The PS1 games are only about £3.50 anyway, plus would you be playing them if they weren't free? If they offered something useful like online backup of your account's saves (I play on 2 different PS3s, plus I lost a lot of my saves when my PS3 died:/ ), I might subscribe, but money off some 15 year old games that I still have the discs for isn't really worth it to me. And I doubt it's worth it for even 5% of PS3 users..
Tell that to anyone who was dumb enough to sign up for PSN Plus (which I don't see any value in myself, but I did get an Xbox Gold subscription just to get similar levels of service to a basic PSN account..)
Well, I'm not really interested in being associated with any ideology, but one argument for privatisation would probably be for efficiency, as large governments (thought also large corporations) get quite bogged down just from their sheer size and inertia, but I don't have a problem with for example the NHS here in Scotland, it's always done a decent job for me. It's not perfect of course, but I'm happy that those who couldn't otherwise afford healthcare can still be looked after those who want to go private can opt out too I think. IMO it's great to provide the option.
Or people who do understand the need for backup, and use this as a convenient way to do so. As long as you're not just storing the files on a solitary machine and the "cloud", it seems like a pretty nice backup system to me. Something like Dropbox or Ubuntu one is a nice way to keep working areas in synch on different machines. With stuff stuff like code for work I tend to keep it off of these services and back it up onto work's servers, but not much of what I have is that important.
What, so they're happy to give the government lots of guns and money to invade other countries and protect themselves, but they're unhappy at the idea of the government actually providing any useful services? Talk about whipped.
Of course it's okay, just don't expect me to buy anything if I don't think it's worth it!
Well, this story goes a small way towards explaining some of the ridiculous prices from some Amazon 3rd party sellers. I saw a textbook recently for hundreds of pounds and wondered wtf they were smoking when they set that price.
The only reason I'd consider getting one of these is to get the PSX emulation, so I wouldn't want to load on something else. With my Streak I loaded on a custom ROM since Dell/O2 are so lethargic with updates, and I haven't had any reason to want a custom ROM on my Xoom yet. Someone has already posted up a link to a free Android PSX emulator anyway, so I'll probably have a look at that:)
Never had an issue with putting custom ROMs on my Xperia either btw (and I didn't buy that device, I was given it by work, and was relatively happy with it).
If they put it in but are happy for people to break it, they're either stupid (for wasting time and money on a feature they don't want), or just pandering to content providers.
Seeing the story about Amazon's cloud music service a few weeks ago just reminded me of the existence of Spotify. I decided to try out the premium service and I love it. I don't see why I'd pay similar amounts to use an Amazon/Google/Apple based hosting service for the year, plus have to buy music on top of that. The Amazon service is good in that they don't count stuff you buy on Amazon towards your storage space, but I still think Spotify has them beat on variety. The only reason you might not want spotify is if 320kbps MP3 isn't good enough quality for you. You can synch as many playlists as you want to play offline, so it's pretty much the same as using iTunes and synching to an iPod for people who don't have a cheap or flat rate data connection, except you have a much larger catalogue of music to choose from.. and you can play local music files in Spotify too.
All this storing your own music/video in the cloud stuff will be pointless once good subscription services and connections are widely available. In some places you can already do HD streaming without any fuss.. we're almost there, and I'm looking forward to it:)
MW2 is the only one I've played, but the Single player was IMO pretty awful compared to other action games I've played recently. The ice climbing was a fun little addition, but the rest of it was rather uninspired. Battlefield: Bad Company 1 single player was my favourite out of all these modern FPSes (not that I've played that many recent ones) because it had a great sense of humour. Bad Company 2 wasn't as good as BC1 (the script seemed awful.. like they'd not bothered with making it funny, but instead interjected random swearing to try to make up for it somehow), but still way better than MW2.
Hehe:) actually I generally try not to troll, I just love that Boxxy song, and having it as my sig has stopped so many people posting outraged responses to my opinions;)
I just got fed up of people constantly knifing me as soon as they appeared, so forced myself to use knife only for a while until I got used to the button (I was used to a different key with the Battlefield controls and I don't think the CoD ones were customisable to match it). I just ran around in a free for all in a very compact map without many open areas, and was surprised when I started getting scores that were consistently in the top 3. My normal play style is generally to be cautious (too much CS), whereas modern games don't really penalise deaths, they only reward kills and completing objectives. So doing the knife thing helped me to become a better player in these more modern games, and actually ended up helping my kill to death ratio too. I'd never heard of noob tubing until today, but it sounds like you tend to blow up yourself a lot with that too. Anyway, I don't see the problem with either knifing or using the grenade launcher. If a tactic can make you consistently better, why not use it? Camping is generally useless in respawn games like CoD, and using knifes (especially with Commando where you can basically knife instantly from a good 3 metres away.. it's crazy) and grenades seems like a smart tactic if everyone's rushing around.
Yeah home is generally better than the cinema, I just go to the movies as I have a card to see films at a flatrate (which crazily only costs something like 1.5x a normal adult ticket, but you get unlimited cinema for the whole month..). Sometimes the projectors at the cinema aren't perfectly focused so I'd actually be getting a better picture from a blu-ray. For some reason I noticed while watching The Wolfman that the picture was especially good though, I'm guessing it was a "digital projector".
It really depends on the type of content for the quality that I'm prepared to settle for. With action blockbusters and sci-fi type stuff I'll want good quality, but if it's just a sitcom or drama then I'm happy with DVD or SD streaming as these things tend to be more about the plot than the visuals/music. I've even managed to watch some VHS tapes in the last few years and forget that the quality was awful just because I was getting into the story.
I bought MW2 for PS3 not long after it came out, and I still find it enjoyable (love knife rushing with commando pro, that's when I started getting decent scores). There are still players of course, though one of my friends kept trying to get me to get Black Ops despite it basically being the same game with some different maps (I haven't actually tried it, but I played one of the WWII CoD games in the past and if felt exactly the same as MW2).
Their ways of exploring its "potential to be even better" is by pumping out more and more frequent updates though. The real way to make it better for the consumer is to release less often so that there are more people that can afford to be playing the latest version with everyone else. Also releasing map updates for free, or allowing custom maps, etc. Really if I was desperate for a good FPS experience I'd go back to the PC and Source based mods..
Guitar Hero and Rock Band "had a huge playerbase, sold well, engaged people for hundreds of hours in multplayer. By every metric possible, the game excels and has the potential to be even better". I'm sure I read hat they made more money than any other genre of game, probably mostly thanks to overpriced peripherals. They killed off interest by pumping out wayyyyyyyy too many versions in a short space of time and far too many fancy new peripherals. Once a year updates would have been fine. Leaving people wanting slightly is better than pandering to their instant gratification nature, otherwise they just get bored.
Exactly. I've bought one CoD game so far. Another came out a few months later and everyone seemed to want to play that instead, despite it being pretty much the same game, just with some different maps. Compared to how things were with Counter-Strike when I was really into my FPSes - free mod, hundreds/thousands of maps available to play for free that can be downloaded from servers if you don't have them... the whole DLC thing is just a massive step backwards for the consumer.
I hate "episodic content" and DLC - if I know in advance that a game is planned in "episodes" I'll tend to wait until all of them come out before playing (for example Monkey Island 5 - great game, no real point being sold in "episodes"). As for DLC I tend to just avoid it unless it's very cheap, or very good.
You obviously don't know anything about how to make pretty graphics then. For one thing, some consoles used shared memory for standard and video RAM. With more RAM, you can have larger draw distances (ie more of the world loaded into RAM at the same time), higher resolution textures, more variety in textures, more complex models, better reflections and anti-aliasing, and so on. Why do you think really high end graphics cards have something like 2GB of RAM these days?
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The PS1 games are only about £3.50 anyway, plus would you be playing them if they weren't free? If they offered something useful like online backup of your account's saves (I play on 2 different PS3s, plus I lost a lot of my saves when my PS3 died :/ ), I might subscribe, but money off some 15 year old games that I still have the discs for isn't really worth it to me. And I doubt it's worth it for even 5% of PS3 users..
Tell that to anyone who was dumb enough to sign up for PSN Plus (which I don't see any value in myself, but I did get an Xbox Gold subscription just to get similar levels of service to a basic PSN account..)
The sellers want to sell just as much (or more!) than you want to buy. This will sort itself out soon enough.
Well, I'm not really interested in being associated with any ideology, but one argument for privatisation would probably be for efficiency, as large governments (thought also large corporations) get quite bogged down just from their sheer size and inertia, but I don't have a problem with for example the NHS here in Scotland, it's always done a decent job for me. It's not perfect of course, but I'm happy that those who couldn't otherwise afford healthcare can still be looked after those who want to go private can opt out too I think. IMO it's great to provide the option.
Offline porn collections are largely unnecessary now that we have decent connections and streaming.
Or people who do understand the need for backup, and use this as a convenient way to do so. As long as you're not just storing the files on a solitary machine and the "cloud", it seems like a pretty nice backup system to me. Something like Dropbox or Ubuntu one is a nice way to keep working areas in synch on different machines. With stuff stuff like code for work I tend to keep it off of these services and back it up onto work's servers, but not much of what I have is that important.
I hear that space is a pretty freaky place.
What, so they're happy to give the government lots of guns and money to invade other countries and protect themselves, but they're unhappy at the idea of the government actually providing any useful services? Talk about whipped.
has made an insightful post!
Of course it's okay, just don't expect me to buy anything if I don't think it's worth it!
Well, this story goes a small way towards explaining some of the ridiculous prices from some Amazon 3rd party sellers. I saw a textbook recently for hundreds of pounds and wondered wtf they were smoking when they set that price.
I meant on my Xoom. Why would you need a 3rd party emulator on the Sony devices?
The only reason I'd consider getting one of these is to get the PSX emulation, so I wouldn't want to load on something else. With my Streak I loaded on a custom ROM since Dell/O2 are so lethargic with updates, and I haven't had any reason to want a custom ROM on my Xoom yet. Someone has already posted up a link to a free Android PSX emulator anyway, so I'll probably have a look at that :)
Never had an issue with putting custom ROMs on my Xperia either btw (and I didn't buy that device, I was given it by work, and was relatively happy with it).
If they put it in but are happy for people to break it, they're either stupid (for wasting time and money on a feature they don't want), or just pandering to content providers.
We're far more mature than that here in the gaming section.
Thanks! Hope it works nicely with Honeycomb :)
What company doesn't "react badly" to people trying to get around their DRM?
Seeing the story about Amazon's cloud music service a few weeks ago just reminded me of the existence of Spotify. I decided to try out the premium service and I love it. I don't see why I'd pay similar amounts to use an Amazon/Google/Apple based hosting service for the year, plus have to buy music on top of that. The Amazon service is good in that they don't count stuff you buy on Amazon towards your storage space, but I still think Spotify has them beat on variety. The only reason you might not want spotify is if 320kbps MP3 isn't good enough quality for you. You can synch as many playlists as you want to play offline, so it's pretty much the same as using iTunes and synching to an iPod for people who don't have a cheap or flat rate data connection, except you have a much larger catalogue of music to choose from.. and you can play local music files in Spotify too.
All this storing your own music/video in the cloud stuff will be pointless once good subscription services and connections are widely available. In some places you can already do HD streaming without any fuss.. we're almost there, and I'm looking forward to it :)
MW2 is the only one I've played, but the Single player was IMO pretty awful compared to other action games I've played recently. The ice climbing was a fun little addition, but the rest of it was rather uninspired. Battlefield: Bad Company 1 single player was my favourite out of all these modern FPSes (not that I've played that many recent ones) because it had a great sense of humour. Bad Company 2 wasn't as good as BC1 (the script seemed awful.. like they'd not bothered with making it funny, but instead interjected random swearing to try to make up for it somehow), but still way better than MW2.
Hehe :) actually I generally try not to troll, I just love that Boxxy song, and having it as my sig has stopped so many people posting outraged responses to my opinions ;)
I just got fed up of people constantly knifing me as soon as they appeared, so forced myself to use knife only for a while until I got used to the button (I was used to a different key with the Battlefield controls and I don't think the CoD ones were customisable to match it). I just ran around in a free for all in a very compact map without many open areas, and was surprised when I started getting scores that were consistently in the top 3. My normal play style is generally to be cautious (too much CS), whereas modern games don't really penalise deaths, they only reward kills and completing objectives. So doing the knife thing helped me to become a better player in these more modern games, and actually ended up helping my kill to death ratio too. I'd never heard of noob tubing until today, but it sounds like you tend to blow up yourself a lot with that too. Anyway, I don't see the problem with either knifing or using the grenade launcher. If a tactic can make you consistently better, why not use it? Camping is generally useless in respawn games like CoD, and using knifes (especially with Commando where you can basically knife instantly from a good 3 metres away.. it's crazy) and grenades seems like a smart tactic if everyone's rushing around.
Yeah home is generally better than the cinema, I just go to the movies as I have a card to see films at a flatrate (which crazily only costs something like 1.5x a normal adult ticket, but you get unlimited cinema for the whole month..). Sometimes the projectors at the cinema aren't perfectly focused so I'd actually be getting a better picture from a blu-ray. For some reason I noticed while watching The Wolfman that the picture was especially good though, I'm guessing it was a "digital projector".
It really depends on the type of content for the quality that I'm prepared to settle for. With action blockbusters and sci-fi type stuff I'll want good quality, but if it's just a sitcom or drama then I'm happy with DVD or SD streaming as these things tend to be more about the plot than the visuals/music. I've even managed to watch some VHS tapes in the last few years and forget that the quality was awful just because I was getting into the story.
I bought MW2 for PS3 not long after it came out, and I still find it enjoyable (love knife rushing with commando pro, that's when I started getting decent scores). There are still players of course, though one of my friends kept trying to get me to get Black Ops despite it basically being the same game with some different maps (I haven't actually tried it, but I played one of the WWII CoD games in the past and if felt exactly the same as MW2).
Their ways of exploring its "potential to be even better" is by pumping out more and more frequent updates though. The real way to make it better for the consumer is to release less often so that there are more people that can afford to be playing the latest version with everyone else. Also releasing map updates for free, or allowing custom maps, etc. Really if I was desperate for a good FPS experience I'd go back to the PC and Source based mods..
Guitar Hero and Rock Band "had a huge playerbase, sold well, engaged people for hundreds of hours in multplayer. By every metric possible, the game excels and has the potential to be even better". I'm sure I read hat they made more money than any other genre of game, probably mostly thanks to overpriced peripherals. They killed off interest by pumping out wayyyyyyyy too many versions in a short space of time and far too many fancy new peripherals. Once a year updates would have been fine. Leaving people wanting slightly is better than pandering to their instant gratification nature, otherwise they just get bored.
Exactly. I've bought one CoD game so far. Another came out a few months later and everyone seemed to want to play that instead, despite it being pretty much the same game, just with some different maps. Compared to how things were with Counter-Strike when I was really into my FPSes - free mod, hundreds/thousands of maps available to play for free that can be downloaded from servers if you don't have them... the whole DLC thing is just a massive step backwards for the consumer.
I hate "episodic content" and DLC - if I know in advance that a game is planned in "episodes" I'll tend to wait until all of them come out before playing (for example Monkey Island 5 - great game, no real point being sold in "episodes"). As for DLC I tend to just avoid it unless it's very cheap, or very good.
Even Amazon had outages recently, I think he was perhaps being sarcastic with respects to that.
You obviously don't know anything about how to make pretty graphics then. For one thing, some consoles used shared memory for standard and video RAM. With more RAM, you can have larger draw distances (ie more of the world loaded into RAM at the same time), higher resolution textures, more variety in textures, more complex models, better reflections and anti-aliasing, and so on. Why do you think really high end graphics cards have something like 2GB of RAM these days?