Yes that's right. I think they were finally closed only a few weeks back or maybe they are still up ?? Yakumo
Online play was fun back in 2005, but I saw the darker side of it the last 2 or so years. You'd be amazed at all the childish crap I witnessed on Halo 2 on LIVE. And I wasn't even playing. I thought about playing Metal Gear Solid 3 Online, but I figured it would suck anyway. And I have heard absolute horror stories about the community. Someone got banned for beating an admin and shit. I never played DoW or anything online, but I have also seen people get banned from the Relic Forums (fansite forums) for stuff they did in online DoW matches. Thats why if I ever played DoW online, I'd probably use Hamachi.
Nintendo is living the dream right now: that portable everybody thought it was a joke when compared to PSP now rules the market, and the Wii, which its essentially a 6 years old console is selling for even more than the original system at launch and people is so crazy for one that theres stock shortages everywhere. Now, why would they care at online gaming while LIVE on Xbox couldnt get even near the original userbase expectations? why would they spend money when according to several studies only 1 in 10 Xbox users is fully online? and lets not even talk about PS2 users: the system may be worst than Live but is still better than the one nintendo had in GC. Plus nintendo is always slow on market trends, just look how much time it took them to move into optical storage, and even so it was a custom one. Whoa! how the feck he got his address anyway?
Mr. Casual means beating him in-game probably Online gaming can't be all bad though. I mean I usually don't like playing against people I don't know, but I would like to play games like the next mariokart or F-zero accross Europe with some friends for example.
I remember someone once saying that Nintendo's use of proprietary optical media was detrimental for developers. Now, I imagine the capacity of the 8cm optical discs was to blame, however, 8cm discs have been around forever. So that leads me to believe developers were pissed at having to buy the GCODs straight from Nintendo instead of being able to use off the shelf media. As far as I'm concerned, the developers should be grateful for the added security from piracy. Look how long it took for the GCN copy-protection to be broken. Anyhow, yeah, Nintendo moves at its own pace, which has its positive and negative affects. :shrug:
Nintendo has notoriously bad third party licensing fees and strict contracts - that's why developers dislike Nintendo. The hardware and mini-DVD discs were fine. No doubt they chose a propriety system partly to avoid the DVD consortium fees too. Oh! http://contracts.onecle.com/thq/nintendo.lic.1997.05.09.shtml
Yeah I thought that too, but theres a lot of "experts" (in piracy) that agree about the GC not being popular enough to get cracked and therefore it took a while to design a modchip for it. Ergo, its wasnt becos the GC was too hard to crack, but becos there wasnt enough people willing to pay for that.
