I used to be a huge PC gamer, but nowadays I game almost exclusively on consoles (except TF2, that game is massive win on a PC). Why? Because I hate upgrading. It costs a lot, and even a mid-high end video card is by itself worth a brand new console. I also hate futzing with my display settings, wondering "what else can I turn off to get this thing smooth and playable?", and updating video drivers, sound drivers, miscellaneous BS drivers... Installing, uninstalling... ugh.
I still do some PC gaming, but it's always on my laptop, which has good enough specs for work and some light media playing, but is never spec'ed out like a gaming rig (I like the battery life and mobility). This limits me, currently, to basically anything 2003 and before, though Half-Life 2 runs very well.
With a console I'm always playing at "max" settings, it's always silky smooth, I can pop the disc in and start playing a game immediately, instead of waiting ages to install.
Not to mention the uniform equipment of consoles opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, on the 360 *everyone* who is online is guaranteed to have a headset (after all, it comes with the console), making it possible for developers to REQUIRE the use of voice chat in multiplayer. Even now, the prevalence of voice chat on 360 is far more than I see on the PC. Try *enforcing* voice chat outside of the most hardcore group of Counter-Strike players, and see how your players react to that.
Look, I have a 360, I like it a lot, and I'm by most standards I'm a 360 fan. But really, those numbers are just BS.
The $280 Xbox 360 is so badly crippled it might as well not exist. It's a damned shame MS sells it at all. The cheapest Xbox 360 that even guarantees an acceptable gaming experience is the $400 one. Without a hard drive your Xbox is useless.
So really it boils down to... $400 vs. $400 vs. $250. Like it or not the PS3 is now very solid competition for the 360 price-wise. Now if only Sony can get some exclusives worth a damn that doesn't start with "F" and end in "antasy".
Ain't anecdotal evidence great? I know at least 10 people with Xbox 360's, and not one of them have had to have it replaced. It's no secret that the 360 has comparatively high failure rates, but 33%? Please link to the publication where you got that number, otherwise you're just spreading FUD.
IPTV is not going to happen in the next 5 years, not on a large scale anyway. Keep in mind that, while most Americans have access to broadband, it's of the most questionable quality and reliability. That 10Mbit line your neighbour Joe has, what kind of throughput would it REALLY give you if you pushed it? 4Mbit? Less? Up here, a 6Mbit line from Rogers frequently can pull less than 2.5Mbit in reality, and this fluctuates wildly depending on network congestion.
The last thing ISPs need is everyone pulling >4Mbit/s during primetime. That will shatter the piss poor network capacity that they currently have the gall to charge for.
We need more reliable broadband that guarantees more bandwidth, and for cheaper, before IPTV will become a reality. Joe user isn't going to understand anything about how his ISP sucks (it loads Google just fine!), and when his shiny HDTV stutters, he's going to blame the IPTV service, if not the TV itself.
They routinely rush studios to push out complete and utter crap under the Activision Value title. Even the decent games still come with serious flaws due to the rushed timetables.
At least they have a "value" line. With EA *every* one of their titles is part of EA Value:P
Activision does good work. Yeah, they pump out their share of crap through their Activision Value department, but when they run across a high profile developer that is good (e.g. Infinity Ward), they know when to take a hands-off approach.
I'd rather have Activision be the industry juggernaut than EA.
Isn't there a fairly simple way to track down leaks? Just set a very light but very visible object in the room, and watch as it naturally drifts towards where the air is exiting the vehicle. It will at least give you a small area to look, as opposed to hunting everywhere within a module.
The "100" argument doesn't really work. If a 100 should never be handed out, after all, no game can be PERFECT, then the highest possible score is a 99? But then, by virtue of 99 being the highest possible score, it becomes the "new" 100. Proof by mathematical induction... all games should be rated a big fat ZERO, since no games are perfect.
IMHO a score of 100 ought to be reserved for "reasonable" perfection, which is to say that, despite its inevitable flaws, they do not detract from what is overall an immensely satisfying experience. Think about it like the star system in use for hotels. Is there a perfect hotel that can't improve in ANY area? Of course not, but there are hotels that are so overwhelmingly good that one can hardly find fault with it. The same is true for games.
I was being facetious... But let's explore that idea.
Currently there's no good way to build an IMU that's small enough to fit in your average handset, let alone cheaply. Heck, we'd have trouble building one that'd fit in 5 handsets. Accelerometers vary greatly - you can get really rough ones like the MEMS accelerometer you see in the Wii-mote, or you can get extremely, extremely accurate ones that can maintain highly accurate positioning even without GPS assistance for extended periods of time. Clearly, for a phone you'd need something down the middle... which doesn't exist right now.
Indoor position tracking on everyday devices is still but a dream right now. I have no doubt we will one day achieve it, but that day won't be in the near future.
Except your GPS-enabled phone won't be able to reach its satellites *at all* inside that elevator, which makes your Google approximation better by process of elimination;)
The only solution is GPS + IMU (inertial motion unit), which will track your movements via accelerometer while you are without GPS signal, and resync when it reacquires. I look forward to buying my own $5000, 4-lb phone!
politicians haven't found a way to inform the public that by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years.
Because they're not likely to be around in 15-20 years, or even more. By the time Joe Public realizes what a marvelous public infrastructure decision that was, 20 years ago, the politician is long gone from office, perhaps even retired. Why let the incumbent take all the glory for your handiwork? In the meantime the taxpayers are bitching and moaning about why they have to build this expensive infrastructure *now*. Politicians are only as short-sighted as the constituents they serve.
Agreed, except that when these things happen it must happen across the board. Too often "corruption" is used as a charge against politicians who piss off fellow, more powerful politicians. When "corruption" charges are laid selectively it does more harm than good.
FYI, the GH games have always had clear delineations between covers and originals. When you start a song, it will show something like "Sweet Child O' Mine - as made famous by Guns N' Roses", for all covers. The lack of "as made famous" indicates an original. IMHO that's plenty clear.
Lucas almost redeemed himself. Until the entire dumb Anakin kills Padme sequence -- which by itself was probably survivable -- followed by Vader howling in girlish pain over a murder he knew he was going to commit.
The whole concept of that sequence *could have* worked brilliantly, if the dialogue didn't suck balls and the director trying to draw parallels with present day constantly. "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!", seriously, if you're going to pan GWB at least get the quote right. Too much "look, parallelism with today!" preachy preachy, not enough epic line-delivering. Rewrite the dialogue to something much more epic, and that scene would have worked masterfully, especially given the brilliant art direction the films have (about their only saving grace).
Absolutely agree. This is a trap that showrunners tend to run into a lot. The one freshest in my memory is Stargate. The original movie had so much mystique - who was this alien? Where did he come from? Why the Egyptians? The mysteries keep the story compelling and interesting.
Then came the TV show, which started great, but eventually they've unraveled so much of the mystery around the original antagonists, that the show was stale and uninteresting, so they had to invent even more antagonists, which got tiring after a while.
Fans often demand backstory, but there is such a thing as filling in too MUCH backstory. This is something where I believe producers and fans can never truly agree. Fans will ALWAYS want all the backstory they can handle, while it's the job of the producers to do everything BUT that.
A sad story to be sure, but that doesn't justify them suing someone who is, for all intents and purposes, an innocent party. There are no laws against covering a song - so long as you pay the right royalties to the right places (which I am *sure* Activision isn't dumb enough to forego). If they're not seeing a penny of that, pursue the parties responsible for THAT...
But, of course, we have the odd exception cases (i.e. most of Europe), where the drinking age does not exist, yet alcohol abuse amongst use is not pandemic. I know many an European family where tradition had kids enjoying a bit of wine at dinner with their folks, or champagne at New Year's, or any number of such situations.
America's alcohol problem is not an *alcohol* problem per se, but rather a cultural one, where abuse is cool and getting your stomach pumped is treated like a rite of passage. Take away this cultural problem and you won't even need a damned legal drinking age.
I'm pretty neutral with regards to age limits on games, drinking, smoking, etc, but IMHO you can't have one without the other. If you're going to be a total nanny state and strip parents of their powers, then do so, don't do it half-assed.
Who says the physical media is broken? Perhaps I bought a DVD where, due to a bug in the menu code, I can't navigate past chapter 10. In that case it's clearly a product worthy of recall, but if I sued the movie studio I'd be rightfully laughed out of court. Buying this broken DVD caused me no harm, and as long as I got a refund on it that's the end of that - any further action would just be needless antagonism, greed, or both.
Did they release a program that they know doesn't work? Have you looked into their bug database to ascertain the veracity of your claim? It's entirely likely that a product may be broken in ways that the manufacturer had never anticipated.
Your Soldner example perfectly illustrates my point. If I bought a copy of Gigli on DVD, I cannot seriously demand a return on account of it being a bad movie. It promised me a compelling storyline, but none existed! Shock! Gasp! Not playing correctly is one thing, but being a bad movie is not a crime, nor is being a bad game. This is one area where I think caveat emptor is perfectly justified.
Swapping game x for game y is not a refund btw.
I'm well aware of that. However, perhaps you ought to review your local consumer protection legislation and bylaws. Here in Canada, for example, any product or service can be refunded within 14 days, if it fails to perform as advertised or claimed, assuming that the product is in reasonably new shape. I know most parts of the USA have this, so perhaps the UK does as well.
Not to mention the fact that there's a difference between "this game sucks, give me my money back" and "this game won't even start up on my non-modified completely-stock console"!
The car is a utilitarian tool, a better analogy is if you bought a DVD movie, but the disc has some problem that won't let it play past the first 15 minutes. But then again, if that happened to you you'd go back and get a refund - and any reputable game shop will take back a product that is widely known to be defective. This isn't to mention that consumer law in most jurisdictions provide a time limit to return *all* products, regardless of store policy.
How good the graphics look often has little to do with how complex or taxing it is from a programming perspective. Keep in mind that, in a flight simulator such as that, much of the geometry is procedural, and only parameters are loaded from disk. This drastically reduces the amount of disk use you incur, and thus the performance hit you take on a single-core CPU. A FPS engine, on the other hand, does not have this luxury. It is blind to the type of content it will be called to display, and therefore cannot make these optimizations. This is why game engines are not a panacea to all your woes, and often an engine designed around a particular gameplay is actually worth writing.
Problems are different to everyone. What is important to you isn't important to me, and vice versa. What's the deal with selling booze to kids anyway? Shouldn't it be up to the parents to control and decide whether or not their children are mature enough for alcohol, and if so, how much?
Smoking and porn too, I suppose. Hell, why do we have a restriction on any of that?
... and the public transit systems to tie them into urban centres. There is no reason why airports have to be within a metropolitan area, if there's a fast monorail/train/rapid transit from the city to the outskirts, there is PLENTY of cheap land left to build airports.
Or better yet, start re-developing our aging and deteriorating rail networks. IMHO there's no good reason much of the east coast is dominated by air travel at all. I'm not sure about Americans, but here in Canada traveling from Toronto to Ottawa (about 450km) takes about the same time by air as by rail (including check-in, security times, etc). Rapid rail transit, IMHO, is THE answer to short and medium range travel. The only time one should have to step on board an aircraft is when flying halfway across the continent. Even going all the way across the state should be well within the means of fast rail travel (not to mention cheaper).
Hell, on a train I get on-board WiFi, a HUGE amount of legroom, seats that don't try to squeeze me, and non-dry non-stuffy air. Not to mention a soothing, quiet clickety-clack of the rails instead of the roar of jet engines. Oh, and no security, no travel restrictions... It is a superior way to travel in almost every way.
You may be interested to know that the 360 has a 3-core CPU, each one supporting two hardware threads. It is the epitome of multi-core processing, really, besides Sony and their weird SPU implementation. Both of the "big boy" consoles on the market now are designed from the ground up to utilize parallel processing - there is a very good reason for this.
Before blaming people for laziness, maybe you need to look at Windows' threading model and how much it sucks. It's sufficient for all processes to receive their share of processing time, but Windows is *not* a real-time OS. I cannot *guarantee* any process a certain amount of CPU time. So while one thread is chugging away with the hard drive, my render thread will thrash and convulse randomly as the OS decides on a whim how much time to give it. It also has a tendency to get hung up when resources are unavailable. Process switching is a relatively expensive procedure, in OS terms anyway, so the OS tends to like to minimize it by giving each process a fair chunk of time before moving on to the next (or worse, waiting for it to yield). This seems find and dandy for your everyday desktop apps, where much of the UI is handled by the OS (which always has processing priority anyway), and a 0.5s wait is barely noticeable. This falls apart when your OS gives your "loading" thread 0.5s of time, and then bounces back to your rendering thread. Oops, noticeable frame drop!
One can imagine a billion ways to solve this via software, but why do that when we've simply created more cores?
The amount of content that Flight Sim X needs to load is a completely different beast than, say, your standard FPS. Your plane never changes, your cockpit never does, content used to generate weather effects stay in memory from initial load to game exit. The only things it really needs to do is load in more ground textures, and procedurally generate more terrain in front of you. Even those trees on the ground are already in-memory, the game is simply cloning them procedurally over the landscape. The CPU hit for this kind of operation is *completely* different than that of loading a huge number of custom meshes at once, collision hulls and all.
This is something we're just starting to scratch on. Why have we always been stuck with boring loading screens, why can't the game load things on the fly? The answer is very simple: multitasking SUCKS on a single CPU. Oh yes, we run a lot of apps simultaneously every day, but have you ever tried loading a level in the background while trying to render a complex scene at 60fps, on a single CPU? You may have noticed that, in the old days (which really is just a couple of years ago) loading screens weren't just static by design - the game would actually STOP responding to the OS while it was too busy loading crap. Notice now, though, with games like Gears of War, where levels are loaded during cutscenes (part of the reason why they're not skippable), or Ghost Recon, where levels are loaded during your mission briefing. Because of the advent of consumer multi-core machines, we are finally able to do something resembling dynamic loading. This is something developers are keenly aware of, and are doing a lot to fix.
Where do you live, exactly? It sounds like you merely live in a town where public transit is woefully poor - which is not indicative of what public transit can do.
I live in Toronto, Canada, and I can't be happier with my public transit. It's a heck of a lot cheaper (about $1200 yearly) than driving a car ($3K for insurance + $3K for gas + maintenance...), and I never have to wait longer than 6-7 minutes for a train. The company keeps the trains and buses fairly ordered (i.e. "feral" children get kicked off), so that's not a problem either. Smoking is most certainly not permitted. The entire system runs on pre-purchased tokens and passes, so there are few lineups (unless you're obstinate and want to pay by cash) to get into the system.
A lot of the problem I see the anti-transit crowd is simply that they're too used to the suburban lifestyle of stuffing a caravan full of junk once every week. I go grocery shopping once every couple of days - this way I can change up my food to whatever I feel like cooking, as opposed to getting stuck with an industrial-sized box of Wheaties for the next gazillion years. Large items? I have a little luggage carrier that can carry anything that may be too heavy to haul by hand. I go shopping whenever I want, which limits the amount I have to carry each time. It's worked out marvelously, and I'd hate to go back to the suburban lifestyle of slinging a jillion bags across a huge parking lot, and then stumbling into the house with it later.
Now, the only time I really do miss not having a car is when moving. I live light and it's not really worth it to get the movers, so I like to move for myself, and doing so via public transit is a pain. But really, it happens rarely enough that I'm not at all bothered - even renting a car is still cheaper than owning one for a whole year.
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I used to be a huge PC gamer, but nowadays I game almost exclusively on consoles (except TF2, that game is massive win on a PC). Why? Because I hate upgrading. It costs a lot, and even a mid-high end video card is by itself worth a brand new console. I also hate futzing with my display settings, wondering "what else can I turn off to get this thing smooth and playable?", and updating video drivers, sound drivers, miscellaneous BS drivers... Installing, uninstalling... ugh.
I still do some PC gaming, but it's always on my laptop, which has good enough specs for work and some light media playing, but is never spec'ed out like a gaming rig (I like the battery life and mobility). This limits me, currently, to basically anything 2003 and before, though Half-Life 2 runs very well.
With a console I'm always playing at "max" settings, it's always silky smooth, I can pop the disc in and start playing a game immediately, instead of waiting ages to install.
Not to mention the uniform equipment of consoles opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, on the 360 *everyone* who is online is guaranteed to have a headset (after all, it comes with the console), making it possible for developers to REQUIRE the use of voice chat in multiplayer. Even now, the prevalence of voice chat on 360 is far more than I see on the PC. Try *enforcing* voice chat outside of the most hardcore group of Counter-Strike players, and see how your players react to that.
Look, I have a 360, I like it a lot, and I'm by most standards I'm a 360 fan. But really, those numbers are just BS.
The $280 Xbox 360 is so badly crippled it might as well not exist. It's a damned shame MS sells it at all. The cheapest Xbox 360 that even guarantees an acceptable gaming experience is the $400 one. Without a hard drive your Xbox is useless.
So really it boils down to... $400 vs. $400 vs. $250. Like it or not the PS3 is now very solid competition for the 360 price-wise. Now if only Sony can get some exclusives worth a damn that doesn't start with "F" and end in "antasy".
Ain't anecdotal evidence great? I know at least 10 people with Xbox 360's, and not one of them have had to have it replaced. It's no secret that the 360 has comparatively high failure rates, but 33%? Please link to the publication where you got that number, otherwise you're just spreading FUD.
IPTV is not going to happen in the next 5 years, not on a large scale anyway. Keep in mind that, while most Americans have access to broadband, it's of the most questionable quality and reliability. That 10Mbit line your neighbour Joe has, what kind of throughput would it REALLY give you if you pushed it? 4Mbit? Less? Up here, a 6Mbit line from Rogers frequently can pull less than 2.5Mbit in reality, and this fluctuates wildly depending on network congestion.
The last thing ISPs need is everyone pulling >4Mbit/s during primetime. That will shatter the piss poor network capacity that they currently have the gall to charge for.
We need more reliable broadband that guarantees more bandwidth, and for cheaper, before IPTV will become a reality. Joe user isn't going to understand anything about how his ISP sucks (it loads Google just fine!), and when his shiny HDTV stutters, he's going to blame the IPTV service, if not the TV itself.
At least they have a "value" line. With EA *every* one of their titles is part of EA Value :P
Activision does good work. Yeah, they pump out their share of crap through their Activision Value department, but when they run across a high profile developer that is good (e.g. Infinity Ward), they know when to take a hands-off approach.
I'd rather have Activision be the industry juggernaut than EA.
Isn't there a fairly simple way to track down leaks? Just set a very light but very visible object in the room, and watch as it naturally drifts towards where the air is exiting the vehicle. It will at least give you a small area to look, as opposed to hunting everywhere within a module.
The "100" argument doesn't really work. If a 100 should never be handed out, after all, no game can be PERFECT, then the highest possible score is a 99? But then, by virtue of 99 being the highest possible score, it becomes the "new" 100. Proof by mathematical induction... all games should be rated a big fat ZERO, since no games are perfect.
IMHO a score of 100 ought to be reserved for "reasonable" perfection, which is to say that, despite its inevitable flaws, they do not detract from what is overall an immensely satisfying experience. Think about it like the star system in use for hotels. Is there a perfect hotel that can't improve in ANY area? Of course not, but there are hotels that are so overwhelmingly good that one can hardly find fault with it. The same is true for games.
I was being facetious... But let's explore that idea.
Currently there's no good way to build an IMU that's small enough to fit in your average handset, let alone cheaply. Heck, we'd have trouble building one that'd fit in 5 handsets. Accelerometers vary greatly - you can get really rough ones like the MEMS accelerometer you see in the Wii-mote, or you can get extremely, extremely accurate ones that can maintain highly accurate positioning even without GPS assistance for extended periods of time. Clearly, for a phone you'd need something down the middle... which doesn't exist right now.
Indoor position tracking on everyday devices is still but a dream right now. I have no doubt we will one day achieve it, but that day won't be in the near future.
Except your GPS-enabled phone won't be able to reach its satellites *at all* inside that elevator, which makes your Google approximation better by process of elimination ;)
The only solution is GPS + IMU (inertial motion unit), which will track your movements via accelerometer while you are without GPS signal, and resync when it reacquires. I look forward to buying my own $5000, 4-lb phone!
Because they're not likely to be around in 15-20 years, or even more. By the time Joe Public realizes what a marvelous public infrastructure decision that was, 20 years ago, the politician is long gone from office, perhaps even retired. Why let the incumbent take all the glory for your handiwork? In the meantime the taxpayers are bitching and moaning about why they have to build this expensive infrastructure *now*. Politicians are only as short-sighted as the constituents they serve.
Agreed, except that when these things happen it must happen across the board. Too often "corruption" is used as a charge against politicians who piss off fellow, more powerful politicians. When "corruption" charges are laid selectively it does more harm than good.
FYI, the GH games have always had clear delineations between covers and originals. When you start a song, it will show something like "Sweet Child O' Mine - as made famous by Guns N' Roses", for all covers. The lack of "as made famous" indicates an original. IMHO that's plenty clear.
The whole concept of that sequence *could have* worked brilliantly, if the dialogue didn't suck balls and the director trying to draw parallels with present day constantly. "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!", seriously, if you're going to pan GWB at least get the quote right. Too much "look, parallelism with today!" preachy preachy, not enough epic line-delivering. Rewrite the dialogue to something much more epic, and that scene would have worked masterfully, especially given the brilliant art direction the films have (about their only saving grace).
Absolutely agree. This is a trap that showrunners tend to run into a lot. The one freshest in my memory is Stargate. The original movie had so much mystique - who was this alien? Where did he come from? Why the Egyptians? The mysteries keep the story compelling and interesting.
Then came the TV show, which started great, but eventually they've unraveled so much of the mystery around the original antagonists, that the show was stale and uninteresting, so they had to invent even more antagonists, which got tiring after a while.
Fans often demand backstory, but there is such a thing as filling in too MUCH backstory. This is something where I believe producers and fans can never truly agree. Fans will ALWAYS want all the backstory they can handle, while it's the job of the producers to do everything BUT that.
A sad story to be sure, but that doesn't justify them suing someone who is, for all intents and purposes, an innocent party. There are no laws against covering a song - so long as you pay the right royalties to the right places (which I am *sure* Activision isn't dumb enough to forego). If they're not seeing a penny of that, pursue the parties responsible for THAT...
But, of course, we have the odd exception cases (i.e. most of Europe), where the drinking age does not exist, yet alcohol abuse amongst use is not pandemic. I know many an European family where tradition had kids enjoying a bit of wine at dinner with their folks, or champagne at New Year's, or any number of such situations.
America's alcohol problem is not an *alcohol* problem per se, but rather a cultural one, where abuse is cool and getting your stomach pumped is treated like a rite of passage. Take away this cultural problem and you won't even need a damned legal drinking age.
I'm pretty neutral with regards to age limits on games, drinking, smoking, etc, but IMHO you can't have one without the other. If you're going to be a total nanny state and strip parents of their powers, then do so, don't do it half-assed.
Who says the physical media is broken? Perhaps I bought a DVD where, due to a bug in the menu code, I can't navigate past chapter 10. In that case it's clearly a product worthy of recall, but if I sued the movie studio I'd be rightfully laughed out of court. Buying this broken DVD caused me no harm, and as long as I got a refund on it that's the end of that - any further action would just be needless antagonism, greed, or both.
Did they release a program that they know doesn't work? Have you looked into their bug database to ascertain the veracity of your claim? It's entirely likely that a product may be broken in ways that the manufacturer had never anticipated.
Your Soldner example perfectly illustrates my point. If I bought a copy of Gigli on DVD, I cannot seriously demand a return on account of it being a bad movie. It promised me a compelling storyline, but none existed! Shock! Gasp! Not playing correctly is one thing, but being a bad movie is not a crime, nor is being a bad game. This is one area where I think caveat emptor is perfectly justified.
Swapping game x for game y is not a refund btw.I'm well aware of that. However, perhaps you ought to review your local consumer protection legislation and bylaws. Here in Canada, for example, any product or service can be refunded within 14 days, if it fails to perform as advertised or claimed, assuming that the product is in reasonably new shape. I know most parts of the USA have this, so perhaps the UK does as well.
Not to mention the fact that there's a difference between "this game sucks, give me my money back" and "this game won't even start up on my non-modified completely-stock console"!
The car is a utilitarian tool, a better analogy is if you bought a DVD movie, but the disc has some problem that won't let it play past the first 15 minutes. But then again, if that happened to you you'd go back and get a refund - and any reputable game shop will take back a product that is widely known to be defective. This isn't to mention that consumer law in most jurisdictions provide a time limit to return *all* products, regardless of store policy.
This is worth a refund, not a lawsuit.
How good the graphics look often has little to do with how complex or taxing it is from a programming perspective. Keep in mind that, in a flight simulator such as that, much of the geometry is procedural, and only parameters are loaded from disk. This drastically reduces the amount of disk use you incur, and thus the performance hit you take on a single-core CPU. A FPS engine, on the other hand, does not have this luxury. It is blind to the type of content it will be called to display, and therefore cannot make these optimizations. This is why game engines are not a panacea to all your woes, and often an engine designed around a particular gameplay is actually worth writing.
Problems are different to everyone. What is important to you isn't important to me, and vice versa. What's the deal with selling booze to kids anyway? Shouldn't it be up to the parents to control and decide whether or not their children are mature enough for alcohol, and if so, how much?
Smoking and porn too, I suppose. Hell, why do we have a restriction on any of that?
... and the public transit systems to tie them into urban centres. There is no reason why airports have to be within a metropolitan area, if there's a fast monorail/train/rapid transit from the city to the outskirts, there is PLENTY of cheap land left to build airports.
Or better yet, start re-developing our aging and deteriorating rail networks. IMHO there's no good reason much of the east coast is dominated by air travel at all. I'm not sure about Americans, but here in Canada traveling from Toronto to Ottawa (about 450km) takes about the same time by air as by rail (including check-in, security times, etc). Rapid rail transit, IMHO, is THE answer to short and medium range travel. The only time one should have to step on board an aircraft is when flying halfway across the continent. Even going all the way across the state should be well within the means of fast rail travel (not to mention cheaper).
Hell, on a train I get on-board WiFi, a HUGE amount of legroom, seats that don't try to squeeze me, and non-dry non-stuffy air. Not to mention a soothing, quiet clickety-clack of the rails instead of the roar of jet engines. Oh, and no security, no travel restrictions... It is a superior way to travel in almost every way.
You may be interested to know that the 360 has a 3-core CPU, each one supporting two hardware threads. It is the epitome of multi-core processing, really, besides Sony and their weird SPU implementation. Both of the "big boy" consoles on the market now are designed from the ground up to utilize parallel processing - there is a very good reason for this.
Before blaming people for laziness, maybe you need to look at Windows' threading model and how much it sucks. It's sufficient for all processes to receive their share of processing time, but Windows is *not* a real-time OS. I cannot *guarantee* any process a certain amount of CPU time. So while one thread is chugging away with the hard drive, my render thread will thrash and convulse randomly as the OS decides on a whim how much time to give it. It also has a tendency to get hung up when resources are unavailable. Process switching is a relatively expensive procedure, in OS terms anyway, so the OS tends to like to minimize it by giving each process a fair chunk of time before moving on to the next (or worse, waiting for it to yield). This seems find and dandy for your everyday desktop apps, where much of the UI is handled by the OS (which always has processing priority anyway), and a 0.5s wait is barely noticeable. This falls apart when your OS gives your "loading" thread 0.5s of time, and then bounces back to your rendering thread. Oops, noticeable frame drop!
One can imagine a billion ways to solve this via software, but why do that when we've simply created more cores?
The amount of content that Flight Sim X needs to load is a completely different beast than, say, your standard FPS. Your plane never changes, your cockpit never does, content used to generate weather effects stay in memory from initial load to game exit. The only things it really needs to do is load in more ground textures, and procedurally generate more terrain in front of you. Even those trees on the ground are already in-memory, the game is simply cloning them procedurally over the landscape. The CPU hit for this kind of operation is *completely* different than that of loading a huge number of custom meshes at once, collision hulls and all.
This is something we're just starting to scratch on. Why have we always been stuck with boring loading screens, why can't the game load things on the fly? The answer is very simple: multitasking SUCKS on a single CPU. Oh yes, we run a lot of apps simultaneously every day, but have you ever tried loading a level in the background while trying to render a complex scene at 60fps, on a single CPU? You may have noticed that, in the old days (which really is just a couple of years ago) loading screens weren't just static by design - the game would actually STOP responding to the OS while it was too busy loading crap. Notice now, though, with games like Gears of War, where levels are loaded during cutscenes (part of the reason why they're not skippable), or Ghost Recon, where levels are loaded during your mission briefing. Because of the advent of consumer multi-core machines, we are finally able to do something resembling dynamic loading. This is something developers are keenly aware of, and are doing a lot to fix.
Where do you live, exactly? It sounds like you merely live in a town where public transit is woefully poor - which is not indicative of what public transit can do.
I live in Toronto, Canada, and I can't be happier with my public transit. It's a heck of a lot cheaper (about $1200 yearly) than driving a car ($3K for insurance + $3K for gas + maintenance...), and I never have to wait longer than 6-7 minutes for a train. The company keeps the trains and buses fairly ordered (i.e. "feral" children get kicked off), so that's not a problem either. Smoking is most certainly not permitted. The entire system runs on pre-purchased tokens and passes, so there are few lineups (unless you're obstinate and want to pay by cash) to get into the system.
A lot of the problem I see the anti-transit crowd is simply that they're too used to the suburban lifestyle of stuffing a caravan full of junk once every week. I go grocery shopping once every couple of days - this way I can change up my food to whatever I feel like cooking, as opposed to getting stuck with an industrial-sized box of Wheaties for the next gazillion years. Large items? I have a little luggage carrier that can carry anything that may be too heavy to haul by hand. I go shopping whenever I want, which limits the amount I have to carry each time. It's worked out marvelously, and I'd hate to go back to the suburban lifestyle of slinging a jillion bags across a huge parking lot, and then stumbling into the house with it later.
Now, the only time I really do miss not having a car is when moving. I live light and it's not really worth it to get the movers, so I like to move for myself, and doing so via public transit is a pain. But really, it happens rarely enough that I'm not at all bothered - even renting a car is still cheaper than owning one for a whole year.