Posts by Greg J Preece 2481 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Talking of old, blocky things, and iD software, who round here remembers being impressed by Doom back in '93? And in fact being genuinely scared whilst playing it?
I genuinely thought it was rubbish. I never liked Doom, at all.
Now Heretic, on the other hand...
We've already seen things where technically the better solution is generally rejected, even as recent as the Xbox One digital sharing feature that, amongst others, was dropped.
....and then turned out to apparently not be nearly as nice as MS made it out to be. But I'm sure their glorified demo mode was worth it for all the inconveniences it brought.
No-one rejected digital sharing. They rejected the excessive bullshit the console heaped on the consumer, and when they did, MS threw a tantrum and took digital sharing away as punishment. There is literally no reason at all why they couldn't have both.
I know the view will be that the companies will just make more profit. Maybe but I think the market will regulate itself. I have only so much to spend, currently I will pay £40 for one of the big budget games knowing I will sell or trade it 6 weeks later for £20, overall it will have cost £20. Now instead of getting it day 1, I might wait for a couple of months until it is has dropped to £20. Or even better with more of the revenue stream coming to them it will get released at £20 or £25 quid. Just look at stream and WoW on the PC. I bought CIV 5 Gold edition on Stream last week for less than a £10. That is alot of game for not much money.
You're ignoring the gigantic issue with that argument: Steam has competition on PC. When they didn't, the discounts didn't happen as often and weren't nearly as deep. These days, I must have accounts on at least a dozen different stores. There are game blogs and entire websites dedicated to comparing game prices for the system, and finding me the best deal.
On PS3/Xbox/Wii, you have one store, and nowhere else to go. You buy the games at the price they set, or piss off. There's no incentive whatsoever for the store to lower prices, so they won't. The DLC for Burnout Paradise, for example, has *never* come down in price, despite that game being pretty old at this point. New games are coming out on PSN 20-30 quid more than the stores are selling them for, and you think they'll reduce prices? I think not.
Nintendo concentrate on what they always have done, making incredibly fun games with their established IPs and occasionally trying something different (which if successful becomes another franchise). They haven't played the "most powerful console" game since the N64 lost to the PS1.
The problem is really more to do with the "hardcore" gamers who just can't bring them selves to play something as cute looking as Mario even if it's a double-hard bastard in terms of actually gameplay.
Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnope.
Nintendo keep re-hashing their established IPs and alienating anyone who doesn't like playing the same thing over and over. I owned every single Nintendo console up until the Wii U, and if it ever bothers to get a library, I'll eventually get one because I go where the games are. That said, I've had an increasing dislike of Ninty's approach since the Wii came out. It's a dreadful Gamecube mod, with terrible controllers, and the library of games is a cesspit at best. I bought one for the arcade ports, and beyond those I haven't seen the need to pick up and play anything else, except Mario Galaxy (because someone at Nintendo made a mistake and made a Mario game that was genuinely new and inventive).
Oh, incidentally, the newer SMB games are trash. Slower, clunkier, more boring versions of Super Mario World.
My PS3, on the other hand, continues to get love. And before you start on with your hardcore gamer stereotypes, I use it to play Okami (like Zelda, but about a thousand times superior), Tokyo Jungle, Child of Eden, Sly Cooper, etc. Sure, I also have Need For Speed installed, but that's the beauty of a system that doesn't identify with hipsters and the too-cool-for-school crowd; I can have both.
If I want to start up God of War and rip someone's testicles off, I can. But I can equally surf onto the store and download something like The Unfinished Swan, or Echochrome, or Rayman, or Ico, or Shadow of the Colossus, etc, etc, etc. Pretending that the other consoles do nothing but explosions and guns is fanboyism.
If being in the Nintendo camp means I have to be happy playing the same series of games again and again, then I'd rather hang out elsewhere, where I can get the full range of games, and play them on a console with superior controls and online services.
And my favourite platform for gaming? Still the PC, which I imagine will only get better now.
Cool is what Apple do...
And work is what workstations do. The clue is in the name. The only Mac desktops I ever came close to liking were the big-ass towers, because when I'm doing work (on a workstation, of course) then I want a big ass workstation I can modify to my requirements as and when necessary. If my work changes in such a way that I need a new component, I shouldn't have to pay over the odds for a Mac-specific one and trail cables over my desk.
Reality of course is that the PS4 will descend into a mess of 'online passes' that you have to buy individually for each 2nd hand game you buy as is the case already with the Vita, but that's not their problem.
EA have announced recently that not only are they ditching that crap, but you'll be given free codes retroactively for games that had that crap. Hopefully others will follow suit.
He can't do whatever he wants just because he's the President
He could at least bloody try. He signed Executive Orders 13492 and 13493 in 2009, which was already late, and then let it slide. Sure, he faced opposition to close it, but that didn't mean that he had to order the re-instatement of military trials in 2011, or that he couldn't be fighting for it in the same way that he appeals to the people for support on gun controls and the like.
It's depressing when even the leadership of the most powerful, most paranoid, most dangerous country on Earth is decided by fashion rather than sense. Apparently you can get away with lying, not fulfilling your promises, adding to the infringement of civil liberties you said you would protect, writing off citizenships to make your people easier to execute, invading and bombing countries at will, mass surveillance, etc when you're the "cool" guy who can skateboard across a stage.
And to think this country impeached a president just for lying about a shag.
I fully expect a story in the next week about how Obama moonwalked across the Lincoln memorial or something, to provide adequate distraction from what a scumbag he is.
So your not in the least bit concerned that a sex criminal might wear google glasses to record kids in a bathroom without them knowing it and then have the ability to store it, share it or do whatever else they like with it?
.....No. Because that is ridiculous. If you're going to record secret video of anything, why would you use something strapped to your face?
Not really, to play the original version you'd typically need an emulator like dosbox. The reason doom still works is because it was open sourced and people have updated it to work on modern systems.
....Which you couldn't do on a console. What, you think Microsoft would let people make an Xbox version of DOSBox?
IMO the graphics on the Wii U are "good enough". As others have mentioned it's all about gameplay. There are some awesome titles on the Wii such as Xenoblade that are as good as anything on Xbox. Next-gen Xenoblade from Wii U likely to be shown at E3 soon.
Couldn't give a toss about the graphics, but the U has everything that annoyed me about the Wii: not enough good games, too much shovelware, too many gimmicks. The 'motes were annoying enough because they barely worked, and the tablet can just sod off.
The main benefit of this is that your games can now follow you wherever you are.
Couldn't they do that before? I mean, I would pick up the game disc, and walk off with it, and play it at my friend's house. Or I would log in on his system, download my game, and play there. (Admittedly, we run PS3s.) What am I missing here?
"They make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity," Obama said, claiming that the surveillance is conducted "under very strict supervision by all three branches of government, and they do not involve listening to people's phone calls, do not involve reading the e-mails of US citizens and US residents."
Don't be ridiculous....that's what PRISM is for!
There needs to be some level of network based filtering. Or at least some form of mechanism to allow my kids to surf the web without inadvertantly straying into dodgy areas.
You know what that mechanism is? YOU. They're your fucking kids, so why don't you start acting like a parent? Why should my liberties be infringed to cater for sprogs you decided to have?
Tell you what: I've got a cat. She's small, fragile and generally not particularly well. If she goes outside, she might be at risk from the various cars on the street, so what we're going to do is put bubble wrap bumpers on every single car and make them drive at 2mph, with anything over a certain weight banned altogether. Sound appropriate?
I grew up through the '90s, when the Internet was wilder and my parents didn't know jack shit about it. I went wherever I wanted, but I did not "inadvertently stray" onto Usenet, or Undernet, or MUDs, or any far less reputable places I would hang out online. I went there because I was interested and it sounded like fun. You cannot accidentally wander from Disney.com to a child porn ring. It does not happen. I've been wandering around the net like that for years, doing whatever I want, and I have never once seen child pornography, extremist terrorist material*, etc. To find them, you must go looking for them. Global filtering will not do anything to stop that.
*Well, actually I did deliberately look some up once, but that just proves my point.
I really want to get my hands on one of these little beauties. I'm a big fan of Mozzy's principled approach to markets, and I want to see this thing succeed. As was said in the article, it will have a much shallower learning curve than many devices, and that can only be good for encouraging developer takeup.
Plus, I've long since had a beef with the "apps for the sake of apps" approach in many businesses, where mobile apps are created simply to have one, and end up doing a far worse job than a simple mobile-oriented version of the website would. They're getting much easier to make, too.
....on the desktop, which means you missed the point of the article and Shuttleworth's comments. The TL;DR version is that no-one cares about the desktop any more.
Well, I say no-one. I do, but then I actually *make* stuff, and we long since became the minority of machine users.
But you go right on ahead and mock me with your partial understanding of my faith.
You can try that line of wounded condescension if you like, and assume that it adds something to your rather flimsy argument, but it used to be my faith also, so please don't try and tell me that I have a partial understanding of Christian bullshit. I was a victim of it for many years.
My keyword was 'widespread'
And mine was not, but you slipped it in as another fragile defence, and I knew you would try and use it as such. I even turned to the man sat next to me and made a bet on it. Thanks very much, you just made me five quid.
I don't care whether or not - on your judgement - the violence and hatred is "widespread" (and if you don't think that destabilising at least a half dozen nations is widespread, fuck off). I care that it exists, and that is it justified by the crap in an ancient set of texts written by nomadic thugs.
Christianity didn't exist yet in Old Testament times. Those were Hebrews, and Christian teachings are much different than the ones you reference.
Aaaah, that Christianity. The "the old testament is kinda embarassing so let's ignore two thirds of our own holy book" kind of Christianity? I take it we're also ignoring the parts of the new testament where Christ re-affirms the old laws, and in fact specifically states that he hasn't come to change them?
Such as what, exactly? To my knowledge it's been centuries since there was any widespread violence in the name of Christianity.
Hahahahaha, what? We'll just ignore, say, Ireland then? Or half of Africa? Or have you not heard of the Lord's Resistance Army? It was fairly well popularised a year or two back (admittedly by another complete nutcase).
Nice try, but there are still plenty of people out there to cause war and misery in the name of that particular sky fairy.
Even at its worst Christianity never said that you'd get to Heaven by killing as many people as possible
Not read much of the old testament, then? Unless you're suggesting that the commands to kill other tribes, apostates, unruly children, disobedient slaves, wives, homosexuals, etc don't count as "as many as possible"?
and centuries later Christians still frequently have the Inquisition thrown in their faces.
You're right. We should be throwing their much more recent atrocities at them.
If someone deliberately hurt my wife or child I'd hurt them very very badly, possibly even kill them, and screw logic, reasoning, the law and sanctamonious twats like you
Then I hope you never work for the police. Though you'd probably fit right in with the Met.
I'm also rather depressed that you have offspring to pass on this crap to.
Why did we waste NHS resources on treating the Woolwich scum should they not have simply preyed for recovery?
Because that's how you demonstrate that you have the moral superiority to call them scum?
Seriously, I get really fucking sick of having to point out basic morality to fuckwits.
I only wish that were true. Sorry, but every single physical copy in the shops will have either Steam, or some other form of restrictions management, many of which will either limit the install count or, like Steam/Steamworks, prevent resale entirely.
Actually, it is optional. Not all games on Steam use Steamworks for the physical disc release. They tend to do so if both releases are simultaneous, but there's no requirement for it.
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