jbanes

The Atari Lynx is the worst. Here it is at 1/100th scale: I think Colonel Mustard did it, in the Jagfest Room, with the Atari Lynx! The second worst offender was the original revision of the Game.com. While not as hefty as, say, a Game Gear, it made up for its low weight with a fairly large footprint. Even with a pair of cargo pants capable of hiding a surface to air missile launcher, you still couldn't fit the Game.com in your pocket! What's really odd is the fact that the system came with two cartridge slots. The cartridges were tiny (here's a photo of one, highly magnified: [.]), but it didn't matter since you needed a backpack to haul your Game.com anyway. Ostensibly, the second port was required so that you could use the modem with a program cartridge. (Thus the horribly mispronounced ".com" at the end of the name.) Personally, I don't think Tiger understood that modem == tethered while portable game system == untethered. That idea had all the legs of a turkey kept in an undersized cage to fatten it up for the Thanksgiving celebration. In hindsight the Game Gear was too large of a design for true portability, but (as you can see) it was far from the worst offender. And you have to give Sega credit for at least trying to make it portable while cramming in a massive number of features.

I think it's quite a bit better myself. When you move the remote, the horizontal plane is regularly more important than the vertical plane. (Partly because of the way that physics work. An enemy is more likely to be next to you rather than above or below you; primarily because you're all standing on the same plane.) Of course, you also need to remember that the Wii's area of motion is in no way related to your screen's actual size or position. It's all just a virtual field of play computed out of thin air by the Wii Remote and the sensor bar. As a result, the actual aim usually has little to do with where the Wii Remote says you're pointing. (This becomes painfully obvious in most of the Zapper games. Which is why they all have a calibration mode that lines up your Wii Remote's data with your TV's actual dimensions.) You tend not to notice this, though, as your brain automatically compensates based on feedback. The cursor says you are at these positions on the screen as you move your remote. Based on that feedback, your brain does a bit of computation to figure out the expected distances traveled for a given turn of the wrist. Even if things don't line up, that's okay. Your brain is used to those sorts of computations. (e.g. Just think of the complex ballistics of throwing a baseball! Things like the weight, air resistance, wind, moisture, etc. all play into how far your throw is for a given amount of force. Yet your brain is usually able to figure it out after only a few warm up tosses!) Yet if what I'm saying is true, shouldn't the screen width not matter? Well, yes. And no. As it happens, we humans have better peripheral vision along the horizontal plane than the vertical. Which means that any time you widen a screen it gives the impression of a more open viewport. This impression feeds back into a psychological response that makes you feel more comfortable with a wide screen than with a square screen. Thus the reason why movie screens and modern HDTVs are rectangular. /amateur psychology

Thanks for posting that, Atari5200. That last link finally gives us a basis for comparison. (The previous links are statistically meaningless as they don't ask the same question.) Doing a quick analysis, it looks like the numbers are down across the board. Which is a key point to realize before going any further. Here are the deltas: -0.88% (more than one) -3.27% (PS3) -11.26% (Wii) -4.02% (360) +7.61% (none) +11.83% (new options) So in fact, there are no winners. All consoles lost interest from consumers. The question is, why? Before answering that, though, there are a few interesting statistical points I'd like to make. First is that loss of interest is inversely proportional to price. i.e. The most expensive the console is, the less interest lost in it. The second is that the poll is not exactly the same as last time. There are new options added, thus possibly skewing the answers. (If you take the percentage of the new options + the gain for the "none" option, it appears to correlate to the missing percentages for the Wii, 360, and PS3.) The third item is that the absolute number of respondents has changed from poll to poll. So here are some possible factors: The addition of the Nintendo DS may have skewed numbers away from the Wii The addition of "gaming-rig" and PSP may have skewed numbers away from the PS3 and 360. Players who wanted a Wii, 360, or PS3 last year already purchased one. Players who wanted a Wii are price conscious and have less liquid income. Poor economic times have caused them to cancel their planned purchase. Players who wanted a PS3 are less affected by economic issues and thus are still looking at the PS3. Players who wanted a PS3 last year still have not made their purchase due to the high price. Numbers for the Wii console were held unnaturally high by constrained supply. Now that supply issues are somewhat easing, the demand for the Wii is evening out. Negative press surrounding the 360's technical issues has resulted in lower consumer confidence. User turnover has resulted in a forum with different tastes than a year ago. The smaller number of respondents (1/10th of last year for each console) possibly suggests manipulation of the numbers. (e.g. A "save the PS3" campaign) Which of those factors, if any, played a role in the results is difficult to tell without further research. Certainly, this is the type of question that is likely to have a high variance over a long period of time. Because of its direct tie to economic issues, there's a high probability that these numbers only reflect the poor economic status and not the true demand for the systems. Still, an interesting bit of numerical tomfoolery. Thanks again for the links.

The number 1 rules of modern statistical analysis is this: NEVER TRUST A WEB POLL. Web polls are almost always skewed by the nature of the visitors they attract. Thus the poll may be a good indication of what type of people visit the site, but it has very little to do with the market as a whole. In this case, GameFAQs is the type of site that is less likely to see Wii players. Since Wii games are more often of a simpler fare, cheats and walkthroughs hold far less value to the average Wii gamer. Which isn't to say that Wii gamers don't visit GameFAQ, but there's a high probability that they're also less likely to participate in the community. (Don't even get me started on the seemingly random moderation of the forums which has driven out quite a few users. If it turns out that there is a bias in those moderations, that would further help skew the numbers.) One final point to consider is that the poll is asking users if they will be buying a game console. If the users already own a Wii, of course they're going to answer in the negative or some other console they are getting in addition to the Wii. (Wii60? PSWii? PSWii60?) Since GameFAQs is a site that caters to people who have a gaming system, the results of this poll are likely even further skewed by the fact that most respondents are talking about a second or third console. That being said, there is one data point in the poll that I personally feel is somewhat representative of the industry. I do believe that the PS3 is starting to gain a bit of steam. The numbers for the PS3 have been going up, as well as the consumer interest I've observed on many of the forums I visit. A number of them are looking at the PS3 as a second console, though some are selling their existing console to be able to afford a PS3. One bit of data that appears to track at first glance is the price appears to be inversely related to sales. As with the PS2, sales go up as the console's price drops. Except that this time Sony can't afford further price drops, so they're getting creative. (Check their recent financials if you need to understand why.) Instead of doing a straight up price drop, they are attempting to provide more perceived value through upgrades to the hardware and AAA pack-in titles. Part of the strategy is to have these new models on the market at higher prices, then "drop" the price of the higher priced model while discontinuing the old model at that price point. This isn't a bad strategy, at least as long as the PS3 maintains parity with the 360's game library. As long as the PS3 can play the AAA titles like GTAIV, consumers will attribute it more value due to the (admittedly dwindling) PS3 exclusive titles like MGS4, Little Big Planet, and Ratchet and Clank. Of course, this strategy will not result in PS2 level sales, but I would imagine that Sony has realized that such a level of sales is an unattainable goal in the near future.

Microsoft intended that the 360 controller could be used either on the 360 console or on the PC. This provided Microsoft with a controller standard when they created their "Windows Games" branding. As far as I know, they work quite well on the PC. Another console that's interesting is the Wii. All you need is a Bluetooth adapter and a free program called "GlovePIE". You can then write scripts to communicate Wii Remote events as keyboard, mouse, and even game controller commands. I've hacked a few scripts before. One was a script for WiiCade games that included support for the sensor bar. (The Datel guys didn't do a very good job with the script they included in the Mii Manager package. They used the acceleration mouse rather than the sensor bar mouse. ) Another was a script that allowed two players to play MAME titles using Wii Remotes on their sides. My kids and I used that script to play one of my favorite arcade shmups: Sky Soldiers. You can also get access to the Wii Remote peripherals like the Classic Controller, the Nunchuk, the Guitar Hero guitar, the balance board, and just about everything else that could possibly attach to or replace a Wii Remote. Interestingly, the PS3 controller is also Bluetooth. Unfortunately, I have yet to hear about anyone hacking them for use on the PC. I can only assume that such projects exist, but I'm afraid I can't be any more helpful than that. (I imagine there's a lack of interest in the controller.)

The Wii already has mass storage in the form of SD Cards. Nintendo just needs to get that part right when it comes to VC and WiiWare titles. AFAIK, there's nothing preventing developers from using the SD Card for pure data. SSBB seems to support writing to the SD Card fine. (Here's looking at you, HARMONIX.) Fixed that for you. Because the Wii Remote was a first try at motion controls. Since there was almost zero industry experience with the technology during development, it's not surprising that Nintendo could have done it somewhat better. However, their first crack at the technology was pretty darn good. Certainly nothing to scoff at. I'm more surprised that they're including the add-on now rather than waiting for the next generation of consoles. Nintendo already stated that they won't supply a hard drive for the Wii. Most likely, they'll end up expanding their current SD Card support. The second option would be something like a USB Key, though that seems less likely. Now here's something I perfectly agree with. I don't think the attachment was required for this generation at all. The Wii Remote has its ups and downs, but it provides quite a bit of info without going down the 1:1 route. Yes, developers are lazy. They'd rather add waggle than figure out a truly innovative control scheme. Yet they're not going to figure out an innovative control scheme unless they're committed to making Wii-only games. Yet they're not going to be committed to making Wii-only games until they get out of the mutli-console mindset that they've been in since the late 16-bit era. The truth of the matter is that exclusives CAN BE A GOOD THING as long as they're targeted at the specific strengths and uniqueness of a console. Unfortunately, consoles have not had sufficiently unique properties since the introduction of the gamepad. (Though the N64 did have some strengths over its competitors prior to the introduction of the Dual Shock.) So the business folks look at the market the wrong way. Nintendo went blue ocean on them and they Just. Don't. Get It. Even if Conduit ends up being a fairly average game, I imagine that High Voltage will become something of a powerhouse in the industry. The key reason for this is that they're the only ones who understand that the Wii is different and that it's also the largest console market in existence at the moment. They stand to win a massive chunk of that market since the big guys like EA are leaving egregious amounts of money on the table.

For better or for worse, Atari closed its doors with money in the bank. Ostensibly, the company was ended because they didn't see any open markets to chase with the Atari brand. So they moved on. Which is more than can be said for Commodore's demise. Love him or hate him (most people hate him; and with good reason!) ol' Jack was a shrewd businessman. He was amazingly good at turning a profit, even if everyone he dealt with hated him. Even at Commodore, Jack had a plan. (Just like a cylon. ) Computers like the Plus/4 were targeted at a possible Japanese threat in the home computer market. Obviously that threat never materialized, but Commodore management had no idea how the computer was supposed to be positioned. This lead to Commodore appearing to have a multiple personality syndrome in the market, with nearly half a dozen incompatible computer models. In any case, that was a short term problem. The long term problem was that Commodore management didn't have a clue what they were doing. Rather than using the Amiga opportunity to correct the problems they had with their low priced computer models, they continued to confuse the market with mis-positioned products and poor communication about new models. You can easily see how the Amiga designers felt about Commodore's management in a Workbench 1.2 Easter Egg: We made Amiga, They fucked it up

Here's the 5 minute run-down: Commodore was formed by Jack Tramiel in the 1950s. They made typewriters. By the 60's Commodore made calculators. In the 70's they acquired MOS Technologies, the designers of the 6502 chip. In the 80's they produced popular home computers like the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. The computers were positioned to compete with Video Game consoles and gaming computers. Jack took the company through a price war with Texas Instruments that lit fire to the dry tinder wood of the over saturated video game market. The video game market crashed. The board got scared and gave Tramiel the boot. Tramiel decided he didn't need those fuddie-duddies anyway and bought Atari. Without Tramiel, Commodore had several new computers in the pipeline that they didn't know how to position without Jack's guidance. They began to falter. In a moment of brilliance, Commodore managed to buy out Amiga before Atari got their hands on it. It was a golden age. Moment of brilliance over. Commodore management had no idea what they were doing. Product lines were confusing and poorly positioned. The company decided that they really needed to be a games company and not a computer company. So they released the C64 Game System. It was a stupid idea and failed. The company decided that they really needed to be a games company and not a computer company. So they released the Amiga CD32 game console. Unlike the previous console, this one was not stupid and managed to get a following in Europe. Commodore didn't have any cash and they just blew it all on a new game system. That was stupid. Commodore proper goes out of business. Through the 90's, the Commodore name was owned by Escom, who branded PCs as "Commodore". The Amiga brand was acquired by Gateway Computers who did nothing with it throughout the 90's. In the late 90's, the Commodore brand was acquired by Tulip computers. They now make lousy PCs with custom decals called "C-Kins". Yeeaaaaahh. The Amiga brand broke off of Gateway and became its own company. Lots of broken promises about a new AmigaOS later and nobody cares any more. Commodore also launched http://www.commodoreworld.com where they sell a PDA/iPod-like device that is supposed to be as exciting as gravel. As Paul Harvey would say, "And now you know... the rest of the story. Good day!"

There in lies the rub. Nintendo DID commit to it when everyone else was chasing graphics. They not only produced the controller, but they produced video games and a market. That IS innovation. (We stand on the shoulders of giants and all that.) Effectively, Nintendo took the risk with their console that Microsoft wasn't willing to take. In comparison, the Sidewinder was not pushed and did not catch on. Which isn't too surprising when you consider that the Sidewinder was still a gamepad. The Wii Remote is quite a different beast from the traditional pad. Not to mention Nintendo's surprisingly good idea to mix the accelerometers seen in motion devices with the IR position tracking seen in LCD light guns. Everyone focuses on the accelerometers, but forgets that the IR tracking is where much of the shakeup has been! I knew. It still gets a big, fat "Whoop de doo". It's like saying that the Intellivision had a direction pad before the NES gamepad. There's probably a lineage there, but there's no need to denigrate the later achievement simply because the former existed. That kind of depends, doesn't it? I'm sure that they'll catch some flak either way. Most players don't know their gaming history very well, so they might give Microsoft a hard time about a SIXAXIS type controller. Now if Microsoft came out with a motion wand that featured IR tracking and a corded expansion plug, they might end up raising a few eyebrows. The truth of the market is that it's all about perception. You can be an angry troll all day long and it won't change the fact that the market still responds to the first company who did a technology RIGHT, not the first company that does it. If Microsoft wants to be seen as original, they're going to have to develop something unique that is beyond what Nintendo does today. Otherwise they're going to have to take their lumps and adopt the controller design just like every console adopted the gamepad after the NES.

No more than removing the Nunchuk defeats the purpose of the Nunchuk. I sincerely doubt this does anything to existing games. The current Wii APIs return the info from the accelerometers and IR Pointer to let programmers know what's happening. Rather than somehow enhancing these sensor readings, I'm fairly certain the Motion Plus will return its own sensor readings. (Anyone care to hazard a guess that this bugger returns gyroscopic information?) In result, games that don't support the peripheral will have no need of it. Now if you're thinking that NEW games for the existing attachments need the Motion Plus attachment, you can disabuse yourself of the notion. The Zapper functions almost entirely on IR input. The spacial motion is (for the most part) ignored. And the Wii Wheel functions well enough without the Motion Plus to where there's no need to support the new peripheral. I don't think I've yet heard anyone complain about "Microsoft's greed". Seems like a silly statement when they're losing money hand over fist. I have heard people complain about Microsoft being a copycat in the market. Which is an inevitable label when you're new to the market and keeping up with the Joneses. Meanwhile Nintendo went out on a branch with Motion Sensing in the first place. None of the other manufacturers committed to this feature like Nintendo did. (Sony's attempt is seen as half-hearted at best. The lack of games would appear to bear that out.) As a result, they get a lot of street cred for trying and attempting to further innovate. That being said, I've heard more than enough complaints about needing Yet Another Peripheral. I can't say I disagree. The Wii is becoming the "Console of a Million Controllers". (As coined by myself. All rights reserved. )

I was paying attention to all the commercials during the E3 presentation. One thing I noticed is that the remote in nearly every presentation was too long. e.g. The Wii Music drums appeared to require the attachment, as did the commercial showing the Clone Wars game. There's a good chance that the only reason why Nintendo is releasing this peripheral is because the developers have been demanding it. Which means that it may end up very well supported.

If you want to pick up the pieces of any of the Arcade properties, you'd need to acquire the Midway rights. If you want to pick up the pieces of the home computing and home console properties, you'd need to acquire the Infogrames rights. Whether you need one or both kind of depends on your revival plan. The only reason why I pointed out that Atari Games and Atari are not the same company is because A Sprite is talking about Atari Games' successes while this thread is discussing Atari-Infogrames. Atari Games never sucked. It was the home branch of Atari that kept dragging the collective name through the mud. Haven't they done that before? Oh, let me count the ways... one... two... three... four... five... six... And that's mostly Pitfall Harry. Of course, it's pretty much only Pitfall Harry because Atari didn't have any cute and lovable characters. They licensed all their characters in the form of Pacman, E.T., Bert and Ernie, Asterix, Dig Dug, Pengo, etc. Bently Bear and Yar are all that Atari has to their name. The latter is not very lovable (actually made a rather poor translation to modern gaming in the GBC remake) and the former is just too gay weird for most players to identify with. It's actually fortunate for Atari that most people identify Pitfall Harry with Atari. However, that doesn't help them much. I think it's telling that the only character Atari could produce for Atari Karts was Bently Bear. The rest had to be made up for the game rather than pulled from a back catalog.

I know! Awesome news, isn't it! As far as I'm concerned, WiiWare needs more shmups. LOTS more shmups.

I think it's because they reorganized the project at the last minute. The game was supposed to be another 3D platformer, but was changed to mini-games as the developers got used to programming for the Wii Remote. Since the Arena was not in the original assets for the game, they had to whip something up in short order. Most of the graphical changes were probably for multi-platform support. For example, the Rabbids originally had fur. That was a very cool effect to see rendered on the Wii. Then when the game came out, the Rabbids were nekkid. That was a major disappointment from a graphical quality standpoint. Yet it meant that the graphics were consistent between the Wii and PS2. (Boo! PS2 is the ban of the Wii's existence. Boo!) Thankfully, Red Steel DID show off quite a few cool effects. It didn't push the machine by any means, but there were definitely some great examples of lighting and fog in that game. On the subject of having many characters on screen, the problem is unlikely to be the AI. Programmers are lazy by nature, and won't develop complex AI routines when simple path finding and state machines will do the trick just fine. Rendering is actually more of a difficulty in 3D than it is in 2D. Modern GPUs can push thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of large sprites per second and not even bat an eye. (I remember doing an OpenGL program just to demonstrate a POC for an Open Source RTS game. A GeForce 2 GTS had very little problem rendering 1000 sprites at 60 fps.) 3D presents unique challenges, though. Can a given GPU render 1000 zombies at 60 fps? Well, that depends on how many polygons we're pushing, how many textels we're rendering, how many lighting effects we're using, and how many pixel shaders we're running. You could potentially have ten thousand zombies that look like crap or two zombies that look near photo-realistic. It all depends upon the quality you're aiming for.

Wii Internet Browser is a one time cost of $5. (500 points) Upgrades to the latest revisions are free. The browser supports the latest in internet standards, so it's quite versatile. However, it does not support Java and Flash is limited to Flash 7. The good news is that YouTube works. You can also play tons of free games designed for the Wii at WiiCade.com. Many of the games take advantage of the Wii's unique capabilities like the game controller, 4 player support, motion sensing (limited to the IR distance and rotation), and always-on Internet. (Disclaimer: I am associated with WiiCade. Mostly because the site rocks, but that's just my opinion. ) There are tons of other sites that target the Wii's browser. Do a search on Google and you should find plenty more.

Atari Games != Atari-Infogrames (aka G.T. Interactive with a new logo)

<offtopic>Doornail. The old saying was that the doornail was hit with the knocker so much, that absolutely nothing could be deader than a doornail. Modern variations on the phrase often refer to a "doorknob", but this is technically incorrect. (Not that you're likely to get called on it. )</offtopic>

I got this game about a week ago. So far it's been very engrossing and fun. I've definitely put way more hours into it than I did the VC release of OOT. One of the big things I changed though, was that I stopped trying to ignore walk-throughs. It used to be if I got stuck, I would spend time working out the puzzle. Which was a lot of fun when I was a kid with too much time on my hands. These days it's just frustrating and a real buzz kill. So I ended up playing Twighlight Princess with a walk-through open in a window on my desktop. If I get stuck at any point, I'll make a reasonable effort to solve the issue, then I'll go straight to the walk-through to get past that point. Which works really well. Stuff that I normally would get stuck on (e.g. I thought the hook shot only linked to the rubies, and didn't realize it could also hook vines.) I'm able to get past without spending hours on experimentation. It's much more fun for an adult with a limited amount of time. Another thing I like about TP is that the dungeons feel more like sections of the world rather than separate entities. I don't know if it's just me or not, but entering a dungeon in Zelda always gave me a feeling of loneliness and claustrophobia. As if I was suddenly cut off from the outside world. Part of that was probably the heavy pressure to complete a dungeon in one sitting, whereas the rest of the story can effectively be paused by saving at any time. I'm not sure if I can put my finger on what has changed so significantly, but the dungeons definitely feel better. Perhaps part of it is that many dungeons are populated with characters that advance the story. Death Mountain is a perfect example of this. There is practically no transition between the Goron homes and the dungeon. You even find Goron homes in the dungeon! Which is simply unheard of in past Zelda games. So all in all, I really liked the game. I've made it as far as the Master Sword. Which is really an intermission in the game's storyline. Or so my trusty walk-through says. A walk-through that also tells me how to get right back in the plot without plodding along looking for the right trigger. P.S. I love the Goron reference, brother.

Depends on how well the emulator has been ported, I would imagine. The Wii allows you to plug in a keyboard, so games that require keyboard support may require you to plug a USB model into your Wii.

My eyes! My eyes! Honestly, it looks like someone got ahold of an old mold for the PSP casing and decided to recycle it for use as a Wii Controller. The classic controller is probably a pretty good choice, but the Playstation style DPad was not. FWIW, I also have large hands. Nintendo's Classic Controller feels just fine. In fact, I often feel like the controller is a real beast in my hands. (It's quite a bit larger than the SNES controller it's modeled after.) Since you have to reach a bit for the thumb sticks, having large hands helps rather than hinders. Even the DPad is incredibly large and easy to use. So just grab a Nintendo Classic Controller and forget that PSP abomination ever existed.

Jobs knew what Gates was up to. He just realized that Microsoft was too slow to respond to the innovation that Apple was putting out. And giving Microsoft a Mac to develop software was only a good thing for Apple. If you want to fix up the history of the Mac, tell Jobs to fire John Scully. Or arrange an accidental drowning in a vat of Pepsi.

If that's the case, he should be able to do a reformat to clear the problem. Just make sure that the contents are backed up first!

Right. But those should become obvious in a test. I seems they never tested their theoretically "great" backup system. In theory, everything works in practice. Doing a test on a running facility is prohibitively expensive and difficult to do. So such tests are usually simulated. The unfortunate fact is that test situations don't always match up to the reality. Sometimes the problems are stupid ones that can't be avoided. Allow me to give a hypothetical example. Let's say your equipment is specced out with a certain range of expected phase variances on startup. Let's also say that those phase variances are within what's considered the industry norm. Ok, good. Your equipment should do the job just fine. But let's also say that this equipment is new high-end stuff that produces far more power than traditional generators. (Multi-megawatt generators are relatively new to data centers. Their high demand has been a limiting factor in building out new centers.) Except, let's say, the amount of power produced creates a greater phase variance than expected for a longer period than expected. The equipment may still be capable of being run until it is brought into phase, but the automated systems will have no way of knowing this. Thus the controller detects the larger-than-expected variance, notes the period for which it has continued, then decides that there is a problem with the power grid and shuts down to prevent equipment damage. In a situation like that, all the specs were met, the equipment was probably tested for the expected variances, but no one realized that a situation would occur. Such a problem is a difficult situation to detect in testing. I see similar issues in the software development I do. You code something that tests fine under all the test cases you can come up with. Then the users come along and start doing things that you never thought they'd try to do. Suddenly, you have an emergency on your hands as you scramble to update the system to handle this edge case that was not accounted for. (This is why I always like to find the most bumbling QA person I can find. The more whacked out, unexpected, unpredictable situations they can find, the better! )

N+2 means that if N units are required to power the facility, the facility will keep an extra 2 units available in case of failure. If N=2, then the facility will have 4 units on site. If N=1000, then the facility will have 1002 units on site. For the most part this works regardless of scale because the units are expected to be reliable. N+1 should be all that's needed to recover from a failure. N+2 offers the ability to continue running after a failure AND still have backups available in case there is another failure before the previously failed unit is repaired. In this case, 8 units were required to power the facility. Thus the facility had 10 units on site. Unfortunately, there appears to have been 4 separate failures in the generators, resulting in the facility being underpowered. The majority of these failures appears to trace back to a problem with the DDEC controller units. Possibly a design flaw or a software bug. Either way, the automatic startup of the generators was not functioning properly due to faulty components provided by the manufacturer. This is every support person's worst nightmare. All the planning and configuration is worth nothing if the parts you purchase end up being unreliable. Any flaw in those parts is likely to be present in all copies of those parts. This is why fields where failure results in death tend to have backup systems developed by an independent contractor. Even if a fault develops in the primary system, the backup is unlikely to repeat the same flaw.

All I can say is... THANK GOD I have been getting SO tired of the repetitive bull**** that EA puts out. Even worse, they acquire companies to rape their branding rather than develop their titles further. In the short dealings I've had with them in the past, the constant discussions about "Madden this", "C&C that", "Wing Commander this" made me want to puke. Management didn't give a damn about what originally made the product interesting. They were only concerned about how they could abuse it in everything from coffee mugs to web games. It's nice to see another top dog on the block. Especially one that treats its properties with the respect they deserve. e.g. If Activision had been the one to acquire Wing Commander, we'd all be playing Privateer MMOG by now. Not to mention that Activision is the ONLY company in history to make GOOD games based on the Star Trek franchise. (Excluding the point and click adventures, of course. 25th Anniversary and A Final Unity were pretty darn good. ) And their handling of the Guitar Hero franchise has been top notch, despite a few minor snafus. (*cough*mono*cough*wherethehelliswiigh3dlcyoupromised*cough*) I guess what I'm saying is.... YAY!