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Which Game Series Would You Reboot?
Franchise reboots are all the rage these days in Hollywood, and the trend is starting to creep into the games industry as well. The Guardian's games blog is running a story discussing a few examples and pondering likely candidates for future reboots. Quoting:
"If anything, the concept of the reboot makes more sense in the videogame sector than it does in movies. For a start, games are complex entities, with each new iteration in a familiar series adding many, many hours of fresh narrative content. Entering, say, the Zelda, Resident Evil, Half-Life, Dragon Quest or Metal Gear worlds at this stage must be massively intimidating — even if the developers go to great lengths to make each entry work as a singular, self-contained entity within the canon. Also, videogames are going through a paradigm shift in terms of popular appeal at the moment. The faithful audience of young males has been joined by new demographics brought in by the Wii, PC casual games, and now the iPhone. Many of these people may be vaguely aware of long-running game brands, but won't have a clue about the key characters, sign post events and basic gameplay mechanisms."
So, which series (or individual title) would you like to see rebooted?
The entire PC gaming market needs a reboot.
Microsoft has done an excellent job of completely destroying the PC gaming market with two simple tools: DirectX and DRM. DirectX has limited gamers to the newest M$ operating systems, so many older gamers and Linux/Mac users will pass right by some newer titles which make game sales slump.
Then there is DRM. Spore, for example, was supposed to be a huge hit because it worked with both DirectX and OpenGL, but when word got out of the draconian DRM EA had implanted to "help" the gaming industry, the game was trashed. Especially in this economy, people don't want to buy what they can't own.
There's no easy way to bypass the M$ monopoly and convince game makers to convert to OpenGL as well as DirectX other than writing to them and make your opinion heard. It has been done already, but if more do it they are bound to listen.
The solution for DRM and piracy is easy. Require an quick online login to open your games, and then your free to play. Yes, the online login won't be convinient, but it's better than DRM.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
For those of you wondering why green laser pointers exist, here is the short answer: take an infrared diode laser, use it to power another laser that is deep into the infrared. Use an optical nonlinear crystal to double the frequency and half the wavelength of that laser. You get 530nm light and profit from a complicated little device. The overall efficiency of this process, however, is something like 6 percent.
That should make most people immediately wonder why the brightest handheld laser pointers you can get currently are green. (ok some of the blue ones are pretty good too but green rules here generally)
The reason is the human eye is MUCH more sensitive to green than it is to red, especially the red that's approaching infrared that most handheld pointers use.
So for 1/4 of the power you can 10x the visual impact.
Long ago I bought a special red laser pointer, it was red but it was shifted much farther away from IR than any of the common pointers of the day. At the time it was the only one you could see in daylight on say a wall. From what I've seen of modern laser pointers like the little keychain ones, they must all be using the higher freq (lower wavelength) now. Memory's really fuzzy at this point but iirc the common "dim" pointers ran at 550-560nm, and mine runs 535. Not a LOT of difference, and still looks like the same red, but runs 4x the visibility at 1/2 the power.
I believe green is the most sensitive color for most herbivores?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.