Besides, it should have been obvious as soon as you saw the name "Sony" attached to it that it was going to suck ass. Why'd you play it in the first place?
The thing that bugs me most about this is where was Europe's computer industry while ours was building Apple ][s and IBM PCs? Where was European and Japanese companies when we were developing DOS, CPM, Windows, MacOS, Xerox PARC? Why is Japan running computers with Microsoft's OS? Where the hell was Sony and Mitsubishi when all of this was being developed? Were they even trying to create their own technologies?
It kind of reminds me of the airliner thing. France and England got pissed that all the airliners were coming from the US, McDonnell Douglass and Boeing, and so decided to create their own aerospace company from scratch. But where was the British and French aerospace industry? Surely they have fighters built there, right? Why couldn't they build airliners?
Basically, if these countries had been half as progressive as the US was, they'd *already have* control of the Internet because they would have been there setting up DNS with us in the first place. It just bothers me. If you miss the boat, you can't swim out to catch it.
Wasn't that at, like, 8:30 this morning? Something like 4 hours before the article was posted? A local radio station (107.7) sent an intern out to record Bill Gates' speech in the morning.
Well, the OG Xbox could do a ton of things that the PS2 couldn't, and the Xbox and PS2 can do a couple things that the Gamecube can't (like play online and play DVDs.)
Specifically:
Play online. (PS2 can, but not as well, and although you can come up with hacks to get Gamecube to do it, it generally doesn't support it.)
Make full use of a HDTV. (Yes, even 1080i... Enter the Matrix ran at that resolution.)
Make full use of a HD. (It's not just for save games; it's for downloading maps/expansions, for caching textures, for ripping media.)
Make full use of Dolby 5.1. (I'm not an audiophile, so I may be wrong on this one.)
Xbox and 360 have/will have adventure games. (Unless you count CRPGs, neither GameCube or PS2 had any adventure games.)
Xbox and 360 have games you can purchase, download and play over Live. HD makes this possible also.
I don't know which of these you consider "gameplay-wise," but it seems to me that if you look at it from a neutral standpoint, the Xbox was a pretty big step in console technology. The Xbox 360 isn't nearly as much of a step, but it's still at least on par with what Sony's building.
It will be missed, but RIAA can't get us all, no matter how hard they try.
Uh, the RIAA wouldn't have tried to get you if you had taken reasonable action to prevent the sharing of copyrighted material. If it was used for "many legal purposes" as you claim, then wouldn't it have been better for all involved to keep it running but put in checks to remove copyrighted material?
More likely, though, the network was there *specifically* for piracy, and the only legal uses were coincidental, like most other P2P networks. Your comment in the last sentence there kind of confirms it.
If you respect the RIAA's property, they'll respect yours. It's that simple.
Well, on Mudconnector.com, it means nothing since every MUD admin who registers checks the box regardless of whether they enforce RP or not.
But basically it means that all actions performed by your character are In Character (IC) actions, and that IC channels are separate from Out Of Character (OOC) channels (and don't mix.) So if you grab a sword and go out into a field and start killing a whole bunch of cattle on a RP-enforced MUD, don't be surprised if a farmer comes out to confront you. (This is as opposed to most MUDs, that work like MMORPGs... i.e. kill whatever the code lets you.)
The easiest way to tell if a MUD is RP-friendly or not is to ask the administrators whether the TELL channel is IC or OOC. If they say it's IC, leave... it means either the admin doesn't know what IC means exactly, or that every character in this world has telepathic powers, either way it's bad news for RPers.
MUD's are like MMORPG's minus the good graphics:).
Not all of them. There are at least three MUDs I know of that are actually RP-Enforced (as opposed to just clicking the "RP Enforced" checkbox at Mudconnector.com.) They're out there, you just need to find them.
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
on
Dungeons and Shadows
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· Score: 1
"Milady, please come forth and take the head of Van Cleef, after you I will take his head as well seeing as he appears to have one for everyone in the group."
There are volunteer-run free RP MUDs that have solved that problem, if you go seek them out. None of them have graphics, but if you're into table-top games you probably don't mind reading a lot of scrolling text.
There were a couple nice RPGs for the Xbox, but they were PC-style RPGs, and not console-style ones. I'm thinking specifically of KOTOR (which is somewhere inbetween, actually), Morrowind, and Fable. Oh, and Arx Fatalis, which is underrated IMO. And Jade Empire.
The only console-style RPG the system had was Sudeki which, frankly, was mediocre at best. (If they had re-recorded the audio and made the combat a little less repetitive, I'd wholeheartedly recommend it. But talk about bad voice acting! Sheesh! Worst in the industy! 1960s Godzilla movie dubbers would have been a better choice!)
If you set the entry mode to "plain old text" it'll automatically insert paragraphs, and it still copes with any HTML tags you might want to add. But seriously, yeah, at the very least use the preview button and try reading your own post. I'm not ashamed to admit that I didn't read past the first sentence of that cluttered block of text.
"Inflated" in what way? The game industry has been selling games at $50 for years, and years, and years, despite inflation. If anything, selling games at $60 is simply the price of games settling where it belongs instead of being artificially low.
Heck, if you counted inflation, I'd bet $60 is still cheap considering the $50 games we were buying in 1995.
1) In what way is King Kong unoriginal? Was there a video game based on the original movie that I'm not aware of? Just because it's adapted from a movie script doesn't make it unoriginal... see the Chronicles of Riddick or Spiderman II video games for proof.
2) Though I definitely expect to see half of these games on ebay for $30 right after launch since they're forcing you to buy the games with the systems.
You don't say who "they" is, but Microsoft isn't forcing you to buy games with the system, nor are the vast majority of retailers. Your gripe is with EB Games, GameStop and other game-specific stores that require bundling deals for pre-sales. Don't spread FUD.
This may come as a shock, but the Mac gaming community is probably 0.001% of the entire gaming community. Just because one small subset of gamers has heard of it doesn't mean it's not underrated.
I was racing to post this myself to get the "early poster free mod points," but you beat me to it. In any case, *seconded!*
Look at how advanced Marathon (1994) was:
1) 3D world where you can look up and down (hey, at the time it was impressive.) 2) Weapons that didn't extend through your stomach but instead were held in a realistic manner. 3) A story so deep that, over a decade later, it's *still* being dissected at marathon.bungie.org and other sites. Not only that but it was clever and had excellent writing. 4) Civilians you had to rescue, security drone allies. (Again, at the time it was impressive.) 5) Designed to be moddable. You could drop in any combination of physics files, map files, sprite files, sound files and music files. You could use the art from your "kill Barney" mod with the sounds from your "Simpsons" mod without using an editor. Marathon 2 even had a nice GUI to select which mod you wanted before you started the game. 6) Multiplayer over LAN 7) Team games with many different game types. 8) Real-time voice communication during multiplayer. 9) Marathon 2 is the first FPS (I'm aware of) to use ambient sounds in the 3D world instead of a musical soundtrack. 10) Probably a half-dozen more I'm not thinking of.
And the people who oppose building nuclear reactors are, in general, the exact same people who complain about burning oil/coal for power. Go figure. That's one of many many reasons I have a lot of trouble with the environmentalism movement in the US.
I live in Snohomish, WA, and I can't use mass transit if I wanted. The bus system here is terrible (each county has their own, and generally the buses do not cross county lines, making them useless for 90% of the commuters.) There's a program called "Sound Transit" building rail, but it's all to the south of Seattle not to the north... there is an Everett run, but commuting to Everett is almost as bad as commuting to Seattle directly, and it only makes 2 runs a day so if you miss a train you're SOL.
Now on the east coast, Boston, or in the San Francisco area, you might have a point. But the original poster was talking about Memphis and I'm talking about Seattle, and there's nothing here transit-wise. The majority of the nation has very poor or non-existant transit. You're in the minority.
It does have some strange omissions. For instance, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II is on there, but not Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance I or other games that use the same graphics engine. But I'm assuming that's more because the testers haven't gotten around to trying it, not necessarily because it's not going to work.
What titles in particular are you concerned about? It covers most of the A-list titles I own. Except Mechwarrior, another strange omission. Most of the C-list games I own aren't on there... even the ones I like, which is a shame.
Believe me, normal people research their $300 purchases before making them. Ceveat Emptor, or whatever, if they don't do their own research and buy whatever they see on the shelf, it's their own problem, not Microsoft's, not the store's.
I'm not sure what to think about this one...
on
The Samus Mystique
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure what to think about this one... can somebody call up the grumpy clerk in the Gamestop in New York and ask him what he thinks?
One short-tempered clerk at a Gamestop in New York estimated that Xbox 360 units will not be available for walk-in customers until April. That's right, April.
Oh, well, if a grumpy clerk at Gamestop says it, IT MUST BE TRUE!!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... yeah.
You do realize it's just a video game, right?
Besides, it should have been obvious as soon as you saw the name "Sony" attached to it that it was going to suck ass. Why'd you play it in the first place?
The thing that bugs me most about this is where was Europe's computer industry while ours was building Apple ][s and IBM PCs? Where was European and Japanese companies when we were developing DOS, CPM, Windows, MacOS, Xerox PARC? Why is Japan running computers with Microsoft's OS? Where the hell was Sony and Mitsubishi when all of this was being developed? Were they even trying to create their own technologies?
It kind of reminds me of the airliner thing. France and England got pissed that all the airliners were coming from the US, McDonnell Douglass and Boeing, and so decided to create their own aerospace company from scratch. But where was the British and French aerospace industry? Surely they have fighters built there, right? Why couldn't they build airliners?
Basically, if these countries had been half as progressive as the US was, they'd *already have* control of the Internet because they would have been there setting up DNS with us in the first place. It just bothers me. If you miss the boat, you can't swim out to catch it.
Wasn't that at, like, 8:30 this morning? Something like 4 hours before the article was posted? A local radio station (107.7) sent an intern out to record Bill Gates' speech in the morning.
I give. What's wrong with it?
Well, the OG Xbox could do a ton of things that the PS2 couldn't, and the Xbox and PS2 can do a couple things that the Gamecube can't (like play online and play DVDs.)
Specifically:
Play online. (PS2 can, but not as well, and although you can come up with hacks to get Gamecube to do it, it generally doesn't support it.)
Make full use of a HDTV. (Yes, even 1080i... Enter the Matrix ran at that resolution.)
Make full use of a HD. (It's not just for save games; it's for downloading maps/expansions, for caching textures, for ripping media.)
Make full use of Dolby 5.1. (I'm not an audiophile, so I may be wrong on this one.)
Xbox and 360 have/will have adventure games. (Unless you count CRPGs, neither GameCube or PS2 had any adventure games.)
Xbox and 360 have games you can purchase, download and play over Live. HD makes this possible also.
I don't know which of these you consider "gameplay-wise," but it seems to me that if you look at it from a neutral standpoint, the Xbox was a pretty big step in console technology. The Xbox 360 isn't nearly as much of a step, but it's still at least on par with what Sony's building.
It will be missed, but RIAA can't get us all, no matter how hard they try.
Uh, the RIAA wouldn't have tried to get you if you had taken reasonable action to prevent the sharing of copyrighted material. If it was used for "many legal purposes" as you claim, then wouldn't it have been better for all involved to keep it running but put in checks to remove copyrighted material?
More likely, though, the network was there *specifically* for piracy, and the only legal uses were coincidental, like most other P2P networks. Your comment in the last sentence there kind of confirms it.
If you respect the RIAA's property, they'll respect yours. It's that simple.
Well, on Mudconnector.com, it means nothing since every MUD admin who registers checks the box regardless of whether they enforce RP or not.
But basically it means that all actions performed by your character are In Character (IC) actions, and that IC channels are separate from Out Of Character (OOC) channels (and don't mix.) So if you grab a sword and go out into a field and start killing a whole bunch of cattle on a RP-enforced MUD, don't be surprised if a farmer comes out to confront you. (This is as opposed to most MUDs, that work like MMORPGs... i.e. kill whatever the code lets you.)
The easiest way to tell if a MUD is RP-friendly or not is to ask the administrators whether the TELL channel is IC or OOC. If they say it's IC, leave... it means either the admin doesn't know what IC means exactly, or that every character in this world has telepathic powers, either way it's bad news for RPers.
MUD's are like MMORPG's minus the good graphics :).
Not all of them. There are at least three MUDs I know of that are actually RP-Enforced (as opposed to just clicking the "RP Enforced" checkbox at Mudconnector.com.) They're out there, you just need to find them.
"Milady, please come forth and take the head of Van Cleef, after you I will take his head as well seeing as he appears to have one for everyone in the group."
There are volunteer-run free RP MUDs that have solved that problem, if you go seek them out. None of them have graphics, but if you're into table-top games you probably don't mind reading a lot of scrolling text.
I recommend The Eternal Struggle. http://www.esmud.com/
There were a couple nice RPGs for the Xbox, but they were PC-style RPGs, and not console-style ones. I'm thinking specifically of KOTOR (which is somewhere inbetween, actually), Morrowind, and Fable. Oh, and Arx Fatalis, which is underrated IMO. And Jade Empire.
The only console-style RPG the system had was Sudeki which, frankly, was mediocre at best. (If they had re-recorded the audio and made the combat a little less repetitive, I'd wholeheartedly recommend it. But talk about bad voice acting! Sheesh! Worst in the industy! 1960s Godzilla movie dubbers would have been a better choice!)
How do you know Kameo isn't that title? How can you possibly predict the influence of the game before it's even released?
If you set the entry mode to "plain old text" it'll automatically insert paragraphs, and it still copes with any HTML tags you might want to add. But seriously, yeah, at the very least use the preview button and try reading your own post. I'm not ashamed to admit that I didn't read past the first sentence of that cluttered block of text.
Look, a new paragraph.
"Inflated" in what way? The game industry has been selling games at $50 for years, and years, and years, despite inflation. If anything, selling games at $60 is simply the price of games settling where it belongs instead of being artificially low.
Heck, if you counted inflation, I'd bet $60 is still cheap considering the $50 games we were buying in 1995.
Two points:
1) In what way is King Kong unoriginal? Was there a video game based on the original movie that I'm not aware of? Just because it's adapted from a movie script doesn't make it unoriginal... see the Chronicles of Riddick or Spiderman II video games for proof.
2) Though I definitely expect to see half of these games on ebay for $30 right after launch since they're forcing you to buy the games with the systems.
You don't say who "they" is, but Microsoft isn't forcing you to buy games with the system, nor are the vast majority of retailers. Your gripe is with EB Games, GameStop and other game-specific stores that require bundling deals for pre-sales. Don't spread FUD.
This may come as a shock, but the Mac gaming community is probably 0.001% of the entire gaming community. Just because one small subset of gamers has heard of it doesn't mean it's not underrated.
I was racing to post this myself to get the "early poster free mod points," but you beat me to it. In any case, *seconded!*
Look at how advanced Marathon (1994) was:
1) 3D world where you can look up and down (hey, at the time it was impressive.)
2) Weapons that didn't extend through your stomach but instead were held in a realistic manner.
3) A story so deep that, over a decade later, it's *still* being dissected at marathon.bungie.org and other sites. Not only that but it was clever and had excellent writing.
4) Civilians you had to rescue, security drone allies. (Again, at the time it was impressive.)
5) Designed to be moddable. You could drop in any combination of physics files, map files, sprite files, sound files and music files. You could use the art from your "kill Barney" mod with the sounds from your "Simpsons" mod without using an editor. Marathon 2 even had a nice GUI to select which mod you wanted before you started the game.
6) Multiplayer over LAN
7) Team games with many different game types.
8) Real-time voice communication during multiplayer.
9) Marathon 2 is the first FPS (I'm aware of) to use ambient sounds in the 3D world instead of a musical soundtrack.
10) Probably a half-dozen more I'm not thinking of.
They were great games, seriously great.
And the people who oppose building nuclear reactors are, in general, the exact same people who complain about burning oil/coal for power. Go figure. That's one of many many reasons I have a lot of trouble with the environmentalism movement in the US.
I live in Snohomish, WA, and I can't use mass transit if I wanted. The bus system here is terrible (each county has their own, and generally the buses do not cross county lines, making them useless for 90% of the commuters.) There's a program called "Sound Transit" building rail, but it's all to the south of Seattle not to the north... there is an Everett run, but commuting to Everett is almost as bad as commuting to Seattle directly, and it only makes 2 runs a day so if you miss a train you're SOL.
Now on the east coast, Boston, or in the San Francisco area, you might have a point. But the original poster was talking about Memphis and I'm talking about Seattle, and there's nothing here transit-wise. The majority of the nation has very poor or non-existant transit. You're in the minority.
Your final score:
+2 funny comments.
-3 rage-inducing anime smileys.
Sorry, there's not a net gain here.
Don't forget Nintendo, in the Games section. I think that one's worst of all... they don't even pretend to be unbiased.
It does have some strange omissions. For instance, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II is on there, but not Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance I or other games that use the same graphics engine. But I'm assuming that's more because the testers haven't gotten around to trying it, not necessarily because it's not going to work.
What titles in particular are you concerned about? It covers most of the A-list titles I own. Except Mechwarrior, another strange omission. Most of the C-list games I own aren't on there... even the ones I like, which is a shame.
You bought Dragon's Lair 3D? You don't deserve backwards compatibility!
;)
That's like complaining that the XBox 360 won't run the Xbox version of Superman.
You really think people are stupid, don't you?
Believe me, normal people research their $300 purchases before making them. Ceveat Emptor, or whatever, if they don't do their own research and buy whatever they see on the shelf, it's their own problem, not Microsoft's, not the store's.
I'm not sure what to think about this one... can somebody call up the grumpy clerk in the Gamestop in New York and ask him what he thinks?
One short-tempered clerk at a Gamestop in New York estimated that Xbox 360 units will not be available for walk-in customers until April. That's right, April.
Oh, well, if a grumpy clerk at Gamestop says it, IT MUST BE TRUE!!!!!