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Domain: greggman.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to greggman.com.

Stories · 2

  1. Capcom Takes Grand Theft Auto To Japan

    Games · Playstation · · posted by simoniker · from the grand-evil-theft-fighter-alpha dept. · 66 comments
    Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a press release announcing that Capcom will publish the phenomenally successful Grand Theft Auto 3 in Japan. It appears the big Japan publisher will "..localize, publish and distribute.. Grand Theft Auto 3" for both Playstation 2 and PC, and "Grand Theft Auto 3 is scheduled for release in the Japanese market in Fall 2003." Interestingly, one commentary about GTA3 in Japan says that the author's Japanese friends "..have been disgusted that such a game exists, and judgmental, as in 'that's the kind of game only an American would like'", but the game's suitability for the Japanese market will only be definitely proved/disproved by sales figures.

  2. Employers Who Hold Back Their Employees?

    Ask · Editorial · · posted by Cliff · from the ethical-employer-behavior dept. · 279 comments
    greggman asks: "So, I'm watching 'Tonight 2', the night news program here in Japan and they are showing E3 coverage. I guess one game that hit it off was a game by KOEI called Dynasty something or other. They visited KOEI here in Yokoyama Japan but they had masked out all faces from the team. When the interviewer asked why, the company rep said 'because other companies would try to steal our employees'. That's messed UP!! I consider that to be akin to treating your employees like slaves. If you can't afford to keep your employees and therefore have to make sure they don't find out about better opportunities then you deserve to go out of business. It's their life not the company's. It almost seems like there'd be a law against action like that. All I can suggest is that you don't support companies that actively prevent their employees from bettering themselves." Couple this with the long hours, the draconian employment contracts, and the insane deadlines, and I begin to wonder if this guy has a serious point. For all the money that programmers make, do Employers do more to make their jobs harder than most?

    "What do you think? I'm not saying a company should go out of its way to find opportunities for their employees but deliberately getting in the way seems to cross some kind of line to me.

    I've actually run a company before and these kind of questions came up. At least once somebody called and actually asked permission to recruit somebody from us. He was a friend but had a good opportunity. I talked to one of my partners and he said we shouldn't get in the way. We were lucky our employee chose to stay as we were not big enough to really offer more but there was no way we were going to prevent him from deciding for himself which we felt like would be immoral and un-ethical."