I read them as a kid so my view may be distorted, but I agree. I thought they were a lot better than the other novels. The prequels of course ruined them, as they ruined the entire expanded universe, but a lot of Zahn's setting is better than Lucas's. If cloaking is so practical (Darth Maul's ship), why the hell doesn't everyone do it?
While Bukiet is the first to admit he's not a baseball expert, in five out of the past six years, he says that his model has produced more correct than incorrect predictions. What? Does this even mean anything? If, say, he was right 51% percent of the time five years and wrong 90% of the time that other year, wouldn't that make his number of successes less than the expected number of successes from just guessing "win" or "lose"? I guess he's either really modest ("I don't like to brag, so I'll just say the accuracy is higher than 42%."), or a really, really bad statician.
Regardless, nice try at trying to spin this future minor drive upgrade as some 'bewildering and frustrating explosion of PS3 models'. Especially since it's extremely common anyway. The PS2 had a huge number of revisions and most people never noticed until it shrank. If you're gonna criticize them, criticize them for not having more versions, such as a harddrive-less one. That said, hardware-wise I think there are officially four versions now excluding region crap. CECHA (the original 20GB hardware), CECHB (the original 60GB hardware), CECHC (the emu one), and now CECHE. If CECHD exists, anyone know what the hell it is?
"Theory", "AI", does it matter what you call it? In my school, they're all sorta in the same part of the building. Read papers. My research is narrow, I'm an undergraduate, but a few years ago the task of logical filtering was deemed coNP-complete, and the group I'm working with recently found a pretty clever, logical circuit-based way to do it much faster. Again, I'm a naïve undergrad, but this hardly seems indicative of your "brute force" approach.
Spin this however you'd like, Ok. How many of these 989 extra European games are worth playing? I hear European gamers complaining about wanting games that are out in America all the time, but hardly ever the opposite. (This is not flamebait or anything, if these games are actually really amazing I'm 100% interested in trying them out) Heck, half the games out here are incredibly lame, so as long as their priority list isn't "1000 of the finest movie-licensed, celebrity-endorsed games of all time", I think it'll be okay. Also, as I understand it, "1000 titles confirmed to work" in emulation leaves open the possibility that a lot of the others will too, albeit with occasional weirdness... I for one find the region lockout stupid though, if they're no longer even using the PS2 hardware. If they dropped it they could advertise higher numbers, since numbers seem to matter so much...
I don't think it's really about them not understanding the market in Japan. The MSX was a pretty big deal, and they really could have tapped into that if they had actually cared about gaming at the time. The Xbox line was pretty much created to tie into their whole "media center" idea, and so they came into the party at a pretty dumb time (when PS2 was at its peak), and made a sort of half-hearted effort to gather Japanese developers. The failure of the first system in Japan has made it extremely hard to resuscitate their image there (where a used Dreamcast costs more than an Xbox), no matter what they do. Nothing is impossible, but they'd need to change their priorities if they want to do better there, and I don't think they're doing that.
I'm not entirely familiar with this, but is there any per-site registration cost to them? If there is, someone should run a bot searching for random garbage string domains. At least it would take them work to sift through the crap, and I'm pretty sure that's incompatible with their business strategy.
Yes, a search company teaming up with an agency that's always losing things! Maybe now they can find that Mars lander, those Moon photos, and what exactly Neil Armstrong said...
You don't understand Nicholas Negroponte, then. He's no particular friend of F/OSS, except as a mechanism for getting free labor for the OLPC project.
It seems amazing to me that you could pick up a hammer, use it to do things that are damn near impossible with your hands, and formulate no opinion on the value of hammers in the process. It's a basic part of human learning. This must be why this project is taking so damned long...
Actually, I'm incredibly good at pattern recognition on intelligence tests and the like. I wowed a AI lecture class once with this skill, on a group problem that was meant to be an example of how incredibly hard pattern recognition can be. When I grew up, NES was synonymous with, "piece of crap that never works when you first put a cartrige in." How greatly is that information affecting the present? It shouldn't have anything to do with my opinion of Nintendo right now, and it doesn't. My point actually was along the lines of pattern recognition, though: humans by nature tend to generalize and make disparate entities whole (in fact, we have to in order to interact with the world around us), but that kind of reasoning isn't always "right."
If they want to have their fingers in all the pies they should be up for it or get out of the kitchen.
So then we agree. "Sony" is too big for its own good, and this is what is making people angry at it. Our definition of Sony differs though. You consider it to be some sort of ethereal "essence" pervading the company and people who work for it, while I believe it to be simply a word. I'm not saying that there aren't management policies to blame, just that blaming the "company" is nonsensical, find something real to hate. My point stands that even if Satan himself were to rise from the ground and start replacing defective cameras he produced, that particular action wouldn't be worthy of criticism.
Nintendo replaces defective product, everyone cheers. Sony replaces defective product, everyone boos. Any peripheral PR problems aside, I don't understand how making a mistake and offering to fix it makes Sony evil and anyone else virtuous. Really though, I guess this is a side-effect of branding. Sony isn't one entity, it's hundreds of thousands of people, making thousands of products and services of the varying levels of quality you'd expect from such a large group of people and products. Unless defective products can be linked to flawed policy, I don't think you can peg these things on the company--the people involved come and go, some were probably fired for this. I'll probably get attacked for defending corporations, but what I'm trying to say is that "corporations" don't exist. They want you to think they do, which is the point of branding and PR and instilling "company spirit" in employees, but a Sony factory executive in China and an Sony advertising executive in Europe work for virtually different companies...
Well, aside from being a weird controller, which R.O.B. is too, the Power Glove doesn't have too much to do with the Wii controller. It's not like it really has the same functionality. The light gun is actually a better comparison, and that was relatively successful. I agree that innovation can't hurt Nintendo at this point, and I didn't particularly mean to rip on Virtual Boy. I find it fun, it's just in the grand scheme of things it failed for the company.
They did make R.O.B., though. They also made the Virtual Boy (utter failure) and the NES controller (which has formed the basis for all joypads since). Taking a risk and being different won't consistently work for anyone. If it did, there would be no risk. They'll succeed and fail on a case by case basis, and the Wii, because it's as unconventional as all those things, will be no exception to that rule. I've played it and I think it will be in the "successful" category though, even just the marketing is better...
I would personally stay away from any company whose management cannot understand basic copyright regulation and attempts to defend itself with such a nonsense argument as "the software is being given away for free".
And I would stay away from any "locally own small business owner". To, uh, owned for my tastes, presumably by themselves...
Actually, the medium used for core functionality is irrelevant. Nintendo's games have been on weirdass proprietary media since... forever... The only "format-pushing" is in the movie-playing function. Really though, each company has a decent justification: Microsoft isn't forcing you to buy it, and Sony's games will actually use it. Yes, the motive behind each offering is ultimately to get you to buy a bunch of movie discs in their format, but if you just ignore the entire format war you won't be too hurt. The Blu-Ray is a huge part of the cost of the PS3, but extra space might actually add to the gameplay experience... (No real telling either way yet, but it does have greater potential than DVD imo)
(although 2009 is more likely, given previous cycles)
Which is sad, since by Sony and Nintendo's cycles the PS4 and Wiii are expected 2012. By Microsoft's record, the Xbox 450 will come out the year HD-TVs actually become the standard in the U.S... What was the point of the 360?
it'll also be possible to buy PSone and PS2 classics you missed out on, as well as a selection of PSP games, from the PlayStation Store, and download them directly to your PS3.
Does that imply that the PS3 will have PSP emulation? That's would be very interesting, since there are a couple of PSP games I want to play, but I don't want to buy one, and none of them are really "handheld" material, they would all be better on a console in my opinion. Or is this a PS3-based PSP game store? (I didn't know you could legally download games onto the thing)
Honestly DQ8 was a great game, but this company has lost me. I played FFXII in Tokyo this past March and I could have sworn it was Xenosaga with a face lift. Story is great but when I drop $50 on a game I want to actually play!
I got the opposite impression. I thought the gameplay was fun, but the story and setting were a bleh mix of older FFs, Star Wars, and cliches... They could have done a lot better with that. You're right that they have a lot of cutscenes, but unlike Xenosaga those cutscenes don't result in very much character or plot development, and only a few of them are particularly there for the sake of action either. Awesome characters like Alsid only show up briefly. I really think the writers squandered the game's potential to be great. I started on FFX though, so maybe I have an unusually high expectation for "wow" from the plot, I dunno...
Slashdot Mirror
I read them as a kid so my view may be distorted, but I agree. I thought they were a lot better than the other novels. The prequels of course ruined them, as they ruined the entire expanded universe, but a lot of Zahn's setting is better than Lucas's. If cloaking is so practical (Darth Maul's ship), why the hell doesn't everyone do it?
What about all the dying Bothans?
"Theory", "AI", does it matter what you call it? In my school, they're all sorta in the same part of the building. Read papers. My research is narrow, I'm an undergraduate, but a few years ago the task of logical filtering was deemed coNP-complete, and the group I'm working with recently found a pretty clever, logical circuit-based way to do it much faster. Again, I'm a naïve undergrad, but this hardly seems indicative of your "brute force" approach.
I don't think it's really about them not understanding the market in Japan. The MSX was a pretty big deal, and they really could have tapped into that if they had actually cared about gaming at the time. The Xbox line was pretty much created to tie into their whole "media center" idea, and so they came into the party at a pretty dumb time (when PS2 was at its peak), and made a sort of half-hearted effort to gather Japanese developers. The failure of the first system in Japan has made it extremely hard to resuscitate their image there (where a used Dreamcast costs more than an Xbox), no matter what they do. Nothing is impossible, but they'd need to change their priorities if they want to do better there, and I don't think they're doing that.
I'm not entirely familiar with this, but is there any per-site registration cost to them? If there is, someone should run a bot searching for random garbage string domains. At least it would take them work to sift through the crap, and I'm pretty sure that's incompatible with their business strategy.
Yes, a search company teaming up with an agency that's always losing things! Maybe now they can find that Mars lander, those Moon photos, and what exactly Neil Armstrong said...
If the logo and the title are any indication however, I have a bad feeling about where they're drawing their inspiration from...
Actually, I'm incredibly good at pattern recognition on intelligence tests and the like. I wowed a AI lecture class once with this skill, on a group problem that was meant to be an example of how incredibly hard pattern recognition can be. When I grew up, NES was synonymous with, "piece of crap that never works when you first put a cartrige in." How greatly is that information affecting the present? It shouldn't have anything to do with my opinion of Nintendo right now, and it doesn't. My point actually was along the lines of pattern recognition, though: humans by nature tend to generalize and make disparate entities whole (in fact, we have to in order to interact with the world around us), but that kind of reasoning isn't always "right."
If they want to have their fingers in all the pies they should be up for it or get out of the kitchen.
So then we agree. "Sony" is too big for its own good, and this is what is making people angry at it. Our definition of Sony differs though. You consider it to be some sort of ethereal "essence" pervading the company and people who work for it, while I believe it to be simply a word. I'm not saying that there aren't management policies to blame, just that blaming the "company" is nonsensical, find something real to hate. My point stands that even if Satan himself were to rise from the ground and start replacing defective cameras he produced, that particular action wouldn't be worthy of criticism.
Nintendo replaces defective product, everyone cheers. Sony replaces defective product, everyone boos. Any peripheral PR problems aside, I don't understand how making a mistake and offering to fix it makes Sony evil and anyone else virtuous. Really though, I guess this is a side-effect of branding. Sony isn't one entity, it's hundreds of thousands of people, making thousands of products and services of the varying levels of quality you'd expect from such a large group of people and products. Unless defective products can be linked to flawed policy, I don't think you can peg these things on the company--the people involved come and go, some were probably fired for this. I'll probably get attacked for defending corporations, but what I'm trying to say is that "corporations" don't exist. They want you to think they do, which is the point of branding and PR and instilling "company spirit" in employees, but a Sony factory executive in China and an Sony advertising executive in Europe work for virtually different companies...
Well, aside from being a weird controller, which R.O.B. is too, the Power Glove doesn't have too much to do with the Wii controller. It's not like it really has the same functionality. The light gun is actually a better comparison, and that was relatively successful. I agree that innovation can't hurt Nintendo at this point, and I didn't particularly mean to rip on Virtual Boy. I find it fun, it's just in the grand scheme of things it failed for the company.
They did make R.O.B., though. They also made the Virtual Boy (utter failure) and the NES controller (which has formed the basis for all joypads since). Taking a risk and being different won't consistently work for anyone. If it did, there would be no risk. They'll succeed and fail on a case by case basis, and the Wii, because it's as unconventional as all those things, will be no exception to that rule. I've played it and I think it will be in the "successful" category though, even just the marketing is better...
If they capture one, that's some fancy state-of-the-art equipment they'll get.
Actually, the medium used for core functionality is irrelevant. Nintendo's games have been on weirdass proprietary media since... forever... The only "format-pushing" is in the movie-playing function. Really though, each company has a decent justification: Microsoft isn't forcing you to buy it, and Sony's games will actually use it. Yes, the motive behind each offering is ultimately to get you to buy a bunch of movie discs in their format, but if you just ignore the entire format war you won't be too hurt. The Blu-Ray is a huge part of the cost of the PS3, but extra space might actually add to the gameplay experience... (No real telling either way yet, but it does have greater potential than DVD imo)
"It has today come to my attention that the newly recently Mortal Kombat..." (Emphasis mine)
Christ, Jack, if you want to write a respectable cease and desist letter and not come off as an ignorant douche, at least proofread the dang thing...
You sure it's not this?
My favorite group is programs that contain "Arrrgh!".
The "lameness filter" totally ruined this post...
Honestly DQ8 was a great game, but this company has lost me. I played FFXII in Tokyo this past March and I could have sworn it was Xenosaga with a face lift. Story is great but when I drop $50 on a game I want to actually play!
I got the opposite impression. I thought the gameplay was fun, but the story and setting were a bleh mix of older FFs, Star Wars, and cliches... They could have done a lot better with that. You're right that they have a lot of cutscenes, but unlike Xenosaga those cutscenes don't result in very much character or plot development, and only a few of them are particularly there for the sake of action either. Awesome characters like Alsid only show up briefly. I really think the writers squandered the game's potential to be great. I started on FFX though, so maybe I have an unusually high expectation for "wow" from the plot, I dunno...