There isn't enough market to justify the cost An announcement of KI3 would erase any such sentiment, I'd say. Also, Smash Bros made an absolute killing on the Gamecube. So, I disagree. It's about the game, not the genre.
Take out Final Fantasy You'd have to take out FF, Kingdom Hears, and Dragonquest. And the point isn't to create blockbuster hits to dethrone GTA, it's to diversify a game lineup to keep folks from getting a PS2 and sticking with just a 360.
I still haven't opened my Bioshock copy for PC, but I will once I have more free time, haha.
If there are many 2d fighters for the 360, then they certainly aren't marketed well. But I'd say there just aren't many at all. Killer Instinct 3 would make headlines and the cover of every gaming magazine. A proper port of Melty Blood couldn't hurt, and like I said before a Smash competitor would be nice. People complain about the D-Pad, but it's just fine for me as a DOA player, and something like Smash doesn't use it except for taunts anyway. The rest do fine with joysticks, much like arcades (Playstation folks like their D-pads but never say anything abot joysticks, but that's where the 360 makes up ground in the fighting game UI department IMO).
But see, you tell me to get a Playstation for RPGs and a Wii for platformers. That's exactly what I'm saying Microsoft should *address* regarding the 360's upcoming lineup! Give people what they want and they hand their $ over to you rather than to a competitor ^_^
Nintendo launched an SMB program leveraging the buzzwords "platform," "galaxy", and "adventure." And "b00zar."
Sorry that's just the first thing that came to mind when I saw "SMB" and I *still* haven't bothered to find out what it actually stands for in the context of TFA.
The 360 would benefit a bit from filling in gaps that other consoles currently do. Sure, it can't release a "Wii Sports" kind of title but there are certain genres in which it's quite weak and doesn't have to be.
One is fighting games. These are really popular despite not really having "progressed" much in something like a decade (even more for some subgenres). Don't give fans a sub-par Guilty Gear and a Dead or Alive and leave it at that. Give folks a *solid* 2D fighter. A Smash Bros competitor couldn't hurt, either, since as fantastic as that series is, it's all too easy to improve on.
Another is JRPGs. Even Americans play these, believe it or not (duh, PS2 RPGs sell brilliantly here after all), and you don't need to be a Japanese developer to whip these up. You just need good art direction and the rest will fall into place assuming the combat system isn't a total disaster. One shoddy attempt with Dragonball Z character design doesn't cut it.
Thirdly, where are the platformers? We got Kameo early on, but that's it! I know Rare can't be bothered to make many games anymore, but there are certainly other developers that can be asked to do the job.
The way things are now are good enough for the 360, but I would rather see less of a total saturation of shooters and rubbish racing games and a bit more diversity in the upcoming game lineup.
"Underpowered graphics" -- By what standards? Mass Effect and Gears look about as good as anything else.
"640p last gen looking Halo 3" -- Pretty much a lie. Halo 3 is not 640p and I think this has been covered multiple times. It doesn't look last-gen it just doesn't look as good as Gears.
"noisy as a jet airplane from the fans" -- you can hear it but gimme a break! any normal level of game volume will drown out the whirr of the fans which isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be.
"forced online fees" -- WTF? I don't know how voluntarily signing up for a service is "forced."
"Already dead in Japan and pretty much all of Europe but kept alive by the rabid US based Halo fans" -- it's doing just fine in Europe and it's much more than just "kept alive" in the US. Its software sales are doing very, very well here.
I'm not sure what perspective you're looking at this from, but my reasoning is ok I think. It's not about implementing "standard keyboard/mouse controls" per se, it's not a question of difficulty, it's a question of time and money spent on it and whether it's worth it. Every game is doing something other games have done in the past in at least some fashion, but it all takes time. If it made sense from a money perspective I imagine publishers would have been suggesting a mouse/keyboard peripheral to the console manufacturers already.
Your comment regarding "top PC competitors" and mice is a bit off because I'm not saying that gamers should be locked to using the lowest common denominator for controls. The real scenario is that these "top PC competitors" probably use the best gaming mice they can get their hands on in order to keep their opponent from having an unnecessary edge. Likewise, if console Halo players were presented with mouse/keyboard controls as an option, the competitive ones would be the first to take that option (assuming it's a better one than standard controllers). This would supposedly give those that bought this peripheral an edge over other players. I'm not sure if this would lead to a bad reaction or not, but it'll lead to *some sort* of reaction and it might not be something MS needs to deal with. It's also easy to spin bad PR in such cases, I'd imagine.
My comment about people being happy with controllers isn't inconsistent with saying that competitive players would prefer a keyboard/mouse if it was available and worked well. You can be happy with a 3-bedroom 2-bath home but if you got to choose that or a 4-bedroom 3-bath one you might choose the latter. There's no contradiction. The point is, there's no pressure from the gamers. If more were like you, perhaps you *would* see a mouse/keyboard option for the XBox and games like Gears or Oblivion or Mass Effect, etc. But that's just not the case.
The article goes on to explain that this has to do with price control. As by far the leading distributor of online music, Apple can maintain a $.99 price point for all songs. The record labels want variable pricing (more than $.99 for some songs, presumably, and hopefully something like $.01 for things like Britney Spears's new crap but that's too optimistic) and by striking contracts with Amazon and other distributors they might be able to put some pressure on Apple in this regard.
It's probably in large part that there just won't be any return on investment. This goes for the game developers especially. Having to develop a UI that works both on controller and mouse/keyboard just isn't worth the time for a lot of developers because of how few users would opt for it over a controller (since a controller is fully useable for the console shooters). The whole issue of pacing and auto-aim also comes up.
I think with some games having the option is a no-brainer and if there were a keyboard/mouse available as a peripheral it would *have to* be supported. But those games (e.g. Oblivion) are few and far between as far as developers are concerned, I suppose.
I'm also not sure how a keyboard/mouse setup in Halo would be welcomed by the competitive online community. Maybe well, maybe not well at all. If PC FPS fans are correct in considering the mouse/keyboard superior, it will certainly lead to a strong reaction and not necessarily a good one. I guess it just makes more sense for Microsoft and others to stick to what's been working.
After all, by far most console gamers are happy enough with their controllers (even if they're rubbish, like with the PS3, haha).
That's why when you *do* need to call to help figure out... I don't know... an error code on a BSOD or something... you say "put me through to Tier 3, n00bl4r!" I think the last time I called IT tech support for actual help was PNY regarding a really bizarre screwup with a graphics card, but the Tier 3 guy I eventually ended up with was actually a proper expert and a pleasure to talk with.
It's a tradeoff in convenience and depends on the player! I have a LOT of music on my computer and keeping the id3 tags in order is next to impossible at this point. Having a player that *does* load as a mass storage device, let me swap stuff back and forth, and *preserves the directory structure that I gave it, allowing me to navigate it the way I would my music folder on my PC* is for instance exactly what I want. My Cowon A2 lets me do that because it doesn't organize music according to id3 tags. It uses a basic directory structure and for my purposes that's far more preferable (it also loads fast enough). I *can't* keep id3 tags organized; iTunes leaves me with a mess of thousands of songs that I cannot use in the least.
I wasn't meaning to imply "intent" in the way you understood; I simply meant that it was a natural occurrence as far as the parasite is concerned. That is, the parasitized host dies 100% (or close enough) of the time because what the parasite does, well, kills it.
That's a sub-type of parasite if you want to go that deep into semantics. Terminology here isn't entirely consistent but at least within entomology they are called "parasites" and that is not in error.
Of course. Parasites usually do not wipe out entire populations unless there's some imbalance in the ecosystem (though certainly when parasites are "brought in" to control a population this may occur). You are right in that parasites coexist with their hosts in the sense that the host population must persist in order to sustain the parasite population.
Though I suspect there are cases where a host population spans several species and so an extinction of a species due to a parasite is therefore possible.
The definition of "parasite" you will often find online is a relationship between organisms where one obtains nourishment from the other and provides no benefit in return. The definition may include "does not kill the host" but in nature I find that's not a consistent definition.
You're mistaken on the principle of parasitism, possibly confusing it on some level with symbiosis. Parasites don't need to keep a host alive. Many parasites kill their hosts (as intended). Parasitic wasps, for instance, lay eggs inside their hosts which then hatch with the larva proceeding to eat the host from the inside out. Such wasps are in fact sometimes used as a "natural" method of pest control.
"After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them"
Um, the Cretaceous period lasted 75 million years. So while it's plausible that insects caused outbreaks of disease in localized populations I really don't see how anything of pandemic proportions can be inferred. As far as evolved resistance goes, well, the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for a LONG time. Much, much longer than mammals. Unless the diseases described all appeared about 65 million years ago, then there's just no logic here.
Besides that, dinosarus may have died out but many other species did not. This includes reptiles, which would have been affected by the pathogens according by these researchers.
The more I think about this, the more it smells like bullcrap.
As a big PC *and* console gamer, I would say it probably depends what you want in your FPS. If quick-response accuracy with a gun is of utmost importance, then you're probably best off with a mouse (although the Wiimote for certain games is probably not going to be any worse). If you like split-screen co-op and sitting on the couch with a comfy controller then I think the PC doesn't quite deliver while something like Gears or Halo 3 does. Game devs are generally savvy about what works on console and what doesn't, so you get different pacing and possibly aim-adjustment on consoles. But that doesn't take anything away from the games per se; after all, difficulty in a game doesn't have to be about how hard something is to aim at (and usually isn't).
As far as RTS games go, to me the problem has always been lack of a easy-to-use cursor. I'm not sure if the Wiimote is easy enough to use to solve that problem. Somehow I doubt it considering even something like clicking on a High Templar and pressing a button to activate Psi Storm on an enemy targe *quickly enough* would be non-trivial because it's hard to maintain accuracy of that level with your wrist. The DS, on the other hand, has a lot more potential in that department...
The 108" display being forgotten is all great and stuff (who cares, really) but the article focused much more on the unresolved HD format war (blu-ray vs hd-dvd) which I find funny considering JUST HOW MANY blu-ray ads I've seen on Slashdot recently. Anyway, prices have indeed dropped a good bit over time and with the slow adoption rates is it really looking like any of these formats is going to take over, let alone win over the standard DVD format, ever? I'm not sure anymore. It seems like if another couple of years go by and nothing much changes, we'll see a solid-state memory format becoming more viable as next-gen storage for media.
Actually that would be nice, but I don't see the movie industry being too keen on that happening, and Sony will never give up on pushing a proprietary media format that they can monopolize.
Hey by all means disobey the seatbelt regulations bud, I'm not gonna get on your case about it. Please disobey it, also disobey some speed limits while you're at it for good measure.
I call BS! I buy coffee, more specifically a White Chocolate Mocha With Soy Milk And Caramel On Top at Starbucks ALL THE TIME (because I'm rich) and half the time there's a customer there who is not at all what you describe. He's just there for some tea (me, I don't even say "tea" anymore I just say "Tazo" because that probably means 'tea' in Mexican or something anyway) or something and stares at the menu for like a whole minute like a clueless moron and then has trouble figuring out that a Grande is medium not large what a dolt.
Yeah the lack of tracks is definitely the game's biggest problem for me as well. Even playing the game for a relatively short amount of time had me getting a bit bored of seeing the same few tracks over and over and over.
I have a friend that works across the hall from the Forza guys, actually. He can probably confirm what you said if I ask him when it comes to tracks, but I'm not really sure why tracks take up quite so much space when there are plenty of single-DVD games out there that seemingly have a LOT more assets on the DVD than Forza does. I suppose some developers may be better at utilizing disk space than others.
I can understand your issue about lack of older low-end cars, especially given your anecdote with the family. I would like a Forza 3 to have a bigger selection of low-end cars certainly, as well as a different reward system that doesn't lock you out of cars you might want to use in career mode for a long time. I guess the whole thing of career mode having you use many different cars but not necessarily the ones you want just doesn't appeal to me. I like to pick one thing I like and stick to it. I do it in fighting games, racing games (if I can -- Bowser is my man in Mario Kart even though he's really bad hehe), and so forth. I would very much like a racing sim with Forza's engine that let me build a team, have a set of 2-4 cars to maintain and enter into races, etc. Having cars be out of reach financially at the beginning is ok, it's like that in Forza even without cars being wholly "unavailable," but at least it's not arbitrary and unrealistic. I don't need to be a "level 30 driver" in real life to hop into a Saleen, after all. ^^
Once Square and others start to really get going with PS3 (that is, once Japanese developers stop concentrating so much on the PS2, haha) it will pick up strength quickly....Yeah, really, the PS3's biggest problem might not be price/Xbox/Wii as much as it is the PS2 which keeps the PS3's target audience fully occupied since it's still doing alright in terms of games.
Yes, yes. Thanks for the informative post, as it illustrates a point of mine that some have not been agreeing with. The 6.5-year wait time for a new Smash is hardly justified. People say they rather have a good game than a quickly made one. Fair enough, but Brawl has not been in development since the release of Melee. If it takes a little over 2 years to put a Smash game together, then we could have been playing a 4th or even 5th iteration by now. And liking it. It's not as if anyone would not buy a Smash game if he/she enjoyed the previous one.
I was always a bit confused about that. SSBM outsold every other game on Gamecube by a HUGE margin. Why Nintendo didn't pump out a couple more Smash games in the meantime just doesn't make sense to me from even a business perspective. The Smash franchise is a license to print money as far as Nintendo is concerned, but it seems everyone knows it but them.
Slashdot Mirror
You're just assuming EA won't have purchased 2K Studios by 2010. Silly you.
I still haven't opened my Bioshock copy for PC, but I will once I have more free time, haha.
If there are many 2d fighters for the 360, then they certainly aren't marketed well. But I'd say there just aren't many at all. Killer Instinct 3 would make headlines and the cover of every gaming magazine. A proper port of Melty Blood couldn't hurt, and like I said before a Smash competitor would be nice. People complain about the D-Pad, but it's just fine for me as a DOA player, and something like Smash doesn't use it except for taunts anyway. The rest do fine with joysticks, much like arcades (Playstation folks like their D-pads but never say anything abot joysticks, but that's where the 360 makes up ground in the fighting game UI department IMO).
But see, you tell me to get a Playstation for RPGs and a Wii for platformers. That's exactly what I'm saying Microsoft should *address* regarding the 360's upcoming lineup! Give people what they want and they hand their $ over to you rather than to a competitor ^_^
Nintendo launched an SMB program leveraging the buzzwords "platform," "galaxy", and "adventure." And "b00zar."
Sorry that's just the first thing that came to mind when I saw "SMB" and I *still* haven't bothered to find out what it actually stands for in the context of TFA.
The 360 would benefit a bit from filling in gaps that other consoles currently do. Sure, it can't release a "Wii Sports" kind of title but there are certain genres in which it's quite weak and doesn't have to be.
One is fighting games. These are really popular despite not really having "progressed" much in something like a decade (even more for some subgenres). Don't give fans a sub-par Guilty Gear and a Dead or Alive and leave it at that. Give folks a *solid* 2D fighter. A Smash Bros competitor couldn't hurt, either, since as fantastic as that series is, it's all too easy to improve on.
Another is JRPGs. Even Americans play these, believe it or not (duh, PS2 RPGs sell brilliantly here after all), and you don't need to be a Japanese developer to whip these up. You just need good art direction and the rest will fall into place assuming the combat system isn't a total disaster. One shoddy attempt with Dragonball Z character design doesn't cut it.
Thirdly, where are the platformers? We got Kameo early on, but that's it! I know Rare can't be bothered to make many games anymore, but there are certainly other developers that can be asked to do the job.
The way things are now are good enough for the 360, but I would rather see less of a total saturation of shooters and rubbish racing games and a bit more diversity in the upcoming game lineup.
Hmmm...
"Underpowered graphics" -- By what standards? Mass Effect and Gears look about as good as anything else.
"640p last gen looking Halo 3" -- Pretty much a lie. Halo 3 is not 640p and I think this has been covered multiple times. It doesn't look last-gen it just doesn't look as good as Gears.
"noisy as a jet airplane from the fans" -- you can hear it but gimme a break! any normal level of game volume will drown out the whirr of the fans which isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be.
"forced online fees" -- WTF? I don't know how voluntarily signing up for a service is "forced."
"Already dead in Japan and pretty much all of Europe but kept alive by the rabid US based Halo fans" -- it's doing just fine in Europe and it's much more than just "kept alive" in the US. Its software sales are doing very, very well here.
Dude that was just FUD trolling.
I'm not sure what perspective you're looking at this from, but my reasoning is ok I think. It's not about implementing "standard keyboard/mouse controls" per se, it's not a question of difficulty, it's a question of time and money spent on it and whether it's worth it. Every game is doing something other games have done in the past in at least some fashion, but it all takes time. If it made sense from a money perspective I imagine publishers would have been suggesting a mouse/keyboard peripheral to the console manufacturers already.
Your comment regarding "top PC competitors" and mice is a bit off because I'm not saying that gamers should be locked to using the lowest common denominator for controls. The real scenario is that these "top PC competitors" probably use the best gaming mice they can get their hands on in order to keep their opponent from having an unnecessary edge. Likewise, if console Halo players were presented with mouse/keyboard controls as an option, the competitive ones would be the first to take that option (assuming it's a better one than standard controllers). This would supposedly give those that bought this peripheral an edge over other players. I'm not sure if this would lead to a bad reaction or not, but it'll lead to *some sort* of reaction and it might not be something MS needs to deal with. It's also easy to spin bad PR in such cases, I'd imagine.
My comment about people being happy with controllers isn't inconsistent with saying that competitive players would prefer a keyboard/mouse if it was available and worked well. You can be happy with a 3-bedroom 2-bath home but if you got to choose that or a 4-bedroom 3-bath one you might choose the latter. There's no contradiction. The point is, there's no pressure from the gamers. If more were like you, perhaps you *would* see a mouse/keyboard option for the XBox and games like Gears or Oblivion or Mass Effect, etc. But that's just not the case.
You forgot to put "kidnaps babies" and "slashes your tires while you sleep" under the bullshit you listed for Xbox 360.
The article goes on to explain that this has to do with price control. As by far the leading distributor of online music, Apple can maintain a $.99 price point for all songs. The record labels want variable pricing (more than $.99 for some songs, presumably, and hopefully something like $.01 for things like Britney Spears's new crap but that's too optimistic) and by striking contracts with Amazon and other distributors they might be able to put some pressure on Apple in this regard.
It's probably in large part that there just won't be any return on investment. This goes for the game developers especially. Having to develop a UI that works both on controller and mouse/keyboard just isn't worth the time for a lot of developers because of how few users would opt for it over a controller (since a controller is fully useable for the console shooters). The whole issue of pacing and auto-aim also comes up.
I think with some games having the option is a no-brainer and if there were a keyboard/mouse available as a peripheral it would *have to* be supported. But those games (e.g. Oblivion) are few and far between as far as developers are concerned, I suppose.
I'm also not sure how a keyboard/mouse setup in Halo would be welcomed by the competitive online community. Maybe well, maybe not well at all. If PC FPS fans are correct in considering the mouse/keyboard superior, it will certainly lead to a strong reaction and not necessarily a good one. I guess it just makes more sense for Microsoft and others to stick to what's been working.
After all, by far most console gamers are happy enough with their controllers (even if they're rubbish, like with the PS3, haha).
That's why when you *do* need to call to help figure out... I don't know... an error code on a BSOD or something... you say "put me through to Tier 3, n00bl4r!" I think the last time I called IT tech support for actual help was PNY regarding a really bizarre screwup with a graphics card, but the Tier 3 guy I eventually ended up with was actually a proper expert and a pleasure to talk with.
It's a tradeoff in convenience and depends on the player! I have a LOT of music on my computer and keeping the id3 tags in order is next to impossible at this point. Having a player that *does* load as a mass storage device, let me swap stuff back and forth, and *preserves the directory structure that I gave it, allowing me to navigate it the way I would my music folder on my PC* is for instance exactly what I want. My Cowon A2 lets me do that because it doesn't organize music according to id3 tags. It uses a basic directory structure and for my purposes that's far more preferable (it also loads fast enough). I *can't* keep id3 tags organized; iTunes leaves me with a mess of thousands of songs that I cannot use in the least.
I wasn't meaning to imply "intent" in the way you understood; I simply meant that it was a natural occurrence as far as the parasite is concerned. That is, the parasitized host dies 100% (or close enough) of the time because what the parasite does, well, kills it.
That's a sub-type of parasite if you want to go that deep into semantics. Terminology here isn't entirely consistent but at least within entomology they are called "parasites" and that is not in error.
Of course. Parasites usually do not wipe out entire populations unless there's some imbalance in the ecosystem (though certainly when parasites are "brought in" to control a population this may occur). You are right in that parasites coexist with their hosts in the sense that the host population must persist in order to sustain the parasite population.
Though I suspect there are cases where a host population spans several species and so an extinction of a species due to a parasite is therefore possible.
The definition of "parasite" you will often find online is a relationship between organisms where one obtains nourishment from the other and provides no benefit in return. The definition may include "does not kill the host" but in nature I find that's not a consistent definition.
You're mistaken on the principle of parasitism, possibly confusing it on some level with symbiosis. Parasites don't need to keep a host alive. Many parasites kill their hosts (as intended). Parasitic wasps, for instance, lay eggs inside their hosts which then hatch with the larva proceeding to eat the host from the inside out. Such wasps are in fact sometimes used as a "natural" method of pest control.
The whole timeline appears a bit fubar here.
"After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them"
Um, the Cretaceous period lasted 75 million years. So while it's plausible that insects caused outbreaks of disease in localized populations I really don't see how anything of pandemic proportions can be inferred. As far as evolved resistance goes, well, the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for a LONG time. Much, much longer than mammals. Unless the diseases described all appeared about 65 million years ago, then there's just no logic here.
Besides that, dinosarus may have died out but many other species did not. This includes reptiles, which would have been affected by the pathogens according by these researchers.
The more I think about this, the more it smells like bullcrap.
As a big PC *and* console gamer, I would say it probably depends what you want in your FPS. If quick-response accuracy with a gun is of utmost importance, then you're probably best off with a mouse (although the Wiimote for certain games is probably not going to be any worse). If you like split-screen co-op and sitting on the couch with a comfy controller then I think the PC doesn't quite deliver while something like Gears or Halo 3 does. Game devs are generally savvy about what works on console and what doesn't, so you get different pacing and possibly aim-adjustment on consoles. But that doesn't take anything away from the games per se; after all, difficulty in a game doesn't have to be about how hard something is to aim at (and usually isn't).
As far as RTS games go, to me the problem has always been lack of a easy-to-use cursor. I'm not sure if the Wiimote is easy enough to use to solve that problem. Somehow I doubt it considering even something like clicking on a High Templar and pressing a button to activate Psi Storm on an enemy targe *quickly enough* would be non-trivial because it's hard to maintain accuracy of that level with your wrist. The DS, on the other hand, has a lot more potential in that department...
The 108" display being forgotten is all great and stuff (who cares, really) but the article focused much more on the unresolved HD format war (blu-ray vs hd-dvd) which I find funny considering JUST HOW MANY blu-ray ads I've seen on Slashdot recently. Anyway, prices have indeed dropped a good bit over time and with the slow adoption rates is it really looking like any of these formats is going to take over, let alone win over the standard DVD format, ever? I'm not sure anymore. It seems like if another couple of years go by and nothing much changes, we'll see a solid-state memory format becoming more viable as next-gen storage for media.
Actually that would be nice, but I don't see the movie industry being too keen on that happening, and Sony will never give up on pushing a proprietary media format that they can monopolize.
Hey by all means disobey the seatbelt regulations bud, I'm not gonna get on your case about it. Please disobey it, also disobey some speed limits while you're at it for good measure.
It was the same with the USSR. Fantastic constitution, maybe even better than the U.S. one, but it didn't matter in the slightest.
I call BS! I buy coffee, more specifically a White Chocolate Mocha With Soy Milk And Caramel On Top at Starbucks ALL THE TIME (because I'm rich) and half the time there's a customer there who is not at all what you describe. He's just there for some tea (me, I don't even say "tea" anymore I just say "Tazo" because that probably means 'tea' in Mexican or something anyway) or something and stares at the menu for like a whole minute like a clueless moron and then has trouble figuring out that a Grande is medium not large what a dolt.
Yeah the lack of tracks is definitely the game's biggest problem for me as well. Even playing the game for a relatively short amount of time had me getting a bit bored of seeing the same few tracks over and over and over.
I have a friend that works across the hall from the Forza guys, actually. He can probably confirm what you said if I ask him when it comes to tracks, but I'm not really sure why tracks take up quite so much space when there are plenty of single-DVD games out there that seemingly have a LOT more assets on the DVD than Forza does. I suppose some developers may be better at utilizing disk space than others.
I can understand your issue about lack of older low-end cars, especially given your anecdote with the family. I would like a Forza 3 to have a bigger selection of low-end cars certainly, as well as a different reward system that doesn't lock you out of cars you might want to use in career mode for a long time. I guess the whole thing of career mode having you use many different cars but not necessarily the ones you want just doesn't appeal to me. I like to pick one thing I like and stick to it. I do it in fighting games, racing games (if I can -- Bowser is my man in Mario Kart even though he's really bad hehe), and so forth. I would very much like a racing sim with Forza's engine that let me build a team, have a set of 2-4 cars to maintain and enter into races, etc. Having cars be out of reach financially at the beginning is ok, it's like that in Forza even without cars being wholly "unavailable," but at least it's not arbitrary and unrealistic. I don't need to be a "level 30 driver" in real life to hop into a Saleen, after all. ^^
"at least" indeed.
...Yeah, really, the PS3's biggest problem might not be price/Xbox/Wii as much as it is the PS2 which keeps the PS3's target audience fully occupied since it's still doing alright in terms of games.
Once Square and others start to really get going with PS3 (that is, once Japanese developers stop concentrating so much on the PS2, haha) it will pick up strength quickly.
Yes, yes. Thanks for the informative post, as it illustrates a point of mine that some have not been agreeing with. The 6.5-year wait time for a new Smash is hardly justified. People say they rather have a good game than a quickly made one. Fair enough, but Brawl has not been in development since the release of Melee. If it takes a little over 2 years to put a Smash game together, then we could have been playing a 4th or even 5th iteration by now. And liking it. It's not as if anyone would not buy a Smash game if he/she enjoyed the previous one.
I was always a bit confused about that. SSBM outsold every other game on Gamecube by a HUGE margin. Why Nintendo didn't pump out a couple more Smash games in the meantime just doesn't make sense to me from even a business perspective. The Smash franchise is a license to print money as far as Nintendo is concerned, but it seems everyone knows it but them.