Since when has the Constitution been a "barrier" for these politicians?
Since forever. Barrier is the correct terminology. The Bill of Rights is designed to protect the people from the government. Our founding fathers understood that need.
The problem is, Hot Coffee wouldn't have been discovered even if the ESRB did play the entire game. Rockstar are the ones who fucked up, and the ESRB couldn't have done anything to prevent the Hot Coffee controversy short of hacking the game, something that goes way beyond the call of duty. The ESRB rates far more games every year than the MPAA rates movies. Personally, I think the current system the ESRB uses, which is basically what the GP describes, is perfectly fine. I'm not sure it's a realistic option to play every aspect of every game to completion. That would take periods of time and levels of effort that are several orders of magnitude beyond what the MPAA does.
There are several things wrong with your response beginning with the fact you are posing AC.
How can you say the ESA does nothing to combat the likes of JT when in the next sentence you acknowledge that they are the very ones (the ONLY ones, by the way) challenging the laws? Those court cases cost the ESA a tremendous amount of time and money to pursue. They have much better things to do than spend all their efforts defending an industry without out the balls to stand up for their right of free expression. Then you go on to say the main stream media considers JT creditable. That's just not true. They ignore him almost completely. It's only the gaming press that pays any attention to JT dropping his name 1000 times often as any real journalist would. JT is a prolific press release writer. Anyone who reads one of his ridiculous releases can see immediately that he is a crank. The guy so effectively mocks himself its almost pointless to join in. It's only when the ESA does something to stop the stupid laws he pushes, or when the Florida Bar goes after him, that JT gets any real press. ESA stands up to and dismisses JT very well each and every time they prove him wrong in court about the validity of his legislative ambitions. What better way is there to prove he's a rotten lawyer with bad ideas? The more states that see that JT is incapable of helping them one bit, and is nothing more than an ambulance chasing fool costing taxpaying voters a lot of money, the less this sort of legislation will have a chance of getting off the ground. The ESA does plenty of good and fights the good fight and have a 100% success record against the likes of JT. Blogging in little "gaming press" sites that are only visited by sycophants who already share your feelings about JT accomplishes nothing. What are YOU doing to REALLY help?
I mean we don't outsource our hollywood scriptwriters to china do we?
"The writer is king here at Capitol Pictures. You don't believe me, take a look at your paycheck at the end of every week - that's what we think of the writer."
"Did you hear the one about the blond who went to Hollywood to get into the movies? She fucked a writer."
"I was saying I've yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine and we have a tendency to treat them like that." "Not at this studio."
"I was thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we can get rid of the actors and directors, maybe we've got something."
"You ain't no writer, Fink - you're a goddamn write-off."
You could have picked a more convincing example of a valued employee than a Hollywood writer. Hollywood is the number one recycler of foreign garbage.
Me too. I thought, "Finally, those guys figured out the Bay Area is too expensive to operate out of." Anybody moving from California to China for better quality of life is kookoobananas. Think Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Texas -- places with established production or technology centers and plenty of fresh meat from local game development schools.
Video games are much faster than sports with much more action going on, often simultaneously in widely separate areas. It's not as simple as bunch of guys chasing a single ball. Real coverage is much, much more difficult, and getting an overview of the whole game can be almost impossible. There are no time outs and no knowing where to look next. Properly covering a video game that doesn't mimic a real-world sport would require post game analysis and judiciously highlighting the more important confrontations in the game from momemnt to moment and from area to area as the game progresses. Meaningful color commentary and video coverage of a live event is almost impossible.
That's exactly what Bill Gates wants to do and will probably start pushing Zune -- I mean soon. He thinks it's just a super wonderful idea that we should all were cameras 24-7 and document and archive every moment of our lives with our computers. Seriously. That could never be abused, could it?
In this day of voyeurism on demand, reality tv, and video blogs, the world looks more and more like it's heading for 1984 -- by choice.
Pikmin for GameCube is my Achilles heel. The final mission is just so much more difficult than everything that leads up to it. The main issue is the controls. I've gotten so close to beating it so many times but I finally gave up. I really liked Pikmin, too. Oh well.
In Metroid Prime the final couple of battles were pretty difficult too, I thought I'd give up but I managed to finally get through them.
I gave up Skies of Arcadia pretty early because the boss battle in the Valua Colosseum. That battle is ridiculous. Beyond that I hate the tedious random encounters, and grinding away for hours to advance just a little in a game (the single worst trend in CRPGs) is bullshit. A shame, because there is a lot to like in Skies of Arcadia.
The old 8-bit and 16-bit games kick my ass regularly. They seem so much harder than today's games.
This really calls into question the validity of Viacom's claim that YouTube was hosting 100,000 infringing videos belonging to them. I wonder what the real number is. I wonder when the backlash hits YouTube over these "false positives" if they will start to require a little more diligence on the side of the claimants who request for videos to be removed. Shouldn't there penalties for making false claims of ownership over the copyrighted materials of others? YouTube's success was built on the shoulders of the little guy, not these giant media conglomerates. Will they do the right thing and help protect their legitimate users?
The Wii is not capable of doing pixel shaders. The hardware can't do it. Period.
That's not entirely true. The Flipper GPU can do pixel shaders, it's called the TEV "Texture EnVironment" engine. What the Wii lacks is vertex shaders.
I have serious doubts that Source and other truly advanced game engines will ever appear on Wii unless they are severely compromised. The sad fact is, as awesome and powerful as the Wii is in a lot of ways, Nintendo made a huge mistake not adding to the feature set of the GPU. GPUs have moved a bit beyond 2001; Nintendo hasn't.
Although on the whole the Wii is more powerful than the original XBox, and Source did appear on the XBox in the form of Half-Life 2, Valve has stated (although I can't find the quote) that Half-Life 2 will not be coming to Wii.
Still, Gabe Newell continues to talk up the Wii saying: "I'm betting that by Christmas of next year, the Wii has a larger installed base than the 360. Other people think I'm crazy. I really like everthing that Nintendo is doing."
And Doug Lombardi said in an interview about Half-Life 2 for PS3: "Understanding the [PS3] has been the biggest challenge of all, since we're still learning a lot about the control and interface. It's really just a design challenge, but nothing impossible to overcome. The bigger challenge will be if we ever did a Wii version down the road."
Valve seems a bit wishy-washy on the topic, so who knows? It seems like an obvious choice to port to Wii, but maybe this quote from Red Steel developer Novel Campos Oriola puts things into perspective (sorry for the bad translation): "I do not have the right to speak in details of what Wii can do graphically. What one can say, it is that on the sum of all that it can do, Wii is more powerful than Xbox. But there are things which Xbox can make and which Wii cannot make." Red Steel uses the Unreal 2 engine.
Exactly. Yes, Pokémon Trading Card Game was the most successful of the many Magic: The Gathering me-too sorta knock offs... sorta in the sense that they are made by the same company. Ripoff or not, Pokémon TCG for Game Boy was the first of such games to reach a wide audience in the video game world -- the focus of the article -- so it deserves to be listed. The original Pokemon, on the other hand, which has nothing to do with cards or Magic or cartoons, was a very fresh spin on the extremely stale tactical combat RPG genre.
Pokemon is in the Firefox spell checker but Pokémon isn't. I can't decide which is dumber.
Why post AC? M.U.L.E. definitely deserved to be on the list. I'm disappointed but hardly surprised it didn't make the list in this post-Doom era we all live in.
Calm down. Video games are a very young industry. When video games finally go mainstream there will be plenty of demand for new kinds of games. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, without the new games how do you attract the new customers?
The truth is, the only real problem area is in consoles which have been utterly hardcore oriented since they went 3D. Fortunately, PCs have become so ubiquitous that smaller, weirder games actually have a fighting chance of finding an audience -- and even a niche audience in the PC realm is HUGE. The current deluge of me-too-itus shovelware is not the end of the world, it's just a phase, and companies that never grow beyond it may find themselves phased out. The only reason it works right now is because the audience is so small and there is a severe limit of consumer dollars to fight over. These games are very expensive to make, so the money-men who fund them stick to a risk-averting formula based on rehashing past successes.
But if you invest in growing the market there's a lot more money to go around, and there's a much better chance for less traditional games to get off the ground. Nintendo is one of the few big game companies that actually gets this and is doing something right by expanding the console market with innovative hardware and software, instead of catering only to the same game players with the same games year after year. I think Nintendo's example (and ultimate success) will not go unnoticed within the industry. Even Microsoft will eventually figure out that they just can't sell Grandma (and often not even Mom and Dad) on Dead Rising and Gears of War. As much as the game industry likes to ape Hollywood, they still have a lot to learn about making art, pleasing the audience, and making money doing both.
If Slipdate Ionwrecks can make a game even half as good as Daikatana, I'll be impressed. It's not that they aren't capable of good code, I just think they've probably already smoked it all.
it would have been nice if you had said that you got the information from reading the actual bill
I didn't have time.
Re:They listed Future Pinball why not Visual Pinba
on
101 Free PC Games
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I went ahead and tried it again on my new system and I didn't even have to monkey with CPU affinity. The problem is still listed in the bug list, but it seems to work ok now. Maybe the problem is still there but this machine may be beefy enough to grunt right through it. Thanks for the info and the glimmer of hope. I finally can play again!
It's not 30, it's 18. The law is to prevent access to violent games by minors and would require clerks to check the ID of anyone who looks under 30, just like a lot of liquor stores do.
Re:They listed Future Pinball why not Visual Pinba
on
101 Free PC Games
·
· Score: 1
I love Visual Pinball and vpinmame can potentially be awesome, but ultimately it is effing lame because after almost six years of development vpinmame still doesn't work on multiprocessor systems. I wish those guys would get their heads out of their asses already. I haven't had a single processor system since 1999. Non-functional vpinmame makes the baby super computer cry.
Slashdot Mirror
Since forever. Barrier is the correct terminology. The Bill of Rights is designed to protect the people from the government. Our founding fathers understood that need.
The problem is, Hot Coffee wouldn't have been discovered even if the ESRB did play the entire game. Rockstar are the ones who fucked up, and the ESRB couldn't have done anything to prevent the Hot Coffee controversy short of hacking the game, something that goes way beyond the call of duty. The ESRB rates far more games every year than the MPAA rates movies. Personally, I think the current system the ESRB uses, which is basically what the GP describes, is perfectly fine. I'm not sure it's a realistic option to play every aspect of every game to completion. That would take periods of time and levels of effort that are several orders of magnitude beyond what the MPAA does.
There are several things wrong with your response beginning with the fact you are posing AC.
How can you say the ESA does nothing to combat the likes of JT when in the next sentence you acknowledge that they are the very ones (the ONLY ones, by the way) challenging the laws? Those court cases cost the ESA a tremendous amount of time and money to pursue. They have much better things to do than spend all their efforts defending an industry without out the balls to stand up for their right of free expression. Then you go on to say the main stream media considers JT creditable. That's just not true. They ignore him almost completely. It's only the gaming press that pays any attention to JT dropping his name 1000 times often as any real journalist would. JT is a prolific press release writer. Anyone who reads one of his ridiculous releases can see immediately that he is a crank. The guy so effectively mocks himself its almost pointless to join in. It's only when the ESA does something to stop the stupid laws he pushes, or when the Florida Bar goes after him, that JT gets any real press. ESA stands up to and dismisses JT very well each and every time they prove him wrong in court about the validity of his legislative ambitions. What better way is there to prove he's a rotten lawyer with bad ideas? The more states that see that JT is incapable of helping them one bit, and is nothing more than an ambulance chasing fool costing taxpaying voters a lot of money, the less this sort of legislation will have a chance of getting off the ground. The ESA does plenty of good and fights the good fight and have a 100% success record against the likes of JT. Blogging in little "gaming press" sites that are only visited by sycophants who already share your feelings about JT accomplishes nothing. What are YOU doing to REALLY help?
Yeah, they did great as far as their mission profile goes, but what they did in a year a man could do in a week.
"The writer is king here at Capitol Pictures. You don't believe me, take a look at your paycheck at the end of every week - that's what we think of the writer."
"Did you hear the one about the blond who went to Hollywood to get into the movies? She fucked a writer."
"I was saying I've yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine and we have a tendency to treat them like that."
"Not at this studio."
"I was thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we can get rid of the actors and directors, maybe we've got something."
"You ain't no writer, Fink - you're a goddamn write-off."
You could have picked a more convincing example of a valued employee than a Hollywood writer. Hollywood is the number one recycler of foreign garbage.
Me too. I thought, "Finally, those guys figured out the Bay Area is too expensive to operate out of." Anybody moving from California to China for better quality of life is kookoobananas. Think Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Texas -- places with established production or technology centers and plenty of fresh meat from local game development schools.
How different? Very different.
Video games are much faster than sports with much more action going on, often simultaneously in widely separate areas. It's not as simple as bunch of guys chasing a single ball. Real coverage is much, much more difficult, and getting an overview of the whole game can be almost impossible. There are no time outs and no knowing where to look next. Properly covering a video game that doesn't mimic a real-world sport would require post game analysis and judiciously highlighting the more important confrontations in the game from momemnt to moment and from area to area as the game progresses. Meaningful color commentary and video coverage of a live event is almost impossible.
That's exactly what Bill Gates wants to do and will probably start pushing Zune -- I mean soon. He thinks it's just a super wonderful idea that we should all were cameras 24-7 and document and archive every moment of our lives with our computers. Seriously. That could never be abused, could it?
In this day of voyeurism on demand, reality tv, and video blogs, the world looks more and more like it's heading for 1984 -- by choice.
You can't open it ... but it can be opened.
Pikmin for GameCube is my Achilles heel. The final mission is just so much more difficult than everything that leads up to it. The main issue is the controls. I've gotten so close to beating it so many times but I finally gave up. I really liked Pikmin, too. Oh well.
In Metroid Prime the final couple of battles were pretty difficult too, I thought I'd give up but I managed to finally get through them.
I gave up Skies of Arcadia pretty early because the boss battle in the Valua Colosseum. That battle is ridiculous. Beyond that I hate the tedious random encounters, and grinding away for hours to advance just a little in a game (the single worst trend in CRPGs) is bullshit. A shame, because there is a lot to like in Skies of Arcadia.
The old 8-bit and 16-bit games kick my ass regularly. They seem so much harder than today's games.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/03/011925 3
This really calls into question the validity of Viacom's claim that YouTube was hosting 100,000 infringing videos belonging to them. I wonder what the real number is. I wonder when the backlash hits YouTube over these "false positives" if they will start to require a little more diligence on the side of the claimants who request for videos to be removed. Shouldn't there penalties for making false claims of ownership over the copyrighted materials of others? YouTube's success was built on the shoulders of the little guy, not these giant media conglomerates. Will they do the right thing and help protect their legitimate users?
I have serious doubts that Source and other truly advanced game engines will ever appear on Wii unless they are severely compromised. The sad fact is, as awesome and powerful as the Wii is in a lot of ways, Nintendo made a huge mistake not adding to the feature set of the GPU. GPUs have moved a bit beyond 2001; Nintendo hasn't.
Although on the whole the Wii is more powerful than the original XBox, and Source did appear on the XBox in the form of Half-Life 2, Valve has stated (although I can't find the quote) that Half-Life 2 will not be coming to Wii.
Still, Gabe Newell continues to talk up the Wii saying: "I'm betting that by Christmas of next year, the Wii has a larger installed base than the 360. Other people think I'm crazy. I really like everthing that Nintendo is doing."
And Doug Lombardi said in an interview about Half-Life 2 for PS3: "Understanding the [PS3] has been the biggest challenge of all, since we're still learning a lot about the control and interface. It's really just a design challenge, but nothing impossible to overcome. The bigger challenge will be if we ever did a Wii version down the road."
Valve seems a bit wishy-washy on the topic, so who knows? It seems like an obvious choice to port to Wii, but maybe this quote from Red Steel developer Novel Campos Oriola puts things into perspective (sorry for the bad translation): "I do not have the right to speak in details of what Wii can do graphically. What one can say, it is that on the sum of all that it can do, Wii is more powerful than Xbox. But there are things which Xbox can make and which Wii cannot make." Red Steel uses the Unreal 2 engine.
Exactly. Yes, Pokémon Trading Card Game was the most successful of the many Magic: The Gathering me-too sorta knock offs ... sorta in the sense that they are made by the same company. Ripoff or not, Pokémon TCG for Game Boy was the first of such games to reach a wide audience in the video game world -- the focus of the article -- so it deserves to be listed. The original Pokemon, on the other hand, which has nothing to do with cards or Magic or cartoons, was a very fresh spin on the extremely stale tactical combat RPG genre.
Pokemon is in the Firefox spell checker but Pokémon isn't. I can't decide which is dumber.
Why post AC? M.U.L.E. definitely deserved to be on the list. I'm disappointed but hardly surprised it didn't make the list in this post-Doom era we all live in.
Calm down. Video games are a very young industry. When video games finally go mainstream there will be plenty of demand for new kinds of games. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, without the new games how do you attract the new customers? The truth is, the only real problem area is in consoles which have been utterly hardcore oriented since they went 3D. Fortunately, PCs have become so ubiquitous that smaller, weirder games actually have a fighting chance of finding an audience -- and even a niche audience in the PC realm is HUGE. The current deluge of me-too-itus shovelware is not the end of the world, it's just a phase, and companies that never grow beyond it may find themselves phased out. The only reason it works right now is because the audience is so small and there is a severe limit of consumer dollars to fight over. These games are very expensive to make, so the money-men who fund them stick to a risk-averting formula based on rehashing past successes. But if you invest in growing the market there's a lot more money to go around, and there's a much better chance for less traditional games to get off the ground. Nintendo is one of the few big game companies that actually gets this and is doing something right by expanding the console market with innovative hardware and software, instead of catering only to the same game players with the same games year after year. I think Nintendo's example (and ultimate success) will not go unnoticed within the industry. Even Microsoft will eventually figure out that they just can't sell Grandma (and often not even Mom and Dad) on Dead Rising and Gears of War. As much as the game industry likes to ape Hollywood, they still have a lot to learn about making art, pleasing the audience, and making money doing both.
... out to be enough for anybody.
If Slipdate Ionwrecks can make a game even half as good as Daikatana, I'll be impressed. It's not that they aren't capable of good code, I just think they've probably already smoked it all.
Actually, I went ahead and tried it again on my new system and I didn't even have to monkey with CPU affinity. The problem is still listed in the bug list, but it seems to work ok now. Maybe the problem is still there but this machine may be beefy enough to grunt right through it. Thanks for the info and the glimmer of hope. I finally can play again!
The article is incorrect, take the extra step and read the bills. Almost everyone is reporting this wrong.
It's not 30, it's 18. The law is to prevent access to violent games by minors and would require clerks to check the ID of anyone who looks under 30, just like a lot of liquor stores do.
I love Visual Pinball and vpinmame can potentially be awesome, but ultimately it is effing lame because after almost six years of development vpinmame still doesn't work on multiprocessor systems. I wish those guys would get their heads out of their asses already. I haven't had a single processor system since 1999. Non-functional vpinmame makes the baby super computer cry.