Just got back from Walmart where I played the Xbox 360 for the first time.
Kameo: Beautiful game. Only played it for a little while. You can be a boxing plant.
Call of Duty 2: Very beautiful game. Fun but nazi machine gunners kept killing me.
King Kong: Nice graphics. Kept getting owned by T-Rex's.
The system itself is very nice looking. The controller is very comfortable. It really is a better version of the Xbox's Controller-S.
While the graphics are definitely a step up from what we're used to on consoles they didn't really wow me the way a new system's graphics used to. I think it has less to do with diminishing returns and more to do with how good some PC games look.
After playing around with it I definitely want one but I won't be running out an buying it day one.
It seems they are changing up the story a bit by giving the four characters distinct personalities. Also, tweaks to the various jobs (classes) you can choose from. The graphical makeover will apparently be pseudo 3D. Not sure what that means, but I think it may be similar to how in Four Swords Adventures the entire game was rendered on various 3D "sheets" to allow for scaling and rippling and other sorts of effects.
As I had hoped, they actually plan on desiging the game so it can be played entirely with the touch screen. I suppose PC style drag and drop equiping as well as targetting enemies just by pointing to them, yay! Japan catches up!
And it would seem there is some wireless feature. No details on that except it is supposed to be a treat for fans who want to play the game together. The minimum will probably be something like in some of the FF games where, during battles, different players had control of different characters (but out of battle, "player one" is always in control). I'm hoping for something more. Maybe an extra side-story where players control a team of characters journeying through a dungeon together? This is being headed up by a designer from FFXI, so hey it's a possibility.
VE3D posted download links. I see the first one... 'Realms of the Haunting Demo'. I think, 'what the heck? Isn't that game ... (*thinks*) about eight years old? Why a demo now?' *checks link* ... 1997... (math! 2005 - 1997...)
And I've never played it. :D I just remember reading about it in PC Gamer. Which meant sometime between 1996 and 2001... and I picked the right year.
I just thought it was interesting... game release minutiae is hard to forget! :)
Quote:In an apt development following our earlier Revolution release-date roundup, Nintendo pres Satoru Iwata has confirmed that the system will be coming out sometime after March (the end of Nintendo’s current fiscal year), but still within the confines of the 2006 calendar year.
In a more strongly worded statement, Iwata made a distinctly more judgmental estimation regarding the company’s sales expectations for the Rev: “It [the Revolution] would be a complete failure if we didn’t sell more units than the Nintendo GameCube.” The GameCube has shipped 18.76 million units as of June of this year.
A “simultaneous worldwide release” will also be attempted (”as much as it’s possible”), following in the footsteps of Microsoft’s nearly simultaneous 360 launch window this fall.
Sardines or beef jerky?? It is written that Plato spent the twilight years of his life endlessly debating this very topic. And now his curse is YOURS! DEBATE IT!
:nodding:
Sardines are oh-so-fishily delicious, and packed with Omega 3 fatty acids! They taste great in any variety of sauces!
Beef jerky is oh-so-smokily yumzy, and packed with Protein! It's always handy for a nutritious, beefy snack!
Whoever came up with the idea should be ... dealt with...
I mean, it's one thing on a PC, which is an open system -- battery dies, or HDD goes bad? Just open up the box and fix it. But consoles are designed to die, well before their purchasers are probably going to never want them again. I started thinking about this a few days ago... extention of some other things partially, but also thinking 'that's not nice'... I mean, isn't it not nice to make you buy something which seems like it's going to last, and which could last a really long time (carts don't break quickly...), but which actually is going to either be a useless piece of plastic in 5-15 years... the only option then is a very tricky battery replacement. But then that battery will just die, losing all your saves again, down the road...
Now, it is true that no electronics last forever. They eventually fail. But the battery dies long, long before the cart... no-battery carts will last a long time in fully usable condition.
Oh, some carts do have other save methods. The main ones (the ones Nintendo has used anyway) are EEPROM and Flash RAM. That is, chips that get written to each time you save. They eventually break down (10,000 writes, or 100,000, or perhaps more, is what I've heard), but that only happens during writes... from what I can tell, if you stop writing it over (that is, put the game away and stop playing it once you're done with it) it stops degrading. Also, when the thing fails it probably won't erase your save. It'll become impossible to continue to save to the cart (and perhaps something will mess up), but it shouldn't actually erase your data like a dead battery will...
Anyway... obviously, the NES, SNES, GB, GBC, and VB (the few that had a save feature) all have battery save only for their games. DS has flashcarts. GC? Not sure if there's a battery in there (for the clock)... but if it died all that should happen is a failure of the internal clock, not bothering most games. N64 and GBA though... those are trickier. Took me a while to find all this data (thank you emulation-websites, for wanting to know this data so you can properly emulate the games (because different save methods must be emulated differently)!)
N64 and GBA each have the following types of saving: None (or password), S-RAM (battery backed RAM save -32KB?), EEPROM (in two sizes, a small one (4KB) and a larger one (16KB n64, 64KB GBA?)), and Flash RAM (128KB n64, something larger than that on GBA), and, for the N64, controller paks (more later, but they are 256kb.). On the N64, the most popular save method is Controller Pak. Second is EEPROM. Flash ROM and S-RAM (that evil stuff) have smaller gamelists... On GBA, EEPROM is most common, with no controller paks for the third parties to all rely on.
(an aside here... there is a lot of mis-information out there about N64 and GBA saving... many people belive that they all use EEPROMS. That is not true. If they did, then the emulation people would not have gone to all this trouble.)
Anyway, by this point (looking at this over the past two days), what I really wanted to know was, which N64 and GBA games will eventually become bricks like NES, SNES, and GB games already are becoming (and GBC games eventually will)?
GBA - by release number or search only, unfortunately. Only one I could find... with the N64 list there's a nice compiled list of games by save type there, but on GBA... http://offlinelistgba.free.fr/index.php
According to these sites:
N64:
Quote: 1080º Snowboarding
F-Zero X
Harvest Moon 64
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The
Major League Baseball featuring Ken Griffey Jr.
Mario Golf
New Tetris, The
Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber
Resident Evil 2
Super Smash Bros.
WCW/NWO Revenge
WWF: Wrestlemania 2000
GBA: From searching through the games I have, and some I've considered getting, this is what I found... quite a few of the good GBA games use batteries.
Fire Emblem and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Castlevania Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, and Aria of Sorrow (but not NES Classics Castlevania), Kirby: The Amazing Mirror, the other Kirby game whose name I forget (the NES remake...), Mario Golf, Mario Tennis, Riviera, Final Fantasy I&II: Dawn of Souls, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Konami Krazy Racers, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, F-Zero: GP Legend... and more I'm sure...
Now, most aren't; most third parties want to minimize costs, so the most common GBA save type is the 4kb eeprom. This or the larger eeprom or flashram are used in lots of games... (some I looked up include all the NES Classics games, all four Mario Advance titles, F-Zero: Climax (the third GBA F-Zero game, Japan only), Mario Kart Super Circuit, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Tactics Ogre, Guilty Gear, King of Fighters, Street Fighter, Sword of Mana, Advance Wars 1 and 2... etc...
Of course, the list could be wrong (more likely for GBA I'd say, given the nature of the sites I found the lists on, but could be wrong for either)... the sites aren't perfect -- for instance the GBA site there has a GBC list, but just says all the games have SRAM -- even games that don't have oncart saving (Project S-11, Micro Machines 1&2 Twin Turbo, Micro Machines V3), but it looks mostly believable... the weirdest thing, though, was Lunar Legend. It listed the Japanese version as being SRAM but the US one as EEPROM... all other games had the same save method in all regions. My guesses are either 1) it's wrong or 2) Ubisoft wanted to save money and cut back on the save size to do so (when porting the game).
Oh yes, one final thing. N64 controller paks, I've read, are mostly battery backed. Third party ones probably all are. (edit: Found a site that says this... http://forums.mogusland.com/archive/inde...t-680.html ... plenty of misinformation there, but the comment that the person opened a memory card and saw a battery in it looks true. There was another site I'd found too, that said some later first-party cards are flash rom and not battery-backed... not sure about the truth of this though.)
The only hope there? Well... that it's easier (and more legal) to back up controller paks, I guess. While some consoles are hard to back up and require hard to get quasi-illegal hardware (and, for older consoles, hard to get and not as supported on modern systems... on this respect GBA is 'easiest', but it still seems to require stuff that's usually used by people uploading roms from the internet to flashcarts to play on their gbas.), N64 controller paks are easy to back up to computers with a dexdrive. Also, the N64 Gameshark (Pro) lets you move orback up save files anywhere, including from a cart to a memory card...
The GBA/DS Gameshark lets you back up DS saves (to PC), but not GBA it seems...
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