Here is what I don't get....why should anybody care again? It was basically an infomercial for Nintendo...okay? Why should we get weepy about what was really nothing more than a 30 page ad for Nintendo?
I mean they'd throw in the occasional tips and tricks, but did you ever ONCE, just one time, see them telling kids "Don't waste your money on this game" ever? They would find something good to say about any old crap shoved out the door and call me weird, but I don't get weepy about an infomercial just because its an OLD infomercial, because in the end its still about shoving games, good or not, and I don't think that is really something to mourn.
Now if Angry Joe, or Yathzee were calling it quits? Then yeah i would feel sad, because they have given me actually USEFUL information about games coming up, and even when I didn't agree with them on a verdict I still learned enough about a game that I knew whether or not it would be something I like. Considering even hand held games are nearly $40 a pop and big name games $60? I want REAL information, not some "Buy it, buy it now! Have I told you that you should buy it, buy it now yet?"
If I want to feel sad about something its the fact that we didn't have any real and honest mags easily available back then, man the amount of money i would have saved if I would have known about some of the stinkers i shelled out money for, Castlevania 64 anyone?
Honestly i just don't get all the nostalgia, I mean here I am in my mid 40s and instead of looking back I want everybody to just look at what we have now and be fucking amazed! Computers that would have been the stuff of sci-fi even 20 years ago, and ANYBODY can afford them! Handheld computers everywhere, nice well working tablets for less than $100 that can give you a wealth of information and entertainment (including gaming) in your hands any time! Incredible graphics, incredible speed and power, and thanks to the economies of scale just about anybody can afford to enjoy all this incredible technology!
So excuse me if I don't shed a tear for a 30 page advertisement, I'll just never understand nostalgia for that kind of junk.
Then how in the fuck are you typing this? Smoke Signals? If you don't even have net access and are typing this from a public library i think you have better fish to fry than being a pirate, and you missed one little flaw in your logic...YOU HAVE TO HAVE DECENT BANDWIDTH TO FUCKING USE BITTORRENT!!!
So if you have enough God damned bandwidth to download a 10Gb+ game from fricking BT I seriously doubt you letting it hook up for 2 MINUTES a damned month is gonna screw ya over pal. I have to say as far as piracy excuses go? This has to be the lamest i have fricking heard. Hell I had my network knocked out for over a week, the games played just fine. if you have a connection good enough to run a BT client its good enough to use Steam, I have two fricking nephews on a WISP, there is nothing more iffy than a WISP, and they use Steam just fine, so I call bullshit. I mean what are you doing, making somebody else pirate the games for you?
I have actually done that, i bought Bioshock II and kept it in the sealed plastic as i played the pirated version because I fricking HATE GFWL, but damned if a nephew didn't get me a game for Xmas and didn't know it was GFWL, so damned if I didn't end up with GFWL anyway.
But in the end you and I both know what this is....excuses. They are coming up with excuses rather than admit they want the product without giving a cent for it. Hell don't think there are some games I'd like on release day that are too high? but I don't go pirate it, I head over to steam and find 10s of thousands of OTHER games that I can buy cheaply and simply waited for the too high game to come down and you know what? It did, very quickly, and when I got it I got ALL the DLC, plus the MP I wouldn't have had on a pirated version, plus all the patches installed automatically, and I often get the ENTIRE SERIES for one low price, like how I got 4 Crysis games for $15, both Torchlight games for $20, or all the Deus Ex games with all the extras and DLC for $15.
So in the end their bullshit is just that, you could spend a lousy $20 a month on Steam and soon be so ass deep in video games you'd need months to play it all, hell I still got games from the summer sale i haven't gotten to play yet and the xmas sale is coming up! So there really is no excuse, gaming has NEVER been cheaper, or easier, or faster, hell I got customers on $250 dual cores with $30 GPUs gaming on Steam and even on their weak gear they have more games than hours in the day, so this is nothing but pirates making up "fight teh power!" bullshit to make them feel less scummy.
Uhhh...you DO realize you are pitying me because I pointed out people like YOU are just using excuses, yes? And no value? You DO know they still sell those games...right? You can get them on the wii virtual console, you can even buy stand alone Genesis and even Atari sticks with all the games built in, so all you are doing is saying "I want it free and I don't care" and for some things I think...okay, but just be honest about it.
If you want me to link citations I will, or just try going to fricking Amazon and type in Atari. Now I DO think that once you buy something it should be yours forever, i shouldn't have to go dig up a receipt from 35 years ago to prove i bought Yar's Revenge for example, but that is just me. The simple fact is they sell ALL those games, often in large bundles, for very very cheap, so you're only fooling yourself if you think DRM is "robbing the future" when you can type "Genesis" in Steam and find every damned game that was ever worth a shit for that system ready to go and play right now.
You ever seen that scene with hundreds of people slap their forehead because of a giant DUH! moment? That's the stupidity of touchscreens on laptops in a nutshell.
People don't give a shit about touching their cell phone because IT IS CHEAP OR FREE (nobody ever looks at what the contracts cost in the long run, so for them its "free") and its getting banged around in their pocket. the same is true about tablets to a point, I have noticed the ones with iPads frankly babying the shit out of it but that ain't Joe Average. But when it comes to laptops THEY ARE EXPENSIVE and generally last us for years (barring a kid with a coke of course) so no shit we don't want to have the screens all scratched up and nasty!
But lets face it, we ALL know what this is...its a Hail Mary. MSFT can't fricking give away the WinPhone and WinRT is gonna be WinDOA because nobody buys Windows to look at the wallpaper, they buy windows to run windows X86 programs that don't run on WinRT, so they might as well have named it WinCE for all the good it'll do 'em. So they are shilling the living fuck out of touchscreens, even where it makes no damned sense, in the hope that WinTel can save their ass. Frankly I doubt it will but since i'm already getting more customers because "You can still get the REAL Windows, right?" I say go right ahead MSFT, dare to be stupid.
Uhhh...in case you ain't been keeping up with current events when Metro 2033 was placed in the "under $5" column they ended up #1 for the 2 week sales period. Here you have SEVEN games and the average at the time of this writing was $6.25, so NO this is NOT a "free money grab" as they could have easily got 4 TIMES more than what they are getting without giving squat to charity by just putting these games in the $5 bin.
Hell the reason I asked about SR 3 is I bought it at $24 with the DLC and so did all my family and friends (love the game BTW, its a blast), so its obvious that plenty will buy these games at a higher price, this is THQ doing something nice and helping out a charity which they should get props for doing.
The ONLY way they could have done this is abandon PPC, as Sony has done and rumors say MSFT will do, because they are all finding out that cutting edge PPC chips are fucking insanely high thanks to the fact these are basically "one offs" and IBM just doesn't have anywhere near the economies of scale of ARM and X86. And since ARM just doesn't have the IPC to do cutting edge games? you either go X86 or you take a weaker PPC unless you want to have a $500+ system like Sony had with the PS3.
Now considering that at $350 they are ALREADY losing money on each unit and if the rumors are true the reason they are losing money is the PPC chip? Well you can see I'm sure why the big N didn't want to sink even more money into a higher powered PPC chip.
Lets face it, PPC is a dead end anyway. they all went to PPC because it was a piracy deterrent but you can buy an ARM based DRM module (which is already baked into the AMD APU they are building for Sony) and it only costs $2 a chip in bulk, and IBM simply doesn't have enough customers for PPC to get any real kind of economies of scale. Sure there are a few big customers of big iron, some of the MMOs like Second Life, the military, but they just don't sell tens of millions of PPC chips to get the prices down like X86 and ARM do so in the end going PPC is gonna put a big dent in your wallet.
so if the rumors are true and Sony and MSFT walk away from PPC I wouldn't be surprised if the Wii U is the last PPC console we see. For the casual crowd Nintendo could have went with a Tegra 3 and ran an emulator for the old SNES and N64 stuff and their customers would have probably been happy, and with an X86 APU they can get high enough economies of scale they can afford to sell a fast quad APU with midrange Radeon chip and really pump up the effects and framerate.
The problem is at $350 they are ALREADY losing money, PPC chips are NOT cheap, so they didn't want to end up with a $500 turkey like Sony did with the PS3. there is a reason why the rumors say that both Sony and MSFT are gonna end up with AMD APUs, because the powerful PPC chips are fricking crazy high because IBM just doesn't get the economies of scale that X86 and ARM do, and for the casual demographic? they will NOT pay $500+ just for a console, so the big N did what they had to do.
Except the TPB version is crippled as it has no MP, will not get the patches (you'll have to go out to find cracks for the patches and good luck with games like the Sims that have expansions since you'll have to find cracks that BOTH work on the version you have and the expansions you have installed) and is generally inferior to the Steam version, which is always up to date, always has MP, has chat and matchmaking, and "just works" without hassles.
Yeah but one thing you are missing is the long tail and lack of competition in this genre. We got a billion "fat space marines that love Chesty McWallHigh" but a good flight sim (needs to work good with keyboard and mouse as well as stick) can be sold for years and years.
Hell just a few months ago I went out and bought yet another copy (my third) of Freelancer...why? Because i had lost my disc in my last move and thanks to the mods there are hundreds of star systems, and factions, you can go lone wolf and just mine and trade or join a group and fight as a pack, this is a game from 2003 yet has tons of people still playing and more mods seem to be made for it every year, so even after nearly a decade its still worth buying.
So you'd think as long as the budget wasn't insane studios would jump on this, sure its a niche audience but its a niche that has money, is under served, and will buy games even years after they are released if they are good and moddable. Frankly good elite style space sims and actual survival horror (as opposed to current games where you are given practically infinite ammo so it feels like playing Power rangers more than being in actual danger) are niches that have fans just aching to open their wallets and hand you money if only they would give them something to buy.
And if anybody here doesn't have FreeLancer? BUY IT NOW and go to ModDB and load up on mods and grab the mod manager. With the great mods you have this HUGE universe with everything from little cargo haulers and mini fighters to fricking monstrous capital ships ALL of which you can buy and customize if you have the credits, and with so much space to explore, trade routes to make runs on, derelict ships to raid, even badlands to hide in, its truly an epic exp.
Riiiight, it has been shown repeatedly that if you can stop the pirates for only FOUR DAYS your sales go up by something like 20%, because many if they can't get it on release will say fuck it and go buy the movie or game rather than have to wait.
And why in the fuck should I care about resale on games that cost me less than a rental? I'm up to 46 games in Steam right now and I paid a grand total of MAYBE $150 for the whole shebang...why would I care about resale? So Gamestop could give me $20 and resell it for $100? Heck nobody even sells used PC games, they just aren't worth anything because the price drops so quickly that a game that was $60 3 months ago can be had for less than $20 now.
As for format shifting? Your grandma could rip a DVD these days, really not hard and if you have something like Netflix most won't even bother with that since they have access to more shows than they could possibly ever watch as it is.
Again as long as the DRM doesn't get in the way or hurt legit customers like Steam and Netflix honestly most of us really don't care, and it gives us some pretty kick ass advantages like being able to pre-order a game and have it already downloaded and installed (often with extra DLC included as a thank you for pre-purchase) so when the release day comes you can be one of the first to enjoy the latest game. For that alone I really don't give a crap about the DRM in Steam, heck I'd say about 12% of the info in the TLII wiki came from me as I was in the game a couple of minutes after release thanks to Steam already having it loaded and ready to go, and if it keeps companies like Runic and THQ afloat because people will buy their titles on Steam because its cheap and easy? Again ALL for it.
Now if you'll excuse me the last of the Humble Bundle just finished loading in Steam so I'm gonna play me some Company Of Heroes, always liked me a good RTS.
Thanks but I didn't say it didn't have one, I said it didn't seem to NEED one because both my boys game like crazy, they never touch CIS or use game mode, and all their games play just fine.
What I like is it only takes a few days for it to learn your programs and the way you use your PC and after that unless you suddenly add something its never encountered before you'll never even know its there. My boys get their games through steam and once it learned they use Steam? that was it, no more questions, it just does its job silently and without dragging the system down.
So anybody that isn't happy with MSE or whatever AV they have ought to give it a try, its free, low resource, and isn't chatty or bug you with pop up boxes, it just does its job and does it quite well. Now the only thing i have MSE on is my gaming box and that is simply because all its doing is gaming and transcoding so not really any reason to remove it as I'm not going anywhere on it to worry about having a real time AV.
None, but some need an excuse to feel better about their piracy, so there ya go. Considering how many game companies have closed their doors in the past few years they are just cutting off their noses to spite their faces, because it will be quickly made clear to game devs to make consoles first, maybe bother with PC later if at all.
What you are missing is what goes on behind the scenes, specifically physics and ragdolls and fire and water effects. All of these take a pretty beefy CPU, Fire up something like Just Cause II for the PC and you'll see what I mean, as it looks REAL when it comes to the way buildings crash, water flows, bombs go off, and bodies fly. All that takes serious power that the Wii U don't have but since that isn't their target demographic I really don't see what the point is.
Uhhh...everybody forget Bill Gates famous "If they pirate, I want them to pirate from us" line? Ballmer apparently has, as which two bombs in recent years had the nastiest DRM? why Vista and 8 of course. Win 7 was totally broken almost from RTM, look up "Win 7 all versions" on TPB and you'll see there is two DVDs, one for 32bit and one for 64bit, that covered every release from basic to ultimate, it even gives you a nice wallpaper based on who made the board!
But one thing they got wrong i believe is that DRM is doomed, i point to netflix and Steam as examples of DRM done right. If you make the customer feel they are getting more value in their purchase and the DRM is unobtrusive and just rides along? Most won't care. look at how many had a fight over the Humble bundle and I was surprised to see how many agreed with me that it didn't matter because Steam gives value like chat, updates, matchmaking, etc and I know many pirates that once they got netflix haven't bothered, they have so many shows to watch now that frankly they could live in front of the set and never see it all, so why bother pirating more?
The reason DRM has gotten a bad rap is because like many ideas handed to PHBs with little foresight naturally it can be misused, look at Starfuck breaking DVD burners, or SecuROM slowing down systems, or how most of those won't play nice with each other or even newer versions of itself so you end up with a dozen of the damned things running in the background. Compare this to steam, when its off? its off. No kernel level crap sucking resources and getting buggier by the day, no hassles, its all just "click to buy game" and even gifting something like the humble bundle takes just a couple of clicks. its cheap, easy, and hassle free and most people will NOT care as long as you meet those requirements.
Hell even with MSFT they used to have common sense, like Windows activation...do i care? No. Why? because after changing every. single. part. on this desktop i had to re-activate exactly ONCE, and that was when I swapped boards. it took less than 10 seconds online, and that was it, done. Compare this to Vista and its black screen of death or even worse WMV/WMA DRM as examples of DRM done poorly. It was glitchy, often screwed up, and ALWAYS defaulted to "Ur a pirate!" so you ended up just wanting the shit far away from you.
So just like VB or Java or Flash or any other thing out there DRM can be done right, or it can be done poorly. Personally I'd rather have a couple of services like Steam and netflix as "one stop shops" where I can buy anything I want cheaply an easily than see our rights stripped away with ever more draconian laws and customer screwing policies like 6 strikes, wouldn't you?
Glad you like it, I switched to Comodo IS from Avast because frankly it was getting just too chatty for my tastes and honestly I haven't seen CIS need a "gaming mode" as both my boys game like crazy and never had a bit of trouble or slowdown from CIS.
And I know all about Comodo Secure DNS, I have it as a backup to my main DNS and I give out (as well as use myself) Comodo Dragon which uses Comodo DNS for just the browser is you like. The only reason I don't use CS-DNS for everything is i have some older software that is already set to use the old FreeDNS and I really don't feel like tweaking it, but since most malware comes from browsers and CS-DNS blocks website malware pages from loading? Really not worried about it.
And while I agree that a wipe and re-install is the best option sometimes that just isn't possible, they could be using one of the OEM Windows that hates normal install discs (eMachines and Compaq are the worst for this) or they have corrupted their hidden OEM partition, or they have too many photos shotgunned across the drive and don't want to risk losing their data. in those cases a cleaning CAN work, its just gonna take longer and thus be more costly than a nuke and re-install, but at the end of the day its the customer's call, not mine.
But personally I don't have to worry about such things, and neither does my family, as I use Paragon Drive Image to make a hidden partition with encrypted images of the drive so I can just send 'em back if they make a boo boo and infect the system. really ought to give it a try, its free, its easy, and it works quite well, even managing to restore my system after the power cut out in the middle of a partition resize which hosed the partition table. took me less than 30 minutes and I was back up like nothing ever happened.
Then its worthless because with a drive by once its loaded you're pwned. And if the only way it does its job is with IE again its worthless, many of us don't use IE and have no desire to use IE so they should really say if its made to work with IE only.
And isn't SmartScreen Win 8 only? considering it looks to be another flop having their AV depend on a tech so few of their customers will have is pretty stupid. But at the end of the day this is why i recommend CIS and Avast, they work with ANY browser and will stop infected pages for loading at all. I still use MSE on my gaming system but then again i'm not going anywhere dodgy on my game system so it really doesn't matter, i could probably get by with just Defender.
Thanks, nice to see somebody else gets it. With Steam they treat me like a customer and have FAST response times to problems, i get free chat, updates, they take care of the MP, so you get a lot of positives by using Steam, if it makes the game companies feel better because it has a mild DRM that could be cracked in under 10 minutes if you wanted to? i have ZERO problem with that, it doesn't clog my system with kernel level crap like Starfucked and SECUReam, and if all the media companies would embrace one or two services like this where i could get any content i want cheap and easy? Seems like a hell of a lot better way to convert people to paying customers rather than lawsuits and 6 strikes bullshit.
And at the end of the day remember its for charity, sure the default settings give THQ 40% but that is fine, they ARE providing a bunch of kick ass games and you can decide who gets what, your choice. in the end I gifted my friends and family a copy and left the setting on the defaults, that way child's play (A REALLY nice charity, if you've ever had a sick kid in a hospital having games to take their minds off being ill is a damned nice) gets some, THQ gets some, and the HB guys get a tip, a win/win as far as I'm concerned. go HB!
Hell just buy another bundle and gift that instead. that's what I did, my boys and my Steam buds got a Humble Bundle from yours truly, I get to help out THQ, a kid's charity that buys games for sick kids in hospitals to play, even tip the Humble Bundle guys for putting together a great deal. Oh and Company of Heroes isn't a shooter, its a KICK ASS strategy game, in the vein of command and Conquer, fun as hell BTW.
Last i checked they are up to 2.5 million and rising, that's a bunch of games for sick kids and since the default setting throws some money THQ's way as well and they have been hurting lately I'd say its a win/win.
Thanks for those that pointed out it wouldn't screw up my DLC, already bought myself, my friends, and my family copies, this way we can all have fun and help a kid's charity at the same time. What a nice thing to do for Xmas, thanks humble bundle and THQ!
What everybody seems to be ignoring is the target demographic for the wii U which is NOT the hardcore shooter crowd.
Is this a weak CPU? Yep, but for the casual games Nintendo is making their money on you aren't gonna see ragdolls and physics up the butt so a powerful CPU makes zero sense, its not ragdolls and fireball effects and physics that sell to the casual crowd, its easy to pick up games that everybody can play without having twitch reflexes.
So I truly see this as much ado about nothing, with only misguided fanbois that expected the big N to make "one console to rule them all" getting butthurt when they find the Wii U can't play games that the X360 can...well duh! The X360 shooter crowd isn't their target demographic! To use a/. car analogy it would be like getting pissy that the Ford fiesta can't take a new Porsche on in the quarter, its just not built for that market, isn't for that market, and just as Ford isn't building the Fiesta for the drag strip so too is the big N not building their consoles for the Gears Of Killzone, Modern Halo crowd.
Or the more sensible thing is unless you have a couple hundred grand in the bank for the lawyer's fee don't be running Tor until we get better laws.
I know many want to do the whole "fight the power!" stance but the laws on kiddy porn are so messed up right now that frankly you don't have to look at squat, just the fact that your connection was used could be enough for you to be looking at 10-20 in PMITA prison.
The way I had it explained to me was thus: Imagine somebody gives you a safe to haul to somewhere, even though you don't actually have the keys to the safe if the cops stop you and open it and find drugs and CP, even though you had zero way of knowing they can still charge you with facilitation and distribution since what you were doing helped a criminal commit a crime.
So you can scream Tor and Freenet is about "freedom!" all you want, all a prosecutor has to do is say CP anymore and the odds of a jury having common sense and letting you off is virtually nil, and of course the judges don't understand dick when it comes to tech so either way you are screwed. If you have a family or anybody that counts on your paycheck? Then frankly you would be insane to run Tor, this guy is gonna have the next couple of years of his life tied up in court and God have mercy if he can't afford to lawyer up, because he's dead meat with a public pretender.
Uhhh...yeah dumbass? There were stories of asbestos miners dying of "bleeding consumption" for fricking hundreds of years, you don't think that all those stories might have been worth a few tests, maybe? lets not forget people have been fucking with asbestos for a couple thousand years now, in fact in Roman times it was thought to be made from salamanders because they could throw a cloth made of it into the fire to clean it. They didn't know WHY the miners all seemed to die, they just did, same as they knew about being "mad as a hatter" without knowing it was the mercury that made them batshit.
So maybe you should actually try reading a little history instead of just being a douchebag, yes?
You want a good site for malware free Internet Porn? MyFreePaysite and "yes i know about links" but no I'm not gonna link to it because the last thing I want is it to be slashdotted. Anyway its the site i point those that get malware bugs to, its got something like 5000 DVDs worth of free porn and no malware. They make their money off selling toys and webcam whores, the usual. they have videos for just about everybody and they are actually good quality, sure you're not gonna get vivid production levels but the girls are hot, lighting and sound is good, most folks are quite happy with it.
And whether its FUD or not you really ought to look at Comodo internet Security, its damned good and pretty much just set and forget, and unlike MSE it has sandboxing by default which is frankly a smart thing to do with browsers, low rights mode or not. Its pretty low on resources, just depending on which parts you pick, for example I'm happy with windows Firewall in 7 so i didn't use their firewall, I don't download email so I didn't use that either, and I don't use P2P so i again didn't use that part. Nice thing about Comodo is while the defaults are perfectly fine you can tweak to your hearts content, everything from scanning rules to sandboxing levels to which components you use, its all easy to customize.
so give CIS a try, its free, its low resource, and unlike MSE it'll actually keep a site infected with malware from loading and tell you what it detected, i have NEVER seen MSE ever stop a page from loading, have you? personally i think its really more about just scanning downloaded files, because watching it in process Explorer while surfing i honestly couldn't detect it actually DOING anything, at least not until I downloaded something, then and ONLY then did its CPU and RAM usage go up.
When did selling games for charity turn into a "Down with the man, FOSSies unite!" kind of thing anyway? The first ones didn't have DRM because News Flash, they were made by dirt poor indies who could afford to buy any DRM. I mean you'd think people would be happy, bigger names mean more sales which means more money to a fricking kid's charity but nope, god fucking forbid that it goes against our fricking religion.
Now for those of us who don't care about GPL religious debates, i have a question...what if you already have one of the games on Steam? will it fuck with the ones you have, get put in the gift pile, just don't count, what? because me and my boys already have SR 3 with all the DLC (great game BTW, fun as hell) but I'd hate to give more than the average just to have it screw up all my DLC, so if anybody knows what actually happens if you already have one of the games I'd really like to know, as giving money to a charity for kids while giving the boys some good games does sound nice. if the game just don't count? Totally fine with that, just don't want to lose all my DLC.
Well I'll be sure to depress you by saying I'm buying it. I already have Steam, there are some great games, and the money goes to charity...I have no problem with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is what I don't get....why should anybody care again? It was basically an infomercial for Nintendo...okay? Why should we get weepy about what was really nothing more than a 30 page ad for Nintendo?
I mean they'd throw in the occasional tips and tricks, but did you ever ONCE, just one time, see them telling kids "Don't waste your money on this game" ever? They would find something good to say about any old crap shoved out the door and call me weird, but I don't get weepy about an infomercial just because its an OLD infomercial, because in the end its still about shoving games, good or not, and I don't think that is really something to mourn.
Now if Angry Joe, or Yathzee were calling it quits? Then yeah i would feel sad, because they have given me actually USEFUL information about games coming up, and even when I didn't agree with them on a verdict I still learned enough about a game that I knew whether or not it would be something I like. Considering even hand held games are nearly $40 a pop and big name games $60? I want REAL information, not some "Buy it, buy it now! Have I told you that you should buy it, buy it now yet?"
If I want to feel sad about something its the fact that we didn't have any real and honest mags easily available back then, man the amount of money i would have saved if I would have known about some of the stinkers i shelled out money for, Castlevania 64 anyone?
Honestly i just don't get all the nostalgia, I mean here I am in my mid 40s and instead of looking back I want everybody to just look at what we have now and be fucking amazed! Computers that would have been the stuff of sci-fi even 20 years ago, and ANYBODY can afford them! Handheld computers everywhere, nice well working tablets for less than $100 that can give you a wealth of information and entertainment (including gaming) in your hands any time! Incredible graphics, incredible speed and power, and thanks to the economies of scale just about anybody can afford to enjoy all this incredible technology!
So excuse me if I don't shed a tear for a 30 page advertisement, I'll just never understand nostalgia for that kind of junk.
Then how in the fuck are you typing this? Smoke Signals? If you don't even have net access and are typing this from a public library i think you have better fish to fry than being a pirate, and you missed one little flaw in your logic...YOU HAVE TO HAVE DECENT BANDWIDTH TO FUCKING USE BITTORRENT!!!
So if you have enough God damned bandwidth to download a 10Gb+ game from fricking BT I seriously doubt you letting it hook up for 2 MINUTES a damned month is gonna screw ya over pal. I have to say as far as piracy excuses go? This has to be the lamest i have fricking heard. Hell I had my network knocked out for over a week, the games played just fine. if you have a connection good enough to run a BT client its good enough to use Steam, I have two fricking nephews on a WISP, there is nothing more iffy than a WISP, and they use Steam just fine, so I call bullshit. I mean what are you doing, making somebody else pirate the games for you?
I have actually done that, i bought Bioshock II and kept it in the sealed plastic as i played the pirated version because I fricking HATE GFWL, but damned if a nephew didn't get me a game for Xmas and didn't know it was GFWL, so damned if I didn't end up with GFWL anyway.
But in the end you and I both know what this is....excuses. They are coming up with excuses rather than admit they want the product without giving a cent for it. Hell don't think there are some games I'd like on release day that are too high? but I don't go pirate it, I head over to steam and find 10s of thousands of OTHER games that I can buy cheaply and simply waited for the too high game to come down and you know what? It did, very quickly, and when I got it I got ALL the DLC, plus the MP I wouldn't have had on a pirated version, plus all the patches installed automatically, and I often get the ENTIRE SERIES for one low price, like how I got 4 Crysis games for $15, both Torchlight games for $20, or all the Deus Ex games with all the extras and DLC for $15.
So in the end their bullshit is just that, you could spend a lousy $20 a month on Steam and soon be so ass deep in video games you'd need months to play it all, hell I still got games from the summer sale i haven't gotten to play yet and the xmas sale is coming up! So there really is no excuse, gaming has NEVER been cheaper, or easier, or faster, hell I got customers on $250 dual cores with $30 GPUs gaming on Steam and even on their weak gear they have more games than hours in the day, so this is nothing but pirates making up "fight teh power!" bullshit to make them feel less scummy.
Uhhh...you DO realize you are pitying me because I pointed out people like YOU are just using excuses, yes? And no value? You DO know they still sell those games...right? You can get them on the wii virtual console, you can even buy stand alone Genesis and even Atari sticks with all the games built in, so all you are doing is saying "I want it free and I don't care" and for some things I think...okay, but just be honest about it.
If you want me to link citations I will, or just try going to fricking Amazon and type in Atari. Now I DO think that once you buy something it should be yours forever, i shouldn't have to go dig up a receipt from 35 years ago to prove i bought Yar's Revenge for example, but that is just me. The simple fact is they sell ALL those games, often in large bundles, for very very cheap, so you're only fooling yourself if you think DRM is "robbing the future" when you can type "Genesis" in Steam and find every damned game that was ever worth a shit for that system ready to go and play right now.
You ever seen that scene with hundreds of people slap their forehead because of a giant DUH! moment? That's the stupidity of touchscreens on laptops in a nutshell.
People don't give a shit about touching their cell phone because IT IS CHEAP OR FREE (nobody ever looks at what the contracts cost in the long run, so for them its "free") and its getting banged around in their pocket. the same is true about tablets to a point, I have noticed the ones with iPads frankly babying the shit out of it but that ain't Joe Average. But when it comes to laptops THEY ARE EXPENSIVE and generally last us for years (barring a kid with a coke of course) so no shit we don't want to have the screens all scratched up and nasty!
But lets face it, we ALL know what this is...its a Hail Mary. MSFT can't fricking give away the WinPhone and WinRT is gonna be WinDOA because nobody buys Windows to look at the wallpaper, they buy windows to run windows X86 programs that don't run on WinRT, so they might as well have named it WinCE for all the good it'll do 'em. So they are shilling the living fuck out of touchscreens, even where it makes no damned sense, in the hope that WinTel can save their ass. Frankly I doubt it will but since i'm already getting more customers because "You can still get the REAL Windows, right?" I say go right ahead MSFT, dare to be stupid.
Uhhh...in case you ain't been keeping up with current events when Metro 2033 was placed in the "under $5" column they ended up #1 for the 2 week sales period. Here you have SEVEN games and the average at the time of this writing was $6.25, so NO this is NOT a "free money grab" as they could have easily got 4 TIMES more than what they are getting without giving squat to charity by just putting these games in the $5 bin.
Hell the reason I asked about SR 3 is I bought it at $24 with the DLC and so did all my family and friends (love the game BTW, its a blast), so its obvious that plenty will buy these games at a higher price, this is THQ doing something nice and helping out a charity which they should get props for doing.
The ONLY way they could have done this is abandon PPC, as Sony has done and rumors say MSFT will do, because they are all finding out that cutting edge PPC chips are fucking insanely high thanks to the fact these are basically "one offs" and IBM just doesn't have anywhere near the economies of scale of ARM and X86. And since ARM just doesn't have the IPC to do cutting edge games? you either go X86 or you take a weaker PPC unless you want to have a $500+ system like Sony had with the PS3.
Now considering that at $350 they are ALREADY losing money on each unit and if the rumors are true the reason they are losing money is the PPC chip? Well you can see I'm sure why the big N didn't want to sink even more money into a higher powered PPC chip.
Lets face it, PPC is a dead end anyway. they all went to PPC because it was a piracy deterrent but you can buy an ARM based DRM module (which is already baked into the AMD APU they are building for Sony) and it only costs $2 a chip in bulk, and IBM simply doesn't have enough customers for PPC to get any real kind of economies of scale. Sure there are a few big customers of big iron, some of the MMOs like Second Life, the military, but they just don't sell tens of millions of PPC chips to get the prices down like X86 and ARM do so in the end going PPC is gonna put a big dent in your wallet.
so if the rumors are true and Sony and MSFT walk away from PPC I wouldn't be surprised if the Wii U is the last PPC console we see. For the casual crowd Nintendo could have went with a Tegra 3 and ran an emulator for the old SNES and N64 stuff and their customers would have probably been happy, and with an X86 APU they can get high enough economies of scale they can afford to sell a fast quad APU with midrange Radeon chip and really pump up the effects and framerate.
The problem is at $350 they are ALREADY losing money, PPC chips are NOT cheap, so they didn't want to end up with a $500 turkey like Sony did with the PS3. there is a reason why the rumors say that both Sony and MSFT are gonna end up with AMD APUs, because the powerful PPC chips are fricking crazy high because IBM just doesn't get the economies of scale that X86 and ARM do, and for the casual demographic? they will NOT pay $500+ just for a console, so the big N did what they had to do.
Except the TPB version is crippled as it has no MP, will not get the patches (you'll have to go out to find cracks for the patches and good luck with games like the Sims that have expansions since you'll have to find cracks that BOTH work on the version you have and the expansions you have installed) and is generally inferior to the Steam version, which is always up to date, always has MP, has chat and matchmaking, and "just works" without hassles.
Yeah but one thing you are missing is the long tail and lack of competition in this genre. We got a billion "fat space marines that love Chesty McWallHigh" but a good flight sim (needs to work good with keyboard and mouse as well as stick) can be sold for years and years.
Hell just a few months ago I went out and bought yet another copy (my third) of Freelancer...why? Because i had lost my disc in my last move and thanks to the mods there are hundreds of star systems, and factions, you can go lone wolf and just mine and trade or join a group and fight as a pack, this is a game from 2003 yet has tons of people still playing and more mods seem to be made for it every year, so even after nearly a decade its still worth buying.
So you'd think as long as the budget wasn't insane studios would jump on this, sure its a niche audience but its a niche that has money, is under served, and will buy games even years after they are released if they are good and moddable. Frankly good elite style space sims and actual survival horror (as opposed to current games where you are given practically infinite ammo so it feels like playing Power rangers more than being in actual danger) are niches that have fans just aching to open their wallets and hand you money if only they would give them something to buy.
And if anybody here doesn't have FreeLancer? BUY IT NOW and go to ModDB and load up on mods and grab the mod manager. With the great mods you have this HUGE universe with everything from little cargo haulers and mini fighters to fricking monstrous capital ships ALL of which you can buy and customize if you have the credits, and with so much space to explore, trade routes to make runs on, derelict ships to raid, even badlands to hide in, its truly an epic exp.
Riiiight, it has been shown repeatedly that if you can stop the pirates for only FOUR DAYS your sales go up by something like 20%, because many if they can't get it on release will say fuck it and go buy the movie or game rather than have to wait.
And why in the fuck should I care about resale on games that cost me less than a rental? I'm up to 46 games in Steam right now and I paid a grand total of MAYBE $150 for the whole shebang...why would I care about resale? So Gamestop could give me $20 and resell it for $100? Heck nobody even sells used PC games, they just aren't worth anything because the price drops so quickly that a game that was $60 3 months ago can be had for less than $20 now.
As for format shifting? Your grandma could rip a DVD these days, really not hard and if you have something like Netflix most won't even bother with that since they have access to more shows than they could possibly ever watch as it is.
Again as long as the DRM doesn't get in the way or hurt legit customers like Steam and Netflix honestly most of us really don't care, and it gives us some pretty kick ass advantages like being able to pre-order a game and have it already downloaded and installed (often with extra DLC included as a thank you for pre-purchase) so when the release day comes you can be one of the first to enjoy the latest game. For that alone I really don't give a crap about the DRM in Steam, heck I'd say about 12% of the info in the TLII wiki came from me as I was in the game a couple of minutes after release thanks to Steam already having it loaded and ready to go, and if it keeps companies like Runic and THQ afloat because people will buy their titles on Steam because its cheap and easy? Again ALL for it.
Now if you'll excuse me the last of the Humble Bundle just finished loading in Steam so I'm gonna play me some Company Of Heroes, always liked me a good RTS.
Thanks but I didn't say it didn't have one, I said it didn't seem to NEED one because both my boys game like crazy, they never touch CIS or use game mode, and all their games play just fine.
What I like is it only takes a few days for it to learn your programs and the way you use your PC and after that unless you suddenly add something its never encountered before you'll never even know its there. My boys get their games through steam and once it learned they use Steam? that was it, no more questions, it just does its job silently and without dragging the system down.
So anybody that isn't happy with MSE or whatever AV they have ought to give it a try, its free, low resource, and isn't chatty or bug you with pop up boxes, it just does its job and does it quite well. Now the only thing i have MSE on is my gaming box and that is simply because all its doing is gaming and transcoding so not really any reason to remove it as I'm not going anywhere on it to worry about having a real time AV.
None, but some need an excuse to feel better about their piracy, so there ya go. Considering how many game companies have closed their doors in the past few years they are just cutting off their noses to spite their faces, because it will be quickly made clear to game devs to make consoles first, maybe bother with PC later if at all.
What you are missing is what goes on behind the scenes, specifically physics and ragdolls and fire and water effects. All of these take a pretty beefy CPU, Fire up something like Just Cause II for the PC and you'll see what I mean, as it looks REAL when it comes to the way buildings crash, water flows, bombs go off, and bodies fly. All that takes serious power that the Wii U don't have but since that isn't their target demographic I really don't see what the point is.
Uhhh...everybody forget Bill Gates famous "If they pirate, I want them to pirate from us" line? Ballmer apparently has, as which two bombs in recent years had the nastiest DRM? why Vista and 8 of course. Win 7 was totally broken almost from RTM, look up "Win 7 all versions" on TPB and you'll see there is two DVDs, one for 32bit and one for 64bit, that covered every release from basic to ultimate, it even gives you a nice wallpaper based on who made the board!
But one thing they got wrong i believe is that DRM is doomed, i point to netflix and Steam as examples of DRM done right. If you make the customer feel they are getting more value in their purchase and the DRM is unobtrusive and just rides along? Most won't care. look at how many had a fight over the Humble bundle and I was surprised to see how many agreed with me that it didn't matter because Steam gives value like chat, updates, matchmaking, etc and I know many pirates that once they got netflix haven't bothered, they have so many shows to watch now that frankly they could live in front of the set and never see it all, so why bother pirating more?
The reason DRM has gotten a bad rap is because like many ideas handed to PHBs with little foresight naturally it can be misused, look at Starfuck breaking DVD burners, or SecuROM slowing down systems, or how most of those won't play nice with each other or even newer versions of itself so you end up with a dozen of the damned things running in the background. Compare this to steam, when its off? its off. No kernel level crap sucking resources and getting buggier by the day, no hassles, its all just "click to buy game" and even gifting something like the humble bundle takes just a couple of clicks. its cheap, easy, and hassle free and most people will NOT care as long as you meet those requirements.
Hell even with MSFT they used to have common sense, like Windows activation...do i care? No. Why? because after changing every. single. part. on this desktop i had to re-activate exactly ONCE, and that was when I swapped boards. it took less than 10 seconds online, and that was it, done. Compare this to Vista and its black screen of death or even worse WMV/WMA DRM as examples of DRM done poorly. It was glitchy, often screwed up, and ALWAYS defaulted to "Ur a pirate!" so you ended up just wanting the shit far away from you.
So just like VB or Java or Flash or any other thing out there DRM can be done right, or it can be done poorly. Personally I'd rather have a couple of services like Steam and netflix as "one stop shops" where I can buy anything I want cheaply an easily than see our rights stripped away with ever more draconian laws and customer screwing policies like 6 strikes, wouldn't you?
Glad you like it, I switched to Comodo IS from Avast because frankly it was getting just too chatty for my tastes and honestly I haven't seen CIS need a "gaming mode" as both my boys game like crazy and never had a bit of trouble or slowdown from CIS.
And I know all about Comodo Secure DNS, I have it as a backup to my main DNS and I give out (as well as use myself) Comodo Dragon which uses Comodo DNS for just the browser is you like. The only reason I don't use CS-DNS for everything is i have some older software that is already set to use the old FreeDNS and I really don't feel like tweaking it, but since most malware comes from browsers and CS-DNS blocks website malware pages from loading? Really not worried about it.
And while I agree that a wipe and re-install is the best option sometimes that just isn't possible, they could be using one of the OEM Windows that hates normal install discs (eMachines and Compaq are the worst for this) or they have corrupted their hidden OEM partition, or they have too many photos shotgunned across the drive and don't want to risk losing their data. in those cases a cleaning CAN work, its just gonna take longer and thus be more costly than a nuke and re-install, but at the end of the day its the customer's call, not mine.
But personally I don't have to worry about such things, and neither does my family, as I use Paragon Drive Image to make a hidden partition with encrypted images of the drive so I can just send 'em back if they make a boo boo and infect the system. really ought to give it a try, its free, its easy, and it works quite well, even managing to restore my system after the power cut out in the middle of a partition resize which hosed the partition table. took me less than 30 minutes and I was back up like nothing ever happened.
Then its worthless because with a drive by once its loaded you're pwned. And if the only way it does its job is with IE again its worthless, many of us don't use IE and have no desire to use IE so they should really say if its made to work with IE only.
And isn't SmartScreen Win 8 only? considering it looks to be another flop having their AV depend on a tech so few of their customers will have is pretty stupid. But at the end of the day this is why i recommend CIS and Avast, they work with ANY browser and will stop infected pages for loading at all. I still use MSE on my gaming system but then again i'm not going anywhere dodgy on my game system so it really doesn't matter, i could probably get by with just Defender.
Thanks, nice to see somebody else gets it. With Steam they treat me like a customer and have FAST response times to problems, i get free chat, updates, they take care of the MP, so you get a lot of positives by using Steam, if it makes the game companies feel better because it has a mild DRM that could be cracked in under 10 minutes if you wanted to? i have ZERO problem with that, it doesn't clog my system with kernel level crap like Starfucked and SECUReam, and if all the media companies would embrace one or two services like this where i could get any content i want cheap and easy? Seems like a hell of a lot better way to convert people to paying customers rather than lawsuits and 6 strikes bullshit.
And at the end of the day remember its for charity, sure the default settings give THQ 40% but that is fine, they ARE providing a bunch of kick ass games and you can decide who gets what, your choice. in the end I gifted my friends and family a copy and left the setting on the defaults, that way child's play (A REALLY nice charity, if you've ever had a sick kid in a hospital having games to take their minds off being ill is a damned nice) gets some, THQ gets some, and the HB guys get a tip, a win/win as far as I'm concerned. go HB!
Hell just buy another bundle and gift that instead. that's what I did, my boys and my Steam buds got a Humble Bundle from yours truly, I get to help out THQ, a kid's charity that buys games for sick kids in hospitals to play, even tip the Humble Bundle guys for putting together a great deal. Oh and Company of Heroes isn't a shooter, its a KICK ASS strategy game, in the vein of command and Conquer, fun as hell BTW.
Last i checked they are up to 2.5 million and rising, that's a bunch of games for sick kids and since the default setting throws some money THQ's way as well and they have been hurting lately I'd say its a win/win.
Thanks for those that pointed out it wouldn't screw up my DLC, already bought myself, my friends, and my family copies, this way we can all have fun and help a kid's charity at the same time. What a nice thing to do for Xmas, thanks humble bundle and THQ!
What everybody seems to be ignoring is the target demographic for the wii U which is NOT the hardcore shooter crowd.
Is this a weak CPU? Yep, but for the casual games Nintendo is making their money on you aren't gonna see ragdolls and physics up the butt so a powerful CPU makes zero sense, its not ragdolls and fireball effects and physics that sell to the casual crowd, its easy to pick up games that everybody can play without having twitch reflexes.
So I truly see this as much ado about nothing, with only misguided fanbois that expected the big N to make "one console to rule them all" getting butthurt when they find the Wii U can't play games that the X360 can...well duh! The X360 shooter crowd isn't their target demographic! To use a /. car analogy it would be like getting pissy that the Ford fiesta can't take a new Porsche on in the quarter, its just not built for that market, isn't for that market, and just as Ford isn't building the Fiesta for the drag strip so too is the big N not building their consoles for the Gears Of Killzone, Modern Halo crowd.
Or the more sensible thing is unless you have a couple hundred grand in the bank for the lawyer's fee don't be running Tor until we get better laws.
I know many want to do the whole "fight the power!" stance but the laws on kiddy porn are so messed up right now that frankly you don't have to look at squat, just the fact that your connection was used could be enough for you to be looking at 10-20 in PMITA prison.
The way I had it explained to me was thus: Imagine somebody gives you a safe to haul to somewhere, even though you don't actually have the keys to the safe if the cops stop you and open it and find drugs and CP, even though you had zero way of knowing they can still charge you with facilitation and distribution since what you were doing helped a criminal commit a crime.
So you can scream Tor and Freenet is about "freedom!" all you want, all a prosecutor has to do is say CP anymore and the odds of a jury having common sense and letting you off is virtually nil, and of course the judges don't understand dick when it comes to tech so either way you are screwed. If you have a family or anybody that counts on your paycheck? Then frankly you would be insane to run Tor, this guy is gonna have the next couple of years of his life tied up in court and God have mercy if he can't afford to lawyer up, because he's dead meat with a public pretender.
Uhhh...yeah dumbass? There were stories of asbestos miners dying of "bleeding consumption" for fricking hundreds of years, you don't think that all those stories might have been worth a few tests, maybe? lets not forget people have been fucking with asbestos for a couple thousand years now, in fact in Roman times it was thought to be made from salamanders because they could throw a cloth made of it into the fire to clean it. They didn't know WHY the miners all seemed to die, they just did, same as they knew about being "mad as a hatter" without knowing it was the mercury that made them batshit.
So maybe you should actually try reading a little history instead of just being a douchebag, yes?
You want a good site for malware free Internet Porn? MyFreePaysite and "yes i know about links" but no I'm not gonna link to it because the last thing I want is it to be slashdotted. Anyway its the site i point those that get malware bugs to, its got something like 5000 DVDs worth of free porn and no malware. They make their money off selling toys and webcam whores, the usual. they have videos for just about everybody and they are actually good quality, sure you're not gonna get vivid production levels but the girls are hot, lighting and sound is good, most folks are quite happy with it.
And whether its FUD or not you really ought to look at Comodo internet Security, its damned good and pretty much just set and forget, and unlike MSE it has sandboxing by default which is frankly a smart thing to do with browsers, low rights mode or not. Its pretty low on resources, just depending on which parts you pick, for example I'm happy with windows Firewall in 7 so i didn't use their firewall, I don't download email so I didn't use that either, and I don't use P2P so i again didn't use that part. Nice thing about Comodo is while the defaults are perfectly fine you can tweak to your hearts content, everything from scanning rules to sandboxing levels to which components you use, its all easy to customize.
so give CIS a try, its free, its low resource, and unlike MSE it'll actually keep a site infected with malware from loading and tell you what it detected, i have NEVER seen MSE ever stop a page from loading, have you? personally i think its really more about just scanning downloaded files, because watching it in process Explorer while surfing i honestly couldn't detect it actually DOING anything, at least not until I downloaded something, then and ONLY then did its CPU and RAM usage go up.
When did selling games for charity turn into a "Down with the man, FOSSies unite!" kind of thing anyway? The first ones didn't have DRM because News Flash, they were made by dirt poor indies who could afford to buy any DRM. I mean you'd think people would be happy, bigger names mean more sales which means more money to a fricking kid's charity but nope, god fucking forbid that it goes against our fricking religion.
Now for those of us who don't care about GPL religious debates, i have a question...what if you already have one of the games on Steam? will it fuck with the ones you have, get put in the gift pile, just don't count, what? because me and my boys already have SR 3 with all the DLC (great game BTW, fun as hell) but I'd hate to give more than the average just to have it screw up all my DLC, so if anybody knows what actually happens if you already have one of the games I'd really like to know, as giving money to a charity for kids while giving the boys some good games does sound nice. if the game just don't count? Totally fine with that, just don't want to lose all my DLC.
Well I'll be sure to depress you by saying I'm buying it. I already have Steam, there are some great games, and the money goes to charity...I have no problem with that.