ShadowPaladin V1.0

Fair enough. I'm not familiar with steam. Or Xbox live to any great degree I never signed up for it although I've played games on it at other peoples houses. The major factors however I see as these. 1. It's all or nothing if your trying to do away with Bluray/HDDVD for download since otherwise all a large HD will do is increase the cost of your console and apparently a 20 GB HD is such a big deal that an Xbox360 version is shipping without one 2. Payment plans your going to need some way of paying for this and the obvious seems to be a CC which not everyone has or is willing to use for this purpose. 3. Retail. Retail chains are not going to want a huge swathe of their profits to disapear , which is going to make the a really unpopular thing if attempted on a large scale. It might happen (likely will) but it's taken years to get people to buy online and still most of the trade is in the highstreet. It's going to take even longer for attitudes towards buying something which you dont have a permenant copy of to catch on.

Thats a good point I dont think we have touched on the virus aspect of downloading. You know there is a virus knocking about which can destroy a DS outright (render it unplayable). Since conosles are meant for a much less computer savvy market the risk from virus' become that much greater.

Lack of space ? Unless the download offers some sort of pass once you buy a game, you would still have to buy it everytime you wanted to play (if you uninstalled it). Depends where you live and what you lost. Like I said initially if the games were offered on a rental basis, then you could treat them as disposable. It would just save you a trip to Blockbusters. You might even be able to stream them in the same way NTL does movies. You buy a movie and it gives you 24 hour access to it any time as many times as you want.

It may depend on where you llive. But when games started to come in standard DVD cases it was quite common to have the disks stacked one of top of the other with no seperators at all between them. Temple of Elemental Evil the reissue came like this as did the NWN pack. With NWN SoU and HotU all stacked one on top of the other. Obviously it's done to cut to costs. Another thing with direct download is that you wont be getting any documentation but rather you will need more online tutorials and in turn this will take up more space. In the above mentioned games the manuals come on PDF files. Which means if you want to read as you play, then you need a printer. Anyway I think we can all agree that it's much less bother replacing a single disk, than it would be to replace every game that you had downloaded to your system.

The ones that get scratched are usually the ones that stack 2 or 3 disks on top of each other. Used to see it a lot on the PC games. I havnt come across it with console games, they seem to have custom built cases.

Anyone would have thought I said I had a third arm. I didnt think it was that big a deal to be honest :">

Thanks, not like I dont have enough to buy that friday anyway. RTS isnt really my favourite thing but Dawn of War was just that good

No I was just wondering what was wrong with it. It looks really nice. Gameplay seriously flawed or something ?

Looks pretty.

Bugger all on here except what comes on windows XP and some anti virus stuff.

Yep like any game with pregenerated characters it's pretty important that you connect with them. The story is so closely tied to the character that I don't think you could seperate them.

We had a great deal of fun with it. The only thing was that having completed the game and then returned to the holding pens it would crash constantly , so I returned it. I guess it was fortunate that the holding pens were an optional area. Ended up with Iron Man (I was playing) Jean (Yuki was playing) and Magneto (which her sister was playing) I switched to wolverine at the end because Iron Man was only level 27 and couldnt do a lot in the end battle (and I was being called a potion hog).

Yes.. I have three copies of Pokemon Emerald that can attest to that :"> I'd never put my entire collection on one disk , not by choice anyway.

Just out of curiosity do you know how many UK homes have broadband? Storage is definately the biggest issue I have with downloading.

It's not quite "bounce" but it's not bad. Good luck to Mr Chu where ever he is.

Mostly games but I also accumulated the usual stuff as well. Downloading movies used to be a very naughty thing to do, so of course I didnt do that.. If you think thats bad, back when the Internet first became available in the UK it used to cost 5p per minute offpeak and 8p during the day.

That they can. Only happened to me with games where they try to pack too many disks in the packaging though (one reason I dont like multidisk games). If you get a lifetime pass for a game then I wouldnt really have a problem with that. Although the thought of having to redownload 900 GB of games would piss me off.

Most games for the PC AFAIK rarely touch the CD drive, aside from checking copy protection. I can verify this as I can play any one of my games without the CD in the drive (i.e. I eject it after I pass the copy protection). <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's probably not too far off for the near future though. When I say my games collection I should add that I'm not just talking about PC games in case anyone is thinking that. But games in general. I did fill one 500GB drive, hence getting a second one although I never managed to fill that one before the first went boom. As for when I got them. I couldnt say I'm terrble at keeping track of this kind of thing to me last years games are old. I know when I got the first they were very new at the time and pretty expensive. How many games... Well I used to keep a list , but in the end I gave up. Aside from the ones in the attic here, there are a ton in my folks attic too.

I've calmed down since I got married. Ask me another :"> I still have one around here, blew up while full of games (of course I have the originals so it's only the saves I lost) but it does highlight a problem I tend to have with downloading. Games at the moment seem to come in at around 6-8 GB (looking at some of the latest releases). Since the revolution has access to the Nintendo back catalogue it should be a good litmus test. The games are a lot smaller too since they are N64/Snes/Nes.

Back when I was a PC gamer full time I had 2 , 500 GB HD's in my machine. For me to accept downloading it has to be what I would consider a throwaway ammount. Like rentals' I don't doubt it will happen at some point. But I doubt it will be in Bills lifetime let alone the 360's.

"As the war between the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray camps continues, Bill Gates has revealed that he favours neither next-gen format - since in the future we'll be so busy downloading things and polishing our 900GB iPods that we'll have forgotten what "discs" of any kind look like". There are couple of things that I don't see as likely here. 1. It's one thing to download a song - actually my personal opinion is that if you use an Ipod legally it's a huge waste of space right now... 2. I've got a PsP , and it's great for travel, but do you seriously think I'm going to watch movies on it rather than a big screen TV and a home theatre system given a choice ? 3. Games are big, and getting bigger all the time. I could fill a 900 gb space with a fraction of my software collection. Security - Once I have the disk it's mine. When I download a song, something screws up and I have to do it all over again. So unless Bill expects me to strap a home theatre system to my back I'd say he's talking bollocks any comments ? I mean if he seriously expected download to be the future why did the 360 only come with a 20 GB HD ?

Final Fantasy I&II Breath of Fire I&II Shining Force Ressurection Final Fantasy Tactics Advance Fire Emblem Fire Emblem:Sacred Stones (easier than the above one). If you want something more Sci Fi - Mega Man Battle Network If your into the building side and open party thing, then you really can't beat Pokemon. Emeralds probably the best since it's the most recent and it's huge. Once you finish the main game, there is another story in there which takes about twice as long.

Why does everything have to be released on the 4th of November ?!!!?

Good tends to be comparitive to what is around at the time.