I think he means that from a customer perspective, not a developer perspective. To the customer a console is a box that goes under the TV and plays games when you put them in. MS is trying to change the customer's perception of the box into something akin to a PC or media center (or more exactly they want to grab that space before Sony can which would be a massive threat for the Windows monopoly as the media stuff would no longer be a selling point for the PC OS). No idea how successful that move is but the game library of the 360 consists almost entirely of PC games.
The PS2 is last gen so it had much longer to get those sales together. The DS also has 2x as many sales as the Wii but it also has been on the market much longer than the Wii. Plotting the Wii against the PS2 at the same point in its life puts the Wii in the lead AFAIK.
Humans are really unique in how much they argue about the ethics of killing something for the benefit of their group. Pretty much all animals just kill it and go their merry way. Either they kill it for food or they kill it because it violated their territory or whatever. Sometimes they just kill for fun. None of them complain about the ethics of all that.
I really want Kodu just for some prototyping and maybe messing around (5€ is a nice price for that IMO) but it's only available in countries which have the community games available which doesn't include Germany (presumably because of the enforced age ratings that no community games will have so they'd effectively be 18+). I wish MS hadn't thrown it on the community games system and instead gone for plain XBLA.
Not every action is supposed to be efficient to input. For example shooting a bunch of targets in a game like Prototype is way faster than in an FPS because Prototype uses autoaim, you just hold the target button, select an enemy, hold the fire button down just long enough to send off a deadly volley, nudge the stick to select the next target, repeat. You can down a large number of targets very quickly with little effort. In an FPS the act of aiming becomes a gameplay element, you have to manually make the gun point at the target before you pull the trigger. Go a step further and many fighting games don't want you to shoot an energy ball with just one button and expect you to input a button combo before you hit the fire button so the act of firing the shot even if it's lined up properly becomes an element of the gameplay. Sports games lend themselves to motion controls easily because they mimic real world movements and often the skill comes from the precision with which you perform but many current videogame designs don't have much in terms of actions the player has to perform skillfully. I think to properly utilize motion controls actions in games need to have more variation in execution, e.g. if you swing a sword incorrectly (say, with the blade not correctly aligned to your swing) you may end up doing less damage. Currently motion controls tend to get used on actions the player character always performs flawlessly and the motion only triggers a predefined result instead of the motion being used to alter the result. Of course that can be done with a button too while the imperfect actions of sports games tend to require huge workarounds to be challenging even with buttons.
Wii games rarely require much actual movement, many use mainly the buttons and pointer with the few gestures requiring just a bit of movement (just enough to tell it's deliberate and not accidental). It's not physically demanding to play something like an FPS on the Wii, only sports games are about mimicking the actual sports movements and only in games that use the upper body (PES uses the Wiimote to turn it into a football RTS instead of making you act stuff out). I found correctly used gestures help the immersion, something like making a quick movement with the Wiimote to reload a weapon or slap an enemy out of the way feels natural.
From what I heard the actual lightgun games let you calibrate the cursor settings so it actually matches your physical aim. Most games just don't do that because it's extra effort for the user and regular, non-lightgun games don't benefit from it.
The limit to a specific browser on a specific OS sounds like there's a lot of client-side code to this (and makes me wonder why the hell it's even browser based if all it's doing is display an installed game in a browser window).
It's not that hard but it's less predictable and the beancounters would prefer predictable improvements they can plan around. Of course they don't seem to plan around the bit where dev costs are ballooning too fast and revenues can't keep up...
Not necessarily insane, illiterate people sometimes develop their own writing system to keep track of things, these often end up vastly more complex than regular text.
It's a joke, the misspelling was used in some mother's open letter to the internet after her child committed suicide, she called him "an hero". Hence "an hero" has become a meme referring to suicide.
And new players are confused when the character creator already demands that they pick five levels of spells before they have played even once (I had Baldur's Gate 2 but not BG1 so I had to make a new character and believe me, when you've never touched D&D stats before that's a total WTF experience).
Blame the ESRB for calling the rating that. No better way to make children completely disregard the rating than to make the label a positive word. Most European systems just print the age on the box, not some vague term like "mature".
Slashdot Mirror
I think he means that from a customer perspective, not a developer perspective. To the customer a console is a box that goes under the TV and plays games when you put them in. MS is trying to change the customer's perception of the box into something akin to a PC or media center (or more exactly they want to grab that space before Sony can which would be a massive threat for the Windows monopoly as the media stuff would no longer be a selling point for the PC OS). No idea how successful that move is but the game library of the 360 consists almost entirely of PC games.
The PS2 is last gen so it had much longer to get those sales together. The DS also has 2x as many sales as the Wii but it also has been on the market much longer than the Wii. Plotting the Wii against the PS2 at the same point in its life puts the Wii in the lead AFAIK.
Humans are really unique in how much they argue about the ethics of killing something for the benefit of their group. Pretty much all animals just kill it and go their merry way. Either they kill it for food or they kill it because it violated their territory or whatever. Sometimes they just kill for fun. None of them complain about the ethics of all that.
No, that's my dinner!
Now with green diode lasers we will eventually have TVs using lasers to draw our images.
Or at least a Virtual Boy with a color display.
No, looks more like the sensor-actuator approach seen in something like the Blender Game Engine.
Does that do 3D? I can make 2D games with PyGame easily but 3D ones are more complicated to get working.
I really want Kodu just for some prototyping and maybe messing around (5€ is a nice price for that IMO) but it's only available in countries which have the community games available which doesn't include Germany (presumably because of the enforced age ratings that no community games will have so they'd effectively be 18+). I wish MS hadn't thrown it on the community games system and instead gone for plain XBLA.
Not every action is supposed to be efficient to input. For example shooting a bunch of targets in a game like Prototype is way faster than in an FPS because Prototype uses autoaim, you just hold the target button, select an enemy, hold the fire button down just long enough to send off a deadly volley, nudge the stick to select the next target, repeat. You can down a large number of targets very quickly with little effort. In an FPS the act of aiming becomes a gameplay element, you have to manually make the gun point at the target before you pull the trigger. Go a step further and many fighting games don't want you to shoot an energy ball with just one button and expect you to input a button combo before you hit the fire button so the act of firing the shot even if it's lined up properly becomes an element of the gameplay. Sports games lend themselves to motion controls easily because they mimic real world movements and often the skill comes from the precision with which you perform but many current videogame designs don't have much in terms of actions the player has to perform skillfully. I think to properly utilize motion controls actions in games need to have more variation in execution, e.g. if you swing a sword incorrectly (say, with the blade not correctly aligned to your swing) you may end up doing less damage. Currently motion controls tend to get used on actions the player character always performs flawlessly and the motion only triggers a predefined result instead of the motion being used to alter the result. Of course that can be done with a button too while the imperfect actions of sports games tend to require huge workarounds to be challenging even with buttons.
Wii games rarely require much actual movement, many use mainly the buttons and pointer with the few gestures requiring just a bit of movement (just enough to tell it's deliberate and not accidental). It's not physically demanding to play something like an FPS on the Wii, only sports games are about mimicking the actual sports movements and only in games that use the upper body (PES uses the Wiimote to turn it into a football RTS instead of making you act stuff out). I found correctly used gestures help the immersion, something like making a quick movement with the Wiimote to reload a weapon or slap an enemy out of the way feels natural.
From what I heard the actual lightgun games let you calibrate the cursor settings so it actually matches your physical aim. Most games just don't do that because it's extra effort for the user and regular, non-lightgun games don't benefit from it.
The poor donkeys...
IIRC the retail re-releases came with ScummVM included.
But if you instead buy a toy for your kid that was made in China and branded by a company in Japan?
It went home.
Same way as a Desoto, just drive there!
The limit to a specific browser on a specific OS sounds like there's a lot of client-side code to this (and makes me wonder why the hell it's even browser based if all it's doing is display an installed game in a browser window).
It's not that hard but it's less predictable and the beancounters would prefer predictable improvements they can plan around. Of course they don't seem to plan around the bit where dev costs are ballooning too fast and revenues can't keep up...
Not me, I have no depth perception.
It's a game about betraying, conning, etc. Only the RMT part was an issue at all, Eve is all about ripping others off ingame.
Not necessarily insane, illiterate people sometimes develop their own writing system to keep track of things, these often end up vastly more complex than regular text.
It's a joke, the misspelling was used in some mother's open letter to the internet after her child committed suicide, she called him "an hero". Hence "an hero" has become a meme referring to suicide.
And new players are confused when the character creator already demands that they pick five levels of spells before they have played even once (I had Baldur's Gate 2 but not BG1 so I had to make a new character and believe me, when you've never touched D&D stats before that's a total WTF experience).
Nope, we don't have any glowing humans.
Blame the ESRB for calling the rating that. No better way to make children completely disregard the rating than to make the label a positive word. Most European systems just print the age on the box, not some vague term like "mature".