The Damned

Really?Then someone really missed that typo in the page I got the price from. And I'm reading some articles I searched for on the price, and I see anywhere from $100 to $150. But still... $200, versus how much for the Blu-Ray drive? And regardless of which is the better deal, again, the preferred format hasn't been chosen yet. So, until one wins over the other, any value the PS3 may have as a movie player is, at best, tenuous.

Explain. /10 CHARACTERS

You can talk about how great a value the PS3 is because it plays Blu-Ray movies until you pass out. There's just one giant, glaring problem with that value: the format war is very young, and there are massive hurdles to overcome first. 1. Studios will decide which format they want to publish their movies on. They want the format that will be the most available to their market. This will depend upon which one has the cheaper player. And if Sony has to underprice their own system with a Blu-Ray player in it for hundreds of dollars just to keep it in the reach of the average consumer (which is still a little high), while MS can just throw a (what is it? $50?) add-on drive that does the same thing, I think we know where people and their wallets are looking. 2. You can also talk about how much better the picture is on which ever format. Thats great. If you're some sort of super high-tech fetishist. Too bad such "hardcore" people are the minority. They are, don't try to argue it. Go into any electronics store and watch the people there. They buy all kinds of stuff that would make technophiles gag. Companies make money selling to the masses, not the elite. Look at the iPod. It's not the "best" player out there. There are several other models that exceed it in features, battery life, storage size... but the iPod is still the player of choice. The point is that Blu-Ray may have such and such features and bandwidth and whatever other technical terms you can throw around, but at the end of the day, people don't know or care about that stuff. Beta had better image quality, and yet it lost out to VHS. 3. Major stores, especially Wal-Mart, don't want to carry more than one format. They would have to divide their shelve space to accommodate the different formats. They want to have one format taking up their shelves. Wal-Mart is a major company. They sell DVDs just as much, if not more than, everyone else. They will demand that studios pick one over the other (there was even a press announcement earlier this year about this. I'd have to go find it, but I do remember it). So there's another concern. If push comes to shove, the big distributors will start throwing their weight around. The whole point is that there is no "value" to the PS3 as a movie player. In the next year, we might see HD-DVD win by a landslide. Or we may see the opposite. Or we may see a mostly even race. It's only when Blu-Ray wins as the format of choice and becomes widely accepted will this phantom value become real. Until then, don't tell me how great it is that I don't have to pay those extra $400 for a player. A player that might end up being useless in the future,

Agreed. And he asked why no one in UnMod liked him... Jesus. Sephfire, keep them coming. Wait... don't you have a pokemon remix to do?:confused:

I'm pretty sure he's done other artwork in the past.

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/01/07/gamestop-pulls-out-creative-stops-to-move-ps3s/ More and more, stories and reports of PS3s not selling come up. People are reportedly returning the ones they bought, as well. It seems that those that bought them with hopes of selling them online for a tidy profit have been screwed. And when people are returning your product unopened... ouch. The interest for a system should not wane so soon after its launch. This is a bad sign. Only with a major price drop this year will we see sale pick up again. But a price drop on a system that is already being sold at a loss of hundreds of dollars? Sony may want people to buy PS3s and get that installed base, but with their massive losses this last year and the various problems they've had as well... I can't see how they could afford it. Back when the PS2 was king and they had money everywhere, they could afford the price drops. But the money they sunk into the PS3, combined with their stock falling to almost having it taken off the market, and then the battery recall, and the government hearings and investigations into their alleged selling of computer chips to foreign powers. They just don't have the means to do a major price cut. It's going to hurt Sony a lot this year, I think. They will see losses and lose ground to the competition, and only with a few years of sacrifice (and possibly layoffs, to save enough money to keep the PS3 going) will they regain some of their past territory. I predict hard time for Sony. Hard times, indeed.

Like I said, I'm not that familiar with IRC. I think I've used it three times in my life. And there was so a pokepun. I said "slack off". That's one right there. If you don't get it, you never used a Slaking.

What? There actually is a Genem 2000?

Done. They should have been activated already, but they weren't... odd. Also, extra points to the first person that finds all the pokepuns in the new announcement.

I gave it a listen. It's short. Fix that. Kidding, kidding... Also, update on the first page. All that extra sleep I got this week seems to have given me some energy. Stupid winter blahs...

1. Samuel L. Jackson is not Afro Samurai. Samuel L. Jackson does he voice for another character completely. Download the show, and then go to ten minutes in. That annoying guy that shows up? That's Jackson. The main selling point for this show is misleading. Intsa-Fail for that right there. (And yes, I know the IMDB page lists him as the title character, but we all know that no user-generated content can ever be wrong:rolleyes: ) If Jackson does do the voice for Afro, then he's not doing much for it. I think he grunted a few times, and that was it. I had to turn the volume up just to make out most of what he was saying. 2. There's "all flash and no substance", and then there's this. It's over-flashed, stylized to the point where it's actually sort of ugly. For a show that wants so desperately wants to be anime, it sure fucked it up. They even threw in random Japanese in the bar scene for no reason. It's there, you just have to turn the volume up to hear him mumble it. 3. The violence was terrible. Nothing warranted it. I think fans of Ninja Scroll got together and wrote this. In fact, that fight with the group of guys looks sort of familiar. I'm not about to go rent Ninja Scroll and skip through it to find the exact scene, but I'd bet it's in there. And don't say it's an homage. That's bullshit. 4. Technology is more random than the action. One guy has an old 15th century style rifle, while another has revolvers, while another has a cell phone and high-tech binoculars. And there are androids or cyborgs or something at one point. I guess I can't really expect much from Spike and the people they're aiming for, but come on...

I see this more and more. I smell a new OCR meme in the works. I love your work, Fishy. I truly do. Let's not quarrel and instead, be friends. I have a cake. You can have not one, but two, pieces if you want.

Wait... why did you draw a young Micheal Jackson in the first panel? I would use a smiley here, but the new ones... they're just not right.

What? Didn't you get my psychic telegram? Sign up on the boards, and go at it. And stay away from that Fishy guy. He's a no-goodnic with his "izzles" and such. He's a bad influence.

Check your personal control panel.

If this guy thinks one person pointing out that a lot of us already have the music readily available is being an asshole or something, than he's got issues of some kind.

You should make another version called Grammar Nazi. Instead of throwing stars, you use little swastik... Maybe that was a little too much.

There's only so much philosophical material in the world, you know...

While I do hesitate to go off-topic, I have to agree with the general idea here. "Wii60" has gone from a cute little play on words to something that even fanboys on both sides are talking about. Anyone that followed the big three at E3 2006 might remember that's where the idea began. Sony and MS both made their own little puns, Sony with "PSWii". Both saw that Nintendo was in a position to take a fairly significant chunk of the market with their new system. I saw the "Wii60" and "PSWii" comments at the time as signs of uncertainty and early damage control. Now, I see how "PSWii" is not going to happen (the price issue, plus the inherent fanboy hate between the Sony and Nintendo camps), and how "Wii60" is more and more likely for more and more people. You're right, the way the factions have split and aligned this generation is odd...

Think of two carnivals: one fits inside a small field, the other is spread out over a half dozen square miles. They both have the same rides and attractions, but the one that is tighter together seems more fun because it's packed up so much tighter. Think of how a carnival would look if each ride was a twenty minute walk from each other. That's how I see the worlds of OoT and TP. They both offer the same things (TP actually offers a little more), but since OoT had a smaller world, is just seems more jam-packed with stuff. TP is still a very good game, though. I'm going to play it again in the future, maybe during one of those times when new releases are slow.

Did you move your computer's antenna around?

That's odd, because my copy of Flood Plains is 128, while Snowbound is variable (I think the project offered two different quality levels). iPods support VBR files, so that can't be the problem. If you hadn't already said you redownloaded the songs, I'd say your copies were corrupted or something. Odd, indeed.

If they're that secluded, then they don't deserve to participate in the great social commune that is the internet. Fie, I say, on them and their exclusion from our glorious modern society of wires and waves! They choose to live in the dark cave of ignorance and fear, while we, the true sons and daughters on technology, bathe in the radiance of that which is the online world!

Or those of us that have all the songs from here (including the removed ones), we can just play them anytime at all, without having to request them. But hey, whatever works for ya. Also, hard drives are cheap these days. Get a good 300 gig for about a hundred bucks or so.

Oh, they're all crazy to some degree. Am I right, guys? Am I right?