Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Buying Call of Duty 2 tonight | Will consoles have big hard drives and download services in 2016?

In 10 years time everyone will be downloading 5 gig files regularly anyways. In 1996, I had a modem that handled 33.6 kbps, now I could get a broadband connection in town with 4 Mbps. Purchase online and download it – 1 hour later, you're playing it! Children don't have credit cards and some people like to pay in cash whenever they can. US broadband speeds are verrrrrrrrrrrrrry slow compare to the rest of the world cos I am only getting 1.5 Mbit. The rest of the world has 8 Mbit connections in the middle class range.

By 2016 Gigabit speeds will be nothing special for those who want it, If videogames have blown out to 50GB by 2016 over a 512 Mbit connection...a 50Gb download would only take (50x8)GBits/second 0.5Gbps = 800 seconds! 50 GB BD will do the same job 8 years sooner...this is the truth. The game industry knows the USA lags behind the rest of the world in broadband. North America buys more games than Europe, period. Still, we've been playing games off the hard drive for 16 years on PC. I know I'll be getting 250 GB minimum in my new PC. The HP LiveStrong is shipped back as we speak and it'll be another week before I can purchase the Systemax Hellcat as a late Xmas gift.

A.) Nintendo Revolution's hard drive is 512 MB containing NES, SNES, and N64 game images.
B.) Xbox 360 has a 20 GB external hard drive for lossy music and expansion packs.
C.)I periodically download 3.3 GB Linux ISOs such as Knoppix or 1.5 GB ISO for OpenSUSE
D.) The Playstation 3 hard drive will have the latest free Linux installed on it. Hook up your USB keyboard and mouse to make it a functional computer.

Today, I went to Century Community College although it wasn't the first time. After taking the orientation (the rules), and I signed up for mathematics. The consolers were nice there so I was polite. After all, The school isn't up to date with their computers. They're still on Pentium 4 3.2 GHz with hyper threading, 1 Gig of RAM, 120 GB hard drive. We have a society that grew up on 32-bit processors for a decade thinking this is as much power as they'll ever need. It seems that our society grew up with Intel because it's in all our schools and most people's computers. I rarely see any AMD processor except at my house 'course. The Pentium processor has made famous in stability and the 64-bit Intel Xeon is famous in super computers (the IBM Blue Gene). Athlon 64 burns less heat due to lower clock frequency, but that doesn't make them perform any less than a Pentium 4.

This school hasn't made the switch to Linux or even OpenOffice 2.0. Somebody was stocking me today, but it was one of the consolers as I never stayed in the same place. Didn't make friends – yet, although I faced up to people and shouted “Firefox rocks”, “What up, what up”, “Anyone like southern rock...anyone at all?” and stuff than I was silent the remaining of the time. Kept electronica music out of the conversation knowing the conversation would be silly, kind of weird.

Hey, I am going to purchase Call of Duty 2 not on Xbox 360, but PC because FPS play better on PC with keyboard and mouse over analog pad. The main character is the Russian sniper from Enemy of the Gates. It is my first pick over Soul Caliber III, Ratchet Deadlocked, and Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow. Call of Duty 2 also had the highest score. I played Call of Duty two years ago in 2003 and 2004. The Quake 3 modified game engine looked excellent three years ago.

I enjoyed F.E.A.R a lot. The game was creepy, but I wasn't scared and wanted to get in the middle of the action. The lighting special effects were brutal on my Radeon 9800 XT taking a big hit on the frame rate! I played through half of it before I repartitioned Windows XP. I needed a fresh installation to begin the new year with. Now, I'm thinking of installing F.E.A.R, Doom 3, Half-life 2, Unreal Tournament (1st one), and Call of Duty 2.

I completed Lunar the Silver Star yesterday, and am thinking of playing the sequel before school starts on January 12th. It'll be tough completing Call of Duty 2 and Lunar 2 in one week because I would have to play everyday.

No comments :