Well, I've run into enough incomplete roms that I could never get to work that paying a couple of bucks for a legal (and working) copy of the game sounds good to me.
I agree. These days a good game that offers good competitive online play can be just as much of a time sink as any MMO. I know years ago I picked up the Half-Life Platinum edition since I had heard great things about Half-Life and finally had a system that could handle it. After finishing it, I tried one of the other games it came with called Counter Strike. The next few months are nothing but a blur of work, sleep, and Counter Strike. It was the only game I played for a long time, and didn't buy any new games for a really long time. Fortunately my addiction was broken by all the lame hackers whose cheating made me get fed up with the game.
Now I play a lot of City of Heroes, but since keeping up with others isn't as big of a concern for me, I'll take time out to play other games as well (that and go have a life away from the computer).
I don't like old games being left in the "grey" area. The few times in the past I downloaded abandonware I always felt the need to run a few virus scans across it just to make sure everything was ok. Being able to download an 'official' freeware copy would be nice, but I would pay to download some games as long as the price was reasonable (like under $5.00 for more recent games or larger downloads).
and this is one of the reasons that the industry is doing so poorly. Both myself and my local retailer don't have a problem with people downloading old, out of print games. But when you can go and download a book that just came out last week, then there's a problem. It's because you hurt everyone down the line. The publisher, printer, distributor, your local store, and the consumer. If everyone who downloaded new rpg material started buying the books, then the cost could go down since the volume of books being produced and sold would increase.
I've used those sites to track down numerous songs so I could go out and buy them. Usually because the song is stuck in my head and the only way to get it out will be to purchase it and play it over and over.
The way MS handles online play on the XBox is the reason I avoid buying games that don't have a good single player experience. I think the problem is that game developers are not allowed to make online games for the XBox that don't use XBox Live, which makes it a monopoly. Dev's need the option to handle XBox online games themselves, instead of having to rely on XBox Live as their only way to connect players across the internet.
The 40 million may have been the number of transactions whose information was stolen. That means that the same card could have been used for multiple transactions, which would explain why the actually number of unique cards is much lower.
40,000,000/(68,000 MC + 132,000 other cards)= 200 transactions per card. Sounds about right.
This is what vacation days are for. I had mine scheduled and locked in back in December. I did the same thing for Ep II and all three Lord of the Rings Movies. Plan ahead, it's not that hard to do.
Slashdot Mirror
IE 7 isn't available for Mac OS X.
Well, I've run into enough incomplete roms that I could never get to work that paying a couple of bucks for a legal (and working) copy of the game sounds good to me.
I agree. These days a good game that offers good competitive online play can be just as much of a time sink as any MMO. I know years ago I picked up the Half-Life Platinum edition since I had heard great things about Half-Life and finally had a system that could handle it. After finishing it, I tried one of the other games it came with called Counter Strike. The next few months are nothing but a blur of work, sleep, and Counter Strike. It was the only game I played for a long time, and didn't buy any new games for a really long time. Fortunately my addiction was broken by all the lame hackers whose cheating made me get fed up with the game.
Now I play a lot of City of Heroes, but since keeping up with others isn't as big of a concern for me, I'll take time out to play other games as well (that and go have a life away from the computer).
I don't like old games being left in the "grey" area. The few times in the past I downloaded abandonware I always felt the need to run a few virus scans across it just to make sure everything was ok. Being able to download an 'official' freeware copy would be nice, but I would pay to download some games as long as the price was reasonable (like under $5.00 for more recent games or larger downloads).
and this is one of the reasons that the industry is doing so poorly. Both myself and my local retailer don't have a problem with people downloading old, out of print games. But when you can go and download a book that just came out last week, then there's a problem. It's because you hurt everyone down the line. The publisher, printer, distributor, your local store, and the consumer. If everyone who downloaded new rpg material started buying the books, then the cost could go down since the volume of books being produced and sold would increase.
I've used those sites to track down numerous songs so I could go out and buy them. Usually because the song is stuck in my head and the only way to get it out will be to purchase it and play it over and over.
The way MS handles online play on the XBox is the reason I avoid buying games that don't have a good single player experience. I think the problem is that game developers are not allowed to make online games for the XBox that don't use XBox Live, which makes it a monopoly. Dev's need the option to handle XBox online games themselves, instead of having to rely on XBox Live as their only way to connect players across the internet.
The 40 million may have been the number of transactions whose information was stolen. That means that the same card could have been used for multiple transactions, which would explain why the actually number of unique cards is much lower. 40,000,000/(68,000 MC + 132,000 other cards)= 200 transactions per card. Sounds about right.
This is what vacation days are for. I had mine scheduled and locked in back in December. I did the same thing for Ep II and all three Lord of the Rings Movies. Plan ahead, it's not that hard to do.