Helping folks who don't like looking at the keyboard while typing! I know it must be hard to think about touch-screens outside the realm of the iPhone and Nintendo DS, but if you were to use a touch-screen in place of the keyboard on your table, you'd be hard-pressed not to look at it as you type if you don't want all sorts of typos and what-not.
Put your hands down on a flat surface and pretend you're typing. Don't look at your hands as you do this. Then actually look down and notice that it's really not that easy to maintain consistent distances without tactile feedback. Hitting a 'y' as opposed to a '6' or '7' becomes rather non-trivial.
LOL! The positioning is to establish a point of reference so you can type without looking. The bumps may as well be on arbitrary keys so long as you are aware of how the keyboard is laid out around those keys. Regardless of what layout you think is superior, both benefit from an easy way to initially position your hands.
I think people who use Dvorak layouts and look for all sorts of non-reasons to state that they do should wear cool patches on their shirts to feel more elite.
One percent of three hundred million I see you have already conducted the census! Can I split the $650 million with you?
Re:In the future nobody touches anything
on
Meet the Laptop of 2015
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Type a lengthy text message without looking at the phone's keyboard. Quickly. ^_^ I mean, there's a reason there's a bump on the 'F' and 'J' keys on the keyboard I'm using at the moment. A good reason.
Seriously, the people who came up with this stuff are completely unimaginative and idiotic. Tactile feedback for typing is almost a necessity given you *don't f-ing look at the keyboard while typing*!! The only "future laptop" with some actual touch feedback they showed was the oily blob, which I don't even know how to approach. If I want to replace my laptop with an oily blob, I'll gain 200 pounds and sit on the table myself.
The one that turns into a book viewer if you turn it 90 degrees is a total joke. Seriously, take your laptop right now, turn it 90 degrees so that the break between the two "halves" is vertical, and tell me that's a comfortable way to handle reading material. Unless it's laying flat on the table (in which case it better be quite small) it's completely unmanageable.
The one they showed slung over the steering wheel of a car, that's just bad. BAD BAD BAD! Hey guys, here's a piece of crap with a touch-screen keyboard you have to stare at in order to use that you can hang right on your steering wheel! And then what, drive and type? That looks like the most uncomfortable thing ever even if you're parked.
I give all these "laptops of the future" an EPIC FAIL out of 10.
I'd say the genre that targets hardcore gamers most is actually the fighting game (non-Smash Bros) genre, hehe, but altogether I do think that FPS games, particularly PC FPS games, are not exactly casual-gamer-friendly. But there's no reason they should be, considering the control setup and general difficulty of getting accustomed to a first-person view. FPSs definitely compete with each other on graphics, so you end up needing some beefy hardware to play the newer ones.
As for "more realistic" controls, I'm not sure how much better you can do with a keyboard+mouse than what's already done. PC FPSs control *well*, just not very naturally. But a table-top keyboard and mouse for controlling a person, particularly "yourself" given that you're in FP view, is hardly natural, so it's an inherent issue. I think to most FPS fans it just doesn't matter one bit, and that's completely fair enough. I play FP games on PC (most recently Bioshock, and Oblivion/FEAR before that) and I'm totally comfortable with the controls. But apart from Oblivion and its awkward menu setup, I would prefer these on my 360 (alas, they were gifts, heh).
I don't know why you were modded Troll, but there are plenty of reasons a game *can* (and should) cost more than a music CD.
1) A game that takes 2-4 years of development by 50-200 people each getting paid an average of $50,000 -- that's a big budget to cover. That's tens of millions they'll need in revenue to break even not even counting the manufacturing/marketing/shipping/etc. costs. Factor those in and $16 per game just won't do it most the time.
2) The market allows for it. There is no cheaper competitor that is beating out $50-$60 games for consumers' entertainment dollars. On the contrary, the game industry is still growing. Even if a game sale amounted to $45 of pure profit, the price doesn't keep people away. Fact is, if most people felt a $16 CD was worth the cost, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
3) Game budgets have exploded over the years but game prices haven't. The time and money spent on a modern "blockbuster" title is probably orders of magnitude greater than it was in the NES/SNES days, but I don't remember paying $10 per new game. I'd imagine the amount of profit made per game is actually LESS than it was a few years ago, but the scale of the market has offset that. What this means for the consumer is that we've been better production value from our games over the years (gameplay being subjective). Music CDs have not offered that same growth.
PC FPS controls are completely unrealistic in terms of movement, aim, etc. For some people that takes away from the immersion a game can provide. Console controls are more natural, especially the Wiimote when it comes to shooting games (in other respects the Wiimote is pretty weak, and traditional controllers are still much better for platformers, fighters, and so forth).
"Mouse look," the PC's biggest strength in FPS games, is all well and good for aiming and looking/turning, but the keyboard is non-analog so you end up with "move" and "don't move" when it comes to your actual character. So even with shooters you have a give-and-take. When PC shooters are designed for PC controls, and console shooters are designed for console controls, you end up with both being very good. When you end up with a port from one system to another without some needed changes, you get PC fans complaining about console shooters being rubbish, and vice versa.
PC's advantages with regards to controls (that don't take away from immersion) would be in RTS games, some three-quarter-view RPGs, and that's probably about it nowadays. The mouse as a fast pointer (and the high resolution of PC monitors) allow for much less obtrusive and time-consuming MENU tasks in PC games than in their console counterparts.
I'm not sure it's so much reasoning along the lines of "your DNA is CRIMINAL-TYPE DNA!" as it is more like "you were a naughty little kid in the past, so you are a suspect now."
Japan isn't the only country in the world that still hunts whales. Norway, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, even the US (Alaskan natives) engages in it. Norway I think brings in more whales than even Japan, though reportedly they use more humane killing methods (or at least are better at using the same ones).
But yeah, the research that was looked at was indeed part of the "research" that the whaling industry sort of conducts in order to keep doing the whole song and dance so they can say they whale for scientific research. Most of it, though, is of course research that they claim involves "lethal sampling" (that way they can say they kill the whale in the name of science, rather than in the name of, um, selling to a high-end restaurant chain or something).
We could ensure that almost everyone has a medical degree by changing the medical degree exams to a potty training exam. Of course, if that were to happen, a medical degree wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on. It could be toilet paper; that would be appropriate and then the degree would be worth about as much as the paper.
If you think about it, he's a fantastic actor, managing to hide that utter insanity and all. It's like Lucy Lawless, who IRL was way more hot and feminine than Xena but didn't get any credit for it.
Anyway, The Last Samurai was a great film, Cruise's insanity notwithstanding.
Depends on how the game supports them. IGN tried a USB 360 controller on Halo 2 PC (online) and did well. I don't remember if they outright dominated, but they certainly weren't even close to "destroyed." Quite the opposite. The PC "purists" who haven't played at the higher skill tiers in console shooters don't appreciate the fact that to win you don't need to be perfectly precise. You need to be close enough, quickly enough. *Enough* being the key word there. Also, controllers allow for very fluid mobility in terms of the actual character.
Disclaimer: I am a pretty serious gamer, and grew up on Nintendo games so don't mistake me for some uninformed XBox or Sony fanboy just in case ^_^
Anyway, regardless of what MP was "designed" to be, it turned out to be IN MY OPINION a boring first person shooter and nothing more. The exploration elements that some people like so much about it I found repetitive, unrewarding, and visually unappealing. At least in Halo you may be rewarded with a fantastic landscape view on occasion if you look for it, to say nothing of proper exploration-oriented games like Morrowind/Oblivion. Metroid gave me no such thing. The backtracking I found to be also quite tedious and that's about it. Enemies reappeared, nothing changed. Rooms took about as long to get through the 3rd time as they did the first. (Ninja Gaiden and Castelvania games don't make that kind of design blunder so I see it as a big minus for MP.) Just about the only part of the game I liked was the Omega Pirate because he was at least 2x as hard as anything else in the game and looked pretty cool.
I think just about any LoZ is a million times the game that MP and Echoes were. I haven't played Corruption, but I only picked up a Wii a couple of days ago. Galaxy wasn't quite enough, Galaxy+Smash is ^_^
@AC: My PC has more powerful components so I can play the games I own at my monitor's native resolution. The 360 doesn't need to scale quite so high. Besides, consoles do more with less than PCs, killing your second point.
Secondly, the game publishers *are the same.* A few are sticking to PC, but most have branched out by now. If one wants to feel "liberated," PC gaming isn't really the way to go about it.
Oh, and have fun gaming on your Linux and Mac OS box without emulating Windows.
Of course I like consoles. They're fantastic. I like my PC games as well, but I'm not going to throw nonsense at you saying PC gaming is better because it gives you more "freedom."
You can spin around and have fine-tuned aiming in consoles that approximates real life. Consoles do not make you "weaker" than in real life by virtue of their control set up, not at all. PC controls actually can make you *better* than real life. The sort of high-speed precision and mobility that smart mouse sensitivity provides is beyond human. ^^
You can't instantly spin 180 in real life, you know... or have fine tuned aiming at a distance with an M-16 for that matter.
Well, regarding replacement of parts, the only advantage I'd say PCs have is turnaround in terms of time. Consoles aren't any more expensive to repair, and often less so depending on the PC component(s) that went bad. Plus a motherboard going bye-bye sometimes takes the CPU or video card with it, etc. Consoles, while under warranty, cost as much to fix as they do to ship one-way by mail. (Of course PC components have warranties as well.) And if you need to buy a new one, it's not always more than it costs to repair a PC. If the video card in my current PC dies, it will cost me almost as much to replace as it would to buy a new 360.
As for the PC vs console issue, to consider one being freedom and the other not is insane bro. The game publishers are the same, for starters. The PC world is more limiting than consoles, even, because you pretty much need a Windows box. With consoles you at least have three legitimate options (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft). And owning all 3 consoles will set you back no more than owning a modern-day "gaming" PC rig.
First of all, comparing modern PCs to NES is like comparing a jackhammer to a wooden hammer. You're comparing two entirely different levels of hardware complexity. Secondly, not only your comparison is pretty much ridiculous and groundless in relationship to more modern consoles,
Are you going to tell me that something like the Wii or Gamecube is also a "wooden hammer" compared to "modern" PCs? Because their build quality and failure rate is amazingly low. Same goes for the DS. The comparison is not ridiculous nor groundless in the least.
the second half of the argument is incorrect as well. Did you know that 16% of X360 are likely to have serious hardware problems within six to ten months after a warranty purchase?
Yes, my first 360 actually had the "general hardware failure" problem and needed to be replaced. It's the one isolated case of console failure I've ever had. That 16% number actually seems a bit on the low side, hah. Though for some time now (since Halo 3 basically) all 360s released have been pretty much problem-free. Smaller die size, less heat issues.
If you do an hour of research and buy your PC components from established and trusted manufacturers like Logitech or ASUS, there's no way in hell your hardware failure rate will be near those 16%. I've dealt with hundreds of PC components over a decade and I only encountered 4 hardware problems that are relevant for this discussion. 2 of them came from cheap WD hard drives, 1 came from an extremely cheap generic name motherboard, the other 1 came from an initially defected ATI video card that was replaced by the manufacturer within a week. On the other hand, we have two PS2s, both of which stopped working after 2 and 4 years of use, and an Xbox 360 that works whenever it feels like it.
If you want anecdotal evidence then boy do I have some horror stories for you! By the way, ASUS is behind the worst one of them ^_^ My consoles (the 360 being #2) all work and all but the 360 have never given me any problems. (This is a lot of consoles; I've been gaming since the NES days and I like all sorts of genres.) Really, though, far more computers need to be fixed on a daily basis than do consoles (even proportionally speaking). If this weren't the case I'm not sure people would make quite as big a buck on it as they do.
As of "PC components are just more prone to failure than consoles, for a multitude of reasons", what exactly is the multitude of reasons you're talking about? Consoles have fixed hardware components that are generally not upgradeable. Analogically, if you get a decent PC box and do not open it or tinker with it in any way, I fail to see why its failure tendency will be any different from a PS3 that stands next to it. Of course, if you factor in an unexperienced upgrader in a fur coat with two super magnets in its pockets, you will get all sorts of statistics to support your line of reasoning. But if you do, please factor in the people who think that cleaning their consoles in a dishwasher is a good idea as well.
Ok, disregarding the last sentence which although is witty gives me far too little credit, I do want to say that if you focus solely on the two consoles which are closest in terms of components and build quality to a PC (the PS3 and the 360 -- both have spinning HDs, etc.) you will find failure rates and tendencies to be rather similar. Components aren't as high-quality and thoroughly tested as one would like, etc. The durabilily also leaves a lot to be desired (this may have been true of the original XBox as well). But take something like the Gamecube. You can tie it to a car and drag it on the pavement. It will still work. You can't do that with any PC. The PSP, DS, Cube, Wii -- what are their failure rates? Quite low. Some of it has to do with QA. Some of it has to do with not having as many fragile components such as a spinning HD or a slide-out disc cradle. Some of it has to do with using truly high-quality parts.
"Why aren't more ELLE readers men?" "Why aren't more M:TG players female?" "Why the heck do automatic transmissions shift gears by themselves seriously what is up with that?"
Ok you're just the other guy that replied -- you are confusing "aim adjustment" with "lock-on." In Metroid Prime you ACTUALLY LOCK ON to the target as long as you hold the aim button. It works like Z-targeting in the Legend of Zelda games. When locked on the only way you can miss is if your target evates your projectile's trajectory after you've already fired it.
That's not at all how aim adjustment in most shooters like Halo works. Not even a little bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Helping folks who don't like looking at the keyboard while typing! I know it must be hard to think about touch-screens outside the realm of the iPhone and Nintendo DS, but if you were to use a touch-screen in place of the keyboard on your table, you'd be hard-pressed not to look at it as you type if you don't want all sorts of typos and what-not.
Put your hands down on a flat surface and pretend you're typing. Don't look at your hands as you do this. Then actually look down and notice that it's really not that easy to maintain consistent distances without tactile feedback. Hitting a 'y' as opposed to a '6' or '7' becomes rather non-trivial.
LOL! The positioning is to establish a point of reference so you can type without looking. The bumps may as well be on arbitrary keys so long as you are aware of how the keyboard is laid out around those keys. Regardless of what layout you think is superior, both benefit from an easy way to initially position your hands.
I think people who use Dvorak layouts and look for all sorts of non-reasons to state that they do should wear cool patches on their shirts to feel more elite.
Type a lengthy text message without looking at the phone's keyboard. Quickly. ^_^ I mean, there's a reason there's a bump on the 'F' and 'J' keys on the keyboard I'm using at the moment. A good reason.
Seriously, the people who came up with this stuff are completely unimaginative and idiotic. Tactile feedback for typing is almost a necessity given you *don't f-ing look at the keyboard while typing*!! The only "future laptop" with some actual touch feedback they showed was the oily blob, which I don't even know how to approach. If I want to replace my laptop with an oily blob, I'll gain 200 pounds and sit on the table myself.
The one that turns into a book viewer if you turn it 90 degrees is a total joke. Seriously, take your laptop right now, turn it 90 degrees so that the break between the two "halves" is vertical, and tell me that's a comfortable way to handle reading material. Unless it's laying flat on the table (in which case it better be quite small) it's completely unmanageable.
The one they showed slung over the steering wheel of a car, that's just bad. BAD BAD BAD! Hey guys, here's a piece of crap with a touch-screen keyboard you have to stare at in order to use that you can hang right on your steering wheel! And then what, drive and type? That looks like the most uncomfortable thing ever even if you're parked.
I give all these "laptops of the future" an EPIC FAIL out of 10.
I'd say the genre that targets hardcore gamers most is actually the fighting game (non-Smash Bros) genre, hehe, but altogether I do think that FPS games, particularly PC FPS games, are not exactly casual-gamer-friendly. But there's no reason they should be, considering the control setup and general difficulty of getting accustomed to a first-person view. FPSs definitely compete with each other on graphics, so you end up needing some beefy hardware to play the newer ones.
As for "more realistic" controls, I'm not sure how much better you can do with a keyboard+mouse than what's already done. PC FPSs control *well*, just not very naturally. But a table-top keyboard and mouse for controlling a person, particularly "yourself" given that you're in FP view, is hardly natural, so it's an inherent issue. I think to most FPS fans it just doesn't matter one bit, and that's completely fair enough. I play FP games on PC (most recently Bioshock, and Oblivion/FEAR before that) and I'm totally comfortable with the controls. But apart from Oblivion and its awkward menu setup, I would prefer these on my 360 (alas, they were gifts, heh).
I don't know why you were modded Troll, but there are plenty of reasons a game *can* (and should) cost more than a music CD.
1) A game that takes 2-4 years of development by 50-200 people each getting paid an average of $50,000 -- that's a big budget to cover. That's tens of millions they'll need in revenue to break even not even counting the manufacturing/marketing/shipping/etc. costs. Factor those in and $16 per game just won't do it most the time.
2) The market allows for it. There is no cheaper competitor that is beating out $50-$60 games for consumers' entertainment dollars. On the contrary, the game industry is still growing. Even if a game sale amounted to $45 of pure profit, the price doesn't keep people away. Fact is, if most people felt a $16 CD was worth the cost, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
3) Game budgets have exploded over the years but game prices haven't. The time and money spent on a modern "blockbuster" title is probably orders of magnitude greater than it was in the NES/SNES days, but I don't remember paying $10 per new game. I'd imagine the amount of profit made per game is actually LESS than it was a few years ago, but the scale of the market has offset that. What this means for the consumer is that we've been better production value from our games over the years (gameplay being subjective). Music CDs have not offered that same growth.
PC FPS controls are completely unrealistic in terms of movement, aim, etc. For some people that takes away from the immersion a game can provide. Console controls are more natural, especially the Wiimote when it comes to shooting games (in other respects the Wiimote is pretty weak, and traditional controllers are still much better for platformers, fighters, and so forth).
"Mouse look," the PC's biggest strength in FPS games, is all well and good for aiming and looking/turning, but the keyboard is non-analog so you end up with "move" and "don't move" when it comes to your actual character. So even with shooters you have a give-and-take. When PC shooters are designed for PC controls, and console shooters are designed for console controls, you end up with both being very good. When you end up with a port from one system to another without some needed changes, you get PC fans complaining about console shooters being rubbish, and vice versa.
PC's advantages with regards to controls (that don't take away from immersion) would be in RTS games, some three-quarter-view RPGs, and that's probably about it nowadays. The mouse as a fast pointer (and the high resolution of PC monitors) allow for much less obtrusive and time-consuming MENU tasks in PC games than in their console counterparts.
Something can be analogous without being equivalent.
I'm not sure it's so much reasoning along the lines of "your DNA is CRIMINAL-TYPE DNA!" as it is more like "you were a naughty little kid in the past, so you are a suspect now."
About as stupid, but different.
Japan isn't the only country in the world that still hunts whales. Norway, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, even the US (Alaskan natives) engages in it. Norway I think brings in more whales than even Japan, though reportedly they use more humane killing methods (or at least are better at using the same ones).
But yeah, the research that was looked at was indeed part of the "research" that the whaling industry sort of conducts in order to keep doing the whole song and dance so they can say they whale for scientific research. Most of it, though, is of course research that they claim involves "lethal sampling" (that way they can say they kill the whale in the name of science, rather than in the name of, um, selling to a high-end restaurant chain or something).
Statistically speaking, Foot Soldiers need a lot more help than the Ninja Turtles too.
If you think about it, he's a fantastic actor, managing to hide that utter insanity and all. It's like Lucy Lawless, who IRL was way more hot and feminine than Xena but didn't get any credit for it.
Anyway, The Last Samurai was a great film, Cruise's insanity notwithstanding.
22,000 files, eh? That's cool.
Depends on how the game supports them. IGN tried a USB 360 controller on Halo 2 PC (online) and did well. I don't remember if they outright dominated, but they certainly weren't even close to "destroyed." Quite the opposite. The PC "purists" who haven't played at the higher skill tiers in console shooters don't appreciate the fact that to win you don't need to be perfectly precise. You need to be close enough, quickly enough. *Enough* being the key word there. Also, controllers allow for very fluid mobility in terms of the actual character.
Disclaimer: I am a pretty serious gamer, and grew up on Nintendo games so don't mistake me for some uninformed XBox or Sony fanboy just in case ^_^
Anyway, regardless of what MP was "designed" to be, it turned out to be IN MY OPINION a boring first person shooter and nothing more. The exploration elements that some people like so much about it I found repetitive, unrewarding, and visually unappealing. At least in Halo you may be rewarded with a fantastic landscape view on occasion if you look for it, to say nothing of proper exploration-oriented games like Morrowind/Oblivion. Metroid gave me no such thing. The backtracking I found to be also quite tedious and that's about it. Enemies reappeared, nothing changed. Rooms took about as long to get through the 3rd time as they did the first. (Ninja Gaiden and Castelvania games don't make that kind of design blunder so I see it as a big minus for MP.) Just about the only part of the game I liked was the Omega Pirate because he was at least 2x as hard as anything else in the game and looked pretty cool.
I think just about any LoZ is a million times the game that MP and Echoes were. I haven't played Corruption, but I only picked up a Wii a couple of days ago. Galaxy wasn't quite enough, Galaxy+Smash is ^_^
@AC:
My PC has more powerful components so I can play the games I own at my monitor's native resolution. The 360 doesn't need to scale quite so high. Besides, consoles do more with less than PCs, killing your second point.
Secondly, the game publishers *are the same.* A few are sticking to PC, but most have branched out by now. If one wants to feel "liberated," PC gaming isn't really the way to go about it.
Oh, and have fun gaming on your Linux and Mac OS box without emulating Windows.
Of course I like consoles. They're fantastic. I like my PC games as well, but I'm not going to throw nonsense at you saying PC gaming is better because it gives you more "freedom."
It's probably more like "with their pants down" AND "in the cookie jar." Then it makes sense.
I learned from George Clooney. This article serves no purpose!
You can spin around and have fine-tuned aiming in consoles that approximates real life. Consoles do not make you "weaker" than in real life by virtue of their control set up, not at all. PC controls actually can make you *better* than real life. The sort of high-speed precision and mobility that smart mouse sensitivity provides is beyond human. ^^
You can't instantly spin 180 in real life, you know... or have fine tuned aiming at a distance with an M-16 for that matter.
Well, regarding replacement of parts, the only advantage I'd say PCs have is turnaround in terms of time. Consoles aren't any more expensive to repair, and often less so depending on the PC component(s) that went bad. Plus a motherboard going bye-bye sometimes takes the CPU or video card with it, etc. Consoles, while under warranty, cost as much to fix as they do to ship one-way by mail. (Of course PC components have warranties as well.) And if you need to buy a new one, it's not always more than it costs to repair a PC. If the video card in my current PC dies, it will cost me almost as much to replace as it would to buy a new 360.
As for the PC vs console issue, to consider one being freedom and the other not is insane bro. The game publishers are the same, for starters. The PC world is more limiting than consoles, even, because you pretty much need a Windows box. With consoles you at least have three legitimate options (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft). And owning all 3 consoles will set you back no more than owning a modern-day "gaming" PC rig.
First of all, comparing modern PCs to NES is like comparing a jackhammer to a wooden hammer. You're comparing two entirely different levels of hardware complexity. Secondly, not only your comparison is pretty much ridiculous and groundless in relationship to more modern consoles,
Are you going to tell me that something like the Wii or Gamecube is also a "wooden hammer" compared to "modern" PCs? Because their build quality and failure rate is amazingly low. Same goes for the DS. The comparison is not ridiculous nor groundless in the least.
the second half of the argument is incorrect as well. Did you know that 16% of X360 are likely to have serious hardware problems within six to ten months after a warranty purchase?
Yes, my first 360 actually had the "general hardware failure" problem and needed to be replaced. It's the one isolated case of console failure I've ever had. That 16% number actually seems a bit on the low side, hah. Though for some time now (since Halo 3 basically) all 360s released have been pretty much problem-free. Smaller die size, less heat issues.
If you do an hour of research and buy your PC components from established and trusted manufacturers like Logitech or ASUS, there's no way in hell your hardware failure rate will be near those 16%. I've dealt with hundreds of PC components over a decade and I only encountered 4 hardware problems that are relevant for this discussion. 2 of them came from cheap WD hard drives, 1 came from an extremely cheap generic name motherboard, the other 1 came from an initially defected ATI video card that was replaced by the manufacturer within a week. On the other hand, we have two PS2s, both of which stopped working after 2 and 4 years of use, and an Xbox 360 that works whenever it feels like it.
If you want anecdotal evidence then boy do I have some horror stories for you! By the way, ASUS is behind the worst one of them ^_^ My consoles (the 360 being #2) all work and all but the 360 have never given me any problems. (This is a lot of consoles; I've been gaming since the NES days and I like all sorts of genres.) Really, though, far more computers need to be fixed on a daily basis than do consoles (even proportionally speaking). If this weren't the case I'm not sure people would make quite as big a buck on it as they do.
As of "PC components are just more prone to failure than consoles, for a multitude of reasons", what exactly is the multitude of reasons you're talking about? Consoles have fixed hardware components that are generally not upgradeable. Analogically, if you get a decent PC box and do not open it or tinker with it in any way, I fail to see why its failure tendency will be any different from a PS3 that stands next to it. Of course, if you factor in an unexperienced upgrader in a fur coat with two super magnets in its pockets, you will get all sorts of statistics to support your line of reasoning. But if you do, please factor in the people who think that cleaning their consoles in a dishwasher is a good idea as well.
Ok, disregarding the last sentence which although is witty gives me far too little credit, I do want to say that if you focus solely on the two consoles which are closest in terms of components and build quality to a PC (the PS3 and the 360 -- both have spinning HDs, etc.) you will find failure rates and tendencies to be rather similar. Components aren't as high-quality and thoroughly tested as one would like, etc. The durabilily also leaves a lot to be desired (this may have been true of the original XBox as well). But take something like the Gamecube. You can tie it to a car and drag it on the pavement. It will still work. You can't do that with any PC. The PSP, DS, Cube, Wii -- what are their failure rates? Quite low. Some of it has to do with QA. Some of it has to do with not having as many fragile components such as a spinning HD or a slide-out disc cradle. Some of it has to do with using truly high-quality parts.
I suppo
"Why aren't more ELLE readers men?"
"Why aren't more M:TG players female?"
"Why the heck do automatic transmissions shift gears by themselves seriously what is up with that?"
Ok you're just the other guy that replied -- you are confusing "aim adjustment" with "lock-on." In Metroid Prime you ACTUALLY LOCK ON to the target as long as you hold the aim button. It works like Z-targeting in the Legend of Zelda games. When locked on the only way you can miss is if your target evates your projectile's trajectory after you've already fired it.
That's not at all how aim adjustment in most shooters like Halo works. Not even a little bit.