Stop bitching. The real point of the article is how marketting has gotten just as out of hand in the world of video games as it has in just about every other mature industry. This is something that should be interesting to you if you care about the current diseased state of our beloved hobby.
this just gave me the perfect idea for a Wii game. It's based on the only japanese TV show with which I am familiar. Maximum Exposure! You control giddy young japanese people as they stumble through dangerous waste-filled obstacle courses built in abandoned industrial parks. Come to think of it, if most japanese television is anything as ridiculous (and amusingly hilarious) as that show, then the entire industry has a bright future in Wii games. Ah Max X. Is that show still on anymore?
I've just recently been reading H.P. Lovecraft for the first time. I had always heard the term "Lovecraftian" describing things I really liked and after finally checking it out I'm really getting into the whole mythology he created. I agree it would have been awesome if Quake would have had more of that in the game, as it is there is really just an atmosphere of Lovecraft. That said, I think id has never really duplicated that atmosphere in a game before or since. There was a real feeling of being in a damned place. I loved how it felt outside of time as well, mixing ancient past and distant future. You can say Quake had no plot but I had more fun in that world than I've had with most storied games. It's weird because I think Doom leaned more towards Quake 1, while Doom 3 leaned more towards Quake 2 in terms of feeling. I wish in future games id would embrace Lovecraftian fantasy and Satanic pageantry more than boring science fiction, but it was probably long-departed Romero who was responsible for it in the first place.
IMHO, the cutesy Disney-ish versions of Mario & Co. didn't really start until around Paper Mario on the N64. There was also a degree of it in Mario 64, but that was mostly due to the somewhat Jar-Jar voice they gave Mario (the character never spoke before that game). The N64 was a real turning point for Nintendo as they suddenly found most of their older players moving on to more "mature" stuff like sports and violence on the Playstation. Nintendo, always about their family image, chose to stick with titles for younger players like all that gay Pokemon shit someone is sure to burn in hell for. I've always liked the original feel of Mario, Zelda, etc. on the older consoles. They didn't really talk much, and the worlds in which they existed weren't so much children's fantasy as they were just plain weird. If you think about it, trampling mushroom people to death and ripping turtles out of their shells are pretty mean things to do. In fact, the majority of Mario, Zelda, and most every game you play is to kill whatever moves on the screen before it kills you, activities not likely to be condoned by the likes of Barney or Mickey Mouse.
Perhaps it was somewhat because of the graphics limitations of the pre-64 systems, allowing for less overly-expressive, flamboyant characters, but I think alot of it has to do with the storytelling. The old games weren't bogged down by pointless character dialogue or hand-holding. They could just be picked up and played by kids or adults alike. Much the same way an adult can enjoy a Pixar movie on a level more sophisticated than a child, I can go back to these games today and appreciate the complex gameplay of SMB or Zelda, and not be exhausted by the inane minutia of supporting characters that exist merely to put into play the game's next McGuffin, the kind of crap Nintendo began putting out with its 3D platformers on the 64, the Donkey Kong 64s and the Banjo Kazooies. In fact, I think Conker's Bad Fur Day was a direct result of that climate, a kind of send-up of those kiddie games, and I have to think it was made by people who were as fed up with the genre as I was.
Some of Nintendo's games have managed to stay cool despite being cartoony. Take Metroid for instance. In the newer Prime series, they've created a game that can be enjoyed by a player of any age, without going too mature or too childsafe with the material. The developer (a third party hired by Nintendo IIRC), really got the original tone of the Metroid games. While I love gory digital violence as much as the next guy, I particularly like this style of gameplay. If you can make me play a game that's safe for children, but not make me feel as though I'm playing a children's game, that's an accomplishment. No one really does that like Nintendo.
Yea, because if America needs anything, it's more service-industry jobs. "Would you like fries with that" is way cooler to say than "One small step for man..."
I really have to disagree here. My friends and I basically have no boundaries on word usage. Not the F-word, not the C-word, and that's across both genders. It doesn't offend me in the least to hear these words. The people around me, and to an extent I think most of the recent generation use profanity quite casually. Just look at the culture, the movies nowadays especially. You become desensitized to it, and it loses all superficial shock value. That doesn't mean you don't respond to indecency or insults. You just begin to look at the larger picture. The intonation of voice, the attitude of the speaker. It's no longer about the words but the intention behind them. This is the way it should be. Having so-called "naughty" words whose very presence offends regardless of context is really just a form of control. You're looked at as immature or lower class if you use profanity around certain people. If those people are in power, they have an easy way to control your behavior. You don't have to use profanity, but taking offense to certain words in themselves is childish. Fucking childish.
I don't travel so I really have no gauge on the rest of the world, but things are pretty depressing here in the states. Democracy really only works when you have an educated and politically active populace. I look around and wonder if that very criteria is a pipe dream. There are bad ideas all around me. Irrational fears and prejudices. Commonplace superstitions that would be recognized as neurotic in any objective context. An unfortunate lack of civic pride or sense of community, especially in contrast to some of the groups I see gather online. Ofcourse it isn't an American phenomenom, but it sure has reached some heights in this country. More depressing considering our relative prosperity.
While I have no experience with this software, I have to say that when I hear the name Democracy Player, I think of drooling masses. I think of misguided liberalism and hypocritical conservatism. I think of the flower power hippies that didn't really accomplish anything. And that's not even considering all the baggage the Bush administration has added to words like "democracy" and "freedom." Yea, Miro is way better. The less I'm reminded of the clusterfuck or real world politics the better. You know, just long enough for the aliens to land and finally sort things out, either ground us like children or annihilate us outright. The people just aren't up to the task.
No actually it doesn't say in the article. I was thinking, this is just another instance where a vendor puts out multiple versions of the same platform, but it isn't really a platform if there are big differences in specs between different models. The so called crippled or gimped 360s and PS3s, the cheaper models, this is all indicative of companies that are trying to sell you on a platform, but haven't even got a solid idea of what their platform is. Thing is, the whole point of a console or a handheld is to have a standard unchanging system on which your software is guaranteed to run with the same performance and compatibility across your whole market. That's what consoles have over PC-gaming. At least, that's how it's supposed to be. Nintendo doesn't pull this shit, they have an idea of what they want to sell and they get it right out of the gate.
I'll add that I don't really mind banner ads, so long as they don't make noise. Some of them are even neat looking, like dynamic parts scripted in flash instead of just static animations, though those floaters are plain evil. While I'd rather not waste the bandwidth or screen space, I understand they're there to provide income to the sites I visit and the software I use. That's fine, and I'm opting into it by using their services. I don't think this should extend to something as fundamental to using a computer as the OS however. Or something as ridiculous as the above post about gas stations with commercials at the pump. I would honestly consider vandalism if those become ubiquitous. That's one of the reasons I really try to avoid shopping at walmart, with their lcd screens in the checkout lines (particularly frustrating that tvs better than mine are wasted on such uses:) That whole opportunistic "captive audience" mentality really needs to be put in check. Why do you think the nation's children have such attention problems. It's all they can do to tune shit out. Will companies ever come to the conclusion that too much advertising leads to people not listening at all? I'm moving into a log cabin if we ever get Minority Report eye-scanners with targetted advertising.
I can choose to use GMail or choose not to. It's a service, a free one. I can opt out anytime I feel, just stop using the account. I have to login to GMail to recieve their targetted advertising. All this data is on their system. MS here is talking about scanning data on my system through OS software I paid them to use. OS software I cannot simply opt out of if I intend to use any of the bazillions of applications written for it. I do a lot of productive things through Google and I don't pay them a dime. They have to make money somehow. I think sending me ads through their free service in exchange for using it is fair and relatively benign. I don't equate that with this new MS strategy at all.
I stopped watching television altogether a few years ago, aside from the occasional SNL when I remember it's on (yea I know, SNL isn't funny, save it). I just find the commercials really disgusting. Whenever I do catch tv now, say when I get bored of staring at my thumbs while visiting relitives, the ads really make me queasy, physically not figuratively. Something about the rapid ramp up of music and the incessant talking, those earworm jingles. There's no silence between commercials anymore, not even a small blip. One just feeds right into the next with their micro-plots and wild changes of tone. It bothers me that so much talent and work goes into making something so disposable. They're really engineered at a fundamental level to get into your mind and stay there, and I think that's something way more insidious than most people realize.
The other day I went into best buy and bought a $30 bluetooth adapter. The cashier asked if I wanted a $10 2-year warranty on the thing. I firmly declined and as she went on explaining the benefits of this program I felt less and less happy to be shopping in a brick & mortar store. The cashier was just doing her job but I still wanted to strangle whatever marketting exec makes them do that. I find generally all advertising really off-putting anymore. I know what the hell I want to buy, I don't get sold things. I'll take a psych test to prove it. I know it works well on lots of sheeple, but let me opt out damn you.
My point is, I'm getting pretty hostile to marketting, and as far as I can help it I won't have any more business with MS if they engage seriously in this strategy. There's enough spam out there, it really doesn't belong anywhere in a fundamental part of an OS.
God what's it like to be so cynical? I mean really, I'm a cynical bastard, but I really don't think Rockstar is going to save a whole shit-ton of money for GTA's budget by soliciting a bunch of wankers on the internet for some of the more benign content in their game. We're talking about sound bytes for just one of the many radio stations the game is bound to have. Even if they hired professional talent as usual, the cost probably wouldn't exceed the price of just one of the hit songs they're going to license for the soundtrack. The point of this whole thing is to make a little contact with the fans and get people excited about the game.
And have you ever seen their game credits? I swear the credits for The Warriors had more names than a typical hollywood movie. Why wouldn't they want to put the peoples' names in there? They have no legal worries with such a strong disclaimer.
What good is more ram anyway? New games certainly can't require more ram than was on the original PSP. Are old games going to know they can use more memory when loading content on a new PSP? Apparently you can't use the PSP for homebrew so really, why bother with more ram?
Also, the fact that they didn't have tv-out in the first place is probably 90% of why UMD movies were such a stupid idea (you know, aside from having another proprietary format for no reason). And it's especially cute that they call this the slim model. Look at those photos. The original wasn't exactly a fat bastard, but slim would imply some significant change in width. God damn Sony is stupid. Just amazingly so.
All that said I'd like to like the PSP and these are all good improvements. Now if only they would release some worthwhile software for the thing, but isn't that just their MO of late. I want to want a PSP and I want to want a PS3. Why can't Sony just get their shit together?
Oh come on. I'd pay $250 to have my voice in a GTA game. We're talking about a game that has grown more and more epic each iteration, a game whose online video preview recognizably clogged the internet upon release, a game that courts big controversy and blockbuster-movie profits. And be assured you're going to see your name in the credits, both in the manual and in the ingame final credits. I'm sure that's enough for any fan.
I don't particularly like him, but prefer him to either Algore or John "changing my middle initial to F." Kerry. I wouldn't vote for any of them, but I always find it strange that people prefer a crazy, violent cowboy over a harmless crank or a simpering wimp. It's not likely we'll ever be attacked on a massive scale (by massive scale I mean like say, something more than a few box-cutter wielding freaks with delusions of afterlife punani), so would it really be all that bad to have someone in office who isn't completely gun-ho about using military force? Like I said, I wouldn't vote for any of them, the lesser of two evils argument never really interested me. But how on earth GW wins the lesser evils vote is beyond me. Ross Perot could fuck things up less. And that guy is certifiable.
Yea guys. The Cell processor is pure chocolate magic. Don't forget that. Just like the Emotion Engine before it. Remember the raw emotion that little baby pumped out! It was crazy town. Wait, what?
Sure you're not doing anything illegal now. But what happens when the government changes its mind and decides to outlaw the act of being a sanctimonious dipshit? Or posting on slashdot? Or being an atheist? Or a muslim? Or gay? Or speaking your mind? People who say the government can have free reign over their lives because they're not doing anything wrong according to the current criteria of "upstanding citizen" really have no imagination when it comes to what future administrations might decide to deem unfit behavior for the citizenry. They don't belong in those areas of our lives in the first place, why give them the extra leverage?
...who toys with the idea that actually communicating with aliens may not be possible. until Rama II when the humans were given a large talking owl with which to communicate. Ya know, because people find owls to be soothing creatures. j/k I loved the whole series of books, though the sequels are definitely more hollywood-friendly.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop bitching. The real point of the article is how marketting has gotten just as out of hand in the world of video games as it has in just about every other mature industry. This is something that should be interesting to you if you care about the current diseased state of our beloved hobby.
Damn I'm actually thinking of MXC or Takeshi's Castle. I am so stupid.
this just gave me the perfect idea for a Wii game. It's based on the only japanese TV show with which I am familiar. Maximum Exposure! You control giddy young japanese people as they stumble through dangerous waste-filled obstacle courses built in abandoned industrial parks. Come to think of it, if most japanese television is anything as ridiculous (and amusingly hilarious) as that show, then the entire industry has a bright future in Wii games. Ah Max X. Is that show still on anymore?
I've just recently been reading H.P. Lovecraft for the first time. I had always heard the term "Lovecraftian" describing things I really liked and after finally checking it out I'm really getting into the whole mythology he created. I agree it would have been awesome if Quake would have had more of that in the game, as it is there is really just an atmosphere of Lovecraft. That said, I think id has never really duplicated that atmosphere in a game before or since. There was a real feeling of being in a damned place. I loved how it felt outside of time as well, mixing ancient past and distant future. You can say Quake had no plot but I had more fun in that world than I've had with most storied games. It's weird because I think Doom leaned more towards Quake 1, while Doom 3 leaned more towards Quake 2 in terms of feeling. I wish in future games id would embrace Lovecraftian fantasy and Satanic pageantry more than boring science fiction, but it was probably long-departed Romero who was responsible for it in the first place.
IMHO, the cutesy Disney-ish versions of Mario & Co. didn't really start until around Paper Mario on the N64. There was also a degree of it in Mario 64, but that was mostly due to the somewhat Jar-Jar voice they gave Mario (the character never spoke before that game). The N64 was a real turning point for Nintendo as they suddenly found most of their older players moving on to more "mature" stuff like sports and violence on the Playstation. Nintendo, always about their family image, chose to stick with titles for younger players like all that gay Pokemon shit someone is sure to burn in hell for. I've always liked the original feel of Mario, Zelda, etc. on the older consoles. They didn't really talk much, and the worlds in which they existed weren't so much children's fantasy as they were just plain weird. If you think about it, trampling mushroom people to death and ripping turtles out of their shells are pretty mean things to do. In fact, the majority of Mario, Zelda, and most every game you play is to kill whatever moves on the screen before it kills you, activities not likely to be condoned by the likes of Barney or Mickey Mouse.
Perhaps it was somewhat because of the graphics limitations of the pre-64 systems, allowing for less overly-expressive, flamboyant characters, but I think alot of it has to do with the storytelling. The old games weren't bogged down by pointless character dialogue or hand-holding. They could just be picked up and played by kids or adults alike. Much the same way an adult can enjoy a Pixar movie on a level more sophisticated than a child, I can go back to these games today and appreciate the complex gameplay of SMB or Zelda, and not be exhausted by the inane minutia of supporting characters that exist merely to put into play the game's next McGuffin, the kind of crap Nintendo began putting out with its 3D platformers on the 64, the Donkey Kong 64s and the Banjo Kazooies. In fact, I think Conker's Bad Fur Day was a direct result of that climate, a kind of send-up of those kiddie games, and I have to think it was made by people who were as fed up with the genre as I was.
Some of Nintendo's games have managed to stay cool despite being cartoony. Take Metroid for instance. In the newer Prime series, they've created a game that can be enjoyed by a player of any age, without going too mature or too childsafe with the material. The developer (a third party hired by Nintendo IIRC), really got the original tone of the Metroid games. While I love gory digital violence as much as the next guy, I particularly like this style of gameplay. If you can make me play a game that's safe for children, but not make me feel as though I'm playing a children's game, that's an accomplishment. No one really does that like Nintendo.
Shyeah! About as much as a blog is a personal homepage. Or a social networking site a web ring. Wait what?
Yea, because if America needs anything, it's more service-industry jobs. "Would you like fries with that" is way cooler to say than "One small step for man..."
I really have to disagree here. My friends and I basically have no boundaries on word usage. Not the F-word, not the C-word, and that's across both genders. It doesn't offend me in the least to hear these words. The people around me, and to an extent I think most of the recent generation use profanity quite casually. Just look at the culture, the movies nowadays especially. You become desensitized to it, and it loses all superficial shock value. That doesn't mean you don't respond to indecency or insults. You just begin to look at the larger picture. The intonation of voice, the attitude of the speaker. It's no longer about the words but the intention behind them. This is the way it should be. Having so-called "naughty" words whose very presence offends regardless of context is really just a form of control. You're looked at as immature or lower class if you use profanity around certain people. If those people are in power, they have an easy way to control your behavior. You don't have to use profanity, but taking offense to certain words in themselves is childish. Fucking childish.
I don't travel so I really have no gauge on the rest of the world, but things are pretty depressing here in the states. Democracy really only works when you have an educated and politically active populace. I look around and wonder if that very criteria is a pipe dream. There are bad ideas all around me. Irrational fears and prejudices. Commonplace superstitions that would be recognized as neurotic in any objective context. An unfortunate lack of civic pride or sense of community, especially in contrast to some of the groups I see gather online. Ofcourse it isn't an American phenomenom, but it sure has reached some heights in this country. More depressing considering our relative prosperity.
While I have no experience with this software, I have to say that when I hear the name Democracy Player, I think of drooling masses. I think of misguided liberalism and hypocritical conservatism. I think of the flower power hippies that didn't really accomplish anything. And that's not even considering all the baggage the Bush administration has added to words like "democracy" and "freedom." Yea, Miro is way better. The less I'm reminded of the clusterfuck or real world politics the better. You know, just long enough for the aliens to land and finally sort things out, either ground us like children or annihilate us outright. The people just aren't up to the task.
No actually it doesn't say in the article. I was thinking, this is just another instance where a vendor puts out multiple versions of the same platform, but it isn't really a platform if there are big differences in specs between different models. The so called crippled or gimped 360s and PS3s, the cheaper models, this is all indicative of companies that are trying to sell you on a platform, but haven't even got a solid idea of what their platform is. Thing is, the whole point of a console or a handheld is to have a standard unchanging system on which your software is guaranteed to run with the same performance and compatibility across your whole market. That's what consoles have over PC-gaming. At least, that's how it's supposed to be. Nintendo doesn't pull this shit, they have an idea of what they want to sell and they get it right out of the gate.
I'll add that I don't really mind banner ads, so long as they don't make noise. Some of them are even neat looking, like dynamic parts scripted in flash instead of just static animations, though those floaters are plain evil. While I'd rather not waste the bandwidth or screen space, I understand they're there to provide income to the sites I visit and the software I use. That's fine, and I'm opting into it by using their services. I don't think this should extend to something as fundamental to using a computer as the OS however. Or something as ridiculous as the above post about gas stations with commercials at the pump. I would honestly consider vandalism if those become ubiquitous. That's one of the reasons I really try to avoid shopping at walmart, with their lcd screens in the checkout lines (particularly frustrating that tvs better than mine are wasted on such uses:) That whole opportunistic "captive audience" mentality really needs to be put in check. Why do you think the nation's children have such attention problems. It's all they can do to tune shit out. Will companies ever come to the conclusion that too much advertising leads to people not listening at all? I'm moving into a log cabin if we ever get Minority Report eye-scanners with targetted advertising.
I can choose to use GMail or choose not to. It's a service, a free one. I can opt out anytime I feel, just stop using the account. I have to login to GMail to recieve their targetted advertising. All this data is on their system. MS here is talking about scanning data on my system through OS software I paid them to use. OS software I cannot simply opt out of if I intend to use any of the bazillions of applications written for it. I do a lot of productive things through Google and I don't pay them a dime. They have to make money somehow. I think sending me ads through their free service in exchange for using it is fair and relatively benign. I don't equate that with this new MS strategy at all.
I stopped watching television altogether a few years ago, aside from the occasional SNL when I remember it's on (yea I know, SNL isn't funny, save it). I just find the commercials really disgusting. Whenever I do catch tv now, say when I get bored of staring at my thumbs while visiting relitives, the ads really make me queasy, physically not figuratively. Something about the rapid ramp up of music and the incessant talking, those earworm jingles. There's no silence between commercials anymore, not even a small blip. One just feeds right into the next with their micro-plots and wild changes of tone. It bothers me that so much talent and work goes into making something so disposable. They're really engineered at a fundamental level to get into your mind and stay there, and I think that's something way more insidious than most people realize.
The other day I went into best buy and bought a $30 bluetooth adapter. The cashier asked if I wanted a $10 2-year warranty on the thing. I firmly declined and as she went on explaining the benefits of this program I felt less and less happy to be shopping in a brick & mortar store. The cashier was just doing her job but I still wanted to strangle whatever marketting exec makes them do that. I find generally all advertising really off-putting anymore. I know what the hell I want to buy, I don't get sold things. I'll take a psych test to prove it. I know it works well on lots of sheeple, but let me opt out damn you.
My point is, I'm getting pretty hostile to marketting, and as far as I can help it I won't have any more business with MS if they engage seriously in this strategy. There's enough spam out there, it really doesn't belong anywhere in a fundamental part of an OS.
God what's it like to be so cynical? I mean really, I'm a cynical bastard, but I really don't think Rockstar is going to save a whole shit-ton of money for GTA's budget by soliciting a bunch of wankers on the internet for some of the more benign content in their game. We're talking about sound bytes for just one of the many radio stations the game is bound to have. Even if they hired professional talent as usual, the cost probably wouldn't exceed the price of just one of the hit songs they're going to license for the soundtrack. The point of this whole thing is to make a little contact with the fans and get people excited about the game. And have you ever seen their game credits? I swear the credits for The Warriors had more names than a typical hollywood movie. Why wouldn't they want to put the peoples' names in there? They have no legal worries with such a strong disclaimer.
What good is more ram anyway? New games certainly can't require more ram than was on the original PSP. Are old games going to know they can use more memory when loading content on a new PSP? Apparently you can't use the PSP for homebrew so really, why bother with more ram?
Also, the fact that they didn't have tv-out in the first place is probably 90% of why UMD movies were such a stupid idea (you know, aside from having another proprietary format for no reason). And it's especially cute that they call this the slim model. Look at those photos. The original wasn't exactly a fat bastard, but slim would imply some significant change in width. God damn Sony is stupid. Just amazingly so.
All that said I'd like to like the PSP and these are all good improvements. Now if only they would release some worthwhile software for the thing, but isn't that just their MO of late. I want to want a PSP and I want to want a PS3. Why can't Sony just get their shit together?
Oh come on. I'd pay $250 to have my voice in a GTA game. We're talking about a game that has grown more and more epic each iteration, a game whose online video preview recognizably clogged the internet upon release, a game that courts big controversy and blockbuster-movie profits. And be assured you're going to see your name in the credits, both in the manual and in the ingame final credits. I'm sure that's enough for any fan.
Then again, if you're as drunk as you imply, maybe that music wasn't all the hot to begin with. I'll dance to anything shitfaced.
zing!
Yea guys. The Cell processor is pure chocolate magic. Don't forget that. Just like the Emotion Engine before it. Remember the raw emotion that little baby pumped out! It was crazy town. Wait, what?
Sure you're not doing anything illegal now. But what happens when the government changes its mind and decides to outlaw the act of being a sanctimonious dipshit? Or posting on slashdot? Or being an atheist? Or a muslim? Or gay? Or speaking your mind? People who say the government can have free reign over their lives because they're not doing anything wrong according to the current criteria of "upstanding citizen" really have no imagination when it comes to what future administrations might decide to deem unfit behavior for the citizenry. They don't belong in those areas of our lives in the first place, why give them the extra leverage?
...who toys with the idea that actually communicating with aliens may not be possible. until Rama II when the humans were given a large talking owl with which to communicate. Ya know, because people find owls to be soothing creatures. j/k I loved the whole series of books, though the sequels are definitely more hollywood-friendly.