Ain't that the truth! I never thought anyone would be interested in watching people have sex with goats that are on fire, but I've since been proven wrong!
Or maybe there is a significant difference between the gaming geeks and us hardware / overclocker geeks.:P
Not in terms of building computers, no. I'm definitely a gamer, but have never overclocked anything in my life as it just doesn't appeal to me. However, I still always assemble my own systems. I'm also looking forward to building my latest PC next week, dual core Athlon 4400+ with 4 gigs of RAM and a pair of 7900 GTX video cards in SLI, should be pretty sweet:)
I honestly don't think the situation is cut and dried like many people are suggesting. Some people have experience and/or enjoy tinkering with their hardware or assembling computers from components, and some people don't. Some of these people are gamers, some of them aren't. There'll always be people who buy overpriced Dellienware Northwest machines because they have no interest in building things themselves, just like there'll always be people who build their own machines because they'd rather masturbate with a cheese grater than buy an off-the-shelf PC.
There is nothing that kills the feeling of immersion for me more than inconsistency - photorealistic models with crappy animations, detaled characters but barren environments (a la Everquest 2), etc.
Truer words were never spoken. I literally laughed out loud the first time I saw my character in Oblivion running forwards and strafing at the same time. Their feet simply slide across the ground, and the animation is not even close to being locked into the terrain!! With games like GTA it's usually difficult to notice that the character is rendered separately from the environment, but this stuck out like a sore thumb.
Not to mention the bombing of the Australian embassy in Indonesia in September 2004. Very few people died IIRC, but it was pretty clearly targeted at Australians. As for major terrorist attacks in or on Australia, effectively zero. Our government is simply using the pretense of "security" to consolidate it's power, much like in the US and the UK.
No, it isn't, and it's absolutely endemic throughout pretty much all forms of media. TV, newspapers, magazines, internet, you name it. I've worked as a journalist in the past, and I found it frightening how often our agenda was being dictated by advertisers. Most magazines have content that's been influenced in choice and style by advertisers, ditto for lifestyle TV shows, and pretty much everything involving travel in any medium is backed by an advertiser at some point, as just a couple of examples. Not to mention the scary number of newspaper articles are essentially re-worded press releases.
Here in Australia it's also pretty common practice for nightly TV news to have a "story" about a show that network is running, eg a story about the manufactured "controversy" on the previous night's Australian Idol or Big Brother.
Does simply saying "everyone else is doing it" make it OK? Hell no. But I think people should remember to read everything with a skeptical mind, as pretty much everybody and everything is for sale.
I tend to trust larger sites more than smaller sites, simply because larger sites have more to lose by being exposed as corporate shills. I think in this case the editors of both Gamespot and Gamespy are pretty clear that some positioning is for sale, content is not.
Any idiot can write a game review (no offense, I'm not referring to your site at all!), but it takes time and a track record to build trust with the public. No trust = no credibility, and honestly, credibility is the only thing they have. Remember how much heat GameSpy took over the Donkey Konga 2 drama?
That's just a crappy product though. Here in Australia we've had explicit data limits for quite some time. Crappy providers like Telstra and Optus will only allocate small amounts of data (I'm talking in terms of transferred per month, not bandwidth) for each customer. Even their "heavy use" plans only allow ~5Gb of data before being capped to 56k.
My plan gives me ADSL2+ at 24 megabit, with a limit of 40 gigs transfer during "peak" hours (8am - midnight), and another 40 gigs during "offpeak" (12am - 8am). So with an 80 gig limit, I have plenty of space to download games to my PS3.
Yes, that's true. You just have to show up at the polling station, get your name marked off the roll and place your ballot in the box. You don't actually have to mark the paper if you don't want to.
There's also what's known as a "donkey vote", where instead of numbering the candidates in order of your preference, you number the candidates in the order they're shown on the ballot. Essentially it's just a random vote.
I know someone who volunteered to count ballots at the last election, apparently some people just scribble all over the paper or write curse words, or draw pictures. It'd be very difficult to judge how many people show up but don't vote, though I would guess it's not that many.
Very true. I don't see this as a serious policy announcement, more of an off-the-cuff remark to try and sway some Family First voters into the Labor fold. Poor Labor, they're getting so desperate for votes it's just sad.
Its a very niche market which means no game company is going to spend an extra few months developing eye candy for a graphics card that a very small population uses.
I disagree with this premise. Almost all game companies spend a lot of time developing additional eye candy for their games. Let's face it, when have you ever seen preview trailers or screenshots that ever really represented what you saw on your own PC? It's a fairly simple premise - make the game look as nice as possible in the previews so that more people will buy it, but it's this sort of thing that pushes game technology further.
You could probably argue that most pre-release screenshots are rendered and/or Photoshopped (and you'd be correct), but I've rarely seen a game run on my system the way it's promised to run.
Yes, but I don't really think that's as big of a barrier as they'd have you believe. Here in Australia, we have almost as much land as the continental US (around 90% IIRC), but only 20 million people (about the population of New York state). That's a whole lot less population density right there, but it's a point of pride for all three of our major mobile operators that they cover 97% of the population.
Even in remote areas you can get a signal, and that's just GSM. CDMA coverage is even better. I never thought I'd find myself praising Australian telcos, but there you have it - they all do a pretty good job of remote coverage without whinging about how much it costs. Well, not as bad as the US carriers seem to, anyway.
Yeah, that quest involving Highlord Bolvar Fordragon is by far the best scripted moment in WoW. Not going to post any spoilers for people who haven't done it, but yeah it rocks. Even better is when n00bs watch the procession from the gate up to the citadel and ask "what's going on?!", and you tell them that if they follow you and help they'll get 10 gold for free. Err, not that I've ever done that...
Your ailment sounds particularly similar to mine. Some games affect me much more than others: I only lasted through about 20 minutes of F.E.A.R., Battlefield 2 about 45-60 mins, Counter-Strike or Doom 1 & 2 I can play for hours. But I couldn't make it through more than 10 minutes of Half-Life 2 (I didn't even last through the opening train ride in HL1). Strangely, it's only first-person games that affect me, though even that's not an exclusive category. WoW from third-person perspective is fine as I've purposely avoided playing it first-person, and using the in-cockpit view for racing games doesn't worry me at all. But then even slow-paced Morrowind gave me a violent headache and nausea in minutes; that one came on so quickly I didn't have time to find the third-person view!
My brother gets the same thing, though much less severely. I haven't really tried any remedies beyond avoiding particular games, so I'll give the ginger and Dramamine a go. Also, it may be of no consequence, but I visited an optometrist this morning for the first time ever (I'm almost 25). Apparently I have astigatism and will need glasses. I wonder if that'll help?
Very interested to hear other people's experiences.
Sorry, but I don't understand why that doesn't apply to console games as well? Surely console games would fall under the definition of "computer software"?
Here in Australia places like Blockbuster Video rent console games, is this not done in the US?
How? Farming in Tyr's hand? Good luck, 50G will take you awhile, a lot longer than an hour or two of effort. I suppose you could run the low end dungeons (ie UBRS and below) roll on BoE's and sell them, but that is shaky at best, and you will be lucky to get done with that inside of 2 hours if you go with a pickup group. Of course this does vary by class, and certain classes (ie rogue) have an easier time farming. 50G an hour is unrealistic if you straight up farm.
You're close, but not quite. The best method of quick gold farming I've found is to solo the midrange instances like Scarlet Monastery and Uldaman. SM in particular gives pretty reasonable loot you can sell for cash, if you're good you can get up to and over 50g per hour. The trick is to basically sneak through the dungeon, kill the bosses and sell their loot. It's surprising how much cash you can get quickly.
I've been pondering buying a MacBook Pro as well, and this question is close to the top of my priority list:)
Judging by the few posts so far on the WoW Mac forums, it runs pretty nicely at full res and full detail, though there are apparently still some issues that can cause FPS to drop off. I would imagine that Blizzard will probably implement some fixes in the next couple of patches to squeeze more fps out of the MacBooks, but it still runs pretty well.
Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2. The graphics in this game are so amazing they look almost as good as Xbox 360 games. Unfortunately, the amount of detail on each car model means the game can only display a handful of them at once (about six from memory). Games like God of War and GTA San Andreas are probably close to the limit of what the PS2 can do.
For PC games, I don't think anything can really top simulation games for processing requirements. Running Simcity 4 on my then-new Athlon 1800XP with 256MB RAM was OK until you got a few thousand people in your city, after that performance just dropped through the floor. Games like Civ 3 and Empire Earth were also very taxing on my previous PC (a PII-400). With PC games though, it's very difficult to tell what's really pushing the limit from the shitty optimising and "just upgrade your PC" mindset that the PC gaming industry is infested with.
You make a good point, but I feel slightly different about things. From listening to Australian commercial radio (my girlfriend likes it, so I have no choice), two things strike me about the music that becomes popular:
1. The path of least resistance. The music that becomes really popular doesn't rely on being appealing to everyone, it does the inverse by being unappealing to less people. It's not so much a case of people "liking" the music, it's more that they "don't mind" it. Rather than making music that a small group of people absolutely love but nobody else can stand, the focus is on making music that is bland enough to not annoy people who don't particularly like it (so that they don't change station).
2. They play it till you like it. Simply playing the same bland formulaic music over and over again works to familiarise the audience with the new act du jour, and hearing it so often means your resistance to it is gradually eroded. I've even been guilty of it myself, when My Humps by the Black Eyed Peas (which I absolutely hate with a passion) came on the other day, I turned the volume up and thought "awesome, I love this track! No, wait, I hate this track!". Repeating a small playlist also creates a false impression of longevity -- you think Jessica Simpson has been around for years and years because you've heard so much of her music on the radio, but she's only been recording for a short time. It's also a demonstrated fact that top-selling artists are having shorter and shorter careers.
Funnily enough, I've always been under the impression that the music of Beethoven's middle and late career generally wasn't well receieved by his contemporaries. His early work (eg the first and second symphonies) operate very much within the style of the times, whereas his later works were far more modern and unconventional. For example, his famous Ninth symphony was the first time anybody had thought to include a choir as part of a symphony orchestra.
Beethoven paved the way for others to follow, and it was only as later musicians followed in his wake that he became recognised for the genius he was.
Let me give you a hint why most people still -need- Windows: gaming. How many top-notch PC games are available for OSX or Linux or BSD? Very few. The only recent popular OSX games I can come up with offhand are World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2, and I can't think of any that run on Linux or BSD (without Wine, which is probably beyond Joe Average). Obviously this isn't a concern for business, but until this situation changes at home Windows will be with us for a long time yet.
Classic chicken-and-egg situation, nobody develops games for OSX/Linux/BSD because there's only a small market for it, and people don't want to switch because there's no games available. Not that I think this is a good situation, but it's a reality.
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I honestly don't think the situation is cut and dried like many people are suggesting. Some people have experience and/or enjoy tinkering with their hardware or assembling computers from components, and some people don't. Some of these people are gamers, some of them aren't. There'll always be people who buy overpriced Dellienware Northwest machines because they have no interest in building things themselves, just like there'll always be people who build their own machines because they'd rather masturbate with a cheese grater than buy an off-the-shelf PC.
Not to mention the bombing of the Australian embassy in Indonesia in September 2004. Very few people died IIRC, but it was pretty clearly targeted at Australians. As for major terrorist attacks in or on Australia, effectively zero. Our government is simply using the pretense of "security" to consolidate it's power, much like in the US and the UK.
No, it isn't, and it's absolutely endemic throughout pretty much all forms of media. TV, newspapers, magazines, internet, you name it. I've worked as a journalist in the past, and I found it frightening how often our agenda was being dictated by advertisers. Most magazines have content that's been influenced in choice and style by advertisers, ditto for lifestyle TV shows, and pretty much everything involving travel in any medium is backed by an advertiser at some point, as just a couple of examples. Not to mention the scary number of newspaper articles are essentially re-worded press releases.
Here in Australia it's also pretty common practice for nightly TV news to have a "story" about a show that network is running, eg a story about the manufactured "controversy" on the previous night's Australian Idol or Big Brother.
Does simply saying "everyone else is doing it" make it OK? Hell no. But I think people should remember to read everything with a skeptical mind, as pretty much everybody and everything is for sale.
I tend to trust larger sites more than smaller sites, simply because larger sites have more to lose by being exposed as corporate shills. I think in this case the editors of both Gamespot and Gamespy are pretty clear that some positioning is for sale, content is not.
Any idiot can write a game review (no offense, I'm not referring to your site at all!), but it takes time and a track record to build trust with the public. No trust = no credibility, and honestly, credibility is the only thing they have. Remember how much heat GameSpy took over the Donkey Konga 2 drama?
That's just a crappy product though. Here in Australia we've had explicit data limits for quite some time. Crappy providers like Telstra and Optus will only allocate small amounts of data (I'm talking in terms of transferred per month, not bandwidth) for each customer. Even their "heavy use" plans only allow ~5Gb of data before being capped to 56k.
My plan gives me ADSL2+ at 24 megabit, with a limit of 40 gigs transfer during "peak" hours (8am - midnight), and another 40 gigs during "offpeak" (12am - 8am). So with an 80 gig limit, I have plenty of space to download games to my PS3.
Yes, that's true. You just have to show up at the polling station, get your name marked off the roll and place your ballot in the box. You don't actually have to mark the paper if you don't want to.
There's also what's known as a "donkey vote", where instead of numbering the candidates in order of your preference, you number the candidates in the order they're shown on the ballot. Essentially it's just a random vote.
I know someone who volunteered to count ballots at the last election, apparently some people just scribble all over the paper or write curse words, or draw pictures. It'd be very difficult to judge how many people show up but don't vote, though I would guess it's not that many.
Very true. I don't see this as a serious policy announcement, more of an off-the-cuff remark to try and sway some Family First voters into the Labor fold. Poor Labor, they're getting so desperate for votes it's just sad.
Its a very niche market which means no game company is going to spend an extra few months developing eye candy for a graphics card that a very small population uses.
I disagree with this premise. Almost all game companies spend a lot of time developing additional eye candy for their games. Let's face it, when have you ever seen preview trailers or screenshots that ever really represented what you saw on your own PC? It's a fairly simple premise - make the game look as nice as possible in the previews so that more people will buy it, but it's this sort of thing that pushes game technology further.
You could probably argue that most pre-release screenshots are rendered and/or Photoshopped (and you'd be correct), but I've rarely seen a game run on my system the way it's promised to run.
Yes, but I don't really think that's as big of a barrier as they'd have you believe. Here in Australia, we have almost as much land as the continental US (around 90% IIRC), but only 20 million people (about the population of New York state). That's a whole lot less population density right there, but it's a point of pride for all three of our major mobile operators that they cover 97% of the population.
Even in remote areas you can get a signal, and that's just GSM. CDMA coverage is even better. I never thought I'd find myself praising Australian telcos, but there you have it - they all do a pretty good job of remote coverage without whinging about how much it costs. Well, not as bad as the US carriers seem to, anyway.
Yeah, that quest involving Highlord Bolvar Fordragon is by far the best scripted moment in WoW. Not going to post any spoilers for people who haven't done it, but yeah it rocks. Even better is when n00bs watch the procession from the gate up to the citadel and ask "what's going on?!", and you tell them that if they follow you and help they'll get 10 gold for free. Err, not that I've ever done that...
Your ailment sounds particularly similar to mine. Some games affect me much more than others: I only lasted through about 20 minutes of F.E.A.R., Battlefield 2 about 45-60 mins, Counter-Strike or Doom 1 & 2 I can play for hours. But I couldn't make it through more than 10 minutes of Half-Life 2 (I didn't even last through the opening train ride in HL1). Strangely, it's only first-person games that affect me, though even that's not an exclusive category. WoW from third-person perspective is fine as I've purposely avoided playing it first-person, and using the in-cockpit view for racing games doesn't worry me at all. But then even slow-paced Morrowind gave me a violent headache and nausea in minutes; that one came on so quickly I didn't have time to find the third-person view!
My brother gets the same thing, though much less severely. I haven't really tried any remedies beyond avoiding particular games, so I'll give the ginger and Dramamine a go. Also, it may be of no consequence, but I visited an optometrist this morning for the first time ever (I'm almost 25). Apparently I have astigatism and will need glasses. I wonder if that'll help?
Very interested to hear other people's experiences.
Actually, the poster directly above you suggested using Google Earth :)
I've been boycotting Starforce for ages, good to see others joining in the good fight :)
Dude, RTFA. The new cards are significantly cheaper than the cards they're replacing.
Sorry, but I don't understand why that doesn't apply to console games as well? Surely console games would fall under the definition of "computer software"?
Here in Australia places like Blockbuster Video rent console games, is this not done in the US?
How? Farming in Tyr's hand? Good luck, 50G will take you awhile, a lot longer than an hour or two of effort. I suppose you could run the low end dungeons (ie UBRS and below) roll on BoE's and sell them, but that is shaky at best, and you will be lucky to get done with that inside of 2 hours if you go with a pickup group. Of course this does vary by class, and certain classes (ie rogue) have an easier time farming. 50G an hour is unrealistic if you straight up farm.
You're close, but not quite. The best method of quick gold farming I've found is to solo the midrange instances like Scarlet Monastery and Uldaman. SM in particular gives pretty reasonable loot you can sell for cash, if you're good you can get up to and over 50g per hour. The trick is to basically sneak through the dungeon, kill the bosses and sell their loot. It's surprising how much cash you can get quickly.
I've been pondering buying a MacBook Pro as well, and this question is close to the top of my priority list :)
Judging by the few posts so far on the WoW Mac forums, it runs pretty nicely at full res and full detail, though there are apparently still some issues that can cause FPS to drop off. I would imagine that Blizzard will probably implement some fixes in the next couple of patches to squeeze more fps out of the MacBooks, but it still runs pretty well.
Actually, I prefer DVDs.
Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2. The graphics in this game are so amazing they look almost as good as Xbox 360 games. Unfortunately, the amount of detail on each car model means the game can only display a handful of them at once (about six from memory). Games like God of War and GTA San Andreas are probably close to the limit of what the PS2 can do.
For PC games, I don't think anything can really top simulation games for processing requirements. Running Simcity 4 on my then-new Athlon 1800XP with 256MB RAM was OK until you got a few thousand people in your city, after that performance just dropped through the floor. Games like Civ 3 and Empire Earth were also very taxing on my previous PC (a PII-400). With PC games though, it's very difficult to tell what's really pushing the limit from the shitty optimising and "just upgrade your PC" mindset that the PC gaming industry is infested with.
I'm ready and willing to conduct as many examinations as possible.
You make a good point, but I feel slightly different about things. From listening to Australian commercial radio (my girlfriend likes it, so I have no choice), two things strike me about the music that becomes popular:
1. The path of least resistance. The music that becomes really popular doesn't rely on being appealing to everyone, it does the inverse by being unappealing to less people. It's not so much a case of people "liking" the music, it's more that they "don't mind" it. Rather than making music that a small group of people absolutely love but nobody else can stand, the focus is on making music that is bland enough to not annoy people who don't particularly like it (so that they don't change station).
2. They play it till you like it. Simply playing the same bland formulaic music over and over again works to familiarise the audience with the new act du jour, and hearing it so often means your resistance to it is gradually eroded. I've even been guilty of it myself, when My Humps by the Black Eyed Peas (which I absolutely hate with a passion) came on the other day, I turned the volume up and thought "awesome, I love this track! No, wait, I hate this track!". Repeating a small playlist also creates a false impression of longevity -- you think Jessica Simpson has been around for years and years because you've heard so much of her music on the radio, but she's only been recording for a short time. It's also a demonstrated fact that top-selling artists are having shorter and shorter careers.
Funnily enough, I've always been under the impression that the music of Beethoven's middle and late career generally wasn't well receieved by his contemporaries. His early work (eg the first and second symphonies) operate very much within the style of the times, whereas his later works were far more modern and unconventional. For example, his famous Ninth symphony was the first time anybody had thought to include a choir as part of a symphony orchestra.
Beethoven paved the way for others to follow, and it was only as later musicians followed in his wake that he became recognised for the genius he was.
I'm not sure why anyone -needs- windows any more.
Let me give you a hint why most people still -need- Windows: gaming. How many top-notch PC games are available for OSX or Linux or BSD? Very few. The only recent popular OSX games I can come up with offhand are World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2, and I can't think of any that run on Linux or BSD (without Wine, which is probably beyond Joe Average). Obviously this isn't a concern for business, but until this situation changes at home Windows will be with us for a long time yet.
Classic chicken-and-egg situation, nobody develops games for OSX/Linux/BSD because there's only a small market for it, and people don't want to switch because there's no games available. Not that I think this is a good situation, but it's a reality.