but it was a pretty solid yet distant second place in just about every other major market in the world. The ONLY reason why there's this pointless debate about "which console was #2 last generation" was because the GameCube failed so miserably in the US.
It's all about culture. Americans want sports and gory-action games, Japanese want Pokémon et al. While 3rd party support matters a lot for the overall success of a console, first-party game types is what allows for market penetration in a geographical region. As long as Microsoft refuses to recognize the need for "out-of-this-world" weird games (weird from an American perspective), Japan won't take them seriously. As long as Nintendo doesn't see the need for action and sports games, America won't take them seriously.
Nintendo needs some first party games that appeal to an American audience and it will win the world. Zelda is a nice first step (which N has taken over and over again, but Zelda, not Mario, really is what opens the door to America for Nintendo). Microsoft has... nothing that I am aware of (for the Japanese market). The next couple of months will be interesting.
Call my cynical but I'm pretty sure the goal of all games these days are to make a profit for the company that designs/produces/distributes them. I hope that many of the games that I have played recently didn't have "Fun" as their goal because I'd hate to think that there are people on this Earth that can fail so miserably at a single goal.
The goal of whoever makes and sells the game is to make money. The goal of whoever plays the game is to have fun. Why else would you play games? To make sure they make money?
Versions of Windows XP bought in the last couple of years include SP2 by default. A fresh install of a current version thus has the firewall switched on by default. You can hardly compain that a version bought in 2001/2 has vulnerabilities that are fixed in the current version;
Dang, so you mean I need to re-buy the same operating system that I bought years ago when it was released?
Incidentally, I believe exactly the same is true for the Mac: versions prior to Tiger did not have the firewall switched on by default.
True (maybe, didn't check). However, Apple clearly mentions that Tiger and whatever cats there were before are not the same operating system. Different products = different complaints.
Incidentally, XP prior to SP2 still had a rudimentary firewall, which whilst it isn't anywhere near as good as the SP2 one, it'll still protect you fine from external attacks whilst you download SP2.
That's if I'm fast enough to enable the firewall before getting hacked. If the ATTGH (average time to get hacked) is 20 minutes, that means some are hacked in an hour, some are hacked in seconds.
Or if you don't want to do that, Microsoft will happily send you a service pack 2 disk.
Why should I have to take my computer offline in order to install an operating system? I never installed a Mac, so I can't speak for that, but I've installed plenty of Linux distros, and at no point (that I am aware of) during the installation has my machine been vulnerable to hacking from the Internet before I apply a patch. Heck, the default install of Fedora Core 4 (maybe even earlier versions) enables the firewall pretty early in the installation.
The whole point of this is not that it's impossible to secure Windows. It is, I know that. The point of the thread is that the default configuration of a freshly installed unpatched operating system needs to be reasonable to some extent, and Windows XP simply doesn't fit in that category. If the very first release of Vista comes with a firewall that's enabled by default (and hopefully fewer services), then Vista will be the first Windows OS to have reasonable defaults.
I think you mean Xgl, but your point is still valid. For anyone who has not seen Xgl in action, head over to YouTube and search up some videos.
Yes, I have seen Xgl in action, I have even used Xgl for a while on my box. While the spinning cube and the wobbling windows are nice and all, it is simply hell when you try to simply resize a window. I don't know the inner-workings of Xgl, but how can they make such 3D stuff and wobbling windows so efficient, while totally killing the actual usefulness of managing windows by resizing them? They don't show *that* in the videos.
I'll use Xgl again when I see a video of a window being resized as fast as it is with a regular 2D desktop.
It certainly will be hacked within minutes of you going online -- if you manually disable the firewall. It's been enabled by default since SP2.
I bought a retail WinXP Home box long ago, before the SP2. When I install it on a freshly formatted machine, it will probably get hacked before I can install SP2.
Windows XP is the system. SP2 is a patch. So yeah, a patched system works. A fresh installation with default configuration does not.
OP said : "It's a shame that no one yet has made an OS that is trivial to get working in a reasonable default configuration"
To which you replied "Windows XP? never had a problem except on the more exotic platforms. Seriously. At all."
Having a bunch of useless and vulnerable services enabled by default is not a "reasonable default configuration". Having a freshly installed OS automatically hacked within minutes of being online means it does not use a "reasonable default configuration"
I'm not even trying to follow the common slashdot anti-microsoft mindset here, it's just a sad fact that the default configuration of WinXP is extremely vulnerable to viruses, worms and trojans.
Several people who have complained about things here on slashdot have apparently been locked out of moderation forever.
I really don't understand the whole fussa about getting mod points. I do get them fairly often, but I rarely use them. Given the amount of stories posted here, I only have so much time to read a couple of them, so I read the ones that are actually interesting to me (duh), meaning that I will probably want to comment on it too, therefore preventing me from modding anything on the topic.
The only way to use my mod points is to read comments on a story that I don't care about. Which is boring... and time consuming... and doesn't make sense anyway.
Riiiight.. because the heating/cooling cycles of electronic equipment being turned on and off repeatedly is *much* better for it.
Running at 100% CPU usage 24/7 generates more heat, more heat means fans need to spin faster, fans spinning faster means they die faster. Also, fans spinning 24/7 also suck up more dust faster inside the console, making it hotter and requiring the fans to spin yet faster.
Read a couple of posts up the parenthood of this one... we're talking about "must have" products, as in "not having an automobile is not an option for some"... "must have" and "need" are pretty much related here.
Since when does the "average American" want a Hummer? Hummers make up a tiny, tiny fraction of vehicles on the road in the US, probably less than 0.1%.
Ok, I said "Hummer" because it is the extreme case. However, there are way more SUV's on the road than there are people who actually need them. SUV's are good for lumberjacks, not for a soccer-mom.
Starbucks is not a "must have" product. [...] For many people, not buying gas is not an option (lack of good public transportation in many parts of the U.S.)
Not buying gas might not be an option for some, but not driving in a Hummer is. There are many much smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles out there, yet for some reason, the average American folk feels like he needs the biggest, hugest car of them all.
"If you add up all the spending on hardware and software that runs on Microsoft operating systems, as well as all the services around installing and maintaining Microsoft applications and solutions, you quickly come up with a number much bigger than Microsoft's revenues," IDC's John Gantz, Al Gillen and Marcel Warmerdam wrote in the study.
That means that companies will have to spend enormous amount of money just to licence, install and maintain MS apps... they still haven't used them, or gotten any improvement on their business... Microsoft is litterally saying "It's gonna cost you a hell of a lot of money if you upgrade".
I got burned in the past. I ain't ever buying MadCatz hardware again. They break easily, and they can't even make a turbo controller that beats my own finger in button-mashing games. What's the point of "turbo" if it's slower than what I can do? I remember my NES-Advantage joystick, now THAT was turbo.
If for say their actual cost is $230 or something and they would lose money on a $200 console $250 sounds like a nice price point. If in fact that are making these (including all other cost) for $190 and selling it at $250 one could argue it might be worth it for them to sell at $200 for a tiny profit, leading to more game sales.
I really doubt the $50 price increase will hurt sales that bad. They expect to ship 4 million units by the end of the year, and unless there's a horrible hardware failure worldwide (which I really doubt, this is Nintendo after all), they will most likely sell all of those 4 million units. Selling each of them at $50 more means they will get an extra $20 million that they can reinvest in first-party titles, online service, and other cool stuff (maybe even R&D for the next Wii 360).
I will be getting one at launch, and although it sucks a little that I will have $50 less in my wallet to buy games and accessories, it's nice to know I'll get a pack-in game to show off the controler. I don't expect Wii sports to be the ultra-amazing-fun game, however, it will be the perfect thing to put when my sister comes at my place and asks what this gizmo is. Wii Sports will be the viral part... "Hey [insert non-gamer relative's name here], check out my new gadget, you can play bowling on TV with that."
By lowering the price from 250 to 150, they go from making 50 per console to losing 50 per console. But they sell 2 million rather than 1.5 million consoles.
Except that, just like the Xbox 360(1), and unfortunately (let's be realistic here) the PS3, the Wii will most probably sell out this holiday season. They won't sell more by lowering the price, because there won't be any more to sell. By selling it $250 instead of the expected $200, if they manage to ship and sell all the 4 millions of the units they promised, that's an extra $20,000,000 they get to invest back in games, online stuff and much more.
(1) Ok, I know the Xbox 360 didn't sell out in Japan, but it wasn't because of the price... MS could have priced it at $10 and Japan still wouldn't have bought it.
Re:The suprising news though is....
on
The Wii Takes NYC
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· Score: 1
BTW, has anyone else noticed that November 19th is a Sunday?...
Apparently, Nintendo always launches on Sunday in North America. I remember getting my pre-ordered DS on a sunday morning. They probably have a real reason for that, although I'm no good in this marketing stuff...
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds to me more like a design flaw than a problem specific to casual gamers
True. Baldur's Gate II is very good in this aspect. Every time you accept quest, it gets written in the log, every time you accomplish an important step in that quest, it also gets written in the log.
So then yeah, it's a design flaw. Which means that many games are badly designed, or simply designed without the casual gamer in mind. Many games are designed for the hardcore gamer and the hardcore gamer only, which is why the casual gamer feels left behind. That is probably what the Wii is hoping to be solving, although the choice of console won't necessarily change the way third parties design their games. Time will tell, 52 days left...
True, and I never saw how a vibrating controller could enhance immersion. Immersion is different reactions for different actions, with the rumble, if my character gets shot, my controller vibrates, if my car runs into a wall, my controller vibrates, if I summon an aeon, my controller vibrates, if something explodes nearby, my controller vibrates... heck, just make it "if something happens on screen, my controller vibrates", and put the controller to auto-vibrate all the time.
I'd say you're better today that you were back then. Try the C&C game again, and see if it takes a year to complete. Back when I was 6 and Super Mario Bros. was all new and shiny, it took months before I finally finished it. Today, 30 minutes could do it. Did the game get easier? No, it's the same, I just got better at it, developped better reflexes, better cognitive ability, etc. I evolved and got better at games.
And that's what makes it hard for casual gamers to enjoy story-based games with quests.
If I read a long novel say, one chapter at a time, then I get busy at work and have to put the book down for two weeks, I can pick it up two weeks later and start from where I left the bookmark. I might not remember all the details of the intrigue at the moment, but the story will continue one page at a time, and eventually I'll remember and continue to enjoy the book.
If I start a long story-based game, then I get busy at work and have to stop playing for two weeks, when I come back, I might be totally unable to progress because I forgot that I need to deliver a plucked blue chicken to a one legged chiropractor three villages away in order to trigger the rest of the story. That is what turns a nice 40 hours game into a boring 60 hours game, because you wasted 10 hours running around and talking to every villager you met (most of them saying useless things, and not even "What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?") until you figured out what you forgot.
I just asked the guy next to me what he uses to burn CD's, and he said he used K3B. So I launched synaptic, and installed K3B. What's your point?
Note: if sound doesn't work in Flash Player (for example on YouTube): sudo apt-get install alsa-oss gksudo gedit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc Change: FIREFOX_DSP="" To: FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" Restart Mozilla Firefox. Now sound should work in Flash Player.
If that's all it takes to have sound in Flash Player, why isn't that the default configuration? Is it again a licence thing that the default install requires broken sound?
The summary is off by a couple (tens? hundreds?) units though. It's not 1 million for USA, it's 1 million for North America, which means they'll send maybe 100k to Canada and 2 or 3 to Mexico. USA ain't alone in America.
I'm still not sure why Nintendo has such a hard-on for losing in the US. The original GameCube was a dismal failure in the US, but it was a pretty solid yet distant second place in just about every other major market in the world. The ONLY reason why there's this pointless debate about "which console was #2 last generation" was because the GameCube failed so miserably in the US.
It's all about culture. Americans want sports and gory-action games, Japanese want Pokémon et al. While 3rd party support matters a lot for the overall success of a console, first-party game types is what allows for market penetration in a geographical region. As long as Microsoft refuses to recognize the need for "out-of-this-world" weird games (weird from an American perspective), Japan won't take them seriously. As long as Nintendo doesn't see the need for action and sports games, America won't take them seriously.
Nintendo needs some first party games that appeal to an American audience and it will win the world. Zelda is a nice first step (which N has taken over and over again, but Zelda, not Mario, really is what opens the door to America for Nintendo). Microsoft has... nothing that I am aware of (for the Japanese market). The next couple of months will be interesting.
54 days till the Wii...
The goal of whoever makes and sells the game is to make money. The goal of whoever plays the game is to have fun. Why else would you play games? To make sure they make money?
Dang, so you mean I need to re-buy the same operating system that I bought years ago when it was released?
Incidentally, I believe exactly the same is true for the Mac: versions prior to Tiger did not have the firewall switched on by default.
True (maybe, didn't check). However, Apple clearly mentions that Tiger and whatever cats there were before are not the same operating system. Different products = different complaints.
Incidentally, XP prior to SP2 still had a rudimentary firewall, which whilst it isn't anywhere near as good as the SP2 one, it'll still protect you fine from external attacks whilst you download SP2.
That's if I'm fast enough to enable the firewall before getting hacked. If the ATTGH (average time to get hacked) is 20 minutes, that means some are hacked in an hour, some are hacked in seconds.
Or if you don't want to do that, Microsoft will happily send you a service pack 2 disk.
Why should I have to take my computer offline in order to install an operating system? I never installed a Mac, so I can't speak for that, but I've installed plenty of Linux distros, and at no point (that I am aware of) during the installation has my machine been vulnerable to hacking from the Internet before I apply a patch. Heck, the default install of Fedora Core 4 (maybe even earlier versions) enables the firewall pretty early in the installation.
The whole point of this is not that it's impossible to secure Windows. It is, I know that. The point of the thread is that the default configuration of a freshly installed unpatched operating system needs to be reasonable to some extent, and Windows XP simply doesn't fit in that category. If the very first release of Vista comes with a firewall that's enabled by default (and hopefully fewer services), then Vista will be the first Windows OS to have reasonable defaults.
Yes, I have seen Xgl in action, I have even used Xgl for a while on my box. While the spinning cube and the wobbling windows are nice and all, it is simply hell when you try to simply resize a window. I don't know the inner-workings of Xgl, but how can they make such 3D stuff and wobbling windows so efficient, while totally killing the actual usefulness of managing windows by resizing them? They don't show *that* in the videos.
I'll use Xgl again when I see a video of a window being resized as fast as it is with a regular 2D desktop.
I bought a retail WinXP Home box long ago, before the SP2. When I install it on a freshly formatted machine, it will probably get hacked before I can install SP2.
Windows XP is the system. SP2 is a patch. So yeah, a patched system works. A fresh installation with default configuration does not.
To which you replied "Windows XP? never had a problem except on the more exotic platforms. Seriously. At all."
Having a bunch of useless and vulnerable services enabled by default is not a "reasonable default configuration". Having a freshly installed OS automatically hacked within minutes of being online means it does not use a "reasonable default configuration"
I'm not even trying to follow the common slashdot anti-microsoft mindset here, it's just a sad fact that the default configuration of WinXP is extremely vulnerable to viruses, worms and trojans.
I really don't understand the whole fussa about getting mod points. I do get them fairly often, but I rarely use them. Given the amount of stories posted here, I only have so much time to read a couple of them, so I read the ones that are actually interesting to me (duh), meaning that I will probably want to comment on it too, therefore preventing me from modding anything on the topic.
The only way to use my mod points is to read comments on a story that I don't care about. Which is boring... and time consuming... and doesn't make sense anyway.
Educate yourself, get the the upper echelon and bone the rest of us.
Running at 100% CPU usage 24/7 generates more heat, more heat means fans need to spin faster, fans spinning faster means they die faster. Also, fans spinning 24/7 also suck up more dust faster inside the console, making it hotter and requiring the fans to spin yet faster.
Read a couple of posts up the parenthood of this one... we're talking about "must have" products, as in "not having an automobile is not an option for some"... "must have" and "need" are pretty much related here.
Ok, I said "Hummer" because it is the extreme case. However, there are way more SUV's on the road than there are people who actually need them. SUV's are good for lumberjacks, not for a soccer-mom.
Not buying gas might not be an option for some, but not driving in a Hummer is. There are many much smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles out there, yet for some reason, the average American folk feels like he needs the biggest, hugest car of them all.
Yeah... I guess my keyboard was running out of zero's... ;-)
"If you add up all the spending on hardware and software that runs on Microsoft operating systems, as well as all the services around installing and maintaining Microsoft applications and solutions, you quickly come up with a number much bigger than Microsoft's revenues," IDC's John Gantz, Al Gillen and Marcel Warmerdam wrote in the study.
That means that companies will have to spend enormous amount of money just to licence, install and maintain MS apps... they still haven't used them, or gotten any improvement on their business... Microsoft is litterally saying "It's gonna cost you a hell of a lot of money if you upgrade".
Weird...
I got burned in the past. I ain't ever buying MadCatz hardware again. They break easily, and they can't even make a turbo controller that beats my own finger in button-mashing games. What's the point of "turbo" if it's slower than what I can do? I remember my NES-Advantage joystick, now THAT was turbo.
I really doubt the $50 price increase will hurt sales that bad. They expect to ship 4 million units by the end of the year, and unless there's a horrible hardware failure worldwide (which I really doubt, this is Nintendo after all), they will most likely sell all of those 4 million units. Selling each of them at $50 more means they will get an extra $20 million that they can reinvest in first-party titles, online service, and other cool stuff (maybe even R&D for the next Wii 360).
I will be getting one at launch, and although it sucks a little that I will have $50 less in my wallet to buy games and accessories, it's nice to know I'll get a pack-in game to show off the controler. I don't expect Wii sports to be the ultra-amazing-fun game, however, it will be the perfect thing to put when my sister comes at my place and asks what this gizmo is. Wii Sports will be the viral part... "Hey [insert non-gamer relative's name here], check out my new gadget, you can play bowling on TV with that."
Except that, just like the Xbox 360(1), and unfortunately (let's be realistic here) the PS3, the Wii will most probably sell out this holiday season. They won't sell more by lowering the price, because there won't be any more to sell. By selling it $250 instead of the expected $200, if they manage to ship and sell all the 4 millions of the units they promised, that's an extra $20,000,000 they get to invest back in games, online stuff and much more.
(1) Ok, I know the Xbox 360 didn't sell out in Japan, but it wasn't because of the price... MS could have priced it at $10 and Japan still wouldn't have bought it.
Apparently, Nintendo always launches on Sunday in North America. I remember getting my pre-ordered DS on a sunday morning. They probably have a real reason for that, although I'm no good in this marketing stuff...