Here's a hint: when you avoid buying something you don't like, it's called "being a rational actor." You have to actually want something to actively boycott it.
If you didn't have the clock problem, then you also weren't using your PS3 on March 1st because that happened regardless of what changes you might have made to the system.
(Actually, it's possible you don't use PSN and were playing non-online games; you were still affected, you just didn't realize it.)
Honestly, if you're a traditional RPG fan, you probably want to be looking at the DS instead. You've got a ton of well-done remakes of classics like the Dragon Quests and Final Fantasy games, plus new games like The World Ends With You, ASH, and new entries to the Namco Tales series. Bioware's got a game forthcoming, too. (Most importantly for me, though, there's a Suikoden game headed to the DS.)
Plus, chances are that you missed out on a lot of the great GBA RPGs, like Golden Sun, Riviera, and Fire Emblem.
The odds would be mitigated if you had, say, 100 friends with launch consoles, but are only talking about the 10 that had problems; but then, that would also mitigate your point. Pshaw! What are the odds that a typical Slashdotter has ten friends, let alone a hundred!
Given how little effort Warner Brothers put into mastering their HD DVD titles and how universally they are panned for their terrible encoding, is it any surprise that customers avoided getting the HD DVD versions?
While I'm disappointed in the news, I don't know that WB will be that large a coup for BluRay. The BR group already scored THE major blow by signing Disney on as an exclusive.
Recent versions of Opera did change some of the keyboard shortcuts to match FF/IE, which was really annoying for long-time Opera uses. A couple that really irked me was changing control-N to "Open New Window" instead of "Open New Tab" and changing control-d to "Add Bookmark" instead of "Paste and Go".
The lag is not present with a 360 nor my PS3 so no it is not in fact my TV. (6ms) It's not the refresh rate that's at issue, it's the scalar processor lag. The Xbox 360 and PS3 are probably outputting at your television's native resolution, so it doesn't have to scale the image. The Wii probably has to be upscaled, which is just enough to cause a noticable lag. If your TV has a "Game Mode", where the signal bypasses the image scaling performed by the TV, you might want to try and see if that improves the response time.
[Y]ou can count the number of games worth playing by yourself on one hand almost literally.
You must have a dazzling number of fingers on your hands. Ever think of taking up piano?
Limiting it just to the last couple of months, the following single-player, non-crossplatform games have been released:
Super Mario Galaxy
Zack & Wiki
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Battalion Wars 2
Medal of Honor: Heroes 2
Geometry Wars: Galaxies
Trauma Center
That's not including any of the "perfectly fine for solo play, but better for multiplayer" games like Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, Ghost Squad, DDR: Hottest Party, or Guitar Hero 3, nor does it include anything released in the ten months or so before, including Zelda: TP or Metroid Prime 3.
Most of the people I've talked to who hated Crystal Chronicles never actually played it, and hated it based on the multiplayer setup and the fact that it was more action-driven. I enjoyed it a lot, but I do have to agree that it is tricky to get the scheduling down for multiplayer. I really hope Square does online for the Wii incarnation.
It looks like Wii will be getting at least two Crystal Chronicles titles, one standard and one WiiWare. From what I've read, it also looks like they may be trying to make the CC games all part of the same unified world, similar to Ivalice. In any case, Square seems to be more interested in expanding the mainline FF titles going forward, so there will probably be a Wii game as part of the FF14 "franchise".
Or opera. I never saw any ads at all even with FF. The only problem is I have not been able to block google text ads or the ads in search results on google with Opera. I haven't done it myself, but you should be able to use user stylesheets to disable the Google search ads. Check this article for some user styles that are linked in the comments.
Hardly comparable. With television, someone decides what content to show you, and you make a decision if you want to watch it. With the auto-updating ad-block filtersets, someone decides what content you never get to see, and you don't get to review what you never get to see or make any meaningful decisions.
It's also useful for games where the sequels reward you for having a completed save game from the previous one (such as Suikoden or Golden Sun). If I want to play through Suikoden 2 and get the full story line (as well as some nice bumps to some character stats), it's a good thing that I was able to use my DexDrive to make sure I didn't lose my Suikoden 1 savefile.
(As a bonus, you can pull the Suikoden 2 save file off the MC and hexedit it to fix the "McDohl" name bug.)
Warhammer isn't really a long-term sort of game. You tend to have scenarios that resolve themselves in at most three hours (depending how how weasely/blitz-happy your opponent is).
There's a number of historical military games that would serve the purpose. Advanced Squad Leader pops to mind most prominantly, mostly because I'm not a huge fan of the military game genre and am not up-to-date on what's new and popular. It's still in print and actively supported (and the company is owned by Curt Schilling).
Unfortunately, most of the really good, deep strategy games are out of print, gone with SPI and Avalon Hill. (Yes, Avalon Hill is still around, but it's just a shell.) Previous posters have mentioned some good options, like Civilization/Advanced Civilization. Other games in that vein would be Age of Renaissance or History of the World.
My personal favorite of the Avalon Hill games is Dune (without any expansions), but that's also a bit hard to find. You might be able to import a translated copy of the French edition, which I think is still in print.
The box claims a playing time of a couple hours, but according to the designer's website, the publisher changed the printed rules so they could get a less-intimidating, shorter play time on the box. The recommended variant rules on the designer's page stretches the game out to a much more interesting four to six hours (or more).
This seems like a good time to bring it up again and ask whether this is reason why the platform was abandoned, or a just-so story.
There's really shouldn't be a whole lot of mystery surrounding the retirement of the Xbox. Microsoft didn't own much of the IP that went into the machine. The original Xbox was pretty much off-the-shelf components that they didn't own the rights to. Microsoft wasn't able to renew the licenses when they expired, so they had no choice but to stop making them. The situation with NVidia was well-publicized: it's possible MS could have bought additional time, but at that point it just wasn't worth it. The 360 was on its way and was theirs, so while they could have squeezed out more royalties from lingering Xbox sales, it didn't make financial sense to do so.
Actually, that really should be the way to go in any community: that law to keep trouble out should not be necessary. But that's just wishful thinking of course. I do have to ask how many of us would simply pay off any damage if it's less than $1000 in fear of your automobile insurance going up if you start filing everything?
Off the top of my head, there's only one state mandates that you carry Collision coverage, which is used to repair damage to your own car (and that's because Michigan has some really funky no-fault laws).
The compulsory liability insurance required by the state is in place to pay for damage you cause to other people's cars or, more importantly, damage you cause to other people. Yes, it's money you will hopefully never see again, but it really is an investment against potential future financial ruin. It's a way for the state to protect its citizens by making sure that they will be cared for if they are hurt in an accident.
Personally, I have no problem spending $40 a month to make sure that if for whatever reason I cause an accident, I'm not on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars. More importantly, I feel better knowing that if someone plows into me, there will be coverage for my medical bills.
* Dragon Quest is rumored to be on its way to the PS3 next year but not official yet. Not surprising when you look at how far the Wii has fallen off in sales. So much for that waggle hype. You mean the same Dragon Quest that has been confirmed for the DS, with the spin-off which sold very well on the Wii?
Right. I'm sure they'll move development from the DS to the PS3. It makes perfect sense.
You are using two completely different sets of numbers to support your position.
The fact that a number of people were continuing to play Halo 2 on Live has little relation to the number of copies of Halo 2 that were continuing to be sold. In fact, there's an argument to be made that ongoing online play of a popular title could retard sales of other, newer titles.
Yes, Halo 3 will continue to sell modestly through 2008. The holiday season will see brisk sales and there will probably be another small bump in sales when the next significant price drop for the 360 is announced. However, there is nothing from the sales patterns of previous Halo games to indicate that Halo 3 will continue to sell significantly beyond the holiday season. It might come close to the sales of Halo 2 (8 million), but the price differences between generations (hw + sw) are probably too much to overcome.
Nintendo, on the other hand, has mastered the art of the long tail sale. Galaxy will probably end up selling more than Halo 3, by all indications. You're probably not aware of the fact that New Super Mario Brothers is the second best selling Mario title of all time, are you? Yet, it's sold over ten million copies, and continues to do so.
Unfortunately for your argument, from all indications the Wii is tracking ahead of the Xbox 360 in terms of attach rate. The attach rate for the Wii as of this July was around 6 (in NA), while the 360's attach rate was 5.4 as of February 2007.
Wii sells right now solely as entertainment machine. Because there is only a handful of real "games" for it - what is absolutely irrelevant to casual demographics which is fine with WiiSports. As well as it was reported numerous times that Wii has quite low attachment rate. Casuals do not buy games - WiiSports for 80% of people is more than enough.
Correction: It was not reported that the Wii has a low attach rate. It has been claimed by many, without any real evidence. However, Nintendo's quarterly report from July (I believe; I can't access it currently from work) indicates a world-wide attach rate of around 4.3 and a North American attach rate of just over 6. That does include Wii Sports, but that's still tracking ahead of where the Xbox360 was at a comparable time -- Microsoft reported in February that they had an attach rate of around 5.5.
If you're going to comment on misrepresentation, you might want to stop using vgchartz as a reference, as they are fond of the "make shit up and then retroactively adjust the numbers after reliable ones come out" method of accounting.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't suppose you have a citation for that? Every report I remember reading about either car in CR mentioned they were rebadged twins.
Here's a hint: when you avoid buying something you don't like, it's called "being a rational actor." You have to actually want something to actively boycott it.
Never mind the fact that the Chicago Tribune has always been one of the flagship conservative newspapers in the nation.
Not that I disagree with the overall sentiment, but it's funny that Chicagoans consider Kankakee to be "downstate".
If you didn't have the clock problem, then you also weren't using your PS3 on March 1st because that happened regardless of what changes you might have made to the system. (Actually, it's possible you don't use PSN and were playing non-online games; you were still affected, you just didn't realize it.)
Honestly, if you're a traditional RPG fan, you probably want to be looking at the DS instead. You've got a ton of well-done remakes of classics like the Dragon Quests and Final Fantasy games, plus new games like The World Ends With You, ASH, and new entries to the Namco Tales series. Bioware's got a game forthcoming, too. (Most importantly for me, though, there's a Suikoden game headed to the DS.) Plus, chances are that you missed out on a lot of the great GBA RPGs, like Golden Sun, Riviera, and Fire Emblem.
Given how little effort Warner Brothers put into mastering their HD DVD titles and how universally they are panned for their terrible encoding, is it any surprise that customers avoided getting the HD DVD versions? While I'm disappointed in the news, I don't know that WB will be that large a coup for BluRay. The BR group already scored THE major blow by signing Disney on as an exclusive.
Recent versions of Opera did change some of the keyboard shortcuts to match FF/IE, which was really annoying for long-time Opera uses. A couple that really irked me was changing control-N to "Open New Window" instead of "Open New Tab" and changing control-d to "Add Bookmark" instead of "Paste and Go".
You must have a dazzling number of fingers on your hands. Ever think of taking up piano?
Limiting it just to the last couple of months, the following single-player, non-crossplatform games have been released:
Super Mario Galaxy
Zack & Wiki
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Battalion Wars 2
Medal of Honor: Heroes 2
Geometry Wars: Galaxies
Trauma Center
That's not including any of the "perfectly fine for solo play, but better for multiplayer" games like Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, Ghost Squad, DDR: Hottest Party, or Guitar Hero 3, nor does it include anything released in the ten months or so before, including Zelda: TP or Metroid Prime 3.
Most of the people I've talked to who hated Crystal Chronicles never actually played it, and hated it based on the multiplayer setup and the fact that it was more action-driven. I enjoyed it a lot, but I do have to agree that it is tricky to get the scheduling down for multiplayer. I really hope Square does online for the Wii incarnation.
It looks like Wii will be getting at least two Crystal Chronicles titles, one standard and one WiiWare. From what I've read, it also looks like they may be trying to make the CC games all part of the same unified world, similar to Ivalice. In any case, Square seems to be more interested in expanding the mainline FF titles going forward, so there will probably be a Wii game as part of the FF14 "franchise".
Hardly comparable. With television, someone decides what content to show you, and you make a decision if you want to watch it. With the auto-updating ad-block filtersets, someone decides what content you never get to see, and you don't get to review what you never get to see or make any meaningful decisions.
It's also useful for games where the sequels reward you for having a completed save game from the previous one (such as Suikoden or Golden Sun). If I want to play through Suikoden 2 and get the full story line (as well as some nice bumps to some character stats), it's a good thing that I was able to use my DexDrive to make sure I didn't lose my Suikoden 1 savefile.
(As a bonus, you can pull the Suikoden 2 save file off the MC and hexedit it to fix the "McDohl" name bug.)
Warhammer isn't really a long-term sort of game. You tend to have scenarios that resolve themselves in at most three hours (depending how how weasely/blitz-happy your opponent is).
There's a number of historical military games that would serve the purpose. Advanced Squad Leader pops to mind most prominantly, mostly because I'm not a huge fan of the military game genre and am not up-to-date on what's new and popular. It's still in print and actively supported (and the company is owned by Curt Schilling).
Unfortunately, most of the really good, deep strategy games are out of print, gone with SPI and Avalon Hill. (Yes, Avalon Hill is still around, but it's just a shell.) Previous posters have mentioned some good options, like Civilization/Advanced Civilization. Other games in that vein would be Age of Renaissance or History of the World.
My personal favorite of the Avalon Hill games is Dune (without any expansions), but that's also a bit hard to find. You might be able to import a translated copy of the French edition, which I think is still in print.
As for games in print, I'll put in a recommendation for Warrior Knights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_Knights) .
The box claims a playing time of a couple hours, but according to the designer's website, the publisher changed the printed rules so they could get a less-intimidating, shorter play time on the box. The recommended variant rules on the designer's page stretches the game out to a much more interesting four to six hours (or more).
There's really shouldn't be a whole lot of mystery surrounding the retirement of the Xbox. Microsoft didn't own much of the IP that went into the machine. The original Xbox was pretty much off-the-shelf components that they didn't own the rights to. Microsoft wasn't able to renew the licenses when they expired, so they had no choice but to stop making them. The situation with NVidia was well-publicized: it's possible MS could have bought additional time, but at that point it just wasn't worth it. The 360 was on its way and was theirs, so while they could have squeezed out more royalties from lingering Xbox sales, it didn't make financial sense to do so.
Are you kidding? Have you seen the prices for the Sony-branded memory cards?
... The only question is what treasure does he drop, and how soon will he respawn?
Off the top of my head, there's only one state mandates that you carry Collision coverage, which is used to repair damage to your own car (and that's because Michigan has some really funky no-fault laws).
The compulsory liability insurance required by the state is in place to pay for damage you cause to other people's cars or, more importantly, damage you cause to other people. Yes, it's money you will hopefully never see again, but it really is an investment against potential future financial ruin. It's a way for the state to protect its citizens by making sure that they will be cared for if they are hurt in an accident.
Personally, I have no problem spending $40 a month to make sure that if for whatever reason I cause an accident, I'm not on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars. More importantly, I feel better knowing that if someone plows into me, there will be coverage for my medical bills.
You are using two completely different sets of numbers to support your position.
The fact that a number of people were continuing to play Halo 2 on Live has little relation to the number of copies of Halo 2 that were continuing to be sold. In fact, there's an argument to be made that ongoing online play of a popular title could retard sales of other, newer titles.
Yes, Halo 3 will continue to sell modestly through 2008. The holiday season will see brisk sales and there will probably be another small bump in sales when the next significant price drop for the 360 is announced. However, there is nothing from the sales patterns of previous Halo games to indicate that Halo 3 will continue to sell significantly beyond the holiday season. It might come close to the sales of Halo 2 (8 million), but the price differences between generations (hw + sw) are probably too much to overcome.
Nintendo, on the other hand, has mastered the art of the long tail sale. Galaxy will probably end up selling more than Halo 3, by all indications. You're probably not aware of the fact that New Super Mario Brothers is the second best selling Mario title of all time, are you? Yet, it's sold over ten million copies, and continues to do so.
Unfortunately for your argument, from all indications the Wii is tracking ahead of the Xbox 360 in terms of attach rate. The attach rate for the Wii as of this July was around 6 (in NA), while the 360's attach rate was 5.4 as of February 2007.
Correction: It was not reported that the Wii has a low attach rate. It has been claimed by many, without any real evidence. However, Nintendo's quarterly report from July (I believe; I can't access it currently from work) indicates a world-wide attach rate of around 4.3 and a North American attach rate of just over 6. That does include Wii Sports, but that's still tracking ahead of where the Xbox360 was at a comparable time -- Microsoft reported in February that they had an attach rate of around 5.5.
If you're going to comment on misrepresentation, you might want to stop using vgchartz as a reference, as they are fond of the "make shit up and then retroactively adjust the numbers after reliable ones come out" method of accounting.