alanschu

Top of the line video cards are generally overpriced. I haven't checked recently, but I know that they used to hover in like the 400 dollar range. A quick check indicates that that seems to be the case.

He once had DUAL 500 GB drives (yes, past tense, meaning he had them long before the cheap 3.5" versions came out). Money is clearly no object for him

Well, am I allowed to be smart with my money? I don't recall being forced to buy all components at once, am I? My CPU is plenty good right now, and my Video card is still good enough, but would probably be my next upgrade. Didn't the GC debut at $199 and the other two at >$300?

Pfft. Experience is experience.

I still have to wait for their placements to open up. Though on the plus side, based on my grades and resume, Electronic Arts has requested a telephone interview with me (according to my school's internship coordinator). I wouldn't mind doing an internship at Electronic Arts either (it's in Vancouver so it'd still be an easy move for me), but the one that they are interested in for me is only an 8 month internship starting in January. I'm interested in the 16 month ones that open up in May.

Depends on how involved Elevation tries to be in the development. Considering they aren't your typical game publisher, this could actually be a good thing. However, I see them as being for the most part just an investor. This brings in a huge influx of capital, while (like most publicly traded companies) still go in the direction of the CEO and the rest of the staff employeed by the respective companies.

What is the starting retail value for most consoles? Didn't the playstation debut at $400 or so? I was basing things on around $300-$400 for each console on average. That would give me $900-$1200 for a computer. Considering many costs such as monitor, hard drive, etc. etc. don't need to be upgraded, I can get a killer computer for that value (in fact I did ).

On the plus side it seems my chances of getting a 16 month internship there is better than ever. (w00t)

That is the evidence thus far as I see it. Or at least could not continue to put out those numbers without "restructuring". <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The sample size is too small to draw conclusions. Many game companies have games that don't perform up to expectations, and they don't disappear just because of it.

I'm not saying it did (or did not) underperform. But it seems like you're making generalizations that Bioware cannot do their own IP.

What? No mention about the Emotion Engine part of the PS2 CPU?

Heres the totals from my last generations consoles purchases. PS2

Actually you did. Here In any case, people are making too big of a deal out of this. Hades sees that EA acquisitions go wrong, and then extrapolates it to Elevation's acquisition? According to my friend pretty much nothing has changed. I'm not going to talk to much about it though, to make sure I don't say anything that might get him in trouble. EDIT: ShadowPaladin, you're reading too much into the output of their first IP game and generalizing it too much.

I'm intrigued by their radiant AI system.

Ah....I thought he was referring to that 8-0 game. Jeez, 10-4 against Buffalo? Crazy that only THREE Ottawa players actually scored. EDIT: Man, not only did they have two players with 4 goals, they had two players that had natural hat-tricks!

Actually I think you bring up an interesting point. ATI does have a negative reputation about their drivers (at a conference where nVidia was demoing their new GeForce 3, the PR guy basically made fun of me and my "driver issues" when I commented that I owned a Radeon....ironically, I think he insulted more people than just me with his arrogance. Anyways, enough ranting). I think if someone has a game that has a problem and they have an ATI card, many people immediately jump to the conclusion that it is ATI's fault. I know that there have been situations, but for some reason I continue to be among the "lucky" that haven't really had any problems with an ATI card since my Rage Fury. The one thing I do miss is ATI's fantastic RMA policy. I used to be able to get them to ship me a card while I kept my current one, and didn't have to send back mine until I received theirs. They still have a decent one though. When I got my Radeon 8500, I had bizarre problems. So I RMA'd my card. They said they tested it and found no problems, but still gave me a new card "just in case." Turns out my motherboard was subpar and could not feed enough power to the AGP slot. Less of an issue with cards having their own power connections now though.

Looking forward to this game.

Actually, I disagree. The cost of buying all three consoles would net you a pretty impressive computer, especially if you have no problems building your own. The big thing about the PC market IMO is that it's a more viable market for new developers. It's possible to circumvent the publisher for the most part, by releasing games online to download. I think this is important because with the costs of game development skyrocketing, you either need a couple unbelievably huge games to support the "experiments" that might not work out, or have publishers becoming more conservative with their designs, making games for the popular market. Of course there is always exceptions when an innovative game turns out to be huge. But these are not the norm.

Bioware's Programming Head came to my school today to talk. It was mostly about AI, in addition to tools. One person asked if they would hope for more resources to be allocated to AI, and the speaker didn't seem to be too optimistic. The main thing he pointed out was that the graphics content is increasing by about 8x, but the memory is only increasing by 4x. According to him, he fully expects the GPU to use at least half of the memory for graphics. I wonder if he was talking graphics for Bioware games, or for graphics in general for games (I'm assuming he was talking about graphics on the XBOX 360). When the question elaborated to how much resources when compared to the current generation, he still seemed rather pessimistic. I got the impression that as a percentage of total resources, he would expect it to go down rather than up EDIT: In other news, he did mention that they are planning on using a truly adaptive AI for the "uber hard" difficulty level of Dragon Age.

I have mixed feelings about running up the score. I didn't watch the rest of the game after Heatley got his hat trick, but if the team still has opportunities to score goals they should still take them IMO. Keeps the mental focus over the course of the long season, and lets you improve on other aspects of the team game to boot. I see tons of blowouts in international hockey, and I always hear about how the dominating team had players that felt bad for the other team, but couldn't let up so that they'd keep their "game faces."

The thing I remembered most was the heavy duty pixelation in the PS1 games, given by their low resolution. Though wouldn't it be best to compare FIFA 2001 for both platforms?

PS2 games looked like late PS1 games?

I don't know. I think I'd rather have a game that had a better setting, characters, and story than Jefferson.

I'd figure the performance would be similar to that of Pirates. I can't imagine why ATI people would be having problems if they weren't having problems with Pirates (unless of course they were having problems with pirates). Pirates runs fantastic for me, so here's hoping.

You said something along the lines of "all first generation games" - which encompasses much more than just the "launch games" - of which Call of Duty - a multi-threaded game is part of. With Oblivion only being a couple of weeks later. I also remember Cliffy B talking about Gears of War being multi-threaded, but I don't recall the source of the interview. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I was referring to The Inquirers interpretation of "first-generation," which I feel is stupid. I know games like Oblivion are multithreaded.