PC Games On the Rebound 179
Via The Escapist, an article on the New York Times website discussing the rebirth of the PC games industry. The piece talks about the bright-looking future for titles on the PC, citing the platform's ease and speed of development and Microsoft's 'Games for Windows' initiative as points in its favour. Mass-market PC maker adoption of the hardcore gaming market is also discussed, with financials being the main thrust of the article. That focus is a double edged sword, given the obvious comparison to console games: "The upsurge comes after some recent reversals. Over all, retail sales of PC-based games in the United States exceeded $970 million in 2006, an increase of about 1 percent of sales the previous year of $953 million, which represented about a 14 percent drop from $1.1 billion in 2004. By contrast, according to the NPD Group, retail sales for console games in 2006 were $4.8 billion; another $1.7 billion was spent on games for hand-held devices like Sony's PlayStation Portable."
Re:"Games for Windows" = MS Monopoly push (Score:2, Informative)
Walk into a game store, and find for me the PC games that are made for other operating systems besides Windows. If you go into an Apple store, you'll find a few Mac versions of some games, but not much. Besides some educational titles, you won't find many Mac titles that aren't also on Windows.
It is not COMPLETE. You can find scattered games that are made for Mac. You can find scattered games for Linux. However, I'd say well over 95% of the PC games that are made (I'm talking about retail games here, not browser games) are for Windows. Some of these games are made with a second version for a Mac. Some make a Linux version.
If that's not dominating the market, you'll have to explain to me what is. You seem confident in your assertion that I'm wrong... but you don't really explain why. I'm interested to know.
Flight Simulator X Service Pack 1 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I dare to disagree (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, you can. OpenGL extensions are already available [nvidia.com].
Re:I dare to disagree (Score:1, Informative)
Here's a hint: DirectX does NOT A LOT more than 3D graphics. At least for games Direct3D is the only component of DirectX that's important (directinput is dead with SDL as an free/open alternative and directsound is dead with OpenAL as an free/open alternative...)
Re:I disagree (Score:2, Informative)
Would you also be upset if your Honda Civic couldn't pull an industrial sized trailor back and forth across the continental US every day?
Re:I disagree (Score:3, Informative)
Which seems straight forward enough; your graphics card needs to have Radeon written on it with a number 8500+ except for 9200 and 9250. Or GeForce written on it with a number 4+ except for ones with "4 MX" on them.
Of course if you don't know what the damn models and numbers are it'll be confusing, but on my two machines one says in the Display Control Panel:
GeForce 7600 GT
Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME
I'd take a punt that the first will work (7 is greater than 4) and the second won't - since it doesn't say Radeon or GeForce. The last sentence (with the typo fixed) would imply to me it's unlikely to work on a laptop built today let alone a year ago.
Also if you think you need a new video card every 6 months, why would you think a year old laptop would have enough video grunt for a new game?
Re:"Games for Windows" = MS Monopoly push (Score:3, Informative)
For a kid who also had an NES system, it sucked. Instead of a nice responsive system, you got characters who would move a little bit at a time even at neutral position. Or who would get stuck going on one direction. The calibration would eventually get out of whack, and you'd have to exit, restart the game, and recalibrate to play for another hour at most.
Back then I even went so far as to purchase a seperate ISA Gravis gamecard, complete with external speed adjustment dongle and everything, because they were supposed to hold calibration much better. Credit where credit is due, it was better than just a sound card gameport, but it still was not perfect.
Now, EVENTUALLY, they came out with digital gamepads (Gravis made one of these too). Far, far better, but the digital nature had trouble with many gameports. The USB gamepad was nothing short of amazing to anyone who remembered the aweful old analog gamepads, though it seems by the time they came along there was nothing left worth using a gamepad to play
Still, back then I did get decent and used to just using the keyboard to play instead. Computer games at the time generally were far cheaper than console games (certain clearanced ones, classics like Elite for example, I got for under $5), and so I don't look at that time completely negatively
Re:I dare to disagree (Score:1, Informative)