While Wifi Connection is nice, the Friend Code system is a real pain. Hopefully they won't continue this model for the Wii.
The advantage of Xbox Live, from what I've seen, is standardization and support. I deserve a higher level of service when I pay rather than get it free...and Live has generally delivered. I don't ever remember having Live downtime in serious quantities (*cough* Blizzard *cough*), and it seems like the games on Live have strong SOPs relative to what I saw on the PS2, which is the main competition online for the XBox in the current gen. Much better to do the networking backbone on the console level, rather than force each developer to support it individually.
Look at the difference between MMO and FPS online in PC games: typical FPS online is a central tracker linking to individually-hosted games, which little control over gametypes, the server's abilities, or matching players together. Extra content is sporatic, user-driven or pay-for-episodes. Third-party services like Gamespy and whatnot are available on the PC, but are unlikely on consoles. MMOs, on the other hand, provide robust, persistent networking and chat features and continued support in the form of new content. Making new content is economical because there's a continuing revenue stream from the player - this seems, to me, critical to encourage game developers to revisit their creations and create new content in existing, already-developed engines (and micropayment schemes may or may not subsitute for subscription fees).
Of course, all speculation above; we haven't seen what large-scale, free service looks like in either Sony or Nintendo's case (though as I said, Wifi Connection is promising on the bare-bones level). They may be able to deliver, but I'm skeptical that it will be as robust as what Live offers.
FF also caches history for faster forward-back browsing. If you just popped up IE7 and punched in a bunch of URLs it makes sense that the footprint would be smaller.
Every time I've had a memory issue with FF, I've been able to trace it to an extension I installed. YMMV.
Yeah, but compare Sabin's Blitz with the combos from FF7 and 8. The button presses for Blitz were all straight out of Street Fighter 2 (QCF, HCB, 3QCF, LeftRightLeft, Spinning Piledriver) and everyone with an SNES knew SF2 by then. By comparison, getting Tifa to do Final Heaven or Zack to do much of anything (especially Zack) is a pain in the ass. It's like Square wanted to emulate Super Mario RPG's action aspects but bigger and more complicated, ultimately, less fun.
Amano had work in all of the FFs - he is solely responsible for the graphic that shows up behind the title (Terra on the Magitek suit (6), Meteor (7), Rinoa and Squall (8), etc etc). Unfortunately, his replacement (Nomura?) is obsessed with the J-Pop singer Gackt and has decided that all of his games will feature a carbon copy of Gackt as the main character. He redesigned Setzer for Kingdom Hearts 2, and the redesign just looks boring - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setzer_Gabbiani
You make a reasonable point about being forced to include escape clauses in your contracts with your clients. However, I get the impression that you aren't selling shrink-wrapped products, and you aren't including a EULA that claims to be enforceable upon the opening and use of the product already purchased. The concern about many forms of DRM is that there is no opportunity to renegotiate the contract - how do I tell Sony-BMG or Apple that I don't accept the terms of their 'licensing agreement'?
Apple's EULA for iTunes. What happens if Apple bites it? I'm going to guess that such an event falls under the "We're not responsible for damage to your stuff" clause near the bottom.
Finally, I have to ask. Does your licensing contract state that you can change the terms of the agreement without prior notice, whenever you want, unilaterally?
Mod Parent up, and I would hope to see more of it with the new fad of "episodic content". Graphical upgrades are nice and all, but I would think that more content takes less time to create once one has already finished the engine and interface...especially compared to making a new sequel with more shinies.
Zelda: Master Quest (the GC version of Orcarina) is a great example of this, and Nintendo has been good at making Game Boy, especially, twofer games - Oracle of Ages/Seasons, Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow/Gold/Silver/Fuschia. The GB ones are probably made because there wasn't a whole lot of processing power available, so there's less pressure to upgrade the internals.
Could the sales of the PS2 indicate that people have little confidence in the PS3? If I wanted a PS3, I wouldn't buy a PS2 - the PS3 will have backwards compatibility. However, if I didn't have any confidence in Sony's PS3, I might buy a PS2 instead for the cheap price-point and large library.
There are a ton of factors that might be contributing to the still-strong PS2 sales. Between price, library, PS3 cost, Xbox 360 supply, and few killer next-gen apps, this seems like something MS needs to keep an eye on but not something to be extremely concerned about...yet.
"Say what you want about the principles of National Socialism, Dude, but at least it was an ethos."
Seriously, it muddies the waters to call today's technophiliac-pirate who downloads movies and music analogous to a principled terrorist organization (not to say that I agree with their principles, but that they have them and stick to them). There are two problems: first, that justifiable laws against piracy are largely unenforceable, and second, that MPAA/RIAA-sanctioned safeguards cause grave harm to legitimate fair use rights.
The only principled stand against the second problem is to not consume their product - don't buy it, don't download it, don't infringe on its copyright. To use the terrorist analogy, anyone who tries to claim that their piracy is principled is a Zarqawi, no freedom fighter but an opportunistic thug. It is thanks to the electronic Zarqawis of the world that I get tagged as an opportunist when I denounce DRM - "Oh, you just want to download music for free."
I borrowed a friend's PSone a while back and tried to go through the 'classics' of the PS1 generation (a lot of Square, mostly). Quite frankly, the only game that holds up really well graphically is FF Tactics, which is a sprite-based game. I'd much rather go back and replay FFT or FF6 than 7, 8 or 9, because sprites hold up better over time. Look at the difference between Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat - people are STILL playing SF2 (c.f. Anniversary Edition), but nobody has bothered to rerelease MK. Both had good fighting systems that were relatively deep, but the cartoony sprites on SF2 hold up a lot better than the pseudorealistic MK sprites.
With sprite graphics, the designer can say "this looks this way because that's how I want it to look", as opposed to polygonal graphics, where there are still jaggies and clipping and clothing issues, despite years and years of work. I get the feeling that this is why there is still a lot of nostalgia for SNES/NES games, and very little for any PS1 game other than FF7.
And just to get marked flamebait, Kefka could whup that whiny Sephiroth any day of the week. After all, it was Kefka who taunted: "You people sound like chapters of a self-help book!"
I had a friend who IMed me last night asking if I'd been on the Battlefield 2 tracker earlier (I hadn't, was playing America's Army, but whatever), and I asked him where the heck he'd gotten a PC from. Turned out he'd bought a new macbook and was using the dual-boot/Windows for games and not much else. Battlefield 2 is a pretty graphics-heavy game, and I was interested to hear that the hardware (even on a laptop) can handle gaming well.
At that point the question becomes: does the mac need gaming? If those who're interested in games can use the OSX for most of their work and winXP for games, does Apple even need to try to cater to that market natively? The solution my friend has appeals to me a lot (I'm currently dualing WinXP/Ubuntu, but FreeBSD-based OSX could easily take the place of the second). It really comes down to the tools-for-the-job argument, and if OSX can provide a better environment for my office (currently WinXP) and compiling (currently linux) tasks while allowing the alternative superior-for-games environment (obviously WinXP) if I want it, I think it's really a best of both worlds.
By the way, there's this little thing called 'body armor' and the enemies in most games are wearing it. It tends to cover your chest and protect against this dreaded 'heart shot' that you speak of. On the other hand, the head is rarely protected as well as the ceramic-and-kevlar chest, and thus receives a damage bonus. Especially attentive developers will place different damage values on the helmet and the unprotected areas of the head - I believe Goldeneye had a few enemies with good helmets.
Also, I imagine that anyone who is, in fact, shot in the face will not be shooting back at you any time soon. I believe the first reaction to such an event is often to fall down and/or seek out medical attention to replace a missing nose.
Cue Lost, season 1: "I was aiming for his heart." "Well, you missed."
The only thing I can think of the OP referring to is the phenomenon where the bullet skims the cranium underneath the skin, popping out the other side and giving the victim a hell of a headache. Tends to happen with low-powered rounds that literally richochet off the skull. It's a freakish enough occurance that I doubt you'd avoid shooting someone in the head.
It is true, however, that self-defense courses do not teach to aim for the head; it's a small target, and you're not going for style points. I remember being asked, "When do you stop firing in a self defense situation?"
For hifi recording, perhaps (though both DCC and MD are inferior to DAT if all you want is sound quality), but my original post was about data-storage and music playing. For both of those purposes, you want a random-access medium, for fast search and playback - DCC is as bad at that as cassette was - and after people had experienced track skipping with CD players, there's no way you're going to get them to go back.
The compression, I note, also improved considerably as time went on. They're up to what, ATRAC-3-plus now? I have a NetMD player, which I use for working out (it's small and sweat-resistant) but I don't have the patience to swap out tracks often - maybe once every three months I update the workout mix.
It always seems to come up that Betamax was 'technologically superior' to VHS, and there's always some/.er who posts a refutation. Instead of being redundant, I'd argue that Minidisc was Sony's worst "technologically superior" failure. MD came about a few years before Zip, and had more storage capacity (177 MB versus 100 MB), a smaller form-factor, and the discs were cheaper. However, the software was terrible for audio (you had to record directly into the audio jack) and there was no way to use MD as portable storage until long after the iPod had arrived. There was a huge market for Zip as a middleware between floppy (1.44") and CD-R, and Sony could've aimed MD towards that market and done well (and provided a superior product to those damn Zip disks).
Even when the first hard-disk mp3 players started coming out, Sony 'updated' with the NetMD software. That software must've been the inspiration for the rootkits of 2005, and was one of thoe most user-unfriendly products I've ever seen. Still no data-recording, even though competing players had that function, and an annoying three-copy rule on each mp3. Add this to a proprietary format and you get a terrible experience - no wonder MD never caught on. Even so, the hardware was good - the HiMD update allows.mp3 and provides hard drive functionality...but too little, too late.
I would hope that Sony has learned the lesson of MD: superior technology without user-friendly software is worthless.
Why does the guy have to stop and stand there every time he wants to shoot his pistol? I just don't get it. Now, if they made it so that he could shoot much more accurately when stopped, that would be one thing. They must not have ever fired a real gun. It's not true to reality. (...) You know, in reality no one stops to shoot. It makes no sense to me that you'd stop. You shoot while you're in motion. Of course when you stop you can be more accurate, but it's not realistic. I got tired of it after the second level; it got boring to me. Some of your readers may say "Well, in Ninja Gaiden you use a bow and arrow while moving" but in real life you don't use a bow and arrow while in motion, but with guns you. If you like sniper games, it's ok to stop.
Hmm, wasn't one of the arguments for intelligent design that the fundamental constants had to be "just right" for the universe to exist? If the shifts of other dimensions causes shifts in our universal constants...another nail in the necessity-of-God argument's coffin?
Slashdot Mirror
While Wifi Connection is nice, the Friend Code system is a real pain. Hopefully they won't continue this model for the Wii.
The advantage of Xbox Live, from what I've seen, is standardization and support. I deserve a higher level of service when I pay rather than get it free...and Live has generally delivered. I don't ever remember having Live downtime in serious quantities (*cough* Blizzard *cough*), and it seems like the games on Live have strong SOPs relative to what I saw on the PS2, which is the main competition online for the XBox in the current gen. Much better to do the networking backbone on the console level, rather than force each developer to support it individually.
Look at the difference between MMO and FPS online in PC games: typical FPS online is a central tracker linking to individually-hosted games, which little control over gametypes, the server's abilities, or matching players together. Extra content is sporatic, user-driven or pay-for-episodes. Third-party services like Gamespy and whatnot are available on the PC, but are unlikely on consoles. MMOs, on the other hand, provide robust, persistent networking and chat features and continued support in the form of new content. Making new content is economical because there's a continuing revenue stream from the player - this seems, to me, critical to encourage game developers to revisit their creations and create new content in existing, already-developed engines (and micropayment schemes may or may not subsitute for subscription fees).
Of course, all speculation above; we haven't seen what large-scale, free service looks like in either Sony or Nintendo's case (though as I said, Wifi Connection is promising on the bare-bones level). They may be able to deliver, but I'm skeptical that it will be as robust as what Live offers.
FF also caches history for faster forward-back browsing. If you just popped up IE7 and punched in a bunch of URLs it makes sense that the footprint would be smaller. Every time I've had a memory issue with FF, I've been able to trace it to an extension I installed. YMMV.
Yeah, but compare Sabin's Blitz with the combos from FF7 and 8. The button presses for Blitz were all straight out of Street Fighter 2 (QCF, HCB, 3QCF, LeftRightLeft, Spinning Piledriver) and everyone with an SNES knew SF2 by then. By comparison, getting Tifa to do Final Heaven or Zack to do much of anything (especially Zack) is a pain in the ass. It's like Square wanted to emulate Super Mario RPG's action aspects but bigger and more complicated, ultimately, less fun.
Amano had work in all of the FFs - he is solely responsible for the graphic that shows up behind the title (Terra on the Magitek suit (6), Meteor (7), Rinoa and Squall (8), etc etc). Unfortunately, his replacement (Nomura?) is obsessed with the J-Pop singer Gackt and has decided that all of his games will feature a carbon copy of Gackt as the main character. He redesigned Setzer for Kingdom Hearts 2, and the redesign just looks boring - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setzer_Gabbiani
You make a reasonable point about being forced to include escape clauses in your contracts with your clients. However, I get the impression that you aren't selling shrink-wrapped products, and you aren't including a EULA that claims to be enforceable upon the opening and use of the product already purchased. The concern about many forms of DRM is that there is no opportunity to renegotiate the contract - how do I tell Sony-BMG or Apple that I don't accept the terms of their 'licensing agreement'?
Apple's EULA for iTunes. What happens if Apple bites it? I'm going to guess that such an event falls under the "We're not responsible for damage to your stuff" clause near the bottom.
Finally, I have to ask. Does your licensing contract state that you can change the terms of the agreement without prior notice, whenever you want, unilaterally?
Mod Parent up, and I would hope to see more of it with the new fad of "episodic content". Graphical upgrades are nice and all, but I would think that more content takes less time to create once one has already finished the engine and interface...especially compared to making a new sequel with more shinies. Zelda: Master Quest (the GC version of Orcarina) is a great example of this, and Nintendo has been good at making Game Boy, especially, twofer games - Oracle of Ages/Seasons, Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow/Gold/Silver/Fuschia. The GB ones are probably made because there wasn't a whole lot of processing power available, so there's less pressure to upgrade the internals.
Johnny Turbo, you've come back to us!
Could the sales of the PS2 indicate that people have little confidence in the PS3? If I wanted a PS3, I wouldn't buy a PS2 - the PS3 will have backwards compatibility. However, if I didn't have any confidence in Sony's PS3, I might buy a PS2 instead for the cheap price-point and large library.
There are a ton of factors that might be contributing to the still-strong PS2 sales. Between price, library, PS3 cost, Xbox 360 supply, and few killer next-gen apps, this seems like something MS needs to keep an eye on but not something to be extremely concerned about...yet.
"Say what you want about the principles of National Socialism, Dude, but at least it was an ethos."
Seriously, it muddies the waters to call today's technophiliac-pirate who downloads movies and music analogous to a principled terrorist organization (not to say that I agree with their principles, but that they have them and stick to them). There are two problems: first, that justifiable laws against piracy are largely unenforceable, and second, that MPAA/RIAA-sanctioned safeguards cause grave harm to legitimate fair use rights.
The only principled stand against the second problem is to not consume their product - don't buy it, don't download it, don't infringe on its copyright. To use the terrorist analogy, anyone who tries to claim that their piracy is principled is a Zarqawi, no freedom fighter but an opportunistic thug. It is thanks to the electronic Zarqawis of the world that I get tagged as an opportunist when I denounce DRM - "Oh, you just want to download music for free."
I borrowed a friend's PSone a while back and tried to go through the 'classics' of the PS1 generation (a lot of Square, mostly). Quite frankly, the only game that holds up really well graphically is FF Tactics, which is a sprite-based game. I'd much rather go back and replay FFT or FF6 than 7, 8 or 9, because sprites hold up better over time. Look at the difference between Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat - people are STILL playing SF2 (c.f. Anniversary Edition), but nobody has bothered to rerelease MK. Both had good fighting systems that were relatively deep, but the cartoony sprites on SF2 hold up a lot better than the pseudorealistic MK sprites.
With sprite graphics, the designer can say "this looks this way because that's how I want it to look", as opposed to polygonal graphics, where there are still jaggies and clipping and clothing issues, despite years and years of work. I get the feeling that this is why there is still a lot of nostalgia for SNES/NES games, and very little for any PS1 game other than FF7.
And just to get marked flamebait, Kefka could whup that whiny Sephiroth any day of the week. After all, it was Kefka who taunted: "You people sound like chapters of a self-help book!"
The MacBook, on the other hand...
I had a friend who IMed me last night asking if I'd been on the Battlefield 2 tracker earlier (I hadn't, was playing America's Army, but whatever), and I asked him where the heck he'd gotten a PC from. Turned out he'd bought a new macbook and was using the dual-boot/Windows for games and not much else. Battlefield 2 is a pretty graphics-heavy game, and I was interested to hear that the hardware (even on a laptop) can handle gaming well.
At that point the question becomes: does the mac need gaming? If those who're interested in games can use the OSX for most of their work and winXP for games, does Apple even need to try to cater to that market natively? The solution my friend has appeals to me a lot (I'm currently dualing WinXP/Ubuntu, but FreeBSD-based OSX could easily take the place of the second). It really comes down to the tools-for-the-job argument, and if OSX can provide a better environment for my office (currently WinXP) and compiling (currently linux) tasks while allowing the alternative superior-for-games environment (obviously WinXP) if I want it, I think it's really a best of both worlds.
By the way, there's this little thing called 'body armor' and the enemies in most games are wearing it. It tends to cover your chest and protect against this dreaded 'heart shot' that you speak of. On the other hand, the head is rarely protected as well as the ceramic-and-kevlar chest, and thus receives a damage bonus. Especially attentive developers will place different damage values on the helmet and the unprotected areas of the head - I believe Goldeneye had a few enemies with good helmets.
Also, I imagine that anyone who is, in fact, shot in the face will not be shooting back at you any time soon. I believe the first reaction to such an event is often to fall down and/or seek out medical attention to replace a missing nose.
Cue Lost, season 1:
"I was aiming for his heart."
"Well, you missed."
The only thing I can think of the OP referring to is the phenomenon where the bullet skims the cranium underneath the skin, popping out the other side and giving the victim a hell of a headache. Tends to happen with low-powered rounds that literally richochet off the skull. It's a freakish enough occurance that I doubt you'd avoid shooting someone in the head.
It is true, however, that self-defense courses do not teach to aim for the head; it's a small target, and you're not going for style points. I remember being asked, "When do you stop firing in a self defense situation?"
The answer? "When the magazine is empty."
For hifi recording, perhaps (though both DCC and MD are inferior to DAT if all you want is sound quality), but my original post was about data-storage and music playing. For both of those purposes, you want a random-access medium, for fast search and playback - DCC is as bad at that as cassette was - and after people had experienced track skipping with CD players, there's no way you're going to get them to go back.
The compression, I note, also improved considerably as time went on. They're up to what, ATRAC-3-plus now? I have a NetMD player, which I use for working out (it's small and sweat-resistant) but I don't have the patience to swap out tracks often - maybe once every three months I update the workout mix.
It always seems to come up that Betamax was 'technologically superior' to VHS, and there's always some /.er who posts a refutation. Instead of being redundant, I'd argue that Minidisc was Sony's worst "technologically superior" failure. MD came about a few years before Zip, and had more storage capacity (177 MB versus 100 MB), a smaller form-factor, and the discs were cheaper. However, the software was terrible for audio (you had to record directly into the audio jack) and there was no way to use MD as portable storage until long after the iPod had arrived. There was a huge market for Zip as a middleware between floppy (1.44") and CD-R, and Sony could've aimed MD towards that market and done well (and provided a superior product to those damn Zip disks).
.mp3 and provides hard drive functionality...but too little, too late.
I would hope that Sony has learned the lesson of MD: superior technology without user-friendly software is worthless.
Even when the first hard-disk mp3 players started coming out, Sony 'updated' with the NetMD software. That software must've been the inspiration for the rootkits of 2005, and was one of thoe most user-unfriendly products I've ever seen. Still no data-recording, even though competing players had that function, and an annoying three-copy rule on each mp3. Add this to a proprietary format and you get a terrible experience - no wonder MD never caught on. Even so, the hardware was good - the HiMD update allows
On Biohazard / Resident Evil 4: I was cracking up at that one.
It's official. Phil Harrison has become the American version of Tomonobu Itagaki.
Hmm, wasn't one of the arguments for intelligent design that the fundamental constants had to be "just right" for the universe to exist? If the shifts of other dimensions causes shifts in our universal constants...another nail in the necessity-of-God argument's coffin?
String theory makes my head hurt.