Well, to tell the truth, on most accounts, he's right- PC gamers are pretty fickle. How many games were cool and innovative, but ended up flopping for one reason or another? Homeworld was not really an overwhelming success- great gameplay, but confusing controls. Black and White- very innovative AI, shamefully non-innovative gameplay. Sacrifice? Excellent game- but no one's playing it... I still can't quite figure out the reason why on that one.

The PC community is well prepared to accept innovation- we spend more money on graphics cards than we spend on the CPU, we overclock and tweak, add memory, all to get the most out of our systems for the next big innovation. However, we know a rip-off when we see it. What good are those expensive graphics cards when the game you play doesn't have graphics? Few gamers I know will pay $10 a month anymore for a primarily text-based game. Heck, I refuse to sign up for any MMRPG's coz I plain old refuse to pay $30 a month for any game.
The line that really offends me is the final quote from McNealy, which essentially compares us to 10 year olds. Right. Like "mommy dearest" he knows what's best for us, so we better pay up and eat our vegetables.

Oh yes, I remember IRQ settings, DMA, himem.sys, all that fun stuff. Doom, I think, was the only game which didn't require me to have a boot disk. Every other game had to have it's own individual settings to free up the right amount of memory with the right options set- X-wing? Disable CD-rom, enable game port, configure xms/ems, etc. Master of Magic? Work that ems setting, disable game port to grab those last critical 2k of memory in the high-memory area... Don't even remind me of Wing Commander...
I'm still trying to figure out how to get the music to play on MOM on my SBLive! card.
Now that I think about it, it's rather silly- you could dump as much extra memory into your machine as you wanted- and around then, 4megs was an incredible amount- but if you couldn't squeeze the most out of the onboard 640k, you'd never be able to play all those fun games.
I may hate Microsoft, but I've got to admit, dealing with crashes is a lot less of a hassle than worrying about xms/ems settings and such. Then again, there was a sort of "victory high" you'd get when you finally optimized your autoexec.bat and config.sys to play the game AND hear the music... till you forgot where you put your boot disk

This comment was edited on Dec 11, 11:00.

Well, after checking out Doom GBA, I can confess that with all the advances in graphics and pretty eye candy and sound, nothing beats actual gameplay as the most important factor in game design- and Doom GBA has the gameplay. All the Doom series did. So even if you're a young gamer who doesn't remember Doom (heck, I've got co-workers who have no clue who Commander Keen is, which is scary considering I work in the gaming industry), you can still appreciate good gameplay.

Too bad this is never going to get the same amount of coverage that the "video game causes kid to shoot his brother" stories get... They never bother with the positive. I hate the "popular media".

Get a controller with dual analog sticks; unfortunately, controls don't make PC port transitions too well, since there's too many different PC controllers out there.
If a PC peripherals company can ever make a controller that feels as durable and comfortable as the standard PS2 controller, they stand to make a fortune...

Heck, I may even pick this up (against my better judgement... ) I'm pretty bored of The Sims, but this sounds like a fairly substantial gameplay change which may just revive my interest ...

I've had this discussion on other boards; Rob's right- CD's, CD-rom's, and DVD's do have a shelf life of about 10-15 years. It's not the "needle" that wears it down, though, usually it's a sort of "CD-rot" caused by air and other contaminants seeping into the data surface through the seam on the edge of the CD. It happens a bit quicker if they're used a lot, due to stress from rotation. (If you have a really old audio CD that's wearing out, you may notice the audio quality on the first few tracks degrading, while the later tracks still sound near-flawless.)
Read-writable CD's have a very short shelf life (just a couple years, I believe) before they degrade, because the data isn't actually sealed, it's inked onto the surface.

Well, I actually did my research before picking up the game, so I had no suprises- I did registry editing to get around the C: drive only install, and I hex edited the characters till they had more realistic stats. And I'm actually enjoying the game now. (For those who want to hex edit their characters, it can be done before starting a new game. Create your character, write down the stats, in order, and convert to hexidecimal. Look for those six numbers in a row in the character files (found in the roster directory) and change them to what you want. The numbers in the file are saved after adding in racial bonuses.)
I'm enjoying the game so far (even if the experience awards are a bit low.) It does give me something to do till NWN and FF10 come out, and it's a bit more tactical than BG2 (which was starting to bore me...) It certainly is a pretty game, if you can bear with some of the design problems...

SafeDisc does have a high "failure" rate, meaning it won't work on many systems. Frankly, as copy protection it's not very useful either, since there's already standard hacks that can crack the protection scheme before the game's even released, although I think the point is to keep Johnny Llama from making five copies on his CD/RW for his friends at school, which it does do, somewhat...
Oh- and the game never should have shipped with the buggy installer. I'm tired of everyone always blaming QA (I know what QA goes through, and it's usually not their fault), but this time it was QA's fault... or UbiSoft's fault, maybe, if they sent the game off to production before getting a final report from QA.

This comment was edited on Oct 2, 18:17.

Hey, cool! Yeah, Running Man- that's what I thought too... I dunno whether to think if it's a good idea or not.

Well, I've understood that lightning shoots up a thin stream first (sometimes too faint to be seen) which ionizes the air and makes a less resistant path for the more massive ground strike that's visible. Since this occurs in a split second, only the bigger of the two strikes is seen by the human eye. Then again, I could have out-dated info...

I've also seen ball lightning before- very weird stuff.

This comment was edited on Aug 20, 10:17.

I think we would have heard as well if this were the case; Microsoft would be in deep trouble if there were a flaw- there's a lot of products timed for the launch, and delaying it would cost a lot of companies (especially Microsoft) a substantial amount of money.

Then again, with an onboard HDD and built in network card, they can always patch the Bios

Geeze- he should move to Norway or somewhere where they'll actually pay for medical treatment like that. Sad that he's actually going to consider resorting to this- and extremely dangerous as well. What happens if he doesn't get 200,000 people signing up- is he going to back out?

I noticed that PoR2 was an SSI game. After seeing Bioware handle the D&D games for so long, it should be interesting seeing what SSI comes up with- they haven't done anything for ages now, have they?

I like it! How about the villager vs your Titan? Ever see Bambi vs Godzilla?

#100 - Ah, you SAG folks mock everything :Þ

Heh, the last FPS to have co-op play was... dare I say it...? Daikatana. And the coop was probably the best thing about the game...

Well, the title tells me all that I ever need to know about the movie- mainly that I shouldn't bother seeing it.

When the hell did this board join up with fatbabies.com's board?

Yet another arguement for disabling anonymous posting

Well, I'm just bitching because I'm broke, and really can't afford to upgrade my computer. Thank god for consoles

You think Doom 3 will have as addictive gameplay as Quake 3 did? Coz, lets face it, Quake 3 had zilch in the way of gameplay. It was a tech demo, nothing more. I played it for about a week before setting it aside. Doom, on the other hand, is still a classic... even compared to modern FPS's, its still fun to play. My point? WAKE UP DEVELOPERS! Eye candy is all well and good, but you'll sell more copies if you focus in on kick-ass gameplay so that half your player base doesn't have to upgrade just to play your game!

Geeze, that's one honkin' big @$$ file. I was gonna grab it 'coz I thought a teamplay mod would give me more survivability on my 56k... Time to see which of my buddies has a CD burner and DSL...