Have you ever visited Japan? You know who the two biggest commercial draws in Japan were in 2002? Bob Sapp (a washed-up NFL player, turned K-1 "fighter".) and David Beckham.
Japanese markets eat stuff that's huge in the States and Europe up BIG TIME.
The XBox is failing on many reasons. It's HUGE, the average Japanese house has very small living room space, and it's common space. It's also commonly used for sleeping. Kind of hard to do that with a huge-ass console plus controllers there.
Second, the XBox commercials SUCK. The XBox Live commercials in Japan were easily the worst video game commercials. One had this scantily cald woman, who looked like she was on drugs, creeping along a wall that's littered with pie remnants. She slinks up to one of them, and tastes the pie. That's it.
In version 2, a man is in an elevator. A demon pops out from the ceiling. Man's elevator falls through the floor. This makes me interested in a system's online capabilities, how?
What are the biggest console game sellers in Japan the last 3-5 years? RPGs. By far. Pokemon, FF, Dragon Quest. If you ain't selling them, you ain't selling consoles.
What does the XBox not have? An RPG.
Why is the average Japanese RPG fan going to buy and XBox and Live when a PS2 and FFXI is going to take up all his time?
Figure out the answer to that question, and then go apply for a high paying job at Microsoft. Until then, the system fails not out of jingoism, it fails because of Microsoft's failure.
It's hopeless wehn you time the damn thing so poorly.
This event coincides with:
The NBA Playoffs. The NHL Playoffs. Opening of MLB season.
Yeah...I see this happening. I watch maybe 4 hours of TV a month normally. I'd participate in this if it weren't in the middle of the one month of TV I cared about. Check the schedule next year, geniuses.
The hard-plastic cover just makes it use MORE plastic. What's the point of that? Just make it the way it was before at that point.
However, I get DVDs and CDs for durability...I'd like to see paper discs but only if they have a similar life span and are scratch resistant...otherwise, keep what we've got now.
I honestly don't have any idea how this is newsworthy. I think, his theories and hundreds of words on why CRPGs don't work with d20 rules can be summed up in 4 letters.
That's the one moment I vividly remember from Max Payne. Unfortunately, it's buried inside of 2 other sequences that require the player to run through the same retarded dream sequence at 1/10th speed, so it lost a lot of the humor value as anger overwhelmed it.
"That's not a threat. That's a promise!" actually has some redeeming unintention comedy value to it, from the way Jackie Chan delivers the line.
No, the "I'm a woman, baby!" line is second in cliche factor next to:
"We're not so different, you and I."
The retarded thing is it's ALWAYS used exactly that way. It's always verbatim. Nobody ever switches it up and says, "You and I really aren't all that different."
Seriously, my company had this problem a couple years back. They said, it's too hard to find the free browser. So I linked to the free broswer download page. It's was that freaking simple. Deep-linking is LEGAL, people.
The "..." signifies awkward silence. That should have been pretty obvious. You don't pronounce anything. If you wanted to act like you were in an anime, you could just yell out, "dot dot dot". But then you would be lame, and everyone else would just give you the "..." blank stare.
It's odd...this stuff shows up in Chinese, too. The movie "Future Cops" (comedy in the Street Fighter universe, only, it's not "technically" SF.) has the protagonist's mom "falling" for some guy becuase he can speak English.
One of the lines he says is, "I am a man, a man and many pens!"
The game developers frankly made a lot of a retarded mistakes. Trying to force a first person engine to make a 3rd person co-op platformer?
Axing your ONE unique selling point...ugh.
I'm sorry, but I can't feel bad for someone who burned through that much cash with fancy office space and all. Everyone knows you get the fancy digs after your first game sells.
I do have to say that this was the best one for the whole day, though. All the other ones were just, "Ugh...it's April Fool's isn't it?", but this one actually made me chuckle.
My sophomore year, UC Irvine went from choose your own UID to First Initial, Middle Initial, 6 letters of last name. Freshmen got them auto-assigned like that.
I was making a database of club emails, and there was a girl in there named Serena Tan...middle initial, A.
The school had a policy of allowing you to change something that was blatantly horrible, so she didn't have to bear with "satan@uci.edu" for more than a week or so.
Exactly. All this crap with region locking in DVDs and games is bull.
I used to own a modded original PS. This was great for playing imports of stuff that would never come over to the US...like Cooking Fighter Hao. I very rarely burned stuff because if I really enjoyed it...I was spending my time PLAYING the damn game. If I didn't enjoy it, it wasn't worth burning.
I'd like to mod my PS2, and I probably will shortly. I would have done it by now, but the import game stores in my area have already been threatened by Sony directly to stop doing it, even though they only sell 100% legit games.
I mod my system so I can play the imports. I do this because if I wait for the game to come out here, EVERYONE knows every intricate detail of the game already because every magazine gets an "exclusive" detail about the game, and it's ridiculous.
So I play the game while its in Japanese...and I can't understand all the info about the details. (You'd be surprised how easy it is to figure out the plots to today's games even without any understanding of the language.) The only thing I keep my US system around for is games that I rent (There aren't any places that rent Japanese games.) and really deep tactical games, where I miss out by not completely understanding the game system.
So why do they care about region locking the games? The manufacturer of the hardware AND the game publisher are in Japan. I'm giving them money to legitimately buy and use the software. What the hell's the problem here?
If they'd only see that by removing region locking they'd get rid of most of the legitimacy of the mod chips themselves, they could crack down on this stuff much harder.
In any case, whenever someone mouths off about how piracy is hurting publishers because people download their games and all...a large percentage of that software downloaded is crap they'd never even give a look at on the store shelves. How many people do you know who played Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. How many people do you think paid for it? 4? But because it's at no real charge to them, some people will burn games that they normally wouldn't even spend rental money on.
Is this lost money to the industry? No. None of those crappy games would have sold or been rented. The game industry needs to stop whining. Software gets more leeway than ANY other product on the market. How many other products can flat out not work, and have the industry standard policy of not providing a cash refund? Click-wrap EULAs and all, I'm perfectly fine with kicking the industry around a bit until it stops acting so consumer-hostile.
What the heck are you talking about? Koster didn't come up with something original! He just made Star Wars Galaxies again. Re-read his suggestion, it's just to make a romance-based MMO where the players respond to content that's automatically generated from a template but given a subset of variables.
My first reaction upon seeing this headline was, "Oh, Koster didn't win, huh? Now that's a big shocker." Then I read the article, and it made me sad because he was actually pathetic enough to do exactly what I disparagingly predicted he would do. How do these 1-track people keeo jobs when their 1 track leads to Suckville? We may never know...
You move to where the companies are. LA. Nobody has you as a full time tester from a different time zone, especially with everyone having source code leaks. If you can't move, it's a pipe dream until you can.
Oh man...if I was allowed to code the game, you would have seen such better versions of a lot of games that you've all played.
They don't require a tester to know how to code. Nobody in our office had access to the code we were working with for the majority of the time. Everything was done outside, and then we got revs mailed back to us.
To an extent any gamer can be QA. But not every gamer can be GOOD QA. The problem with this lies in the fact that 1 good QA guy in a leadership position can cover up the flaws of several other testers. You get one guy who can work hard, has good writing skills and pride in his work, and he'll cover up the flaws of several people under him. In this manner, you can hire 3 good QA guys to oversee the work of 15 crappy ones, and get serviceable results.
You'd be shocked at how little of a hiring process there is during crunch time. A lot of temp testing hires are given jobs solely based off of the available hours they have. Since the GOOD guys cover up for the crap guys, outsiders assume the department is OK and don't do anything about they way they've hired people.
Nobody can accurately describe QA without having done it for a year or so. "Merely playing the game" is a lot less trivial than you'd make it appear.
How many times do you play a game for fun, load up 35 different save points, and check that you can buy, sell, and cancel out of transactions at a store. Then go and sell every single item you have in stock, and make sure it gives you the proper amount of money back. After that, buy every single item you sold, and then make sure it deducts the proper amount of money, and that it won't sell it to you if you don't have enough cash.
At the end of all this 30-45 hours of mundane work, the pointlessness of it all is underscored by the Lead taking a look at your results and chucking them in the waste bin. All for $8/hr.
You feel your life ticking away at a QA job. The only reasons compelling enough to tough out that job are that you take pride in knowing there's one less text error gamers will laugh about. You know that you've got a damn good group of guys with you, you're just biding your time to get a job at a better QA or game gig, or there's room to advance to somewhere else in the company.
Um...if by "games" you include this in the discusssion. This was a game outsourced to Russia. And that's why everyone hates the idea.
When I worked for Squaresoft, it was a pain enough to get bugs translated for the US versions of the game, send them over to Japan, and hopefully have Japan type the English in properly, because all the dev was done there. We at least had the benefit of having the game done already. Try explaining that your truck has to have an opponent to race against in Russian to someone who may not have ever coded a game before.
You guys probably didn't see this Press Release they made earlier. Basically, they had this old company lying around, one that was publicly traded. Then, they had Infinium Labs, the current incarnation of the company merge with the shell of the old company.
This gave Infinium Labs a public valuation and stock that was publicly traded...but it was all bullshit.
"Animations are very nice. (the guys at SOE must have logged countless hours in exotic dance clubs...all under the guise of doing research for the Entertainer class.)"
Slashdot Mirror
If you count the GBA, it's in 3rd.
System Total Sales in 2004
GameBoy Advance SP: 971,900
PlayStation 2: 960,500
GameCube: 321,400
GameBoy Advance: 117,300
Xbox: 16,500
PSone: 8,300
WonderSwan Crystal: 4,700
Solidly in 3rd is struggling to hold onto 1/3rd of the #s for #2.
It is easy to see the impact of the quality RPG.
Wow. What a bunch of crap.
Have you ever visited Japan? You know who the two biggest commercial draws in Japan were in 2002? Bob Sapp (a washed-up NFL player, turned K-1 "fighter".) and David Beckham.
Japanese markets eat stuff that's huge in the States and Europe up BIG TIME.
The XBox is failing on many reasons. It's HUGE, the average Japanese house has very small living room space, and it's common space. It's also commonly used for sleeping. Kind of hard to do that with a huge-ass console plus controllers there.
Second, the XBox commercials SUCK. The XBox Live commercials in Japan were easily the worst video game commercials. One had this scantily cald woman, who looked like she was on drugs, creeping along a wall that's littered with pie remnants. She slinks up to one of them, and tastes the pie. That's it.
In version 2, a man is in an elevator. A demon pops out from the ceiling. Man's elevator falls through the floor. This makes me interested in a system's online capabilities, how?
What are the biggest console game sellers in Japan the last 3-5 years? RPGs. By far. Pokemon, FF, Dragon Quest. If you ain't selling them, you ain't selling consoles.
What does the XBox not have? An RPG.
Why is the average Japanese RPG fan going to buy and XBox and Live when a PS2 and FFXI is going to take up all his time?
Figure out the answer to that question, and then go apply for a high paying job at Microsoft. Until then, the system fails not out of jingoism, it fails because of Microsoft's failure.
It's hopeless wehn you time the damn thing so poorly.
This event coincides with:
The NBA Playoffs.
The NHL Playoffs.
Opening of MLB season.
Yeah...I see this happening. I watch maybe 4 hours of TV a month normally. I'd participate in this if it weren't in the middle of the one month of TV I cared about. Check the schedule next year, geniuses.
The hard-plastic cover just makes it use MORE plastic. What's the point of that? Just make it the way it was before at that point.
However, I get DVDs and CDs for durability...I'd like to see paper discs but only if they have a similar life span and are scratch resistant...otherwise, keep what we've got now.
No it isn't. If you don't keep the mood of the world, you might as well just call the game "Combat".
I honestly don't have any idea how this is newsworthy. I think, his theories and hundreds of words on why CRPGs don't work with d20 rules can be summed up in 4 letters.
WotC.
Dunno why he didn't just do that.
It's like the Marketing Dept. over there had a competition for the least descriptive, yet most derivative name that included the word "Live".
I mean..."True Fantasy"? WTF?
Once again...worst PR in the biz. They might as well have called it "Developers, Developers!"
That's the one moment I vividly remember from Max Payne. Unfortunately, it's buried inside of 2 other sequences that require the player to run through the same retarded dream sequence at 1/10th speed, so it lost a lot of the humor value as anger overwhelmed it.
"That's not a threat. That's a promise!" actually has some redeeming unintention comedy value to it, from the way Jackie Chan delivers the line.
No, the "I'm a woman, baby!" line is second in cliche factor next to:
"We're not so different, you and I."
The retarded thing is it's ALWAYS used exactly that way. It's always verbatim. Nobody ever switches it up and says, "You and I really aren't all that different."
What I don't understand is:
You run a company. You know people need the link to d/l your software.
HOW HARD IS IT TO GRAB THE LINK YOURSELF?
Seriously, my company had this problem a couple years back. They said, it's too hard to find the free browser. So I linked to the free broswer download page. It's was that freaking simple. Deep-linking is LEGAL, people.
The "..." signifies awkward silence. That should have been pretty obvious. You don't pronounce anything. If you wanted to act like you were in an anime, you could just yell out, "dot dot dot". But then you would be lame, and everyone else would just give you the "..." blank stare.
It's odd...this stuff shows up in Chinese, too. The movie "Future Cops" (comedy in the Street Fighter universe, only, it's not "technically" SF.) has the protagonist's mom "falling" for some guy becuase he can speak English.
One of the lines he says is, "I am a man, a man and many pens!"
The game developers frankly made a lot of a retarded mistakes. Trying to force a first person engine to make a 3rd person co-op platformer?
Axing your ONE unique selling point...ugh.
I'm sorry, but I can't feel bad for someone who burned through that much cash with fancy office space and all. Everyone knows you get the fancy digs after your first game sells.
I do have to say that this was the best one for the whole day, though. All the other ones were just, "Ugh...it's April Fool's isn't it?", but this one actually made me chuckle.
My sophomore year, UC Irvine went from choose your own UID to First Initial, Middle Initial, 6 letters of last name. Freshmen got them auto-assigned like that.
I was making a database of club emails, and there was a girl in there named Serena Tan...middle initial, A.
The school had a policy of allowing you to change something that was blatantly horrible, so she didn't have to bear with "satan@uci.edu" for more than a week or so.
Better yet...watch the wacky commercial:
http://www.playstation.jp/ch/cm/index.html
Second from the top on the right.
Exactly. All this crap with region locking in DVDs and games is bull.
I used to own a modded original PS. This was great for playing imports of stuff that would never come over to the US...like Cooking Fighter Hao. I very rarely burned stuff because if I really enjoyed it...I was spending my time PLAYING the damn game. If I didn't enjoy it, it wasn't worth burning.
I'd like to mod my PS2, and I probably will shortly. I would have done it by now, but the import game stores in my area have already been threatened by Sony directly to stop doing it, even though they only sell 100% legit games.
I mod my system so I can play the imports. I do this because if I wait for the game to come out here, EVERYONE knows every intricate detail of the game already because every magazine gets an "exclusive" detail about the game, and it's ridiculous.
So I play the game while its in Japanese...and I can't understand all the info about the details. (You'd be surprised how easy it is to figure out the plots to today's games even without any understanding of the language.) The only thing I keep my US system around for is games that I rent (There aren't any places that rent Japanese games.) and really deep tactical games, where I miss out by not completely understanding the game system.
So why do they care about region locking the games? The manufacturer of the hardware AND the game publisher are in Japan. I'm giving them money to legitimately buy and use the software. What the hell's the problem here?
If they'd only see that by removing region locking they'd get rid of most of the legitimacy of the mod chips themselves, they could crack down on this stuff much harder.
In any case, whenever someone mouths off about how piracy is hurting publishers because people download their games and all...a large percentage of that software downloaded is crap they'd never even give a look at on the store shelves. How many people do you know who played Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. How many people do you think paid for it? 4? But because it's at no real charge to them, some people will burn games that they normally wouldn't even spend rental money on.
Is this lost money to the industry? No. None of those crappy games would have sold or been rented. The game industry needs to stop whining. Software gets more leeway than ANY other product on the market. How many other products can flat out not work, and have the industry standard policy of not providing a cash refund? Click-wrap EULAs and all, I'm perfectly fine with kicking the industry around a bit until it stops acting so consumer-hostile.
What the heck are you talking about? Koster didn't come up with something original! He just made Star Wars Galaxies again. Re-read his suggestion, it's just to make a romance-based MMO where the players respond to content that's automatically generated from a template but given a subset of variables.
My first reaction upon seeing this headline was, "Oh, Koster didn't win, huh? Now that's a big shocker." Then I read the article, and it made me sad because he was actually pathetic enough to do exactly what I disparagingly predicted he would do. How do these 1-track people keeo jobs when their 1 track leads to Suckville? We may never know...
You move to where the companies are. LA. Nobody has you as a full time tester from a different time zone, especially with everyone having source code leaks. If you can't move, it's a pipe dream until you can.
Yeah, and their:
"Graphical Error: Woman's ankles exposed."
I mean, if they even get THAT in. Most of the time they're just going on and on about the evils of electricity.
Oh man...if I was allowed to code the game, you would have seen such better versions of a lot of games that you've all played.
They don't require a tester to know how to code. Nobody in our office had access to the code we were working with for the majority of the time. Everything was done outside, and then we got revs mailed back to us.
To an extent any gamer can be QA. But not every gamer can be GOOD QA. The problem with this lies in the fact that 1 good QA guy in a leadership position can cover up the flaws of several other testers. You get one guy who can work hard, has good writing skills and pride in his work, and he'll cover up the flaws of several people under him. In this manner, you can hire 3 good QA guys to oversee the work of 15 crappy ones, and get serviceable results.
You'd be shocked at how little of a hiring process there is during crunch time. A lot of temp testing hires are given jobs solely based off of the available hours they have. Since the GOOD guys cover up for the crap guys, outsiders assume the department is OK and don't do anything about they way they've hired people.
Nobody can accurately describe QA without having done it for a year or so. "Merely playing the game" is a lot less trivial than you'd make it appear.
How many times do you play a game for fun, load up 35 different save points, and check that you can buy, sell, and cancel out of transactions at a store. Then go and sell every single item you have in stock, and make sure it gives you the proper amount of money back. After that, buy every single item you sold, and then make sure it deducts the proper amount of money, and that it won't sell it to you if you don't have enough cash.
At the end of all this 30-45 hours of mundane work, the pointlessness of it all is underscored by the Lead taking a look at your results and chucking them in the waste bin. All for $8/hr.
You feel your life ticking away at a QA job. The only reasons compelling enough to tough out that job are that you take pride in knowing there's one less text error gamers will laugh about. You know that you've got a damn good group of guys with you, you're just biding your time to get a job at a better QA or game gig, or there's room to advance to somewhere else in the company.
The reason this went unnoticed for so long is simple...those guys at NASA...you know, they're not exactly rocket scientists...
Um...if by "games" you include this in the discusssion. This was a game outsourced to Russia. And that's why everyone hates the idea.
When I worked for Squaresoft, it was a pain enough to get bugs translated for the US versions of the game, send them over to Japan, and hopefully have Japan type the English in properly, because all the dev was done there. We at least had the benefit of having the game done already. Try explaining that your truck has to have an opponent to race against in Russian to someone who may not have ever coded a game before.
You guys probably didn't see this Press Release they made earlier. Basically, they had this old company lying around, one that was publicly traded. Then, they had Infinium Labs, the current incarnation of the company merge with the shell of the old company.
This gave Infinium Labs a public valuation and stock that was publicly traded...but it was all bullshit.
"On top of that there was the daily 2 hour lunch, that we usually took at a strip club."
I KNEW IT!
Here's the relevant quote from the review:
"Animations are very nice. (the guys at SOE must have logged countless hours in exotic dance clubs...all under the guise of doing research for the Entertainer class.)"
I was SOOOO onto you guys...