The spike VGA were awful the first time I tried to watch them for 15 minutes. 70% commercials, 15% people that have nothing to do with video games making noise, 10% T&A and 5% showing a developer standing there while loud shit and flashing lights drown them out. It was such utter garbage I couldn't believe it was actually allowed on television. Its the television equivilent of a failed abortion.
I pretty much agree. Both ATI and Nvidia have recieved a lot of flack lately for their viral marketing campaigns...but when you look at its base its the same old story: paying people to pretend to like your products. Ultimately the buyer has to beware and trust their own judgement. You're always getting lied too, so this isn't really anything new. Do what you always did, assume you were being lied to until its revealed otherwise.
However, this doesn't stop me from seeing how utterly pathetic it is to pay a marketing firm to pertend to be a teenager. I can just imagine a group of middle aged marketing execs sitting around a table discussing "whats cool with teenagers these days" and trying to graft those aspects onto a fake individual that everyone is going to want to emulate. It makes me laugh...but honestly, large groups of stupid people working together to come up with stupid ideas is hardly a new theme. Seems like it would be cheaper and get better results to just pay a bunch of teenagers to brag about your product on forums instead.
I know thats the reason I abandoned them. And its the reason I stopped using yahoo. There main page took to long to load and was filled with enough competing crap to cause your brain to implode. Sure, you can just get the search bar by going to search.yahoo.com or something...but thats another layer of that complexity thing that their competitor didn't have. Why bother?
Exactly what I was going to say. I was really hoping he won the primaries back in 2000 because I was really excited about him as a canidate. But now he just disgusts me.
Between this and his flag burning its clear he's just another tool without any conviction at all. And between this and the flag burning amendment he's becoming quite the opponent of freedom of speech. And thats a position that I just plain can't ever get behind.
Ah...now its easier then ever for cross platform development on the PC and consoles. Looks like the unwelcome trend of PC game interfaces with gigantic picture icons, no tool tips, rigid control schemes and tacked-on-ish mouse support shall continue unabated.
Seriously, it sounds like this is an ok idea but the amount of restrictions seem to limit its potential. It appears to lower the barrier to entry...but does it really? It sounds like when you read the fine print they aren't really giving you much. I guess I can't blame them, they make their money on the games not the console...so if they started giving distribution rights away for free they would be screwing themselves.
Microsoft has been trying to have their cake and eat it too by making cross platform games for windows/PC easy. Games are the main thing that ties you average home user to the windows platform. They've kind of been eating themselves since they jumped into the console arena. Cross-platform is a way of saying to users "you still need windows for PC games!" while still growing their console end.
The trouble is, the PC has traditionally offered some advantages over the console in controls, community, etc. Perhaps advantages isn't the right word, rather differences. Most ported or even cross platform games feel like the PC support was stuck on as an afterthought these days, they have since the xbox came out. Its not a PC game...its a console game on your PC. Its only a matter of time before the PC gamers start just buying a xbox instead. And you can see that happening now, I hear a lot of people saying "its expensive upgrading my PC...I'm just going to buy an xbox360 or PS3 instead". Maybe thats what microsoft wants. But its also going to weaken their OS market because people are going to buy less new PCs and stay with their old ones longer.
We'll see how this strategy plays out in the end. Frankly, I think MS would have been better offering a console that was very different from the PC as a gaming platform to prevent dilution of that brand. But, they're a computer company so its not a surprise they stuck with what they knew. (The original xbox pretty much was just a PC anyway right?)
Does anyone else think kids mom's are going in to buy "that new playstation that the kids said they wanted for christmas" and leaving with the PS2 since the PS3 inventories are nonexistent? I'm sure this happens...I just wonder how much. I remember asking my mom for a specific computer game for christmas when I was a kid and ending up with some game that was just on sale. "You wanted a computer game! Here it is!"
So...what you're saying that a company that releases playstation 3 exclusives should have no bias for the playstation 3 at all then. That makes sense, afterall, its not like they've tied their very success to that particular console or anything.
I think 50 years or death, the longer of the two would be fair. That way if some one died of a drug overdose a year after he hit it big his family would still be provided for.
But you say that only a select few manage to make a reasonable living, but thats just the way it works. There's only room for so many musicians and artists in the world...and we need a lot more truck drivers, nurses, garbage collectors, etc. When some one becomes a starving artists they're either driven by some need to create that can't be ignored (in which case copyright is moot, they were going to do this anyway) or they're betting on themselves. They're betting they're good enough to beat the odds. If it was easy to 'make it' as a musician then everyone would do it...but lets face it, no one wants to buy the CD of every crappy garage band that ever existed.
The faulty logic here is that it presumes that new independent service providers aren't sprouting up every day. He sees the big trees in the forest, but misses the seeds and sprouts.
The logic he's using here only works if the company is entrenched like say, Microsoft, is. But this is a new emerging market...as you suggest as soon as they get done buying the competitors out, some one else will move into fill the void/niche.
A real world example of this failing that I can think of was match.com trying to dominate the online dating services in like 2001 or so. At the risk of revealing myself as the as the antisocial dork I really am, I was 'in the market' for those services at the time. Match.com had gone around and bought up all the free competing services available at that time and made them all point to match.com. It got rid of their competition...for about as long as it took for some one to setup their own database and fill the "free online dating" website void. About a year later it seems like they had even more competitors then ever.
Watch what? Broadband penetration in most the US is still piss poor, broadband competition in ALL of the US even moreso. If this is where the world is planning on going, and they need broadband to get there, the US better get ready to be left behind.
What are you talking about? Haven't you seen the bang-up job banks and credit card companies have done at keeping our personal information from being lost...and the impressive level of accountability they display when those rare events occur? Jeeze! You're going to have to learn to trust people if you want to make it in this world.!
And by people, I mean companies that did a cost benefit analysis and decided that when it came right down to it your data actually wasn't that important to them and wasn't really worth putting a whole lot of effort into protecting.
Protecting information from loss is expensive. But protecting data from some one trying to steal it is even more so. If I'm a large company thats pushing around data my competitors really want...do I want to put it in servers I own managed by people within my own company? Or with a third party company? Both can of course be corrupted...but which one would be cheaper to buy and less likely to be looking out for your companies interests?
Larger, more established companies tend to change slowly. They tend to be risk averse even though they're actually better equiped to weather potential failures then their smaller competitors. And in situations like this, divisions within the company can be crippled by their sister divisions. The video game division doesn't just have to compete with nintendo and microsoft, it has to compete with other divisions within sony. The video game division says they need to keep their costs down, but the other division needs to push that new expensive bluray format so that gets stuck on there for instance.
Sony seems obsessed with trying to get the market to adopt one of their proprietary media formats. They tried just using their name to push it, and then they've started trying to piggyback on the success of some of their other products to get it adopted. Neither has had much success. It'd be a great revenue generator, but consumers don't want to pay the extra cost and competitors are right there to offer an alternative. Give it up already! They aren't helping blu-ray be adopted, they're hurting their PS3.
Its certainly possible my BIL was...embellishing his side of the story a bit...but you understood my point. Apparently (I didn't do much research on this myself since I don't own an xbox 360) the simple act of changing it from vertical to horizontal positions and vice versa can destroy disks. I'm sorry but I can't describe that behavior as anything less than ridiculous. Particularly since optical drive technology is hardly new.
You hit the nail on the head though. Your suggestions make sense, but ultimately do little unless they are adopted by a large number of people. I don't buy a lot of additional things with the exception of computer part indulgences so I can afford to be a bit more picky with my choices...but its a walmart world, which is predominately populated with walmart products.
Don't consumer level routers offer some of this functionality these days? My linksys is ancient, but I thought I remember reading the newer models offered some throttling features.
I played the xbox360 at my bother in law's over the thanksgiving holiday. I was pretty impressed with the graphical power and gears of war is the first shooter I didn't feel clumsy with when playing with a controller. But the system has eaten his oblivion disk twice (he had a store wipe it once) as well as leaving circular scratches on his call of duty 3 disk that prevent several midgame levels from loading.
Microsoft claims that the machine cannot be moved while on with a disk in it or it will do this to the disks. He claims he didn't move it. My feeling is there's no excuse for the machine doing that regardless. Skipping, rebooting midgame, hell even erasing your saved games...are all understandable or acceptable. But, a machine that destroys your $60 game disks, that can't be easily backed up, because you bumped into the entertainment center is unacceptable IMO. Its definately not a terrible machine power wise, but what did they save? $3 or something putting the piece of junk dvd player in the machine?
And then you have the reports of updates bricking the consoles and it doesn't really instill a lot of confidence in the system. And what is with the 90 day warentees? As I understand it this is becoming industry standard for consoles. I know the console market is pretty competitive, but even PC parts which are often installed by people with limited expertise and are very price competitive still all offer a 1 year warentee at least. I guess when you're selling systems at a loss the urge to cut costs wherever you can is pretty strong. But as a consumer, when I see the company not even willing to stand behind the product for a year I start to think there's something fishy going on.
I've got part swallowed-by-the-evil-empire and part they'll-fix-it-til-its-broke feelings about this. utorrent was the only client that really gave me what I wanted. The trouble with perfection is that from the top you can only go down.
This is true. For all my bitching and complaining about some of the current legislation in our country, there seem to be plenty of european examples of much worse.
That doesn't mean I'm happy with where the US seems to be going these days, it just means other places are futher along.
'The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,' she said. 'We might as well not have studied.'"
That is certainly an unfortunately state of affairs. But it sounds like she hit the nail on the head. From the article it sounds like schools that teach the marketable skills are out of their financial reach. If thats the case, it doesn't make sense spending money on the cheaper schools when they provide no real benefit. All you're doing there is allowing them to continue with their useless practices and putting yourself in debt.
The researchers say their approach is similar to the one used by weather forecasters.
So its results are only accurate when looking about 4 hours into the future?
Some one suggested on another forum this might be the case. It seems plausible actually, now that I think about it. We've only seen video card prices rise in recent history, even on the high end. Of course intel probably wouldn't have been involved, they don't have any video offerings that are highend.
I don't get it...what is the DOJ's angle here? There is real competition in the graphics card market, more so then the processor market and definately more then say...the operating system market.
I agree. One of my favorite PC games was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The single-player was pretty average, with a handful of very inspired levels. However, the multiplayer was exceptional. I played it, regularly, for over a year.
Even with single player games, the creation of a dynamic experience and enjoyable replayability is far more important then how long it takes to complete the game to me. Its easy to create a game where you have to hit rabbits with a sword for 12 hours to advance. Its much harder to make each and every time you play a different experience, even slightly. But things like co-op modes and better A.I. as well as a level of randomness in events can make you play a 10 hour game 10 times or more.
I actually played Gears of War at my brother in laws last week. Usually I'm pretty uninterested in any console shooters, since I feel like I'm struggling with the controls. (I'm a PC snob) But I really enjoyed that game. The 3rd person perspective was handled in a very cool way, I loved shooting around corners and the limited amount of weapons you could carry. And even though few of the weapons struck me as very novel (the hammer of dawn was a very noteworthy exception) I found the co-operative play and use of cover and flanking very fun. And the controls seemed much better suited to this style of play then more traditional FPS.
It may only be 10 hours long, but I could see myself repeating those 10 hours at least a few times.
I take it you haven't played BattleField 2. It might taste good at first, but later that night when your ass is exploding you'll wish you'd stayed home for dinner.
Trouble ahead for international turd factory!
on
The 'EA Image' Tarnished
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· Score: 2, Insightful
'Although market share has not declined dramatically to date, in years such as 2007, which promises to have tremendous competition, it seems likely if quality does not improve...
What competition? I thought they'd finished buying and gutting every company that had a semi successful title in the last 5 years. And when they couldn't buy them, they obtained exclusive franchise licensing so they could torpedo their ships before they even left port.
I have no idea what the future holds for EA. But I wouldn't be so sure that they won't continue to get away with releasing half finished products, humping and dumping young developers and double charging their customers. It seems like plenty of people have continued to buy their products.
I'm just bitter they swallowed some of my favorite little development houses in the late 90s.
Westwood is just another notch on EA's bedpost. They've been buying companies and sucking the blood out of them before discarding their withered corpse as a matter of course for some time now.
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The spike VGA were awful the first time I tried to watch them for 15 minutes. 70% commercials, 15% people that have nothing to do with video games making noise, 10% T&A and 5% showing a developer standing there while loud shit and flashing lights drown them out. It was such utter garbage I couldn't believe it was actually allowed on television. Its the television equivilent of a failed abortion.
I pretty much agree. Both ATI and Nvidia have recieved a lot of flack lately for their viral marketing campaigns...but when you look at its base its the same old story: paying people to pretend to like your products. Ultimately the buyer has to beware and trust their own judgement. You're always getting lied too, so this isn't really anything new. Do what you always did, assume you were being lied to until its revealed otherwise.
However, this doesn't stop me from seeing how utterly pathetic it is to pay a marketing firm to pertend to be a teenager. I can just imagine a group of middle aged marketing execs sitting around a table discussing "whats cool with teenagers these days" and trying to graft those aspects onto a fake individual that everyone is going to want to emulate. It makes me laugh...but honestly, large groups of stupid people working together to come up with stupid ideas is hardly a new theme. Seems like it would be cheaper and get better results to just pay a bunch of teenagers to brag about your product on forums instead.
I know thats the reason I abandoned them. And its the reason I stopped using yahoo. There main page took to long to load and was filled with enough competing crap to cause your brain to implode. Sure, you can just get the search bar by going to search.yahoo.com or something...but thats another layer of that complexity thing that their competitor didn't have. Why bother?
Exactly what I was going to say. I was really hoping he won the primaries back in 2000 because I was really excited about him as a canidate. But now he just disgusts me.
Between this and his flag burning its clear he's just another tool without any conviction at all. And between this and the flag burning amendment he's becoming quite the opponent of freedom of speech. And thats a position that I just plain can't ever get behind.
Ah...now its easier then ever for cross platform development on the PC and consoles. Looks like the unwelcome trend of PC game interfaces with gigantic picture icons, no tool tips, rigid control schemes and tacked-on-ish mouse support shall continue unabated.
Seriously, it sounds like this is an ok idea but the amount of restrictions seem to limit its potential. It appears to lower the barrier to entry...but does it really? It sounds like when you read the fine print they aren't really giving you much. I guess I can't blame them, they make their money on the games not the console...so if they started giving distribution rights away for free they would be screwing themselves.
Microsoft has been trying to have their cake and eat it too by making cross platform games for windows/PC easy. Games are the main thing that ties you average home user to the windows platform. They've kind of been eating themselves since they jumped into the console arena. Cross-platform is a way of saying to users "you still need windows for PC games!" while still growing their console end.
The trouble is, the PC has traditionally offered some advantages over the console in controls, community, etc. Perhaps advantages isn't the right word, rather differences. Most ported or even cross platform games feel like the PC support was stuck on as an afterthought these days, they have since the xbox came out. Its not a PC game...its a console game on your PC. Its only a matter of time before the PC gamers start just buying a xbox instead. And you can see that happening now, I hear a lot of people saying "its expensive upgrading my PC...I'm just going to buy an xbox360 or PS3 instead". Maybe thats what microsoft wants. But its also going to weaken their OS market because people are going to buy less new PCs and stay with their old ones longer.
We'll see how this strategy plays out in the end. Frankly, I think MS would have been better offering a console that was very different from the PC as a gaming platform to prevent dilution of that brand. But, they're a computer company so its not a surprise they stuck with what they knew. (The original xbox pretty much was just a PC anyway right?)
Does anyone else think kids mom's are going in to buy "that new playstation that the kids said they wanted for christmas" and leaving with the PS2 since the PS3 inventories are nonexistent? I'm sure this happens...I just wonder how much. I remember asking my mom for a specific computer game for christmas when I was a kid and ending up with some game that was just on sale. "You wanted a computer game! Here it is!"
So...what you're saying that a company that releases playstation 3 exclusives should have no bias for the playstation 3 at all then. That makes sense, afterall, its not like they've tied their very success to that particular console or anything.
I think 50 years or death, the longer of the two would be fair. That way if some one died of a drug overdose a year after he hit it big his family would still be provided for.
But you say that only a select few manage to make a reasonable living, but thats just the way it works. There's only room for so many musicians and artists in the world...and we need a lot more truck drivers, nurses, garbage collectors, etc. When some one becomes a starving artists they're either driven by some need to create that can't be ignored (in which case copyright is moot, they were going to do this anyway) or they're betting on themselves. They're betting they're good enough to beat the odds. If it was easy to 'make it' as a musician then everyone would do it...but lets face it, no one wants to buy the CD of every crappy garage band that ever existed.
The faulty logic here is that it presumes that new independent service providers aren't sprouting up every day. He sees the big trees in the forest, but misses the seeds and sprouts.
The logic he's using here only works if the company is entrenched like say, Microsoft, is. But this is a new emerging market...as you suggest as soon as they get done buying the competitors out, some one else will move into fill the void/niche.
A real world example of this failing that I can think of was match.com trying to dominate the online dating services in like 2001 or so. At the risk of revealing myself as the as the antisocial dork I really am, I was 'in the market' for those services at the time. Match.com had gone around and bought up all the free competing services available at that time and made them all point to match.com. It got rid of their competition...for about as long as it took for some one to setup their own database and fill the "free online dating" website void. About a year later it seems like they had even more competitors then ever.
Watch what? Broadband penetration in most the US is still piss poor, broadband competition in ALL of the US even moreso. If this is where the world is planning on going, and they need broadband to get there, the US better get ready to be left behind.
What are you talking about? Haven't you seen the bang-up job banks and credit card companies have done at keeping our personal information from being lost...and the impressive level of accountability they display when those rare events occur? Jeeze! You're going to have to learn to trust people if you want to make it in this world.!
And by people, I mean companies that did a cost benefit analysis and decided that when it came right down to it your data actually wasn't that important to them and wasn't really worth putting a whole lot of effort into protecting.
Protecting information from loss is expensive. But protecting data from some one trying to steal it is even more so. If I'm a large company thats pushing around data my competitors really want...do I want to put it in servers I own managed by people within my own company? Or with a third party company? Both can of course be corrupted...but which one would be cheaper to buy and less likely to be looking out for your companies interests?
Larger, more established companies tend to change slowly. They tend to be risk averse even though they're actually better equiped to weather potential failures then their smaller competitors. And in situations like this, divisions within the company can be crippled by their sister divisions. The video game division doesn't just have to compete with nintendo and microsoft, it has to compete with other divisions within sony. The video game division says they need to keep their costs down, but the other division needs to push that new expensive bluray format so that gets stuck on there for instance.
Sony seems obsessed with trying to get the market to adopt one of their proprietary media formats. They tried just using their name to push it, and then they've started trying to piggyback on the success of some of their other products to get it adopted. Neither has had much success. It'd be a great revenue generator, but consumers don't want to pay the extra cost and competitors are right there to offer an alternative. Give it up already! They aren't helping blu-ray be adopted, they're hurting their PS3.
Its certainly possible my BIL was...embellishing his side of the story a bit...but you understood my point. Apparently (I didn't do much research on this myself since I don't own an xbox 360) the simple act of changing it from vertical to horizontal positions and vice versa can destroy disks. I'm sorry but I can't describe that behavior as anything less than ridiculous. Particularly since optical drive technology is hardly new.
You hit the nail on the head though. Your suggestions make sense, but ultimately do little unless they are adopted by a large number of people. I don't buy a lot of additional things with the exception of computer part indulgences so I can afford to be a bit more picky with my choices...but its a walmart world, which is predominately populated with walmart products.
Don't consumer level routers offer some of this functionality these days? My linksys is ancient, but I thought I remember reading the newer models offered some throttling features.
I played the xbox360 at my bother in law's over the thanksgiving holiday. I was pretty impressed with the graphical power and gears of war is the first shooter I didn't feel clumsy with when playing with a controller. But the system has eaten his oblivion disk twice (he had a store wipe it once) as well as leaving circular scratches on his call of duty 3 disk that prevent several midgame levels from loading.
Microsoft claims that the machine cannot be moved while on with a disk in it or it will do this to the disks. He claims he didn't move it. My feeling is there's no excuse for the machine doing that regardless. Skipping, rebooting midgame, hell even erasing your saved games...are all understandable or acceptable. But, a machine that destroys your $60 game disks, that can't be easily backed up, because you bumped into the entertainment center is unacceptable IMO. Its definately not a terrible machine power wise, but what did they save? $3 or something putting the piece of junk dvd player in the machine?
And then you have the reports of updates bricking the consoles and it doesn't really instill a lot of confidence in the system. And what is with the 90 day warentees? As I understand it this is becoming industry standard for consoles. I know the console market is pretty competitive, but even PC parts which are often installed by people with limited expertise and are very price competitive still all offer a 1 year warentee at least. I guess when you're selling systems at a loss the urge to cut costs wherever you can is pretty strong. But as a consumer, when I see the company not even willing to stand behind the product for a year I start to think there's something fishy going on.
I've got part swallowed-by-the-evil-empire and part they'll-fix-it-til-its-broke feelings about this. utorrent was the only client that really gave me what I wanted. The trouble with perfection is that from the top you can only go down.
This is true. For all my bitching and complaining about some of the current legislation in our country, there seem to be plenty of european examples of much worse.
That doesn't mean I'm happy with where the US seems to be going these days, it just means other places are futher along.
'The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,' she said. 'We might as well not have studied.'"
That is certainly an unfortunately state of affairs. But it sounds like she hit the nail on the head. From the article it sounds like schools that teach the marketable skills are out of their financial reach. If thats the case, it doesn't make sense spending money on the cheaper schools when they provide no real benefit. All you're doing there is allowing them to continue with their useless practices and putting yourself in debt.
The researchers say their approach is similar to the one used by weather forecasters.
So its results are only accurate when looking about 4 hours into the future?
Some one suggested on another forum this might be the case. It seems plausible actually, now that I think about it. We've only seen video card prices rise in recent history, even on the high end. Of course intel probably wouldn't have been involved, they don't have any video offerings that are highend.
I don't get it...what is the DOJ's angle here? There is real competition in the graphics card market, more so then the processor market and definately more then say...the operating system market.
Why are they going after these guys anyway?
I agree. One of my favorite PC games was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The single-player was pretty average, with a handful of very inspired levels. However, the multiplayer was exceptional. I played it, regularly, for over a year.
Even with single player games, the creation of a dynamic experience and enjoyable replayability is far more important then how long it takes to complete the game to me. Its easy to create a game where you have to hit rabbits with a sword for 12 hours to advance. Its much harder to make each and every time you play a different experience, even slightly. But things like co-op modes and better A.I. as well as a level of randomness in events can make you play a 10 hour game 10 times or more.
I actually played Gears of War at my brother in laws last week. Usually I'm pretty uninterested in any console shooters, since I feel like I'm struggling with the controls. (I'm a PC snob) But I really enjoyed that game. The 3rd person perspective was handled in a very cool way, I loved shooting around corners and the limited amount of weapons you could carry. And even though few of the weapons struck me as very novel (the hammer of dawn was a very noteworthy exception) I found the co-operative play and use of cover and flanking very fun. And the controls seemed much better suited to this style of play then more traditional FPS.
It may only be 10 hours long, but I could see myself repeating those 10 hours at least a few times.
I take it you haven't played BattleField 2. It might taste good at first, but later that night when your ass is exploding you'll wish you'd stayed home for dinner.
'Although market share has not declined dramatically to date, in years such as 2007, which promises to have tremendous competition, it seems likely if quality does not improve...
What competition? I thought they'd finished buying and gutting every company that had a semi successful title in the last 5 years. And when they couldn't buy them, they obtained exclusive franchise licensing so they could torpedo their ships before they even left port.
I have no idea what the future holds for EA. But I wouldn't be so sure that they won't continue to get away with releasing half finished products, humping and dumping young developers and double charging their customers. It seems like plenty of people have continued to buy their products.
I'm just bitter they swallowed some of my favorite little development houses in the late 90s.
Westwood is just another notch on EA's bedpost. They've been buying companies and sucking the blood out of them before discarding their withered corpse as a matter of course for some time now.