The thing people are missing is that you can switch the panels in your hotkey bar. There are what, four or five panels? You set two of the trigger buttons to rotate through them, and set O, X, [] and Triangle to 1-4 on the boxes, and you have access to 20 or so spells. That's more than I use regularly. You've got a stick for moving, a stick for mousing, you've still got all four d-pad directions, select, and start to use. Not to mention L3 and R3, if you push down on the sticks. There are actually as many buttons on a PS3 controller as I regularly use in WoW to control my character. The only difficult part would be the lack of a mouse, as it would be gimped with a stick, but it's still doable.
I work at Best Buy as well, and I can tell you that this article is slightly misinformed. First of all, as far as I can tell, this announcement doesn't seem all that credible, for one, and for two we've already been told that both the 80GB and the 40GB models are "at risk". That means that we're no longer going to be carrying them.
Before everyone gets their pants in a bunch over that, I can explain the whole situation fairly easily. They are discontinuing both the 80 and the 40GB SKUs... and removing Motorstorm and Spiderman 3 from them respectively, and relaunching them without these packins. This is something we've known was coming for a while--it was pretty obvious they weren't going to keep the extra content in there for the life of the system. So they're ditching the bonus content, just like Microsoft did with their two free games that they packaged in over the holidays.
Best Buy has communicated to their employees through "the Watercooler" and basically made it known that we can expect the new SKUs to be made available in February.
Apparently all of you Xbox fanboys are quick to forget that the Sony Connect store has been available on PCs for a long, long time. Yes, a comprehensive digital music store, owned and run by Sony, years before the 360 ever game out, and longer than that before Microsoft enabled downloadable content on their system. Now if Sony already has a digital music store, has a history of digital distribution of content, how exactly is this Sony copying off of Microsoft? Because they didn't design it specifically for a console? Uhhh, big deal? It works in your internet browser, so I'm not quite sure where the difference is. While Connect doesn't offer video content to the best of my knowledge, I'm pretty sure that the leap from, "Hey! Let's charge for downloadable music" to "Hey! Let's charge for downloadable movies!" isn't such a huge leap of thinking that they were unable to come up with it. I think you fanboys need to do a little research and stop being ignorant.
I'd me more impressed if it was being produced or directed by Shinya Tsukamoto. In a lot of ways I think he's better than Miike, but maybe it's just personal preference. And while I'm crossing off things on a wishlist, I wish Asano Tadanobu was starring, for he is the greatest actor alive.
"For example: BetaMax, MiniDisc, UMD, and (coming soon) BluRay"
And what, exactly was UMD in a format war against? DVD? CD? I'm slightly confused. There was nothing about the UMD that was causing it to compete against any other format. That's like saying the movies they put out for the Gameboy Adveance were in direct competition with DVDs. UMD, like GBA carts, GameCube discs, and pretty much every other format, is just a proprietary format for a game system. They do not fail or succeed, because their purpose is limited to one usage. Calling UMD a failure is a complete irrelevance to the topic at hand. It may not have been a great format for movies to be played on, but frankly, other than a memory stick, it was the only thing that movies could be played on for the PSP, so it was quite successful at what it was supposed to do. Oh, it's also quite successful as a format to put PSP games on, for the reasons stated above. Talking about UMD as a failure is ignorance in the grandest degree.
As for MiniDisc, it actually won the format war with its only direct competition at the time, Philips Digital Compact Cassette. At the time MiniDisc and DCC were the only two formats that were easily able to be recorded and overwritten, so MiniDisc had some early success. It was only the advent of easily writeable CDs that really did the MiniDisc in. But CD was already an established format at the time, and MiniDisc was a new one, so competing with an improvement to an established format was a battle no format could hope to win.
Regardless of all of this, you act as if these things are pre-determined because formats in the past have failed. That is complete ignorance. The success of future formats does not rely on the success of former ones. In fact, it's because of Sony's past failures, particularly the VHS/Betamax failure, that they've come to have the dominant position they are in now. During VHS/Betamax Sony wasn't quick enough to woo the attention of the major studios, and in the end it was the lack of support for the format that did it in. This time around Sony leapt at the chance of getting studio support. They learned their lesson from past mistakes. It's because of their tenacity at pursuing studio support that gave them the upper hand that they have this time. The very thing you point to as evidence of future failure is actually one of the main reasons they will succeed so handily this time around.
I've got a Level 49 Human Mage (Nimlier) on Illidan and I'm a member of the guild Praetorians. To be honest, I only wish I had been there for this. Added to that, I think this is absolutely hilarious.
Illidan is largely a Horde dominated server, and I've spend hours upon hours being camped and ganked or running away from Horde that are ganking me. It's pretty disgusting how often they do it and how long they'll sit around doing it for on Illidan. If you ask anyone on the server that plays for alliance they'll tell you the same thing about the horde. To see something like this happen is like one of my pipe dreams come true after the hours of frustration I've suffered at the hands of the horde. And to be honest, had the situation been reversed, the horde would have done the exact same thing. It's been said before, but if they really wanted to avoid this sort of thing they shouldn't have held the funeral in a contested zone, and by doing so they left themselves wide open for attack.
And to that extent, the people that are calling for a ban are fools. This is what a PVP server is about. Suppose Serenity Now had just been walking about, stumbled into a large group of horde and reacted by slaughtering them? That's perfectly fine to do. Does it make a difference that the group they slaughtered was holding what they considered to be a solemn event? That certainly hasn't stopped any horde from slaughtering the raids I've gotten together after hours of effort right before we enter an instance. So their funeral was a bust, they can go somewhere else or wait until later to finish it or start over. That's how the game works, and this was completely legal in the rules of the game, and it should stay that way.
Play WoW with a PS3 controller
Oct 21st 2008 4:55PM (WoW)Best Buy closing out 80GB PS3
Jan 24th 2008 6:56PM (Joystiq)Before everyone gets their pants in a bunch over that, I can explain the whole situation fairly easily. They are discontinuing both the 80 and the 40GB SKUs... and removing Motorstorm and Spiderman 3 from them respectively, and relaunching them without these packins. This is something we've known was coming for a while--it was pretty obvious they weren't going to keep the extra content in there for the life of the system. So they're ditching the bonus content, just like Microsoft did with their two free games that they packaged in over the holidays.
Best Buy has communicated to their employees through "the Watercooler" and basically made it known that we can expect the new SKUs to be made available in February.
Sony hints at downloadable HDTV and movies on PS3
Feb 19th 2007 5:20PM (Engadget)Sega's Yakuza goes from game to movie
Jan 30th 2007 9:26AM (Joystiq)PS3 bitten by Yellow Dog Linux
Oct 17th 2006 10:20PM (Joystiq)Blu-ray will beat HD-DVD, says Forrester (again)
Oct 8th 2006 1:54PM (Joystiq)And what, exactly was UMD in a format war against? DVD? CD? I'm slightly confused. There was nothing about the UMD that was causing it to compete against any other format. That's like saying the movies they put out for the Gameboy Adveance were in direct competition with DVDs. UMD, like GBA carts, GameCube discs, and pretty much every other format, is just a proprietary format for a game system. They do not fail or succeed, because their purpose is limited to one usage. Calling UMD a failure is a complete irrelevance to the topic at hand. It may not have been a great format for movies to be played on, but frankly, other than a memory stick, it was the only thing that movies could be played on for the PSP, so it was quite successful at what it was supposed to do. Oh, it's also quite successful as a format to put PSP games on, for the reasons stated above. Talking about UMD as a failure is ignorance in the grandest degree.
As for MiniDisc, it actually won the format war with its only direct competition at the time, Philips Digital Compact Cassette. At the time MiniDisc and DCC were the only two formats that were easily able to be recorded and overwritten, so MiniDisc had some early success. It was only the advent of easily writeable CDs that really did the MiniDisc in. But CD was already an established format at the time, and MiniDisc was a new one, so competing with an improvement to an established format was a battle no format could hope to win.
Regardless of all of this, you act as if these things are pre-determined because formats in the past have failed. That is complete ignorance. The success of future formats does not rely on the success of former ones. In fact, it's because of Sony's past failures, particularly the VHS/Betamax failure, that they've come to have the dominant position they are in now. During VHS/Betamax Sony wasn't quick enough to woo the attention of the major studios, and in the end it was the lack of support for the format that did it in. This time around Sony leapt at the chance of getting studio support. They learned their lesson from past mistakes. It's because of their tenacity at pursuing studio support that gave them the upper hand that they have this time. The very thing you point to as evidence of future failure is actually one of the main reasons they will succeed so handily this time around.
Funeral crashing in WoW
Apr 17th 2006 12:34PM (Joystiq)Illidan is largely a Horde dominated server, and I've spend hours upon hours being camped and ganked or running away from Horde that are ganking me. It's pretty disgusting how often they do it and how long they'll sit around doing it for on Illidan. If you ask anyone on the server that plays for alliance they'll tell you the same thing about the horde. To see something like this happen is like one of my pipe dreams come true after the hours of frustration I've suffered at the hands of the horde. And to be honest, had the situation been reversed, the horde would have done the exact same thing. It's been said before, but if they really wanted to avoid this sort of thing they shouldn't have held the funeral in a contested zone, and by doing so they left themselves wide open for attack.
And to that extent, the people that are calling for a ban are fools. This is what a PVP server is about. Suppose Serenity Now had just been walking about, stumbled into a large group of horde and reacted by slaughtering them? That's perfectly fine to do. Does it make a difference that the group they slaughtered was holding what they considered to be a solemn event? That certainly hasn't stopped any horde from slaughtering the raids I've gotten together after hours of effort right before we enter an instance. So their funeral was a bust, they can go somewhere else or wait until later to finish it or start over. That's how the game works, and this was completely legal in the rules of the game, and it should stay that way.
Kudos Serenity Now.