Maybe I should title this "Criterion drops the ball (again)". 3 Disks, lots of goodies, but none of it is 16:9 enhanced. Is this just because Criterion thinks that North American consumers like blackbars or is there some conspiracy afoot to prevent the spread of widescreen TVs?
Even if the writing is not very polished, Gamezero is presenting information which most folks interested in console gaming rarely see in one place online. Not too many people will make the effort to read "Game Over" by David Scheff or "Phoenix" by Leonard Herman.
I'm going to assume that you live in Europe based on your email address. I don't know about your ethnicity, so I can't say if you have ever lived outside of your home country. If you have never been outside of the West, I understand why you assume English is "easy to learn". If you have never lived outside your home country or outside of the West, try it for a year or so then come back and say what you said.
Most of the world does not speak English and is perfectly happy with their local language. The Japanese part of the Internet is doing quite well without English, thank you. This is the only place I have lived besides the U.S. and I can clearly say that even though studying English is a popular hobby here, 99% of all communications in the.jp name space are in Japanese. All of our 6 monthly Linux magazines are in Japanese. There are more Linux books in Japanese than I can keep track of. AFAIK most of the O'Reilly books have been translated as well.
If people did not "waste time internationalizing," only the people who want to spend time going through the work of reading in another language could enjoy the Internet. My mother in law, who is in her late 50's, really dislikes reading English, but thanks to localized OS' and software she can send and recieve email in Japanese from everyone in the family.
just because it was easy for you to learn English does not mean it is easy for everyone else.
Kojima has enjoyed star status or at least cult status for a long time here in Japan. He has been the director for the whole Metal Gear series (except the NES version of Snake's Revenge which he had nothing to do with), as well as Snatcher and Policenauts.
It is a real shame that MGS was the first of his games to reach a wide audience in the US. The NES version of Metal Gear suffered from a terrible translation and the real Metal Gear 2 for the MSX2 computer system was never translated or ported to any other platform. Snatcher was released for the ill-fated Sega CD and was wonderfully translated (actually the same translator as MGS) but since consumers did not flock to the Sega CD, most people never had a chance to play Snatcher. Too bad because it is a great game. Policenauts was ported from the NEC PC-9801 series of computers to the 3DO, Playstation and Sega Saturn here in Japan. There were rumors that a US release for the Saturn was planned, but the project was canned due to the early death of the Saturn market in the US.
Just as a measure of Kojima's status, the "rarest" of his games, the MSX Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake" now sells for hundreds of dollars in Japan and the US.
As you might have guessed, I am a fan of Kojima's games (^_^)
1.Built a game that is both action-packed and intellectually challenging.
Action packed? I'm going to be nice and assume you are talking about story events, not gaming action. Even if you only consider the Square games released in the US, the majority are very low on action and are designed to be solved/completed by high school students.
2.Built a game that *works* 100% on the target platform
Not so hard to do in the console environment. Your target platform is a fixed hardware spec and you don't have to worry about add-ins, or OS variations.
3.Provided the best in both video and audio technology available at the time
I agree with you here. I have always been a fan of their soundtrack CDs. I still listen to the Chrono Trigger soundtrack CD on a regular basis.
Personally I have gotten bored with Squaresoft, but that maybe to the fact that I am no longer interested in the "teenagers save the world from ultimate evil" storyline and also the fact that I am old-school about my games. I don't really like the new "cinematic" style of RPGs. I watch movies and play games for different reasons.
J.C. Herz's effort is not anywhere near as good a source of information as the other two texts the author of the article reccommended. Herz seems to have written "Joystick Nation" with little actual first hand experience with the business or consumer side of the console game industry. I can't point to specific examples since my copy is located halfway around the earth from me, but as I recall the whole book seemed to be written from an uninformed outsider's point of view.
Leonard Herman's "Phoenix" is more of an encyclopedic/time line read with a real wealth of information, especially about the US side of the console business. Leonard writes from the perspective of a collector who has been in the scene and has many industry contacts.
David Scheff's "Game Over" is more like business journalism with enough human interest for the general reader as well. Scheff focuses on Nintendo and is perhaps the only English language writer to present Nintendo's history in Japan. Not that it should be treated as 100% gospel, but it is still a great book.
Even in Japan, very little in the way of "insider" info is published on the game industry, partly due to the fact that there is very little investigative journalism to begin with and also becuse it is not considered polite to publish dirt on big companies. There are a few self publised books or pamphlets which can be found with great effort which claim to tell "the truth" about the industry, but not much else.
Lord only knows where this foolishness about the Net being a community started, but it just ain't so. The Net may enable a sense of community between people with like interests and it may enable communication between members of that community of people with like interests, but the Net in no way is a community on it's own. The Net is not a location where people live, it is not the people who communicate nor is it the similarities which bring people together. I would suggest that John Katz purchase a dictionary.
John Katz asked us "Are hostile environments simply a trade-off for freedom, then, one of the permanent legacies of the talented young men who helped build the Net and are building it still?" I hardly think that hostile environments are a legacy of those who built the Net. Hostile environments have always existed and probably always will in one form or another. To go a bit further, the hostility which exists on the Net is far less severe than that which occurs in the physical world.
So what if someone sent you mail saying "Please die"? That is alot different from the more tradtional methods of attempting to suppress an offensive opinion (blunt instrument, sharp stick, knife, gun, etc). Grow up and get over it.
It think perhaps I'll just stop reading Katz for a while. Maybe I'll check back in a few months and see if I find that his writing is more firmly grounded in reality.
Years ago I took a job with Trusted Information Systems. The salary was OK for me at the time and the options were basically icing on the cake. TIS was later aquired by Network Associates. Since I survived the aquisition, I got more options. I never really paid much attention to them until Network Associates suffered a crash in their stock price (take a look at NAI's stock history at Yahoo). I was given the option to reprice my options at $11 or keep my previous strike price. If I chose to reprice, I would have had to agree to a one year period where I was not allowed to exercise my options. I and many others decided not to reprice figuring that the way this industry goes I would probably be somewhere else in a year.
I checked on how many options I had vested and found that I had about 600 valued at $28 and about 400 valued at $22 (the differences in value being due to when they were issued & the merger). The only problem was that Network Associates revalued the stock at $16 per share. All of a sudden, my options were worth less than the trading price. Not too long after the stock crashed, I was "rightsized". I had 90 days to exercise my options from the date I left the company. Unfortunately the stock price never went over my strike price during those 90 days.
The moral of this is that even if your options are gravy, don't rely on them. If I had taken out a loan for any kind of large purchace figuring that I could pay it back based on my options I would be in big trouble now.
JK, you can pat yourself on the back in public as much as you want, but there will still be people who don't agree with you. Yesterday I thought you were just uninformed, today I think you are childish. I hate to ask, but how old are you anyway?
Before I get too far into this, I'll mention the obvious fact that everyone who reads or writes a message on the Web does so with products and technologies made possible by large organizations and corporations. Most of the readers of Slashdot probably owe their livelyhoods to multinational corporations in one form or another. Considering this, blanket condemnation of big business is outright hypocracy.
If you don't like working for a large corporation, go work for a mom'n'pop outfit or start your own business. Tired of your unrewarding mind numbing high tech job? May I suggest that you learn the phrase "You want fries with that?". If you don't find that rewarding, learn to operate a lathe or figure out which end of a broom to push. No nation on earth has ever said that interesting and rewarding work is an inalianable right.
Multinational business has existed for thousands of years. The trade routes beteen Asia and the Middle East existed long before Nike. If anyone thinks that workers have it bad today, perhaps they should try serfdom. Working conditions are "better" today. In the US and many other places, more opportunity for individual advancement exists than at any other time in the history of civilization. Consider the concept of low interest micro-financing which makes it possible for individuals in developing countries to borrow the US$50 they need to start or improve a business.
"Techo-Idealism"? Please. Those of us who communicate on the Net rarely remember that most people in the world (or even in the USA) do not. Let's not be too quick to pat ourselves on the back for believing that the freedom of speech we are allowed to excercise on the Net is the root of the Seatle protests. Mob behavior has been around much longer than the Internet. Anyone who studies the history of power will realize that rulers throughout history have attempted to limit individual freedoms and that this is not in and of itself a "Bad Thing" (think about it for five minutes please). The freedom of free assembly which exists in the US and some other nations is a Good Thing. The ability to publicly express an opionion which opposes the establishment is also a Good Thing. Americans are exremely lucky that they have been guaranteed these rights for more than 200 years now. Even in this short period of history, the issues raised in Seattle are hardly new. Even the questions of the morality of business has been around for thousands of years. I would guess that human fear of change and the unknown has also been with us for quite a while. Breking the windows of a store is not going to relieve the fear of do anything about what caused it.
None of the above is meant as blanket agreement with current business practices nor is it meant to show a total disregard for individual workers. I have both benefitted and been harmed by multinational business practices. I used to work in the US, was assigned to another country and not too long afterwards, the company which sent me here was bought by a larger company. Eventually I was restructured and was unemployed for a few months. As they say "sh*t happens". I found another job with a small company and life went on. Even in between I managed to feed my family by doing different kinds of work.
In more than 10 years of working in the computer industry in the US and overseas I'd have to say that laisez faire capitalism seems to produce more interesting jobs than economies where non productive companies are kept on permanant life support. My personal opinion is that fear of multinational business is sort of like fear of the UN and it's "Black Helicopters" just waiting over the hill, ready to steal our precious bodily fluids. I'll just take what you wrote as your opionion and nothing more.
Even though it does not come from the WTO directly, free trade has really benefitted India in a big way. There are now lots of Indians working outside of their country in high paying tech jobs. A fair chunk of that money goes home and you can bet it helps to improve the standards of living of those who recieve it. Maybe you didn't know that almost the entire tech staff of JP Morgan's Tokyo office is Indian. The free movement of labor has alot to do with free trade.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I should title this "Criterion drops the ball (again)". 3 Disks, lots of goodies, but none of it is 16:9 enhanced. Is this just because Criterion thinks that North American consumers like blackbars or is there some conspiracy afoot to prevent the spread of widescreen TVs?
I for one am looking forward to that!
Nice try. Atari released a number of consoles after they got into the desktop business.
Don't let the ignoramuses rewrite history. Atari died at the hands of Commodore long before Nintendo ever walked on the scene
And your point is what exactly? Again, Atari released new systems after Nintendo resurected the console market in the US.
Even if the writing is not very polished, Gamezero is presenting information which most folks interested in console gaming rarely see in one place online. Not too many people will make the effort to read "Game Over" by David Scheff or "Phoenix" by Leonard Herman.
What the heck does "modern efficiency of Marxism-Lenninism and Mao Zedong thought" mean anyway?
Most of the world does not speak English and is perfectly happy with their local language. The Japanese part of the Internet is doing quite well without English, thank you. This is the only place I have lived besides the U.S. and I can clearly say that even though studying English is a popular hobby here, 99% of all communications in the .jp name space are in Japanese. All of our 6 monthly Linux magazines are in Japanese. There are more Linux books in Japanese than I can keep track of. AFAIK most of the O'Reilly books have been translated as well.
If people did not "waste time internationalizing," only the people who want to spend time going through the work of reading in another language could enjoy the Internet. My mother in law, who is in her late 50's, really dislikes reading English, but thanks to localized OS' and software she can send and recieve email in Japanese from everyone in the family.
just because it was easy for you to learn English does not mean it is easy for everyone else.
It is a real shame that MGS was the first of his games to reach a wide audience in the US. The NES version of Metal Gear suffered from a terrible translation and the real Metal Gear 2 for the MSX2 computer system was never translated or ported to any other platform. Snatcher was released for the ill-fated Sega CD and was wonderfully translated (actually the same translator as MGS) but since consumers did not flock to the Sega CD, most people never had a chance to play Snatcher. Too bad because it is a great game. Policenauts was ported from the NEC PC-9801 series of computers to the 3DO, Playstation and Sega Saturn here in Japan. There were rumors that a US release for the Saturn was planned, but the project was canned due to the early death of the Saturn market in the US.
Just as a measure of Kojima's status, the "rarest" of his games, the MSX Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake" now sells for hundreds of dollars in Japan and the US.
As you might have guessed, I am a fan of Kojima's games (^_^)
Action packed? I'm going to be nice and assume you are talking about story events, not gaming action. Even if you only consider the Square games released in the US, the majority are very low on action and are designed to be solved/completed by high school students.
2.Built a game that *works* 100% on the target platform
Not so hard to do in the console environment. Your target platform is a fixed hardware spec and you don't have to worry about add-ins, or OS variations.
3.Provided the best in both video and audio technology available at the time
I agree with you here. I have always been a fan of their soundtrack CDs. I still listen to the Chrono Trigger soundtrack CD on a regular basis.
Personally I have gotten bored with Squaresoft, but that maybe to the fact that I am no longer interested in the "teenagers save the world from ultimate evil" storyline and also the fact that I am old-school about my games. I don't really like the new "cinematic" style of RPGs. I watch movies and play games for different reasons.
J.C. Herz's effort is not anywhere near as good a source of information as the other two texts the author of the article reccommended. Herz seems to have written "Joystick Nation" with little actual first hand experience with the business or consumer side of the console game industry. I can't point to specific examples since my copy is located halfway around the earth from me, but as I recall the whole book seemed to be written from an uninformed outsider's point of view.
Leonard Herman's "Phoenix" is more of an encyclopedic/time line read with a real wealth of information, especially about the US side of the console business. Leonard writes from the perspective of a collector who has been in the scene and has many industry contacts.
David Scheff's "Game Over" is more like business journalism with enough human interest for the general reader as well. Scheff focuses on Nintendo and is perhaps the only English language writer to present Nintendo's history in Japan. Not that it should be treated as 100% gospel, but it is still a great book.
Even in Japan, very little in the way of "insider" info is published on the game industry, partly due to the fact that there is very little investigative journalism to begin with and also becuse it is not considered polite to publish dirt on big companies. There are a few self publised books or pamphlets which can be found with great effort which claim to tell "the truth" about the industry, but not much else.
Lord only knows where this foolishness about the Net being a community started, but it just ain't so. The Net may enable a sense of community between people with like interests and it may enable communication between members of that community of people with like interests, but the Net in no way is a community on it's own. The Net is not a location where people live, it is not the people who communicate nor is it the similarities which bring people together. I would suggest that John Katz purchase a dictionary.
John Katz asked us "Are hostile environments simply a trade-off for freedom, then, one of the permanent legacies of the talented young men who helped build the Net and are building it still?" I hardly think that hostile environments are a legacy of those who built the Net. Hostile environments have always existed and probably always will in one form or another. To go a bit further, the hostility which exists on the Net is far less severe than that which occurs in the physical world.
So what if someone sent you mail saying "Please die"? That is alot different from the more tradtional methods of attempting to suppress an offensive opinion (blunt instrument, sharp stick, knife, gun, etc). Grow up and get over it.
It think perhaps I'll just stop reading Katz for a while. Maybe I'll check back in a few months and see if I find that his writing is more firmly grounded in reality.
I checked on how many options I had vested and found that I had about 600 valued at $28 and about 400 valued at $22 (the differences in value being due to when they were issued & the merger). The only problem was that Network Associates revalued the stock at $16 per share. All of a sudden, my options were worth less than the trading price. Not too long after the stock crashed, I was "rightsized". I had 90 days to exercise my options from the date I left the company. Unfortunately the stock price never went over my strike price during those 90 days.
The moral of this is that even if your options are gravy, don't rely on them. If I had taken out a loan for any kind of large purchace figuring that I could pay it back based on my options I would be in big trouble now.
JK, you can pat yourself on the back in public as much as you want, but there will still be people who don't agree with you. Yesterday I thought you were just uninformed, today I think you are childish. I hate to ask, but how old are you anyway?
/.
Chris Barker
Tokyo, Japan
gaijin_yutz on
Before I get too far into this, I'll mention the obvious fact that everyone who reads or writes a message on the Web does so with products and technologies made possible by large organizations and corporations. Most of the readers of Slashdot probably owe their livelyhoods to multinational corporations in one form or another. Considering this, blanket condemnation of big business is outright hypocracy.
If you don't like working for a large corporation, go work for a mom'n'pop outfit or start your own business. Tired of your unrewarding mind numbing high tech job? May I suggest that you learn the phrase "You want fries with that?". If you don't find that rewarding, learn to operate a lathe or figure out which end of a broom to push. No nation on earth has ever said that interesting and rewarding work is an inalianable right.
Multinational business has existed for thousands of years. The trade routes beteen Asia and the Middle East existed long before Nike. If anyone thinks that workers have it bad today, perhaps they should try serfdom. Working conditions are "better" today. In the US and many other places, more opportunity for individual advancement exists than at any other time in the history of civilization. Consider the concept of low interest micro-financing which makes it possible for individuals in developing countries to borrow the US$50 they need to start or improve a business.
"Techo-Idealism"? Please. Those of us who communicate on the Net rarely remember that most people in the world (or even in the USA) do not. Let's not be too quick to pat ourselves on the back for believing that the freedom of speech we are allowed to excercise on the Net is the root of the Seatle protests. Mob behavior has been around much longer than the Internet. Anyone who studies the history of power will realize that rulers throughout history have attempted to limit individual freedoms and that this is not in and of itself a "Bad Thing" (think about it for five minutes please). The freedom of free assembly which exists in the US and some other nations is a Good Thing. The ability to publicly express an opionion which opposes the establishment is also a Good Thing. Americans are exremely lucky that they have been guaranteed these rights for more than 200 years now. Even in this short period of history, the issues raised in Seattle are hardly new. Even the questions of the morality of business has been around for thousands of years. I would guess that human fear of change and the unknown has also been with us for quite a while. Breking the windows of a store is not going to relieve the fear of do anything about what caused it.
None of the above is meant as blanket agreement with current business practices nor is it meant to show a total disregard for individual workers. I have both benefitted and been harmed by multinational business practices. I used to work in the US, was assigned to another country and not too long afterwards, the company which sent me here was bought by a larger company. Eventually I was restructured and was unemployed for a few months. As they say "sh*t happens". I found another job with a small company and life went on. Even in between I managed to feed my family by doing different kinds of work.
In more than 10 years of working in the computer industry in the US and overseas I'd have to say that laisez faire capitalism seems to produce more interesting jobs than economies where non productive companies are kept on permanant life support. My personal opinion is that fear of multinational business is sort of like fear of the UN and it's "Black Helicopters" just waiting over the hill, ready to steal our precious bodily fluids. I'll just take what you wrote as your opionion and nothing more.
Even though it does not come from the WTO directly, free trade has really benefitted India in a big way. There are now lots of Indians working outside of their country in high paying tech jobs. A fair chunk of that money goes home and you can bet it helps to improve the standards of living of those who recieve it. Maybe you didn't know that almost the entire tech staff of JP Morgan's Tokyo office is Indian. The free movement of labor has alot to do with free trade.