It's even worse than that: the bulk of HDTVs now being sold are still going to early adopters, who are now UPGRADING their old HDTVs to new models, the majority of non-early adopter purchases are STILL SDTVs.
No, CD-ROM drives weren't new in 1994, they were just going mainstream in 1994. My real computer was a 486 DX2/50 with 4MB of RAM, 250MB HD, 3.5 + 5 1/4 floppies, and a 240MB HD, in 1993. Shipped with DOS 6.0 and MS-Windows 3.1. But CD drives for computers had been available since at least 1990, even burners, but only on systems like SCSI Mac II's used for desktop publishing and costing >$10,000.
One can, by only mildly twisted logic credit Adolph Hitler with even more good acts: He helped build the autobahns, he ended the great depression in Germany, ended the world wide depression, was instrumental in the design of the Volkwagen Beetle, and helped jumpstart development of the modern Computer. It can easily be argued that without Adolph Hitler, Alan Turing would NEVER have had a chance to pursue his life work, and would have been persecuted to death as a homosexual much earlier. By extension, the transitor might never have been invented, and the integrated circuit.
What are you talking about? Apart from studio time, you can get the rest of that stuff for just a couple of grand. Professional sound? Pfffff. The mass market is too deaf to tell the difference anyway. Basically you're still recording for FM radio these days, and a $2000-$2500 will get you a good Mackie Mixer, (You don't need one of the $3million studio jobs, you're just recording 3-6 people.) a compressor, and several good quality condensor mikes. Add in an already owned computer and decent quality audio interface and you're set. It just doesn't take that much cash to do professional sounding audio these days, Sorry to break it to you, but you can get 1980's level studio recording in your garage for just a couple of grand, and 90% of people won't be able to tell the difference.
Hypothetically at least, humans have the ability to reason and to distinguish between "good" acts and "bad" acts. Animals don't. Therefore while animals are essentially assigned the status of the criminally insane or children (not compentant to be judged for their actions) humans are assumed to be compentant. Therefore, yes, if a human kills animals, it's the humans fault, because the human made the choice to do so; if an animal kills a human, its the human's fault, because the human made choices that resulted in his death, or some other human caused the human or animal to be in the situation that the caused the first human's death and it is the fault of the second human.
That's the difference. You either assert that humans are the only ones capable of moral blame, or that animals have the same rights as humans, or alternatively that free-will does not exist and all, and we're just "watching" a movie.
You've hit the nail on the head IMO. We had a lab fill with TRS-80 with LOGO in my elementary school too.
I think the pathetic thing is that all the extra complexity in modern programming languages hasn't bought us anything at all. Nothing they do wasn't done in generic C, or even older lanuages in the 70's and 80's.
I agree with the grandparent. He WAS in the right. And it was his fucking business. IMO, in a just world the correct response would have been to shoot her tires out.
They all seem pretty crummy to me, the Apple one is Bose designed and has even more horrible high end and boomy bass than the others. The horribly sad part is that it's fairly difficult to find a decent set of speakers these day, between overpriced boutique crap (designed to look stylish), and tinny satellite systems (designed to be hidden), both with horrid frequency response curves just distributed differently. Far too much focus on Wife Acceptance factor, in my not so humble opinion. There aren't any companies that even make anything vaguely similar to a Klipsch Cornwall, or comparable JBL's these days.
I rather thought they suceeded in the US by fighting a rear-guard delaying action, while waiting for an EVEN MORE* corporate friendly administration to come to power and call off the dogs. At least that's how I saw it.
*Please don't pretend the Clinton administration wasn't corporate friendly, it's just flat out wrong. The only difference was that Cliinton, being a Democratic Leadership Council owned democrat, at least put up an appearance of acting in the public interest, while the Bush administration has basically bent the united states over a table and made the whole country scream "Thank you Sir! May I have another?"
What the United States needs is the reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a slavishly loyal Congress, a meteor to fall on the Supreme Court, and about 20 years.
As much as I like the game, the interface is pretty crap. I'd recommend "Curse of Monkey Island" or "Full Throttle" instead. Or the older, "Day of the Tentacle" or "Secret of Monkey Island 1 or 2," or "Sam and Max Hit the Road"
The trouble with Adventure games is that they don't tend to be Million Sellers, instead, the good titles tend to have reliable sales in the 100,000-300,000 unit range.
In "The Escapist" Warren Spectre has been running a series of articles about problems he perceives in the gaming industry, and one of those is that there's now a huge funding gulf in the industry. You can do low budget titles ($10,000,000) and get funding, but its almost impossible to get mid-range titles funded (those in range of ($1-2million). Those numbers are production budgets BTW. Thus adventure titles fall right in the no-man's-land that's impossible to fund, a top notch adventure costing a couple million to produce, and then reliably netting two to ten times that number.
One of the things I find fascinating is that this problems is among the things Johnny L. Wilson (former editor in chief of CGW magazine) predicted in an editorial published in 1995. He was arguing it was one of the things we had to figure out how to avoid "now that gaming has gone mass market." As I see it, all of the things he warned against have in fact come to pass.
Ummm, Apparently you haven't heard, but before Tell Tale Games was formed, LucasArts was working on a Sam&Max sequel, it was apparently 90% finished or so, and then it was canned.
Irfanview is the Dog's bollocks for image viewing. Unfortunately there's nothing that really matches it on OS X, it's the one app I really miss after switching to Apple. It combines the ease of use of "Xee" (Xee is a new app, otherwise there's nothing really comparable on OS X, both are infinitly superior to preview.app for everything except.pdf) with most of the editing functionality of Graphic Convertor, along with a very nice batch processor. It's free, (as in beer for non-commercial use) and after Firefox, there's no app I would more strongly recommend for a Windows user.
As a matter of fact, if DarWINE ever gets up to snuff, I'll probably go back to using it.
Officially supported and legal shouldn't be discounted. The iTunes Music Store is a good example. If Nintendo manages to make their "Virtual Console" system at least as easy to use as the iTMS, and there's really no reason to think they won't, then that will be a big deal. It's one thing to say, "Well, I can do that on my modded Xbox right now, so what?", but not everyone is willing to do that (buy a modded Xbox). All Nintendo has to do is make the legal option easier and simpler for the average person, and they should succeed, just like Apple does with iTunes. I really don't think HD is an issue this generation. HD is still too expensive and represents way too small a proportion of the installed user base. I just don't see that changing, even in the next five years or so. Nintendo will add HD support to a console when it is cost effective to do so.
The Revolution is really exciting for many reasons, not just classic gaming support, but also open standards support in the form of SD cards (bye bye proprietary memory cards!), USB (USB Harddisk support WHOOO!), and in terms of the price of the developers kit ($2000, nearly anyone can afford to develop for the Revolution, and its not like it will be that difficult).
And I'd like to cite a practice called "culling the herd." If your kids are too stupid to survive childhood, maybe they shouldn't. I wish there were real vampires. Humanity needs a real, dangerous predatory animal to keep its numbers in check.
Well, given that the announced European pricing makes it look like the PS3 will debut in the USA for around $500, I'm getting more and more confident Nintendo is set to sweep this generation. At any rate, I am seriously psyched about the revolution, I'm going to be in retro-2D hog heaven this fall. I'm betting we see an announcement from Nintendo regarding Capcom's back catalog sometime in a couple of months, and that means all kinds of goodness!
Hold on there! While I can't imagine how to make an MMO in Hyrule work, I think Resident Evil 4 multiplayer would kick ass! It'd make for some awesome deathmatch fun.
Huzzah! Finally some evidence for something I intuitively felt, that 1MHz 1-bit sampling is inferior to 24-bit 48KHz sampling, which raises the question, why the heck don't we have a format that uses 24-bit 48khz, or even 96KHz, I being convinced that the 192Khz of DVD-A is just flat-out overkill, Human hearing maxes out functionally at 20Khz, and given that there's not even anything musically important over about 10Khz or so.
There needs to be a miniaturized DVD standard utilizing 24-bit 48Khz! Such a format would have the dynamic range of high quality vinyl, throughout the complete spectrum of human hearing.
I can see that, but I would argue that the whole "Survival Horror" genre owes a great deal to the Adventure genre. In many ways the gameplay elements are similar; they both involve exploration of the environment and puzzle-solving as primary gameplay activities. Combat tends to be something avoided, rather than sought.
On the other hand, of course, "Sam & Max Hit the Road" they certainly are not. As for Dreamfall, the press releases about it seem to paint it much more like "Indigo Prophecy", or "Tomb Raider" than the original, which has me worried. However, Ragnar Tornquist has shown much greater capability for writing than the guy behind "indigo prophecy" so it may work out alright. Still, two really major releases in 7 years does not a thriving genre make.
Additionally I think the Anonymous Coward that replied to my OP just proved my point for me. A good half of the titles he cites as showing the continued existence of the western RPG are just Neverwinter Nights Expansion Packs. Woohoo, there's a thriving market.
Why is it that everyone seems to believe all things are cyclical in nature?
Maybe because they ARE? See the "business cycle," trends in fashion, popular music, etc.
The NES was not released in America in 1984, according to Wikipedia, it was released in Japan in 1983, and then in America in late 1985, with a European release in 1987. Deeper in the article it notes that the 1985 release wasn't even nationwide, that didn't occur until February of 1986.
I would argue that shovelware isn't limited at all on the Xbox or PS2. Nintendo does strict testing to prevent it, but not them. There's a LOT of crap on the PS1, PS2, and XBOX. The PS1 suceeded due to:
1. Final Fantasy VII
2. The fact that all the shovelware was "3-D!", and therefore the consumers bought it up like they did the crap for systems in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
All what games by Bioware? How many have you noticed lately? "All those games by Bethesda"? Do what? They've only released like 3 RPGs in the past 10 years! And in case you haven't noticed most of Bioware's RPG titles game out around 98-2000, it's 2006 man. The western RPG ain't exactly enjoying a freakin' Renaissance. You'll be one of those people that claim "Adventure Games are alive and well!," simply because of the Silent Hill Series, and the older resident evils, which really aren't all that similar to classic Adventure games of the early 1990's anyway. The last really good point and click was "The Longest Journey," which came out in 1999. And don't get me started on Indigo Prophecy, the writing there got so bad it made the Wachowski brothers look like, well, something anyway.
It's naive to claim the video game industry wasn't dead because of the 8-bit personal computers like the Commodore 64. The C64 never had the market punch the 2600 had, and no actual software for the C64 had sales numbers like the 2600 games in during the '80-'83 period. The market positively wilted from million selling titles on the 2600, to companies being thankful for shipping 10,000 units on the C64 and Apple II. If you want to try and force it to be seen that way.
I think it is more accurate to describe the situation as the Video game market crashed so hard, the then miniscule, but still growing, Personal Computer market came to dominate for a short period of time. After all, the Personal Computer market goes back even further than the home PONG machines that predated the 2600.
That's the difference! While the market has migrated away from real gamers, we're still here. That's what Nintendo is aiming squarely at this generation. Nintendo appeals to two groups: Family friendly (where the "kiddie" accusation comes from, but Mario Kart is still a blast, and so is Pikmin) and the real old school gamers who never left, i.e. the people who played Gradius, and Contra, and Castlevania on the original Nintendo.
Gaming has temporarily (yes, Temporarily!) gone mainstream, just as it did in the early 1980's. This too, shall pass, Sony and Microsoft will fall, but Nintendo will remain, cranking out profitable quarter after profitable quarter. The mainstream audience demands tits and ultraviolence, so that's what Sony and Microsoft deliver, but the mainstream is fickle, and doesn't really give a damn about any one type of entertainment fundamentally. This era is going to come crashing down just like the Atari 2600, and Nintendo will be there, AGAIN, to pick up the pieces and move on.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even worse than that: the bulk of HDTVs now being sold are still going to early adopters, who are now UPGRADING their old HDTVs to new models, the majority of non-early adopter purchases are STILL SDTVs.
Illegal to experiment on prisoners? HAH! Do you know anything about how medical trials are done in this country?
No, CD-ROM drives weren't new in 1994, they were just going mainstream in 1994. My real computer was a 486 DX2/50 with 4MB of RAM, 250MB HD, 3.5 + 5 1/4 floppies, and a 240MB HD, in 1993. Shipped with DOS 6.0 and MS-Windows 3.1. But CD drives for computers had been available since at least 1990, even burners, but only on systems like SCSI Mac II's used for desktop publishing and costing >$10,000.
One can, by only mildly twisted logic credit Adolph Hitler with even more good acts: He helped build the autobahns, he ended the great depression in Germany, ended the world wide depression, was instrumental in the design of the Volkwagen Beetle, and helped jumpstart development of the modern Computer. It can easily be argued that without Adolph Hitler, Alan Turing would NEVER have had a chance to pursue his life work, and would have been persecuted to death as a homosexual much earlier. By extension, the transitor might never have been invented, and the integrated circuit.
Somehow I'm not really worried. This disease doesn't even have the potential to slow down human population growth.
eh? what makes it "illegal" to sell in-game items exactly? That the companies say you can't? That isn't legally binding. As should be obvious.
What are you talking about? Apart from studio time, you can get the rest of that stuff for just a couple of grand. Professional sound? Pfffff. The mass market is too deaf to tell the difference anyway. Basically you're still recording for FM radio these days, and a $2000-$2500 will get you a good Mackie Mixer, (You don't need one of the $3million studio jobs, you're just recording 3-6 people.) a compressor, and several good quality condensor mikes. Add in an already owned computer and decent quality audio interface and you're set. It just doesn't take that much cash to do professional sounding audio these days, Sorry to break it to you, but you can get 1980's level studio recording in your garage for just a couple of grand, and 90% of people won't be able to tell the difference.
Hypothetically at least, humans have the ability to reason and to distinguish between "good" acts and "bad" acts. Animals don't. Therefore while animals are essentially assigned the status of the criminally insane or children (not compentant to be judged for their actions) humans are assumed to be compentant. Therefore, yes, if a human kills animals, it's the humans fault, because the human made the choice to do so; if an animal kills a human, its the human's fault, because the human made choices that resulted in his death, or some other human caused the human or animal to be in the situation that the caused the first human's death and it is the fault of the second human.
That's the difference. You either assert that humans are the only ones capable of moral blame, or that animals have the same rights as humans, or alternatively that free-will does not exist and all, and we're just "watching" a movie.
I think the pathetic thing is that all the extra complexity in modern programming languages hasn't bought us anything at all. Nothing they do wasn't done in generic C, or even older lanuages in the 70's and 80's.
I agree with the grandparent. He WAS in the right. And it was his fucking business. IMO, in a just world the correct response would have been to shoot her tires out.
They all seem pretty crummy to me, the Apple one is Bose designed and has even more horrible high end and boomy bass than the others. The horribly sad part is that it's fairly difficult to find a decent set of speakers these day, between overpriced boutique crap (designed to look stylish), and tinny satellite systems (designed to be hidden), both with horrid frequency response curves just distributed differently. Far too much focus on Wife Acceptance factor, in my not so humble opinion. There aren't any companies that even make anything vaguely similar to a Klipsch Cornwall, or comparable JBL's these days.
*Please don't pretend the Clinton administration wasn't corporate friendly, it's just flat out wrong. The only difference was that Cliinton, being a Democratic Leadership Council owned democrat, at least put up an appearance of acting in the public interest, while the Bush administration has basically bent the united states over a table and made the whole country scream "Thank you Sir! May I have another?"
What the United States needs is the reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a slavishly loyal Congress, a meteor to fall on the Supreme Court, and about 20 years.
The trouble with Adventure games is that they don't tend to be Million Sellers, instead, the good titles tend to have reliable sales in the 100,000-300,000 unit range.
In "The Escapist" Warren Spectre has been running a series of articles about problems he perceives in the gaming industry, and one of those is that there's now a huge funding gulf in the industry. You can do low budget titles ($10,000,000) and get funding, but its almost impossible to get mid-range titles funded (those in range of ($1-2million). Those numbers are production budgets BTW. Thus adventure titles fall right in the no-man's-land that's impossible to fund, a top notch adventure costing a couple million to produce, and then reliably netting two to ten times that number.
One of the things I find fascinating is that this problems is among the things Johnny L. Wilson (former editor in chief of CGW magazine) predicted in an editorial published in 1995. He was arguing it was one of the things we had to figure out how to avoid "now that gaming has gone mass market." As I see it, all of the things he warned against have in fact come to pass.
Ummm, Apparently you haven't heard, but before Tell Tale Games was formed, LucasArts was working on a Sam&Max sequel, it was apparently 90% finished or so, and then it was canned.
As a matter of fact, if DarWINE ever gets up to snuff, I'll probably go back to using it.
The Revolution is really exciting for many reasons, not just classic gaming support, but also open standards support in the form of SD cards (bye bye proprietary memory cards!), USB (USB Harddisk support WHOOO!), and in terms of the price of the developers kit ($2000, nearly anyone can afford to develop for the Revolution, and its not like it will be that difficult).
And I'd like to cite a practice called "culling the herd." If your kids are too stupid to survive childhood, maybe they shouldn't. I wish there were real vampires. Humanity needs a real, dangerous predatory animal to keep its numbers in check.
Well, given that the announced European pricing makes it look like the PS3 will debut in the USA for around $500, I'm getting more and more confident Nintendo is set to sweep this generation. At any rate, I am seriously psyched about the revolution, I'm going to be in retro-2D hog heaven this fall. I'm betting we see an announcement from Nintendo regarding Capcom's back catalog sometime in a couple of months, and that means all kinds of goodness!
Hold on there! While I can't imagine how to make an MMO in Hyrule work, I think Resident Evil 4 multiplayer would kick ass! It'd make for some awesome deathmatch fun.
There needs to be a miniaturized DVD standard utilizing 24-bit 48Khz! Such a format would have the dynamic range of high quality vinyl, throughout the complete spectrum of human hearing.
On the other hand, of course, "Sam & Max Hit the Road" they certainly are not. As for Dreamfall, the press releases about it seem to paint it much more like "Indigo Prophecy", or "Tomb Raider" than the original, which has me worried. However, Ragnar Tornquist has shown much greater capability for writing than the guy behind "indigo prophecy" so it may work out alright. Still, two really major releases in 7 years does not a thriving genre make.
Additionally I think the Anonymous Coward that replied to my OP just proved my point for me. A good half of the titles he cites as showing the continued existence of the western RPG are just Neverwinter Nights Expansion Packs. Woohoo, there's a thriving market.
Maybe because they ARE? See the "business cycle," trends in fashion, popular music, etc.
The NES was not released in America in 1984, according to Wikipedia, it was released in Japan in 1983, and then in America in late 1985, with a European release in 1987. Deeper in the article it notes that the 1985 release wasn't even nationwide, that didn't occur until February of 1986.
I would argue that shovelware isn't limited at all on the Xbox or PS2. Nintendo does strict testing to prevent it, but not them. There's a LOT of crap on the PS1, PS2, and XBOX. The PS1 suceeded due to:
1. Final Fantasy VII
2. The fact that all the shovelware was "3-D!", and therefore the consumers bought it up like they did the crap for systems in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
All what games by Bioware? How many have you noticed lately? "All those games by Bethesda"? Do what? They've only released like 3 RPGs in the past 10 years! And in case you haven't noticed most of Bioware's RPG titles game out around 98-2000, it's 2006 man. The western RPG ain't exactly enjoying a freakin' Renaissance. You'll be one of those people that claim "Adventure Games are alive and well!," simply because of the Silent Hill Series, and the older resident evils, which really aren't all that similar to classic Adventure games of the early 1990's anyway. The last really good point and click was "The Longest Journey," which came out in 1999. And don't get me started on Indigo Prophecy, the writing there got so bad it made the Wachowski brothers look like, well, something anyway.
I think it is more accurate to describe the situation as the Video game market crashed so hard, the then miniscule, but still growing, Personal Computer market came to dominate for a short period of time. After all, the Personal Computer market goes back even further than the home PONG machines that predated the 2600.
Gaming has temporarily (yes, Temporarily!) gone mainstream, just as it did in the early 1980's. This too, shall pass, Sony and Microsoft will fall, but Nintendo will remain, cranking out profitable quarter after profitable quarter. The mainstream audience demands tits and ultraviolence, so that's what Sony and Microsoft deliver, but the mainstream is fickle, and doesn't really give a damn about any one type of entertainment fundamentally. This era is going to come crashing down just like the Atari 2600, and Nintendo will be there, AGAIN, to pick up the pieces and move on.