Disney's control of its characters
on
Razor Blade Games?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Now, if they had made it more of an RPG, with an action component
Hmmm... possibly like the Mana engine... smells good.
and extended the universe with a new story, THEN it might have been interesting.
For one thing, Disney might have dictated terms to Virgin that prohibited writing new story lines because any new story lines might conflict with the direction Disney wanted to take the characters in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride.
Better would have been to do like Rare did in Goldeneye for N64: missions inspired by the movie, with more depth in each mission than was explored in the movie, and a couple extra missions that might as well have been "deleted scenes" in the movie. Completely linear levels where the player dies instantly if he leaves the track, such as if he jumps off the ostrich in the "Can't Wait to Be King" mission of The Lion King for Super NES, are a Bad Thing.
Stop playing RIAA music and you can then stop paying RIAA rates.
"Stop playing RIAA music"? What other music is out there? Many major record labels and music publishers are owned by the same companies. Even if an independent recording artist writes his own songs, how can a songwriter prove in court that the songs he writes are in fact original, that is, that they haven't already been written by somebody else?
But then company A makes a set of characters, and companies B, C, and D license them. Company A now has a recognizable brand in those characters. What's the fundamental difference between A licensing a world to B and A hiring B to do the programming?
How do you even classify something like Popcap's Insaniquarium? Or PaRappa the Rapper, or Dance Dance Revolution?
Simon, Parappa, Beatmania, DDR, Guitar Freaks, Pump It Up, Pop'n Music, Space Channel 5, and the like are called "rhythm games." A good rhythm game requires good songwriting, and that can be difficult to impossible to come up with on a tight budget. I can't afford a PS2 and thus haven't tried Rez, Frequency, or Amplitude, but those seem to be rhythm-shooter hybrids.
Snood is a nearly-exact knockoff of Taito's Puzzle Bobble: Bust-A-Move, played only by players who are unwilling to either buy a console or install an emulator to get the Real Thing.
But yes, I get your point that simple games such as Bust-A-Move can be fun without requiring too much of a budget. The problem here is finding that killer game formula, a needle in a haystack.
At this stage, if you want to develop on consoles, your company has to have made a name for itself on the Microsoft Windows DirectX platform. Come back once you're solidly in the black.
rather than producing Hollywood-caliber graphics on a custom basis for each game, perhaps that function is better served by standalone companies that create characters and associated animations that game developers can license for use.
Licensing characters with animations? Movie license games are rarely[1] good games. Capcom and Virgin tried the licensed-character route in the 1990s, borrowing characters from cel-animated movies published by the company we love to hate. The games (such as Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers, Aladdin, Pinocchio, The Lion King, etc) turned out way too one-dimensional to have any replay value. Or just read the reviews for Enter The Matrix.
[1] There is of course the occasional exception such as Goldeneye for Nintendo 64.
If you install the GNOME libs, you can run GNOME apps in KDE with the KDE window manager's window decorations. If you install the KDE libs, you can run KDE apps in GNOME with the GNOME window manager's window decorations. If your distribution has made default widget themes for GTK+ and Qt with similar-looking decorations (Red Hat's default theme is an example), and if GNOME and KDE libs agree to handle drag and drop in a compatible manner, users often won't notice much of a difference between GNOME apps and KDE apps.
But the best way to stimulate the industry is to drop all patents at all. Altogether.
Clarification: This should apply only to patents on inventions that can be usefully implemented as a program running on a generic PC. People who suggest abolishing the patent system entirely may not realize that doing so would kill the development of new drugs.
You wouldn't accept it if gas stations used a new gasoline for cars every 5 years and you had to buy a new car and junk the previous one for nothing, I don't see why you mock the same thing with software.
Some of the difference here is that while computers-bought-three-years-ago get faster all the time, cars-bought-three-years-ago don't because of the danger to human life posed by a high-speed automotive collision.
New computers may be inexpensive, but cheap != free. Would Joe Sixpack want his state tax rates raised just to pay for replacing the PCs in all the schools?
and I already compromised on Finding Nemo, so I can't do it again.
I take the Lessig Challenge (use Google if you aren't familiar). I'm not giving Disney more than twelve 99-cent movie rentals a year. I'll see Finding Nemo, but I'll wait until 1. it's on video and 2. it's no longer a new release.
My boeuf with DisneyCo isn't with the company's support of homosexuality as much as it is with the company's lobbying to change copyright law for the worse and with its use of sweatshop labor.
Wine does not in any way, shape, or form, emulate the x86 processor architecture.
True.
You can compile wine on an apple and it won't help one bit.
False, for two reasons. First of all, if you have the C or C++ source for an application (under either a free software license or a so-called "shared-source" license), you can recompile it for any POSIX conforming target using Wine. Then, remember that some versions of SoftWindows (a version of RealPC distributed with a special OEM version of Microsoft Windows) had a traditional x86 emulator for user code but HLE'd much of the kernel code, especially the video driver; somebody might hack up a version of Wine that integrates with Bochs (hopefully after getting Bochs to dynamically recompile code).
Because Plex86 is a virtualizer, not an emulator, much of Plex86 is written in x86 assembly language. How do I compile x86 assembly language for a PowerPC processor?
Few games are multithreaded, so having two processors isn't such an advantage.
Don't many games run sound on a separate thread that sleeps on DirectSound? Don't many games run AI on a separate thread? Even if the graphics engine hogs CPU 0, that leaves CPU 1 for everything else, especially in future games.
Mr. Carmack, are you reading this? Will Doom 3 take advantage of SMP?
The real benefit is when you're running multiple applications, so you can dedicate one processor to the game and one processor to the rest of your applications, and hopefully minimize the performance hit from multi-tasking.
Either that or run the game on one CPU and the bots on the other.
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Now, if they had made it more of an RPG, with an action component
Hmmm... possibly like the Mana engine... smells good.
and extended the universe with a new story, THEN it might have been interesting.
For one thing, Disney might have dictated terms to Virgin that prohibited writing new story lines because any new story lines might conflict with the direction Disney wanted to take the characters in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride.
Better would have been to do like Rare did in Goldeneye for N64: missions inspired by the movie, with more depth in each mission than was explored in the movie, and a couple extra missions that might as well have been "deleted scenes" in the movie. Completely linear levels where the player dies instantly if he leaves the track, such as if he jumps off the ostrich in the "Can't Wait to Be King" mission of The Lion King for Super NES, are a Bad Thing.
Then how would the drug companies recoup the cost of research and development for the ten drugs that fail for every one drug that the FDA approves?
I would GLADLY pay 7/10000 dollars for the right to broadcast a song. That's 0.07 cents per song!
Multiply that by the number of listeners. Multiply that by the number of songs you play in a month.
There are plenty of bands out their on the web whose music could likely be picked up relatively cheaply
How can a webcaster know for sure if an independent band's self-written songs are in fact original?
Stop playing RIAA music and you can then stop paying RIAA rates.
"Stop playing RIAA music"? What other music is out there? Many major record labels and music publishers are owned by the same companies. Even if an independent recording artist writes his own songs, how can a songwriter prove in court that the songs he writes are in fact original, that is, that they haven't already been written by somebody else?
But then company A makes a set of characters, and companies B, C, and D license them. Company A now has a recognizable brand in those characters. What's the fundamental difference between A licensing a world to B and A hiring B to do the programming?
How do you even classify something like Popcap's Insaniquarium? Or PaRappa the Rapper, or Dance Dance Revolution?
Simon, Parappa, Beatmania, DDR, Guitar Freaks, Pump It Up, Pop'n Music, Space Channel 5, and the like are called "rhythm games." A good rhythm game requires good songwriting, and that can be difficult to impossible to come up with on a tight budget. I can't afford a PS2 and thus haven't tried Rez, Frequency, or Amplitude, but those seem to be rhythm-shooter hybrids.
Snood is a nearly-exact knockoff of Taito's Puzzle Bobble: Bust-A-Move, played only by players who are unwilling to either buy a console or install an emulator to get the Real Thing.
But yes, I get your point that simple games such as Bust-A-Move can be fun without requiring too much of a budget. The problem here is finding that killer game formula, a needle in a haystack.
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
At this stage, if you want to develop on consoles, your company has to have made a name for itself on the Microsoft Windows DirectX platform. Come back once you're solidly in the black.
rather than producing Hollywood-caliber graphics on a custom basis for each game, perhaps that function is better served by standalone companies that create characters and associated animations that game developers can license for use.
Licensing characters with animations? Movie license games are rarely[1] good games. Capcom and Virgin tried the licensed-character route in the 1990s, borrowing characters from cel-animated movies published by the company we love to hate. The games (such as Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers, Aladdin, Pinocchio, The Lion King, etc) turned out way too one-dimensional to have any replay value. Or just read the reviews for Enter The Matrix.
[1] There is of course the occasional exception such as Goldeneye for Nintendo 64.
If you install the GNOME libs, you can run GNOME apps in KDE with the KDE window manager's window decorations. If you install the KDE libs, you can run KDE apps in GNOME with the GNOME window manager's window decorations. If your distribution has made default widget themes for GTK+ and Qt with similar-looking decorations (Red Hat's default theme is an example), and if GNOME and KDE libs agree to handle drag and drop in a compatible manner, users often won't notice much of a difference between GNOME apps and KDE apps.
But the best way to stimulate the industry is to drop all patents at all. Altogether.
Clarification: This should apply only to patents on inventions that can be usefully implemented as a program running on a generic PC. People who suggest abolishing the patent system entirely may not realize that doing so would kill the development of new drugs.
The only way I can listen to it via mp3 is to, yup, download an 'illegal' mp3!
Or do what I do: reproduce it over analog. The noise added by .ogg encoding overwhelms the ADC noise floor. The RIAA will never succeed in copy-protecting audio.
Of course there's also post processing, pop elimination, noise reduction, normalizing, etc will all modify the resulting hash.
"Pop elimination" eh? Does that delete all your Britney Spears and *NSUCK MP3s? Would "noise reduction" get rid of bad techno?
adjust its length until its checksum matches that of "Oops, I did it again".
The people brute-forcing RC5 haven't even solved a 72-bit key yet; how do you expect anybody to solve a 128-bit MD5 hash?
You wouldn't accept it if gas stations used a new gasoline for cars every 5 years and you had to buy a new car and junk the previous one for nothing, I don't see why you mock the same thing with software.
Some of the difference here is that while computers-bought-three-years-ago get faster all the time, cars-bought-three-years-ago don't because of the danger to human life posed by a high-speed automotive collision.
New computers may be inexpensive, but cheap != free. Would Joe Sixpack want his state tax rates raised just to pay for replacing the PCs in all the schools?
and I already compromised on Finding Nemo, so I can't do it again.
I take the Lessig Challenge (use Google if you aren't familiar). I'm not giving Disney more than twelve 99-cent movie rentals a year. I'll see Finding Nemo, but I'll wait until 1. it's on video and 2. it's no longer a new release.
My boeuf with DisneyCo isn't with the company's support of homosexuality as much as it is with the company's lobbying to change copyright law for the worse and with its use of sweatshop labor.
I don't want to have to carry two laptops just so I can run that odd app for the other platform.
Wine does not in any way, shape, or form, emulate the x86 processor architecture.
True.
You can compile wine on an apple and it won't help one bit.
False, for two reasons. First of all, if you have the C or C++ source for an application (under either a free software license or a so-called "shared-source" license), you can recompile it for any POSIX conforming target using Wine. Then, remember that some versions of SoftWindows (a version of RealPC distributed with a special OEM version of Microsoft Windows) had a traditional x86 emulator for user code but HLE'd much of the kernel code, especially the video driver; somebody might hack up a version of Wine that integrates with Bochs (hopefully after getting Bochs to dynamically recompile code).
Because Plex86 is a virtualizer, not an emulator, much of Plex86 is written in x86 assembly language. How do I compile x86 assembly language for a PowerPC processor?
Few games are multithreaded, so having two processors isn't such an advantage.
Don't many games run sound on a separate thread that sleeps on DirectSound? Don't many games run AI on a separate thread? Even if the graphics engine hogs CPU 0, that leaves CPU 1 for everything else, especially in future games.
Mr. Carmack, are you reading this? Will Doom 3 take advantage of SMP?
The real benefit is when you're running multiple applications, so you can dedicate one processor to the game and one processor to the rest of your applications, and hopefully minimize the performance hit from multi-tasking.
Either that or run the game on one CPU and the bots on the other.
This guys sense of humor includes laughing at perfectly normal operation instructions because they contain "lots of arrows"? ...yawn...
And did this guy ever play Dance Dance Revolution?