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G4: The Pong Channel?
CoffeeNowDammit writes "Care to watch other people play Pong? You may be able to do so with the debut of G4, a new US cable channel (via participating Comcast cable providers) devoted entirely to video-gaming. G4 will air a marathon of Pong.. 24 hours a day.. see ball, see ball bounce.. for an entire week. Story is here . What a country." This has got to be a joke, right? A fake press release? Please, tell me it's a joke.
I, for one, hope it's NOT a joke. I absolutly love watching others play video games. But that's probably because I suck at them myself. Either way, i'd pay for this channel in a heartbeat.
Oh wait, nevermind.... disregard the above post. I was too stoned to realize what i was typing.
In other news...grass on the median of Central Avenue grew 1" in the past ten days, and the paint dried on Mrs. Jones' living room walls in only three hours!
- Bill
This was obviously for the new Porn channel, not Pong channel. Why on Earth would someone from Slashdot submit a story that had nothing to do with porn and everything to do with nostalgia game play?
I really hate Dan Patrick.
Will there be ad breaks? I just know I'm gonna be in the bathroom when the most exciting goal is scored...
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of their beancounters when someone else actually reads the market study they've obviously been adhering to and notices that they've mistakenly read that a "pong-marathon" would be good for ratings instead of "porn-marathon" :-)
My Sig: SEGV
Thanks for spoiling it! chrisd: all your plotlines are belong to frontpage.
Squint in amazement at our week long marathon of text based MUD's.
All your favorites, all day, all week long. Don't touch that dial.
?
I thought they were talking about Pong on the G4 (computers), as in Open Firmware Pong from the 98 MacHack Contest
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Most attempts to do it give you the players POV, which for most games sucks just as much as, say, head mounted cameras in conventional sports. The player dashes here and there, looks left, looks right, and from the players point of view its very straightforward, but from the viewer's point of view its a confusing jerky mess.
What is needed is multi-player games with customised clients that act like camera positions. Put a "cameraman" in charge of the client with pan and zoom controls, and maybe smooth 3d traverse as well, and you would have a pleasant viewing experience.
You also need games that can do well given such a gods-eye view. Quake capture the flag games in fairly open terrain could work very well indeed.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Which alternates between crap and crap with a Manowar soundtrack. The main show they have involves footage from games with 'real world' music dubbed over the top. Either Eurotrash pop or Power Metal, funnily enough.
They've now started to branch out a bit by having 'review' slots, which can be quite entertaining in themselves, having two guy geeks and a girl geek flirting around and occasionally mentioning the games. But they spoil it all by intercutting the real programming with extended 3-minute-plus adverts for premium rate phone in competitions which are apparently their only source of revenue.
It's crap, but it's watchable crap.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
This is a tactical move.
People will be flipping through the channel and come across pong. They will stop, because everyone recognizes pong. They will see "g4, the videogame network" at the bottom corner. Many people in the target audience will go "duuude, check it out, man, a videogame network.. sweet!.. hey dont bogart that J"
They will look at their tv and say "k, videogame network is channel 42, ill scope it out later." and change the channel.
2 days later.. "what happened to that videogame network.." *flips through channels* "here it is.. woah, coverage of that new ps2 release that everyone is drooling over!"
get it?
no
There was a radio station in Louisville, KY (102.3 FM) that was re-launching back around '96 as a alternative rock station. About a week before they went on the air, they started playing the Beatles song "I Am The Walrus" over and over and over again. The rumor was that they were out to set a record. Either way, people would check in every once in a while to see if the station was up yet or maybe just out of morbid curiosity. When they did finally premier, everyone had heard of them and their ratings were sky-high.
:-)
I'm assuming that the folks at G4 are just trying to create some buzz and do something fun at the same time. So, good luck to them... of course that alternative rock station is now a "smooth-rock" station.
I had hoped that this was a chance to watch a bunch of PINGs.
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
I've heard of some weird fetishes, but whatever moves your joystick.....
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
The press release is no joke - they really are showing Pong. But the reason behind it is because EVERY cable TV network has to test their feed before they truly go live. MOST networks do something boring like color bars with a low tone. G4 decided to be CREATIVE and show Pong for ONE WEEK and everybody gets all over them. The real programming starts on May 1st.
It figures, though. The last time G4 was announced on Slashdot in November, it got a very heavy critisizm that it wouldn't work from CmdrTaco. I submitted the story it was launching 3 times last week and it was rejected. I guess they were waiting for a NEGATIVE story to come in before covering it at all. So I guess Slashdot will be unsupportive of the new network. Yet I bet if they showed Linux all the time it would be hailed as the second coming.
There is a show like this on the network, called "Arena".
One of Slashdot's favorites, Wil Wheaton, is one of the commentators on the show.
This actually happens with a lot of new channels. If you're planning to show something you have to pay for, you don't want to start with real content. If your equipment gets delayed, or you have problems with it when you start, you don't want to be wasting content you paid for. On the other hand, you don't want to pay for your broadcast bandwidth if you're not going to broadcast anything.
So the usual thing to do is to broadcast something really cheap until you know it's all working correctly. Of course, you run into the danger of people actually preferring the fake content to what you actually want to show. (There was one station that broadcast a camera pointed at a fishtank until they got their studio ready, and then people called in to request the fishtank)