I used to play SNES Faceball quite a bit with a friend that owned the system. I marveled at the digitized speech that said "Have a nice day!" when you lost, almost as much as I hated the smug, asshole tone the game programmers gave that bit of speech.

Resolutions are news now. What I think that means... #1

Time and again when we have a thread about a game's resolution I get told that 'no one' cares outside of GAF. Yet there it is reported as a major story on every mainstream gaming site. There it is reported on websites like Digital Spy, who's main headline right now is that Beyoncé reposted someone else's Instagram photos.


Why are such sites reporting on this, all of a sudden? I presume because the stories are generating discussion and traffic. If it generates traffic for one site, other sites are going to start running the story. Whether your average gamer knows exactly what those numbers mean doesn't really matter, they know that 1080p is better than 720p. They know that 900p isn't as good as 1080p.


Even if they couldn't identify something as 1080p, it's in their head that 1080p is better. Thanks to TV manufacturers. Thanks to Blu-Rays. Thanks to competing streaming services. When they see a story like 'Game X is this on PS4 and less on Xbox One' they understand that it means the PS4 version is better, even if they don't understand anything else.


Most gaming sites didn't even report this stuff in headlines last gen. It's happened this gen off the back of some pretty serious system wars and multiplatform games suddenly becoming stronger on the PS4 when they were usually weaker on PS2 and PS3. As a long time participant in threads comparing different versions of multiplatform games, we've gone from a few pages to multiple threads on the topic that balloon to thousands of posts.


I don't think the genie is being put back in the bottle. The news is out there now. It's having an effect whether people understand it or not... and many people don't even here on NeoGAF.


But I don't think there is any turning back now. I don't think we're going to stop seeing resolutions make for major headlines. Bemoan it all you like, but that's where we are. These stories are going to effect sales. Will they slow the sales of a 900p game down? Maybe not, but the platform with the lower number is going to be impacted at least slightly.

Interesting Gaf post.

Is it eleventy-billion-in-the-hole bad?

The whole Kinect thing was a big joke. I'm sorry, I don't like talking to my games console like a fucking moron to get it to do things that I could just push a button to do. It has been out for ages, then they tried a big push with Xbox One to make it a staple feature out of the box and STILL nobody has developed any kind of really compelling reason why this glorified camera is needed, or how it makes games any better (better with kinect....lmao). Better with Kinect according to.....who? The guys at Microsoft that greenlit the thing in the first place?

And to charge an extra $100 fucking dollars for your console just to force this into my hands?!

I'm tired of dumb gimmicks like this being FORCED onto gaming and hyped up as the next big thing when in reality all it is is a prayer ball to try and hit the same lightning in a bottle that the Wii managed. The Wii did what it did though, because at the end of the day it was STILL a functional controller. Not a camera you talk to and wave your hands at.

Stick to reality, guys. Stick to realistic innovations and the stuff that makes sense. Don't try to force me to believe a dumb gimmick is the greatest thing ever made, or that it makes my games better when it clearly doesn't. And don't ruin once proud developers like Rareware by turning them into a factory to pump out gimmick games for a gimmick peripheral.

Eat a diseased dick.

Your CDs are dying

"Adrienne LaFrance reports at the Atlantic that if you've tried listening to any of the old CDs lately from your carefully assembled collection from the 1980's or 1990's you may have noticed that many of them won't play. 'While most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. My once-treasured CD collection — so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994 — isn't just aging; it's dying. And so is yours.'



Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress is trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. But it's a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years and even CDs made by the same company in the same year and wrapped in identical packaging might have totally different lifespans. 'We're trying to predict, in terms of collections, which of the types of CDs are the discs most at risk,' says France. 'The problem is, different manufacturers have different formulations so it's quite complex in trying to figure out what exactly is happening because they've changed the formulation along the way and it's proprietary information.' There are all kinds of forces that accelerate CD aging in real time. Eventually, many discs show signs of edge rot, which happens as oxygen seeps through a disc's layers. Some CDs begin a deterioration process called bronzing, which is corrosion that worsens with exposure to various pollutants. The lasers in devices used to burn or even play a CD can also affect its longevity. 'The ubiquity of a once dominant media is again receding. Like most of the technology we leave behind, CDs are are being forgotten slowly,' concludes LaFrance. 'We stop using old formats little by little. They stop working. We stop replacing them. And, before long, they're gone.'"

The hell?

So unless you vacuum pack you CDs, everything's going to rot within 20 years. Given our ages now and imagine when you started buying optical media, that means that stuff you bought in the 90s could be dying right now, including games.

edgecrusher said:

The other night when he acted like a drama queen because he didn't get 50 points? What a douche he is.

Awww boo hoo your reject former Celtic assholes Garnett and Pierce are going to lose AGAIN to Lebron. They are the biggest bitches in the NBA. Lebron can do what he wants he's the best in the world.

Geez, is that intentional or did he make a mistake in not including Nintendo?

Dvader said:

Awww boo hoo your reject former Celtic assholes Garnett and Pierce are going to lose AGAIN to Lebron. They are the biggest bitches in the NBA. Lebron can do what he wants he's the best in the world.

Hahaha...honestly I don't even like Basketball. Mostly BECAUSE too many players seem like drama queens.

Haha NPD defines core gamer as people who play MS, Sony, or PC for at least 22 hours a week and play core genres. No mention of Nintendo at all. Wow.

gamingeek said:

The hell?

So unless you vacuum pack you CDs, everything's going to rot within 20 years. Given our ages now and imagine when you started buying optical media, that means that stuff you bought in the 90s could be dying right now, including games.

Yeah, I remember reading about this stuff years ago. I kind of put this in the back of my mind.