And the bitch is its really not that hard, but they are so God damned greedy they will turn down money because it isn't "iMoney" and end up fucking themselves.
A good example of what I mean is Steam. back in the days before Steam everybody I knew had a shitload of pirated games, now nobody i know pirates games, why? Steam made it so damned cheap and easy to get any game they want that they just don't bother, simple as that. between the sales, the extras like chat and matchmaking, it just got to the point it really wasn't worth dealing with the bullshit when the alternative is "push button" simple.
There is NO damned reason why I shouldn't be able to go to a one stop website and get any movie or show I want, no reason at all except they are so damned greedy they will happily fuck themselves out of the money. I mean why in the fuck can i go to fricking Walmart and find huge piles of movies in giant bins for under $5, but if I want the same damned movie on my netbook they want the same price as a new release AND I have to have an always on Internet connection which fucks the whole damned reason for putting a movie on my damned netbook in the first place!
This is why I have ZERO sympathy for these movie douchebags, none at all, because its their own damned fault. time and time again we have seen that black markets occur because a population is not being served by a regular market,either they can't get what they want at all or the price is too damned high or in this case? BOTH. The pirated version of a movie is in every metric better than the legal product by leaps and bounds! NO unskippable ad horseshit for crap i don't give a rat's ass about, NO always online bullshit like with the digital versions, NO stupid worthless DRM that keeps more than half of the devices i own from even playing their shit NONE of that exists with the pirate version...yet I'm supposed to feel bad because people are bypassing your horseshit?
People pirate because your prices are too damned high and you tie too much bullshit into your product PERIOD. I mean here it is 20 fucking 13 and I can't even just buy a fricking.avi or.mp4 of a 25 fricking year old movie to play on my devices? Why the hell can't I pay 25c a pop for old shows in a format that will play on everything, when i can fricking buy MP3s that play anywhere huh? We aren't even talking new releases, shit that is so damned old it can be had in the Fred's 4 movies for $5 sets, like the old Chuck Norris stuff, but IF you can even find it online they are gonna charge full price AND have it locked with DRM like its a screener for Iron man 3...give me a break!
So you Brits need to go have a royal shitfit as its YOUR tax dollars they are wasting, both in the cost of the investigations AND in the cost of housing these "dangerous criminals" and for what? So you can prop up a failed business model of a bunch of rich old douchebags? Fuck them and the horse they rode in on, get with the times or die you old bastards.
Yes Win 7 X64 would be a good target but then you run into the problem of having to keep two lines running, the 32bit XP and the 64bit Win 7 and what I was trying to say is Win 7 would be a better target all around. As you noted XP X64 had serious lack of drivers and its pretty obvious from looking at the numbers Win 7 appears to be the last widely adopted Windows we are gonna see, the new direction being seriously off-putting to most consumers and businesses.
This way they could keep all the work they had done on XP as an "XP Mode" for Win 7 to increase compatibility and with only having the single target more of the work could be shared. I think continuing to focus efforts on a 32 bit only OS that is not only nearly 14 years old but which will be abandoned by MSFT next year really isn't the right way to go, as i pointed out systems half a decade old can already use more RAM than 32bit can take and once XP is abandoned software support will drop off sharply, just as we saw with Win98 and Win2K.
But no matter which route they take they really need to get on the ball, there is tens of millions or more XP boxes out there that is gonna lose support in just 10 months, if they want to be a contender they need to have a usable OS by the time XP hits EOL or all that work will end up being for naught as people have no choice but buy a Win 7 or Win 8.1 PC to replace it.
If you believe those bullshit numbers the government keeps pulling out its ass i have a nice bridge you might be interested in, as those numbers DO NOT COUNT those that have given up, those with degrees flipping burgers because that was all they could get, or those stuck trying to survive on a part time job because no full time jobs are to be had.
Summer is here, if you have some vacation time (which most people don't) why don't you take a little road trip to the midwest and south to see the REAL story, you'll see business districts that look like something out of Escape From New York, huge sections of towns consisting of boarded up buildings, in a good portion of the country it looks like those pictures you see of the great depression.
And again what you are describing exists ONLY in a few coastal cities, no trains, no buses, no public transport in a good size section of the country. Lets take my home state's capital for example, no buses except for a tiny line that goes between MLK and the shopping mall so your white ass ain't gonna be riding that, and unless you want to be sucking smog on the freeway you'll have to live in the river district, housing there starts at 3 quarters of a mil and rental properties can easily cost you 4k and up, and this is in a state where the average person makes less than 40k a year.
so sorry but I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. unless you want to live packed in like rats in one of the coastal megacities what you are describing? Doesn't exist. Hell I'd pay good money to see you try to bike through MLK in DFW, Memphis, or pretty much any major city as I'd be willing to bet you'd be a hood ornament or target practice for a gang banger before your ass even made 5 blocks, and unless you are a CxO of a fortune 500 company your ass ain't living close enough to bike to work unless you want to live in the jungle that is the inner cities. Hell most cops won't even go down MLK in most cities without a major show of force or SWAT, your ass wouldn't last 20 minutes trying to bike through there.
So you give up your data and get not a single dime, congrats. Me I'd rather get paid, even a small slice is better than nothing, but if you wanna stick with google after their nasty privacy policy changes you go right on ahead, I'm sure they just love guys like you.
Thanks, for those of us who grew up on Sci-Fi and Carl Sagan being shown all these incredible places we can never reach is like taking a starving man and showing him pictures of incredible meals, all it does is slap us in the face with the fact that thanks to relativity we will most likely never go beyond our tiny little solar system.
This is why I've started to actively avoid articles on new exoplanets and the like, life can be depressing enough without having someone constantly show you incredible places you can never get to.
Its the UN, have they EVER been anything but worthless, expensive, and ineffective? Its not like any of the west which has been marching towards fascism for decades is gonna listen to them anyway, so they might as well just put out a petition calling for world peace for all the good their little resolution is gonna do.
This is why I have argued for years that digital games should be sold on the Steam style of cheap bundles, because you really are removing a LOT of the risk with a digital distribution system. After all if you sell 1 copy today and 10k tomorrow, how much stock do you need? NONE because its simply making copies of 1s and 0s, no need for shelves or trucks or warehouses.
When the market crashed some of my friend's dads literally ended up with full semi loads of games that were only worth a small percentage of what they paid. In a digital system simply can't happen, no need to keep extra copies of anything so you only buy the exact same amount you sell, zero risk and if the price goes down then the publisher either takes a cut or you just let his single copy sit on the server. With the space you have on your average server and the low cost of drive space you could have 10k games that only sell in the single digits a month and still turn a profit.
This is also though why i think the Xbox S (S for Stupid God Damned Name that makes no sense) will bomb, the infrastructure just isn't there yet to make the switch to fully digital only and the fact that less than half the X360s are currently ever used online at all just drives that point home. While digital is great if the infrastructure is there right now there is simply too many without broadband that buy consoles and by cutting out all those sales? Well lets hope the hackers can crack the Xbox S like they did the Xbox 1 as i have a feeling there is gonna be a shitload of unsold units that end up on woot! next year cheap.
I don't know about that, I thought Mechwarrior 3 and 4, No One Lives Forever 2,Freelancer, and the original Far Cry looked pretty damned good and with the exception of the last one the system requirements were pretty lean.
Honestly i believe that since that time we have gone backwards as before since the engines and graphics were pretty much equal you had to come up with other things to sell the game, like GHOUL physics in Soldier of Fortune I & II, good writing and funny dialog in the NOLF series, or having smart AI that would call for help and flank you like in far Cry and the first 2 FEAR games.
So while I have nothing against more power, I am running a hexacore CPU after all, I just wish they would use that power for something other than a few more stupid lighting effects or a bloated engine, instead give me larger worlds, smarter bad guys, hell I have been playing the Crysis games of late and I don't think the AI is as good with those as they were all the way back in Far Cry 1, its just prettier, but not by much.
To me the sad part is unless we can find some way around that pesky relativity thing this is probably as close as we are ever gonna get to it. If you look at a pic showing our position in the milky way we really are in the ass end of town with all the really cool stuff so far away from us it would take a trip longer than humans have existed just to go to the center.
maybe its just me but as someone who grew up watching Star Trek and Lost In Space every time they find a new planet i remember that we'll never ever get to see it in person and it just bums me out.
That doesn't have anything to do with the engine, in fact there is a ton of great games that used their own tweaked version of the Unreal engine, its management chasing CoD money that make too many studios crank out bad clones.
And just because they build an engine in house doesn't mean that engine won't suck balls, look at how practically nobody but their parent companies use the Doom 3 or Crytek engines, the Crytek engine used on Crysis 1 was so bad that the fans had to make a patch to drop the living hell out of the graphics on the last level because no matter what hardware you had the engine would crap all over itself on that last level so badly even high end cards couldn't handle it.
At the end of the day it isn't about who makes the engine, its about what you can do with it, hence why Unreal engines dominate more than any other, at least last i checked. But as far as Unity3D...is there any big selling triple A titles that use it? Last i heard like RPG Maker it was one of those niche engines used to crank out indie games. Not that there is anything wrong with that, finding an underserved niche and catering to it is one of the oldest business tactics there is and if they can make a decent living in that niche more power to 'em, but I honestly haven't heard of any 30 million plus AAA titles using it as the engine.
People can laugh but that is why I switched to Bing Search, it gives me a slice in the form of Amazon gift cards. If you want to make money off my data? Fine, give me a slice, hell it doesn't even have to be a big slice, I'm sure what I'm getting from Bing isn't much compared to how much they get for the data, but its better than not getting anything and all those Amazon cards means that just by doing the searches I'd have to do anyway at the shop all those little odds and ends i always need, adapters, cables, CD envelopes, etc, are all paid for by the slice I get from Bing.
So whether others will get you a cut or not is up in the air but if any of them are listening I'm a hell of a lot more likely to use your service if i get a slice, no matter how thin that slice is. I'm also more likely to point other people to your service, I've probably had 100 people switch simply by pointing out they can get stuff, from movies to gift cards, just by doing what they were gonna do for free. Its really not a hard sell and once they cash in some points and see how easy it is to get stuff? they're hooked.
It really is in their best interests to give us a slice, because with all the competition we have today for our limited time its an easy way to get and retain users.
But isn't this the problem of pretty much all game engines today? I mean you look at how good some of the games in the golden age of 99-04 looked and played, even on weak as hell hardware, and then you look at some of the frankly insane system requirements for modern games, games that only look moderately better than those games from more than a decade ago, and you can tell what having the "any idiot can use this without knowing anything" mantra when it comes to game engines has cost us.
Everyone talks about "Windows bloat" but nobody talks about engine bloat and how many extra resources all this abstraction is costing us. It will be interesting to see if mobile gaming will bring a return to less abstraction or if like PCs they are gonna have to just grow insanely powerful so they can run engines that let you build by drag and drop.
Thanks, I didn't know how to describe it but that was pretty much it, the pits felt almost like they sucked you in, no matter how I tried to go around those bastards I always seemed to end up in the pits. After playing games like Yar's, Haunted House, and Pitfall! where it was intuitive and easy to tell where the boundaries are that game was hell for a kid to try to navigate. also remember that the old TVs didn't have nearly as sharp a picture as they did in the 90s so trying to make something out at the single pixel level? NOT happening.
According to my friends dad who owned the local Magic Mart, as well as the one that owned the mom & pop electronic shop that was EXACTLY what happened, WB started not taking back the product, giving excuses, and delaying payment until they all saw the only way they could get any of their money back was to dump it all as fast as they could and hope to get back a small percentage of what they paid.
Believe me friend if you weren't there you wouldn't believe it, they all had so much product I was literally getting 5 Coleco games for $5 and i could get a dozen Atari games for $10 or 20 games for $15 and because of having to unload so much product, which again they wouldn't have had in the first place if this market warping system hadn't been in place, caused the handheld market to also collapse because nobody was gonna pay $15-$20 for a single game handheld, the handhelds quickly ended up on the cheap table as well as the retailers all panicked and tried to get out. I would go into Magic Mart with $40 and walk out with a couple of BAGS filled with games, handhelds, controllers, by the start of 84 you probably could have gotten 1 of every single game related item in the entire store for less than $80.
So as I was saying ultimately it was NOT the games, it was NOT a glut of titles, it was a system that rewarded taking risks that at any other time simply wouldn't have been taken. At any other time and with a normal retail situation in place they wouldn't have had more than one or two copies of each title, and then you'd have one unknown for every 5 titles by proven companies, so even if the market slowed down it wouldn't have caused any major disruptions. The fly by night companies wouldn't have caused any more damage than the fly by night companies making shitty little games for iPad or XBL does now because there would have been zero incentive to sink a lot of money into their product.
But anybody can see the flaw with the system in place in the early 80s, since the retailers couldn't "lose" anything on video games (since the worst that would happen is they could trade for new product or get a refund) they all bought waaaay more product than they could ever hope to sell, didn't matter which distributor or who made it, because they can't lose, right? So even if you took the crappy games out of the equation you'd still have a situation ripe for collapse, with retailers carrying much more stock with many more of each title than they would have been able to afford to lose, so again all it would take is a couple of the big players having a few bad quarters (like WB losing a half a billion on ET and Pac Man) for the whole thing to collapse.
So my argument is that collapse was inevitable, it was only a question of when.
I don't know why you got informative because whomever gave you that obviously hadn't been to the USA, where we have so many bullshit laws on the books that they CAN arrest anybody pretty much for shits and giggles.
There is one that is basically "Defying authority" (sorry if i don't know the exact term for a bullshit law) where the cop gets to decide what that is and we have seen in the past simply asking why you are being detained can be enough to get that bullshit thrown at you, there is the always popular "resisting arrest", that one is used a lot in the south for those that were driving while black, and of course you have the classic but still used often "disturbing the peace" which again you simply breathing can be enough to get that since again its entirely up to the cop as to what counts as a disturbance.
Since we saw here that it was the LEFT voting for the jack boots this time can we please quit with the whole "The right is jack boots, the left is for freedom" bullshit now? BOTH sides want more power, BOTH sides want bigger government, the only real difference between the two is whose boots would be at your throat, with the left wanting an all powerful big bro that controls everything while the right would prefer corporate feudalism with a government that yields to the corporate masters.
At the end of the day this is what happens when you only have two parties, they become too entrenched, too extreme, and ultimately worthless and dangerous to democracy. Its time to face the fact the entire system is broken and needs a major overhaul, starting with the fact that there is only two parties which always ends up being coke in a can versus coke in a bottle. If you are for individual rights, freedom, and the right to choose how you live? Then you don't have any party, you are disenfranchised my friends, you are quickly becoming a non entity in the ever more fascist USSA.
This is why I have said for years we need to have a project similar to the WPA only laying fiber across the country as water and power was once laid. With broadband being so empowering, everything from education to shopping to entertainment, as time goes on you are gonna see more and more places caught in a catch-22 where they really need decent broadband to be competitive and not be depressed economically but because they ARE depressed there is zero chance of them getting it.
We really need a top notch broadband infrastructure if we are gonna compete and I have seen in my own area how lack of broadband distorts things, as my building has up to a year waiting list while the buildings down the street are frankly newer and nicer, yet are cheap and have no waiting list...and always plenty of vacancies...why? because we can get high speed DSL and Cable, they can get neither. We really do need to spend money to make money in this case but sadly I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime.
I'm sorry but you are wrong and here is why...it wasn't a horrible port, in fact it was a miracle, because you are taking a system designed to play pong and managing to get all that shit on the screen and actually get it to WORK.
Imagine being given an arcade game of Crysis level graphics and being told you have to port that to a 100MHz Pentium I with a 4Mb Matrox card, because THAT is what we are talking about here. Pac Man ran on arcade hardware that frankly was a decade ahead of what the 2600 had under the hood, it had a lot faster CPU, more memory, not to mention all the custom hardware that was the order of the day back then. The 2600 as you noted only had TWO sprite registers, that's it, and the reason for that is when it was cooked up in 1976 the rage was Pong so it was designed to play those types of games, a little block being hit back and forth by little paddles, and that was pretty much it. That is why so many of the early games were like combat, with no real "enemies" to speak of, just two players, each controlling a little pile of blocks that shot a little block at each other.
I mean when you look at the actual specs of the hardware with a cut rate version of the MOS 6502 only capable of accessing a MAX of 4kB of RAM, a truly pathetic 128 BYTES of game RAM, and no frame buffer at all, the fact that they were able to make an actual playable version of such an advanced game that had came out years later is frankly a miracle and I think the dev really deserves credit for that, for this really was no minor feat.
The sad part is there is always some that will trot out how this church or that church has done good things, when in reality its the PEOPLE that have done those good things and I would argue that even if you removed the religion the outcome would have been the same. After all how many times have we seen people risking their lives to help rescue others in a disaster, not because some preacher told them to, or fear of a skybully spanking them if they didn't, but because they simply felt compassion and empathy for their fellow man.
Ultimately to get rid of religion we are gonna have to deal with what it truly is at its core...fear of death. But while fear of death is a useful trait to have as a species, after all those that didn't fear the lions and tigers and bears ended up as food for them, sadly it has now become the most powerful weapon of control ever devised by evil men. How many would put up with living in squalor now if they didn't have some preacher selling them some candyland where they would live forever and get to see their oppressors thrown down?
If you want to STFU a religious person while proving that religion is ultimately about control? Point this out to them...one of the few "freedoms" afforded blacks, even when they were slaves, was the freedom of religion. But why? Why would the slave owners give a rat fuck about the "soul" of a being they saw as a soulless animal? Simple, it made them easier to control. It made them passive, it made them easier to manage. While I was never a fan of socialism (more a fan of socialistic capitalism as practiced by Henry Ford) one thing attributed to Marx is VERY true, in that religion is the opiate of the masses, especially the downtrodden. as long as they have the priest selling them a line of bullshit about a magical candyland where its all sunshine and puppies those at the top have nothing to fear, the religion will keep the masses in line.
But I honestly haven't really seen any compatibility issues between 32bit XP and 32bit Win 7, in fact when I switched my customers to Win 7 I had a grand total of 2 pieces of hardware that didn't work, both of which worked in 32bit but the customers wanted x64, and a few stupid programs that came down to DRM bullshit which of course probably wouldn't work in ReactOS anyway.
I could see them putting out the XP version for legacy, just as you say, but they really need to have some kind of 64bit OS because lets face it, systems that won't run more than the 3.2GB RAM limit are gonna be becoming more and more rare as time goes on. Hell the old junker I'm using at the shop as a netbox until I can find an AM2 board for that ULV Athlon x2 I have in the CPU drawer is a circa 2006 Pentium D and even it will hold 4GB of RAM if I actually cared enough to replace the RAM.
Riiiight, because in a dead economy one can afford to just throw everything away and move because some basement dweller thinks i need to ride a bike to work. And what magical state would you suggest? Again the USA simply isn't designed around a bicycle, and nearly all places where you can get a job better than saying "You want fries with that?" to ride a bike will either have you living in a closet that cost every cent you make because of how high the nice neighborhoods are, or you better be comfy wearing a BPV and having a 9mm on your little bike trek.
And they gave him FIVE WEEKS to go from nothing to RTM! I'm sorry but they could have chosen any killer dev and it wouldn't have mattered with that time table, no way in hell.
But that is where you are wrong, it really wasn't the horrible games, it was an economic system built AROUND games that ultimately caused it to crash.
In a way it is comparable to the housing crash, you had a system that was rewarding behavior that in any other time would have been seen as a BAD idea is rewarded. As I said I was buddies with the kids of the retailers and they ended up with a LOT more product than they could really afford to lose money on, but thanks to the retail gaming system that was in place? Well they didn't have to worry about that did they? They could just hand back every single product that didn't sell and get new product that would, and they could keep doing this until the product was sold.
Now imagine how warping such a system would be, imagine if you KNEW, without a shadow of a doubt, that every single laptop your store carried was guaranteed to sell because if it didn't? Why you'll be handed a brand new laptop to replace every single old laptop until every one were sold! What do you think that would do to the electronics section of every store, when they know that they simply can't lose when it comes to that product? Well that is EXACTLY what happened with games, you had stores picking up MUCH more product than they would have because they couldn't lose, see? They would get their money back or they would get the profits, no way they can lose!
And THAT is what called it, not the bad games. After all if their system worked like every other product they wouldn't gamble on more than one or two copies of a title and IF it sold then and ONLY then would they buy more copies of that product. Instead the system actively encouraged buying all the product you could possibly fit on the shelf because at the very least you'd get ALL of your money back, and every sale was profit time!
So really the fact that there was a glut of bad games in reality only made the system collapse faster, when if you take a good hard look at the way the system then worked then the obvious conclusion is that it had no other way it could end, all it would take is a few of the big companies having some bad quarters or games that flopped, even good games that just didn't catch on, for the whole system to fall down like dominoes.
As somebody who was actually there and who was friends with many of the store owners in my area at the time? I can tell you what caused the crash and it was NOT ET, ET was just a really famous flop, like how they made more Pacman carts than there were 2600 consoles and ended up having to give away Pacman carts with just about every promo.
No what REALLY caused the crash was how business was done back then which very few people know about. I am about to tell you how retail worked when it came to games, i bet you'll spot the fatal flaw before I'm even done explaining it, ready? Here goes....
The way retail for games worked was a store would buy X number of carts from a company or distributor and then when Y number of carts didn't sell they would RETURN those carts to the company who would then give them new product or a refund and then recycle the carts. This way the retail channel wasn't overloaded with old product driving down the price, even small stores could have a nice selection (since they knew they'd get replacements or cash for all unsold product) and a lot of the cart could be recycled thus lowering production cost for the company, so a win/win for them and retailers.
By now I'm sure everybody sees the fatal flaw in this little arrangement, Atari lost a couple of high profile cases which made it so ANYBODY could make a 2600 cart and the next thing you know an assload of fly by night companies are cranking out such "gems" as Chase The Chuckwagon and a ton of really lame one trick games. Well naturally all these lame half assed games didn't sell but when the retailers went to send the product back to get new products or a refund most of the companies just cashed out and folded.
And THIS is what caused the crash! You see the retailers didn't want to have warehouses and shelves filled with shit nobody wanted, and they couldn't send it back, so by the middle of 83 instead of paying $20+ a game I was buying games at a buck a pop or 12 for $10...now why would I pay $20 for a single game when I was getting 5 Coleco games for $5, or a dozen Atari games for $10? Not to mention the same thing happened to the handhelds so I was getting cool handhelds like Football and Pool for a couple of bucks a pop, so why would I pay $20 for one game?
The answer is I wouldn't and neither would anybody else which is why the price went into a freefall, due to the high price of chips back then even if you made a truly great game thanks to how low the prices hit you often wouldn't even be able to make back what you paid to have the cart made, much less make a nickel in profit, and THAT is why so many companies folded. Being buddies with the kids of the retailers I got to hear how many of them ended up losing tens of thousands because of how much they had paid for product VS what it would sell for (which was a shitload of money back then) so naturally most of them dumped every bit of product they had and didn't want a damned thing to do with anything video game related for quite a long time. I know that in my area the NES didn't even show up until late '88 simply because all the retailers feared another pocket raping which considering how many of them were left in bad shape after the crash you really can't blame them.
So yes ET sucked and was a badly made POS, but honestly no single game had jack shit to do with the crash, it was a badly set up business practice that gave retailers a false sense of security which caused them to buy more stock than they could really afford to lose money on that caused the crash.
Are you fucking stoned? Seriously? Better than 80%? Sorry I have to throw a flag, bullshit on the field. Fuck all the Pacman and Galaga knockoff were better than that boring as hell POS, even the game designer apologized for making it! It doesn't deserve to even be named in the same breath as Star Raiders, Haunted House, Night Driver, Yar's Revenge, Pitfall!, Space Invaders, hell I could go on all day with the amount of truly great games there was for the 2600 while ET was nothing but a quickly thrown together cash grab, which again even the guy who wrote it admitted that and said they gave him less than 5 weeks to go from nothing to RTM.
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And the bitch is its really not that hard, but they are so God damned greedy they will turn down money because it isn't "iMoney" and end up fucking themselves.
A good example of what I mean is Steam. back in the days before Steam everybody I knew had a shitload of pirated games, now nobody i know pirates games, why? Steam made it so damned cheap and easy to get any game they want that they just don't bother, simple as that. between the sales, the extras like chat and matchmaking, it just got to the point it really wasn't worth dealing with the bullshit when the alternative is "push button" simple.
There is NO damned reason why I shouldn't be able to go to a one stop website and get any movie or show I want, no reason at all except they are so damned greedy they will happily fuck themselves out of the money. I mean why in the fuck can i go to fricking Walmart and find huge piles of movies in giant bins for under $5, but if I want the same damned movie on my netbook they want the same price as a new release AND I have to have an always on Internet connection which fucks the whole damned reason for putting a movie on my damned netbook in the first place!
This is why I have ZERO sympathy for these movie douchebags, none at all, because its their own damned fault. time and time again we have seen that black markets occur because a population is not being served by a regular market,either they can't get what they want at all or the price is too damned high or in this case? BOTH. The pirated version of a movie is in every metric better than the legal product by leaps and bounds! NO unskippable ad horseshit for crap i don't give a rat's ass about, NO always online bullshit like with the digital versions, NO stupid worthless DRM that keeps more than half of the devices i own from even playing their shit NONE of that exists with the pirate version...yet I'm supposed to feel bad because people are bypassing your horseshit?
People pirate because your prices are too damned high and you tie too much bullshit into your product PERIOD. I mean here it is 20 fucking 13 and I can't even just buy a fricking .avi or .mp4 of a 25 fricking year old movie to play on my devices? Why the hell can't I pay 25c a pop for old shows in a format that will play on everything, when i can fricking buy MP3s that play anywhere huh? We aren't even talking new releases, shit that is so damned old it can be had in the Fred's 4 movies for $5 sets, like the old Chuck Norris stuff, but IF you can even find it online they are gonna charge full price AND have it locked with DRM like its a screener for Iron man 3...give me a break!
So you Brits need to go have a royal shitfit as its YOUR tax dollars they are wasting, both in the cost of the investigations AND in the cost of housing these "dangerous criminals" and for what? So you can prop up a failed business model of a bunch of rich old douchebags? Fuck them and the horse they rode in on, get with the times or die you old bastards.
Yes Win 7 X64 would be a good target but then you run into the problem of having to keep two lines running, the 32bit XP and the 64bit Win 7 and what I was trying to say is Win 7 would be a better target all around. As you noted XP X64 had serious lack of drivers and its pretty obvious from looking at the numbers Win 7 appears to be the last widely adopted Windows we are gonna see, the new direction being seriously off-putting to most consumers and businesses.
This way they could keep all the work they had done on XP as an "XP Mode" for Win 7 to increase compatibility and with only having the single target more of the work could be shared. I think continuing to focus efforts on a 32 bit only OS that is not only nearly 14 years old but which will be abandoned by MSFT next year really isn't the right way to go, as i pointed out systems half a decade old can already use more RAM than 32bit can take and once XP is abandoned software support will drop off sharply, just as we saw with Win98 and Win2K.
But no matter which route they take they really need to get on the ball, there is tens of millions or more XP boxes out there that is gonna lose support in just 10 months, if they want to be a contender they need to have a usable OS by the time XP hits EOL or all that work will end up being for naught as people have no choice but buy a Win 7 or Win 8.1 PC to replace it.
If you believe those bullshit numbers the government keeps pulling out its ass i have a nice bridge you might be interested in, as those numbers DO NOT COUNT those that have given up, those with degrees flipping burgers because that was all they could get, or those stuck trying to survive on a part time job because no full time jobs are to be had.
Summer is here, if you have some vacation time (which most people don't) why don't you take a little road trip to the midwest and south to see the REAL story, you'll see business districts that look like something out of Escape From New York, huge sections of towns consisting of boarded up buildings, in a good portion of the country it looks like those pictures you see of the great depression.
And again what you are describing exists ONLY in a few coastal cities, no trains, no buses, no public transport in a good size section of the country. Lets take my home state's capital for example, no buses except for a tiny line that goes between MLK and the shopping mall so your white ass ain't gonna be riding that, and unless you want to be sucking smog on the freeway you'll have to live in the river district, housing there starts at 3 quarters of a mil and rental properties can easily cost you 4k and up, and this is in a state where the average person makes less than 40k a year.
so sorry but I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. unless you want to live packed in like rats in one of the coastal megacities what you are describing? Doesn't exist. Hell I'd pay good money to see you try to bike through MLK in DFW, Memphis, or pretty much any major city as I'd be willing to bet you'd be a hood ornament or target practice for a gang banger before your ass even made 5 blocks, and unless you are a CxO of a fortune 500 company your ass ain't living close enough to bike to work unless you want to live in the jungle that is the inner cities. Hell most cops won't even go down MLK in most cities without a major show of force or SWAT, your ass wouldn't last 20 minutes trying to bike through there.
So you give up your data and get not a single dime, congrats. Me I'd rather get paid, even a small slice is better than nothing, but if you wanna stick with google after their nasty privacy policy changes you go right on ahead, I'm sure they just love guys like you.
Thanks, for those of us who grew up on Sci-Fi and Carl Sagan being shown all these incredible places we can never reach is like taking a starving man and showing him pictures of incredible meals, all it does is slap us in the face with the fact that thanks to relativity we will most likely never go beyond our tiny little solar system.
This is why I've started to actively avoid articles on new exoplanets and the like, life can be depressing enough without having someone constantly show you incredible places you can never get to.
Its the UN, have they EVER been anything but worthless, expensive, and ineffective? Its not like any of the west which has been marching towards fascism for decades is gonna listen to them anyway, so they might as well just put out a petition calling for world peace for all the good their little resolution is gonna do.
This is why I have argued for years that digital games should be sold on the Steam style of cheap bundles, because you really are removing a LOT of the risk with a digital distribution system. After all if you sell 1 copy today and 10k tomorrow, how much stock do you need? NONE because its simply making copies of 1s and 0s, no need for shelves or trucks or warehouses.
When the market crashed some of my friend's dads literally ended up with full semi loads of games that were only worth a small percentage of what they paid. In a digital system simply can't happen, no need to keep extra copies of anything so you only buy the exact same amount you sell, zero risk and if the price goes down then the publisher either takes a cut or you just let his single copy sit on the server. With the space you have on your average server and the low cost of drive space you could have 10k games that only sell in the single digits a month and still turn a profit.
This is also though why i think the Xbox S (S for Stupid God Damned Name that makes no sense) will bomb, the infrastructure just isn't there yet to make the switch to fully digital only and the fact that less than half the X360s are currently ever used online at all just drives that point home. While digital is great if the infrastructure is there right now there is simply too many without broadband that buy consoles and by cutting out all those sales? Well lets hope the hackers can crack the Xbox S like they did the Xbox 1 as i have a feeling there is gonna be a shitload of unsold units that end up on woot! next year cheap.
I don't know about that, I thought Mechwarrior 3 and 4, No One Lives Forever 2,Freelancer, and the original Far Cry looked pretty damned good and with the exception of the last one the system requirements were pretty lean.
Honestly i believe that since that time we have gone backwards as before since the engines and graphics were pretty much equal you had to come up with other things to sell the game, like GHOUL physics in Soldier of Fortune I & II, good writing and funny dialog in the NOLF series, or having smart AI that would call for help and flank you like in far Cry and the first 2 FEAR games.
So while I have nothing against more power, I am running a hexacore CPU after all, I just wish they would use that power for something other than a few more stupid lighting effects or a bloated engine, instead give me larger worlds, smarter bad guys, hell I have been playing the Crysis games of late and I don't think the AI is as good with those as they were all the way back in Far Cry 1, its just prettier, but not by much.
To me the sad part is unless we can find some way around that pesky relativity thing this is probably as close as we are ever gonna get to it. If you look at a pic showing our position in the milky way we really are in the ass end of town with all the really cool stuff so far away from us it would take a trip longer than humans have existed just to go to the center.
maybe its just me but as someone who grew up watching Star Trek and Lost In Space every time they find a new planet i remember that we'll never ever get to see it in person and it just bums me out.
That doesn't have anything to do with the engine, in fact there is a ton of great games that used their own tweaked version of the Unreal engine, its management chasing CoD money that make too many studios crank out bad clones.
And just because they build an engine in house doesn't mean that engine won't suck balls, look at how practically nobody but their parent companies use the Doom 3 or Crytek engines, the Crytek engine used on Crysis 1 was so bad that the fans had to make a patch to drop the living hell out of the graphics on the last level because no matter what hardware you had the engine would crap all over itself on that last level so badly even high end cards couldn't handle it.
At the end of the day it isn't about who makes the engine, its about what you can do with it, hence why Unreal engines dominate more than any other, at least last i checked. But as far as Unity3D...is there any big selling triple A titles that use it? Last i heard like RPG Maker it was one of those niche engines used to crank out indie games. Not that there is anything wrong with that, finding an underserved niche and catering to it is one of the oldest business tactics there is and if they can make a decent living in that niche more power to 'em, but I honestly haven't heard of any 30 million plus AAA titles using it as the engine.
People can laugh but that is why I switched to Bing Search, it gives me a slice in the form of Amazon gift cards. If you want to make money off my data? Fine, give me a slice, hell it doesn't even have to be a big slice, I'm sure what I'm getting from Bing isn't much compared to how much they get for the data, but its better than not getting anything and all those Amazon cards means that just by doing the searches I'd have to do anyway at the shop all those little odds and ends i always need, adapters, cables, CD envelopes, etc, are all paid for by the slice I get from Bing.
So whether others will get you a cut or not is up in the air but if any of them are listening I'm a hell of a lot more likely to use your service if i get a slice, no matter how thin that slice is. I'm also more likely to point other people to your service, I've probably had 100 people switch simply by pointing out they can get stuff, from movies to gift cards, just by doing what they were gonna do for free. Its really not a hard sell and once they cash in some points and see how easy it is to get stuff? they're hooked.
It really is in their best interests to give us a slice, because with all the competition we have today for our limited time its an easy way to get and retain users.
But isn't this the problem of pretty much all game engines today? I mean you look at how good some of the games in the golden age of 99-04 looked and played, even on weak as hell hardware, and then you look at some of the frankly insane system requirements for modern games, games that only look moderately better than those games from more than a decade ago, and you can tell what having the "any idiot can use this without knowing anything" mantra when it comes to game engines has cost us.
Everyone talks about "Windows bloat" but nobody talks about engine bloat and how many extra resources all this abstraction is costing us. It will be interesting to see if mobile gaming will bring a return to less abstraction or if like PCs they are gonna have to just grow insanely powerful so they can run engines that let you build by drag and drop.
Thanks, I didn't know how to describe it but that was pretty much it, the pits felt almost like they sucked you in, no matter how I tried to go around those bastards I always seemed to end up in the pits. After playing games like Yar's, Haunted House, and Pitfall! where it was intuitive and easy to tell where the boundaries are that game was hell for a kid to try to navigate. also remember that the old TVs didn't have nearly as sharp a picture as they did in the 90s so trying to make something out at the single pixel level? NOT happening.
According to my friends dad who owned the local Magic Mart, as well as the one that owned the mom & pop electronic shop that was EXACTLY what happened, WB started not taking back the product, giving excuses, and delaying payment until they all saw the only way they could get any of their money back was to dump it all as fast as they could and hope to get back a small percentage of what they paid.
Believe me friend if you weren't there you wouldn't believe it, they all had so much product I was literally getting 5 Coleco games for $5 and i could get a dozen Atari games for $10 or 20 games for $15 and because of having to unload so much product, which again they wouldn't have had in the first place if this market warping system hadn't been in place, caused the handheld market to also collapse because nobody was gonna pay $15-$20 for a single game handheld, the handhelds quickly ended up on the cheap table as well as the retailers all panicked and tried to get out. I would go into Magic Mart with $40 and walk out with a couple of BAGS filled with games, handhelds, controllers, by the start of 84 you probably could have gotten 1 of every single game related item in the entire store for less than $80.
So as I was saying ultimately it was NOT the games, it was NOT a glut of titles, it was a system that rewarded taking risks that at any other time simply wouldn't have been taken. At any other time and with a normal retail situation in place they wouldn't have had more than one or two copies of each title, and then you'd have one unknown for every 5 titles by proven companies, so even if the market slowed down it wouldn't have caused any major disruptions. The fly by night companies wouldn't have caused any more damage than the fly by night companies making shitty little games for iPad or XBL does now because there would have been zero incentive to sink a lot of money into their product.
But anybody can see the flaw with the system in place in the early 80s, since the retailers couldn't "lose" anything on video games (since the worst that would happen is they could trade for new product or get a refund) they all bought waaaay more product than they could ever hope to sell, didn't matter which distributor or who made it, because they can't lose, right? So even if you took the crappy games out of the equation you'd still have a situation ripe for collapse, with retailers carrying much more stock with many more of each title than they would have been able to afford to lose, so again all it would take is a couple of the big players having a few bad quarters (like WB losing a half a billion on ET and Pac Man) for the whole thing to collapse.
So my argument is that collapse was inevitable, it was only a question of when.
I don't know why you got informative because whomever gave you that obviously hadn't been to the USA, where we have so many bullshit laws on the books that they CAN arrest anybody pretty much for shits and giggles.
There is one that is basically "Defying authority" (sorry if i don't know the exact term for a bullshit law) where the cop gets to decide what that is and we have seen in the past simply asking why you are being detained can be enough to get that bullshit thrown at you, there is the always popular "resisting arrest", that one is used a lot in the south for those that were driving while black, and of course you have the classic but still used often "disturbing the peace" which again you simply breathing can be enough to get that since again its entirely up to the cop as to what counts as a disturbance.
Since we saw here that it was the LEFT voting for the jack boots this time can we please quit with the whole "The right is jack boots, the left is for freedom" bullshit now? BOTH sides want more power, BOTH sides want bigger government, the only real difference between the two is whose boots would be at your throat, with the left wanting an all powerful big bro that controls everything while the right would prefer corporate feudalism with a government that yields to the corporate masters.
At the end of the day this is what happens when you only have two parties, they become too entrenched, too extreme, and ultimately worthless and dangerous to democracy. Its time to face the fact the entire system is broken and needs a major overhaul, starting with the fact that there is only two parties which always ends up being coke in a can versus coke in a bottle. If you are for individual rights, freedom, and the right to choose how you live? Then you don't have any party, you are disenfranchised my friends, you are quickly becoming a non entity in the ever more fascist USSA.
This is why I have said for years we need to have a project similar to the WPA only laying fiber across the country as water and power was once laid. With broadband being so empowering, everything from education to shopping to entertainment, as time goes on you are gonna see more and more places caught in a catch-22 where they really need decent broadband to be competitive and not be depressed economically but because they ARE depressed there is zero chance of them getting it.
We really need a top notch broadband infrastructure if we are gonna compete and I have seen in my own area how lack of broadband distorts things, as my building has up to a year waiting list while the buildings down the street are frankly newer and nicer, yet are cheap and have no waiting list...and always plenty of vacancies...why? because we can get high speed DSL and Cable, they can get neither. We really do need to spend money to make money in this case but sadly I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime.
I'm sorry but you are wrong and here is why...it wasn't a horrible port, in fact it was a miracle, because you are taking a system designed to play pong and managing to get all that shit on the screen and actually get it to WORK.
Imagine being given an arcade game of Crysis level graphics and being told you have to port that to a 100MHz Pentium I with a 4Mb Matrox card, because THAT is what we are talking about here. Pac Man ran on arcade hardware that frankly was a decade ahead of what the 2600 had under the hood, it had a lot faster CPU, more memory, not to mention all the custom hardware that was the order of the day back then. The 2600 as you noted only had TWO sprite registers, that's it, and the reason for that is when it was cooked up in 1976 the rage was Pong so it was designed to play those types of games, a little block being hit back and forth by little paddles, and that was pretty much it. That is why so many of the early games were like combat, with no real "enemies" to speak of, just two players, each controlling a little pile of blocks that shot a little block at each other.
I mean when you look at the actual specs of the hardware with a cut rate version of the MOS 6502 only capable of accessing a MAX of 4kB of RAM, a truly pathetic 128 BYTES of game RAM, and no frame buffer at all, the fact that they were able to make an actual playable version of such an advanced game that had came out years later is frankly a miracle and I think the dev really deserves credit for that, for this really was no minor feat.
The sad part is there is always some that will trot out how this church or that church has done good things, when in reality its the PEOPLE that have done those good things and I would argue that even if you removed the religion the outcome would have been the same. After all how many times have we seen people risking their lives to help rescue others in a disaster, not because some preacher told them to, or fear of a skybully spanking them if they didn't, but because they simply felt compassion and empathy for their fellow man.
Ultimately to get rid of religion we are gonna have to deal with what it truly is at its core...fear of death. But while fear of death is a useful trait to have as a species, after all those that didn't fear the lions and tigers and bears ended up as food for them, sadly it has now become the most powerful weapon of control ever devised by evil men. How many would put up with living in squalor now if they didn't have some preacher selling them some candyland where they would live forever and get to see their oppressors thrown down?
If you want to STFU a religious person while proving that religion is ultimately about control? Point this out to them...one of the few "freedoms" afforded blacks, even when they were slaves, was the freedom of religion. But why? Why would the slave owners give a rat fuck about the "soul" of a being they saw as a soulless animal? Simple, it made them easier to control. It made them passive, it made them easier to manage. While I was never a fan of socialism (more a fan of socialistic capitalism as practiced by Henry Ford) one thing attributed to Marx is VERY true, in that religion is the opiate of the masses, especially the downtrodden. as long as they have the priest selling them a line of bullshit about a magical candyland where its all sunshine and puppies those at the top have nothing to fear, the religion will keep the masses in line.
But I honestly haven't really seen any compatibility issues between 32bit XP and 32bit Win 7, in fact when I switched my customers to Win 7 I had a grand total of 2 pieces of hardware that didn't work, both of which worked in 32bit but the customers wanted x64, and a few stupid programs that came down to DRM bullshit which of course probably wouldn't work in ReactOS anyway.
I could see them putting out the XP version for legacy, just as you say, but they really need to have some kind of 64bit OS because lets face it, systems that won't run more than the 3.2GB RAM limit are gonna be becoming more and more rare as time goes on. Hell the old junker I'm using at the shop as a netbox until I can find an AM2 board for that ULV Athlon x2 I have in the CPU drawer is a circa 2006 Pentium D and even it will hold 4GB of RAM if I actually cared enough to replace the RAM.
Riiiight, because in a dead economy one can afford to just throw everything away and move because some basement dweller thinks i need to ride a bike to work. And what magical state would you suggest? Again the USA simply isn't designed around a bicycle, and nearly all places where you can get a job better than saying "You want fries with that?" to ride a bike will either have you living in a closet that cost every cent you make because of how high the nice neighborhoods are, or you better be comfy wearing a BPV and having a 9mm on your little bike trek.
And they gave him FIVE WEEKS to go from nothing to RTM! I'm sorry but they could have chosen any killer dev and it wouldn't have mattered with that time table, no way in hell.
But that is where you are wrong, it really wasn't the horrible games, it was an economic system built AROUND games that ultimately caused it to crash.
In a way it is comparable to the housing crash, you had a system that was rewarding behavior that in any other time would have been seen as a BAD idea is rewarded. As I said I was buddies with the kids of the retailers and they ended up with a LOT more product than they could really afford to lose money on, but thanks to the retail gaming system that was in place? Well they didn't have to worry about that did they? They could just hand back every single product that didn't sell and get new product that would, and they could keep doing this until the product was sold.
Now imagine how warping such a system would be, imagine if you KNEW, without a shadow of a doubt, that every single laptop your store carried was guaranteed to sell because if it didn't? Why you'll be handed a brand new laptop to replace every single old laptop until every one were sold! What do you think that would do to the electronics section of every store, when they know that they simply can't lose when it comes to that product? Well that is EXACTLY what happened with games, you had stores picking up MUCH more product than they would have because they couldn't lose, see? They would get their money back or they would get the profits, no way they can lose!
And THAT is what called it, not the bad games. After all if their system worked like every other product they wouldn't gamble on more than one or two copies of a title and IF it sold then and ONLY then would they buy more copies of that product. Instead the system actively encouraged buying all the product you could possibly fit on the shelf because at the very least you'd get ALL of your money back, and every sale was profit time!
So really the fact that there was a glut of bad games in reality only made the system collapse faster, when if you take a good hard look at the way the system then worked then the obvious conclusion is that it had no other way it could end, all it would take is a few of the big companies having some bad quarters or games that flopped, even good games that just didn't catch on, for the whole system to fall down like dominoes.
As somebody who was actually there and who was friends with many of the store owners in my area at the time? I can tell you what caused the crash and it was NOT ET, ET was just a really famous flop, like how they made more Pacman carts than there were 2600 consoles and ended up having to give away Pacman carts with just about every promo.
No what REALLY caused the crash was how business was done back then which very few people know about. I am about to tell you how retail worked when it came to games, i bet you'll spot the fatal flaw before I'm even done explaining it, ready? Here goes....
The way retail for games worked was a store would buy X number of carts from a company or distributor and then when Y number of carts didn't sell they would RETURN those carts to the company who would then give them new product or a refund and then recycle the carts. This way the retail channel wasn't overloaded with old product driving down the price, even small stores could have a nice selection (since they knew they'd get replacements or cash for all unsold product) and a lot of the cart could be recycled thus lowering production cost for the company, so a win/win for them and retailers.
By now I'm sure everybody sees the fatal flaw in this little arrangement, Atari lost a couple of high profile cases which made it so ANYBODY could make a 2600 cart and the next thing you know an assload of fly by night companies are cranking out such "gems" as Chase The Chuckwagon and a ton of really lame one trick games. Well naturally all these lame half assed games didn't sell but when the retailers went to send the product back to get new products or a refund most of the companies just cashed out and folded.
And THIS is what caused the crash! You see the retailers didn't want to have warehouses and shelves filled with shit nobody wanted, and they couldn't send it back, so by the middle of 83 instead of paying $20+ a game I was buying games at a buck a pop or 12 for $10...now why would I pay $20 for a single game when I was getting 5 Coleco games for $5, or a dozen Atari games for $10? Not to mention the same thing happened to the handhelds so I was getting cool handhelds like Football and Pool for a couple of bucks a pop, so why would I pay $20 for one game?
The answer is I wouldn't and neither would anybody else which is why the price went into a freefall, due to the high price of chips back then even if you made a truly great game thanks to how low the prices hit you often wouldn't even be able to make back what you paid to have the cart made, much less make a nickel in profit, and THAT is why so many companies folded. Being buddies with the kids of the retailers I got to hear how many of them ended up losing tens of thousands because of how much they had paid for product VS what it would sell for (which was a shitload of money back then) so naturally most of them dumped every bit of product they had and didn't want a damned thing to do with anything video game related for quite a long time. I know that in my area the NES didn't even show up until late '88 simply because all the retailers feared another pocket raping which considering how many of them were left in bad shape after the crash you really can't blame them.
So yes ET sucked and was a badly made POS, but honestly no single game had jack shit to do with the crash, it was a badly set up business practice that gave retailers a false sense of security which caused them to buy more stock than they could really afford to lose money on that caused the crash.
Are you fucking stoned? Seriously? Better than 80%? Sorry I have to throw a flag, bullshit on the field. Fuck all the Pacman and Galaga knockoff were better than that boring as hell POS, even the game designer apologized for making it! It doesn't deserve to even be named in the same breath as Star Raiders, Haunted House, Night Driver, Yar's Revenge, Pitfall!, Space Invaders, hell I could go on all day with the amount of truly great games there was for the 2600 while ET was nothing but a quickly thrown together cash grab, which again even the guy who wrote it admitted that and said they gave him less than 5 weeks to go from nothing to RTM.
So it was the inspiration for Dark Souls then?