What's really sad is that so many people passed on Wind Waker because of the new look and it was really an excellent game. The only thing it was missing was the two additional dungeons that we're supposedly cut from it due to time constraints. Otherwise, it was by far the biggest overhaul Zelda has ever had. There were remnants of the old Zelda, as you could see how the races had evolved, and elements like the Triforce and Master Sword were carried over.
There's two things I think Zelda could do that would be massive changes; one is a bit more extreme than the other.
1) Take the game way out of Hyrule. Hyrule can be included, but there's much more to that continent that is never explored - give us a planet to explore instead of one kingdom (and the little area outside of Hyrule we got in TP
2) This idea is a bit more extreme. Since Wind Waker showed us the future of Hyrule, why not go further into the future - much further. Some fans might call foul, but why not try moving the Zelda forumla to something like Steampunk or even futuristic setting. They could always still include the time travel parts of it to bring us back to ancient Hyrule for a while as well.
will hardware vendors stop releasing 32-bit chips?
Nope - if they can keep making them smaller, less power hungry, and with less heat output, they'll have a use in various embedded systems.
Will companies upgrade hardware in order to get the latest version of Windows?
Eventually, yes. My company is currently in the process of upgrading to Core 2 Duo workstations so we can run Vista in VmWare more efficiently (needed for software testing). Once 64 bit only Windows comes out, we'll probably have to upgrade to something that lets us run virtual 64 bit Windows as well.
Will this help provide more incentive for a Linux desktop?
Not likely. While Linux is getting easier to install and use, your average consumer will continue to purchase Windows, because they have used it in the past or use it at work. Apple will probably make some headway since people know the name and it has the advertising power, but Linux just isn't going to catch on with Joe Blow consumer until I can purchase a Linux box, put any hardware I want into it with no problems, attach any peripheral I want with no problems, etc. Plug and play and driver support are a big deal. My wife and I currently have two printers because there aren't drivers for my Dell printer avaiable for her Mac (though that's Dell's issue, not Windows or Macs).
Will this increase the amount of lead going into our landfills?
Municipal computer recycling programs are growing, and there are lots of small companies that will take your old equipment for less than what the city currently charges for lots of that stuff. As people get more and more educated about identity theft and the like, I suspect more people will take their computers to businesses where they can verify the hard drive has been destroyed; or maybe just do what I do and keep it for myself to be reformatted and used again in an enclosure.
They would probably get more viewership if every other word wasn't "frak", or some conjugation of it. I don't have problems with language in shows, but hearing frak 100 times an hour just gets irritating, and I know people who have stopped watching after a few minutes because of just how annoying it got.
Probably because the White Engine is designed to work with the cell processor in PS3, while the Unreal engine can be ported to just about anything (including PC).
This could easily be tied to some sort of biometrics much simpler than DNA, such as fingerprints (fairly easy to implement most places) or retinal scans (a bit more expensive and difficult to implement).
Now I know the Slashdot crowd tends to get all up in arms about having a database with everyone's fingerprints, but I personally don't see what the concern is. If "Big Brother" really wants to screw with me, they certainly could do so without already having my fingerprints in a database or really knowing anything about me. If you're concerned that having your fingerprints in a database may make it easier for the police to catch you if you commit a crime, well then maybe you should find a legitimate career option.
Identification, including state issues driver's licenses, is already overseen at the federal level by the Department of the Treasury (unless they have since switched that to DHS). Having a federal ID would simplify a lot of things, and would, in my opinion, be a requirement for something like a true national healthcare system, in order to verify your exact identity at any health care provider.
To reduce identify theft, important information such as SSN etc should not be displayed on or stored in such a card, but organizations that need to access it could use info on the card to get it by querying a database. If every database query is logged, it would be possible to track those who are accessing the information illegally.
You got it correct. They want you to rate them as to how influential they are, so 100 is best and 1 is worst, then the people with the highest average ratings get the highest spots in the list.
I always thought he was an obscure Mortal Kombat character, but according to his profile, he's a Korean R&B and Pop star. He has done some live shows in the US (2 sold out shows at Madison Square Garden) but has yet to hit it big in the US. My guess is that his ballot box is being stuffed by otaku fan girls.
I'm still waiting for an official English release of Bahamut Lagoon 1. Square should realize the virtual console would be the perfect place to publish localized versions of titles never previously released, as long as they can keep the translation costs below the revenue of the number of copies they expect it could sell (and Nintendo lets them release stuff into other regions than the original region).
I bet Seiken Densetsu 3 (equivalent to Secret of Mana 2) could easily sell 50,000 - 100,000 downloads at 8 dollars a piece.
From what I can find about his daughter, I don't see this as likely considering:
A) She's soon to turn 29
B) From what I can see she spent at least part of her child hood living with Jobs and his wife (her step-mother)
I don't think it's so much that production is decreasing, as it is that they had a giant stockpile of constructed, un-localized Wiis ready before the initial released in November. along with a stockpile of parts for making more Wiis that wasn't immediately shipped to stores so that they could localize and then distribute them based on what regions were selling the most. However, since it's been regularly selling out everywhere, and possibly as a pace faster than Nintendo or any of their suppliers fully anticipated, they probably are hitting a limit on production for one or two components that are limiting their production output.
I've never had problems with using Discover card and shipping to an address not matching my billing address and not on my Discover account, so I'm not sure where you've ever heard of this policy from. My experience includes purchases from Amazon, Dell, Newegg and other online stores.
I've worked with Vista a bit on VMware for work and I think I would eventually want to upgrade to it. I just don't want to have to pay an arm and a leg for hardware to really use its full feature set, so I'm waiting at least until SP1 comes out because then the hardware I really want will be less expensive.
If you're curious what I was using to run it in VMWare, I was using VMWare Workstation 5.5.3 on a computer with an Intel Core 2 CPU 6600 @ 2.4 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM. I gave 512 MB of RAM to the VM, and the image takes up approximately 12 GB of my hard drive. It runs fine, and I'd say it definitely boots faster than my WinXP VM images.
Since the VM image was still an internal beta version I had to do some tweaking to get the sound to work, and I can't run Aero in VM Ware (no hardware graphics acceleration available for the VM) but overall I found a lot of the new features in the OS, such as the new search tools and new Start menu layout to be good improvements overall. Not enough to make me upgrade my current laptop, but nothing that would make me avoid Vista in the future either.
Well, I don't know about Canadian tax law, but here's how it works in the US.
I live in Wisconsin which has approximately 5.5% State sales tax (some municipal areas have a small extra tax)
When I purchase a product online, the company only adds sales tax if they have a physical presence in the state from which I am purchasing; so for example, Amazon.com purchases are not taxed at time of purchase for me since they have no offices or warehouses here, but a purchase from Borders.com or Barnesandnoble.com would be.
For any purchase which wasn't taxed at time of purchase, I am supposed to pay the 5.5% sales tax along with my state income tax; there's a line for it on the form where I just say how much sales tax I'm paying.
Now in general, if you miss a few dollars on small purchases they aren't going to come after you, but if the state department of revenue figures out you purchased thousands of dollars of product in this manner to avoid sales tax, they may come after you. I really only worried about it one year where I bought several thousand dollars in computer equipment, because I'd rather pay something up front then get audited later.
While there are a lot of setup menus and such, the manual does a very good job of explaining all of them.
I think the main point of simplicity he is talking about is the controller. If you take someone who hasn't played video games since the days of NES, Atari or Pong (if they've played at all), the XBox and PSX/2/3 controllers can be very intimidating. Even the SNES controller could be intimidating to some. Even for games with complex controls, the Wii controls, while they may initially seem tricky, are easier to remember - for example, when playing Madden on the XBox, I could never remember which button was Catch and which button was Swat when playing pass defense, while on the Wii they are easy to remember because you literally make a catching or swatting motion.
I agree it would be impossible to make a card that can't be counterfeited in some way, although the newer credit card style DLs are harder to fake than the old laminated ones, and I'm sure they could come up with something more complicated that than. I wouldn't expect these cards to actually be used as bank cards; I was referring more the fact that you're often asked for picture ID when cashing a check, and would likely need ID to get a loan. If the card only has the same information as a current DL with perhaps a couple of extra items printed on the card itself, a counterfeit could likely pass at just face value. But, if the card is then scanned and pulls data from the central database and the data on that database doesn't match what's on the card (or maybe the database has a picture that doesn't match the one on the card) then it can be identified as counterfeit.
I suppose I'm a bit strange when it comes to this issue - I also see no problem with having a national Fingerpint and DNA registry of all citizens taken at birth. Some view it as illegal search and seizure, but I see it as a crime preventative measure. I don't see a need to worry about the government framing you for crimes with that data, because they could already frame you for a crime easily enough if they wanted to. There are a lot of crimes where fingerprints or DNA are found but they cannot be solved because the matching data is not in any current database. We already fingerprint teachers and other professionals as a necessity for employment, so why not automatically fingerprint every potential nutjob out there.
The only possible concern is that a few too many people take DNA evidence as being infallible, while it has at times shown to have been comprimisd or contaminated.
So just curious, what exactly is most people's concern about having a National ID card? It's not like your name isn't already in a dozen databases that are either owned by the national government (Social Security, IRS, Selective Service), available to corporate entities nation wide (Credit reports) or can be linked up between states (DMV, criminal records, etc). People can cry about Big Brother all they want, but the fact of the matter is, if the government wants your info, they can find it.
If a national ID card could be created that was truly impossible to counterfeit, that couldn't be used for identity theft, and that you could use for your driver's license, banking, passport, employment identification, and various other situations that require some other form of legal documentation (such as birth certificate, etc), I'd rather just have that than have to carry a dozen other things. The card could carry an electronic hash code that gets sent to a central database to retrieve data, so any really important data, such as SSN, wouldn't be stored directly on the card itself. For added security in some scenarios (like banking), biometric data of some sort could be stored in the central database as well. The central database could be cut off from any network to eliminate (or minimize) hacking and it could occasionally be connected to a shadow database with a down stream only connection. The shadow database would be the one actually accessed for data requests and it would be auto-updated multiple times a day, so even if it were hacked somehow it would be corrected automatically and any changes could be reported.
Maybe I say this because I work for a healthcare IT company, but I see one of the greatest uses of a national ID card to be for the establishment of national electronic medical records. If you show up in the ER, they could just swipe your card and pull up your entire past medical history within minutes. (Note: in the current world of EMRs it's virtually impossible to pull almost all data from one healthcare organiation to another, because various settings or lists of data objects will never match and most databases don't store literal strings for all data because the amount of storage required would be even more ridiculous than it already is. However, essential information such as historical problems, allergies, medications, etc can be shared readily, even if they aren't in a format that can be dumped into the local database.)
The combat system in Xenosaga 1 was pretty horrendous too, especially when compared to how good the combat was in Xenogears.
The biggest problems I had with Xenosaga 1 combat were:
1) Backrow characters couldn't take any actions (as I recall)
2) Couldn't repair AWGS in combat
3) AWGS we're completely underpowered, at least when you're used to the Gears from Xenogears
4) The break system which allowed bosses to break in at any time.
While the story was interesting enough, the combat system was infuriatingly frustrating and the cut scenes were just a little too long, which made it really hard to sit through and play. I almost would have preferred that they'd just made it an anime series out of the cutscenes to spare us the pain of the battle system.
That probably wouldn't make a difference - a lot of the people watching the "Asian anime crud" are likely to be fans from the US and Europe trying to watch shows that haven't been released here yet, either in fan-sub form or by keeping a Japanese dictionary handy.
If Sony were to reduce the price, it would certainly increase sales. However, increasing sales and increasing your losses at the same time is not necessarily a good thing since it obviously leads to significantly more money lost. While dropping the wholesale price they are charging retailers for the unit may increase initial losses on the PS3, each sale boosts their potential gains as they only make money through the sales of games. If more units don't start selling, there is the possibility that developers will choose to release a title on XBox360 only instead of both X360 and PS3 because the number of potential PS3 version sales (at least within the first 6-12 months of the title's launch) isn't worth the development costs.
If more titles are withdrawn or postponed due to low unit sales, such as how F.E.A.R. was postponed from the initial launch date, it will actually slow down console unit sales because potential buyers looking for those titles will purchase the system they can play them on instead, the XBox360. If the cycle continues, their losses eventually become much larger because either A) people will stop buying the unit altogether due to the lack of games or B) They'll have to drop the price much lower just to sell the units they already produced at a higher cost.
What Sony should probably do is slow down or stop production as long as units are sitting on store shelves and focus on reducing costs of production - there's no point in paying a premium to produce units that aren't going to sell at the current price. It would be easier to get an accurate picture of what the actual situation is if they would actually release data on the number of systems sold as opposed to the number of systems shipped.
Unfortunately it didn't sell very well, so there's basically no chance of a sequel, but there is another game with Clive Barker's name on it slated to come out late this year. Clive Barker's Jericho
One problem with either Saturn or Dreamcast is that the size of a download would be much to large. Internal flash on the Wii is 512 MB. Dreamcast discs could be up to 1GB. While it's a possible that the download for an emulator would be possible, the problem is that the games are not readily available, as most resale stores don't carry them anymore. I think we'd be more likely to see some sort of Saturn hits collection released by Sega than any downloadable Saturn or Dreamcast games.
This made me think of one interesting point. There have been at least 3 slightly different version of most of the NES Super Mario games: the original NES version, the GBA version and the SNES version included in Super Mario All-Stars (along with Mario the Lost Levels).
So, is Nintendo more likely to release the original versions ($15 for the 3 games), the enhanced SNES version ($8 for the 3 games) or some new version which includes enhancements from the GBA version ($8-10?). They really don't have to worry about the ability to save since VC has a built in save state ability, but the ability to have multiple saves on each game from Super Mario All-Stars could be appreciated by households with many gamers.
Slashdot Mirror
What's really sad is that so many people passed on Wind Waker because of the new look and it was really an excellent game. The only thing it was missing was the two additional dungeons that we're supposedly cut from it due to time constraints. Otherwise, it was by far the biggest overhaul Zelda has ever had. There were remnants of the old Zelda, as you could see how the races had evolved, and elements like the Triforce and Master Sword were carried over. There's two things I think Zelda could do that would be massive changes; one is a bit more extreme than the other. 1) Take the game way out of Hyrule. Hyrule can be included, but there's much more to that continent that is never explored - give us a planet to explore instead of one kingdom (and the little area outside of Hyrule we got in TP 2) This idea is a bit more extreme. Since Wind Waker showed us the future of Hyrule, why not go further into the future - much further. Some fans might call foul, but why not try moving the Zelda forumla to something like Steampunk or even futuristic setting. They could always still include the time travel parts of it to bring us back to ancient Hyrule for a while as well.
Crap, I've been posting on phpBB boards too much and forgot to add line breaks, sorry about that.
will hardware vendors stop releasing 32-bit chips? Nope - if they can keep making them smaller, less power hungry, and with less heat output, they'll have a use in various embedded systems. Will companies upgrade hardware in order to get the latest version of Windows? Eventually, yes. My company is currently in the process of upgrading to Core 2 Duo workstations so we can run Vista in VmWare more efficiently (needed for software testing). Once 64 bit only Windows comes out, we'll probably have to upgrade to something that lets us run virtual 64 bit Windows as well. Will this help provide more incentive for a Linux desktop? Not likely. While Linux is getting easier to install and use, your average consumer will continue to purchase Windows, because they have used it in the past or use it at work. Apple will probably make some headway since people know the name and it has the advertising power, but Linux just isn't going to catch on with Joe Blow consumer until I can purchase a Linux box, put any hardware I want into it with no problems, attach any peripheral I want with no problems, etc. Plug and play and driver support are a big deal. My wife and I currently have two printers because there aren't drivers for my Dell printer avaiable for her Mac (though that's Dell's issue, not Windows or Macs). Will this increase the amount of lead going into our landfills? Municipal computer recycling programs are growing, and there are lots of small companies that will take your old equipment for less than what the city currently charges for lots of that stuff. As people get more and more educated about identity theft and the like, I suspect more people will take their computers to businesses where they can verify the hard drive has been destroyed; or maybe just do what I do and keep it for myself to be reformatted and used again in an enclosure.
They would probably get more viewership if every other word wasn't "frak", or some conjugation of it. I don't have problems with language in shows, but hearing frak 100 times an hour just gets irritating, and I know people who have stopped watching after a few minutes because of just how annoying it got.
Probably because the White Engine is designed to work with the cell processor in PS3, while the Unreal engine can be ported to just about anything (including PC).
This could easily be tied to some sort of biometrics much simpler than DNA, such as fingerprints (fairly easy to implement most places) or retinal scans (a bit more expensive and difficult to implement). Now I know the Slashdot crowd tends to get all up in arms about having a database with everyone's fingerprints, but I personally don't see what the concern is. If "Big Brother" really wants to screw with me, they certainly could do so without already having my fingerprints in a database or really knowing anything about me. If you're concerned that having your fingerprints in a database may make it easier for the police to catch you if you commit a crime, well then maybe you should find a legitimate career option. Identification, including state issues driver's licenses, is already overseen at the federal level by the Department of the Treasury (unless they have since switched that to DHS). Having a federal ID would simplify a lot of things, and would, in my opinion, be a requirement for something like a true national healthcare system, in order to verify your exact identity at any health care provider. To reduce identify theft, important information such as SSN etc should not be displayed on or stored in such a card, but organizations that need to access it could use info on the card to get it by querying a database. If every database query is logged, it would be possible to track those who are accessing the information illegally.
You got it correct. They want you to rate them as to how influential they are, so 100 is best and 1 is worst, then the people with the highest average ratings get the highest spots in the list.
I always thought he was an obscure Mortal Kombat character, but according to his profile, he's a Korean R&B and Pop star. He has done some live shows in the US (2 sold out shows at Madison Square Garden) but has yet to hit it big in the US. My guess is that his ballot box is being stuffed by otaku fan girls.
I'm still waiting for an official English release of Bahamut Lagoon 1. Square should realize the virtual console would be the perfect place to publish localized versions of titles never previously released, as long as they can keep the translation costs below the revenue of the number of copies they expect it could sell (and Nintendo lets them release stuff into other regions than the original region). I bet Seiken Densetsu 3 (equivalent to Secret of Mana 2) could easily sell 50,000 - 100,000 downloads at 8 dollars a piece.
From what I can find about his daughter, I don't see this as likely considering: A) She's soon to turn 29 B) From what I can see she spent at least part of her child hood living with Jobs and his wife (her step-mother)
I don't think it's so much that production is decreasing, as it is that they had a giant stockpile of constructed, un-localized Wiis ready before the initial released in November. along with a stockpile of parts for making more Wiis that wasn't immediately shipped to stores so that they could localize and then distribute them based on what regions were selling the most. However, since it's been regularly selling out everywhere, and possibly as a pace faster than Nintendo or any of their suppliers fully anticipated, they probably are hitting a limit on production for one or two components that are limiting their production output.
I've never had problems with using Discover card and shipping to an address not matching my billing address and not on my Discover account, so I'm not sure where you've ever heard of this policy from. My experience includes purchases from Amazon, Dell, Newegg and other online stores.
I've worked with Vista a bit on VMware for work and I think I would eventually want to upgrade to it. I just don't want to have to pay an arm and a leg for hardware to really use its full feature set, so I'm waiting at least until SP1 comes out because then the hardware I really want will be less expensive. If you're curious what I was using to run it in VMWare, I was using VMWare Workstation 5.5.3 on a computer with an Intel Core 2 CPU 6600 @ 2.4 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM. I gave 512 MB of RAM to the VM, and the image takes up approximately 12 GB of my hard drive. It runs fine, and I'd say it definitely boots faster than my WinXP VM images. Since the VM image was still an internal beta version I had to do some tweaking to get the sound to work, and I can't run Aero in VM Ware (no hardware graphics acceleration available for the VM) but overall I found a lot of the new features in the OS, such as the new search tools and new Start menu layout to be good improvements overall. Not enough to make me upgrade my current laptop, but nothing that would make me avoid Vista in the future either.
Well, I don't know about Canadian tax law, but here's how it works in the US.
I live in Wisconsin which has approximately 5.5% State sales tax (some municipal areas have a small extra tax)
When I purchase a product online, the company only adds sales tax if they have a physical presence in the state from which I am purchasing; so for example, Amazon.com purchases are not taxed at time of purchase for me since they have no offices or warehouses here, but a purchase from Borders.com or Barnesandnoble.com would be.
For any purchase which wasn't taxed at time of purchase, I am supposed to pay the 5.5% sales tax along with my state income tax; there's a line for it on the form where I just say how much sales tax I'm paying.
Now in general, if you miss a few dollars on small purchases they aren't going to come after you, but if the state department of revenue figures out you purchased thousands of dollars of product in this manner to avoid sales tax, they may come after you. I really only worried about it one year where I bought several thousand dollars in computer equipment, because I'd rather pay something up front then get audited later.
While there are a lot of setup menus and such, the manual does a very good job of explaining all of them.
I think the main point of simplicity he is talking about is the controller. If you take someone who hasn't played video games since the days of NES, Atari or Pong (if they've played at all), the XBox and PSX/2/3 controllers can be very intimidating. Even the SNES controller could be intimidating to some. Even for games with complex controls, the Wii controls, while they may initially seem tricky, are easier to remember - for example, when playing Madden on the XBox, I could never remember which button was Catch and which button was Swat when playing pass defense, while on the Wii they are easy to remember because you literally make a catching or swatting motion.
So has Magic: The Gathering, so that's not saying much.
I agree it would be impossible to make a card that can't be counterfeited in some way, although the newer credit card style DLs are harder to fake than the old laminated ones, and I'm sure they could come up with something more complicated that than. I wouldn't expect these cards to actually be used as bank cards; I was referring more the fact that you're often asked for picture ID when cashing a check, and would likely need ID to get a loan. If the card only has the same information as a current DL with perhaps a couple of extra items printed on the card itself, a counterfeit could likely pass at just face value. But, if the card is then scanned and pulls data from the central database and the data on that database doesn't match what's on the card (or maybe the database has a picture that doesn't match the one on the card) then it can be identified as counterfeit.
I suppose I'm a bit strange when it comes to this issue - I also see no problem with having a national Fingerpint and DNA registry of all citizens taken at birth. Some view it as illegal search and seizure, but I see it as a crime preventative measure. I don't see a need to worry about the government framing you for crimes with that data, because they could already frame you for a crime easily enough if they wanted to. There are a lot of crimes where fingerprints or DNA are found but they cannot be solved because the matching data is not in any current database. We already fingerprint teachers and other professionals as a necessity for employment, so why not automatically fingerprint every potential nutjob out there.
The only possible concern is that a few too many people take DNA evidence as being infallible, while it has at times shown to have been comprimisd or contaminated.
So just curious, what exactly is most people's concern about having a National ID card? It's not like your name isn't already in a dozen databases that are either owned by the national government (Social Security, IRS, Selective Service), available to corporate entities nation wide (Credit reports) or can be linked up between states (DMV, criminal records, etc). People can cry about Big Brother all they want, but the fact of the matter is, if the government wants your info, they can find it.
If a national ID card could be created that was truly impossible to counterfeit, that couldn't be used for identity theft, and that you could use for your driver's license, banking, passport, employment identification, and various other situations that require some other form of legal documentation (such as birth certificate, etc), I'd rather just have that than have to carry a dozen other things. The card could carry an electronic hash code that gets sent to a central database to retrieve data, so any really important data, such as SSN, wouldn't be stored directly on the card itself. For added security in some scenarios (like banking), biometric data of some sort could be stored in the central database as well. The central database could be cut off from any network to eliminate (or minimize) hacking and it could occasionally be connected to a shadow database with a down stream only connection. The shadow database would be the one actually accessed for data requests and it would be auto-updated multiple times a day, so even if it were hacked somehow it would be corrected automatically and any changes could be reported.
Maybe I say this because I work for a healthcare IT company, but I see one of the greatest uses of a national ID card to be for the establishment of national electronic medical records. If you show up in the ER, they could just swipe your card and pull up your entire past medical history within minutes. (Note: in the current world of EMRs it's virtually impossible to pull almost all data from one healthcare organiation to another, because various settings or lists of data objects will never match and most databases don't store literal strings for all data because the amount of storage required would be even more ridiculous than it already is. However, essential information such as historical problems, allergies, medications, etc can be shared readily, even if they aren't in a format that can be dumped into the local database.)
That's strange, I didn't have that problem until after I got married.
The combat system in Xenosaga 1 was pretty horrendous too, especially when compared to how good the combat was in Xenogears. The biggest problems I had with Xenosaga 1 combat were: 1) Backrow characters couldn't take any actions (as I recall) 2) Couldn't repair AWGS in combat 3) AWGS we're completely underpowered, at least when you're used to the Gears from Xenogears 4) The break system which allowed bosses to break in at any time. While the story was interesting enough, the combat system was infuriatingly frustrating and the cut scenes were just a little too long, which made it really hard to sit through and play. I almost would have preferred that they'd just made it an anime series out of the cutscenes to spare us the pain of the battle system.
That probably wouldn't make a difference - a lot of the people watching the "Asian anime crud" are likely to be fans from the US and Europe trying to watch shows that haven't been released here yet, either in fan-sub form or by keeping a Japanese dictionary handy.
If more titles are withdrawn or postponed due to low unit sales, such as how F.E.A.R. was postponed from the initial launch date, it will actually slow down console unit sales because potential buyers looking for those titles will purchase the system they can play them on instead, the XBox360. If the cycle continues, their losses eventually become much larger because either A) people will stop buying the unit altogether due to the lack of games or B) They'll have to drop the price much lower just to sell the units they already produced at a higher cost.
What Sony should probably do is slow down or stop production as long as units are sitting on store shelves and focus on reducing costs of production - there's no point in paying a premium to produce units that aren't going to sell at the current price. It would be easier to get an accurate picture of what the actual situation is if they would actually release data on the number of systems sold as opposed to the number of systems shipped.
Unfortunately it didn't sell very well, so there's basically no chance of a sequel, but there is another game with Clive Barker's name on it slated to come out late this year. Clive Barker's Jericho
One problem with either Saturn or Dreamcast is that the size of a download would be much to large. Internal flash on the Wii is 512 MB. Dreamcast discs could be up to 1GB. While it's a possible that the download for an emulator would be possible, the problem is that the games are not readily available, as most resale stores don't carry them anymore. I think we'd be more likely to see some sort of Saturn hits collection released by Sega than any downloadable Saturn or Dreamcast games.
This made me think of one interesting point. There have been at least 3 slightly different version of most of the NES Super Mario games: the original NES version, the GBA version and the SNES version included in Super Mario All-Stars (along with Mario the Lost Levels). So, is Nintendo more likely to release the original versions ($15 for the 3 games), the enhanced SNES version ($8 for the 3 games) or some new version which includes enhancements from the GBA version ($8-10?). They really don't have to worry about the ability to save since VC has a built in save state ability, but the ability to have multiple saves on each game from Super Mario All-Stars could be appreciated by households with many gamers.