EA is doing its best to raise the PC game prices to console levels, at least on the mainland. 55€ for a freaking PC game. Really, they should think about LOWERING pürices, not raising them. Games are already way too expensive for those "casual gamers" weveryone wants to sell to, the only reason 50€ looks normal to us is because we've been paying that much for ages. Compare that to CDs or DVDs.
Standard of living means the money people earn and spend to lead a certain kind of life. E.g. a country where everyone earns 8000$ a month and pays 6000$/month for necessities has ten times the standard of living a country with 800$/month income and 600$/month necessities. It doesn't mean that the life is of higher quality, just that more money changes hands.
If it's anything like the PC games that support user-created playermodels (which includes all previous UTs, by the way) it will just display the default model if you didn't download the custom one.
However you need to get that gameshark code from somewhere because I doubt the memory address tracing* of the thing can find a value that isn't changed, ever so you either get the code or poke arbitrary addresses in the hope of getting something done.
On the PC you can theoretically enter a "cheatcode" yourself by using a hex editor or the debug program that's included with Windows.
Anyway, I think the ESRB should rate what you can access from the default state without direct alterations to game files, not what you can reach if you change data the game never changes. Doesn't matter what is hidden in the game, if it cannot be reached without external modification of the game's files (including savegames) you have to consciously choose to encounter it.
Besides, it's just silly that the hot coffee scene could push the rating of a game like GTA up but that's another issue.
*=The only cheat device I used was an Action Replay for the original Gameboy, it allowed you to filter memory addresses by tracking their changes in certain situations. Not sure if today's cheat devices can still do arbitrary memory writes.
Actually the otakus are something to think about. The DS and Wii sell a LOT by having appeal to audiences beyond the gaming equivalent of an otaku. I'm not sure about Japan but in the west they could make a shitload of money by expanding their audience some more. Currently only kids watch those shows without being nerds, the older demographics are being neglected and there's probably a lot of money to be gotten by reaching them like Nintendo has managed to. Of course there's the perception that anime is fgor kids but hey, the same can be said about videogames. Now of course the not so easy thing is the HOW.
I think he was pointing out the difference between swapping and paging. Windows uses paging, swapping pretty much means the whole program is either in memory or not while paging means every block in the memory can be pushed to the disk independently.
The Wii is appealing to a new market but it's not leaving the old market cold. Both Nintendo itself and several third parties are supplying games that regular gamers will play, too. One of the best selling games on the Wii was Red Steel, an overhyped launch FPS. Not the kind of game casual gamers buy. I really don't think there's this hard divide between "real" gamers and newcomers that no game can cross, the non-gamer specific games are just the gateway drug to sell games to more people.
Also it's funny that you mention Square-Enix, Rockstar and Konami since all of them have announced support for the Wii. Rockstar was even planning to put Manhunt 2 on the Wii as well but the AO rating stopped that one. While it's doubtful that the Wii will get the same games as the other systems it does get its own games from several of the traditional big series.
That said, I do think that the Wii will "win" this generation by a large margin. But in five years when the majority of the public has high def TVs, the Wii will be the most dated console within its lifetime the industry has ever seen...
The PS2 was looking quite terrible too but games sell more consoles than technical stats and the PS2 ended up as the console that got EVERY kind of game, no matter what you wanted. (cue Tepples complaining about the lack of four player support OOTB...)
PS2 had no competition during that time, it didn't lose anything by taking long to build up. The PS3's problem is that this time the 360 was the console with that particular advantage. The PS2 could sell badly for quite a long time before the competition would catch up but the PS3 has the other consoles running ahead and securing developer support. Look at the 360 now, it's selling quite slowly at the moment but because of its lead time has the most games so far and it'll take the PS3 a long time to catch up with it, if that ever happens.
there is good reason to draw a bad conclusion about Vista from this. One of Vista's big selling points was better security, yet here we have somebody stepping up front and center with an apparently freshly installed and freshly owned Vista box.
However, we don't know how much user error was involved.There's always the chance that he was running admin and clicked yes when it asked him whether vista_activation_keygen.exe should be allowed to run with full admin rights...
In my area they are ubiquitous and they even give them away for free with a cellphone contract. It also has the largest shelf space for its games of any of the current gen consoles so that doesn't seem to be because of a total lack of interest.
How about you stop pretending the Wii is just a fad and realize that if the PS3 doesn't shape up REALLY quickly it will be buried by that "OMG last gen" console? The PS3 is providing for noone, it lacks the userbase to attract games and it lacks the games to attract a userbase. The Wii is rapidly gaining dev support while the PS3 is losing it. Sony can talk all they want about next gen graphics, the market is proving them wrong. Besides, it's not like the PS3 isn't competing with the 360 either. That thing also has more games and users than the PS3 (and no, the difference in time on the market doesn't matter, devs don't plan their games out of fairness, they plan them for profit), even if the Wii doesn't eat into the PS3's market the 360 does and so far the superficial graphical differences, promises of "potential" (by the time that potential is realized they could have gotten much more powerful and easier to use hardware for cheaper) and support for a format noone needs aren't enough for the PS3 to overcome the 360.
Besides, the PS3 doesn't sell 400k every month. It did that much ONCE. Now it's at less than 100k.
The cost from malpractice insurance comes because everyone decides to sue their doctor. In most socialized countries that's simply not an option, unless the doctor is grossly negligent you don't have a claim and negligence for a doctor is a crime that no insurance will cover and thus doesn't increase the cost of the medical system. However the standard for negligence is much stricter than what seems to be the case in the US, you pretty much have to leave the patient crippled to apply for that.
People don't overuse healthcare (except for the hypochondriacs, of course) in socialized medicine countries, of course the docs have a full schedule but they need that by now to make enough money. Unless you don't value your time at all visiting the doc isn't free, you have to get there, wait and often get conflicts between the doc's appointment time and your work time. Besides, socialitzed medicine doesn't have to mean it's free, in Germany we have a 10€/quarter fee for visiting the doc (goes to the health insurance, not the doc), to be paid once for each doc you go to during that quarter so people who run from doc to doc to get the diagnosis they want do pay more while those who do need medical attention don't pay much.
Random fact: In a first aid course we were told that if we see an injured person in America we should pretend we didn't see anything because you can get sued for any damage that happens there whereas here providing first aid exempts you from liability unless you act negligent.
About #3, a country ignoring your patent isn't making the drug for export (though several countries would probably have no qualms about importing it from such a country since it is a matter of life and death), they're making it for internal use. This is already happening for the HIV treatment since the parts of the world that suffer the most from AIDS cannot afford the prices that the pharma cos charge. If illegal drugs can make their way into the US surely a beneficial one would make it on the black market, especially one that's the last hope for a large number of people.
#4 has the FDA as a hurdle, either you do your extensive testing and getting approval right away and get a whole lot of attention with the possibility of a public outcry and calls for forcing you to release it or you have to go through that whole process when your competitor may be further along.
Of course the other points remain true but you may end up taking only the US market and losing the rest of the world.
If you were a CEO of a company with a patented AIDS treatment and your R&D department said they found a cure for AIDS and want to know what to do with it would you...
1. Tell them to put it in a drawer, keep selling treatments and hope none of your competitors (especially the ones who don't have patents on a treatment) manage to develop it independently, patenting it and wrecking both your treatment market AND preventing you from raking in the cure money? 2. Patent it right away but don't use it until your treatment patent expires or somebody else releases a cure, hope that third world countries don't figure out your patent and start producing it without giving a damn about your patents and of course risk that you're late to the party if someone else manages to push a cure through the system fast enough that you can't get yours on the market at the same time? This would also risk problems with shareholders that determine you should have driven up the immediate earnings more. 3. Push it to the market ASAP to hurt the competition that's making treatments and be the only supplier for a cure for millions (billions?) of people, rake in MAD money from all the sales and retire with the profit from your shares?
Are those blanks actual blanks or just mismatching symbols? I've never seen a slot machine with blanks but then again I haven't been inside a casino, I've only seen those things you see in the corner of a bar.
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The 60$ games cost 70€ in Europe whereas the 50$ games cost "only" 60€ so the US dollar isn't a sufficient explaination.
EA is doing its best to raise the PC game prices to console levels, at least on the mainland. 55€ for a freaking PC game. Really, they should think about LOWERING pürices, not raising them. Games are already way too expensive for those "casual gamers" weveryone wants to sell to, the only reason 50€ looks normal to us is because we've been paying that much for ages. Compare that to CDs or DVDs.
Books definitely rate higher.
Standard of living means the money people earn and spend to lead a certain kind of life. E.g. a country where everyone earns 8000$ a month and pays 6000$/month for necessities has ten times the standard of living a country with 800$/month income and 600$/month necessities. It doesn't mean that the life is of higher quality, just that more money changes hands.
They hid it from the ESRB because they considered it deleted.
If it's anything like the PC games that support user-created playermodels (which includes all previous UTs, by the way) it will just display the default model if you didn't download the custom one.
However you need to get that gameshark code from somewhere because I doubt the memory address tracing* of the thing can find a value that isn't changed, ever so you either get the code or poke arbitrary addresses in the hope of getting something done.
On the PC you can theoretically enter a "cheatcode" yourself by using a hex editor or the debug program that's included with Windows.
Anyway, I think the ESRB should rate what you can access from the default state without direct alterations to game files, not what you can reach if you change data the game never changes. Doesn't matter what is hidden in the game, if it cannot be reached without external modification of the game's files (including savegames) you have to consciously choose to encounter it.
Besides, it's just silly that the hot coffee scene could push the rating of a game like GTA up but that's another issue.
*=The only cheat device I used was an Action Replay for the original Gameboy, it allowed you to filter memory addresses by tracking their changes in certain situations. Not sure if today's cheat devices can still do arbitrary memory writes.
Says the guy whose signature looks like a USB dongle goblin that upgraded to a plasma blaster.
It had no "game experience may change during online play" warning.
Unless we're talking about the Catan card game, of course.
Is that the taste of "Mission Accomplished"?
Solution: Anime companies working on Wii games. Once they learn how to make good games they won't even need the anime to market it anymore.
Actually the otakus are something to think about. The DS and Wii sell a LOT by having appeal to audiences beyond the gaming equivalent of an otaku. I'm not sure about Japan but in the west they could make a shitload of money by expanding their audience some more. Currently only kids watch those shows without being nerds, the older demographics are being neglected and there's probably a lot of money to be gotten by reaching them like Nintendo has managed to. Of course there's the perception that anime is fgor kids but hey, the same can be said about videogames. Now of course the not so easy thing is the HOW.
I think he was pointing out the difference between swapping and paging. Windows uses paging, swapping pretty much means the whole program is either in memory or not while paging means every block in the memory can be pushed to the disk independently.
The Wii is appealing to a new market but it's not leaving the old market cold. Both Nintendo itself and several third parties are supplying games that regular gamers will play, too. One of the best selling games on the Wii was Red Steel, an overhyped launch FPS. Not the kind of game casual gamers buy. I really don't think there's this hard divide between "real" gamers and newcomers that no game can cross, the non-gamer specific games are just the gateway drug to sell games to more people.
Also it's funny that you mention Square-Enix, Rockstar and Konami since all of them have announced support for the Wii. Rockstar was even planning to put Manhunt 2 on the Wii as well but the AO rating stopped that one. While it's doubtful that the Wii will get the same games as the other systems it does get its own games from several of the traditional big series.
That said, I do think that the Wii will "win" this generation by a large margin. But in five years when the majority of the public has high def TVs, the Wii will be the most dated console within its lifetime the industry has ever seen...
The PS2 was looking quite terrible too but games sell more consoles than technical stats and the PS2 ended up as the console that got EVERY kind of game, no matter what you wanted. (cue Tepples complaining about the lack of four player support OOTB...)
PS2 had no competition during that time, it didn't lose anything by taking long to build up. The PS3's problem is that this time the 360 was the console with that particular advantage. The PS2 could sell badly for quite a long time before the competition would catch up but the PS3 has the other consoles running ahead and securing developer support. Look at the 360 now, it's selling quite slowly at the moment but because of its lead time has the most games so far and it'll take the PS3 a long time to catch up with it, if that ever happens.
So if I want to avoid airport security testing I need to dress up like John Rambo?
there is good reason to draw a bad conclusion about Vista from this. One of Vista's big selling points was better security, yet here we have somebody stepping up front and center with an apparently freshly installed and freshly owned Vista box.
However, we don't know how much user error was involved.There's always the chance that he was running admin and clicked yes when it asked him whether vista_activation_keygen.exe should be allowed to run with full admin rights...
In my area they are ubiquitous and they even give them away for free with a cellphone contract. It also has the largest shelf space for its games of any of the current gen consoles so that doesn't seem to be because of a total lack of interest.
How about you stop pretending the Wii is just a fad and realize that if the PS3 doesn't shape up REALLY quickly it will be buried by that "OMG last gen" console? The PS3 is providing for noone, it lacks the userbase to attract games and it lacks the games to attract a userbase. The Wii is rapidly gaining dev support while the PS3 is losing it. Sony can talk all they want about next gen graphics, the market is proving them wrong. Besides, it's not like the PS3 isn't competing with the 360 either. That thing also has more games and users than the PS3 (and no, the difference in time on the market doesn't matter, devs don't plan their games out of fairness, they plan them for profit), even if the Wii doesn't eat into the PS3's market the 360 does and so far the superficial graphical differences, promises of "potential" (by the time that potential is realized they could have gotten much more powerful and easier to use hardware for cheaper) and support for a format noone needs aren't enough for the PS3 to overcome the 360.
Besides, the PS3 doesn't sell 400k every month. It did that much ONCE. Now it's at less than 100k.
The cost from malpractice insurance comes because everyone decides to sue their doctor. In most socialized countries that's simply not an option, unless the doctor is grossly negligent you don't have a claim and negligence for a doctor is a crime that no insurance will cover and thus doesn't increase the cost of the medical system. However the standard for negligence is much stricter than what seems to be the case in the US, you pretty much have to leave the patient crippled to apply for that.
People don't overuse healthcare (except for the hypochondriacs, of course) in socialized medicine countries, of course the docs have a full schedule but they need that by now to make enough money. Unless you don't value your time at all visiting the doc isn't free, you have to get there, wait and often get conflicts between the doc's appointment time and your work time. Besides, socialitzed medicine doesn't have to mean it's free, in Germany we have a 10€/quarter fee for visiting the doc (goes to the health insurance, not the doc), to be paid once for each doc you go to during that quarter so people who run from doc to doc to get the diagnosis they want do pay more while those who do need medical attention don't pay much.
Random fact: In a first aid course we were told that if we see an injured person in America we should pretend we didn't see anything because you can get sued for any damage that happens there whereas here providing first aid exempts you from liability unless you act negligent.
About #3, a country ignoring your patent isn't making the drug for export (though several countries would probably have no qualms about importing it from such a country since it is a matter of life and death), they're making it for internal use. This is already happening for the HIV treatment since the parts of the world that suffer the most from AIDS cannot afford the prices that the pharma cos charge. If illegal drugs can make their way into the US surely a beneficial one would make it on the black market, especially one that's the last hope for a large number of people.
#4 has the FDA as a hurdle, either you do your extensive testing and getting approval right away and get a whole lot of attention with the possibility of a public outcry and calls for forcing you to release it or you have to go through that whole process when your competitor may be further along.
Of course the other points remain true but you may end up taking only the US market and losing the rest of the world.
No need for malpractice insurance.
If you were a CEO of a company with a patented AIDS treatment and your R&D department said they found a cure for AIDS and want to know what to do with it would you...
1. Tell them to put it in a drawer, keep selling treatments and hope none of your competitors (especially the ones who don't have patents on a treatment) manage to develop it independently, patenting it and wrecking both your treatment market AND preventing you from raking in the cure money?
2. Patent it right away but don't use it until your treatment patent expires or somebody else releases a cure, hope that third world countries don't figure out your patent and start producing it without giving a damn about your patents and of course risk that you're late to the party if someone else manages to push a cure through the system fast enough that you can't get yours on the market at the same time? This would also risk problems with shareholders that determine you should have driven up the immediate earnings more.
3. Push it to the market ASAP to hurt the competition that's making treatments and be the only supplier for a cure for millions (billions?) of people, rake in MAD money from all the sales and retire with the profit from your shares?
Are those blanks actual blanks or just mismatching symbols? I've never seen a slot machine with blanks but then again I haven't been inside a casino, I've only seen those things you see in the corner of a bar.