I've bought toys from http://www.audioauthority.com/, and if you have the cash to spend, I'd invest in a AVAtrix Whole-House Routing System (about $4000), which is an A/V matrix distribution system.
It doesn't support HDMI, but for sending/controlling HD Component (or DVI) from up to 6 locations, and signal distro over a pair of Cat5s, it's really tough to beat. I've been planning for years on setting a system like this up in a house so I could watch/play any component on any display in the house.
The article was an opinion piece, and a great conversation-starter (as proven here) that only proves the point: Everyone likes something different, be it different genres (FPS, RPG, etc), or even different styles in each genre (HL vs. Quake/Doom vs. Deus Ex)
There is no hard/fast RIGHT way to make a game. Each successful game has something unique about it, and share little aside from perspective (and that's changing, GoW is a great 3rd-person FPS) from game to game.
Some great examples of different variations on the FPS 'Genre':
Doom/Quake - The original FPS (barring Wolfenstein, of course) - Run and gun and have fun.
Halo/Halo2 - BIG envrionments (yes I know about the Halo 2 limitations, but it FELT huge) and very cinematic.
HL/HL2 - "Puzzle Cinematic".. really made you feel as if you were participating in a moving story (as opposed to only watching cutscenes)
Lost Planet/Gears of War - Both "3rd Person" shooters that felt like FPS. Gears was much better than LP, but they both have footholds in the FPS formula.
Condemned/FEAR - 'Horror' FPS.. and most of the combat in Condemned was melee weapons.. granted the 'evidence' collection was pretty much a gimme, but it was a fantastic (albeit short) ride.
Max Payne - I didn't notice anyone mention this gem... it was short but the great film noir setting/story combined with the 'bullet time' gimmick was only marred by Max's constant grimace.
So as you can see.. making a list of 'rules' is pretty much a bunk idea intended to stir up a nest. Everyone likes something different (and in a lot of cases, something different about/within the same game). It all boils down to one rule: Make it fun and interesting enough for everyone to come away with a positive experience.
Not broken, Midnight Launch 360. Used to freeze during long sessions until I set up proper ventilation in the cabinet it was sitting in. (DUH.. so it wouldn't recirculate the hot air it was pumping out back through the intake)
Exactly what I was thinking. It's almost statistically impossible for him to have purchased, and replaced, THAT many machines, and EVERY one failed on him, all due to faulty machines.
When I was working at Gamestop, people would call ALL the time for tech support for different things. A lot of calls were about overheating 360s.. and most of them had the damn things in a media cabinet. Non-techies don't understand the concept of INTAKE/EXHAUST when it comes to consumer electronics. OR they stick the power brick on carpet.
Believe it or not, I have a launch X360 that has had NO problems (aside from freezing when it was, duh, overheating during certain games - yes I had poor ventilation). Now I have my 360 inside my standing cabinet on the top shelf. I drilled an exhaust hole in the back and attatched an 80mm A/C fan I nabbed from a Sony PS2 Kiosk going in the garbage. I didn't bother with an intake fan (didn't have another fan and the cabinet isn't airtight)
After running my 360 for about 30 hours straight (Viva Pinata achievement) inside the cabinet with the glass door closed, it was still cool to the touch. It's just like the old tech support stories about the coffee cup holder, or the mouse/foot pedal.. a LARGE number of 'faulty machines' are due to plain ignorance or stupidity.
As an assistant manager at Gamestop over the holidays, I had a few experiences with this:
One time, a kid wanted an M game. After telling him he needed a parent to buy it, he rode his bike home. Dad drove him back up, and sent him in with his ID. Told him still no go. Kid left and got Dad out of the car (poor guy, looked dead tired). I apologized profusely for the hassle, but Dad was extremely understanding, and even thanked me for doing a proper job.
Another parent comes to mind that was shopping for her son. He wanted an M-rated game, and when I told Mom about it, she didn't understand what that meant. After the explanation, she 'got it' and told him to shop for other things.
Other parents have come in and allowed their kids to buy M-rated games based on content. One kid wanted God of War (Sex, Language, Violence, etc. etc.) and Mom said "No, find another game without sex or language." I think he found something WWE 2006, which if I remember correctly was only violent content, which she was OK with.
All in all, of the (likely) dozens of M-rated ID/Get your Parents situations that I experienced, the only time I had even close to a confrontational parent encounter was one parent that asked why we didn't have chairs in the front of the store so tired folks could rest while the kids went nosing around. I told her about the ratings and how parents should shop WITH their kids, and a lot of parents did just that. She seemed stunned, having no idea what I was talking about.
Parents really are taking a much more active role, at least from my personal experience, and I am very reassured by it.
Former EA employess decide to create game studio (Spark)
Spark signs deal with Activision for 3 games and US$1M advance
Spark hires other EA employees for art/development
EA sues Spark over ghost and zip files (theft), Spark says it's EA IT's fault (incompetence)
EA/Spark settle for nothing.
Activision advances Spark cash to cover legal fees.
That's just getting the studio off the ground. At this juncture, I feel bad for Spark and angry with EA ('course, who needs much reason these days to be angry @EA). Also, Activision is acting cool (or protecting their investment) and helping bail them out of trouble.
Spark starts development work on "a AAA title" for Activision (CoD)
Development crawls, Activision gets antsy
Activision outsources a lot of the dev work for game, and sends over contractors to help
Activision advances more money to Spark for development
Spark CTO quits and sues Spark(?) (unclear in article, assumed)
Game finishes, ships, and sells pretty well
Ok.. so fiasco over. Activision got their game, Spark got it done (amidst great turmoil)everyone happy right?
Spark proposes another game to Activision
Activision thinks it sucks and tells Spark to take off, contract released
Spark gets pissy and demands a cancellation fee (US$500K)
WTF is wrong with these guys? I can't stand most publishers (EA or Activision), but this little dev studio that could who was plagued by drama (and got bailed out, pretty clean to boot) decides to bite the hand that fed em? I say let em' burn (unless this isn't the WHOLE story)
Link to Gabe's original post and her response: (In case Penny-arcade is blocked at work)
Gabe,
Your news post about the kids and the homeless man yesterday made me sick to my stomach, before I even read the CNN article. I knew what it was going to be about before even reading the article. It was not the article itself, or even your post that made me sick, it was the fact that I know this boy. Or, rather that I could be considered one of the "parents" of this boy.
The boy's father and I have been together for almost seven years, and I had what I guess could be called a "stepmother" relationship with the kid. To say that living with this kid was hell would be a complete understatement.
I don't think I have ever actively hated anyone in my entire life, but this kid just makes my blood boil.
As I write this, my teeth are clenched, my hands are shaking, and my whole body is seething with the hatred I feel for this kid and what he has done. Seeing the article brings back all the horrible memories from when he lived with us.
He was constantly in trouble in school, with the cops, with us, with his mother, and with anyone else who was an authority figure. Not a week went by that the school or the cops wouldn't call us for something. His attitude was basically "fuck you, I don't have to listen to you" said with a shrug.
We tried absolutely everything we could think of to get him to behave like a normal human being... we tried groundings, negative reinforcement / punishment, positive reinforcement, counseling, and anything and everything the counselors suggested. We tried to get him interested and involved in extracurricular activities, like hockey, drama, music, art, anything, but he got himself kicked out of every group he was in with his "make me" attitude. When we would ground him, we took away everything. No TV, no computer, no phone, no leaving the house, no snacks or junk food.... Everything. When he was grounded, he was only allowed to sit in his room and read or draw. He was actually a pretty good artist, and we tried to encourage him to spend his time working with his talent. He would just sit there and take it... the groundings had absolutely no affect on him at all. Most of the time, he didn't even remember why he was being grounded. At the end of it, we would ask him if it was worth it to have everything taken away in exchange for what he did... he usually just shrugged. He could be grounded for weeks, or a month at a time, and then the very next day would do something to get back in trouble again. Most kids get grounded or punished a couple of times, and then they want to avoid having to go through it again... not this kid, nothing seemed to phase him.
And we're not talking the usual teenager stuff, like coming home late, or refusing to do the dishes. We're talking stealing cars, setting fires, drinking, getting picked up for drugs, beating up handicapped kids at school (yes, really) stealing things out of our house... all with this "I'll do whatever the fuck I want" attitude.
We had absolutely no idea what else we could do. We already had him in counseling, and we did everything the counselors suggested. We tried rewarding his good behavior (what little there was) to try to get him to see that when he behaves like a normal human being, things are good and people enjoy being around him. Nothing phased him at all.
Then, things took an even worse turn when he decided that whenever he didn't get his way, or we did something he didn't like, he told his counselors and teachers that we were abusing him. (Never happened.) And for some inexplicable reason, everybody believed him. I understand that child abuse is a very serious situation, and that they have to take every possible case seriously, but this was clearly a case of him manipulating people to get what he wanted. We had people from the school, cops, and social services over at our ho
Jack Tretton = President of Sony Computer Entertainment of America. And a boldfaced liar that owes me $3600 for the 3 PS3's that I had in the back of the gamestop I just quit working for.
Not to criticize your point, maybe off-topic, but Gears is a "3rd Person Shooter" not a FPS (First-Person Shooter).
Controller would probably work a lot better than Keyboard/Mouse in this instance, the only time you're in a FPS perspective is when you zoom in. They REALLY did a hellova job mapping the controller to the game (and the triggers make the game playable).
I'd like to qualify my opinion by stating that I've played FPS since Doom (Yes 1), and I absolutely refused to play ANY FPS on ANY console, until Halo came out. Say what you will about M$ or the Xboxes, but they made a controller that you CAN play a FPS on reliably, and not make gamers run screaming for mice/WASD.
I worked at a Gamestop as an Assistant Manager for the holiday season.. (and both the Wii and PS3 launches), this is what people bought:
1. Wiis, if we had them (tended to run out about an hour after the UPS guy arrived, sometimes less)
2. PS3s, until the Wii released.
3. Xbox 360s by the TON (average 3-4 a day), and out of those, 75% went out the door with a copy of Gears.
Well.. you're looking at $50 for the game, $50 for a Wireless 360 controller, and another $20 for the PC Wireless adapter. That's a pretty steep cost of entry.
Only one problem with that theory:
Xbox360 and PS3 are the only 'Hi-Def' bells and whistles consoles on the market. Wii is fantastic, but it won't run high resolution games like Gears of War.
PS3 is getting crushed (Flamebait away, but look at the installed base numbers).
Now, with over 10 million installed base of GAMING machines (x360), that Microsoft is pushing like crazy,.. OpenGL is going to go down the tubes, because there is NO console that runs an OpenGL stack (native), but you can EASILY port that 360 game over to Windows DirectX (compared to rebuilding and recoding from the ground up) and then you have a HUGE potential customer base across both PC and 360.
They did it with Halo 2, they'll do it with Halo 3, and you can bet your bottom dollar that there's a ton of 3rd party publishers that will do it too. It's not just a numbers game, but a development cost game.
I miss OpenGL, and I prefer competition, but between Microsoft pushing DirectX to bridge the gap between PC and console, DirectX is definitely the way to go for devs nowadays.
Aside from parents trying to make their kids happy for X-mas.. how many people that spend $600 on a Video Game machine don't consider themselves gamers?
Yes, Gamestops are getting resupplied with PS3s.. but only enough to cover pre-orders. In fact, in my store we got in two today (for the last two pre-orders) and are under orders that if both don't get picked up (and paid off) the systems get shipped to another store to cover pre-orders that haven't been filled (yet).
We're not going to see a 'free' shipment of PS3's until next year.. Sony's pre-launch promises are bunk (because the yields on working Cells are terrible).
We're expecting to get in Wii's later today/tonight, and they'll go on sale Friday (since we're closed on Thursday for the holiday). We did get a shipment of Zelda's in yesterday, but those flew off the racks as fast as they were put up. Wii-motes and Joysticks are the same story (as soon as they're on the floor they're gone).
I've told parents personally that if they're shopping for Christmas, they can afford to wait for Wii's (we're expecting shipments every week, and Nintendo has always been good about keeping up stock post-launch).. Those hunting for a Sony.. well.. that's a different story.
Don't be so certain about that pre-order -> Ebay profit.
Not only is everyone else doing it.. but a large subset of them won't get to Ebay their console (without a delay).. Ebay is tracking serial #s (which you have to enter to sell your PS3) and a large number of them are getting tagged as "Not sellable for X days"..
I can't tell you how I know for certain.. but it's worth investigating so you don't get burned, right?
Not to mention, I used to spend $500-$300 on JUST upgrading my graphics card.. every other year..
A decent gaming PC will run you $2500 minimum, maybe less if you can swap the mobo, have decent RAM already, and you monitor isn't a junker. A high-end gaming system is upwards of $4000 out of the box.
OR.. I could spend $400 on my 360, $1700 on a 42-Inch HDTV (with a VGA input for my computer), and have a machine that I never have to fiddle with drivers or rebooting to do anything, and there's that whole video-on-demand and HD-DVD for another $200 on Friday..
Yea.. it's not worth getting at all. Granted, it's a 'toy'.. but now I can watch the shows I capture to my Media PC on my home theatre through a Cat-5.. (used to have a DTS encoder, DVI-HDMI, wireless keyboard + mouse, 25' USB cable/hub, all hooked up to my 6-fan PC under the entertainment center), play awesome games (I never got Farcry to work with my graphics card, and Quake 3 looks fantastic) @ 720p/1080i x 42".. and downloadable TV shows/HD movies by the end of the month.. probably one of the best investments in 'Toys' I've ever made.
Not to mention that the visualization tool + my 50GB MP3 library is a fantastic DJ for parties. Oh yea.. 'just a toy'.. forgot.
Actually.. there's only 175k slated for US, and 400k worldwide before X-mas.
That's from my buddy the manager of a local chain store. Not to mention that he's told me that at least 1/2 of his pre-orders are destined for E-bay.
I'd say something about that devious plan, but I'm under an NDA.. suffice it to say it'll be an interesting Friday.
Have you ever been to a kid's cancer ward? My fiance's daughter had a tumor (successfuly removed, she's fully recovered) when she was 4, and we visited all the time.
True, there are a lot of kids that won't be in there for long (day, few days, etc.) but when you're undergoing treatment, a lot of kids can kill a good 4-8 hours a day (at least) not sleeping, bored to tears watching TV or doing schoolwork via tutoring.
Now apply that logic to cancer kids undergoing long-term in-patient treatment.. they live in those hospitals for sometimes weeks or even months. RPGs (teaching critical thinking, encouraging problem-solving, engaging reading skills) would be excellent for them, keep them engaged, entertained, AND using their brains.
Jack goes to jail for making a ruckuss about 'Bully'
Rockstar bribes warden of Jail, installs cameras and arranges 'special accomodations' for dear ol' Jack.
Jack gets to spend some quality time with some new friends (Read: Bullies)
Rockstar includes some great vid captures of Jack in their new game.. (just innocent boys experimenting in their element)
Granted, that was poorly stated. The Mario Bros. franchise itself isn't 'garbage'.. but turning a 2d (at the time) platformer with a very thin plot into a Hollywood production was, to term it lightly, a stretch.
Something important to bear in mind:
Halo was the game that defined the Xbox launch and led a lot to it's success. Halo 2 was THE game of the last console generation (fastest selling media in the US, $125 million in 24 hours).. I have a lot of non-gamer friends that specifically bought X-Boxes and Halo 2 (as well as live subscriptions) just to play online together across the country.
Now, if you actually have played the game, or seen the 'making of' DVD, you might change your perspective. They developed the game a lot like an actual Hollywood production, with professional spot-on voice acting, a great plotline, and scored by a symphony orchestra (along with some modern rockers)..
True, the normal rule of thumb is "Video Game -> Movies do poorly and suck." But take into account the original games used to make the adaptation: Super Mario Bros, Double Dragon, Bloodrayne, Doom, etc. Garbage in = Garbage out.
Both Jackson and Bungie are anal-retentive diehards about thier work, there is a very strong chance that this game will break the bank at the box office. Not to mention that this will further market the Xbox 360 and Halo 3 simultaneously; I just hope M$ doesn't rush it to meet a 2007 launch to coincide with the game (which I doubt Bungie will allow them to do.. they only rushed Halo out the door.. they sat on Halo 2 and 3 despite what Microsoft wanted, in order to do the job right, and it paid off in spades).
Slashdot Mirror
I've bought toys from http://www.audioauthority.com/, and if you have the cash to spend, I'd invest in a AVAtrix Whole-House Routing System (about $4000), which is an A/V matrix distribution system.
It doesn't support HDMI, but for sending/controlling HD Component (or DVI) from up to 6 locations, and signal distro over a pair of Cat5s, it's really tough to beat. I've been planning for years on setting a system like this up in a house so I could watch/play any component on any display in the house.
As long as I can still play my PS2 Barbie Horse Adventures .. then I'm sold!
To each his/her own.
.. really made you feel as if you were participating in a moving story (as opposed to only watching cutscenes) .. and most of the combat in Condemned was melee weapons .. granted the 'evidence' collection was pretty much a gimme, but it was a fantastic (albeit short) ride. ... it was short but the great film noir setting/story combined with the 'bullet time' gimmick was only marred by Max's constant grimace.
.. making a list of 'rules' is pretty much a bunk idea intended to stir up a nest. Everyone likes something different (and in a lot of cases, something different about/within the same game). It all boils down to one rule: Make it fun and interesting enough for everyone to come away with a positive experience.
The article was an opinion piece, and a great conversation-starter (as proven here) that only proves the point: Everyone likes something different, be it different genres (FPS, RPG, etc), or even different styles in each genre (HL vs. Quake/Doom vs. Deus Ex)
There is no hard/fast RIGHT way to make a game. Each successful game has something unique about it, and share little aside from perspective (and that's changing, GoW is a great 3rd-person FPS) from game to game.
Some great examples of different variations on the FPS 'Genre':
Doom/Quake - The original FPS (barring Wolfenstein, of course) - Run and gun and have fun.
Halo/Halo2 - BIG envrionments (yes I know about the Halo 2 limitations, but it FELT huge) and very cinematic.
HL/HL2 - "Puzzle Cinematic"
Lost Planet/Gears of War - Both "3rd Person" shooters that felt like FPS. Gears was much better than LP, but they both have footholds in the FPS formula.
Condemned/FEAR - 'Horror' FPS
Max Payne - I didn't notice anyone mention this gem
So as you can see
Not broken, Midnight Launch 360. Used to freeze during long sessions until I set up proper ventilation in the cabinet it was sitting in. (DUH .. so it wouldn't recirculate the hot air it was pumping out back through the intake)
Exactly what I was thinking. It's almost statistically impossible for him to have purchased, and replaced, THAT many machines, and EVERY one failed on him, all due to faulty machines.
.. and most of them had the damn things in a media cabinet. Non-techies don't understand the concept of INTAKE/EXHAUST when it comes to consumer electronics. OR they stick the power brick on carpet.
.. a LARGE number of 'faulty machines' are due to plain ignorance or stupidity.
When I was working at Gamestop, people would call ALL the time for tech support for different things. A lot of calls were about overheating 360s
Believe it or not, I have a launch X360 that has had NO problems (aside from freezing when it was, duh, overheating during certain games - yes I had poor ventilation). Now I have my 360 inside my standing cabinet on the top shelf. I drilled an exhaust hole in the back and attatched an 80mm A/C fan I nabbed from a Sony PS2 Kiosk going in the garbage. I didn't bother with an intake fan (didn't have another fan and the cabinet isn't airtight)
After running my 360 for about 30 hours straight (Viva Pinata achievement) inside the cabinet with the glass door closed, it was still cool to the touch. It's just like the old tech support stories about the coffee cup holder, or the mouse/foot pedal
As an assistant manager at Gamestop over the holidays, I had a few experiences with this:
One time, a kid wanted an M game. After telling him he needed a parent to buy it, he rode his bike home. Dad drove him back up, and sent him in with his ID. Told him still no go. Kid left and got Dad out of the car (poor guy, looked dead tired). I apologized profusely for the hassle, but Dad was extremely understanding, and even thanked me for doing a proper job.
Another parent comes to mind that was shopping for her son. He wanted an M-rated game, and when I told Mom about it, she didn't understand what that meant. After the explanation, she 'got it' and told him to shop for other things.
Other parents have come in and allowed their kids to buy M-rated games based on content. One kid wanted God of War (Sex, Language, Violence, etc. etc.) and Mom said "No, find another game without sex or language." I think he found something WWE 2006, which if I remember correctly was only violent content, which she was OK with.
All in all, of the (likely) dozens of M-rated ID/Get your Parents situations that I experienced, the only time I had even close to a confrontational parent encounter was one parent that asked why we didn't have chairs in the front of the store so tired folks could rest while the kids went nosing around. I told her about the ratings and how parents should shop WITH their kids, and a lot of parents did just that. She seemed stunned, having no idea what I was talking about.
Parents really are taking a much more active role, at least from my personal experience, and I am very reassured by it.
That's just getting the studio off the ground. At this juncture, I feel bad for Spark and angry with EA ('course, who needs much reason these days to be angry @EA). Also, Activision is acting cool (or protecting their investment) and helping bail them out of trouble.
Ok
WTF is wrong with these guys? I can't stand most publishers (EA or Activision), but this little dev studio that could who was plagued by drama (and got bailed out, pretty clean to boot) decides to bite the hand that fed em? I say let em' burn (unless this isn't the WHOLE story)
Unfortunately, it would be the minority that would bother to investigate the truth situation (for study or enlightenment).
Bigger media (and money) is to be had for ignoring this side of the story, and instead pulling a Jack Thompson.
How much news coverage did the "Video Games Good for Surgeons" story get? And how much has THIS story generated?
It was a joke man .. lighten up.
Jack Tretton = President of Sony Computer Entertainment of America. And a boldfaced liar that owes me $3600 for the 3 PS3's that I had in the back of the gamestop I just quit working for.
They develop a launch title for PS3 that DOESN'T move PS3's .. then "Move to enjoy the good life" in China ...
They didn't decide to relocate; Jack Tretton promptly shipped them off when Resistance didn't kill Gears/Wii like it was supposed to.
Not to criticize your point, maybe off-topic, but Gears is a "3rd Person Shooter" not a FPS (First-Person Shooter).
Controller would probably work a lot better than Keyboard/Mouse in this instance, the only time you're in a FPS perspective is when you zoom in. They REALLY did a hellova job mapping the controller to the game (and the triggers make the game playable).
I'd like to qualify my opinion by stating that I've played FPS since Doom (Yes 1), and I absolutely refused to play ANY FPS on ANY console, until Halo came out. Say what you will about M$ or the Xboxes, but they made a controller that you CAN play a FPS on reliably, and not make gamers run screaming for mice/WASD.
I worked at a Gamestop as an Assistant Manager for the holiday season .. (and both the Wii and PS3 launches), this is what people bought:
... with shipments of more than 2 million copies in six weeks leading Microsoft to proclaim it the "fast-selling next-generation console game" to date"
.. I can see your point. Really.
1. Wiis, if we had them (tended to run out about an hour after the UPS guy arrived, sometimes less)
2. PS3s, until the Wii released.
3. Xbox 360s by the TON (average 3-4 a day), and out of those, 75% went out the door with a copy of Gears.
"around 2m Xbox 360s were sold between the start of November 2006 and Christmas Day." and Gears of War,
Yea
Well .. you're looking at $50 for the game, $50 for a Wireless 360 controller, and another $20 for the PC Wireless adapter. That's a pretty steep cost of entry.
GoW drove sales of the Xbox 360 through the holidays. Damn shame that it probably won't do the same for Vista ..
Only one problem with that theory: Xbox360 and PS3 are the only 'Hi-Def' bells and whistles consoles on the market. Wii is fantastic, but it won't run high resolution games like Gears of War. PS3 is getting crushed (Flamebait away, but look at the installed base numbers).
.. OpenGL is going to go down the tubes, because there is NO console that runs an OpenGL stack (native), but you can EASILY port that 360 game over to Windows DirectX (compared to rebuilding and recoding from the ground up) and then you have a HUGE potential customer base across both PC and 360.
Now, with over 10 million installed base of GAMING machines (x360), that Microsoft is pushing like crazy,
They did it with Halo 2, they'll do it with Halo 3, and you can bet your bottom dollar that there's a ton of 3rd party publishers that will do it too. It's not just a numbers game, but a development cost game.
I miss OpenGL, and I prefer competition, but between Microsoft pushing DirectX to bridge the gap between PC and console, DirectX is definitely the way to go for devs nowadays.
Aside from parents trying to make their kids happy for X-mas .. how many people that spend $600 on a Video Game machine don't consider themselves gamers?
The ones in denial.
Yes, Gamestops are getting resupplied with PS3s .. but only enough to cover pre-orders. In fact, in my store we got in two today (for the last two pre-orders) and are under orders that if both don't get picked up (and paid off) the systems get shipped to another store to cover pre-orders that haven't been filled (yet).
We're not going to see a 'free' shipment of PS3's until next year .. Sony's pre-launch promises are bunk (because the yields on working Cells are terrible).
We're expecting to get in Wii's later today/tonight, and they'll go on sale Friday (since we're closed on Thursday for the holiday). We did get a shipment of Zelda's in yesterday, but those flew off the racks as fast as they were put up. Wii-motes and Joysticks are the same story (as soon as they're on the floor they're gone).
I've told parents personally that if they're shopping for Christmas, they can afford to wait for Wii's (we're expecting shipments every week, and Nintendo has always been good about keeping up stock post-launch) .. Those hunting for a Sony .. well .. that's a different story.
Don't be so certain about that pre-order -> Ebay profit. Not only is everyone else doing it .. but a large subset of them won't get to Ebay their console (without a delay) .. Ebay is tracking serial #s (which you have to enter to sell your PS3) and a large number of them are getting tagged as "Not sellable for X days" ..
I can't tell you how I know for certain .. but it's worth investigating so you don't get burned, right?
Not to mention, I used to spend $500-$300 on JUST upgrading my graphics card .. every other year ..
A decent gaming PC will run you $2500 minimum, maybe less if you can swap the mobo, have decent RAM already, and you monitor isn't a junker. A high-end gaming system is upwards of $4000 out of the box.
OR .. I could spend $400 on my 360, $1700 on a 42-Inch HDTV (with a VGA input for my computer), and have a machine that I never have to fiddle with drivers or rebooting to do anything, and there's that whole video-on-demand and HD-DVD for another $200 on Friday ..
Yea .. it's not worth getting at all. Granted, it's a 'toy' .. but now I can watch the shows I capture to my Media PC on my home theatre through a Cat-5 .. (used to have a DTS encoder, DVI-HDMI, wireless keyboard + mouse, 25' USB cable/hub, all hooked up to my 6-fan PC under the entertainment center), play awesome games (I never got Farcry to work with my graphics card, and Quake 3 looks fantastic) @ 720p/1080i x 42" .. and downloadable TV shows/HD movies by the end of the month .. probably one of the best investments in 'Toys' I've ever made.
Not to mention that the visualization tool + my 50GB MP3 library is a fantastic DJ for parties. Oh yea .. 'just a toy' .. forgot.
Actually .. there's only 175k slated for US, and 400k worldwide before X-mas.
That's from my buddy the manager of a local chain store. Not to mention that he's told me that at least 1/2 of his pre-orders are destined for E-bay.
I'd say something about that devious plan, but I'm under an NDA .. suffice it to say it'll be an interesting Friday.
Have you ever been to a kid's cancer ward? My fiance's daughter had a tumor (successfuly removed, she's fully recovered) when she was 4, and we visited all the time. True, there are a lot of kids that won't be in there for long (day, few days, etc.) but when you're undergoing treatment, a lot of kids can kill a good 4-8 hours a day (at least) not sleeping, bored to tears watching TV or doing schoolwork via tutoring. Now apply that logic to cancer kids undergoing long-term in-patient treatment .. they live in those hospitals for sometimes weeks or even months. RPGs (teaching critical thinking, encouraging problem-solving, engaging reading skills) would be excellent for them, keep them engaged, entertained, AND using their brains.
Rockstar releases this: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/22/boy-on-boy-kiss
Jack goes to jail for making a ruckuss about 'Bully'
Rockstar bribes warden of Jail, installs cameras and arranges 'special accomodations' for dear ol' Jack.
Jack gets to spend some quality time with some new friends (Read: Bullies)
Rockstar includes some great vid captures of Jack in their new game
Granted, that was poorly stated. The Mario Bros. franchise itself isn't 'garbage' .. but turning a 2d (at the time) platformer with a very thin plot into a Hollywood production was, to term it lightly, a stretch.
Something important to bear in mind: Halo was the game that defined the Xbox launch and led a lot to it's success. Halo 2 was THE game of the last console generation (fastest selling media in the US, $125 million in 24 hours) .. I have a lot of non-gamer friends that specifically bought X-Boxes and Halo 2 (as well as live subscriptions) just to play online together across the country.
Now, if you actually have played the game, or seen the 'making of' DVD, you might change your perspective. They developed the game a lot like an actual Hollywood production, with professional spot-on voice acting, a great plotline, and scored by a symphony orchestra (along with some modern rockers) ..
True, the normal rule of thumb is "Video Game -> Movies do poorly and suck." But take into account the original games used to make the adaptation: Super Mario Bros, Double Dragon, Bloodrayne, Doom, etc. Garbage in = Garbage out.
Both Jackson and Bungie are anal-retentive diehards about thier work, there is a very strong chance that this game will break the bank at the box office. Not to mention that this will further market the Xbox 360 and Halo 3 simultaneously; I just hope M$ doesn't rush it to meet a 2007 launch to coincide with the game (which I doubt Bungie will allow them to do .. they only rushed Halo out the door .. they sat on Halo 2 and 3 despite what Microsoft wanted, in order to do the job right, and it paid off in spades).