Nothing all that interesting, but I wanted to bring this up for ABF...
Quote:How do the Xbox and the Xbox 360 compare in terms of manufacturing costs and subsidies?
They're quite different. Let's just put it that way.
Basically, Xbox was done, as I said, in 18 months. We used a lot of off-the-shelf parts, which was required to get the product to market in time and made it easy for developers, so that was good. The challenges over time have been that it's tougher to cost-reduce the product. We couldn't combine chipsets - we actually couldn't change the chipsets at all, because they weren't ours. NVIDIA and Intel were just producing the chips and then supplying them to us.
So there wasn't anything we could do to combine chips, or merge the silicon architecture - and that's where the huge amount of cost reduction actually comes from. You know, in hard discs and DVD drives, there's actually not that much cost reduction that happens. There are physical laws - a spinning platter costs so much, and there's very little you can do about that.
In this generation, we actually manage the intellectual property for our chipsets ourselves. We have the capability to combine those chips, to redesign them, to cost-reduce them - and so this will be a far more cost-effective product from a manufacturing perspective. The beginning of a cycle is always high cost, but that will go down in a more straightforward and predictable fashion on Xbox 360 than it did with Xbox.
...
Is that something that happened with Xbox? Have you ever hit a break-even point on hardware costs against sale prices?
In the hardware, I think we've said pretty consistently that the hardware has been subsidised throughout the life cycle of the product. Again, part of the design for it was that we had to make an investment to get into the marketplace; we had 18 months. We didn't design the hardware to be a break-even endeavour over the life cycle, we designed it to be the most powerful console, and to have an impact.
We think it did that successfully, and it just required us to fund that. Now with Xbox 360 we have the opportunity to make that investment pay off.
I just wanted you to see I wasn't making all that stuff up about Microsoft having changed things up concerning the hardware and cost-reduction.
Quote:<b>20-year-old who used Grand Theft Auto as defense for triple homicide sentenced to lethal injection.</b>
Earlier this year, Devin Moore, now 20, was on trial for the 2003 triple homicide of three Alabama policemen. While in detention for stealing a car, Moore grabbed the pistol of one officer and used it to fatally shoot a total of three of them.
The defense mounted a case based on a childhood full of mental and physical abuse, as well as an affinity for violent games. One game in particular, Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto III, was singled out, because gamers can steal cars and kill cops in it. Moore had said he was inspired by the PlayStation 2 game.
In August, a jury swiftly convicted Moore of the charges. And today, a judge laid down the most severe punishment the justice system allows.
Moore will be put to death by lethal injection. Defense attorney Jim Standridge will appeal the case.
The victims' families have sued Take-Two Interactive (parent company of Rockstar), Sony, Wal-Mart, and GameStop for their parts in the manufacturing and selling of the game.
Ugh...weren't crazy people killing BEFORE video games were invented? I also like the way they really kind of gloss over the whole "lifetime of physical and mental abuse...<i>BUT HE PLAYED GRAND THEFT AUTO TOO!</i>"
*cue gasps, dramatic music*
Why don't the sue the parents for making the kid crazy instead of the game manufacturer who has safely entertained 99.999998% of the gaming population by NOT turning them into mass-murderers?
Okay, I got this game the other day because I need more DS goodness [to go along with Castlevania and Trace Memory]. Trauma Center is more or less a puzzle game with scalpel and a storyline about bio-terrorism [I kid you not]. Where this is different from other games [storyline aside] is that not only are you timed [most operations are 5 minutes] the patients have vital signs, meaning if there vitals drop to zero other doctors came in and take over leaving you to be fired in disgrace. What this means is that you are fighting to seperate clocks AND working on a semi-realistic person at the same time. Needless to say it can make things really intense. I'm talking 10X more intense than the really hard levels in Dr. Mario intense. It's also HARD. And not just the very last levels [which I'm sure are even harder], but even some of the ones in the earlier chapters are hard. It's also one of the best games on the DS.
If you have a DS I suggest you give this a good look, it just might be what you're looking for.
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