Artlover

Well it finally happened, I upgraded to NXE and I'm an unhappy camper. I really didn't want to, I've been avoiding it like the plague for months now. But I just got f'in sick & tired of seeing all these new games and DLC that I was interested in. So here I sit with this crap, downloading Broken Steel. Yes, it IS slower. Sometimes A LOT slower. Even trying to browse the DLC on XBL is slow. Not very well organized. Avatar's. Not that I care about them, but I wish there were more options for configuring them. Maybe I would sorta maybe care about them then. As it stands, options are way too limited to allow me to create the "Mii" I want. <Sigh> Broken Steel had better be worth this!

Drop the last two and add Fallout 3 and Half Life 2 - The Orange Box.

The relationship between 3D Realms and Radar Group is unclear at best. In what little I found on it all, it doesn't seem like they have anything to do with DNF.

I kinda am. I've always hated the entire concept as they implimented it. The two primary reasons have already been discussed. Points vs Dollars. Sure, it's more or less easy enough to calculate, but still, there is no logical reason for making 80 points = $1.00 other then being different and skewing actual value for impluse buyers. Pre buying blocks of points. MS claims it's too costly to handle microtransactions and that's why they did it this way. BS. iTunes doesn't have any problems handling microtransactions, neither do a lot of other simmilar online companies selling cheap content. Wanna buy a single song for .99 on your credit card, no problem. Obviously, it's not too costly otherwise everyone else wouldn't be doing it. MS's way of doing it only benefits them. You have they pay them for the points, regardless if you use them all or not. If you don't use them all, those unused points translates into real money of your's sitting in their bank account making them interest. To that end, what I propose is that since I have to pre-deposit funds that they are making money from, that it cut both ways and that I earn intrest points based on whatever rate their bank is giving them for holding MY funds. It doesn't even have to be the full intrest rate either, if they want to keep some of it like a 1/4 or 1/3, that would be fine. Just give me a little something from the free money they are making from MY money.

No, it's not hypothetical. The article only says "may" on account that they apparently didn't confirm it themselves. If you read the two forum links you will notice that many actual players HAVE confirmed it.

The best emulators are on the Xbox! Mod the thing already, will ya!

Yup, pin 5, right fire button input. Have to open it up, desolder and remove the old DB9 socket and install a good one it's it's place. Not sure where the cheapest and easiest place would be to get a replacement. I usually take them off dead atari & cbm equipment myself. I guess the easiest and free thing to do for now would be to swap the sockets between player 1 and player 2 till you get a replacement.

Or maybe it was never real to begin with.

Don't get me started on Farnell. One thing annoying is their website on a whole. I check them out about twice a year, and for several years I was never even able to reach a site because it was always down for maint or reconstruction. And I don't mean down for just a few days, I mean down for atleast several weeks (after 3 weeks of trying every single day, I give up). Another thing annoying thing about them is their international sales. They in 38 countires directly. By that I mean they have a local country website and contact information for those countries. Counties like China, Brazil, Israel, Romania, Turkey. But countries like USA and Canada have to go through their export division. A long time ago, when I first wanted to place an order with them, they seemed to be hooked up with Newark Electronics here in the USA & Canada. Only Newark didn't carry any of the same products. Looking at their distributers list now, they don't seem to be connected to the North Amercia's at all anymore. Going on 15 years+ later, I'm still wanting to place an order with them and they still don't offer any reasonable way for people from here to do so like most international compnaies do. Really sucks too because they are the only company I've ever found that actually has the oddball parts I need to fix my old Sony monitor.

How exactly are you holding those 5200 sticks?

Interesting observation. It is pointing to xbox-scene UK forums. Even the Majornelson.com link seems to be mostly UK people responding and are the only ones who have confirmed this. Hmmmm.. Maybe it is a UK thing. Still sucks tho.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/arkanoid...as-hidden-costs So, you spend the 800 points to buy the "full game", and when you play it, you find out it's only half the game and it costs another 400 points to unlock the rest of it which they don't mention. Aside from it not being worth 1200 points, I'm pretty sure this falls into the realm of being illegal.

For the record, I don't think the 5200 sticks are bad. Never really had many problems with them, no more so then any other controller. Sure, every once in a blue moon I'd have to open it and clean the contacts with an eraser. Once I had to repair a mylar trace that corroded away. Big deal. No worse then having to fix the fire button on the old CX-40's all the time because it would fail. Either the spring would stop sprining, or the metal disk would crack and there I go taking apart a ballpoint clicky pen for the spring, or a cheap throw away w/chin activated hang-up button telephone to scrounge up metal contact disks from the dial pad. The major relaibility issues I had with the 5200 sticks was on the console side it self with the damn 4000 series mux chips failing and needing to be replaced every few years. Other then being non self centering, they were fine. And quite honestly, not being self centering helped on some games.

Yup. Used Digikey many times in the past 18 years. Mouser is good too, so is Unicorn Electronics, MPJA, All Electronics, MCM Electronics. All companies I've done business with. Only thing is minimum orders and/or surcharges for unders under minimum, and shipping costs. Sometimes, if you only need a couple of things, it's cheaper and easier just to go to RS and pay more for them. Could also look in the phonebook and see what mom & pop electronic componente places exist in your area (if any).

I think it would be more akin to one kind of ipod only supporting Britany, and another ipod only supporting Metallica. That's the thing about it. If you want to provide different music and stuff, there are other ways to go about it then making a whole new game. I've always complained. There is nothing much the new games really offer besides a roster change, and you don't need a whole new game to do that.

Publisher Take-Two says it will no longer fund development of the game but retains rights to the title. "We can confirm that our relationship with 3D Realms for Duke Nukem Forever was a publishing arrangement, which did not include ongoing funds for development of the title," said Take-Two's Alan Lewis in a statement. This quote from the BBC article is a little confusing. But how does Take-Two get possesion of the property if they had no financial stake in it? I think Alan Lewis means that they were no longer funding the game. This is what caused (IMO) 3D Realms to fail. The problem is you're comparing a line of sensationalism written by the author of the article vs an actual quote made by one of the parties directly invovled. Rather then try to assume what Alan ment inorder to make it fit with what the article author said, you should assume the article author is an idiot and got his information mixed up/distorted.

I think you're right, it doesn't matter. Tho, "suposidly" not all DC's can boot CD's. Personally, I think this is a myth, I have 4 of them from various years of production and they all do. There is also the issue of being offically licensed. Not that that matters much either really. But Sega was still licensing the occasional game for the DC even tho they had long abandonded it. One of the rules to be licensed was it had to be on Sega media. However I believe this whole aspect only applied to pressed media. Wonder what the last offically licensed game is anyways....maybe "Triggerheart Exelica" from 2007 would be my guess. It was also used in the arcades. On the Naomi arcade machines, the Chihiro arcade system board and as an option for the Triforce arcade system board. Interesting side notes to this: The Chihiro is based on Xbox hardware and the Triforce is based on Gamecube hardware. I know Sega worked with Nintendo in developing the Triforce, but I don't see anything about Sega working with MS over the Chihiro. Wonder if they just stole it.

If one is going to go that route, then we can forget eBay as you can buy a brand new one directly from CodeJunkies for $29.99. http://us.codejunkies.com/Products/XBOX-Ac...__EF000174.aspx

Yup. That's all it is anyways. Tho it might be neccessary to edit one of the files in the Action Replay software with the device ID from whatever xbox mem card or xbox compatable USB drive you're trying to use.

I see. You just like to argue with me and flip-flop just for the sake of doing so. I see what you're trying to do tho, which is mix in planets you can't land on, which we both know I wasn't talking about (tho many of them do have crap on them as well). Whatever. My biggest problem is I never really use the map much. I use the radar. When you land on a planet without an objective, it drops you in the middle of no where with no direction and where even aimless driving around won't always get you near enough anything for a maker to show up. So in many cases it is easy to think a planet is barren. Open the map, there crap is, along the parameter in out of the way hard to reach areas that you likely won't ever find unless you look at the map. But that is my fault. On the same token, real men don't use maps, they drive around lost till they run out of gas and pretend like thats where they were going and ment to do that. Excuse me, when did I ever say I didn't like the game? Read some of the other Mass Effect threads, you'll notice I have mostly praised it and in fact do like it. It's up there with Portals and Fallout 3 of my favorite games. Tho admittedly it's mostly because of the hot lesbian sex. And no, I don't have lack of understand of genre definitions. I simply reject them for being BS. Sandbox is to vague and pretty much anything that is simply non-linear ends up classified as such. Rail-shooter is another definition I reject for the opposite reason, it's to specific, so games that should be classified as such aren't. It's like when someone tells me game whatever isn't a rail-shooter and all I'm doing in it is walking from Point A to Point B shooting stuff along a linear pathway that I have to follow, I have reason to suspect the definitions are screwed up.

AFAIK, it's so niche, there isn't a lot of room to make it anything else then it is. That said, what pray tell do you have in mind for a "new" game? Sure hope you aren't thinking something like "Super Katamari RPG", cuz I'll smack you!

Yes, most mass produced games were pressed. Tho they also produced recordable GD-Roms along with GD Burners (that were part of their development systems). Anyone with a dev system could run off a small production. Used to see blanks pop up on eBay every once in a while. Not for a few years tho. Haven't seen any new licensed indie games on GD-Rom either for a few years either. There were a couple of releases mid 2008, but they were on CD's. Looks like Sega really did abandond the format back in 2007.

Yeah, a few years ago. Not sure what the status is now. But I wouldn't doubt it if atleast a couple of dedicated fans were still activly supporting it. People still write for the 2600 and stuff. GD-Rom isn't really an issue. DC's can boot from from regular CD's, and some indie games produced by singular individuals were infact released on CD's rather then GD's. It was only the bigger indie houses that used them. Tho it is an interesting question. I wonder what the current stock of GD-Rom discs is now. Sega didn't stop producing the discs till 2007 I believe. There could still be a large stock of it avaialble as demand wasn't that high. The only other thing that uses GD-Roms are the Naomi arcade systems.

Don't know why people keep saying GTA. I don't consider it to be sandbox either. There is nothing out there that really is. Fallout 3 is kinda sorta almost pretty close. But even that still limits you. Regarding planets in Mass Effect. Ok, if we want to be litteral about it. Yes, you can find "something" on every one of them. Even the ones you can't land on. The value they have in bothering to discover on the otherhand. Sure, land on Presrop or something, manage to travel to the parameter zone border when you'll find an abandonded camp and a couple of locked boxes where you can pick up something you already have. Travel across the map to another border area and find a couple of rogue miners that you have to kill since they are hostile to you. If you can manage to get your Mako there without getting stuck you'll find a deposit of Uranium. And over there is a pile of debris. I mean, it's interesting and all. It's nice they put the time to create these areas. But in doing some of them, it seems to be just busy work. Something to do for the sake of doing it and not much else. Money? Already have more then I need. Omnigel? Already have more then I need. Achievements? Don't care. Atleast when there is a side-quest invovled, you have a sense of purpose and accomplishment. But to bust my questless ass trying to get the Mako over a range of mountains just to pick up something that's 2 levels below the weakest one all my characters have already have. Might as well be barren for what I'm taking away from there. It's really more of an issue with how some dynamics of RPG's are in general. Balance, or lack of it. Early on, you want/need to explore so you build up your stats and can find stuff like money, weapons, spells, augments, whatever. But eventually you reach a point where all of it becomes irrelevant. Once you're signifigantly higher then everyone else (or at the highest you can go), once you have all the money/weapons/spells there is no point anymore. You don't need anything anymore and nothing is a challenge. All that's left is to complete the final mission and finish the game. Even Fallout3 had this problem, where you needed to start making up your own objectives just to have a reason to keep playing. This is how I view the planets of Mass Effect. It's great at first and when a side quest is invovled. But after a while, you're doing things just to do them and you start to wonder why you're bothering.

As a matter of fact, I have. About a 1/4 of them. Sure, many have side quests. A lot of those planets are completely barren too with noting to do other then aimlessly drive around with no purpose.