The removal of mod tools in MW2 most certainly does have something to do with the RPG elements.
Bioshock and Fallout 3 aren't competitive multiplayer games - your level doesn't affect anyone outside of your one-player game. Leveling in MW2 controls access to perks and weapons that are supposed to be earned, and your level is supposed to be indicative of your relative experience and playtime. The leveling system creates a community hierarchy. Now, I'm not making any argument about whether or not that aspect adds to the game. What I'm saying is that if mod tools existed, nobody could play the game the way the devs intended because the leveling structure would be completely useless, at least in the game's current incarnation - people would just mod their way to 70 and that's that.
I suppose they could have created an option like Diablo 2's "hardcore" mode that guarantees character integrity - they could have segmented play into a completely unranked, all-perks-and-weapons, no EXP mode and a separate, ranked, leveling mode where you earn your achievements. However, saying "mod tools don't affect RPG elements" would be like me saying that everyone should just get infinite money and experience in WoW - it changes the way the game works.
The problem is that it can't really get that much more intuitive or flexible. It's just a pain in the ass, plain and simple.
Part of the problem is the attention-whore factor. I think the bigger factor is that people don't use the privacy controls because they're a chore. No one wants to take the time to segment their 1000+ lists of friends and set privacy controls for each group, so they just don't. Plus, Facebook is going to continue to find ways to mine data and make it available, which means new options (including privacy options) are going to be added all the time. The defaults for these new features will always be the most permissive options, because if users have to go find the right switches to flip to enable new features, no one will use those features, and the perception will be that the site is not keeping pace with other social networking applications.
Facebook became popular by eschewing complexity, and now it's become so large, it can't avoid it if it wants to continue to cater to people who want to maintain some aspect of privacy without turning their social network into a full time job. The GP is wrong about not being able to partition your friends list, but he is right that it's designed from the ground up to be nonprivate. The larger your network is, the more interesting the application is.
Eventually a new, lesser-known social network application will arrive whose mission statement is to connect you with your "real friends" so you can feel safe in sharing your pictures and information. Just like Facebook, the company that owns it will drive to get larger and larger, and will encourage their users to grow their networks and share more information with more people, until they arrive where Facebook is today, and the cycle starts again.
I really believe that the keyboard (or lack of one) is by far primary issue with tablet computing. Everything else is a niggling issue by comparison.
The first image many people conjure up when someone says "tablet computer" is stuff you see in movies, where people are shuffling images around and "enhancing" them, speaking to someone in a videoconference, playing a game with their hands, etc. That sounds great! In reality, *most* work that *most* people do with computers involves inputting a lot of text: writing a journal or document, putting in web addresses, tagging or naming files, writing emails or instant messages.
The niches where tablets are effective are always the ones where text input is not required: where the bulk of the user's work is reading data that's already on the devices and displayed/organized in such a way that it's "at their fingertips," like the canonical example of a doctor reading a chart.
Until Apple (or anyone else) can figure out how to make the average user's computing experience cease to rely on inputting text, or make a slate computer incredibly cheap so people can justify buying one as a toy that they don't do much with, slates are going to have a hard time in the marketplace. The only convincing example I've heard someone give (I think it was here on/.) was replacing your home magazine rack next to your couch with a net-enabled slate that has a great UI for managing tons of bookmarks to popular sites and a good on-screen keyboard for when you really need to type an address. Unfortunately, a slate that *only* does that is going to be too limited in functionality for most people to bother purchasing it. Most people will continue to purchase what they already do: laptops. They're fine to use on the couch and they do everything else as well, and prices are low.
A detachable/separate keyboard doesn't solve the problem - now you have another part that you need to keep track of that's not chained down somewhere, so you're going to have to find it every time you want to use it, and then wrestle with connectors/hinges/latches to get it on and off. The best solution is a minimal hard keyboard parallel to the screen that slides out when you need to use it. It works, but just like the phones that have them, you're not going to want to type a document with it, so the use of the tablet still needs to be largely confined to activites that require no text input.
If you really want a tablet and really need to write, but like the vast majority of other users out there you still need to input a great deal of text, get a folding/converting laptop. Still the best of both worlds, especially if they get thinner.
The problem with that argument is that if someone else fucks up, you or I may be affected by the consequences in terrible ways that no amount of compensation or punishment inflicted on the other party could correct.
I see your uid, but you get an obligatory "you must be new here". All aircraft-mounted laser weaponry stories must be tagged with "realgenius", "ihatepopcorn" or some variant thereof.
How do you think the speedometer that the odometer is connected to works?
Besides, wheel radius on a car is variable and is constantly changing. This is one of the primary reasons that speedometers read fast - the car maker provides a conservative buffer to ensure that no matter what your tire wear, air pressure and wheel size are, there is a much better chance of you traveling equal to or slower than the displayed speed, as opposed to faster than the displayed speed.
The sooner that everyone has implemented and is using motion controls, the better. We need developers to get shitty, gimmicky uses of it out of their systems, and we need better hardware and software for reduced lag and more precise control.
Am I really personally that interested in games that are 100% built around motion control? As the Wii taught me, no, I'm not. I think a lot of game enthusiasts feel the same way. What I *am* excited about, and what I think game enthusiasts should be excited about, is when developers come up with more subtle uses that really add control and flexibility. One thing I really want is the ability to change the direction of the first-person camera in racing games by tilting my head, so I don't need to take my hands off of the controls (note - I'm not talking about "head tracking" where position data is used to provide a realistic viewport, I'm just talking about mapping head tilt to an analog camera control). My understanding is that GT5 + PS Eye will provide this feature. Leaning in first person shooters is another good example. Is it a "realistic" 1 to 1 mapping of a real world motion to a game action? No, but it adds to a player's ability to control the game seamlessly. It only adds to the experience - it doesn't take anything away and you don't have to use it, and the game is still perfectly playable even if you don't have the right hardware.
We need to get to the point where developers are no longer asking "how can we establish a good player experience by using motion control" and instead focus on gameplay and implementation with standard controllers, later asking "where could motion control help this experience we've established?"
Just wanted to point out that, coincidentally, Mark Pilgrim's excellent Dive Into Python 3 just became available in print form today: http://diveintopython3.org/. He published Dive Into Python under the GNU Free Documentation license and made it available in a number of formats, and Dive Into Python 3 is available under a Creative Commons license and downloadable in HTML and PDF form. Full copies of both texts can be browsed online. Both are excellent. Interestingly, both were published by Apress.
What happens when, in the future, a cell phone is a 50 cent piece of hardware that can be embedded into a wristwatch?
When that happens, and when it can be sold no-strings-attached without some kind of contract or network/service lock-in, then it wouldn't be a limiting factor. I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
I don't think anyone will refuse to buy a device just because it includes a feature they won't use.
If that was true the iPod touch wouldn't exist, and everyone would just have iPhones. Again, we can chat again when a cell phone is a 50 cent piece of hardware that doesn't have any strings attached, but that's a long ways off, if it ever happens. Same for GPS, etc. etc. Sure, we can now put a calculator in everything, but not everything is as simple as a calculator (and not just for hardware reasons).
we will carry around a dumb LCD display, and we will buy tiny little modules for it like a cell phone and a gaming system. That's gives you the best of both worlds - convergence, without carrying around redundant devices or paying for what you don't need.
I like this idea, but it still has it's limitations. What are the features of the LCD? Does it have multi-touch? What kind of buttons? How many colors? How many modules can it accept? Can the modules talk to each other? To the network? How are the modules licensed and sold? Perhaps most importantly: who will make it, and how will they drive these decisions?
Convergence will always suffer from these kinds of problems. Anywhere you share a platform, you share limitations.
Convergence is great, but if Nintendo turned their next portable game system into a phone, they would substantially reduce their potential market share by excluding all the people who already have a phone and don't want to switch to another one, or who just want the game system and don't want to pay for the phone components. Plus, Nintendo has proven that they can hold their own against giants from other industries who have attempted to move in on their space by sticking to what they know: games. Having to cooperate with mobile phone providers, subscription plans and the like is not in Nintendo's genes.
Many here may disagree with their stance on online/social gaming, their underpowered console as compared to their competitors, or their focus on expanding the market with ideas like motion control or promotion of casual gaming as opposed to catering to video game enthusiasts, but the last couple years of sales numbers have shown that Nintendo knows what they are doing and is perfectly comfortable continuing down that path.
I see blogs and sites like this harping on the stupidity of the Windows 7 launch party package all over the place, meaning that Microsoft's marketing has done its job - everyone and their dog now knows not only that Windows 7 exists, but that it is launching soon.
Seriously, if they wanted you to have a party they would have put alcohol in it. They wanted to get people talking, and they did.
The solution to this is the solution that would solve a lot of problems with games, but will probably never happen - proper reviews.
Ads in some games are alright. In some games, they're annoying. In some games, they really detract from the experience - maybe not the *gameplay*, but the *experience*. Reviewers should be incorporating all aspects of a game into their reviews *and their scores*, including this one.
All it will take is a game or two that gets its score dropped by half a point or a full point with a comment in the scoring section that says "The ads are intrusive and detract from the experience, and lowered the overall score" to get developers rethinking this strategy. Developers, especially big developers, don't hear user complaints, they hear voting with dollars. They *do*, however, hear reviewer complaints and don't like the bad press, and lower reviews may also result in fewer units sold.
unless you count my work laptop that I only use to VPN into work.
That counts just as much as keeping a Windows machine around for gaming - "work" is an important reason why people who use other operating systems at home may keep a copy of Windows installed somewhere as well.
Sort of. It's not a "licensing issue" in that MS wants you to shell out for some kind of license to use more than 4GB on a 32-bit system - it's just that the license protection functions of the OS are what are used to prevent PAE from being enabled. The *reason* that MS disabled PAE is because a large number of 3rd party drivers are unreliable when used with PAE and > 4GB of memory.
My second favorite are the menus that start with "Please listen carefully as our options have changed blah blah blah..."
In many cases, I doubt the menu has *ever* changed. Pretty sure it's just a trick to get people to listen to the whole recording, in some cases to keep billing them, and in others to reduce the number of calls that go to a real support person about functionality that exists far down the option tree.
I should have been more clear: HTML describes the *structure* of a document, of which pages are not a part.
As many have said above, you could use CSS if you really wanted to, since page specifications are presentational aspects of the document. Or, you could use LaTeX, which is designed for this kind of use.
HTML describes a document. "Document" used to imply printed pages, but it doesn't anymore. HTML doesn't have anything to represent the notion of a page because documents don't have pages.
Why in hell do people continue to pour money into this monstrosity of a software company?
Because everyone else does - namely, the people who make the software I like to use and that I know how to use, and all my family and friends, with whom it is easier to share the same operating system.
Because most of the time you *aren't* performing an action that requires similar movements with both thumbs, you are performing an action that requires one thumb on a stick or d-pad and the other on buttons.
If the right stick wasn't offset, the buttons would be, and the buttons are used far more than the stick.
It's not "politics" or lack of programming ability. It's that if you released a game like San Andreas on the Wii, no one would buy it.
If you play games like San Andreas, you probably own a 360 or PS3, even if you own a Wii too. Which system would you buy it for?
Keep in mind that I'm not just talking about "you", I'm talking about the trend of the Wii audience, which is millions and millions of people. A large fraction of those millions have to buy a game with high production costs for that game to have been worth the development investment.
The problem is that developers see this motion sensing technology and scream "GIMMICK! WE MUST IMPLEMENT GIMMICK!!!!"
Well if you're not going to implement the motion sensing, why put the game on the Wii at all? The 360 and PS3 have better online support, better non-motion controllers (not everyone has a classic controller, and a sideways Wii remote is pretty lackluster), and hardware that is more capable in every respect. There is literally nothing you can do on a Wii that you can't do better on a 360 or PS3 except for motion control...
well, there is one other thing you can do better - market a game to a larger audience. I'm pretty sure that this is the reason most games hit the Wii - not because the developer is aching to use motion controls, but because there's such a large audience that they can afford to throw shit against the wall and see what sticks. In fact, it's in the best interest of their business that they do.
Motion controls and Wii Sports sold the Wii. Now, it's got a huge but extremely fractured and fickle audience. There's no guarantee for a publisher that sinks $10 or $20 million into developing a Wii-exclusive game that they're going to see a return on it, because no one can figure out how to make a game on the Wii that appeals to a large fraction of that huge market it has. What they're sure of is that sinking a ton of money into a AAA title like they've been doing for years on every other system, hoping to hit it big, doesn't work on the Wii. The trend is that Wii top-sellers *aren't* the standard AAA titles that sell on other systems.
This is why the Wii doesn't get AAA titles or "masterpieces" - because they are to0 expensive to make and they aren't guaranteed to sell. Nothing is guaranteed to sell on the Wii, but that marketshare is too big to ignore. The solution is to make cheap games and see who bites.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
- Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
Previous virtualization systems did not require processor virtualization extensions to function.
They're calling it a "goof" because it would have made more sense *not* to require the extensions and use them only on an as-present basis to enhance performance. This is especially appropriate given that that many of Intel's offerings are lacking VT, and Virtual PC 2007 (the foundation for XPM) does not require extensions, but can use them if they are present.
I imagine that the reason Microsoft requires them is that they wanted to have an excellent baseline for performance of XPM on all machines. They made the mistake of assuming that many/most machines have virtualization extensions, when the article states that that is not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
The removal of mod tools in MW2 most certainly does have something to do with the RPG elements.
Bioshock and Fallout 3 aren't competitive multiplayer games - your level doesn't affect anyone outside of your one-player game. Leveling in MW2 controls access to perks and weapons that are supposed to be earned, and your level is supposed to be indicative of your relative experience and playtime. The leveling system creates a community hierarchy. Now, I'm not making any argument about whether or not that aspect adds to the game. What I'm saying is that if mod tools existed, nobody could play the game the way the devs intended because the leveling structure would be completely useless, at least in the game's current incarnation - people would just mod their way to 70 and that's that.
I suppose they could have created an option like Diablo 2's "hardcore" mode that guarantees character integrity - they could have segmented play into a completely unranked, all-perks-and-weapons, no EXP mode and a separate, ranked, leveling mode where you earn your achievements. However, saying "mod tools don't affect RPG elements" would be like me saying that everyone should just get infinite money and experience in WoW - it changes the way the game works.
The problem is that it can't really get that much more intuitive or flexible. It's just a pain in the ass, plain and simple.
Part of the problem is the attention-whore factor. I think the bigger factor is that people don't use the privacy controls because they're a chore. No one wants to take the time to segment their 1000+ lists of friends and set privacy controls for each group, so they just don't. Plus, Facebook is going to continue to find ways to mine data and make it available, which means new options (including privacy options) are going to be added all the time. The defaults for these new features will always be the most permissive options, because if users have to go find the right switches to flip to enable new features, no one will use those features, and the perception will be that the site is not keeping pace with other social networking applications.
Facebook became popular by eschewing complexity, and now it's become so large, it can't avoid it if it wants to continue to cater to people who want to maintain some aspect of privacy without turning their social network into a full time job. The GP is wrong about not being able to partition your friends list, but he is right that it's designed from the ground up to be nonprivate. The larger your network is, the more interesting the application is.
Eventually a new, lesser-known social network application will arrive whose mission statement is to connect you with your "real friends" so you can feel safe in sharing your pictures and information. Just like Facebook, the company that owns it will drive to get larger and larger, and will encourage their users to grow their networks and share more information with more people, until they arrive where Facebook is today, and the cycle starts again.
I really believe that the keyboard (or lack of one) is by far primary issue with tablet computing. Everything else is a niggling issue by comparison.
The first image many people conjure up when someone says "tablet computer" is stuff you see in movies, where people are shuffling images around and "enhancing" them, speaking to someone in a videoconference, playing a game with their hands, etc. That sounds great! In reality, *most* work that *most* people do with computers involves inputting a lot of text: writing a journal or document, putting in web addresses, tagging or naming files, writing emails or instant messages.
The niches where tablets are effective are always the ones where text input is not required: where the bulk of the user's work is reading data that's already on the devices and displayed/organized in such a way that it's "at their fingertips," like the canonical example of a doctor reading a chart.
Until Apple (or anyone else) can figure out how to make the average user's computing experience cease to rely on inputting text, or make a slate computer incredibly cheap so people can justify buying one as a toy that they don't do much with, slates are going to have a hard time in the marketplace. The only convincing example I've heard someone give (I think it was here on /.) was replacing your home magazine rack next to your couch with a net-enabled slate that has a great UI for managing tons of bookmarks to popular sites and a good on-screen keyboard for when you really need to type an address. Unfortunately, a slate that *only* does that is going to be too limited in functionality for most people to bother purchasing it. Most people will continue to purchase what they already do: laptops. They're fine to use on the couch and they do everything else as well, and prices are low.
A detachable/separate keyboard doesn't solve the problem - now you have another part that you need to keep track of that's not chained down somewhere, so you're going to have to find it every time you want to use it, and then wrestle with connectors/hinges/latches to get it on and off. The best solution is a minimal hard keyboard parallel to the screen that slides out when you need to use it. It works, but just like the phones that have them, you're not going to want to type a document with it, so the use of the tablet still needs to be largely confined to activites that require no text input.
If you really want a tablet and really need to write, but like the vast majority of other users out there you still need to input a great deal of text, get a folding/converting laptop. Still the best of both worlds, especially if they get thinner.
The problem with that argument is that if someone else fucks up, you or I may be affected by the consequences in terrible ways that no amount of compensation or punishment inflicted on the other party could correct.
I see your uid, but you get an obligatory "you must be new here". All aircraft-mounted laser weaponry stories must be tagged with "realgenius", "ihatepopcorn" or some variant thereof.
How do you think the speedometer that the odometer is connected to works?
Besides, wheel radius on a car is variable and is constantly changing. This is one of the primary reasons that speedometers read fast - the car maker provides a conservative buffer to ensure that no matter what your tire wear, air pressure and wheel size are, there is a much better chance of you traveling equal to or slower than the displayed speed, as opposed to faster than the displayed speed.
The sooner that everyone has implemented and is using motion controls, the better. We need developers to get shitty, gimmicky uses of it out of their systems, and we need better hardware and software for reduced lag and more precise control.
Am I really personally that interested in games that are 100% built around motion control? As the Wii taught me, no, I'm not. I think a lot of game enthusiasts feel the same way. What I *am* excited about, and what I think game enthusiasts should be excited about, is when developers come up with more subtle uses that really add control and flexibility. One thing I really want is the ability to change the direction of the first-person camera in racing games by tilting my head, so I don't need to take my hands off of the controls (note - I'm not talking about "head tracking" where position data is used to provide a realistic viewport, I'm just talking about mapping head tilt to an analog camera control). My understanding is that GT5 + PS Eye will provide this feature. Leaning in first person shooters is another good example. Is it a "realistic" 1 to 1 mapping of a real world motion to a game action? No, but it adds to a player's ability to control the game seamlessly. It only adds to the experience - it doesn't take anything away and you don't have to use it, and the game is still perfectly playable even if you don't have the right hardware.
We need to get to the point where developers are no longer asking "how can we establish a good player experience by using motion control" and instead focus on gameplay and implementation with standard controllers, later asking "where could motion control help this experience we've established?"
Just wanted to point out that, coincidentally, Mark Pilgrim's excellent Dive Into Python 3 just became available in print form today: http://diveintopython3.org/. He published Dive Into Python under the GNU Free Documentation license and made it available in a number of formats, and Dive Into Python 3 is available under a Creative Commons license and downloadable in HTML and PDF form. Full copies of both texts can be browsed online. Both are excellent. Interestingly, both were published by Apress.
What happens when, in the future, a cell phone is a 50 cent piece of hardware that can be embedded into a wristwatch?
When that happens, and when it can be sold no-strings-attached without some kind of contract or network/service lock-in, then it wouldn't be a limiting factor. I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
I don't think anyone will refuse to buy a device just because it includes a feature they won't use.
If that was true the iPod touch wouldn't exist, and everyone would just have iPhones. Again, we can chat again when a cell phone is a 50 cent piece of hardware that doesn't have any strings attached, but that's a long ways off, if it ever happens. Same for GPS, etc. etc. Sure, we can now put a calculator in everything, but not everything is as simple as a calculator (and not just for hardware reasons).
we will carry around a dumb LCD display, and we will buy tiny little modules for it like a cell phone and a gaming system. That's gives you the best of both worlds - convergence, without carrying around redundant devices or paying for what you don't need.
I like this idea, but it still has it's limitations. What are the features of the LCD? Does it have multi-touch? What kind of buttons? How many colors? How many modules can it accept? Can the modules talk to each other? To the network? How are the modules licensed and sold? Perhaps most importantly: who will make it, and how will they drive these decisions?
Convergence will always suffer from these kinds of problems. Anywhere you share a platform, you share limitations.
Convergence is great, but if Nintendo turned their next portable game system into a phone, they would substantially reduce their potential market share by excluding all the people who already have a phone and don't want to switch to another one, or who just want the game system and don't want to pay for the phone components. Plus, Nintendo has proven that they can hold their own against giants from other industries who have attempted to move in on their space by sticking to what they know: games. Having to cooperate with mobile phone providers, subscription plans and the like is not in Nintendo's genes.
Many here may disagree with their stance on online/social gaming, their underpowered console as compared to their competitors, or their focus on expanding the market with ideas like motion control or promotion of casual gaming as opposed to catering to video game enthusiasts, but the last couple years of sales numbers have shown that Nintendo knows what they are doing and is perfectly comfortable continuing down that path.
I see blogs and sites like this harping on the stupidity of the Windows 7 launch party package all over the place, meaning that Microsoft's marketing has done its job - everyone and their dog now knows not only that Windows 7 exists, but that it is launching soon.
Seriously, if they wanted you to have a party they would have put alcohol in it. They wanted to get people talking, and they did.
The solution to this is the solution that would solve a lot of problems with games, but will probably never happen - proper reviews.
Ads in some games are alright. In some games, they're annoying. In some games, they really detract from the experience - maybe not the *gameplay*, but the *experience*. Reviewers should be incorporating all aspects of a game into their reviews *and their scores*, including this one.
All it will take is a game or two that gets its score dropped by half a point or a full point with a comment in the scoring section that says "The ads are intrusive and detract from the experience, and lowered the overall score" to get developers rethinking this strategy. Developers, especially big developers, don't hear user complaints, they hear voting with dollars. They *do*, however, hear reviewer complaints and don't like the bad press, and lower reviews may also result in fewer units sold.
unless you count my work laptop that I only use to VPN into work.
That counts just as much as keeping a Windows machine around for gaming - "work" is an important reason why people who use other operating systems at home may keep a copy of Windows installed somewhere as well.
If a browser as crash-prone as Netscape shipped today, it *wouldn't* be three years ahead of the competition.
Why do people think that Linux is magically going to do things that they would never expect Windows or Mac OS to do?
Because people here keep telling me it will!
Sort of. It's not a "licensing issue" in that MS wants you to shell out for some kind of license to use more than 4GB on a 32-bit system - it's just that the license protection functions of the OS are what are used to prevent PAE from being enabled. The *reason* that MS disabled PAE is because a large number of 3rd party drivers are unreliable when used with PAE and > 4GB of memory.
My second favorite are the menus that start with "Please listen carefully as our options have changed blah blah blah..."
In many cases, I doubt the menu has *ever* changed. Pretty sure it's just a trick to get people to listen to the whole recording, in some cases to keep billing them, and in others to reduce the number of calls that go to a real support person about functionality that exists far down the option tree.
I should have been more clear: HTML describes the *structure* of a document, of which pages are not a part.
As many have said above, you could use CSS if you really wanted to, since page specifications are presentational aspects of the document. Or, you could use LaTeX, which is designed for this kind of use.
HTML describes a document. "Document" used to imply printed pages, but it doesn't anymore. HTML doesn't have anything to represent the notion of a page because documents don't have pages.
Why in hell do people continue to pour money into this monstrosity of a software company?
Because everyone else does - namely, the people who make the software I like to use and that I know how to use, and all my family and friends, with whom it is easier to share the same operating system.
Because most of the time you *aren't* performing an action that requires similar movements with both thumbs, you are performing an action that requires one thumb on a stick or d-pad and the other on buttons.
If the right stick wasn't offset, the buttons would be, and the buttons are used far more than the stick.
It's not "politics" or lack of programming ability. It's that if you released a game like San Andreas on the Wii, no one would buy it.
If you play games like San Andreas, you probably own a 360 or PS3, even if you own a Wii too. Which system would you buy it for?
Keep in mind that I'm not just talking about "you", I'm talking about the trend of the Wii audience, which is millions and millions of people. A large fraction of those millions have to buy a game with high production costs for that game to have been worth the development investment.
The problem is that developers see this motion sensing technology and scream "GIMMICK! WE MUST IMPLEMENT GIMMICK!!!!"
Well if you're not going to implement the motion sensing, why put the game on the Wii at all? The 360 and PS3 have better online support, better non-motion controllers (not everyone has a classic controller, and a sideways Wii remote is pretty lackluster), and hardware that is more capable in every respect. There is literally nothing you can do on a Wii that you can't do better on a 360 or PS3 except for motion control...
well, there is one other thing you can do better - market a game to a larger audience. I'm pretty sure that this is the reason most games hit the Wii - not because the developer is aching to use motion controls, but because there's such a large audience that they can afford to throw shit against the wall and see what sticks. In fact, it's in the best interest of their business that they do.
Motion controls and Wii Sports sold the Wii. Now, it's got a huge but extremely fractured and fickle audience. There's no guarantee for a publisher that sinks $10 or $20 million into developing a Wii-exclusive game that they're going to see a return on it, because no one can figure out how to make a game on the Wii that appeals to a large fraction of that huge market it has. What they're sure of is that sinking a ton of money into a AAA title like they've been doing for years on every other system, hoping to hit it big, doesn't work on the Wii. The trend is that Wii top-sellers *aren't* the standard AAA titles that sell on other systems.
This is why the Wii doesn't get AAA titles or "masterpieces" - because they are to0 expensive to make and they aren't guaranteed to sell. Nothing is guaranteed to sell on the Wii, but that marketshare is too big to ignore. The solution is to make cheap games and see who bites.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
- Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
Previous virtualization systems did not require processor virtualization extensions to function.
They're calling it a "goof" because it would have made more sense *not* to require the extensions and use them only on an as-present basis to enhance performance. This is especially appropriate given that that many of Intel's offerings are lacking VT, and Virtual PC 2007 (the foundation for XPM) does not require extensions, but can use them if they are present.
I imagine that the reason Microsoft requires them is that they wanted to have an excellent baseline for performance of XPM on all machines. They made the mistake of assuming that many/most machines have virtualization extensions, when the article states that that is not the case.