Excuse me - First off a programmer has nothing to do with hardware much past having to develop for it. Programmers don't design hardware - engineers do, and there's a big difference. I am a programmer who works in the GIS field. I did not design any of the GPS units we use, I just have to write software that uses them. As it stands Miyamoto was one of the overseers during the design of the Wii. Sure, he didn't himself layout the circuit board but he's one of the people who told the engineers what to do. My guess is he kind of knows what he's talking about.
They're so compatible that as far as I know no form of emulation is required to play Gamecube games on the Wii. That's not just compatible, that's the same damn thing.
Framerate really has nothing to do with the console. That has everything to do with lazy/crappy developers who don't take care to ensure a good solid framerate. Frankly this is one of my pet peeves for console games. In a situation where there is no mystery as to the hardware on the user side you have no excuse for poor performance. It's not like on the PC where you can say "well we couldn't optimize for every possible piece of hardware." There's only one bloody set of hardware on the console! The CPU is the same, the GPU is the same, the RAM is the same - PERIOD. In the case of the 360 and PS3 harddrives may vary or may not be present at all but that's a minor difference and has nothing to do with the framerate loss we see in some games. I haven't seen a Wii game suffer from a poor framerate but I've seen a few Gamecube games do it. On the same end Halo 3 is an awesome looking game and I have never seen it suffer from a poor framerate.
Console framerates have everything to do with a developer doing a crummy job - not the inability for the hardware. When your hardware is fixed you have no excuse for not designing correctly for it.
I'm not at all surprised. Here's a man who is famous for creative mind asked what he thought about the new consoles. Of course he's not going to find the PS2 + 1 and the XBOX +1 (well + 360 in this case) interesting. They simply are more of the same. Better graphics with HD support. Even more bloat trying to act as a media hub. Wireless controllers. These are all nice things but really nothing that took any creativity. Really those two consoles are the sum of minor upgrades to bring them in line with newer technology.
The Wii itself is actually even worse in this regard, it's the past generation of tech being sold...again. The innovation and creativity is in the controller and that's what he respects. In this way the Wii isn't a Gamecube + 1 it's more like a Gamecube + Demographic widening idea. Is he doing anything of note for the Wii/DS? I'd be curious to see what he comes up with.
Just need a firmware update? Just need a firmware update?" Bloody hell man. It's a bloody movie player not your computer. You shouldn't have to do anything to it to make it work past pluging it in. What's next? Requiring people who buy an LCD TV to update its firmware as well? These are consumer electronics not computers despite how the line is being blurred lately. You don't buy your dvd player thinking that later you may have to flash its firmware and perhaps also do a driver update. You buy the thing to be a simple device that plays movies.
He's talking about from a design standpoint, not just features and setting. Miyamoto is infamous for "upending the table." That is if he doesn't like where the game is going he chucks it to the ground and they start over. This is why Twilight Princess took so long. Yeah, on the surface it looks a lot like Ocarina of Time. It however is not just Ocarina of Time code with an updated engine and a new environment. It's its own game built from the ground up.
As for not innovating, you're talking about the man who pretty much has set the bar of what gamers expect. Time and time again he's set the standard and gone off in his new direction. Unless you think the control scheme for the new Zelda DS game is not innovative?
At my high school those of us in AP Calc and honors math analysis were bombarded with constant state/federal exams to make the school look really good.
What about the regular math analysis students or the people who did not take calc? They were in the gym playing basketball.
Good times...good times...
That was at Redlands East Valley High btw.
http://rev.redlandsusd.net/
Sure there is....oh wait we're talking about display drivers. Yeah, no there is nothing to see. Or more to the point you can't see anything. Screens were always overrated anyway - ATI wants us to move back to binary displays.
I don't know if anyone caught this...but a 21% boost in crap sales is still crap.
Remember your basic math...
121 of 100 is a 21% increase 1210 of 1000 is a 21% increase
Putting it in terms of this article if we add 21% to the listed PS3 sales, 360 sales, and Wii sales....
98,500 * 1.21 = 119,185 or an increase of 20,685 for the PS3 198,400 * 1.21 = 240,064 or an increase of 41,664 for the 360 381,800 * 1.21 = 461,978 or an increase of 80,178 for the Wii
Reading further we see that the current 360 sales are up by 28%, not 21% which would lead to an even larger gap. As you can see...yeah...sales were boosted - they still suck though. Percentages don't tell the whole story. And as for Sony's "135% sales increase over the last two weeks," I'm sorry but I smell some more marketing BS. Even if we assume that they really did have a 135% increase that would mean that their sales would now be as follows:
98,500 * 2.35 = 231,475 or an increase of 132,975 for the PS3
Effectively, that means that they would have passed the 360 although again no one can confirm this so odds are it's an exaggeration. My own experience trolling through game stores and Best Buys I see 360s move all the time and overhear lots of inquiries over when the next Wii shipment is comming in - I have to date never seen a PS3 move. Not once, and definitely not over the last two weeks when I spent much of my time in electronics stores shopping for a new LCD. It could just be a localized thing but I would think I'd see one sell if sales really were up as much as they say they were. And lets be honest here - even if they were up that much that's still no where near the Wii. And also are high sales really a good thing for Sony right now? They're losing their exclusivity left and right meaning game sales will be down and their return on the loss per console will be less.
Maybe the headline should read,"Exploit which bored college students figured out fifteen years ago is finally released to the mainstream". They are a source of major innovation aren't they? Whitespace anyone? http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/
No receipt to the voter. Why? They were historically used by unscrupulous men with power over others to verify votes. IE If you worked for me, I could tell you who to vote for, demand to see the receipt showing your vote, and fire you if you didn't vote correctly.
We have laws protecting people against this already - if someone actually did this you can land them with one helluva suit.
Receipt is pointless and worthless.
I fail to see how a paper receipt which would allow voters to verify who they voted for worthless. Moreover I fail to see how the paper receipt the machine keeps is any more worthless than the paper ballot you would prefer to turn in. Same damn thing. Paper is paper.
Doesn't guarantee non-partisan.
Since we all know that the government is the epiphany of proper management and lack of abuse. I mean politicians would never do things to further their own careers at the cost of the public.
Nothing guarantees non-partisanship. Nothing. Do you hear me? The people at the place where they print the ballots can screw with it just as badly as Diebold and again I bring up the case of voter being barred in Florida. Moving to the public sector however changes it from a profit driven business to a public service where (while still quite possible) corruption is less likely. How is moving to public a bad thing when Diebold flat out admits they want one side to win? Also for the record just because it is government doesn't mean that a politician runs it personally. This way all the politicians would be vying for control keeping closer to balance than a private company whom only a few investors control.
True, paper ballots or not, you have to pay attention to all aspects of the voting system. Personally, I like the fill in the bubble voting cards. They're both machine and human readable.
The receipts the machine keeps would be human readable. Hell you could even make it punch in cards that the voter can visually verify after they're done voting.
So you want to add massive increases in costs (I do mean massive) for what comes out to a false sense of security. Likely since it will have less overview than existing OSes the new one will be massively LESS secure thus opening up tons of abuse possibilities. Like say having non-trivial to detect code tightly integrated into it that allows for even worse abuse.
So you yet again want to add massive increases in costs (I do mean massive) for what comes out to a false sense of security. Since we all know that no one will ever be able to make a reader/writer using either reverse engineering or publicly available descriptions. Not to mention that a new interface will likely have bugs and less overview than USB does.
No security is perfect. With enough determination and skill you can get into anything, ANYTHING. The point of security is not really to be an impenetrable wall, but rather a wall so damn high you don't bother climbing over it. Also this would be an initial cost, one which would likely be returned in savings over not having quite as many mechanical break downs in the future. There's a reason electronic systems are better than mechanical ones - moving parts break.
Electronic voting (registration and/or counting) is based on two premises:
Your mistake is an issue of scale. It's relatively easy to slip in one or two false paper ballots. It may not even be that hard to make the machine a little more picky when it comes to checking punchouts on the democrat side of the ballot. But there's backups, paper backups, that get checked and confirmed, even if at a small ratio. Someone watching the pile of ballots go through the machine can find it odd that mostly left-leaning candidates get kicked out as incomplete ballots. Little things can be snuck through easier.
But electronic... that's what you want when you want to do BIG lies. Just off the top of my head from the last 2 POTUS elections... cards coming preloaded with thousands of votes. Systems designed so that if you left a busy machine collecting votes and forgot to empty it out, it would kick over at 16384 to -16383 (funny how that happened in left-leaning counties, eh?). Funny "glitches" (I hate that word when it comes to elections) that lost entire counties of votes. Concerns that the system might be undercounting Demos and overcounting Repubs. Software that made it exceedingly easy to switch your entire ballot to republican on the last page, without really telling you it was. Or software that just preselected your candidates for you.
Add too all that... NO paper trail... NO hard copy in your hand to confirm... NO audit trail to be checked to ensure fairness and honesty. Just trust the magic box will tell the other, main, magic box, the correct vote, hope for the best, and ignore the man behind the curtain promising Ohio to Bush. Also, ignore those pesky pollsters and statisticians, they don't actually know what they're doing.
Yes I understand all that, but that doesn't change the fact that you can't ignore the flaws in previous systems and the possible advantages to this one. Any new system is full of bugs. This is why I always avoid the first few generations of a product just because I know there are issues that need to be worked out and I don't want to have to deal with that. This is no different except the implications and reprecussions are far more drastic (politics is a bit more important than say your car afterall). We shouldn't be trying to abolish it altogether, we should be trying to fix it to make it work. In my view the big fixes that need to be made are these:
A proper paper trail needs to be provided including a receipt for both the voter themself and the voting district in the event of a recount.
The design, production, and upkeep of electronic voting systems needs to be taken out of the the hands of the private sector and instead be taken care of by the government.
Electronic systems need to have an operating system that is dratically different and absolutely proprietary to itself and further be completely open source so it can reviewed by the public at will.
The interfaces to and from the devices need to be proprietary and not be simply a reshaped version of an existing interface. No more USB ports.
That's a small list really but you get the idea. And again I think you should reconsider if paper votes could somehow not have a huge flaw. Deadmen voting? Hanging chads? Lost ballots? Miss-labaled voting cards? Furthermore you're not considering the political machinations behind those previous elections. While the voting was screwed up both times in both cases the polical machines behind both parties were just as flawed if not more so. Lets not forget the people barred from voting in Florida because they simply shared a name with a convicted felon. Paper ballots would not have saved you from that one.
I'm not referring to little old ladies; they're not the ones making comments like "The case points to the dangers of electronic voting systems, which make it harder to ensure fair elections." I'm speaking to people like Luke who make blanket comments that are honestly unfounded. We should be focusing on improving/repairing current voting systems and seriously look at removing the private sector from the equation completely. Unless you enjoy sharing something in common with the 17th century.
I don't particularly buy the argument that electronic voting is somehow more or less difficult to tamper with than paper voting. Sure there is no guarantee that the hardware and software is protected and will truly offer a fair vote - but can you really say the same thing for paper? Remember those ballots have to go to a machine that counts them. That machine is not perfect - it is just as prone to error and manipulation as your electronic system. Of course with paper ballots you can resort to a manual recount but that is costly and time consuming. Moreover if you think electronic and mechanical counters are unreliable a human is a disaster.
I'm not saying that the current electronic voting schemes are good. There is clear evidence that the majority of them are flawed and should be replaced or at the very least fixed. I am saying however that making blanket comments that electronic voting is either more or less secure than traditional paper ballots is rather misguided. We're an electronic generation and so we are more attuned to make use of technology rather than more traditional methods. Along those same lines we are used to seeing all the flaws of technology and miss out on the more basic flaws in other systems. After all, hanging chads anyone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_chad/
Very nice, albeit still not enough to justify me getting one. Mind you the reason why I haven't is not an issue with the TiVo itself - more of a matter of nothing being on television worth watching anyway. If they add a "unSuck" button you can count me as the first person in line.
That's the problem though, lagging like crazy and moreover packet loss. In Co-op not only do you have to synchronize both players but also every single monster, vehicle, and scripted event on the entire map. Even the slightest difference throws the players out of synch destroying the experience and leading to some interesting situations, like being shot by an Elite five feet away that on your screen is a mile away. It only takes one dropped packet to throw a wrench in the works.
I've written code before to synchronize mancala games across the internet while also allowing for observers. That was no small project mind you; and that was with Mancala, a game many orders of magnitude easier than Halo.
Many developers with even more clout than Bungie have made claims that they would include online Co-op and then failed to deliver. It's a lesson on why you should take any features list published by a developer with a grain of salt.
While I don't think GamePolitics.com counts as "some random blogger" I do agree, in part, that "Top [10, 25, 100] list of [insert topic here]" are, by and large, completely arbitrary and pointless. More over I don't feel they justify a full posting but that might just be my own view.
We're talking legal scandals here not just gaming scandals - though frankly some sort of legal action should have taken place over Daikatana...class action suit anyone?
Gonna be sad to see the GB name go but it's not like the idea behind Gameboy games is gone. Cheap, fun, portable, reliable - all principles the Gameboy pionered and the DS continues.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me - First off a programmer has nothing to do with hardware much past having to develop for it. Programmers don't design hardware - engineers do, and there's a big difference. I am a programmer who works in the GIS field. I did not design any of the GPS units we use, I just have to write software that uses them. As it stands Miyamoto was one of the overseers during the design of the Wii. Sure, he didn't himself layout the circuit board but he's one of the people who told the engineers what to do. My guess is he kind of knows what he's talking about.
They're so compatible that as far as I know no form of emulation is required to play Gamecube games on the Wii. That's not just compatible, that's the same damn thing.
I'm sorry, I must have messed up my citation and sources. I mean besides the wikipedia article there's only this:
The Wii Really Is an Updated GameCube
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/11/the_wii_really.html
And this:
Wii "hardware is basically a GC," says Miyamoto
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/04/wii-hardware-is-basically-a-gc-says-miyamoto/
Yeah, I must be mistaken.
The Wii is running Gamecube hardware slightly enhanced to require less power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#Technical_specifications
Framerate really has nothing to do with the console. That has everything to do with lazy/crappy developers who don't take care to ensure a good solid framerate. Frankly this is one of my pet peeves for console games. In a situation where there is no mystery as to the hardware on the user side you have no excuse for poor performance. It's not like on the PC where you can say "well we couldn't optimize for every possible piece of hardware." There's only one bloody set of hardware on the console! The CPU is the same, the GPU is the same, the RAM is the same - PERIOD. In the case of the 360 and PS3 harddrives may vary or may not be present at all but that's a minor difference and has nothing to do with the framerate loss we see in some games. I haven't seen a Wii game suffer from a poor framerate but I've seen a few Gamecube games do it. On the same end Halo 3 is an awesome looking game and I have never seen it suffer from a poor framerate.
Console framerates have everything to do with a developer doing a crummy job - not the inability for the hardware. When your hardware is fixed you have no excuse for not designing correctly for it.
I'm not at all surprised. Here's a man who is famous for creative mind asked what he thought about the new consoles. Of course he's not going to find the PS2 + 1 and the XBOX +1 (well + 360 in this case) interesting. They simply are more of the same. Better graphics with HD support. Even more bloat trying to act as a media hub. Wireless controllers. These are all nice things but really nothing that took any creativity. Really those two consoles are the sum of minor upgrades to bring them in line with newer technology.
The Wii itself is actually even worse in this regard, it's the past generation of tech being sold...again. The innovation and creativity is in the controller and that's what he respects. In this way the Wii isn't a Gamecube + 1 it's more like a Gamecube + Demographic widening idea. Is he doing anything of note for the Wii/DS? I'd be curious to see what he comes up with.
Or perhaps it actually went and did something new instead of rehashing the same crap all over again this time slightly shinier. I'm just saying...
He'd smile and stick out his tongue.
Nyah
Just need a firmware update? Just need a firmware update?" Bloody hell man. It's a bloody movie player not your computer. You shouldn't have to do anything to it to make it work past pluging it in. What's next? Requiring people who buy an LCD TV to update its firmware as well? These are consumer electronics not computers despite how the line is being blurred lately. You don't buy your dvd player thinking that later you may have to flash its firmware and perhaps also do a driver update. You buy the thing to be a simple device that plays movies.
A firmware update? For my bluray player? Yeah because the average consumer will know how to do this or even be aware of the possibility.
He's talking about from a design standpoint, not just features and setting. Miyamoto is infamous for "upending the table." That is if he doesn't like where the game is going he chucks it to the ground and they start over. This is why Twilight Princess took so long. Yeah, on the surface it looks a lot like Ocarina of Time. It however is not just Ocarina of Time code with an updated engine and a new environment. It's its own game built from the ground up.
As for not innovating, you're talking about the man who pretty much has set the bar of what gamers expect. Time and time again he's set the standard and gone off in his new direction. Unless you think the control scheme for the new Zelda DS game is not innovative?
At my high school those of us in AP Calc and honors math analysis were bombarded with constant state/federal exams to make the school look really good. What about the regular math analysis students or the people who did not take calc? They were in the gym playing basketball. Good times...good times... That was at Redlands East Valley High btw. http://rev.redlandsusd.net/
Sure there is....oh wait we're talking about display drivers. Yeah, no there is nothing to see. Or more to the point you can't see anything. Screens were always overrated anyway - ATI wants us to move back to binary displays.
I don't know if anyone caught this...but a 21% boost in crap sales is still crap.
Remember your basic math...
121 of 100 is a 21% increase
1210 of 1000 is a 21% increase
Putting it in terms of this article if we add 21% to the listed PS3 sales, 360 sales, and Wii sales....
98,500 * 1.21 = 119,185 or an increase of 20,685 for the PS3
198,400 * 1.21 = 240,064 or an increase of 41,664 for the 360
381,800 * 1.21 = 461,978 or an increase of 80,178 for the Wii
Reading further we see that the current 360 sales are up by 28%, not 21% which would lead to an even larger gap. As you can see...yeah...sales were boosted - they still suck though. Percentages don't tell the whole story. And as for Sony's "135% sales increase over the last two weeks," I'm sorry but I smell some more marketing BS. Even if we assume that they really did have a 135% increase that would mean that their sales would now be as follows:
98,500 * 2.35 = 231,475 or an increase of 132,975 for the PS3
Effectively, that means that they would have passed the 360 although again no one can confirm this so odds are it's an exaggeration. My own experience trolling through game stores and Best Buys I see 360s move all the time and overhear lots of inquiries over when the next Wii shipment is comming in - I have to date never seen a PS3 move. Not once, and definitely not over the last two weeks when I spent much of my time in electronics stores shopping for a new LCD. It could just be a localized thing but I would think I'd see one sell if sales really were up as much as they say they were. And lets be honest here - even if they were up that much that's still no where near the Wii. And also are high sales really a good thing for Sony right now? They're losing their exclusivity left and right meaning game sales will be down and their return on the loss per console will be less.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=252289&cid =19909291
No receipt to the voter. Why? They were historically used by unscrupulous men with power over others to verify votes. IE If you worked for me, I could tell you who to vote for, demand to see the receipt showing your vote, and fire you if you didn't vote correctly.
We have laws protecting people against this already - if someone actually did this you can land them with one helluva suit.
Receipt is pointless and worthless.
I fail to see how a paper receipt which would allow voters to verify who they voted for worthless. Moreover I fail to see how the paper receipt the machine keeps is any more worthless than the paper ballot you would prefer to turn in. Same damn thing. Paper is paper.
Doesn't guarantee non-partisan.
Since we all know that the government is the epiphany of proper management and lack of abuse. I mean politicians would never do things to further their own careers at the cost of the public.
Nothing guarantees non-partisanship. Nothing. Do you hear me? The people at the place where they print the ballots can screw with it just as badly as Diebold and again I bring up the case of voter being barred in Florida. Moving to the public sector however changes it from a profit driven business to a public service where (while still quite possible) corruption is less likely. How is moving to public a bad thing when Diebold flat out admits they want one side to win? Also for the record just because it is government doesn't mean that a politician runs it personally. This way all the politicians would be vying for control keeping closer to balance than a private company whom only a few investors control.
True, paper ballots or not, you have to pay attention to all aspects of the voting system. Personally, I like the fill in the bubble voting cards. They're both machine and human readable.
The receipts the machine keeps would be human readable. Hell you could even make it punch in cards that the voter can visually verify after they're done voting.
So you want to add massive increases in costs (I do mean massive) for what comes out to a false sense of security. Likely since it will have less overview than existing OSes the new one will be massively LESS secure thus opening up tons of abuse possibilities. Like say having non-trivial to detect code tightly integrated into it that allows for even worse abuse.
So you yet again want to add massive increases in costs (I do mean massive) for what comes out to a false sense of security. Since we all know that no one will ever be able to make a reader/writer using either reverse engineering or publicly available descriptions. Not to mention that a new interface will likely have bugs and less overview than USB does.
No security is perfect. With enough determination and skill you can get into anything, ANYTHING. The point of security is not really to be an impenetrable wall, but rather a wall so damn high you don't bother climbing over it. Also this would be an initial cost, one which would likely be returned in savings over not having quite as many mechanical break downs in the future. There's a reason electronic systems are better than mechanical ones - moving parts break.
Electronic voting (registration and/or counting) is based on two premises:
But electronic... that's what you want when you want to do BIG lies. Just off the top of my head from the last 2 POTUS elections... cards coming preloaded with thousands of votes. Systems designed so that if you left a busy machine collecting votes and forgot to empty it out, it would kick over at 16384 to -16383 (funny how that happened in left-leaning counties, eh?). Funny "glitches" (I hate that word when it comes to elections) that lost entire counties of votes. Concerns that the system might be undercounting Demos and overcounting Repubs. Software that made it exceedingly easy to switch your entire ballot to republican on the last page, without really telling you it was. Or software that just preselected your candidates for you.
Add too all that... NO paper trail... NO hard copy in your hand to confirm... NO audit trail to be checked to ensure fairness and honesty. Just trust the magic box will tell the other, main, magic box, the correct vote, hope for the best, and ignore the man behind the curtain promising Ohio to Bush. Also, ignore those pesky pollsters and statisticians, they don't actually know what they're doing.
Yes I understand all that, but that doesn't change the fact that you can't ignore the flaws in previous systems and the possible advantages to this one. Any new system is full of bugs. This is why I always avoid the first few generations of a product just because I know there are issues that need to be worked out and I don't want to have to deal with that. This is no different except the implications and reprecussions are far more drastic (politics is a bit more important than say your car afterall). We shouldn't be trying to abolish it altogether, we should be trying to fix it to make it work. In my view the big fixes that need to be made are these:
That's a small list really but you get the idea. And again I think you should reconsider if paper votes could somehow not have a huge flaw. Deadmen voting? Hanging chads? Lost ballots? Miss-labaled voting cards? Furthermore you're not considering the political machinations behind those previous elections. While the voting was screwed up both times in both cases the polical machines behind both parties were just as flawed if not more so. Lets not forget the people barred from voting in Florida because they simply shared a name with a convicted felon. Paper ballots would not have saved you from that one.
I'm not referring to little old ladies; they're not the ones making comments like "The case points to the dangers of electronic voting systems, which make it harder to ensure fair elections." I'm speaking to people like Luke who make blanket comments that are honestly unfounded. We should be focusing on improving/repairing current voting systems and seriously look at removing the private sector from the equation completely. Unless you enjoy sharing something in common with the 17th century.
I don't particularly buy the argument that electronic voting is somehow more or less difficult to tamper with than paper voting. Sure there is no guarantee that the hardware and software is protected and will truly offer a fair vote - but can you really say the same thing for paper? Remember those ballots have to go to a machine that counts them. That machine is not perfect - it is just as prone to error and manipulation as your electronic system. Of course with paper ballots you can resort to a manual recount but that is costly and time consuming. Moreover if you think electronic and mechanical counters are unreliable a human is a disaster.
I'm not saying that the current electronic voting schemes are good. There is clear evidence that the majority of them are flawed and should be replaced or at the very least fixed. I am saying however that making blanket comments that electronic voting is either more or less secure than traditional paper ballots is rather misguided. We're an electronic generation and so we are more attuned to make use of technology rather than more traditional methods. Along those same lines we are used to seeing all the flaws of technology and miss out on the more basic flaws in other systems. After all, hanging chads anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_chad/
Very nice, albeit still not enough to justify me getting one. Mind you the reason why I haven't is not an issue with the TiVo itself - more of a matter of nothing being on television worth watching anyway. If they add a "unSuck" button you can count me as the first person in line.
That's the problem though, lagging like crazy and moreover packet loss. In Co-op not only do you have to synchronize both players but also every single monster, vehicle, and scripted event on the entire map. Even the slightest difference throws the players out of synch destroying the experience and leading to some interesting situations, like being shot by an Elite five feet away that on your screen is a mile away. It only takes one dropped packet to throw a wrench in the works. I've written code before to synchronize mancala games across the internet while also allowing for observers. That was no small project mind you; and that was with Mancala, a game many orders of magnitude easier than Halo. Many developers with even more clout than Bungie have made claims that they would include online Co-op and then failed to deliver. It's a lesson on why you should take any features list published by a developer with a grain of salt.
While I don't think GamePolitics.com counts as "some random blogger" I do agree, in part, that "Top [10, 25, 100] list of [insert topic here]" are, by and large, completely arbitrary and pointless. More over I don't feel they justify a full posting but that might just be my own view.
We're talking legal scandals here not just gaming scandals - though frankly some sort of legal action should have taken place over Daikatana...class action suit anyone?
Gonna be sad to see the GB name go but it's not like the idea behind Gameboy games is gone. Cheap, fun, portable, reliable - all principles the Gameboy pionered and the DS continues.