Wii Play is number one? Most people bought it together with a Wii remote (which made it almost free if you deduct the remote price). So, it IS a bundled game.

But if bundled games are included in the list then surely Wii Sports should be number one. According to wikipedia it has sold about twice a many copies as Wii Play.

I agree that this list is botched. They obviously used some strange metrics that need to be mentioned for this list to make any sense.

Raven isn't what they used to be.

You are right. For one thing, they used to be famous for always being done on time. IIRC they did their first Jedi Knight game in under a year and were done in time for christmas. AND it didn't even suck ... on the contrary!

If it's not cost efficient to keep the servers running, then shut them down.

Its not "cost efficient" to keep servers running directly after the main sales of the game are through. You already got the money and servers only cost you (no matter how many people are playing).

Of course, this is an immensely stupid way of looking at it. People paid for the game expecting to be able to play it online. Frustrating your customers is not a good thing to do if you want to sell them other things in the future. And companies like Valve show how much you can profit from good and long support for your games.

Also, I suspect that EA will get into trouble if anyone ever decides to sue them in Europe. We have quite strict consumer protection laws here and in contrast to the US you cannot simply write a passage into the EULA to circumvent these. I am almost certain that a european court would rule that EA needs to keep the servers running for a "reasonable" amount of time and that one year is certainly not reasonable.

not failing to note "facsimile machines"

Excellent! Smithers, get the automobile and buy one of those newfangled facsimile machines!

They're about 5-10 years ahead of their time. I have no doubt this sort of thing will happen eventually, but not anytime soon.

Maybe in the US. I wonder why they didn't start the beta in Europe or Korea where most people have or can get really high quality broadband. Also, these areas are much closer populated than the US, which means that the physical distances to the server will be much lower.

Maybe they just wanted to solve the hardest case from the start, but it still seems strange.

Regarding the 80ms lag thing: I think it might be correct for most people. It includes the controller latency, network latency, computing latency and display latency. When you look at a normal multiplayer game, you might have a 20-30ms ping. But you'll also often have at least one frame (=40ms) display latency and some controller latency. So 80 ms for the whole thing seems plausible.

The question is if they can really guarantee this <80ms latency. The video suggests that they are aware of the fundamental technical problems and they claim to have solved them. But we'll have to see.

I am carefully optimistic about this thing.

One notable thing: the launch date given in the video is winter 2009. So unless it comes out today, this one will be late...

As for the Ajax-style approach, it's my understanding in that case you are having every user load all the data on the page, but just not showing some of it, but a goal here is to be able to present more stories in less space and keep the page size managable.

Not necessarily. The script could also load the additional text on demand with an XMLHTTPRequest.

But I think maybe this is a little over-engineering. Think about it. Lets say you have 10 stories with a "read more" link. And lets say each has an additional 30 lines of text with 100 characters each. All in all the additional data would amount to about 30 KB, which is nothing. I understand keeping the stories short for the presentation, but I don't think the size is an issue, even if all the invisible text is loaded from the beginning. As an added bonus, if everything is already loaded then clicking on the link would expand the text instantly, instead of having to load new data over the net.

today is the 150th anniversary of the release of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species. Thanks to Frans for that as well.

Wow. I didn't know that Frans also worked on the Origin of Species! Congrats for that ;).

Darwin has really ripped him off by not including his name, though :D.

Mechwarrior 4 Mercs, is probably the second best Mech game ever. (Right after Mechwarrior 2)

Nah. Mechwarrior 2(!) Mercenaries was by far the best. I wasted a lot of hours on that one.

This comment was edited on Nov 16, 2009, 10:15.

That's not what it's going to tell most who will hear about this though. You don't come away thinking "it's marketing, the game probably rocks".

No, probably not.

Kudos to this mag for refusing to do it, but I bet if Ubisoft had also thrown a bit of money their way, they'd have been more than happy to oblige.

I don't think so. While most magazines struggle, Computerbild and Computerbild Spiele are part of the "Bild" group of magazines. These are huge mass market publications and every kind of Bild magazine is one of the market leaders in its category. A "bit of money" would probably not be enough.

They should have approached Gamespot, they would have snapped it up in a heartbeat

But it would have looked out of place if Gamespot had given the game a "Sehr gut" rating ;).

It speaks fucking wonders over how good Ubi themselves think their game is if they have to try to bribe reviewers to give it a good score.

Nah. This is marketing guys at work. These people don't care if something is good or not. In fact, it is their job to ignore the real quality and just treat every product like it is the best thing since sliced bread.

So you can probably not infer the quality of the product from what these guys did. It may be good, or it may be bad

To say that a one-hit kill with a shotgun to the face somehow eliminates stats is absolutely preposterous.

I agree. If realism makes stats irrelevant, then why are marines trained so well? If the OP was right you could just give a shotgun to a bunch of normal guys and get the same result.

for some reason some pages appear ad free; including the homepage

Same here. I'm in germany, so maybe all ads are geo-targeted for other countries?

Wow, I did not expect this. For a marketing movie this one is surprisingly well made.

I could predict every single one of these replies hours ago when Blue first posted this topic. Blue's is so cynical, retarded, and predictable these days.

That's the one comment that was still missing ;).

But is censorship, in essence just ignoring and hoping the world will forget, really the answer?

It is not about trying to forget. German children learn more about WWII than about any other subject. During my school years we had eight (yes, eight) units about the nazis and WWII in the context of different school subjects.

The reason the swastika symbol is illegal is itself a symbolic gesture. This decision was made right after WWII and it served as a demonstration that germany wanted to distance itself from the brutal genocide that was committed under Hitler.

It is a bit silly to prevent the usage in a WWII game. I agree with that. Especially because you can get permission to use it in other types of art like movies. But that is bureaucracy...

Oh and by the way, Carmack denounced Direct3D early on and that's why they stuck with OpenGL but now we know that Direct3D had a bright future because it would evolve faster and be better targeted for gaming.

The reason why he denounced Direct3D is because it was a pretty bad API. But it steadily improved and by D3D7 Carmack was on the record as saying that it has finally caught up to OpenGL in usability.

That's the reason: it used to be bad, then it got better. And JC definitely was right about that.

Don't know about the PhysX stuff, though. I guess it depends on how expensive it is for nvidia to include the technology. If integrating it is not much of a technical problem then I it is a good thing, even if it is a gimmick for cool looking smoke.

If on the other hand a considerablly large portion of the graphics card sales price is used to pay for it, then I think JC is right and it is not worth it.

17 button mouse...

More is better? I don't think so.

Sad

I guess this is a typical suit decision. I can see it before me: "Woah! Monkey Island is super successful! We need more classics, quick!". And the fastest thing you can do is slap together some old ROM images and an SNES emulator for the Wii.

They should really take the time and invest in proper remakes...

only if you are really pathetic and uncreative from a logic standpoint..

Please feel free to post the stories you have written on the net. A great literature award cannot be far away for someone who obviously knows as much about writing as you do!