It's more like an interesting titbit. Quite a few game developers are avoiding the Wii recently for major releases, even though it is the best selling console worldwide.
For a title like SFIV this is interesting, because the developers readily admit that it's going to be much like the original SF games, only in 3D, therefore there is no inherent need for performance hardware to enjoy the game. Make of that what you will. Maybe it's telling. Maybe it says nothing at all. Maybe that kind of conjecture is pretty useless:P. Who knows!
They are called right whales because they are the 'right whales to hunt.' Conveniently, they like to swim close to the surface, and after you kill them they will float, which made life easy for the big whaling ships 100 or so years ago. The sea used to be full of them. Now there are 350 left.
I see Apple iPods on the street every day. I see Apple iPhones on the TV constantly. I know Apple is the company to buy my technology from, because everyone else does. Therefore, when I come to make a purchase as boring as a new PC, I know Apple will make one I want to buy.
"I would describe myself as more of a casual gamer, but crap like this (and what happened with Bioshock) makes me want to completely avoid PC gaming entirely and stick just with consoles. My Gamecube will happily play any game I stick into it, without requiring an internet connection."
Oh ok. Want to play an obscure RPG based on your favourite cartoon series? Nope! That's only for the Japanese market, not you, you silly overseas buyer. But it's ok, it's in Japanese anyway, so no big loss. But hey, there's a version out in the US now, and it's translated into English! Want to import it now? Nope, you can't! That's only for the US market, you silly PAL territory buyer.
That is why I can barely stand to play console games any more. You can buy a copy abroad, in English, and physically hold in your hands your legitimately purchased product, but if you put it in your machine it won't work, because you need a PAL version. But there is no PAL version, and there never will be. Why won't Sony and Nintendo let me give them money for the stuff they are selling which I want to buy?
At least with PC gaming if you get crap like this there's a cracked version of the single player games on the net within 24 hours of release.
Perhaps western society has just enjoyed a greater awareness of what exactly is good and bad for the planet and other people over the last 30 years? I mean, when I think of great things that happened in 70's America I'm automatically reminded of black equality, the hippy movement, and the discovery of the extent of the environmental destruction of our planet. The Clean Air Act was just a consequence of this kind of social shift in priorities. Isn't it quite likely that the same people who started these movements have just raised their children to be nicer, more conscientious citizens?
"Unbelievable - "better position to compete"? Are they so incredibly afraid of Sony, then, despite their enormous lead? Or are things not quite as rosy for the XBox as various sources would have us believe?"
More likely they see that Sony Games is reeling, and Microsoft is moving in for the kill while they're off balance, by introducing all the features of their competitors and more. Certainly they're already a league ahead in terms of market adoption, but due to the immense cost of producing the console, and the amount they lose on each one, Sony will need to sell a certain amount of software in the life of the console to avoid bankrupting their games division. I think someone at Microsoft had a bit of a brainwave - what would the market be like in 5 years if there were no PlayStation 4?
Haha, I just realised something. Presumably there will come a time when an artist needs his compensation, so he writes to the relevant authorities to send it over. What are they going to do? Best case scenario, they give him his 3% back. The same 3% he earned off the back of his recording, and the government took away as tax. I mean, no income is actually being generated from this scheme, it's just shuffling money about! Perhaps this hypothetical artist will be thankful for the intervention, but I rather doubt it.
"I was curious so I asked around at work, it sounds like people are pay around four or five pounds ($8-$10). And I'm glad that I haven't had to guilt trip anyone into paying for it."
Anyone else find that interesting? I was just thinking about how much I would be willing to pay for an album, if I were going to set the price. About £3.50 was my answer. Then I come across this comment, and apparently some guys on the other side of England, in a totally different situation to me (i'm a poor ex-student on the dole, they "receive a decent paycheck") had roughly the same idea about a fair price. However, when I go into HMV music store CDs are £12 promotional price, £16 normal price. Perhaps £4 is the price our market dictates for this kind of medium. Suppose the prices are artificially kept way above a fair market value by some kind of monopoly - wouldn't people be incredibly driven to create another avenue of distribution, or to seek out that avenue despite the considerable hassle for the first time user? I wonder.
Face it, this decision is based on general public opinion on video games as well as political climate and other social factors. It's 100% arbitrary. If Rockstar wasn't the developer, they could avoid the controversy Bully and GTA created and actually rate the game on it's own merits. As it is, the decision smacks of teaching Rockstar a lesson, especially considering some of the films they've let through in recent months. So, if they don't want to change the content they could just wait 6 months, by which time the daily mail will have a new story about princess Diana, or immigrants, or some other piece of shit about todays fads killing our kids (my next prediction is Anime), and it will slip through without incident.
Could someone provide an outline of what the law actually says? We have this exact law here in the UK, and if a company does sell an 18 rated game to a minor it is a criminal offence. The clerk themselves are not personally sent to court however, but the company is fined a certain amount based on the circumstances, and then the offender is probably fired. The way I understood the proposed law, this was what the senator was suggesting.
Incidentally, considering manhunt 2 was just banned again here, i'd say our country has more to learn from yours than vica-verca.
"So far I count 4 Playstation models: 60 GB (discontinued in America but still being sold everywhere), 20 GB (discontinued), 80 GB, 40 GB. Also, notice that these models are not necessarily better as disc space increases. For example, the best one is the 60 GB (with full hardware PS2 compatibility)..."
Some smart alec may already have pointed this out, but the 60gb and 20gb versions originally released in the USA were the same as the 60/20gb versions they have in Japan, which had the emotion engine and full hardware backwards compatibility. The 60gb PAL version was different, in that it used the cell to emulate the emotion engine, but still contained some hardware that let it run PS2 and PS1 games. That makes 5 SKU's worldwide, which is probably giving their firmware developers some horrible nightmares.
Now here's the fun part - the 80gb model you yanks are now receiving is the same gimped out software emulation machine we had in the first place. Beware, the emulation rate was about 70% correct for PS2 games in the UK last time I looked, and you guys have perhaps 1/3rd again as many titles released in your territory as we do, which will take the rate of working titles down significantly. PS1 titles are significantly worse, although I have no idea how many of those work. The software backwards compatibility is a red herring, it is hit and miss at best.
Worthy of note is that the original 2 SKUs are still on sale in Japan, which to me suggests that consumers over there do not put up with the kind of bullshit we are seeing in our territories.
'Tabula Rasa' is latin for 'clean slate'. That explains why it was used in that episode of buffy, which was about erasing memory. It is the title of this game because each character starts life with no class at all, a 'clean slate', and then they specialise throuugh a tiered levelling system. It has also been set up to allow for backtracking, allowing you to forget your new skills and begin at the beginning of any given tier with a 'clean slate.' I will now write the words 'clean slate' in single quotes again, just to emphasise what every review of this game is eventually going to look like.
Thanks for the reply, but as I said I usually use my monitor, not a TV. The Xbox's internal settings were set to the native resolution and FPS that I use on my computer (and there is no filtering at all, because it's just a normal monitor:) ). I did actually spend a lot of time trying to fix the problem, as well as the letterboxing that use to occur on 5x4 monitors (which was fixed in a firmware update, kinda), but to no avail.
Just FYI, my dad has a nice 36 inch LG at his place, and I tried it out there. Same problem. I swapped the 360 for a PS2, and although I get a lot more pixelation the TV seems to sharpen up the image, which I actually find preferable.
And yes, settlers of catarn demo ran *perfectly* on both devices:).
'It's great news that both of these companies are taking machinima seriously enough that they have been willing to come out and authorize some kinds of machinima... That's a huge improvement over where we were before, which was (that) no one wanted to give machinima guys any kind of guidance at all.'
Just FYI, Microsoft have taken a very personal interest in Red Vs. Blue, even going so far as to have exclusive Xbox live releases. Blizzard have been making their own machinima (L70ETC - I am murloc), and rumour has it they contribute to warcraftmovies.com . This all happened at a corporate level way before their lawyers laid pen to paper.
It's quite interesting to see how each company handled the situation - Blizzard financed their own works and bought the community a home. Microsoft financed buying the best of the community. Typical of each company, i'd say.
This is actually a rampant problem on the xbox 360. I used to own one, and one of the first things I noticed about the machine was that images which should be crisp on your display were actually blurry around the edges. This odd phenomenon occurs everywhere, from the 360 dashboard, to the game menus and fmv's, to the in game graphics themselves. It seemed likely to me that this was because the machine is rendering things at a low resolution, and they trying to upscale by 20-30% in both x and y directions, which causes distortions in the image because it isn't a sensible division, like 100%.
Every single game i've played has this problem, except settlers of catarn. If you are reading this and you have a 360, go download the demo of this off live arcade and try it out. Notice how crisp and clean the visuals are? The game is rendered from the get go in your native resolution, nwhich results in a sharp image with no distortion. You also never see any stretching, because if you're using an unorthodox screen shape (I used my monitior, which is 5-4) it will use your exact resolution as the buffer size.
This post it entitled 'fuck upscaling,' because the fuzzy blur you get from every game the machine plays gives me a headache after about 2 hours play. If they want to reduce the resolution then fine, but just output whatever you render, don't upscale. I had to sell my 360, and one of the reasons was because of badly defined visuals. It should be the first thing people consider after high frame rate, in my opinion.
I remember the frustration after encountering the gesture based spells in Black & White on the PC. Nothing has changed. Abstract gestures suck as much now as they did then.
Yeah, boy was that game a flop! I'll just link wikipedia's list of failures which it encountered when it was released:
* E3 2000 Game Critics Awards: Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best PC Game, Best Strategy Game
* E3 1999 Game Critics Awards: Best Original Game
* BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards 2001 for Interactivity and Moving Images
* The Electronic Multimedia Awards. (EMMA) Gold Award Of Excellence
* ECTS 2001 for PC Game of the Year Power Unlimited Benelux,PC Game of the Year CD Action Eastern Europe,PC Game of the Year PC Games Germany,PC Game of the Year KwVideogiochi.it Italy,PC Game of the Year PC Hemma Scandinavia, PC Game of the Year Solo Juegos.com Spain
* PC World (US) for Best game of 2001
* ACADEMY OF INTERACTIVE ARTS AND SCIENCES, Nominated for six awards. It won Computer Game Of The Year and Innovation in Computer Gaming
* THE GAME DEVELOPERS CHOICE AWARDS (US) four awards. Excellence in Programming, Excellence in Game Design, Game Of The Year, Game Innovation Spotlight
* Gamespy, Gamer's Choice Of The Year (Strategy)
* GAMES MAGAZINE (USA) Game Of The Year
* NY times, Reviewers choice of the year's best videogame.
* PC Gameplay UK, Game of 2001
* Cnet's top five games of the summer, #1.
* CGW, voted number one by readers of CGW.
* Joint highest PC game review score ever on IGN.com [9.7/10] (joint with Half Life 2)
What a coaster that turned out to be.
Now, I can't say I have been able to play lair yet, and it certainly did not recieve the same quality of reviews as black and white, but I see no reason not to give it the benefit of the doubt. Most of the reviews I read suggest that if they couldn't get to grips with the control scheme in the first hour of play the game is poorly designed. Most of the reccomendations i've read from gamers suggest that if you persist and learn the control scheme, the game is surprisingly rewarding. Who do I believe here? Those are not mutually exclusive statements. One thing is for sure: if the control scheme is like black and white, but hideously complex, i'm in.
"German based company Festo has develop a bionic arm that emulates muscles (video included) with a product called "fluidic muscle." It works like a normal animal-human muscle but movement is achieved using a compressed air and valve system. This new type of prosthetic offers rapid response, small size, simple assembly and ease of control. On their website they show the range of fluidic muscles operating a car race simulator."
Slashdot Mirror
For a title like SFIV this is interesting, because the developers readily admit that it's going to be much like the original SF games, only in 3D, therefore there is no inherent need for performance hardware to enjoy the game. Make of that what you will. Maybe it's telling. Maybe it says nothing at all. Maybe that kind of conjecture is pretty useless :P. Who knows!
They are called right whales because they are the 'right whales to hunt.' Conveniently, they like to swim close to the surface, and after you kill them they will float, which made life easy for the big whaling ships 100 or so years ago. The sea used to be full of them. Now there are 350 left.
I havent seen any massive blackholes emerge and gobble up the sun or solar system.
You can't see them, they absorb light! They could be all around us now and you'd never know... until it was too late!
"Microsoft is already working on a game for the next-next-gen console to bear the Xbox name."
Sounds neat. The real question is, will they be controlling it with one of these?
I see Apple iPods on the street every day. I see Apple iPhones on the TV constantly. I know Apple is the company to buy my technology from, because everyone else does. Therefore, when I come to make a purchase as boring as a new PC, I know Apple will make one I want to buy.
Sincerely, the average consumer.
"I would describe myself as more of a casual gamer, but crap like this (and what happened with Bioshock) makes me want to completely avoid PC gaming entirely and stick just with consoles. My Gamecube will happily play any game I stick into it, without requiring an internet connection."
Oh ok. Want to play an obscure RPG based on your favourite cartoon series? Nope! That's only for the Japanese market, not you, you silly overseas buyer. But it's ok, it's in Japanese anyway, so no big loss. But hey, there's a version out in the US now, and it's translated into English! Want to import it now? Nope, you can't! That's only for the US market, you silly PAL territory buyer.
That is why I can barely stand to play console games any more. You can buy a copy abroad, in English, and physically hold in your hands your legitimately purchased product, but if you put it in your machine it won't work, because you need a PAL version. But there is no PAL version, and there never will be. Why won't Sony and Nintendo let me give them money for the stuff they are selling which I want to buy?
At least with PC gaming if you get crap like this there's a cracked version of the single player games on the net within 24 hours of release.
"Are they going to change their name to "Erotic Arts"?"
:). Although that might be more of a product description than a name...
Or "Electronic Ass"
Perhaps western society has just enjoyed a greater awareness of what exactly is good and bad for the planet and other people over the last 30 years? I mean, when I think of great things that happened in 70's America I'm automatically reminded of black equality, the hippy movement, and the discovery of the extent of the environmental destruction of our planet. The Clean Air Act was just a consequence of this kind of social shift in priorities. Isn't it quite likely that the same people who started these movements have just raised their children to be nicer, more conscientious citizens?
"Unbelievable - "better position to compete"? Are they so incredibly afraid of Sony, then, despite their enormous lead? Or are things not quite as rosy for the XBox as various sources would have us believe?"
More likely they see that Sony Games is reeling, and Microsoft is moving in for the kill while they're off balance, by introducing all the features of their competitors and more. Certainly they're already a league ahead in terms of market adoption, but due to the immense cost of producing the console, and the amount they lose on each one, Sony will need to sell a certain amount of software in the life of the console to avoid bankrupting their games division. I think someone at Microsoft had a bit of a brainwave - what would the market be like in 5 years if there were no PlayStation 4?
Haha, I just realised something. Presumably there will come a time when an artist needs his compensation, so he writes to the relevant authorities to send it over. What are they going to do? Best case scenario, they give him his 3% back. The same 3% he earned off the back of his recording, and the government took away as tax. I mean, no income is actually being generated from this scheme, it's just shuffling money about! Perhaps this hypothetical artist will be thankful for the intervention, but I rather doubt it.
"I was curious so I asked around at work, it sounds like people are pay around four or five pounds ($8-$10). And I'm glad that I haven't had to guilt trip anyone into paying for it."
Anyone else find that interesting? I was just thinking about how much I would be willing to pay for an album, if I were going to set the price. About £3.50 was my answer. Then I come across this comment, and apparently some guys on the other side of England, in a totally different situation to me (i'm a poor ex-student on the dole, they "receive a decent paycheck") had roughly the same idea about a fair price. However, when I go into HMV music store CDs are £12 promotional price, £16 normal price. Perhaps £4 is the price our market dictates for this kind of medium. Suppose the prices are artificially kept way above a fair market value by some kind of monopoly - wouldn't people be incredibly driven to create another avenue of distribution, or to seek out that avenue despite the considerable hassle for the first time user? I wonder.
Gears of War and UT3 are coming to the Mac, according to Epic's Mark Rein. Leaving it out of the news post is just an oversight.
Face it, this decision is based on general public opinion on video games as well as political climate and other social factors. It's 100% arbitrary. If Rockstar wasn't the developer, they could avoid the controversy Bully and GTA created and actually rate the game on it's own merits. As it is, the decision smacks of teaching Rockstar a lesson, especially considering some of the films they've let through in recent months. So, if they don't want to change the content they could just wait 6 months, by which time the daily mail will have a new story about princess Diana, or immigrants, or some other piece of shit about todays fads killing our kids (my next prediction is Anime), and it will slip through without incident.
Could someone provide an outline of what the law actually says? We have this exact law here in the UK, and if a company does sell an 18 rated game to a minor it is a criminal offence. The clerk themselves are not personally sent to court however, but the company is fined a certain amount based on the circumstances, and then the offender is probably fired. The way I understood the proposed law, this was what the senator was suggesting.
Incidentally, considering manhunt 2 was just banned again here, i'd say our country has more to learn from yours than vica-verca.
"So far I count 4 Playstation models: 60 GB (discontinued in America but still being sold everywhere), 20 GB (discontinued), 80 GB, 40 GB. Also, notice that these models are not necessarily better as disc space increases. For example, the best one is the 60 GB (with full hardware PS2 compatibility)..."
Some smart alec may already have pointed this out, but the 60gb and 20gb versions originally released in the USA were the same as the 60/20gb versions they have in Japan, which had the emotion engine and full hardware backwards compatibility. The 60gb PAL version was different, in that it used the cell to emulate the emotion engine, but still contained some hardware that let it run PS2 and PS1 games. That makes 5 SKU's worldwide, which is probably giving their firmware developers some horrible nightmares.
Now here's the fun part - the 80gb model you yanks are now receiving is the same gimped out software emulation machine we had in the first place. Beware, the emulation rate was about 70% correct for PS2 games in the UK last time I looked, and you guys have perhaps 1/3rd again as many titles released in your territory as we do, which will take the rate of working titles down significantly. PS1 titles are significantly worse, although I have no idea how many of those work. The software backwards compatibility is a red herring, it is hit and miss at best.
Worthy of note is that the original 2 SKUs are still on sale in Japan, which to me suggests that consumers over there do not put up with the kind of bullshit we are seeing in our territories.
'Tabula Rasa' is latin for 'clean slate'. That explains why it was used in that episode of buffy, which was about erasing memory. It is the title of this game because each character starts life with no class at all, a 'clean slate', and then they specialise throuugh a tiered levelling system. It has also been set up to allow for backtracking, allowing you to forget your new skills and begin at the beginning of any given tier with a 'clean slate.' I will now write the words 'clean slate' in single quotes again, just to emphasise what every review of this game is eventually going to look like.
Thanks for the reply, but as I said I usually use my monitor, not a TV. The Xbox's internal settings were set to the native resolution and FPS that I use on my computer (and there is no filtering at all, because it's just a normal monitor :) ). I did actually spend a lot of time trying to fix the problem, as well as the letterboxing that use to occur on 5x4 monitors (which was fixed in a firmware update, kinda), but to no avail.
:).
Just FYI, my dad has a nice 36 inch LG at his place, and I tried it out there. Same problem. I swapped the 360 for a PS2, and although I get a lot more pixelation the TV seems to sharpen up the image, which I actually find preferable.
And yes, settlers of catarn demo ran *perfectly* on both devices
Just FYI, Microsoft have taken a very personal interest in Red Vs. Blue, even going so far as to have exclusive Xbox live releases. Blizzard have been making their own machinima (L70ETC - I am murloc), and rumour has it they contribute to warcraftmovies.com . This all happened at a corporate level way before their lawyers laid pen to paper.
It's quite interesting to see how each company handled the situation - Blizzard financed their own works and bought the community a home. Microsoft financed buying the best of the community. Typical of each company, i'd say.
This is actually a rampant problem on the xbox 360. I used to own one, and one of the first things I noticed about the machine was that images which should be crisp on your display were actually blurry around the edges. This odd phenomenon occurs everywhere, from the 360 dashboard, to the game menus and fmv's, to the in game graphics themselves. It seemed likely to me that this was because the machine is rendering things at a low resolution, and they trying to upscale by 20-30% in both x and y directions, which causes distortions in the image because it isn't a sensible division, like 100%. Every single game i've played has this problem, except settlers of catarn. If you are reading this and you have a 360, go download the demo of this off live arcade and try it out. Notice how crisp and clean the visuals are? The game is rendered from the get go in your native resolution, nwhich results in a sharp image with no distortion. You also never see any stretching, because if you're using an unorthodox screen shape (I used my monitior, which is 5-4) it will use your exact resolution as the buffer size. This post it entitled 'fuck upscaling,' because the fuzzy blur you get from every game the machine plays gives me a headache after about 2 hours play. If they want to reduce the resolution then fine, but just output whatever you render, don't upscale. I had to sell my 360, and one of the reasons was because of badly defined visuals. It should be the first thing people consider after high frame rate, in my opinion.
Arrr!
Nice, but isn't /. the ASCII representation of the /. effect?
They've got nukes, dick head, and lots of them. Going to war with china wouldn't just be blasphemy, it'd be M.A.D.ness...
Yeah, boy was that game a flop! I'll just link wikipedia's list of failures which it encountered when it was released:
* E3 2000 Game Critics Awards: Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best PC Game, Best Strategy Game
* E3 1999 Game Critics Awards: Best Original Game
* BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards 2001 for Interactivity and Moving Images
* The Electronic Multimedia Awards. (EMMA) Gold Award Of Excellence
* ECTS 2001 for PC Game of the Year Power Unlimited Benelux,PC Game of the Year CD Action Eastern Europe,PC Game of the Year PC Games Germany,PC Game of the Year KwVideogiochi.it Italy,PC Game of the Year PC Hemma Scandinavia, PC Game of the Year Solo Juegos.com Spain
* PC World (US) for Best game of 2001
* ACADEMY OF INTERACTIVE ARTS AND SCIENCES, Nominated for six awards. It won Computer Game Of The Year and Innovation in Computer Gaming
* THE GAME DEVELOPERS CHOICE AWARDS (US) four awards. Excellence in Programming, Excellence in Game Design, Game Of The Year, Game Innovation Spotlight
* Gamespy, Gamer's Choice Of The Year (Strategy)
* GAMES MAGAZINE (USA) Game Of The Year
* NY times, Reviewers choice of the year's best videogame.
* PC Gameplay UK, Game of 2001
* Cnet's top five games of the summer, #1.
* CGW, voted number one by readers of CGW.
* Joint highest PC game review score ever on IGN.com [9.7/10] (joint with Half Life 2)
What a coaster that turned out to be.
Now, I can't say I have been able to play lair yet, and it certainly did not recieve the same quality of reviews as black and white, but I see no reason not to give it the benefit of the doubt. Most of the reviews I read suggest that if they couldn't get to grips with the control scheme in the first hour of play the game is poorly designed. Most of the reccomendations i've read from gamers suggest that if you persist and learn the control scheme, the game is surprisingly rewarding. Who do I believe here? Those are not mutually exclusive statements. One thing is for sure: if the control scheme is like black and white, but hideously complex, i'm in.
"Yarrrrr!"
Enjoy the news, now with correct English!