Microsoft Reboots Two Classic PC Games 275
An anonymous reader writes "Ever since it launched the Xbox, Microsoft has had a fickle relationship with Windows as a gaming platform. On one hand PC gaming is a major driver of hardware and operating system sales, but on the other hand the PC is inherently less secure than the Xbox console, with piracy much more likely to impact sales of a PC title than a console one. Games for Windows Live has been an attempt to bring some of the success of Xbox Live to the PC, and while many games have shipped with support for Games for Windows Live, it hasn't exactly been a favorite of PC gamers. After all these half-hearted efforts, the last thing anyone expected was for Microsoft to announce new PC-only reboots of two classic game franchises, Flight Simulator and Age of Empires. But yesterday it did just that, announcing a massively multiplayer version of Age of Empires and a new Flight Simulator called Flight. The big question is whether Microsoft can make Games For Windows Live relevant in a market where Steam has taken hold, or if it's too late."
GFWL, no thanks (Score:5, Informative)
As long as it's attached to GFWL, no thanks. GFWL is such a piece of shit I will not have anything to do with games that require it. If you want me to buy your game, do not tie it to GFWL. It is unstable and a huge pain in the ass to deal with. MS should fire the management that came up with it; it does not in any way help Windows as a game platform.
Re:GFWL, no thanks (Score:5, Informative)
To pile up on the hatred: Live accounts will also occasionally expire. Accounts tied to purchases. Fuck MS.
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Try using your Xbox gamer tag account then
I don't want all of my devices/games tied to a single account, Hell, I don't want my games tied to ANY account.
I want to be able to plug in my console, put in my game, and play the damned thing. I don't want to run into problems where "Oh crap, I must have started that game while on my sister's account or xbox, looks like all that playtime gets reset if I want to play it on MY account/xbox"
Or maybe that's not the problem, I don't know, because everything gets so fr
Re:GFWL, no thanks (Score:5, Informative)
I don't want to run into problems where "Oh crap, I must have started that game while on my sister's account or xbox, looks like all that playtime gets reset if I want to play it on MY account/xbox"
1. There are no problems moving games between Xboxes.
2. Saves are locked to their associated gamertag. This is designed to solve the "Oh crap, my brother/sister/parent/dog played on my console and erased my f*cking save!" problem. Just create yourself an XBL Silver gamertag, it takes seconds and is completely free, then all your stuff will be safely partitioned away. The 360 can use a USB drive to save, so even if you don't own a 360 at all you can just put your account and gamertag on any cheap USB drive to easily take it between friends houses.
Or maybe that's not the problem, I don't know, because everything gets so freaking out of whack if you don't play the games exactly as you were 'supposed' to play them as defined by the service.
What the fuck are you talking about? Log in to your account, play game any way you feel like.
I also love how it used to be that if I bought something and hooked it up to my television that it was a household purchase. Now? Looks like I'd have to buy every item for each person in my family if they want to enjoy the same game that I have.
And that hasn't changed at all. Purchases are tied both to the account and Xbox that they were bought with, so anyone playing on that Xbox can access the content regardless and that user can access it on any Xbox. It's very well implemented and there's an easy transfer tool to reassign the content to a different console in the event of a dead console or buying a new model.
So no, you're totally wrong if you think you need to buy content once for each person. One console, one purchase, everyone can use it.
Re:GFWL, no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
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The only game I have tried through Games for Windows Live is Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II and it has yet to ever be able to connect - it always returns error 0x81051911. The troubleshooting steps Microsoft has you go through include everything from port forwarding a half dozen ports to resetting your TCP/IP stack.
That's not troubleshooting. Troubleshooting is when you log exactly what's going on, dig through the logs, work out what the error is and then propose a solution based upon that. Or, if you personally aren't equipped to do that, the system provides some means for you to submit the logs to someone who is.
What you're describing is "Choose a random item from a list of half-a-dozen or so things which seem to make some sort of sense based on the error code, try it, lather rinse and repeat until success. If no
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Your technical notion of troubleshooting is entirely much more complicated than the consumer/user version of troubleshooting. What you described as "choose a random item from a list" is exactly what MS and any other consumer company label as troubleshooting. Look in the back of many device manuals and you will see a section labeled "troubleshooting" where it gives a description of the problem and a list of things to do/try.
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Same here though the game was GTA4. Not sure if it was the same error message but I never managed to get it to work.
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I got GTA4 working to my satisfaction (memory-editing hackery and save-game hacking in single-player mode is fun, and if I paid for the game, who's to say that I can't/shouldn't?) by using a replacement for the GFWL DLL which stubbed out the icky stuff. Sadly, such a thing isn't available for the entire GFWL-based library.
Re:GFWL, no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
The only game I have tried through Games for Windows Live is Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II and it has yet to ever be able to connect - it always returns error 0x81051911. The troubleshooting steps Microsoft has you go through include everything from port forwarding a half dozen ports to resetting your TCP/IP stack, yet I can play any other online game with no issues, including connecting to X-Box Live on my sons console. GFWL is a POS and I won't buy any other game that requires it.
Believe it or not I bought Bioshock 2 through steam, and it still required GFWL. I had to go through all that and more just to be able to save my progress in the game. Included in this mess is having to type in a CD Key twice for a digitally downloaded game (once to install the game, and once to tie it to my GFWL account).
Never again. Ever. YMMV, but all two games I've ever purchased that required GFWL have required googling for a solution to their DRM hassles to get the single player up and running. Never ever again.
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The only GFWL game I own is Fallout 3, and it worked just fine. Achievements appeared on my Xbox, which would be nice if I cared at all about gamer points.
Re:GFWL, no thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
What's that? You want me to register for a GFWL account and sign in every time I load the game just so I can play in single player? Good luck with that.
Yes, I know, you can create offline accounts, but you still have to create them and sign in just to play single player and yes, I know Blizzard have done the same thing with Starcraft II & Battle.net and they're fuckers for doing it too.
Re:GFWL, no thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget about all Steam games.
Or the recent Bioware games.
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I don't know what Bioware's up to, but I think Steam is different... since you're buying the game from them and getting it download-only, setting up an account is less invasive, since you had to do it to make the purchase to begin with. GFWL games require you to setup an account and login every time you play for a game you purchased in a box at the store. To that I disagree wholeheartedly. If I buy something at the store it's mine and unless it's something like WoW, I do not want to have to sign up with
Re:GFWL, no thanks (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't know what Bioware's up to, but I think Steam is different... since you're buying the game from them and getting it download-only
IIRC half life 2 (and I think other valve games too) requires you to sign up to steam and activate and your copy through it (and IIRC the activation process involves a forced update to the latest version of the game) even if you bought your game as a boxed copy.
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Bioware/EA also offers download only versions of the games. Steam games can also be bough as "normal" retail versions, but still require Steam. When you bought a retail Steam game (like: Just Cause 2, Borderlands, Mafia 2, Half Life 2, etc.) you will have to through the additional hassle to set up an account. For Steam games you also have to log in every time you want to play a game.
GFWL does have an auto login feature. GFWL doesn't require logging in or being online, it depends on the games. Most GFWL game
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I don't know what Bioware's up to, but I think Steam is different... since you're buying the game from them and getting it download-only,
Except when you buy the boxed game in the store....and still need a Steam account. That's why I'm not buying the more recent Total War games.
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I don't know what Bioware's up to, but I think Steam is different... since you're buying the game from them and getting it download-only, setting up an account is less invasive, since you had to do it to make the purchase to begin with.
Yeah. Imagine my surprise when I bought Half-life 2 down at the local Wal-Mart on a whim, only to discover that I couldn't play it because 56K was the only available internet at the time. Steam is no less shitty than Games for Windows.
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"You are offline, loading the game anyway, 'cause we love you like that" screen.
Yeah, glad that works for you.
For me it's almost always. You are offline, something you did we didn't like so we are treating your game as online only, fuck you.
And it ALWAYS happens when I'm waiting at the airport and just want to play a few offline, single player games.
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Fallout 3 and Bioshock 2. I bought both on Steam, both use Windows Live, so I have to log into both to play them. Love both games, I freaking hate Windows live. It told me I already had an account on Windows Live, and getting it to work the first time was a bitch. Now it just works, but I don't care for MS tracking my gaming. Gabe and Steam I worry a little less with.
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Single player steam games do not require you to sign-on to steam. (There might be some, but I have yet to encounter one. Let me know if you find any so I make sure not to buy them.)
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I'm not trying to say Valve are saints and Steam is the rapture, but it's so much better than GFWL (God-Awful?)
Like the OP, I also got saddled with it on my last system with DoW2. It worked maybe 60% for connecting games, and connections would frequently drop out. It would frequently lock up the admittedly crappy BT router I was forced to use at the time when negotiating UPnP. There's a god-damned banner ad at the bottom. A bunch of publishers have chosen to go the "you must be logged in to play!" option wh
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Don't forget about all Steam games.
I'm done with Steam, but for a different reason. Bought several games on it, like Warhammer 40k and CS:S. Then I decided to try some CS1.6 and see what's all the fuzz about it from so-called "progamers". Guess what. I got an advertisment in the game for Valves Orange Box! E-mailed them that i find that outrageous and that they should remove it. They: sorry, can't do that. Me: i guess i can't buy from Steam then, anymore.
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Huh? Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age shipped with only a disc check; no online activation at all, let alone each time you want to play. (At least if you bought the DVD version; I don't know how the online versions work.)
You still needed to register to get the stuff from Cerberus Network and whatever bonus content you got with Dragon Age.
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Registering * Signing In to get Bonus Content is *not* the same a having to do so just to play the game.
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Huh? Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age shipped with only a disc check; no online activation at all,
I believe for Dragon Age you get some additional shit if you bought any of the DLC. Which I didn't, so... Great game, looking forward to DA2 but give the fucking in-game DLC peddlers a dollar sign instead of the usual exclamation mark. I'd ask for an option to completely get rid of them, but I know I won't get it.
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Blizzard at least gives you something in return for it... you can chat with friends playing other games. I don't have Starcraft II at all, but I regularly chat with friends playing that game from WoW.
Re:GFWL, no thanks (Score:5, Informative)
Offline accounts is a nice idea, but the way GFWL has implemented it makes is worse than nothing.
1: You still need to sign up for a Windows Live account and Microsoft Passport to activate it.
2: If you save your progress in offline mode, and then log in to online mode, your save progress is unavailable. Even on the same machine.
I did the big mistake of buying a collection of games on Steam that looked nice: Dirt, Dirt2, Fuel and Grid. Then I discovered that I could play but not save my progress without signing up for an account I didn't want. And would get interrupted every few minutes by a notice saying the servers could not be reached. It turns out that the service doesn't appear to work through NAT if instead of a cheap cone NAT home router, you have full symmetric NAT. In short, the games were a waste of money.
It's getting ridiculous when in addition to the Steam DRM, you are subjected to Securom (or worse) AND have to enter a CD key to use online AND have to sign up for a Live account. The incentive to download a cracked copy has become rather large, and isn't caused by pirates, but by MBAs who don't seem to understand that making your paying customers jumping through hoops make it more likely that they'll go somewhere else for their fix.
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Games for Windows Live isn't that bad. So long as they're not trying to charge for online play again, it's not really any more noticeable than Steam. Besides, an RTS and a Flight Simulator are games that simply cannot be done correctly on a console.
They also mention Fable 3, but I don't recall ever getting Fable 2 for the PC?
Wow i must be tired (Score:4, Informative)
Am I insane or is the woman superimposed on the right hand side of the [weirdly purely flash] Flight site topless with propellers for nipples?
or both?
Re:Wow i must be tired (Score:5, Funny)
You just made thousands of Flash- and Microsoft-hating nerds knowingly enter a pure-Flash Microsoft site.
Truly well played!
Marketing is exempt from dog food (Score:5, Insightful)
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When I load up the page on a 1280x1024 monitor, I have to scroll to the right to see that. Maybe that was snuck in as a joke during testing because it was "off screen" during QA.
Re:Wow i must be tired (Score:5, Insightful)
Not many people use screen resolutions that low
You'd be surprised.
Re:Wow i must be tired (Score:4, Insightful)
Half the people I know still use 1024 on 19"+ monitors because otherwise "the screen is too small" for them to read.
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Half the people I know still use 1024 on 19"+ monitors because otherwise "the screen is too small" for them to read.
Have they tried increasing the system DPI (Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > General > Display > DPI setting)?
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Have they tried increasing the system DPI (Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > General > Display > DPI setting)?
It works, except when it doesn't, and when it doesn't you have the option of messing with your resolution, or tweaking each program individually (when they don't support it)
Then you end up with a frankenstein of system settings some of which seem to apply, and then Oh my looks like this program started paying attention to the DPI and is now all wonky.
It's just easier
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despite it's weird aspect ratio 1280x1024 was a common resoloution for both CRTs and LCDs for quite a while and in places with slower replacement cycles is likely to still be common.
Afiact it's only fairly recently that 1280x1024 has been replaced as the common low end desktop option by various widescreen formats (I think 1440x900 is the most common though I have seen some desktops as low as 1280x800!).
even according to steams hardware survey ( http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ [steampowered.com] ) which is likely to be
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These wide screen monitors might be great for games like flight or for viewing wide screen movies but they sure as hell suck for large spreadsheets and documents. I think that they are part of a plot to destroy western civilization. Its almost impossible to get a monitor more than 1200 pixels high these days.
Twice 960x1200 (Score:2)
These wide screen monitors might be great for games like flight or for viewing wide screen movies but they sure as hell suck for large spreadsheets and documents.
Then put two 960x1200 pixel windows side-by-side on your 1920x1200 pixel monitor. Windows 7 has Snap for this, and even Windows XP lets the user click one window's taskbar button, Ctrl+right click another, and Tile Vertically.
I think that they are part of a plot to destroy western civilization. Its almost impossible to get a monitor more than 1200 pixels high these days.
This was as true in the days of 1600x1200 as it is now.
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Hint 1: View documents two pages at a time, like opening a book. Generally this fits a widescreen aspect ratio like a glove.
Hint 2: Buy a screen with a rotatable stand and run in portrait mode. Just about any modern video card will support this.
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You've been reading too much Slashdot. Now go and play outside, it's a lovely day.
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she's wearing a shirt, it looks like propellers because she's semi-transparent
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I cannot answer your question confidently, further study will be needed.
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Pasties, under a semi-transparent shirt.
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That's nothing. Stare at the picture of clouds opposite the weird lady with propeller-nipples. Keep staring.
After a while, you can clearly see a naked man bending over with his junk hanging out the back.
Uh, nevermind.
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hmmm, lol? (Score:2)
The big question is whether Microsoft can make Games For Windows Live relevant in a market where Steam has taken hold, or if it's too late.
He must have a different definition of "relevant" than mine to make that a "big question".
AOE MMO (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless it's persistent (which it isn't), how can they claim that it's a "massively multiplayer"? You might as well call any online game a "massive multiplayer" if:
a. It has a game lobby
b. Many people can play online at once.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play my favorite MMO, Counter-Strike.
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Counter-strike doesn't have a lobby...
What about Diablo II? Server-side persistent characters, servers can't be hosted by players (at least officially), both PvE and PvP play...
No, the true definition of an MMO is very large numbers of players being in the same game world at once. In a strategy game that could be ownership of small territories on a large world map. In an RPG it means literally many characters in the world.
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Not according to the trailer (Score:3, Informative)
According to the trailer it is persistent.
Re:AOE MMO (Score:4, Informative)
A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO) is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet, and feature at least one persistent world.
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I think the confusion lies in the definitions of persistence. One meaning refers to the world's continued operation when the player is absent, as in WoW, which is the sense you use. However it can also refer to the persistence of player actions, such as the way Halo keeps track of the positions of dead enemies and weapon drops indefinitely. WoW is quite clearly not a very persistent game in that sense, otherwise it'd be a ghost town knee-deep in corpses, which explains the AC's confusion.
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Hmm, since we're quoting Wikipedia, I think it's actually appropriate for once to say "[citation needed]". Ordinarily, on Slashdot, this is a stupid and/or snarky way to say "I disagree", but in this case, I don't necessarily disagree. I'm just not quite sure where or how this supposedly "official" definition of a brand-new term came from. Especially with those {{POV-check}} and {{Refimprove}} tags at the top of the WP article.
That's something they are good at (Score:4, Funny)
At least, reboots are something Microsoft are very good at.
In Soviet Russia, (Score:4, Funny)
You reboot Microsoft! Wait, that happens all over the world, not just Russia
Games for Windows (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding, based on an editorial in Edge earlier this year [edge-online.com], is that GfW just plain flat-out doesn't work. Not in the sense that its limited user base makes for poor multiplayer or that it has insufficient publisher for its downloadable games service, but in the sense that it does not reliably allow you to download games or play online.
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What else should we expect from the same company that brought us PlaysForSure [wikipedia.org], which doesn't always "Play For Sure".
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What else should we expect from the same company that brought us PlaysForSure [wikipedia.org], which doesn't always "Play For Sure".
Come on. That name was a blatant attempt to introduce FUD into a marketplace where previously there had been none. In this case, the FUD was "How can I be sure my MP3 player will play tracks I buy?"
Given the number of legitimate online music stores that operated at the time, the correct answer to that would have been "What are you talking about? You can't buy music online anyway!"
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Reboot is such a poor word (Score:4, Insightful)
The term "reboot" is used to describe something "done again", but I think it's a pretty stupid word to use as it's not descriptive at all. Does my OS or hardware somehow radically change whenever I reboot it? Maybe Windows users experience this, I don't know.
When I first heard the term years ago I immediately disliked it. It feels like someone that don't work with computers as a profession thought that it was "cool" or "trendy" to use "pc terms" outside their original context, so "reboot" was the victim of the day.
< /rant >
Re:Reboot is such a poor word (Score:4, Interesting)
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Rebooting a show or series is like pressing the reset button: everything is cleared from the table and begun anew, but still with the same hardware basis. However, what happens in the boot sequence? Which OS do you choose in grub? Is there a live cd in the drive? You might end up somewhere completely different compared with before the reboot, even though the underlying principles are exactly the same. Similarly with shows and series, the subsequent seasons an
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The software can radically change with a reboot.
Rebooting a show or series is like pressing the reset button: everything is cleared from the table and begun anew, but still with the same hardware basis. However, what happens in the boot sequence? Which OS do you choose in grub? Is there a live cd in the drive? You might end up somewhere completely different compared with before the reboot, even though the underlying principles are exactly the same. Similarly with shows and series, the subsequent seasons and games = boot sequence.
I guess you could look at it like that: When I reboot a computer you "never know what you're gonna get," but I'm not really buying it. Rebooting isn't viewed as something inconsistent or earth shattering: You expect a consistent result when rebooting a computer. Sure you could boot another OS, but that OS was there all along, it didn't just appear. You could boot a live CD but the old OS would still be there. Rebooting is a pretty safe, normal event that is related to consistent results without anything une
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You are right, reboot is a shite term. It's clearly just marketing bollocks.
Reset would be a much more accurate, but reset kind of implies that it (a TV series) was done wrong in the past. If the old series' DVDs are still on the shelves, you don't want to do that!
Taking a word from the world of tech means there isn't much baggage of extra meaning to most people that "reset" does have. Apart from to geeks like you and I who hear shit like "Batman has been rebooted", and cringe.
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Reboot: To start over from scratch. These days it's not entirely accurate what with these new-fangled "hard drive" things, but go back a bit and that's exactly what a reboot did.
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Reboot: To start over from scratch.
Only if you have a computer without persistent storage...
I doubt Microsoft has started over from scratch, but I guess time will tell.
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Reboot: To start over from scratch. These days it's not entirely accurate what with these new-fangled "hard drive" things, but go back a bit and that's exactly what a reboot did.
This is interesting. I was not aware that it was an old expression (predating PCs, which you're implying). But after checking with the free online dictionary, I'm not sure it is, since it's not mentioned outside of a computer context (correct me if I'm wrong).
The term "booting a computer" comes from the term "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" meaning that you're helping yourself / being independent (accomplishing some task). A computer booting thus means something in the line that it's starting up and
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When you reboot a computer (especially an old one without much by way of persistent memory) you are losing all your session-specific data, and restarting your programmes from their original parameters. Assuming you don't feed in exactly the same inputs, the new session will produce markedly different results.
When a TV show is "rebooted" you are getting rid of everything that has happened so far and restarting based on just the original premise.
Seems like a good enough analogy to me.
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You are so caught up in the physics of re-booting that you ignore the reason people re-boot. Because something has changed. And in the Windows world, this often includes new software, new drivers, new... stuff that is an improvement.
Sure, so if the term was used in the meaning of "incremental change" it would be a (slightly) different story, but it's used as if to mean "complete rewrite" which isn't what I expect would happen whenever I reboot my computer.
MS not serious about the PC (Score:2)
... they are not committed to the platform since they adopted xbox as their strategy for entering the gaming market. Only in hindsight did they realize the damage they did for the relevancy of their platform as a whole. The nerd in me hopes linux and linux apps finally comes of age and the only reason people will keep windows around is for certain games and more and more real work will be done on linux or within the browser.
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rename (Score:2)
Well, at least when I go by the availability of the website, it should be renamed to Age of Empire offline, because it apparently is.
And I dimly remember that "Flight" (or maybe "Flight!") is already taken as a name for a computer game. Not that anyone at MS would care.
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Why would they? Is Microsoft Flight taken? If the original dev team sue for being too close to "Microsoft Flight Simulator" they'll just brush 'em off with hand-held fans improvised from leftover product key stickers and maybe call it Windows Flight if they're nervous. A little pair of blue birdies tells me they'll find ways of keeping names without keeping names and w
Their own fault in the first place. (Score:4, Interesting)
I never stopped playing AOE (specifically AOE2:Conquerors). I *DID* stop playing it online because MS just sucked the life out of the multiplayer aspect by locking it to a single vendor for online matchmaking and then destroying that facility when they got bored of AOE.
So, what's here for *me*, someone that wants to play AOE but was forced by Microsoft's enforced-obsolescence to stop playing it online unless I wanted to faff about with third-party software or entering IP addresses? I won't believe it won't happen again, and I don't believe that a new MMO "reboot" will be anywhere near as good as the AOE2:Conq. And are we talking about a monthly subscription model or can I actually *OWN* the game (or at least my copy of it) forever?
In the meantime, playing the classic version over a private VPN it is.
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I still enjoy playing Age of Mythology now and again. I don't bother playing online, though, since I'm not very good and will only wind up getting beaten.
Aww, shitty games :( (Score:2)
Will the default airport still be meigs field? (Score:2)
Will the default airport still be meigs field?
games for windows live . . . ugh (Score:2)
I bought Batman Arkham Asylum and had numerous problems with Games for Windows Live.
GWL slowed the loading of the game, gave weird errors, and there was even a problem getting a patch due to this running in the background.
I haven't bought a game with GWL since.
I boycotted Steam for 5 years after having a bad experience 1 time, I'll probably give GWL that much time to correct their issues as well.
BTW:
Steam still has MAJOR faults that nobody really mentions on gaming sites very often such as server lists not
Seems like just yesterday... (Score:2)
Seems like just yesterday that they canned the whole group that made Flight Simulator...
That lasted a long time. What was it like 9 months ago?
This 'Flight' better be pretty awesome. X was pretty nice once they patched it to use multiple cores and now you can find it cheap on sale. If 'Flight' doesn't add anything beyond graphics (which were awesome on X if you could crank them, including multiple positionable monitors/views) then there's no reason to upgrade.
Re:What about Hearts, Freecell and Minesweeper? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually Minesweeper has been part of Windows since it was released in 1990's "Microsoft Entertainment Pack" and Hearts was included in 1992's Windows for Workgroups 3.1 as a demonstration of the "for Workgroups" part of the name.
So that's 20 years for Minesweeper and 18 years for Hearts. I don't know when Freecell was first released. It was part of win32s, but I can't find out when the first version of that thing shipped.
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So that's 20 years for Minesweeper and 18 years for Hearts. I don't know when Freecell was first released. It was part of win32s, but I can't find out when the first version of that thing shipped.
A little bit of digging shows it was later included in the Entertainment Pack 2 which was released in 1991 according to Microsoft's support lifecycle pages. It could not have been earlier than 1990 since that's when Windows 3.0 came out so 19-20 years old. Since it missed EP1, probably 19. And I can't really believe I bothered to go looking.
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Re:What about Hearts, Freecell and Minesweeper? (Score:5, Funny)
And I can't really believe I bothered to go looking.
I win.
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For a really old one, there's Nibbles which came with MS-DOS.
It was one of the example programs that came with QBasic. Text based, including shared-screen-shared-keyboard multiplayer. Surprisingly addictive in multiplayer mode, it didn't play correctly in more modern, faster machines (due to an easy to fix bug with the delay calculation code) and was last seen packaged with, I believe, NT 4.0
Plenty of hours wasted on that one during colleage when we should've been doing course work ...
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Check out the FMV [youtube.com] from the new photo-realistic 3D version of Minesweeper
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It's particularly sad that PC gaming once meant free of hassle, except perhaps for a CD check. Now it means rootkits and spyware. I have to make sure a game is not sold by Blizzard, is not Steam Powered, and is not part of Games for Windows before I know that I can actually just install and play the game that I paid for.
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Or you can just get flightgear http://www.flightgear.org/ [flightgear.org] , which lets you fly against others, or fly planes, UFOs, even a Deux Cheveaux.
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It's particularly sad that PC gaming once meant free of hassle, except perhaps for a CD check. Now it means rootkits and spyware. I have to make sure a game is not sold by Blizzard, is not Steam Powered, and is not part of Games for Windows before I know that I can actually just install and play the game that I paid for.
Yeah I miss the days of Doom and Duke Nukem. Install the game (copies to hard drive), modify my autoexec.bat and config.sys (did this once and added a menu), reboot into Game Mode when I play so I have more than 520kb of conventional (I got up to 740, which is good because Wolf needed 720K and that required some tricks since video sat around 640k). Other than that, sometimes I had to figure with a Setup.exe program or make sure SET BLASTER was right. When I'm done I can reboot into regular mode so Windo
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Which is why some PSone games loaded level data on the fly, as needed, as intended. Compare the Spyro games to Mario 64. Some PS2 games do the same thing, ever play EQOA, you'll never see a load screen past boot up unless you directly TP somewhere. You could walk/swim from Fayspires to the Kappa fortress on Odus and never see a single load screen.
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Any idiot can torrent a cracked game and play Dr. Mario on their PC trying to clean out all 800 viruses.
Hacking an Xbox requires a few minutes of thought and reading some instructions.
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I wouldn't be surprised to see if Microsoft does the same with Age of Empires- AOE and AOK, (and to some extent, III) were all fairly c
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That's what I thought... they probably just bought and rebranded another small company's flight simulator, as they often do when it's too hard to innovate for themselves.
Also, maybe the term "reboot" will be more appropriate for when they fire the new development team again later this year? ^_^