After a long time staring at broken smilies, I decided to prune out the ones that were dead. Most of them led to Great Rumbler's old page. If he wants to reupload them, that's fine, but they were dead at the time. This'll force his hand at least.
I'll add that it might be a good idea to upload the smilies to this server so there's no worry about them dying.
Quote:Game On
Nintendo Is Star of E3 Show as Rivals Scramble to Catch Up
By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 12, 2007; Page D01
SANTA MONICA, Calif., July 11 -- For many analysts and fans, Nintendo was something of an afterthought at the video game industry's annual E3 trade show in recent years.
But after a blockbuster launch of its Wii console and its ongoing dominance in the portable game market with its mobile DS handheld game console, the company that brought the world Mario and Zelda is now the company that others are trying to catch.
Nintendo's competitors, meanwhile, are playing an expensive round of brinksmanship with each other to win back some of the attention. This week Sony cut the price on its PlayStation 3 console by $100. Microsoft recently announced an expanded warranty program for the Xbox 360 console, which could cost the company more than $1 billion.
Neither Microsoft nor Sony is making money in the game industry, since both are selling their consoles at below cost in their attempt to boost interest. Nintendo, meanwhile, which introduced the $249 Wii six months ago, can barely keep up with demand for the profitable product.
Microsoft and Sony even scaled back their annual parties at the E3 show. In years past, Microsoft held events at such glamorous Los Angeles venues as the Orpheum Theater, the Shrine Auditorium and Grauman's Chinese Theater. This year, its event was at a Santa Monica high school. Sony, which previously held events that featured such concert acts as Macy Gray and Beck, settled for a low-key sushi shindig this year.
Nintendo says it is not paying a lot of attention to Sony or Microsoft.
Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, said the bigger question was how to get the non-gamers of the world interested in Nintendo systems.
"There are 24 hours in every day, and only a small time is available for leisure," he said at a news conference Wednesday. "We intend to steal more of that time for video games."
Fils-Aime, as expected, showed off some more Mario and Zelda game titles, the franchises for which Nintendo is most famous. His focus, however, was on how Nintendo products have won fans among senior citizens and women at levels well above the norm in the young-male-dominated industry.
For years, as the video game industry battled for dominance in the living room, the best graphics typically beat the competition. The popularity of the Wii's motion-detecting controllers has changed that notion, popularizing the life-like simulation of games, not their high-end computing aspect.
As a result, game companies are now trying to think of new ways to get players feeling like they are inside the game, designing realistic add-ons.
The Wii balance board, for example, lets players lean one way or another to control their game characters. The board is to be part of Wii Fit, the fitness program that Nintendo has in the works, illustrating that the "Wii workout" craze among those trying to get in shape by swinging fake rackets has only just begun.
Quote:E3 VIDEOGAME CONFERENCE
Sony Draws Yawns
Rachel Rosmarin, 07.11.07, 7:49 PM ET
LOS ANGELES -
If the best Sony has to offer is a Darth Vader-branded PlayStation Portable, it may be in trouble.
Having already announced its big news July 9 — a $100 price drop on the PlayStation 3 — Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people )'s event at the E3 video game convention Wednesday didn't leave room for many surprises.
However, Sony made a point of picking a hardware fight with Nintendo (other-otc: NTDOY - news - people ) on the portable front. Sony redesigned its PlayStation Portable into a slimmer shape, offered two new colors (one silver, and one etched with Star Wars' Darth Vader) and gave it the ability to export video to high-definition televisions, all to better compete with Nintendo's DS. Nintendo sells about 423,000 portable devices per month, while Sony sells only 221,000, according to NPD.
Sony executives made it clear that they know they need to do more than lower prices to woo consumers back to its flagging video game brand. Tepid audience response at Wednesday's event suggests the company hasn't yet done enough.
“Our accomplishments bring no guarantees for the future,” said Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton. “We want to earn each and every one of our customers.” While Monday's price cut is already reaping rewards — Tretton said sales of the just-reduced PS3 have already doubled at the company's top five retailers — it won't juice sales enough to give the company the “installed base” that it wants.
Sony tried to impress its bread and butter customers — hard-core gamers — with a slew of exclusive violent action games from third-party publishers and Sony's in-house studios. Footage of gruesome knife battles in Konami's Metal Gear Solid 4 drew cheers, but it might be too little too late: the game will be released later than expected in early 2008.
The company can't promise PS3 owners exclusive access to Grand Theft Auto 4 from Take-Two Interactive (nasdaq: TTWO - news - people ) — it will appear on Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people )'s Xbox 360 as well — so Sony's taking a stab at creating a game called Infamous, which features a similar style of play known as the “emergent gaming sandbox.”
Price cuts and new colors on hardware will only go so far to help Sony catch up to Nintendo, which is moving to take an even bigger lead. Earlier on Wednesday at Nintendo's E3 event, the company attempted to prove that it could expand upon its successful strategy of appealing to nontraditional gamers, while at the same time encroaching on Sony's hard-core gamer demographic.
Nintendo aims to get traditional gamers interested in the Wii with a new gun-shaped controller and a few “first-person shooter” games. For everyone else, Nintendo intends to capitalize on the Wii's motion-sensing features by selling a new suite of health-conscious games called Wii Fit. It requires the purchase of a floor-pad controller that looks a lot like a bathroom scale.
Anyone wish to one-up this guy? You have a tough job ahead of you. His specialist ability is to suck out your colors to make you weak, like he's Murky Dismal or something.
Yeah, I picked it up. As the latest Interplay-style (Bioware/Obsidian) RPG it was one of the top games on my list to get for my new PC, and I have it now. :)
Initial impressions, positive and negative:
+:
-Fantastic graphics (it looks really nice, and there's great art direction too...)
-Great writing, I can already tell. I'd expect this, coming from Obsidian. They've got some of the best writers in the industry...
-Plot with real choices (good/neutral/evil, mostly)
-party-based with full control over all party members (unlike NWN1)
-Pausable real-time with full control while paused (so unlike KotOR you can give movement orders and stuff while paused, as you could in any decent D&D RPG)
-Despite some simplified elements like the automation, it IS a D&D PC RPG, so there is no stupid attack queue (which requires you to either leave it to the automation or spend all of your time queueing up power attacks and stuff, so annoying)
-:
-High technical requirements... this requires a pretty powerful computer to look good.
-Annoying camera -- you have to keep moving it around and it never just feels "right" like the 2d isometric BG camera did
-No auto-pause options that I can find -- a major omission! It's part of the current theme in games... dumb them down, make them easy for average person to play without thinking, don't put in all of the features that the hardcore users want, and it's really too bad... so no auto-pausing that I can find.
-By default a wide variety of automation features are on so your party will pretty much fight all on their own... you need to disable a whole list of stuff in each character before you actually get control of them (it's not just hitting a "party AI off" button like Baldur's Gate, and the automation options are more extensive -- it can even automate spell use now). It's like they spent their time on that instead of the autopause options, unless I missed something... (the same goes for character creation, where you can use premade characters or templates to mostly avoid character creation, which is one of the most important and interesting parts of any PC RPG -- and they have a great, extensive system here!) anyway, it's not something I want to ever use.
-You can't go into all of the houses in the first town! What the heck? This is a BG-style PC RPG, right? Why can't I go into all of the houses? At least say "the door is locked and you don't have enough lockpicking skill yet" or something. But no, they didn't even do that. That's so stupid... :bummed:
-No Quicksave! What the heck? That's an extremely important function... and I don't see an autosave either... ah, I hope I'm just missing something.
-And last, but most importantly, I REALLY HATE POINT-BUY! I don't know why anyone ever thought that it was a good idea, but I hate it so, so much... point buy stinks. Awful system. I want to use good old dice rolls to set my character stats! Point buy gives you far less points... I mean, base of 8 plus 32, and getting more points takes more? It stinks. That's eight points short of where Aerie fell in BGII, and she was one of the worse characters in the team stats-wise... I know there are some items that can help there, but still. Point buy is horrible and being forced to use it is really annoying.
It's really quite good. The problems are more in the "annoyances" category than the "actual major problem" category...
![[Image: Scottcartman.gif]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/Scottcartman.gif)
