Getting older now, and I find that its more important that I can understand what's going on then that the game is pretty. Ran into this problem with Blazblue, where some of the backgrounds were so contrasting and busy that they were downright distracting from the actual game. I ended up having serious problems even playing the game due to that.
Your vision mileage may vary of course, but for my dollar a game with simple, clear graphics is a lot better then a game with fancy graphics that obscure the action. Frozen Synapse is an example on the extreme end of clarity that works really well.
Actually, it's not. The US government screams "protectionism" when other countries pass things like privacy laws that don't allow you to store private data outside the country precisely because of the US government's fondness for spying on everything. If you have to keep data private legally, it's a pretty bad start when a cloud provider shows up and can't explain why they won't have to hand a Canadian business' data on Canadian customers over to a US spy agency on totally arbitrary conditions.
Sometimes the two aren't related, but sometimes they are.
Home users tend to blindly say yes whenever an installer wants to do something (or a virus wants to do something, for that matter). Changing the OS won't fix that unless the OS is highly locked down (ala iOS).
Based on what data? NPD says that game sales are slumping, but NPD's numbers are shit. They're based on retail sales at big stores. They're of little to no use when tracking the growth areas of the gaming market: anything digital. Game sales are likely not down at all, just people buying shiny disks at Walmart.
Besides that, 2012 has featured a lot of big name letdowns compared to 2011. The fall season will likely do better.
The "level cap" has never been any kind of challenge in most MMOs. It's just about time investment and in the past, having the right class or people to group with. In actual fact, reaching the level cap is when the real game starts.
Vanilla WoW did have some pretty hard content. Original Scholomance was crazy if you did it with the intended 5 people (most groups at the time were actually raids of 10). Original Naxxramus had *nobody* on most of the servers in the game manage to fully clear it before Burning Crusade rendered it obsolete. The Strathlome timed run was a good challenge until you overgeared it with raid gear.
It's gotten progressively easier over time, to the point that now you push a button in the raid finder, get tossed into an easymode raid with a PUG, and essentially go beat up a loot pinata boss. Pokemon Panda expansion is not going to reverse that trend.
Yeah, I get that. And if I'm an industry follower, I can accept it.
As a phone buyer? I don't care. I want the best phone I can get today. The Lumia 900 does not stack up against a Galaxy S III or an iPhone 4S and win. It's simply not a competitor at the high end of the market.
Nokia's next set of phones on WP8 might be, but that doesn't matter today.
Gartner is a joke, and this retraction is just another in a long list of mistakes they've made. They're known for saying whatever people want them to say, and in this case since Microsoft pays the bills they can't leave bad things about Windows 8 floating around out there.
Too bad it really does suck with a mouse and keyboard. And hey, Metro apps get suspended if they're not in the foreground. So you won't be doing background work either. The whole desktop version of Windows 8 is just the revenge of Vista. It's a disaster driven by poor leadership that's desperate to try and get somewhere in the tablet market and willing to throw their desktop users under a bus to get there.
When the Lumia is capable of doing advanced things like have Skype receive calls without being a foreground app, then maybe I can take this seriously.
As it stands right now the Lumia and WP7 are just lousy phones. They're not up to par with the competition. They got better reviews then they deserved considering how many reviewers adored the thing, but the market didn't care.
"Zero-cost, but certainly not Free Software; one has to wonder whether Open Source games with a "donation" build in the store would do better than proprietary games with upfront costs."
Seriously? $0.99 is too much so they pirate it, but if you open source it they'll give you money instead of just playing the free version?
Not a chance. These people are just cheap. They'll take the cheap option. Open source is not some magic fairy dust that is going to fix that.
No, it's more likely a reaction to the pathetically low quality of Youtube comments.
Similar to how Rotten Tomatoes disabled commenting on Dark Knight Rises reviews entirely when the trolling shit to everything else ratio got so skewed that they couldn't ignore it anymore.
Too many people online think that "anonymous" = "license to be a complete fuckwad".
Actually I'm pretty sure people are going to be so pissed off by how asstacular Metro is on a desktop PC that it'll further taint the brand in mobile.
People already don't get warm fuzzy feelings when they think "Windows". They tolerate it on the desktop because they don't think they have a choice. But when they don't understand how to use their home PC because of the new shitty UI, nobody is going to leap from that into wanting a phone with "Windows" in the name.
It's going to fail just as badly as Windows Phone 7, and that's assuming Nokia survives long enough to launch a WP8 phone. With their sales & cash flow deteriorating in rapid fashion they're getting close to being a prime target for a hostile takeover liquidation.
Didn't T-Mobile Germany just announce that they're never going to carry the Lumia 900, now that it's been Osborned by Microsoft?
Over in the US, they're not carrying it because there's no demand. People simply don't walk in asking for Lumias in a quantity that matters, as compared to Android or iPhones.
1. Umm, you want to be able to both available to receive calls in Skype *AND* use the phone for *ANYTHING* else?
Sorry, you need another platform. WP7 can't do that. It's hilariously awful that you need Skype to be in the foreground to be available to receive a call, but there it is.
Now if only stuff being added to Windows Phone 8 was in any way useful to people buying a Lumia today...
Saying "it's fixed in 8" is totally meaningless when current phones can't be upgraded. Why would anybody in their right mind want to buy a Lumia right now knowing that? Microsoft threw the current lineup of phones under the bus on that one.
"Apple" is a positive brand. You attach it to something and the something gains percieved value.
"Windows" and "Microsoft" are not positive brands. You attach "Windows" to something, and people immediately think of their home PC. That is not a good thing given how awful the average home PC is.
There's also first mover advantage for the iPhone, things that people do care about like very high resolution displays & games, and Microsoft's well earned reputation for killing their media products on a whim (which they just did to all WP7 devices). But even if it was just as good as the iPhone they'd be facing an uphill battle simply due to the Windows name. Windows is a brand you tolerate, not one that inspires loyalty.
Most people don't do those things, which means that a 5 year old PC is pretty much the same as a modern one. Chrome loading in 0.2 seconds instead of 0.4 is not a significant improvement.
Now that'll change in October. Then a 5 year old PC will be better then a modern one, since the old one won't have that Windows 8 plague infecting it.
People need more useful advice then this, because "use different passwords everywhere" is so impractical for most of the public that it's ignored.
More and more I don't think smaller websites like this should even store passwords. Use external authentication providers like Facebook or Google accounts instead. We've seen too many cases where companies that aren't huge don't have security that can stand up, and given budget they never really will.
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Getting older now, and I find that its more important that I can understand what's going on then that the game is pretty. Ran into this problem with Blazblue, where some of the backgrounds were so contrasting and busy that they were downright distracting from the actual game. I ended up having serious problems even playing the game due to that.
Your vision mileage may vary of course, but for my dollar a game with simple, clear graphics is a lot better then a game with fancy graphics that obscure the action. Frozen Synapse is an example on the extreme end of clarity that works really well.
Actually, it's not. The US government screams "protectionism" when other countries pass things like privacy laws that don't allow you to store private data outside the country precisely because of the US government's fondness for spying on everything. If you have to keep data private legally, it's a pretty bad start when a cloud provider shows up and can't explain why they won't have to hand a Canadian business' data on Canadian customers over to a US spy agency on totally arbitrary conditions.
Sometimes the two aren't related, but sometimes they are.
Home users tend to blindly say yes whenever an installer wants to do something (or a virus wants to do something, for that matter). Changing the OS won't fix that unless the OS is highly locked down (ala iOS).
Based on what data? NPD says that game sales are slumping, but NPD's numbers are shit. They're based on retail sales at big stores. They're of little to no use when tracking the growth areas of the gaming market: anything digital. Game sales are likely not down at all, just people buying shiny disks at Walmart.
Besides that, 2012 has featured a lot of big name letdowns compared to 2011. The fall season will likely do better.
You want to call a generic thing a "Windows" virus instead of a "Computer" virus, and you're complaining about word choice?
What a fucking joke.
The "level cap" has never been any kind of challenge in most MMOs. It's just about time investment and in the past, having the right class or people to group with. In actual fact, reaching the level cap is when the real game starts.
Vanilla WoW did have some pretty hard content. Original Scholomance was crazy if you did it with the intended 5 people (most groups at the time were actually raids of 10). Original Naxxramus had *nobody* on most of the servers in the game manage to fully clear it before Burning Crusade rendered it obsolete. The Strathlome timed run was a good challenge until you overgeared it with raid gear.
It's gotten progressively easier over time, to the point that now you push a button in the raid finder, get tossed into an easymode raid with a PUG, and essentially go beat up a loot pinata boss. Pokemon Panda expansion is not going to reverse that trend.
Yeah, I get that. And if I'm an industry follower, I can accept it.
As a phone buyer? I don't care. I want the best phone I can get today. The Lumia 900 does not stack up against a Galaxy S III or an iPhone 4S and win. It's simply not a competitor at the high end of the market.
Nokia's next set of phones on WP8 might be, but that doesn't matter today.
Gartner is a joke, and this retraction is just another in a long list of mistakes they've made. They're known for saying whatever people want them to say, and in this case since Microsoft pays the bills they can't leave bad things about Windows 8 floating around out there.
Too bad it really does suck with a mouse and keyboard. And hey, Metro apps get suspended if they're not in the foreground. So you won't be doing background work either. The whole desktop version of Windows 8 is just the revenge of Vista. It's a disaster driven by poor leadership that's desperate to try and get somewhere in the tablet market and willing to throw their desktop users under a bus to get there.
When the Lumia is capable of doing advanced things like have Skype receive calls without being a foreground app, then maybe I can take this seriously.
As it stands right now the Lumia and WP7 are just lousy phones. They're not up to par with the competition. They got better reviews then they deserved considering how many reviewers adored the thing, but the market didn't care.
"Zero-cost, but certainly not Free Software; one has to wonder whether Open Source games with a "donation" build in the store would do better than proprietary games with upfront costs."
Seriously? $0.99 is too much so they pirate it, but if you open source it they'll give you money instead of just playing the free version?
Not a chance. These people are just cheap. They'll take the cheap option. Open source is not some magic fairy dust that is going to fix that.
No, it's more likely a reaction to the pathetically low quality of Youtube comments.
Similar to how Rotten Tomatoes disabled commenting on Dark Knight Rises reviews entirely when the trolling shit to everything else ratio got so skewed that they couldn't ignore it anymore.
Too many people online think that "anonymous" = "license to be a complete fuckwad".
Actually I'm pretty sure people are going to be so pissed off by how asstacular Metro is on a desktop PC that it'll further taint the brand in mobile.
People already don't get warm fuzzy feelings when they think "Windows". They tolerate it on the desktop because they don't think they have a choice. But when they don't understand how to use their home PC because of the new shitty UI, nobody is going to leap from that into wanting a phone with "Windows" in the name.
It's going to fail just as badly as Windows Phone 7, and that's assuming Nokia survives long enough to launch a WP8 phone. With their sales & cash flow deteriorating in rapid fashion they're getting close to being a prime target for a hostile takeover liquidation.
Didn't T-Mobile Germany just announce that they're never going to carry the Lumia 900, now that it's been Osborned by Microsoft?
Over in the US, they're not carrying it because there's no demand. People simply don't walk in asking for Lumias in a quantity that matters, as compared to Android or iPhones.
That only started becoming an issue recently. The low volumes are because there's no real demand for Windows phones.
Shame that Microsoft is competing with today's iPhone and not the one from 5 years ago, eh?
1. Umm, you want to be able to both available to receive calls in Skype *AND* use the phone for *ANYTHING* else?
Sorry, you need another platform. WP7 can't do that. It's hilariously awful that you need Skype to be in the foreground to be available to receive a call, but there it is.
Now if only stuff being added to Windows Phone 8 was in any way useful to people buying a Lumia today...
Saying "it's fixed in 8" is totally meaningless when current phones can't be upgraded. Why would anybody in their right mind want to buy a Lumia right now knowing that? Microsoft threw the current lineup of phones under the bus on that one.
"Apple" is a positive brand. You attach it to something and the something gains percieved value.
"Windows" and "Microsoft" are not positive brands. You attach "Windows" to something, and people immediately think of their home PC. That is not a good thing given how awful the average home PC is.
There's also first mover advantage for the iPhone, things that people do care about like very high resolution displays & games, and Microsoft's well earned reputation for killing their media products on a whim (which they just did to all WP7 devices). But even if it was just as good as the iPhone they'd be facing an uphill battle simply due to the Windows name. Windows is a brand you tolerate, not one that inspires loyalty.
Most people don't do those things, which means that a 5 year old PC is pretty much the same as a modern one. Chrome loading in 0.2 seconds instead of 0.4 is not a significant improvement.
Now that'll change in October. Then a 5 year old PC will be better then a modern one, since the old one won't have that Windows 8 plague infecting it.
That's not how it's used. Flatlining in corporate speak is a flat line. Sales aren't growing.
What you're thinking of is a death spiral.
Considering how many of the channels around right now are just a small handful of shows repeated ad nauseum, I fail to see why this is a bad thing.
There isn't limitless money for content. Spreading it around more channels just makes everything have to be cheaper.
See, the Storage Wars Channel (formerly known as A&E).
People who want live sports are pretty likely to shut up and pay for whatever bundle-o-crap that the providers are selling.
People need more useful advice then this, because "use different passwords everywhere" is so impractical for most of the public that it's ignored.
More and more I don't think smaller websites like this should even store passwords. Use external authentication providers like Facebook or Google accounts instead. We've seen too many cases where companies that aren't huge don't have security that can stand up, and given budget they never really will.
Probably would have saved the guy who fell off his bike during a protest ride against helmet laws.
Then again, that would have prevented him from earning a Darwin Award.
windowsupdate.microsoft.com reports 99.9% IE user agents. IE is on a comeback!
(What? It's just as useful a metric as TFA.)