You can download in the background most of the time. It downloads slightly slower than the 360, according to TFA. It seems like that to me, but I do use wireless for the PS3 and wired for the 360, so I can be no judge.
The download speed is not the issue on PS3. Whenever you download anything you have to install it, which takes about eight times as long as on the 360 and you can't do anything else whilst that's going on. That, combined with the necessity of installing some games before playing them (which takes as long or longer than on a PC) and you've got a few pretty poor design decisions.
This is actually an important issue for those of us that care about games, and whilst it is a bit prankish, it not 'just some prank'. Anyway, there's no category on Slashdot for 'preaching to the converted', it's just a general assumption that news articles will fit the bent of the site.
There's plenty you can do about it: Stop buying software that you can't use in perpetuity, and stop buying software that you can't move onto another machine at will, and stop buying software that requires activation to run.
Yes, that's pretty much what I've stopped doing.
You're kind of missing the point though. This used to be my hobby. These were things I was looking forwards to playing with. Now they're ruined, and I don't play them. I fail to see how losing a hobby, giving up on things I cared about, and missing out on the hot title I waited two years to see in production is anything other than a pyrrhic victory.
Right now, every time it is more convenient for someone to say "It's a license! Not a 'sale'!", they get to say that. It's in the EULA!
Yet every time it's more convenient for them to say "You bought it! It's yours!", they get to say that too.
Right now, the corporation wins no matter what I do.
I absolutely agree with this, and you would be getting modded up if I hadn't already replied to the post above yours. Also, I have no mod points.
My feeling is that, of course, this will eventually change for the consumer's benefit. But I think that is still some time off, and meanwhile not only are software companies lobbying for whatever they want, not only are they doing and saying whatever they want, but they're implementing unfair activations, limitations, and DRMs to get away with whatever they want. It's a damn racket.
EULA's are not very enforceable: users don't agree to them and they are contracts of adhesion.
I wish that were true. Unfortunately what once worked for us (the fact that nobody could really do anything about it if we broke the EULA) now works against us: companies are starting to limit our rights using online activation and restrictions, and now we're the ones who can do nothing about it. A few flailing class actions aside, who's going to go to court over a $40 game? What shops take opened products back - especially ones that are now useless?
Almost all EULAs claim to limit users right to resell the software, however this is unenforceable due to the First-sale doctrine
I wish that were true, too. But since many games that you buy these days are tied to an online account, which in some cases contains the rights to play all of your other games, you really can't resell them. The few services that let you sell individual games from such an account generally charge a 'nominal' fee, which is just enough to make it under no circumstances worth doing so.
You can sell your whole account of course, if you want to sell all your games at once.... except that you can't, of course. If you sell your World of Warcraft or Steam account, that's grounds for it being cut off.
I understand that you're using the term 'unenforceable' to mean 'not legally enforcable'. But let's not beat around the bush - this stuff is starting to become very easy to enforce in spite of the law, and nobody is, or currently can, do anything about it.
I also understand that it's not all about the games. In fact, the most unconscionably EULAs usually are on corporate software. But I talk about games primarily because I know games, I used to love games, and I'm genuinely losing interest in one of my favourite hobbies because of how the customer is being treated.
It doesn't work reliably, but might be useful for not-yet-existing computers
Kind of blows the whole concept of bandwidth out of the water, doesn't it? When you can instantly duplicate bits of information to a machine at any location...
Seriously... if you went out to the local bowling alley, and the guy on the desk said 'You're a fucking thief, and a liar, and we'll be watching you. Here's your shoes and have fun!'... I would not be having fun at the bowling alley.
The guy at the desk also have to tell you to wait 20-30 mins, even though all the lanes are free, because that's how long it takes to fire up a lane.
And then he says 'Yeah, we're just rigging security cameras to make sure you don't play more than ten frames, or get any redos, or let a friend share your go... (whispers) or bring their own shoes. We know you're a fucking cheat, and a liar, see. This is for your own good. If we didn't spend millions on our high tech security system, and pass the cost directly on to our customers, whilst simultaneously alienating them, and disenfranchising them from the whole bowling experience... well... if we didn't do that we might go out of business.'
There will eventually be a point where even the most hardened PC gamer will think: why am I bothering with this crap when all I want to do is play the fucking game? It's not worth the effort when a console provides a much smoother experience.
Not flamebait. This is a perfectly appropriate assessment, if a little hyperbolic. I mean THE most hardened PC gamer will probably never think that. But a lot of hardened gamers that I know do think that.
I would almost include myself in that category, if it weren't for the clear and obvious superiority of the PC platform for FPS, MMOs, RTS, etc. (Put simply, it's a PC version or nothing when it comes to the latest RTS).
But I do play almost exclusively on my console now. I played thirty, maybe forty games in 2008. On the PC that was: World of Goo, Quake Wars, WoW and Fallout 3. Everything else was on my consoles.
Potential flamebait: Only three games I cared about were for the PS3. The rest run better on the 360... Oh dear.
"A recent news story at the Reg discussed the case of a Texas teacher"
Citations please, does 'Karen' really exist, is this even true or just someone looking for hits to his blog.
Citations...? This word.... I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'm starting to be a bit tired of all the "games for windows", "rockstar whatever club", "funny happy spend-five-minutes-filling-info superfun club".
Absolutely. This kind of bullshit, combined with aggressive DRM, is turning the first twenty, thirty, or more minutes of 'gaming' on the PC into an experience equivalent to filing tax returns.
All the top dogs in the industry are barking on about piracy being their biggest problem. Their biggest problem is that if you take the FUN out of an entertainment product, it fails, utterly, in its most crucial objective. The clue is in the word entertainment.
You can remove enjoyment from a product in a number of ways: directly, by making mediocre games or by forcing you to jump through hoops before you can play them... but also indirectly: by acting like such an asshole that nobody can relax long enough to get into your game.
Seriously... if you went out to the local bowling alley, and the guy on the desk said 'You're a fucking thief, and a liar, and we'll be watching you. Here's your shoes and have fun!'... I would not be having fun at the bowling alley.
Even on the off chance that I didn't leave immediately, I'd spend eight frames thinking 'What a fucking asshole' instead of getting into the bowling.
If you have DRM that makes my purchase into a rental, you don't get my money. That's a given. But there's a bigger problem than that:
I no longer care enough to pirate most of these games. They're the work of assholes.
But let's assume again that it just so works out that a black hole is created, doesn't evaporate, and it ends up with very little momentum, and just starts slowly drifting around inside the earth. The black hole would have very little mass, and it's gravity would be negligible, it wouldn't "suck" in matter. For it to absorb another particle, it would have to actually bump into it. It's important to understand how very tiny this black hole would be. The event horizon would be many times smaller than even the diameter of an atom. And although we generally consider matter to be reasonably solid and dense stuff, an atom is almost entirely empty space. The black hole could pass through billions and billions of atoms without actually hitting and absorbing a nucleus.
That's pretty cool. Does that open the door to the possibility of a type of radiation which is composed of subatomic black holes?
A friend of mine lost a limb in a accident with a lathe. When he tried to get a prosthesis, Bluecross/Blueshield denied the request because he wasn't covered. He now beats himself for having wanted to save $30/year on insurance.
Ah, the great Gnu/Linux naming controversy.
It's a long page for a short issue, but if you really want to kill a tree, try printing the talk page, instead.
You know that there's zealotry involved when the argument for justification of a single sentence is longer than the entire article.
So what makes this online FPS stand out from all the other ones?
There's Nexuiz, OpenArena, Sauerbraten, Tremulous, Urban Terror... I had my fill of first person shooters years ago and yet for some reason they're still being developed and offer little to nothing different over the last one.
I don't know why this guy got modded Troll. Wanting to know what's different about a title is a perfectly valid question. Especially in a -recently- unadventurous genre, such as the FPS. As is being bored of a genre a perfectly valid statement, when taken in that context. Sure, if he's just shown up to announce that he didn't care about FPS games, that wouldn't have added much. But 'What's different?' is really the question 'Why should I care?' and that's a perfectly fair question to ask.
The main site's been slashdotted, all we've got is the summary, and the only real selling point mentioned there is that it's open source. If that's enough for you, sure, fine, ok. But for me open source is a BONUS, not a panacea.
Interesting side note: I know one of the main designers of Tremulous through an old friend. Nice guy, drives an utterly crazy car.
guys they did this work, I played this game enough to be able to tell it wasn't fun to play, it tried to be a Battlefield 2 clone with a broken physics engine, and "real-time" shadows that wasted FPS and didn't need to be real-time at all, static objects could have just been baked into the megatextures like bf2, was sad to see ETQW when it finally showed up a year late and suck ass gameplay. Splash Damage and id should be ashamed of this product and tech.
QW:ET is one of the best made, best balanced team FPS games I have EVER played. If it draws from anything, it draws from the previous Enemy Territory game. I'm sure we've all played a lot of the original ET, being that it was free. QW is like a much refined version of this, with a modern graphics overhaul, and more interesting setting.
a warmed over version of Doom3 / Quake 4 tech that was poorly coded by Splash.
I mean, come on? Flamebait if not outright troll. But insightful? Where's the evidence that this was poorly coded - this game is a masterwork, IMO.
Presumably they won't have this problem from March though when everyone using a British ISP will have their Internet activity stored on a government run database.
As far as I can tell, the entire Times website has fallen off the internet. It's reporting as a DNS error, for me! I know we didn't slashdot them. Maybe they have a free request policy on traffic logs, and the CEOP are hitting them with an accidental DOS attack.
Sure there is plenty of anti-ms sentiment here, but your claim of hypocrisy, in this case, is unfounded and borderline troll.
I didn't make a claim of hypocrisy. Not all double-standards are hypocritical.
However, you pegged me as someone who doesn't identify with the anti-MS crowd, and pointed out that my claims were unfounded. Even though I didn't make those claims.
This rather makes your claims unfounded. Are they hypocritical? Doesn't matter. Irony trumps hypocrisy, and it meet those conditions in spades.
Same here, ya there might be a few healthy tidbits, but the negatives far out weight the health benifits.
Actually, that's not true, unless you can point out the negatives of drinking 175ml of red wine per day. Good luck, because they do that and more in countries with some of the highest life expectancies in Europe. The thing about food is that what is good for you is usually good for you in small amounts, but that what is bad for you is NOT usually bad for you in small amounts. All things in moderation, and there are very few of these 'negatives'. That's what they mean by a balanced diet.
Not to mention the fact that nVdia have so many faulty chipsets out there right now, and have lied time and time again about the scale and scope of the problem - to the degree that I simply won't touch them any more.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how this works on the PS3.
You can download in the background most of the time. It downloads slightly slower than the 360, according to TFA. It seems like that to me, but I do use wireless for the PS3 and wired for the 360, so I can be no judge.
The download speed is not the issue on PS3. Whenever you download anything you have to install it, which takes about eight times as long as on the 360 and you can't do anything else whilst that's going on. That, combined with the necessity of installing some games before playing them (which takes as long or longer than on a PC) and you've got a few pretty poor design decisions.
Doesn't this deserve to be under idle?
This is actually an important issue for those of us that care about games, and whilst it is a bit prankish, it not 'just some prank'. Anyway, there's no category on Slashdot for 'preaching to the converted', it's just a general assumption that news articles will fit the bent of the site.
Would anyone like to even take a guess at how much trouble Mr. Shoe Thrower is in?
There's plenty you can do about it: Stop buying software that you can't use in perpetuity, and stop buying software that you can't move onto another machine at will, and stop buying software that requires activation to run.
Yes, that's pretty much what I've stopped doing.
You're kind of missing the point though. This used to be my hobby. These were things I was looking forwards to playing with. Now they're ruined, and I don't play them. I fail to see how losing a hobby, giving up on things I cared about, and missing out on the hot title I waited two years to see in production is anything other than a pyrrhic victory.
Right now, every time it is more convenient for someone to say "It's a license! Not a 'sale'!", they get to say that. It's in the EULA! Yet every time it's more convenient for them to say "You bought it! It's yours!", they get to say that too. Right now, the corporation wins no matter what I do.
I absolutely agree with this, and you would be getting modded up if I hadn't already replied to the post above yours. Also, I have no mod points.
My feeling is that, of course, this will eventually change for the consumer's benefit. But I think that is still some time off, and meanwhile not only are software companies lobbying for whatever they want, not only are they doing and saying whatever they want, but they're implementing unfair activations, limitations, and DRMs to get away with whatever they want. It's a damn racket.
EULA's are not very enforceable: users don't agree to them and they are contracts of adhesion.
I wish that were true. Unfortunately what once worked for us (the fact that nobody could really do anything about it if we broke the EULA) now works against us: companies are starting to limit our rights using online activation and restrictions, and now we're the ones who can do nothing about it. A few flailing class actions aside, who's going to go to court over a $40 game? What shops take opened products back - especially ones that are now useless?
Almost all EULAs claim to limit users right to resell the software, however this is unenforceable due to the First-sale doctrine
I wish that were true, too. But since many games that you buy these days are tied to an online account, which in some cases contains the rights to play all of your other games, you really can't resell them. The few services that let you sell individual games from such an account generally charge a 'nominal' fee, which is just enough to make it under no circumstances worth doing so.
You can sell your whole account of course, if you want to sell all your games at once.... except that you can't, of course. If you sell your World of Warcraft or Steam account, that's grounds for it being cut off.
I understand that you're using the term 'unenforceable' to mean 'not legally enforcable'. But let's not beat around the bush - this stuff is starting to become very easy to enforce in spite of the law, and nobody is, or currently can, do anything about it.
I also understand that it's not all about the games. In fact, the most unconscionably EULAs usually are on corporate software. But I talk about games primarily because I know games, I used to love games, and I'm genuinely losing interest in one of my favourite hobbies because of how the customer is being treated.
So, it looks like they'll be supplementing human power with wind power. That's kind of disappointing.
Maybe for you, but I'm glad they've finally found a use for my uncontrollable flatulence. (You insensitive clod!)
It doesn't work reliably, but might be useful for not-yet-existing computers
Kind of blows the whole concept of bandwidth out of the water, doesn't it? When you can instantly duplicate bits of information to a machine at any location...
Seriously... if you went out to the local bowling alley, and the guy on the desk said 'You're a fucking thief, and a liar, and we'll be watching you. Here's your shoes and have fun!' ... I would not be having fun at the bowling alley.
The guy at the desk also have to tell you to wait 20-30 mins, even though all the lanes are free, because that's how long it takes to fire up a lane.
And then he says 'Yeah, we're just rigging security cameras to make sure you don't play more than ten frames, or get any redos, or let a friend share your go... (whispers) or bring their own shoes. We know you're a fucking cheat, and a liar, see. This is for your own good. If we didn't spend millions on our high tech security system, and pass the cost directly on to our customers, whilst simultaneously alienating them, and disenfranchising them from the whole bowling experience... well... if we didn't do that we might go out of business.'
There will eventually be a point where even the most hardened PC gamer will think: why am I bothering with this crap when all I want to do is play the fucking game? It's not worth the effort when a console provides a much smoother experience.
Not flamebait. This is a perfectly appropriate assessment, if a little hyperbolic. I mean THE most hardened PC gamer will probably never think that. But a lot of hardened gamers that I know do think that.
I would almost include myself in that category, if it weren't for the clear and obvious superiority of the PC platform for FPS, MMOs, RTS, etc. (Put simply, it's a PC version or nothing when it comes to the latest RTS).
But I do play almost exclusively on my console now. I played thirty, maybe forty games in 2008. On the PC that was: World of Goo, Quake Wars, WoW and Fallout 3. Everything else was on my consoles.
Potential flamebait: Only three games I cared about were for the PS3. The rest run better on the 360... Oh dear.
Emotional state - frustrated and disappointed.
"A recent news story at the Reg discussed the case of a Texas teacher" Citations please, does 'Karen' really exist, is this even true or just someone looking for hits to his blog.
Citations...? This word.... I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'm starting to be a bit tired of all the "games for windows", "rockstar whatever club", "funny happy spend-five-minutes-filling-info superfun club".
Absolutely. This kind of bullshit, combined with aggressive DRM, is turning the first twenty, thirty, or more minutes of 'gaming' on the PC into an experience equivalent to filing tax returns.
All the top dogs in the industry are barking on about piracy being their biggest problem. Their biggest problem is that if you take the FUN out of an entertainment product, it fails, utterly, in its most crucial objective. The clue is in the word entertainment.
You can remove enjoyment from a product in a number of ways: directly, by making mediocre games or by forcing you to jump through hoops before you can play them... but also indirectly: by acting like such an asshole that nobody can relax long enough to get into your game.
Seriously... if you went out to the local bowling alley, and the guy on the desk said 'You're a fucking thief, and a liar, and we'll be watching you. Here's your shoes and have fun!' ... I would not be having fun at the bowling alley.
Even on the off chance that I didn't leave immediately, I'd spend eight frames thinking 'What a fucking asshole' instead of getting into the bowling.
If you have DRM that makes my purchase into a rental, you don't get my money. That's a given. But there's a bigger problem than that:
I no longer care enough to pirate most of these games. They're the work of assholes.
But let's assume again that it just so works out that a black hole is created, doesn't evaporate, and it ends up with very little momentum, and just starts slowly drifting around inside the earth. The black hole would have very little mass, and it's gravity would be negligible, it wouldn't "suck" in matter. For it to absorb another particle, it would have to actually bump into it. It's important to understand how very tiny this black hole would be. The event horizon would be many times smaller than even the diameter of an atom. And although we generally consider matter to be reasonably solid and dense stuff, an atom is almost entirely empty space. The black hole could pass through billions and billions of atoms without actually hitting and absorbing a nucleus.
That's pretty cool. Does that open the door to the possibility of a type of radiation which is composed of subatomic black holes?
A friend of mine lost a limb in a accident with a lathe. When he tried to get a prosthesis, Bluecross/Blueshield denied the request because he wasn't covered. He now beats himself for having wanted to save $30/year on insurance.
Yeah, but it feels like someone else is doing it.
why do people still try to attach GNU/ to Linux?
Ah, the great Gnu/Linux naming controversy. It's a long page for a short issue, but if you really want to kill a tree, try printing the talk page, instead.
You know that there's zealotry involved when the argument for justification of a single sentence is longer than the entire article.
It's really only 1800 Gigs.
Ah, the drivemaker's kilobyte...
So what makes this online FPS stand out from all the other ones? There's Nexuiz, OpenArena, Sauerbraten, Tremulous, Urban Terror... I had my fill of first person shooters years ago and yet for some reason they're still being developed and offer little to nothing different over the last one.
I don't know why this guy got modded Troll. Wanting to know what's different about a title is a perfectly valid question. Especially in a -recently- unadventurous genre, such as the FPS. As is being bored of a genre a perfectly valid statement, when taken in that context. Sure, if he's just shown up to announce that he didn't care about FPS games, that wouldn't have added much. But 'What's different?' is really the question 'Why should I care?' and that's a perfectly fair question to ask.
The main site's been slashdotted, all we've got is the summary, and the only real selling point mentioned there is that it's open source. If that's enough for you, sure, fine, ok. But for me open source is a BONUS, not a panacea.
Interesting side note: I know one of the main designers of Tremulous through an old friend. Nice guy, drives an utterly crazy car.
guys they did this work, I played this game enough to be able to tell it wasn't fun to play, it tried to be a Battlefield 2 clone with a broken physics engine, and "real-time" shadows that wasted FPS and didn't need to be real-time at all, static objects could have just been baked into the megatextures like bf2, was sad to see ETQW when it finally showed up a year late and suck ass gameplay. Splash Damage and id should be ashamed of this product and tech.
QW:ET is one of the best made, best balanced team FPS games I have EVER played. If it draws from anything, it draws from the previous Enemy Territory game. I'm sure we've all played a lot of the original ET, being that it was free. QW is like a much refined version of this, with a modern graphics overhaul, and more interesting setting.
a warmed over version of Doom3 / Quake 4 tech that was poorly coded by Splash.
I mean, come on? Flamebait if not outright troll. But insightful? Where's the evidence that this was poorly coded - this game is a masterwork, IMO.
Presumably they won't have this problem from March though when everyone using a British ISP will have their Internet activity stored on a government run database.
As far as I can tell, the entire Times website has fallen off the internet. It's reporting as a DNS error, for me! I know we didn't slashdot them. Maybe they have a free request policy on traffic logs, and the CEOP are hitting them with an accidental DOS attack.
Sure there is plenty of anti-ms sentiment here, but your claim of hypocrisy, in this case, is unfounded and borderline troll.
I didn't make a claim of hypocrisy. Not all double-standards are hypocritical.
However, you pegged me as someone who doesn't identify with the anti-MS crowd, and pointed out that my claims were unfounded. Even though I didn't make those claims.
This rather makes your claims unfounded. Are they hypocritical? Doesn't matter. Irony trumps hypocrisy, and it meet those conditions in spades.
Same here, ya there might be a few healthy tidbits, but the negatives far out weight the health benifits.
Actually, that's not true, unless you can point out the negatives of drinking 175ml of red wine per day. Good luck, because they do that and more in countries with some of the highest life expectancies in Europe. The thing about food is that what is good for you is usually good for you in small amounts, but that what is bad for you is NOT usually bad for you in small amounts. All things in moderation, and there are very few of these 'negatives'. That's what they mean by a balanced diet.
Seriously, do you /really/ want to know what they do behind closed doors?
That's funny, don't get me wrong, it is.
But if Microsoft had published this kind of data on users downloading habits, this would have been published under YRO.
Not to mention the fact that nVdia have so many faulty chipsets out there right now, and have lied time and time again about the scale and scope of the problem - to the degree that I simply won't touch them any more.
So now it's one man and three cups? I thought the hallucination was about two girls!
With the two girls, it's straightforward PTSD.