Actually, folks in famine or war zones don't have the time or motivation to bitch about things like McJobs, unfaithful spouses, Amazon.com's product lineup, or the Cowboys' dismal season, yet they still fight and scrap to not just survive, but improve their lives in any way they are able. Sometimes you do hear about people that just give up, and while this is a tragedy, these exceptions prove my points below. Many, many people in terrible living situations struggle on and on and on even as death and devastation and misery breathe down their necks. These folks are often forced to struggle on through utter shit without even the option to bitch.
It sort of puts life in perspective. The fact that we live in relative security and comfort by no means removes our right to bitch and complain and struggle to improve our own lives; the fact that others are worse off absolutely does not mean striving to improve what we already have is wrong. Maybe, though, we should all agree to spend at least as much energy finding what's RIGHT in our lives as we do pointing out what's WRONG. Fulfillment and happiness are never guaranteed, even with the perfect McJob and a faithful spouse, but neither are they impossible, even when you're wondering if it'll ever rain again and bullet-holes riddle your walls. Personal fulfillment is a personal responsibility, and being happy is a decision you have to make every single morning. Mastering these two skills is the key to a good life, regardless of how long you live. It's hard as hell, but, life's best things always are.
People everywhere "keep going" because they choose to, and although I bitch and moan about everything that pisses me off, I like to think I'll always choose to keep going, too.
Everything was, apparently, vegetarian in the Garden of Eden. The lions and the lambs were, also apparently, good pals, lounging about all day. This also explains why they didn't fall or drown. And last, God's only merciful sometimes, other times he's wrathful, dopey, sleepy, happy, grumpy, sneezy, bashful, doc, and pissed.
Funny bit is, back in the days I went to church, there were nutjob answers to everything, and as a kid, that shit was presented as if it made a damn bit of sense (it was grownups telling me, so it HAD to be truth by definition).
I dunno, not saying I'm for or against the $40k fee, but the bandwidth is definitely not negligible... if you consider how many people own an Xbox 360, and then consider what percentage of them will need to patch the game, all those $0.0001 (which doesn't seem like an accurate number, even though you put "exactly") 5Mb files start to add up.
Also, like many others have said, this encourages developers to spend the time getting the game right in the first place instead of rushing to market. Software development is very difficult, but patching live systems is a terrifyingly dangerous task; pushing patches and running them through QA sandboxes is easy, but pushing a patch to a live, production machine (like my Xbox 360) had better fucking not happen without rigorous testing from every company involved (MS is gonna have different interests to in testing than Mr. Developer is).
I guess many of us believe that a small dev SHOULD be "ripped off" (or penalized) for releasing shoddy software, and that this policy is actually logically sound. My *only* question is whether Microsoft is qualified to judge what shoddy software is.
I don't claim that making money is important for the internet to survive. I should probably have been more clear. My point is just any medium that can be exploited for profit will be. I also think that there comes a point where the money being made by exploiting that medium clashes with the original intent of the medium, and that's where we are now with the internet. So many companies are trying to change (or have already changed) the public perception of what the internet really is. Your point about control is not just valid - it's absolutely the crux of the issue. But with corporations that throw small nation's GDP at "solving" made up issues, it's going to take more than a few mirror sites to wrest control back.
I love that you bring up CNN, which I go to all the time because I like the way they present news. From a navigation standpoint, though, I think the layout and general web presence sucks ass. I can't put my finger on why other sites are better without sitting down and doing a real comparison; I just know the general feel of the site is terrible, and it takes longer to move about than it should (off the top of my head, forever long image loads, pages waiting on banners, bullshit "read more" buttons to free up ad real estate, etc). People may not copy their content, but they may copy their general layout, thinking that it's "good" because "Oh my god, that's CNN! They must have done research or some shit into web layout... Johnson! Make our web-site do that!" To me, that's a problem, but I don't know how to solve it. It gets really scary when companies actually pay to expand their control beyond their own websites (through "standards" or forcing new web policies for their affiliates/vendors). Some of these corporations have deep enough pockets to push whatever they want, regardless of how damaging to the internet it is. It seems the only defense against this is for another group of companies push an opposing standard.
As for your other points about site control, freedom of mirrors, I am in complete agreement. I don't think making money is important for the internet's survival; rather, I think exploiting it for profit irresponsibly is a threat to the internet's survival as an open forum.
That's a very good point. Maybe the thing is flying at 51,000 mph, but that's just relative to Earth. As we orbit the sun, does the velocity of the craft slow down as our orbit approaches it? I guess the answer's yeah, it does, since the reference point is changing. Still, mph or kps are a good units for the average joe (or even folks who could get the math if they tried, but choose not to delve that deeply).
Since the math doesn't really matter to us, other than for the fun of it or if we are doing actual research, maybe just saying that the craft is hauling space-balls is good enough.
The NFL does have an overall story arc (albeit a simple one). The lead-up to the Superbowl. Without the Superbowl, the NFL season would have no climax, and the story wouldn't end. It'd be boring as hell, as would any other professional sport. =)
Still, your point is a good one. Some games can stand on their own without story, but I think it's because these games are competitively fun. I don't think anyone could play single-player UT over and over for 3 years straight without wishing turn one of the guns on himself. Rather, it's fun because you're learning, improving, growing, and (above all) competing. These games are, by their very nature, apples to a story-driven game's orange.
The GP's point was that, to folks like him (and myself), a game needs something compelling enough to spend limited time playing through it even once, let alone multiple times. Games like UT get VERY old to folks that can't or won't dedicate the time to get good enough to be competitive, or spend time making us sit in a lobby waiting for a match, and end up feeling like a big waste of time rather than an entertaining diversion.
Of course developers should keep developing non-story games, or any other games that make money, but it seems we've arrived at the point where a respected (?) industry expert is saying story-games are pointless and bad. To me, this means too much emphasis is being put on the gamers that have the time to play various no-story games competitively. As these gamers get older and start families, their time dwindles*. Ignoring the proven historical success of story-driven games and expecting them to continue playing Call of Duty 17 with their 40-something frat-buddies is a very foolish mistake.
*Important Note: It doesn't matter what she's promising you now.
Even worse: She'll also promise that getting married and having kids won't change how often you get head, but that's a lie too.
Worst of all: We all have fantasies of gaming while getting head. Yes, it would be an awesomeness to transcend all other awesomeness in the history of mankind. However, if this does happen, she *is* about to bite you.
I agree with you 100%. I'm also at the point in my life where I have little time to play a game - and when I do, if it doesn't have a good enough ratio of gameplay to story, I don't play it any more, especially when there are other games out there that get it right.
I'm playing Dark Souls now, after just finishing Demon's Souls, and while the stories aren't high-end RPG stuff, there's still enough background to make the games compelling enough to play. They're both extremely punishing of mistakes, but because I know why my character is where she is, and why she needs to move forward from that point, I've become engrossed in the game without giving up. I don't think I could give what little time I have to a game if it was all difficulty with no storyline reward (even if the only "story" reward is a new NPC to chat with, or the description on an item the boss drops, or a neat new sword engraved with an ancient knight's initials). I'm learning about the world in a unique fashion, but I'm still learning. The games could have easily left out these small touches, according to Jaffe, but guess what? They would have suffered tremendously, I'd have gotten supremely bored, yet another game would have been put on the shelf or to a Gamestop to gather dust, and my love for games and the gaming industry would shrink just a little further.
I play to be challenged AND entertained these days - if I just wanted to be challenged without entertainment, all I'd have to do is come to work more, and that's doesn't cost me money - it earns it! So, to sum up, fuck games with no stories.
Totally agree. I love me some JRPG cutscenes, but I want the pivotal decisions, character developments, and battles to be mine. Reward me with the cutscenes I earned, but don't use them to narrate your story; tell it as much as is possible through the gameplay interactions. My favorite is the cutscene AFTER a super tough boss fight; the bane of my existence are the long ones right before or during a super tough boss fight.
Hold on now you guys; nobody's arguing that Mario Kart or Gran Turismo needs cutscenes, but you must admit that having drivers or cars that are all equally non-descript with minor or no differences would have detracted from these games. Sure, if the gameplay is amazing enough, people might still play the games, but games would still suffer from a lack of substance.
Folks like noh8rz2 and I are simply arguing that there are entire genres of games that DO benefit from having a detailed, poignant, and compelling story in the same fashion that games like Mario Kart and Gran Turismo benefit from having diversity in unit selection and gameplay. Sure, the In other words, in a game where you assume the role of a character, having a good story to keep you playing is as important as the gameplay.
And, actually, if the cutscenes are GOOD, I'd have no issue with them in Mario Kart or Gran Turismo. All that needs to be provided is a fast, easy way to skip cutscenes (or maybe even an option for "no cutscenes, EVAR" from the main menu), and the ability to replay them if you missed one the first time around. This caters to everyone when a developer wants to go to the trouble of creating the cutscenes in the first place.
I agree. If I wanted a game that goes out of it's way to remove all attempts at having a story, I'd buy something like Twisted Metal (Turismo-Kart with Juggalos?). I *like* to walk the line between "movie" and "game" by taking control of a character and pitting myself against the game's characters, and then being rewarded for my prowess by uncovering the next part of the story (via cut-scene, an unexpected character development, or a new level to explore). I know that I'm not the only one.
Frankly, I find games that have ZERO story to be trite and stupid - even if the gameplay totally rocks, it's very difficult for me to get absorbed into the game such that I even finish it, let alone play it twice. Notable exceptions are games that are meant to be only multi-player, such as a racing game or a WW2 fps, but for games like, say, resident evil, or the zelda franchise - why would anyone play a game like that without knowing at least a little of the world they're heading into? That seems a silly thing to expect. On top of that, many multiplayer games also have single player story-driven campaigns: Warhammer 40k, Starcraft to name just two franchises. I'd truly hate to see those go, and if they do, it just might be what turns me away from gaming.
Yup, and I thought it was better when gas was a buck a gallon. You can't get whine back in the bottle, so why are you trying? Rather, accept what you have to, change what you can, and try to find something good in the whole mess.
Got news for ya; the internet will KEEP changing too, and nobody really knows how this is gonna happen. It could turn into a giant nightmare (which we should work to avoid, see "change what you can"), it could provide more than it already does (see "find something good") and it could end up with various sites with millions of visitors that provide nothing of value to the rest of the internet as a whole (see "accept what you have to" and/or Youtube).
The problem is for any type of standardization on the magnitude you suggest to be created, and more importantly, followed, several behemoths have to throw truckloads of cash at it faster than other behemoths can throw truckloads of cash at their standard.
I agree with you, in principle, but the internet just does not work that way now, and maybe never did. There's far too much money at stake, and an altruistic approach just won't be as successful as a capitalistic one.
We've had other technologies and creations that have also gone through this trend, such as TV, fax, telephone, newspapers, various printed pamphlets, paintings... hell maybe even cave drawings. Historically, Scentcone is correct; now that there is so much being offered, people WILL be quick to make money from it. That's not a bad thing, by the way, so long as the revenue is earned responsibly.
This isn't a shot at you or your point, but I have to wonder why people tend to loop all "print media" into one thing. I see it all the time, but in running my print shop I've found there are many distinctions to be made.
Newspapers, magazines, junk mail, etc may be dying off (or, more optimistically, transforming) but some print media (banners, billboards, vehicle graphics, screen printing, garments, business cards, fine art prints, and others) continue to gain traction as the quality and cost of materials improves. Notice most of those items, with the notable exceptions of business cards and clothing, are large format, and even the exceptions are still around because they are useful, either in price, personalization, or re-usability; something that a newspaper or magazine simply doesn't provide. It doesn't look like these will die soon, even due to those fancy digital billboards or stupid little business mini-disks (fruit flies live longer than those things did). Often, a digital version of a billboard or banner use the same software and production facilities as vinyl billboards, are 50 times as expensive to create and maintain, and suffer greatly from age (dead pixels on a 30'x10' screen are a bitch). Replacing a printed billboard every couple of months is actually cheaper, though it doesn't allow for the driver-distracting nature of ads that change every 15 seconds.
In any case, much of print media is FAR from dead, and the print industry has advanced far enough (especially digital inkjets and various ink technologies) that there are some things that just cannot easily or economically be done without ink. Some things, like books, just won't be the same in digital format, and others, like film, will die the death they were destined for, but "print media" as a whole is pretty healthy in many respects.
Hey, that's just crazy enough that it might work. I decided not to pay my taxes for several years in a row, and the government never even knew!!
This year I'm getting absolutely fucked, though, for some reason.... it must be because I'm in the tax bracket that get their asses nailed to the wall on leap years.
Well said. I don't care if there's advertising on a site. Sometimes I even use it, though it's rare. Still, that's why it's there.
What I care about is when there's a site that uses obtrusive advertising, which forces itself on me. Yeah, I know you have a banner ad in the lower right. I see it, trust me. There's no reason to force it to the foreground of my browser in a flash animation, hiding the close button in one pixel with multiple pop-up buttons surrounding said pixel. Even sites like cnn.com do this, and its plain uncalled for, and detracts completely from the reason I went to the site in the first place, which is to find information. If that happens enough to piss me off (which could be ONE time, if I'm having an annoyed day) I stop going to the site, meaning all those fancy annoyance ads are worth one less person.
By all means, advertise, but do us both a favor and don't try to piss me off. Marketing and web presence departments should really know this by now.
Yeah. First things that come to mind are Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. You can play both without an online presence, but the games are much more interesting when you're playing in a persistent online state; being invaded at any time, watching other players silhouettes struggle just like you, seeing helpful messages written on the ground by other players, and being able to summon help when necessary are all beautiful additions to the games. But, to get them, guess who needs a PSN account? Everyone playing the game.
I think the old days of playing games by your lonesome aren't gone, but they are modified. I still feel like I'm struggling alone against a horde of demons, but the small touches that random real people bring to the game enhance it rather than detract from it (unlike, say, WoW where the fools make total immersion all but impossible). It would be nice if things like online human interaction weren't seen as a commodity for Sony, and instead relied on nothing more than a connection to the internet and good programming from the developer, like the old days.
Actually, there were investigations all the time into situations where a fellow cop did something wrong.
For instance, I was point on an investigation into an officer that went in and deleted 10 or so database records, and was not authorized to do so. These records were of an arrest of a family member of his; a DUI, if I recall. He even went in and deleted the system records that recorded the original deletions. He failed to realize that deletion of system records is tracked recursively; he would have needed to turn off system records prior to deleting ANYTHING for it to have gone unnoticed. Access rights at that level belonged to one person at the agency (usually the database admin; not even the police chief typically has this info) and, of course, us. This guy was caught with no recourse; I was even able to find the deleted records by sifting through the backups. He is no longer a police officer, at least at that agency, and the firing was all done pretty efficiently.
Others of my former colleagues would deal with this type of abuse, as well as its opposite: adding records to a database without grounds (mugshots, jail fines, court papers, etc for people who had committed no crime). We would also get requests all the time, as in, 2 or 3 for every 25-ish national support calls, for help aggregating records entered by a particular police officer over an alleged abuse of power (or for the defense of an accused officer's behavior; some cops really ARE wrongly accused). This wasn't a common enough task, especially at the smaller agencies, that the records clerks knew how to accomplish it alone, but it was common enough that we had a read-only report procedure written to accomplish it easily. Some of the bigger agencies would request their own modifications to this report, especially when the officer in question had been there for 30 years and accumulated enough records to slow the entire database while running the report. The agencies were typically not stupid (though there really were some Maybury-like organizations), and you can pretty much bet that anytime an officer is no longer an officer, he did something he shouldn't have, and the turnover rate for medium to large agencies is actually pretty high. It's in the best interest of the agency that you don't know the details, but it happens quite a lot.
I actually agree, to a point, with your assessment that lots of cops *think* they're above the law. Even in the cases I pointed out, the officers weren't risking criminal penalties very often. All of the officers that got caught also got fired, losing pensions and all the other secondary benefits in addition to paychecks, but had I done the same thing, I'd have had to lawyer up. I suppose there are benefits to that; it's much easier to fire an officer quickly than to arrest and prosecute one, providing paid leave during the process.
My argument isn't that cops are all or even mostly great people, just that there are some tremendous assholes that are working in an environment where their non-asshole or asshole-lite co-workers tend to focus on their own jobs, believing (hoping?) that the right higher-ups are on top of it. I'd guess most random samples of people would be like this, although I'd also guess that a random sample of police officers would show a somewhat higher capacity for abuse of power. There are reasons cops want to be cops, after all, and it seems likely that some officers went into law enforcement to wield power.
Anyway, being a cop is much like any other job, and maybe it's like the military (never was an army grunt, going off hearsay). If Joe in cubicle C watches The Matrix all day long instead of finishing Tuesday's TPS report, I sort of expect him to fall at some point, but that's a management issue, not mine, and I have enough shit to do without the responsibility of opening that can of worms. Again, the fact that leadership and law is structured like this is the problem.
Or the west, in general. You'd think that such huge distances between townships would make the individual families living there MORE dependent on communication, not less. May not make as much money as the city-folk, but a market definitely exists. Just depends if it would make more money in the long run than building out the infrastructure (which the state governments, I'm sure, would subsidize anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, folks in famine or war zones don't have the time or motivation to bitch about things like McJobs, unfaithful spouses, Amazon.com's product lineup, or the Cowboys' dismal season, yet they still fight and scrap to not just survive, but improve their lives in any way they are able. Sometimes you do hear about people that just give up, and while this is a tragedy, these exceptions prove my points below. Many, many people in terrible living situations struggle on and on and on even as death and devastation and misery breathe down their necks. These folks are often forced to struggle on through utter shit without even the option to bitch.
It sort of puts life in perspective. The fact that we live in relative security and comfort by no means removes our right to bitch and complain and struggle to improve our own lives; the fact that others are worse off absolutely does not mean striving to improve what we already have is wrong. Maybe, though, we should all agree to spend at least as much energy finding what's RIGHT in our lives as we do pointing out what's WRONG. Fulfillment and happiness are never guaranteed, even with the perfect McJob and a faithful spouse, but neither are they impossible, even when you're wondering if it'll ever rain again and bullet-holes riddle your walls. Personal fulfillment is a personal responsibility, and being happy is a decision you have to make every single morning. Mastering these two skills is the key to a good life, regardless of how long you live. It's hard as hell, but, life's best things always are.
People everywhere "keep going" because they choose to, and although I bitch and moan about everything that pisses me off, I like to think I'll always choose to keep going, too.
At least we can still duplicate our toons, and man the duping process is fun, even though it doesn't work every time.
Everything was, apparently, vegetarian in the Garden of Eden. The lions and the lambs were, also apparently, good pals, lounging about all day. This also explains why they didn't fall or drown. And last, God's only merciful sometimes, other times he's wrathful, dopey, sleepy, happy, grumpy, sneezy, bashful, doc, and pissed.
Funny bit is, back in the days I went to church, there were nutjob answers to everything, and as a kid, that shit was presented as if it made a damn bit of sense (it was grownups telling me, so it HAD to be truth by definition).
Your post triggered a mental image of God flipping a giant space-coin with Lucifer over who got to nail Mary. Weird.
Hmm. Guess I did end up saying I was for the fee. Go figure.
I dunno, not saying I'm for or against the $40k fee, but the bandwidth is definitely not negligible... if you consider how many people own an Xbox 360, and then consider what percentage of them will need to patch the game, all those $0.0001 (which doesn't seem like an accurate number, even though you put "exactly") 5Mb files start to add up.
Also, like many others have said, this encourages developers to spend the time getting the game right in the first place instead of rushing to market. Software development is very difficult, but patching live systems is a terrifyingly dangerous task; pushing patches and running them through QA sandboxes is easy, but pushing a patch to a live, production machine (like my Xbox 360) had better fucking not happen without rigorous testing from every company involved (MS is gonna have different interests to in testing than Mr. Developer is).
I guess many of us believe that a small dev SHOULD be "ripped off" (or penalized) for releasing shoddy software, and that this policy is actually logically sound. My *only* question is whether Microsoft is qualified to judge what shoddy software is.
You... you're turning me on....
What... the... hell? Who ARE you, you glorious indecency?
I don't claim that making money is important for the internet to survive. I should probably have been more clear. My point is just any medium that can be exploited for profit will be. I also think that there comes a point where the money being made by exploiting that medium clashes with the original intent of the medium, and that's where we are now with the internet. So many companies are trying to change (or have already changed) the public perception of what the internet really is. Your point about control is not just valid - it's absolutely the crux of the issue. But with corporations that throw small nation's GDP at "solving" made up issues, it's going to take more than a few mirror sites to wrest control back.
I love that you bring up CNN, which I go to all the time because I like the way they present news. From a navigation standpoint, though, I think the layout and general web presence sucks ass. I can't put my finger on why other sites are better without sitting down and doing a real comparison; I just know the general feel of the site is terrible, and it takes longer to move about than it should (off the top of my head, forever long image loads, pages waiting on banners, bullshit "read more" buttons to free up ad real estate, etc). People may not copy their content, but they may copy their general layout, thinking that it's "good" because "Oh my god, that's CNN! They must have done research or some shit into web layout... Johnson! Make our web-site do that!" To me, that's a problem, but I don't know how to solve it. It gets really scary when companies actually pay to expand their control beyond their own websites (through "standards" or forcing new web policies for their affiliates/vendors). Some of these corporations have deep enough pockets to push whatever they want, regardless of how damaging to the internet it is. It seems the only defense against this is for another group of companies push an opposing standard.
As for your other points about site control, freedom of mirrors, I am in complete agreement. I don't think making money is important for the internet's survival; rather, I think exploiting it for profit irresponsibly is a threat to the internet's survival as an open forum.
That's a very good point. Maybe the thing is flying at 51,000 mph, but that's just relative to Earth. As we orbit the sun, does the velocity of the craft slow down as our orbit approaches it? I guess the answer's yeah, it does, since the reference point is changing. Still, mph or kps are a good units for the average joe (or even folks who could get the math if they tried, but choose not to delve that deeply).
Since the math doesn't really matter to us, other than for the fun of it or if we are doing actual research, maybe just saying that the craft is hauling space-balls is good enough.
The NFL does have an overall story arc (albeit a simple one). The lead-up to the Superbowl. Without the Superbowl, the NFL season would have no climax, and the story wouldn't end. It'd be boring as hell, as would any other professional sport. =)
Still, your point is a good one. Some games can stand on their own without story, but I think it's because these games are competitively fun. I don't think anyone could play single-player UT over and over for 3 years straight without wishing turn one of the guns on himself. Rather, it's fun because you're learning, improving, growing, and (above all) competing. These games are, by their very nature, apples to a story-driven game's orange.
The GP's point was that, to folks like him (and myself), a game needs something compelling enough to spend limited time playing through it even once, let alone multiple times. Games like UT get VERY old to folks that can't or won't dedicate the time to get good enough to be competitive, or spend time making us sit in a lobby waiting for a match, and end up feeling like a big waste of time rather than an entertaining diversion.
Of course developers should keep developing non-story games, or any other games that make money, but it seems we've arrived at the point where a respected (?) industry expert is saying story-games are pointless and bad. To me, this means too much emphasis is being put on the gamers that have the time to play various no-story games competitively. As these gamers get older and start families, their time dwindles*. Ignoring the proven historical success of story-driven games and expecting them to continue playing Call of Duty 17 with their 40-something frat-buddies is a very foolish mistake.
*Important Note: It doesn't matter what she's promising you now.
Even worse: She'll also promise that getting married and having kids won't change how often you get head, but that's a lie too.
Worst of all: We all have fantasies of gaming while getting head. Yes, it would be an awesomeness to transcend all other awesomeness in the history of mankind. However, if this does happen, she *is* about to bite you.
I agree with you 100%. I'm also at the point in my life where I have little time to play a game - and when I do, if it doesn't have a good enough ratio of gameplay to story, I don't play it any more, especially when there are other games out there that get it right.
I'm playing Dark Souls now, after just finishing Demon's Souls, and while the stories aren't high-end RPG stuff, there's still enough background to make the games compelling enough to play. They're both extremely punishing of mistakes, but because I know why my character is where she is, and why she needs to move forward from that point, I've become engrossed in the game without giving up. I don't think I could give what little time I have to a game if it was all difficulty with no storyline reward (even if the only "story" reward is a new NPC to chat with, or the description on an item the boss drops, or a neat new sword engraved with an ancient knight's initials). I'm learning about the world in a unique fashion, but I'm still learning. The games could have easily left out these small touches, according to Jaffe, but guess what? They would have suffered tremendously, I'd have gotten supremely bored, yet another game would have been put on the shelf or to a Gamestop to gather dust, and my love for games and the gaming industry would shrink just a little further.
I play to be challenged AND entertained these days - if I just wanted to be challenged without entertainment, all I'd have to do is come to work more, and that's doesn't cost me money - it earns it! So, to sum up, fuck games with no stories.
Totally agree. I love me some JRPG cutscenes, but I want the pivotal decisions, character developments, and battles to be mine. Reward me with the cutscenes I earned, but don't use them to narrate your story; tell it as much as is possible through the gameplay interactions. My favorite is the cutscene AFTER a super tough boss fight; the bane of my existence are the long ones right before or during a super tough boss fight.
Hold on now you guys; nobody's arguing that Mario Kart or Gran Turismo needs cutscenes, but you must admit that having drivers or cars that are all equally non-descript with minor or no differences would have detracted from these games. Sure, if the gameplay is amazing enough, people might still play the games, but games would still suffer from a lack of substance.
Folks like noh8rz2 and I are simply arguing that there are entire genres of games that DO benefit from having a detailed, poignant, and compelling story in the same fashion that games like Mario Kart and Gran Turismo benefit from having diversity in unit selection and gameplay. Sure, the In other words, in a game where you assume the role of a character, having a good story to keep you playing is as important as the gameplay.
And, actually, if the cutscenes are GOOD, I'd have no issue with them in Mario Kart or Gran Turismo. All that needs to be provided is a fast, easy way to skip cutscenes (or maybe even an option for "no cutscenes, EVAR" from the main menu), and the ability to replay them if you missed one the first time around. This caters to everyone when a developer wants to go to the trouble of creating the cutscenes in the first place.
I agree. If I wanted a game that goes out of it's way to remove all attempts at having a story, I'd buy something like Twisted Metal (Turismo-Kart with Juggalos?). I *like* to walk the line between "movie" and "game" by taking control of a character and pitting myself against the game's characters, and then being rewarded for my prowess by uncovering the next part of the story (via cut-scene, an unexpected character development, or a new level to explore). I know that I'm not the only one.
Frankly, I find games that have ZERO story to be trite and stupid - even if the gameplay totally rocks, it's very difficult for me to get absorbed into the game such that I even finish it, let alone play it twice. Notable exceptions are games that are meant to be only multi-player, such as a racing game or a WW2 fps, but for games like, say, resident evil, or the zelda franchise - why would anyone play a game like that without knowing at least a little of the world they're heading into? That seems a silly thing to expect. On top of that, many multiplayer games also have single player story-driven campaigns: Warhammer 40k, Starcraft to name just two franchises. I'd truly hate to see those go, and if they do, it just might be what turns me away from gaming.
Yup, and I thought it was better when gas was a buck a gallon. You can't get whine back in the bottle, so why are you trying? Rather, accept what you have to, change what you can, and try to find something good in the whole mess.
Got news for ya; the internet will KEEP changing too, and nobody really knows how this is gonna happen. It could turn into a giant nightmare (which we should work to avoid, see "change what you can"), it could provide more than it already does (see "find something good") and it could end up with various sites with millions of visitors that provide nothing of value to the rest of the internet as a whole (see "accept what you have to" and/or Youtube).
The problem is for any type of standardization on the magnitude you suggest to be created, and more importantly, followed, several behemoths have to throw truckloads of cash at it faster than other behemoths can throw truckloads of cash at their standard.
I agree with you, in principle, but the internet just does not work that way now, and maybe never did. There's far too much money at stake, and an altruistic approach just won't be as successful as a capitalistic one.
We've had other technologies and creations that have also gone through this trend, such as TV, fax, telephone, newspapers, various printed pamphlets, paintings... hell maybe even cave drawings. Historically, Scentcone is correct; now that there is so much being offered, people WILL be quick to make money from it. That's not a bad thing, by the way, so long as the revenue is earned responsibly.
This isn't a shot at you or your point, but I have to wonder why people tend to loop all "print media" into one thing. I see it all the time, but in running my print shop I've found there are many distinctions to be made.
Newspapers, magazines, junk mail, etc may be dying off (or, more optimistically, transforming) but some print media (banners, billboards, vehicle graphics, screen printing, garments, business cards, fine art prints, and others) continue to gain traction as the quality and cost of materials improves. Notice most of those items, with the notable exceptions of business cards and clothing, are large format, and even the exceptions are still around because they are useful, either in price, personalization, or re-usability; something that a newspaper or magazine simply doesn't provide. It doesn't look like these will die soon, even due to those fancy digital billboards or stupid little business mini-disks (fruit flies live longer than those things did). Often, a digital version of a billboard or banner use the same software and production facilities as vinyl billboards, are 50 times as expensive to create and maintain, and suffer greatly from age (dead pixels on a 30'x10' screen are a bitch). Replacing a printed billboard every couple of months is actually cheaper, though it doesn't allow for the driver-distracting nature of ads that change every 15 seconds.
In any case, much of print media is FAR from dead, and the print industry has advanced far enough (especially digital inkjets and various ink technologies) that there are some things that just cannot easily or economically be done without ink. Some things, like books, just won't be the same in digital format, and others, like film, will die the death they were destined for, but "print media" as a whole is pretty healthy in many respects.
Hey, that's just crazy enough that it might work. I decided not to pay my taxes for several years in a row, and the government never even knew!!
This year I'm getting absolutely fucked, though, for some reason.... it must be because I'm in the tax bracket that get their asses nailed to the wall on leap years.
Well said. I don't care if there's advertising on a site. Sometimes I even use it, though it's rare. Still, that's why it's there.
What I care about is when there's a site that uses obtrusive advertising, which forces itself on me. Yeah, I know you have a banner ad in the lower right. I see it, trust me. There's no reason to force it to the foreground of my browser in a flash animation, hiding the close button in one pixel with multiple pop-up buttons surrounding said pixel. Even sites like cnn.com do this, and its plain uncalled for, and detracts completely from the reason I went to the site in the first place, which is to find information. If that happens enough to piss me off (which could be ONE time, if I'm having an annoyed day) I stop going to the site, meaning all those fancy annoyance ads are worth one less person.
By all means, advertise, but do us both a favor and don't try to piss me off. Marketing and web presence departments should really know this by now.
Then why is yours still here?
It's also like rocketing from Earth to Pluto in just over 8 years, or from the Moon to Saturn in just under 5 years (via TFA). =)
Teasing aside, the little space-bullet hit 51,000 mph during Jupiter's gravity assist. Crazy fast.
...what's the next format for noninteractive video?
Radioactive video!! "Zee gogglez! Zey do nuffink!!"
Yeah. First things that come to mind are Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. You can play both without an online presence, but the games are much more interesting when you're playing in a persistent online state; being invaded at any time, watching other players silhouettes struggle just like you, seeing helpful messages written on the ground by other players, and being able to summon help when necessary are all beautiful additions to the games. But, to get them, guess who needs a PSN account? Everyone playing the game.
I think the old days of playing games by your lonesome aren't gone, but they are modified. I still feel like I'm struggling alone against a horde of demons, but the small touches that random real people bring to the game enhance it rather than detract from it (unlike, say, WoW where the fools make total immersion all but impossible). It would be nice if things like online human interaction weren't seen as a commodity for Sony, and instead relied on nothing more than a connection to the internet and good programming from the developer, like the old days.
Actually, there were investigations all the time into situations where a fellow cop did something wrong.
For instance, I was point on an investigation into an officer that went in and deleted 10 or so database records, and was not authorized to do so. These records were of an arrest of a family member of his; a DUI, if I recall. He even went in and deleted the system records that recorded the original deletions. He failed to realize that deletion of system records is tracked recursively; he would have needed to turn off system records prior to deleting ANYTHING for it to have gone unnoticed. Access rights at that level belonged to one person at the agency (usually the database admin; not even the police chief typically has this info) and, of course, us. This guy was caught with no recourse; I was even able to find the deleted records by sifting through the backups. He is no longer a police officer, at least at that agency, and the firing was all done pretty efficiently.
Others of my former colleagues would deal with this type of abuse, as well as its opposite: adding records to a database without grounds (mugshots, jail fines, court papers, etc for people who had committed no crime). We would also get requests all the time, as in, 2 or 3 for every 25-ish national support calls, for help aggregating records entered by a particular police officer over an alleged abuse of power (or for the defense of an accused officer's behavior; some cops really ARE wrongly accused). This wasn't a common enough task, especially at the smaller agencies, that the records clerks knew how to accomplish it alone, but it was common enough that we had a read-only report procedure written to accomplish it easily. Some of the bigger agencies would request their own modifications to this report, especially when the officer in question had been there for 30 years and accumulated enough records to slow the entire database while running the report. The agencies were typically not stupid (though there really were some Maybury-like organizations), and you can pretty much bet that anytime an officer is no longer an officer, he did something he shouldn't have, and the turnover rate for medium to large agencies is actually pretty high. It's in the best interest of the agency that you don't know the details, but it happens quite a lot.
I actually agree, to a point, with your assessment that lots of cops *think* they're above the law. Even in the cases I pointed out, the officers weren't risking criminal penalties very often. All of the officers that got caught also got fired, losing pensions and all the other secondary benefits in addition to paychecks, but had I done the same thing, I'd have had to lawyer up. I suppose there are benefits to that; it's much easier to fire an officer quickly than to arrest and prosecute one, providing paid leave during the process.
My argument isn't that cops are all or even mostly great people, just that there are some tremendous assholes that are working in an environment where their non-asshole or asshole-lite co-workers tend to focus on their own jobs, believing (hoping?) that the right higher-ups are on top of it. I'd guess most random samples of people would be like this, although I'd also guess that a random sample of police officers would show a somewhat higher capacity for abuse of power. There are reasons cops want to be cops, after all, and it seems likely that some officers went into law enforcement to wield power.
Anyway, being a cop is much like any other job, and maybe it's like the military (never was an army grunt, going off hearsay). If Joe in cubicle C watches The Matrix all day long instead of finishing Tuesday's TPS report, I sort of expect him to fall at some point, but that's a management issue, not mine, and I have enough shit to do without the responsibility of opening that can of worms. Again, the fact that leadership and law is structured like this is the problem.
Or the west, in general. You'd think that such huge distances between townships would make the individual families living there MORE dependent on communication, not less. May not make as much money as the city-folk, but a market definitely exists. Just depends if it would make more money in the long run than building out the infrastructure (which the state governments, I'm sure, would subsidize anyway).