Back in the day when I had an Atari 800, games were typically GBP35 with the odd extreme one being GBP80 (Some SSI or Avalon Hill game, War in Russia I think?).
My monthly pay at the time was GBP120 so that was basically a weeks money per game.
Bearing in mind how much more effort goes into a modern game, it's amazing prices have effectively dropped. That said, I had more fun then with those old 8K games except the very occassional title that really grabs me now like Bioshock.
A fair point but part of the equation is also that a film gives you two hours of entertainment whereas a game gives you perhaps 20-50+ hours.
Personally, I'm reasonably OK with prices - a new title in the UK is around GBP40 but quickly falls to GBP20 or less after a few months. There are some titles which are GBP50 and that's just too much for me though.
Let's face it, they'd have been mad to open shops and show people Vista. Now they have something apparantly rather better, they want to show it off to the world.
As others have said though, I can't imagine much real reason unless they have a whole raft of new titles coming out that no-one knows about. A few years ago when they had all those multimedia titles for movies, art, musical intsruments and so on, I'd have appreciated the chance ot get hands on with a few titles but now I can't see much in their lineup that is a try-before-you-buy sort of title. It's either something you need or you don't.
>But are we really going to try to maximize speed over durability?
I was taught very early in my IT career that there are 3 considerations on any project.
1. It can be cheap
2. It can be fast
3. It can be reliable.
Now go and pick 2 out of 3.
The stupid thing is, it doesn't even need faked reviews - Carbonite is genuinely good. it's got me out of a scrape several times and the ability to go back to older versions of documents is great too. Ermm.. this is starting to sound like I'm being facetious but really, it is good.
>the real reason of operating a newspaper or site is to make your audience see the world through your goggles
Not quite - newspapers, magazines etc exist to sell advertising space. The editorial content is just there to support this aim. It was different prior to the early 70's when magazines/papers genuinely existed to provide information to the readers but now that's a byproduct.
I used to load it up just for the intro screen. The music with the lyrics & bouncing ball were great - including the audio samples. This was on an Atari 800 - the C64 version would probably be sightly better c/o the SID chip but the Atari version was pretty damn good.
>did they downsize their qa staff or something?
If they did, it would be typical management stupidity - 'Hey, lets cut staff so we have enough to keep up our ludicrous bonuses!'... 'Whadya mean our reputation has gone to hell and sales are down 40%?'
The albums I've bought that I wouldn't otherwise have had I not been able to download and try it first? I buy MORE albums now that I did before Napster et al opened my ears to new artists and songs.
I would say Belkin *used* to be a premium brand. Stuff I used maybe ten years ago was generally well made - metal cased KVM's etc. More recent stuff seems to be more bargain basement. I once spent hours at a friends house after he bought a Belkin wireless router against my recommendation. Finally got it semi working but I told him to buy a Netgear instead and guess what? When he did, it just worked.
As a reviewer, I do often check out other reviews of a product I'm looking at as a sanity check and it's frightening how often I read review after review saying how great something is when having used it myself, it is patently not. Some are clearly adverts dressed up as reviews but often they're from sites/publishers which you'd really hope did their homework but it seems like they just read the PR blurb and recycled it. Shocking and also depressing as it brings my own profession in to disrepute.
The economy globally has tanked. My firm has just shed *another* 400 IT jobs. I know many people who got made redundant just before Christmas. Firms are collapsing left right and centre and those left are cutting right back to keep afloat.
Personally,I'd take pretty much any job you can get right now,IT or otherwise. It's not a time to be picky.
I saw a documentry about forensic computing and they said they had machines/modified drives etc that could extract data from shards of CD/DVDs, smashed up disk platters and hard drives that had been securely erased (read from residual dta either side of the tracks using modified finer heads). They did say text was much easier than encrypted stuff or images/audio as quite a few inbetween bytes do get lost but on text they had a fairly good recovery rate from burnt chunks of platter and the like.
'Which' in the UK are an interesting bunch. Most people that subscribe think very highly of their thorough testing and methods until they read something on a subject they understand and then they realise they're by and large clueless. I've lost count of the number of people I know who used to praise them until their pet subject got featured be that HiFi, computers or washing machines. At that point, they generally cancel their sub.
This very article pretty much confirms that as 'experts' all say Which was going too far.
>developers have an easier time working with it
All the developers I know badmouth Sony big time for their lack of support. A friend told me that as a rule of thumb, if you contact Sony dev support with an issue, they get back around 3-4 weeks later with an email saying "it's in the manuals". Microsoft usually get back within 3-7 hours and often with code examples or a workaround.
>Wii uses more or less the same graphics hardware as the Game Cube.
The Wii is supposed to be 50% more powerful (which isn't saying much). Most developers still use Gamecube devkits for Wii games so they are by and large very similar architectures.
Yep, they were all Rincewind ones I'd tried. I'll give some of your suggestions a go, thanks.
(Methinks/. needs some sort of email option for this sort of msg unless I've missed it)
Boy, this site has really started to slip, quality wise. The Zunes have failed, stopped working, anything but committed suicide. Jeez.
Have to say though, I'd hate to be MS Zune support at this point - most of the staff will be off or in serious party mood, not what you need when something this big happens.
Slashdot Mirror
>reminded me of counters strike
When tiddly winks goes bad...
Back in the day when I had an Atari 800, games were typically GBP35 with the odd extreme one being GBP80 (Some SSI or Avalon Hill game, War in Russia I think?).
My monthly pay at the time was GBP120 so that was basically a weeks money per game.
Bearing in mind how much more effort goes into a modern game, it's amazing prices have effectively dropped. That said, I had more fun then with those old 8K games except the very occassional title that really grabs me now like Bioshock.
A fair point but part of the equation is also that a film gives you two hours of entertainment whereas a game gives you perhaps 20-50+ hours.
Personally, I'm reasonably OK with prices - a new title in the UK is around GBP40 but quickly falls to GBP20 or less after a few months. There are some titles which are GBP50 and that's just too much for me though.
Take one banker, tie rope to neck, swing. Prod occassionally.
Let's face it, they'd have been mad to open shops and show people Vista. Now they have something apparantly rather better, they want to show it off to the world.
As others have said though, I can't imagine much real reason unless they have a whole raft of new titles coming out that no-one knows about. A few years ago when they had all those multimedia titles for movies, art, musical intsruments and so on, I'd have appreciated the chance ot get hands on with a few titles but now I can't see much in their lineup that is a try-before-you-buy sort of title. It's either something you need or you don't.
>But are we really going to try to maximize speed over durability?
I was taught very early in my IT career that there are 3 considerations on any project.
1. It can be cheap
2. It can be fast
3. It can be reliable.
Now go and pick 2 out of 3.
>Hey, we hate fucking Enya...
Oh I don't know, there's a certain MILF appeal in there somewhere.
1. Overly complex control systems
2. Pointless backstory that really adds nothing to the actual game.
The stupid thing is, it doesn't even need faked reviews - Carbonite is genuinely good. it's got me out of a scrape several times and the ability to go back to older versions of documents is great too. Ermm.. this is starting to sound like I'm being facetious but really, it is good.
>the real reason of operating a newspaper or site is to make your audience see the world through your goggles
Not quite - newspapers, magazines etc exist to sell advertising space. The editorial content is just there to support this aim. It was different prior to the early 70's when magazines/papers genuinely existed to provide information to the readers but now that's a byproduct.
Let it never be said jokes don't go whoosh on some people.
I used to load it up just for the intro screen. The music with the lyrics & bouncing ball were great - including the audio samples. This was on an Atari 800 - the C64 version would probably be sightly better c/o the SID chip but the Atari version was pretty damn good.
>did they downsize their qa staff or something? ... 'Whadya mean our reputation has gone to hell and sales are down 40%?'
If they did, it would be typical management stupidity - 'Hey, lets cut staff so we have enough to keep up our ludicrous bonuses!'
The albums I've bought that I wouldn't otherwise have had I not been able to download and try it first? I buy MORE albums now that I did before Napster et al opened my ears to new artists and songs.
>I enjoy at least 1 Belkin product
liking a bit of hardware is one thing but enjoying it? That sounds... wrong somehow.
There are pretty accurate reviews at www.pcbookreview.com although not a hueg selection compared to Amazon, natch.
I would say Belkin *used* to be a premium brand. Stuff I used maybe ten years ago was generally well made - metal cased KVM's etc. More recent stuff seems to be more bargain basement. I once spent hours at a friends house after he bought a Belkin wireless router against my recommendation. Finally got it semi working but I told him to buy a Netgear instead and guess what? When he did, it just worked.
As a reviewer, I do often check out other reviews of a product I'm looking at as a sanity check and it's frightening how often I read review after review saying how great something is when having used it myself, it is patently not. Some are clearly adverts dressed up as reviews but often they're from sites/publishers which you'd really hope did their homework but it seems like they just read the PR blurb and recycled it. Shocking and also depressing as it brings my own profession in to disrepute.
The economy globally has tanked. My firm has just shed *another* 400 IT jobs. I know many people who got made redundant just before Christmas. Firms are collapsing left right and centre and those left are cutting right back to keep afloat.
Personally,I'd take pretty much any job you can get right now,IT or otherwise. It's not a time to be picky.
I saw a documentry about forensic computing and they said they had machines/modified drives etc that could extract data from shards of CD/DVDs, smashed up disk platters and hard drives that had been securely erased (read from residual dta either side of the tracks using modified finer heads). They did say text was much easier than encrypted stuff or images/audio as quite a few inbetween bytes do get lost but on text they had a fairly good recovery rate from burnt chunks of platter and the like.
'Which' in the UK are an interesting bunch. Most people that subscribe think very highly of their thorough testing and methods until they read something on a subject they understand and then they realise they're by and large clueless. I've lost count of the number of people I know who used to praise them until their pet subject got featured be that HiFi, computers or washing machines. At that point, they generally cancel their sub.
This very article pretty much confirms that as 'experts' all say Which was going too far.
>developers have an easier time working with it
All the developers I know badmouth Sony big time for their lack of support. A friend told me that as a rule of thumb, if you contact Sony dev support with an issue, they get back around 3-4 weeks later with an email saying "it's in the manuals". Microsoft usually get back within 3-7 hours and often with code examples or a workaround.
>Wii uses more or less the same graphics hardware as the Game Cube.
The Wii is supposed to be 50% more powerful (which isn't saying much). Most developers still use Gamecube devkits for Wii games so they are by and large very similar architectures.
Yep, they were all Rincewind ones I'd tried. I'll give some of your suggestions a go, thanks. /. needs some sort of email option for this sort of msg unless I've missed it)
(Methinks
Boy, this site has really started to slip, quality wise. The Zunes have failed, stopped working, anything but committed suicide. Jeez.
Have to say though, I'd hate to be MS Zune support at this point - most of the staff will be off or in serious party mood, not what you need when something this big happens.