The problem with FPS as a spectator sport is you can't see everything at once. You only see through the eyes of one player at one point in the map. Also, with the exception of 1v1 games like quake live, watching a top level FPS player just isn't that impressive. I can watch the world championship of counterstrike and other than aim, I don't see what makes them so good, even though I've played a lot of counterstrike and understand the game well. I don't know if that's because the game just doesn't have that high a skill ceiling or if it doesn't show. Same with Call of Duty.
With MMOs like Wow it's hard to see what abilities they're using visually and I honestly don't think there's that much skill in it. I can't imagine watching a Wow arena match and being amazed at how good a player is.
I don't agree with Ebert but I think he makes an interesting point. Games definitely contain art, but can a game itself be considered a work of art? Some games are actually very similar to movies or books. They may have a lot of cut scenes or written text to tell a story, beautiful 3D or 2D worlds, and characters that the player gets emotionally attached to. But this is just bringing other artistic mediums into a game. It doesn't prove that games themselves are works of art. To do that we would have to look purely at the gameplay.
Take the game of Tetris. It's a great game, but has no characters or story, and is pretty much not designed to be visually appealing at all. It is all about the gameplay. We could even look beyond video games, like Chess for example. Is the game of Chess itself a work of art? I would say yes, because it is the creative work of a human being designed to evoke an emotional response. The emotion being the thrill of competition.
Technically Java isn't platform independent either. It only runs on whatever platforms Sun has released a JRE for, which is most of them. If the SDK for NaCl generates 32bit and 64bit executables for both x86 and ARM, they have at least 99% of the market covered.
Why is Apple against WebM? I know they've been pushing H.264, but do they actually have anything to gain by H.264 becoming the defacto standard instead of WebM? Wouldn't they prefer not paying royalties?
Intel can't get into anti-trust trouble simply because no one is able to compete with them. They have to be caught for specifically doing something monopolistic.
I am surprised that Intel still has the power to stop companies from building x86 processors. That patent is like 30 years old now. Doesn't it expire eventually?
Wow already has the auction house for that, so if you want an item, buy the gold at a site like gamer2gamer, and use it to by the sword at the auction house.
Porn may have been a major factor in the days of beta/vhs, but nowadays most porn comes over the internet. Why watch a 1 - 2 hour movie in your living room filled with lame actors and a lame story, when you can watch short clips at the privacy of your computer? The adult industry knows they don't have the weight to affect this format war, so they are supporting both formats.
The majority of power generated in the US comes from fossil fuels.
So to power an electric car, you will convert the chemical energy in fossil fuel into electric energy in a power plant, send it over thousands of miles of power lines, doing several voltage conversions along the way, convert it back into chemical energy in your cars battery, back into electric energy as it goes to the engine, and then finally into mechanical energy moving the car. This is MUCH less efficient than just converting the chemical energy directly of fossil fuel into mechanical energy in your car's internal combustion engine. In every conversion to different type of energy you lose something.
Until we can eliminate our dependence on fossil fuel to generate power, electric cars are actually worse for the environment than gasoline cars.
Also a big reason HD-DVD drives are so expensive is it simply takes a lot of horsepower to play HD-DVDs. HD-DVD drives actually have pretty powerfull processors. With the HD-DVD addon all the video processing is done by the xbox360 itself.
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The problem with FPS as a spectator sport is you can't see everything at once. You only see through the eyes of one player at one point in the map. Also, with the exception of 1v1 games like quake live, watching a top level FPS player just isn't that impressive. I can watch the world championship of counterstrike and other than aim, I don't see what makes them so good, even though I've played a lot of counterstrike and understand the game well. I don't know if that's because the game just doesn't have that high a skill ceiling or if it doesn't show. Same with Call of Duty. With MMOs like Wow it's hard to see what abilities they're using visually and I honestly don't think there's that much skill in it. I can't imagine watching a Wow arena match and being amazed at how good a player is.
I don't agree with Ebert but I think he makes an interesting point. Games definitely contain art, but can a game itself be considered a work of art? Some games are actually very similar to movies or books. They may have a lot of cut scenes or written text to tell a story, beautiful 3D or 2D worlds, and characters that the player gets emotionally attached to. But this is just bringing other artistic mediums into a game. It doesn't prove that games themselves are works of art. To do that we would have to look purely at the gameplay. Take the game of Tetris. It's a great game, but has no characters or story, and is pretty much not designed to be visually appealing at all. It is all about the gameplay. We could even look beyond video games, like Chess for example. Is the game of Chess itself a work of art? I would say yes, because it is the creative work of a human being designed to evoke an emotional response. The emotion being the thrill of competition.
Technically Java isn't platform independent either. It only runs on whatever platforms Sun has released a JRE for, which is most of them. If the SDK for NaCl generates 32bit and 64bit executables for both x86 and ARM, they have at least 99% of the market covered.
Why is Apple against WebM? I know they've been pushing H.264, but do they actually have anything to gain by H.264 becoming the defacto standard instead of WebM? Wouldn't they prefer not paying royalties?
Intel can't get into anti-trust trouble simply because no one is able to compete with them. They have to be caught for specifically doing something monopolistic. I am surprised that Intel still has the power to stop companies from building x86 processors. That patent is like 30 years old now. Doesn't it expire eventually?
Anyone know how to change the color scheme in Eclipse? I couldn't find an easy way to do it.
These days DVD revenue is actually 3-4 times higher than box office revenue for most movies.
Wow already has the auction house for that, so if you want an item, buy the gold at a site like gamer2gamer, and use it to by the sword at the auction house.
Porn may have been a major factor in the days of beta/vhs, but nowadays most porn comes over the internet. Why watch a 1 - 2 hour movie in your living room filled with lame actors and a lame story, when you can watch short clips at the privacy of your computer? The adult industry knows they don't have the weight to affect this format war, so they are supporting both formats.
The majority of power generated in the US comes from fossil fuels. So to power an electric car, you will convert the chemical energy in fossil fuel into electric energy in a power plant, send it over thousands of miles of power lines, doing several voltage conversions along the way, convert it back into chemical energy in your cars battery, back into electric energy as it goes to the engine, and then finally into mechanical energy moving the car. This is MUCH less efficient than just converting the chemical energy directly of fossil fuel into mechanical energy in your car's internal combustion engine. In every conversion to different type of energy you lose something. Until we can eliminate our dependence on fossil fuel to generate power, electric cars are actually worse for the environment than gasoline cars.
Also a big reason HD-DVD drives are so expensive is it simply takes a lot of horsepower to play HD-DVDs. HD-DVD drives actually have pretty powerfull processors. With the HD-DVD addon all the video processing is done by the xbox360 itself.
I will be laughing my ass off if some hacker makes dx10 work with windows xp.