I enjoy playing more than one character at a time in WoW. I don't do same class setups and I control everything manually, so it's a bit different than you've seen in those quad-boxing elemental shaman videos. It's also all done on the same PC with dual monitors. I have three high-level pairs right now... enhancement shaman + fire mage, protection paladin + affliction warlock and arms warrior + holy priest.
The idea of the shaman+mage combo is that they're two DPS trying to kill the mob as fast as possible, but what makes it nice is that enhancement shamans tend to have lulls in their DPS as they're very bursty with Windfury and crits. The mage helps make up for these bursts by simply throwing a couple spells into the mix. It's rarely anything more than maybe a scorch or two and if necessary, fire blast. Usually the shaman is good enough to get the mob down very far in the first few seconds.
The priest+warrior was started because of how much I disliked leveling my warrior to 60 in the early days of WoW. It's honestly not very fast unless I fight more than one thing at a time (go go sweeping strikes!) in which this combo simply can last quite a long time. So essentially, if I want to maximize time on this combo, I need to literally be fighting 4+ mobs at a time. Also, a priest helps negate one factor that hurts a warrior... the time between fights (which affects your left over rage).
The paladin+warlock was more or less setup to assist both characters. One could easily use a Voidwalker as a warlock or simply chain-fear a mob until it dies, but at times, this can be more mana intensive and the voidwalker isn't necessarily the best at holding aggro and is limited against multiple mobs. The Paladin is more like a second pet for my Warlock... an enhanced Void Walker in a sense. The real benefit is for my Paladin as the warlock definitely provides DPS which is what the protadin lacks.
Only negative aspect I can say about this is sometimes you simply don't learn everything about your class. Sometimes it's figuring out how to beat a difficult situation that shows the possible amazing abilities that your class has that may not be exactly obvious.
You don't find a lot of tanks in WoW, because of how the spec is so poor at doing anything other than tanking. Sure, you can kill a mob, but hand-in-hand with it taking forever... it's awfully boring.
Blizzard is actually changing this in WotLK by taking a few key talents in each class that has a tanking capability and adding them into the skills. For example, warriors will now get Shield Slam at level 40. Also, Defensive Stance will now receive the additional threat enhancement from Defiance by default. Paladins are having the +threat modifier removed from Improved Righteous Fury and it will be put into the spell by default. Although, I don't think I read anything about Holy Shield.
The only thing that I really find vastly different between Vanilla WoW and TBC is the incredibly large amount of grinding that you almost have to do. In vanilla WoW, the grinding was typically for bonuses. For example, a Winterspring Frostsaber had no point other than having a cool mount. Also, you could grind Argent Dawn rep to get a pattern or two and make your Naxxramas attunement cheaper. Thorium Brotherhood to get Dark Iron plate for tanks to use in MC/BWL. For the most part, rep wasn't really required for anything important. I personally don't mind the reputation so much in TBC... except for the Scryer and Aldor idea of splitting profession stuff up amongst them. That's just pretty evil to do to people that want all of them.
Personally, I think the Death Knights will be a lot of fun, because they look like they'll require a bit more management than most classes due to their two-resource (runes and runic power) design.
Just get a smart Paladin to judge Seal of Justice and the druid can no longer run faster than 100%. Seal of Justice also works on mounts, but the big deal is that Seal of Justice (as mentioned in the tool-tip) is not considered a movement impairing effect and therefore a druid shapeshift does not remove it.
However, it can be removed by a Priest, Paladin or a Warlock's Felhunter as it is a magic effect.
Blazing Speed has a chance to fail if the rogue has enough points in Assassination to get Vile Poisons. This is also true of Gnome Mages that try to use Escape Artist. There are a ton of different variables that can go into how easily (or how difficult it is) to get away from a rogue as a mage.
Rogues are the one class you don't want to let get close to you and with Blizzard's nerf of Adrenaline Rush and the buff to Shadowstep, it pushed more rogues to the latter (where some use Mutilate now with the Improved Backstab -> Piercing Wounds change). So, essentially, Blizzard's buff to Shadowstep pushed rogues into a build that is quite anti-mage, but even then, it's not impossible to defeat a rogue as a mage.
Illidan wasn't included in The Burning Crusade either, but it's not like you had to pay for the patch to include the Black Temple nor will you have to pay for the patch that will add Icecrown Tower into WotLK.
1) ASUS has released a version of the EeePC with a reduced version of Windows XP on it.
2) The article doesn't mention any poll regarding how many EeePC users have installed Windows XP over the linux install on their EeePC.
3) I RTFA'd and I still don't see how they're correlating falling SSD prices becoming Microsoft's enemy. Linux was installed on the EeePC to keep the prices down, but ASUS realized some users would want XP and even included a driver CD with XP drivers on it! The only issue I think Microsoft had with the EeePC is that they didn't have a good "official" version of XP that works well with SSD as SSDs have limited writes, so some users prefer turning off virtual memory and removing other features that tend to write in the background. Using RAM drives is fairly popular too as they serve as a place to store browser cache, etc.
I have a EeePC 4G Surf and I installed Windows XP on mine. The Linux distro was alright, but out of the box it didn't interface well with my network (streaming files and network shares were a bit of a pain), which XP had no problem with.
Even as it states in the originating Wired DIY Wiki page, "Also, consider just buying the movie new: a blank Blu-Ray disc is from $15-$25 for write-once media." (Note that we are also not considering the money for the BR burner).
Now, I'm no studio exec, but the chances that a studio will re-release in Blu-Ray or put out old Blu-Ray versions (movies such as Shooter that were pulled from Blu-Ray once Paramount went HD-DVD exclusive) is fairly decent. This sounds like a huge time and money sink to me and for my HD-DVD movies? I'd rather just wait until they come out on Blu-Ray to buy them again.
I actually like Vista (as I just submit myself to public flaming for such:P) but I'm still interested in what people find so poor about it. I won't say that I've had a perfect time with Vista as that's not true, but in comparison, the issues I've had have been minimal. I always turn off UAC as it does provide a level of protection, but I've been using PCs for awhile and I'm sure the level of annoyance > level of protection for me. I learned not to execute Britknee_Spers_Nudz.exe!
The annoyance that I tend to run into a lot is when you create a shortcut (via Send to Desktop or whatever) and you delete the target of that shortcut. Then when you try to delete the shortcut, Explorer will hang for around 30 seconds. I assume it's trying to access the target to say, "hey, this is an installed program! you should use Program Manager to remove it!" So yeah, it seems like a poor omission in file checking logic, but oh well, I rarely hit that problem.
One thing I noticed is when I went to help my friend's step-father with installing an older application (QuickBooks) on his new Dell Laptop with Vista, it wouldn't install. Vista kept reporting that it needed a compatible version of Flash (?). Going to the vendor's website, there was a patch but it never worked. I think that may be a fault in Vista for not being as helpful as it should be in reporting how to solve the incompatibility, but even when we circumvented the automatic help, Intuit's website wasn't that useful either.
So in short, I'm actually tempted to check this book out to see what people really dislike about Vista as I've heard people trash-talk it and when I ask them what's so bad... they tend to just say, "well, I heard..." Nothing better than knowing your enemy's play book;). Doubt I'd need to buy it as a simple skim would be sufficient.
"they will benefit from Blu-Ray's higher transfer rates"
I was under the impression that the Blu-ray drive in the PS3 has worse transfer rates than the DVD drive in the 360? This is the reason that games like Devil May Cry 4 are using the HDD (some more than others, the example installs to the HDD where some games use it as a "buffer" of sorts (some 360 games will do this too if a HDD is detected)). This isn't to say that all Blu-ray drives will always have worse transfer rates as the PS3 only has a 2x drive and I believe there are already 4x drives available for PC use.
Well, on the PC there are places like FilePlanet that provide exclusive demos/betas to their paying subscribers only. You either don't get this demo at all or you have to wait until the exclusivity runs out.
I'm actually kind of glad that my gold subscription actually has a sense of worth to it now more than just playing games online (which I don't do all that often anyway). Also, as long as the week delay doesn't put the demo out for Silver members after the game comes out, I don't see where the actual problem is. Sounds like people don't want to hear others clamoring about how great a demo is and they can't remark because they can't get it.
I actually just started this recently. My 360 gave me a red ring and after some net searching, I found out it was a HDD error. I've never heard anyone else mention this so I was a bit wary, but I kind of brushed it off. Then a month-ish later, it happened again, so I decided to see if EB Games had any used memory cards. They had a 64MB one for $20, so I picked that up and backed up any save data that could be backed up (DoA4 wouldn't let me copy the saved data).
Now the only problem that comes from something like this is remembering to continue to back up data. A mirror setup (a la RAID1) isn't bad, but that's done via hardware... not peopleware:P.
They're adding quests to Dustwallow Marsh. A goblin quest-center will be added if I remember correctly.
It's actually not that hard to level from 20->60, it just takes time and is much easier if you know every zone's quests and everything about the quests which help comprise a "real level requirement" as we all know that just because the quest says level 45 beside it, it doesn't mean you can do it at level 43 or sometimes even level 45! Probably one of the best examples of this is the Bloodsail Buccaneers quest. The highest level opponent is level 48, so someone looking at the quest seeing that it's yellow at 43 might attempt this and see a red-con mob staring them in the face (Cap'n Stillwater is a mean fella). A good example of the opposite is the level 50 Portlebelly Portos (God knows I didn't spell that one right) quest in the Hinterlands (but from Booty Bay). There may be level 50-ish turtles, but they're all neutral (except the 47 elite Gammerita, who can be avoided).
From my experiences, people that head to Outlands at level 58 (the minimum level for entering via the Dark Portal, Blizzard has suggested that they might remove the min level though) tend to need all of the zones to quest in to reach level 70. This ignores people that run instances often or grind on mobs. Personally, I never enter Outlands until level 60, because even then, I never run out of quests on Azeroth to do.
How is it a superficial hack when Windows XP has no Live for Windows support? There's currently a hack to make the game run in Windows XP, but the hack supports everything but internet play (since that's Live for Windows). You can play over networks and such though. This Falling Leaf software package is supposed to add the Live for Windows support that is missing, but it also will not be free.
I bet Microsoft wouldn't mind migrating Live for Windows so much if they made you pay for it, but people would probably be in even more of an uproar.
Any self-respecting geek would simply "hack" the PSP using a modified firmware (which is quite easy to do... as simple as the old XBOX softmods). Using these modified firmwares, you can play videos at different resolutions and even different containers (rather than just mp4).
I believe the hacks are the reasons why PSPs will start selling more combined with the new $169 price, which puts it only $40 more than the Nintendo DS Lite. Also, recently Sony finally shifted prices down on the older games using the Playstation's "Greatest Hits" moniker.
But in light of this article, which is about Sony screwing over the PSP... I don't think anyone would argue against it. Sony made some poor choices when it came to the PSP (and some may say when it came to the PS3 as well).
Wasn't most of the information only explicitly clear in Final Fantasy VII: The Last Order? I don't recall most of that being in the game itself.
Final Fantasy VI had an advantage, in my opinion, when it came to music as well. Albeit they were tacky MIDI-esque SPDs, the music would capture you fairly well, but FF7 only had a couple good tracks in comparison (Still More Fighting (or Those Who Fight Further... whichever name you have it as), One-Winged Angel, etc). Although, to me, those FF7 songs were good, but they still don't have the attachment that songs from FF4 and FF6 provide.
Even though I played those aforementioned SNES games many years ago, I still remember scenes from the game where the musical scores played. Such as The Unforgiven, which plays when Cyan realizes that Kefka poisoned Castle Damcyan's water supply and he rushes in to find everyone dead or dying. There's The Veldt which obviously played while you were on... the veldt! Forever Rachel, the song that plays when you finally find out what makes Locke so protective... obviously dealing with Rachel. Songs such as Techno Chocobo being the best of their renditions throughout the series. Although, FF7's chocobo theme was pretty good too. I still remember the FF4 theme "Battle 2" where Rosa kept telling Kain to jump to stop Barbaricca's spinning technique that made her invincible to attacks.
Sorry, nice try, but you just gave yourself away as a Sony marketing person. About the same as your NDS? Hahahahaahah. Please, go work on your "All I want for Passover is a PS3" campaign. If I were a Sony marketing person, I sure wish I would at least get paid for it:P.
Personally? I see myself as a person who doesn't blindly hate the PSP, because I actually use it. Although, I will admit that my PSP is "hacked" running a modified firmware that allows me to do a bit more out of the box than a PSP purchased fresh off the shelf. I do like some of my NDS games and some of my PSP games, but when it comes to doing non-gaming activities, my PSP is like an extra added bonus. Heck, I've even used it to transport files across PCs because I don't have a thumb drive! It's the little things that I've done that've gave me a bit of extra appreciation for the PSP... not Sony marketing dollars:P.
So hey, you're more than welcome to call me a Sony marketing person for commenting on my differing experiences, but it doesn't necessarily make it right. I know my experiences don't necessarily follow the norm, which is why I mentioned that I even have friends who complained about the battery life.
I'm sorry, but i have to call bullshit on the battery life issue. My psp will die after 6 hours (if i'm luckY)... and my DS can go upwards of 18 or so hours. I've never had my DS last for 18 hours, so maybe that's where the problem lies. It also depends on what I'm doing with my PSP. If I'm using it as a music player, it obviously won't use as much power as it turns the screen off after a couple minutes. I could also help to curb the battery issue by ripping my games onto my memory stick to avoid having to power the UMD drive.
I still think that people tend to forget that the PSP will use power while it's turned off (and I suspect the NDS may as well, I haven't really tested nor noticed it as I don't play my NDS often) and whether or not they expect it to have a full charge or not could be an eye-turner when they turn their PSP on to find it at half power. I know one time I left my PSP dormant for awhile and I tried to turn it on and it wouldn't turn on. I then realized that it probably ate up all of its power and I simply plugged it in and yup, it asked for the time and date, because it lost that from lack of power.
You must have massive pockets. I can stick it in my front pocket, only if i'm standing, and if i don't have anything else. My ds on the other hand, will fit comfortably next to my ipod in my front pocket with little interference. Eh, I'm not sure if they're larger than the average pocket, but I was just wearing some pleated khaki work pants? The PSP isn't really too thick, I think most would complain about it being too long and weighty. I do notice a difference if I'm wearing cargo pants and I place my PSP in one of the cargo pockets vs placing my DS Lite in one of the cargo pockets.
It costs too much.
It only costs 30% more than the Nintendo DS Lite right now for more functionality out of the box.
Its load times are obnoxious for a portable.
Certain games are bad, yes, but not all. I own 14 PSP games and none of them have load times that have made me annoyed or anything like that.
It's too big to stick in your pocket.
Funny, I just put mine in my pocket with no problem and I have the Mad Catz clamshell on it which increases the size quite a bit.
The control scheme is awkward.
The joystick is weird, but personally I got used to it fairly easily. Other than that, everything is fine control-wise for me. The issue may actually be that the games you've played are ports of PS(X/2) games and therefore you're used to the PS2 controller layout.
The games suck.
Purely personal preference. I mean, like I stated above, I have 14 games and I like them all. I only own about 6 DS games in comparison.
The battery life sucks.
You know, my friend complained about his PSP's battery life, but mine's been fairly good for as long as I've owned it. It's been about as good as my NDS when both are at a full charge. I can tell you that if you leave the wireless networking on, it won't last as long. It also eats up power while sitting there dormant.
Nobody wants to buy movies again on UMD.
Agreed with that. UMD is useless, because it costs as much as a DVD and unlike a DVD, you have limited use! If the PSP had a video output feature, it may have been better, but there isn't one.
Honestly, I don't mean to sound rude, but anyone who bases the overall speed of a processor on the "megahertz" needs to re-evaluate the inner-workings of processors and what exactly differentiates the PowerPC-based Xenon processor from your run-of-the-mill desktop x86-64 variety.
There was actually a good article on Anandtech at one point about how these next-gen processors are not good for gaming compared to your typical desktop dual-core CPU. I mean, you could go on how Cell's SPE's have no branch prediction, which hampers their logical processing (i.e. not as great for features such as AI). PowerPC processors are also in-order execution, which is somewhat wasteful in some situations.
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I enjoy playing more than one character at a time in WoW. I don't do same class setups and I control everything manually, so it's a bit different than you've seen in those quad-boxing elemental shaman videos. It's also all done on the same PC with dual monitors. I have three high-level pairs right now... enhancement shaman + fire mage, protection paladin + affliction warlock and arms warrior + holy priest.
The idea of the shaman+mage combo is that they're two DPS trying to kill the mob as fast as possible, but what makes it nice is that enhancement shamans tend to have lulls in their DPS as they're very bursty with Windfury and crits. The mage helps make up for these bursts by simply throwing a couple spells into the mix. It's rarely anything more than maybe a scorch or two and if necessary, fire blast. Usually the shaman is good enough to get the mob down very far in the first few seconds.
The priest+warrior was started because of how much I disliked leveling my warrior to 60 in the early days of WoW. It's honestly not very fast unless I fight more than one thing at a time (go go sweeping strikes!) in which this combo simply can last quite a long time. So essentially, if I want to maximize time on this combo, I need to literally be fighting 4+ mobs at a time. Also, a priest helps negate one factor that hurts a warrior... the time between fights (which affects your left over rage).
The paladin+warlock was more or less setup to assist both characters. One could easily use a Voidwalker as a warlock or simply chain-fear a mob until it dies, but at times, this can be more mana intensive and the voidwalker isn't necessarily the best at holding aggro and is limited against multiple mobs. The Paladin is more like a second pet for my Warlock... an enhanced Void Walker in a sense. The real benefit is for my Paladin as the warlock definitely provides DPS which is what the protadin lacks.
Only negative aspect I can say about this is sometimes you simply don't learn everything about your class. Sometimes it's figuring out how to beat a difficult situation that shows the possible amazing abilities that your class has that may not be exactly obvious.
You don't find a lot of tanks in WoW, because of how the spec is so poor at doing anything other than tanking. Sure, you can kill a mob, but hand-in-hand with it taking forever... it's awfully boring.
Blizzard is actually changing this in WotLK by taking a few key talents in each class that has a tanking capability and adding them into the skills. For example, warriors will now get Shield Slam at level 40. Also, Defensive Stance will now receive the additional threat enhancement from Defiance by default. Paladins are having the +threat modifier removed from Improved Righteous Fury and it will be put into the spell by default. Although, I don't think I read anything about Holy Shield.
The only thing that I really find vastly different between Vanilla WoW and TBC is the incredibly large amount of grinding that you almost have to do. In vanilla WoW, the grinding was typically for bonuses. For example, a Winterspring Frostsaber had no point other than having a cool mount. Also, you could grind Argent Dawn rep to get a pattern or two and make your Naxxramas attunement cheaper. Thorium Brotherhood to get Dark Iron plate for tanks to use in MC/BWL. For the most part, rep wasn't really required for anything important. I personally don't mind the reputation so much in TBC... except for the Scryer and Aldor idea of splitting profession stuff up amongst them. That's just pretty evil to do to people that want all of them.
Personally, I think the Death Knights will be a lot of fun, because they look like they'll require a bit more management than most classes due to their two-resource (runes and runic power) design.
Just get a smart Paladin to judge Seal of Justice and the druid can no longer run faster than 100%. Seal of Justice also works on mounts, but the big deal is that Seal of Justice (as mentioned in the tool-tip) is not considered a movement impairing effect and therefore a druid shapeshift does not remove it.
However, it can be removed by a Priest, Paladin or a Warlock's Felhunter as it is a magic effect.
Blazing Speed has a chance to fail if the rogue has enough points in Assassination to get Vile Poisons. This is also true of Gnome Mages that try to use Escape Artist. There are a ton of different variables that can go into how easily (or how difficult it is) to get away from a rogue as a mage.
Rogues are the one class you don't want to let get close to you and with Blizzard's nerf of Adrenaline Rush and the buff to Shadowstep, it pushed more rogues to the latter (where some use Mutilate now with the Improved Backstab -> Piercing Wounds change). So, essentially, Blizzard's buff to Shadowstep pushed rogues into a build that is quite anti-mage, but even then, it's not impossible to defeat a rogue as a mage.
Illidan wasn't included in The Burning Crusade either, but it's not like you had to pay for the patch to include the Black Temple nor will you have to pay for the patch that will add Icecrown Tower into WotLK.
There's a couple slight problems with this.
1) ASUS has released a version of the EeePC with a reduced version of Windows XP on it.
2) The article doesn't mention any poll regarding how many EeePC users have installed Windows XP over the linux install on their EeePC.
3) I RTFA'd and I still don't see how they're correlating falling SSD prices becoming Microsoft's enemy. Linux was installed on the EeePC to keep the prices down, but ASUS realized some users would want XP and even included a driver CD with XP drivers on it! The only issue I think Microsoft had with the EeePC is that they didn't have a good "official" version of XP that works well with SSD as SSDs have limited writes, so some users prefer turning off virtual memory and removing other features that tend to write in the background. Using RAM drives is fairly popular too as they serve as a place to store browser cache, etc.
I have a EeePC 4G Surf and I installed Windows XP on mine. The Linux distro was alright, but out of the box it didn't interface well with my network (streaming files and network shares were a bit of a pain), which XP had no problem with.
Even as it states in the originating Wired DIY Wiki page, "Also, consider just buying the movie new: a blank Blu-Ray disc is from $15-$25 for write-once media." (Note that we are also not considering the money for the BR burner).
Now, I'm no studio exec, but the chances that a studio will re-release in Blu-Ray or put out old Blu-Ray versions (movies such as Shooter that were pulled from Blu-Ray once Paramount went HD-DVD exclusive) is fairly decent. This sounds like a huge time and money sink to me and for my HD-DVD movies? I'd rather just wait until they come out on Blu-Ray to buy them again.
I thought I heard that they could transfer ownership rights over between consoles?
Also, aren't you supposed to be able to play any media as long as one of these two criteria are met:
1) Original console it was purchased on.
2) Logged into the account that purchased the item.
That's what I've always been told had to happen, but this article shows that is not the case.
I actually like Vista (as I just submit myself to public flaming for such :P) but I'm still interested in what people find so poor about it. I won't say that I've had a perfect time with Vista as that's not true, but in comparison, the issues I've had have been minimal. I always turn off UAC as it does provide a level of protection, but I've been using PCs for awhile and I'm sure the level of annoyance > level of protection for me. I learned not to execute Britknee_Spers_Nudz.exe!
;). Doubt I'd need to buy it as a simple skim would be sufficient.
The annoyance that I tend to run into a lot is when you create a shortcut (via Send to Desktop or whatever) and you delete the target of that shortcut. Then when you try to delete the shortcut, Explorer will hang for around 30 seconds. I assume it's trying to access the target to say, "hey, this is an installed program! you should use Program Manager to remove it!" So yeah, it seems like a poor omission in file checking logic, but oh well, I rarely hit that problem.
One thing I noticed is when I went to help my friend's step-father with installing an older application (QuickBooks) on his new Dell Laptop with Vista, it wouldn't install. Vista kept reporting that it needed a compatible version of Flash (?). Going to the vendor's website, there was a patch but it never worked. I think that may be a fault in Vista for not being as helpful as it should be in reporting how to solve the incompatibility, but even when we circumvented the automatic help, Intuit's website wasn't that useful either.
So in short, I'm actually tempted to check this book out to see what people really dislike about Vista as I've heard people trash-talk it and when I ask them what's so bad... they tend to just say, "well, I heard..." Nothing better than knowing your enemy's play book
"they will benefit from Blu-Ray's higher transfer rates"
I was under the impression that the Blu-ray drive in the PS3 has worse transfer rates than the DVD drive in the 360? This is the reason that games like Devil May Cry 4 are using the HDD (some more than others, the example installs to the HDD where some games use it as a "buffer" of sorts (some 360 games will do this too if a HDD is detected)). This isn't to say that all Blu-ray drives will always have worse transfer rates as the PS3 only has a 2x drive and I believe there are already 4x drives available for PC use.
Is it DrumMania? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drummania
Well, on the PC there are places like FilePlanet that provide exclusive demos/betas to their paying subscribers only. You either don't get this demo at all or you have to wait until the exclusivity runs out.
I'm actually kind of glad that my gold subscription actually has a sense of worth to it now more than just playing games online (which I don't do all that often anyway). Also, as long as the week delay doesn't put the demo out for Silver members after the game comes out, I don't see where the actual problem is. Sounds like people don't want to hear others clamoring about how great a demo is and they can't remark because they can't get it.
From what I've heard, the plan is to add rumble support to these older games like Motorstorm, but they currently do not have rumble support.
I actually just started this recently. My 360 gave me a red ring and after some net searching, I found out it was a HDD error. I've never heard anyone else mention this so I was a bit wary, but I kind of brushed it off. Then a month-ish later, it happened again, so I decided to see if EB Games had any used memory cards. They had a 64MB one for $20, so I picked that up and backed up any save data that could be backed up (DoA4 wouldn't let me copy the saved data).
:P.
Now the only problem that comes from something like this is remembering to continue to back up data. A mirror setup (a la RAID1) isn't bad, but that's done via hardware... not peopleware
That's why I always used the sexy voice in UT2K4. Nothing like a hot-sounding woman telling you that you're on a killing spree!
They're adding quests to Dustwallow Marsh. A goblin quest-center will be added if I remember correctly.
It's actually not that hard to level from 20->60, it just takes time and is much easier if you know every zone's quests and everything about the quests which help comprise a "real level requirement" as we all know that just because the quest says level 45 beside it, it doesn't mean you can do it at level 43 or sometimes even level 45! Probably one of the best examples of this is the Bloodsail Buccaneers quest. The highest level opponent is level 48, so someone looking at the quest seeing that it's yellow at 43 might attempt this and see a red-con mob staring them in the face (Cap'n Stillwater is a mean fella). A good example of the opposite is the level 50 Portlebelly Portos (God knows I didn't spell that one right) quest in the Hinterlands (but from Booty Bay). There may be level 50-ish turtles, but they're all neutral (except the 47 elite Gammerita, who can be avoided).
From my experiences, people that head to Outlands at level 58 (the minimum level for entering via the Dark Portal, Blizzard has suggested that they might remove the min level though) tend to need all of the zones to quest in to reach level 70. This ignores people that run instances often or grind on mobs. Personally, I never enter Outlands until level 60, because even then, I never run out of quests on Azeroth to do.
How is it a superficial hack when Windows XP has no Live for Windows support? There's currently a hack to make the game run in Windows XP, but the hack supports everything but internet play (since that's Live for Windows). You can play over networks and such though. This Falling Leaf software package is supposed to add the Live for Windows support that is missing, but it also will not be free.
I bet Microsoft wouldn't mind migrating Live for Windows so much if they made you pay for it, but people would probably be in even more of an uproar.
Any self-respecting geek would simply "hack" the PSP using a modified firmware (which is quite easy to do... as simple as the old XBOX softmods). Using these modified firmwares, you can play videos at different resolutions and even different containers (rather than just mp4).
I believe the hacks are the reasons why PSPs will start selling more combined with the new $169 price, which puts it only $40 more than the Nintendo DS Lite. Also, recently Sony finally shifted prices down on the older games using the Playstation's "Greatest Hits" moniker.
But in light of this article, which is about Sony screwing over the PSP... I don't think anyone would argue against it. Sony made some poor choices when it came to the PSP (and some may say when it came to the PS3 as well).
Wasn't most of the information only explicitly clear in Final Fantasy VII: The Last Order? I don't recall most of that being in the game itself.
Final Fantasy VI had an advantage, in my opinion, when it came to music as well. Albeit they were tacky MIDI-esque SPDs, the music would capture you fairly well, but FF7 only had a couple good tracks in comparison (Still More Fighting (or Those Who Fight Further... whichever name you have it as), One-Winged Angel, etc). Although, to me, those FF7 songs were good, but they still don't have the attachment that songs from FF4 and FF6 provide.
Even though I played those aforementioned SNES games many years ago, I still remember scenes from the game where the musical scores played. Such as The Unforgiven, which plays when Cyan realizes that Kefka poisoned Castle Damcyan's water supply and he rushes in to find everyone dead or dying. There's The Veldt which obviously played while you were on... the veldt! Forever Rachel, the song that plays when you finally find out what makes Locke so protective... obviously dealing with Rachel. Songs such as Techno Chocobo being the best of their renditions throughout the series. Although, FF7's chocobo theme was pretty good too. I still remember the FF4 theme "Battle 2" where Rosa kept telling Kain to jump to stop Barbaricca's spinning technique that made her invincible to attacks.
If I were a Sony marketing person, I sure wish I would at least get paid for it
Personally? I see myself as a person who doesn't blindly hate the PSP, because I actually use it. Although, I will admit that my PSP is "hacked" running a modified firmware that allows me to do a bit more out of the box than a PSP purchased fresh off the shelf. I do like some of my NDS games and some of my PSP games, but when it comes to doing non-gaming activities, my PSP is like an extra added bonus. Heck, I've even used it to transport files across PCs because I don't have a thumb drive! It's the little things that I've done that've gave me a bit of extra appreciation for the PSP... not Sony marketing dollars
So hey, you're more than welcome to call me a Sony marketing person for commenting on my differing experiences, but it doesn't necessarily make it right. I know my experiences don't necessarily follow the norm, which is why I mentioned that I even have friends who complained about the battery life.
I've never had my DS last for 18 hours, so maybe that's where the problem lies. It also depends on what I'm doing with my PSP. If I'm using it as a music player, it obviously won't use as much power as it turns the screen off after a couple minutes. I could also help to curb the battery issue by ripping my games onto my memory stick to avoid having to power the UMD drive.
I still think that people tend to forget that the PSP will use power while it's turned off (and I suspect the NDS may as well, I haven't really tested nor noticed it as I don't play my NDS often) and whether or not they expect it to have a full charge or not could be an eye-turner when they turn their PSP on to find it at half power. I know one time I left my PSP dormant for awhile and I tried to turn it on and it wouldn't turn on. I then realized that it probably ate up all of its power and I simply plugged it in and yup, it asked for the time and date, because it lost that from lack of power. You must have massive pockets. I can stick it in my front pocket, only if i'm standing, and if i don't have anything else. My ds on the other hand, will fit comfortably next to my ipod in my front pocket with little interference. Eh, I'm not sure if they're larger than the average pocket, but I was just wearing some pleated khaki work pants? The PSP isn't really too thick, I think most would complain about it being too long and weighty. I do notice a difference if I'm wearing cargo pants and I place my PSP in one of the cargo pockets vs placing my DS Lite in one of the cargo pockets.
It only costs 30% more than the Nintendo DS Lite right now for more functionality out of the box.
Its load times are obnoxious for a portable.
Certain games are bad, yes, but not all. I own 14 PSP games and none of them have load times that have made me annoyed or anything like that.
It's too big to stick in your pocket.
Funny, I just put mine in my pocket with no problem and I have the Mad Catz clamshell on it which increases the size quite a bit.
The control scheme is awkward.
The joystick is weird, but personally I got used to it fairly easily. Other than that, everything is fine control-wise for me. The issue may actually be that the games you've played are ports of PS(X/2) games and therefore you're used to the PS2 controller layout.
The games suck.
Purely personal preference. I mean, like I stated above, I have 14 games and I like them all. I only own about 6 DS games in comparison.
The battery life sucks.
You know, my friend complained about his PSP's battery life, but mine's been fairly good for as long as I've owned it. It's been about as good as my NDS when both are at a full charge. I can tell you that if you leave the wireless networking on, it won't last as long. It also eats up power while sitting there dormant.
Nobody wants to buy movies again on UMD.
Agreed with that. UMD is useless, because it costs as much as a DVD and unlike a DVD, you have limited use! If the PSP had a video output feature, it may have been better, but there isn't one.
Honestly, I don't mean to sound rude, but anyone who bases the overall speed of a processor on the "megahertz" needs to re-evaluate the inner-workings of processors and what exactly differentiates the PowerPC-based Xenon processor from your run-of-the-mill desktop x86-64 variety.
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There was actually a good article on Anandtech at one point about how these next-gen processors are not good for gaming compared to your typical desktop dual-core CPU. I mean, you could go on how Cell's SPE's have no branch prediction, which hampers their logical processing (i.e. not as great for features such as AI). PowerPC processors are also in-order execution, which is somewhat wasteful in some situations.
Here's a wikipedia article on in-order and out-of-order execution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_executi
Sure we do, it's called a lobotomy ;).
You make them a bit less responsive of a person, but hey, at least they aren't bad anymore!