It is more accurate to say that, while the opinions themselves are not contradictory, the arguments are. The argument usually centers around the inviolable sanctity of life. This assumption means that it's better for a child to be born under bad circumstances, than to have died before he knew what hit him, because the world gets another sacred life. However, the death penalty involves snuffing out a sacred life, so we're down two sacref lives instead of just one.
A more rational pro-life argument is that a complete human life is created as soon as the sperm hits the egg, therefore terminating a pregnancy does harm. But, being more precise, it's also more open to criticism, either by redefining the moment life begins, or by weighing the harm of dying in the womb against the harm of being born in bad circumstances. In contrast, you can't change someone's mind about what's sacred.
The abortion debate, like the hacker debate and the copyfight, have the weakness that many arguments on both sides appeal to feelings rather than reason. This results inevitably in semantic shifting, as phrases lose their meaning when different personalities try to adapt them.
In this case, "information wants to be free" used to refer to the nature of information: secrets are hard to keep; some ideas have a tendency to spread while others bury themselves. But that's not what it means to the 13-year-old who sells pirate DVD's to his classmates.
The first moment of true drama I ever remember in a game was Rescue on Fractalus. I suppose I mean drama beyond the excitement and frustration cycle that keeps people playing any game.
Rescue on Fractalus is a 3D flight simulator, in which one lands on fractally-generated terrain to rescue downed pilots from hostile territory. They run up to your ship, knock on the door, and you open the airlock and let them in. As the levels advance, the defenses become stronger.
At a certain stage, you find that the astronauts you're rescuing start to have green skin. If you let them in, they start sabotaging your ship. because they're aliens. The ideal way to deal with them is to turn your ship's systems back on before they reach the airlock, as the shields will kill them.
If, however, you don't open the airlock for them, instead of knocking politely, they jump in front of the windshield in brilliant full-size animation, scream at you, and scare the bejeepers out of you if you're seven years old.
I think the biggest impact these consoles are having is not in revenue, but in brand damage, as is the case with most counterfeit products.
The games are all there, but often the titles or copyright notices are removed, or the graphics are askew, the little built-in light gun doesn't work, or the sound is off for some reason. The controllers are badly designed, such that you don't know which button is Start, which is Jump, and what the deal is with the turbo buttons.
I do think Nintendo is missing the opportunity to sell consoles like this themselves. But it seems they'd rather sell us old NES games for $20 each on the Game Boy Advance.
Well, the keynote did a good job of explaining the rationale.
What do other Flash players have in common, he asked aloud, as a picture of some amorphous no-name flash player loomed behind him. And the four bullet points read:
Tiny screen that's too small to read
Tiny hard-to-press buttons
Torturous user interface
Takes disposable AAA batteries, which can cost you $100 per year (unless you use NiMH like I do.)
The iPod Shuffle addresses all of these problems. First, they lose the screen. Second, they reduce the buttons to something you can operate by touch. Third, they provide visual feedback in the form of strategically-placed LED's. And finally, they let you charge it with USB.
Also, iTunes has an AutoFill feature that'll dump a playlist to it right away.
I noticed as soon as G4 bought TechTV, suddenly I saw at least one show or segment about drift racing EVERY DAY.
Now drift racing is getting its own show.
And I never hear a word about drift racing on any other TV channel, ever.
I wonder how much of this might be the whim of some trust-fund kid who's got a garage full of riced-out Hondas and some influential position in the network.
The difference between the two mouse buttons was the first thing I taught my grandmother.
Or, more specifically, that if she wanted to experiment, then the safest way to do that was with the right mouse button. If she wants to "pick" something, use the left one, but if she wants to do anything more, try the right one. The advantage of context menus is that you don't have to scan the whole screen for the function you need.
But, programming a user interface where you don't need context menus, that's definitely a worthy cause.
How can we get women to buy G.I. Joe?
on
Getting the Girl
·
· Score: 1
I think it's a good idea to draw a parallel between video games, children's toys, and other hobbies.
I put forth that any video game, toy, or hobby that involves guns is going to appeal to more men than women, as a rule. You might see a woman who's formidable at Halo 2, or a female hunter with a big deer trophy in her living room, or a little girl who wants a G.I. Joe for her birthday, but I imagine you'll have to look a little harder to find her.
Consider that the games most popular with females don't center around the use of guns or other overt violence: Tetris, Sims, Pac-Man, Dance Dance Revolution, etc. There's nothing overtly feminine about any of these games, but there's also nothing overwhelmingly masculine about them either.
And then consider that most games these days are shooters of some kind. First-person shooters, space shooters, World War II and Vietnam epics, side-scrollers, and all that. Make room in that pie chart for the interminable flood of sports franchises that are the bane of neglected girlfriends everywhere. And save a slice for those games influenced by the Girls Gone Wild fad. Whatever's left is that which MIGHT appeal to women, if they're even any good. Is it any surprise that the video game industry is perceived as having a giant "NO GURLS ALLOWED" sign on it with the S backwards?
Making a video game that appeals to women is like making a board game that appeals to women. Not knowing my board game history, can anybody tell me if Milton-Bradley ever had to tackle that problem?
Does anybody use the journal features of Slashdot? It has many features similar to Livejournal, most notably the friends list, and the view of friends' journals.
Slashdot even goes one better -- you can also define a foes list. If LJ had that, it would be World War III.
All is not lost. I've had some experience with college freshmen and high schoolers, though probably geekier than the median. Many of them are very curious and appreciative of games from before their time. I was at a party a few months ago, and someone had received a NES for their birthday, and all the teenagers piled into the living room to see it in action.
Unfortunately, much of it might be retro-novelty, since they spent a good half hour playing some tedious walking shoot-em-up before they switched to anything good.
The NES seems to represent the dividing line between primitive games and modern games. This is the point where games started to acquire modern features such as continues, save states, fractional health instead of simply dying after each hit. It's where home games started to take on the high-resolution multicolored look of arcade games, not to mention larger worlds and wider varieties of challenges. What's more, many of these games are the prequels to current franchises, like Metroid, Sonic, and Final Fantasy. That may be why NES games are such popular Easter eggs for modern Nintendo games.
It sure doesn't look as "clean" as Teddy, a modeling program based on drawing 2d shapes and projecting them into 3D. The demonstration video is very impressive.
There's a newer version called SmoothTeddy, but the additional features have made the interface a little tougher, and the demonstration video spends the whole first half talking about technical improvements over the original Teddy.
Teddy was the 3D modeling system used for Alice, a 3D programming environment designed for grade school children.
Do the Japanese know the role a game named ET played in american video game history?
For the uninitiated, it was a movie license game for the Atari 2600, programmed in a two-month rush when most games took six, and they manufactured more cartridges than the number of consoles that existed to play them. The game bombed so badly, they had to bury their unsold and returned inventory in the desert -- and you can still find a dozen ET cartridges at any thrift store.
And now it's the codename for a portable system that's going up against the universally loved Nintendo DS.
How are they going to fill that timeslot? They better come up with something better than, say, Cinematech.
Unscrewed was fun for a while, but to be honest, I'm not such a huge fan anymore. It seems to have become a showcase for crackpot psychics lately, and while they're fun to laugh at, the problem is they won't appear on the show unless Marty kisses their asses.
The Screen Savers will never get its former glory back. There's certainly some fat to be trimmed from the show; they seemed to spend the first ten minutes giving everyone on the show two minutes to explain each segment that was about to come up. But they could have solved that problem by reformatting the show instead of firing everyone. I know that I'll miss Yoshi's gadgetry, but to tell the truth, I don't think most of us are chomping at the bit to reproduce his 80-hour projects. Yoshi could have his own show for the hardcore hardware guys out there, but it's probably too good an idea for anyone at G4TechTV to think of.
I used to wish we got G4TV in Phoenix because I thought shows about video games might be cool. Perhaps they could be, but I've been largely disappointed thusfar.
I tried this back in college, when it was just for DOS. Fun stuff, though you can tell that some parts of the game are based on idealized memories.
For example, we all knew that blue Tektites were more likely to drop 5-Rupee pieces than most characters, and blue Moblins were more likely to drop bombs. But in Zelda Classic, it seems they drop these respective treasures three or four times per screen. Makes it a little too easy, I think, but nobody to my knowledge has reverse-engineered the game to the point where we understand what the probabilities really are.
But the one feature I love the most about Zelda Classic: you can switch B-button weapons without taking five seconds to scroll up to the selection screen. I love that. I wish the N64 ports had that.
To be honest, most American gamers know what's coming out of Japan, and they're just as formulaic as American games. We've got our first-person shooters and mission-based driving games, while they've got fighters, insanely long RPG's, and quite a few too many card-based battle games.
So, while we're celebrating how Japanese the game is, it's really secondary to how non-formulaic the game is, compared to what we've usually been seeing.
This is especially true of Playstation 2 owners. Gamecube owners are already accustomed to formula-breaking games; they have Pikmin, after all.
The article seems to focus on SF Bay area retailers. SF is a tech-savvy, geek-rich town with a healthy Asian population to boot, so it stands to reason more people there would have heard about it. At least eight per vicinity-of-a-store.
Here in Phoenix/Tempe, I just sauntered into Fry's Electronics and bought one of three copies on display, Friday night. I wonder if they've sold out yet. So it's worth giving your local retailer a call to see if they have it in. And remember, "Katamari" is easier to spell over the phone than "Damacy", "Damashii", "DeMacci", or "Dummycheese".
I'm pretty much hooked on the game. I've played all the levels, and I can still see myself putting the game in about once a day for the foreseeable future. It makes me just want to share it with everybody.
I'd like to bring up Animal Crossing. A lot of my friends told me how cool it was, and I agree that it can be a lot of fun to watch your town evolve like that. But it seems to ask a lot from you.
In play time, for example, you can't save for like the first hour, not until you've finished all of Tom Nook's chores. And every time I want to take the train to another town, I have to talk to that stupid cat. In fact, a great deal of the game consists of reading dialogue you've heard before.
But the real tragedy comes when you realize the commitment level they expect. Suppose you just want to play every Saturday afternoon or so, when you have an afternoon to kill. Well, the game will punish you for having the audacity to have a real life, by filling your town with weeds, and your house with vermin, and everyone you talk to will complain about how long you've been gone.
Of course, the game comes from Japan, where the norm for a role-playing game is, well, definitely not for the wage slave.
Well, some of us will burn out and come back. I'm not a big marathon gamer, and every so often I set a goal to finish all the single-player Starcraft campaigns, and I always get bored and quit somewhere in the Protoss missions. Most of my non-gaming hobbies are the same way.
But, there are people who, if left to their own devices, will not only drown themselves in a MMORPG for years at a time, but they may even have an affair within the game, and leave their current mate. We've all heard the stories, and we all know someone who's either ended or started a relationship in this way. So, it's definitely not true that people always burn out before it becomes problematic.
I've been waiting for Commodore BBSes to return to the net for a long time.
The thing I liked the most about Commodore BBSes was the color and graphics. Every BBS had little custom color schemes and graphical flourishes here and there. And, of course, the phreakers' boards had the most flamboyant designs. With the popularity of ASCII art today, you can just imagine what Commodore users could accomplish with PETSCII, and what Atari users could accomplish with ATASCII now that you mention it.
Color64 and C-net boards had a charm that was hard to match.
Actually, there were plenty of 2K games in the beginning, including Combat.
I reverse-engineered Combat out of curiosity, and learned that even in the simplest games, you often had to make changes not just every scanline, but in mid-scanline as well.
2K. A hex dump of a 2k program could probably fit on one or two pieces of A4 paper.
I've seen two Prop Cycle machines in the Phoenix area: one at Metrocenter, that apparently wasn't very popular and was eventually marked down to 25 cents per play. The other is still at the bottom of a staircase at GameWorks Tempe, for $1.00 a play.
I think it's the perfect game for a home exercise bike console, though looking at my home entertainment center I don't think my television is high enough off the ground. Still, I'd find a way to make it work; I live in a second-floor apartment and the downstairs neighbors wouldn't appreciate it if I bought a DDR controller.
The Playstation 2 can probably outperform the original Prop Cycle machine graphics-wise, and create levels that are higher in number, larger in size, and finer in detail. A land-based bicycle game set in Amsterdam would be excellent.
Slashdot Mirror
It is more accurate to say that, while the opinions themselves are not contradictory, the arguments are. The argument usually centers around the inviolable sanctity of life. This assumption means that it's better for a child to be born under bad circumstances, than to have died before he knew what hit him, because the world gets another sacred life. However, the death penalty involves snuffing out a sacred life, so we're down two sacref lives instead of just one.
A more rational pro-life argument is that a complete human life is created as soon as the sperm hits the egg, therefore terminating a pregnancy does harm. But, being more precise, it's also more open to criticism, either by redefining the moment life begins, or by weighing the harm of dying in the womb against the harm of being born in bad circumstances. In contrast, you can't change someone's mind about what's sacred.
The abortion debate, like the hacker debate and the copyfight, have the weakness that many arguments on both sides appeal to feelings rather than reason. This results inevitably in semantic shifting, as phrases lose their meaning when different personalities try to adapt them.
In this case, "information wants to be free" used to refer to the nature of information: secrets are hard to keep; some ideas have a tendency to spread while others bury themselves. But that's not what it means to the 13-year-old who sells pirate DVD's to his classmates.
The first moment of true drama I ever remember in a game was Rescue on Fractalus. I suppose I mean drama beyond the excitement and frustration cycle that keeps people playing any game.
Rescue on Fractalus is a 3D flight simulator, in which one lands on fractally-generated terrain to rescue downed pilots from hostile territory. They run up to your ship, knock on the door, and you open the airlock and let them in. As the levels advance, the defenses become stronger.
At a certain stage, you find that the astronauts you're rescuing start to have green skin. If you let them in, they start sabotaging your ship. because they're aliens. The ideal way to deal with them is to turn your ship's systems back on before they reach the airlock, as the shields will kill them.
If, however, you don't open the airlock for them, instead of knocking politely, they jump in front of the windshield in brilliant full-size animation, scream at you, and scare the bejeepers out of you if you're seven years old.
Or, as it turns out, fifteen years old.
I think the biggest impact these consoles are having is not in revenue, but in brand damage, as is the case with most counterfeit products.
The games are all there, but often the titles or copyright notices are removed, or the graphics are askew, the little built-in light gun doesn't work, or the sound is off for some reason. The controllers are badly designed, such that you don't know which button is Start, which is Jump, and what the deal is with the turbo buttons.
I do think Nintendo is missing the opportunity to sell consoles like this themselves. But it seems they'd rather sell us old NES games for $20 each on the Game Boy Advance.
And how many nanoseconds elapsed before the right-wing talk radio choir started their Banshee-like wailing over "activist judges"?
What do other Flash players have in common, he asked aloud, as a picture of some amorphous no-name flash player loomed behind him. And the four bullet points read:
- Tiny screen that's too small to read
- Tiny hard-to-press buttons
- Torturous user interface
- Takes disposable AAA batteries, which can cost you $100 per year (unless you use NiMH like I do.)
The iPod Shuffle addresses all of these problems. First, they lose the screen. Second, they reduce the buttons to something you can operate by touch. Third, they provide visual feedback in the form of strategically-placed LED's. And finally, they let you charge it with USB.Also, iTunes has an AutoFill feature that'll dump a playlist to it right away.
Looks like a pretty competitive product.
I noticed as soon as G4 bought TechTV, suddenly I saw at least one show or segment about drift racing EVERY DAY.
Now drift racing is getting its own show.
And I never hear a word about drift racing on any other TV channel, ever.
I wonder how much of this might be the whim of some trust-fund kid who's got a garage full of riced-out Hondas and some influential position in the network.
The difference between the two mouse buttons was the first thing I taught my grandmother.
Or, more specifically, that if she wanted to experiment, then the safest way to do that was with the right mouse button. If she wants to "pick" something, use the left one, but if she wants to do anything more, try the right one. The advantage of context menus is that you don't have to scan the whole screen for the function you need.
But, programming a user interface where you don't need context menus, that's definitely a worthy cause.
I think it's a good idea to draw a parallel between video games, children's toys, and other hobbies.
I put forth that any video game, toy, or hobby that involves guns is going to appeal to more men than women, as a rule. You might see a woman who's formidable at Halo 2, or a female hunter with a big deer trophy in her living room, or a little girl who wants a G.I. Joe for her birthday, but I imagine you'll have to look a little harder to find her.
Consider that the games most popular with females don't center around the use of guns or other overt violence: Tetris, Sims, Pac-Man, Dance Dance Revolution, etc. There's nothing overtly feminine about any of these games, but there's also nothing overwhelmingly masculine about them either.
And then consider that most games these days are shooters of some kind. First-person shooters, space shooters, World War II and Vietnam epics, side-scrollers, and all that. Make room in that pie chart for the interminable flood of sports franchises that are the bane of neglected girlfriends everywhere. And save a slice for those games influenced by the Girls Gone Wild fad. Whatever's left is that which MIGHT appeal to women, if they're even any good. Is it any surprise that the video game industry is perceived as having a giant "NO GURLS ALLOWED" sign on it with the S backwards?
Making a video game that appeals to women is like making a board game that appeals to women. Not knowing my board game history, can anybody tell me if Milton-Bradley ever had to tackle that problem?
Does anybody use the journal features of Slashdot? It has many features similar to Livejournal, most notably the friends list, and the view of friends' journals.
Slashdot even goes one better -- you can also define a foes list. If LJ had that, it would be World War III.
All is not lost. I've had some experience with college freshmen and high schoolers, though probably geekier than the median. Many of them are very curious and appreciative of games from before their time. I was at a party a few months ago, and someone had received a NES for their birthday, and all the teenagers piled into the living room to see it in action.
Unfortunately, much of it might be retro-novelty, since they spent a good half hour playing some tedious walking shoot-em-up before they switched to anything good.
The NES seems to represent the dividing line between primitive games and modern games. This is the point where games started to acquire modern features such as continues, save states, fractional health instead of simply dying after each hit. It's where home games started to take on the high-resolution multicolored look of arcade games, not to mention larger worlds and wider varieties of challenges. What's more, many of these games are the prequels to current franchises, like Metroid, Sonic, and Final Fantasy. That may be why NES games are such popular Easter eggs for modern Nintendo games.
It sure doesn't look as "clean" as Teddy, a modeling program based on drawing 2d shapes and projecting them into 3D. The demonstration video is very impressive.
There's a newer version called SmoothTeddy, but the additional features have made the interface a little tougher, and the demonstration video spends the whole first half talking about technical improvements over the original Teddy.
Teddy was the 3D modeling system used for Alice, a 3D programming environment designed for grade school children.
All of this software is free to download.
Do the Japanese know the role a game named ET played in american video game history?
For the uninitiated, it was a movie license game for the Atari 2600, programmed in a two-month rush when most games took six, and they manufactured more cartridges than the number of consoles that existed to play them. The game bombed so badly, they had to bury their unsold and returned inventory in the desert -- and you can still find a dozen ET cartridges at any thrift store.
And now it's the codename for a portable system that's going up against the universally loved Nintendo DS.
How are they going to fill that timeslot? They better come up with something better than, say, Cinematech.
Unscrewed was fun for a while, but to be honest, I'm not such a huge fan anymore. It seems to have become a showcase for crackpot psychics lately, and while they're fun to laugh at, the problem is they won't appear on the show unless Marty kisses their asses.
The Screen Savers will never get its former glory back. There's certainly some fat to be trimmed from the show; they seemed to spend the first ten minutes giving everyone on the show two minutes to explain each segment that was about to come up. But they could have solved that problem by reformatting the show instead of firing everyone. I know that I'll miss Yoshi's gadgetry, but to tell the truth, I don't think most of us are chomping at the bit to reproduce his 80-hour projects. Yoshi could have his own show for the hardcore hardware guys out there, but it's probably too good an idea for anyone at G4TechTV to think of.
I used to wish we got G4TV in Phoenix because I thought shows about video games might be cool. Perhaps they could be, but I've been largely disappointed thusfar.
I tried this back in college, when it was just for DOS. Fun stuff, though you can tell that some parts of the game are based on idealized memories.
For example, we all knew that blue Tektites were more likely to drop 5-Rupee pieces than most characters, and blue Moblins were more likely to drop bombs. But in Zelda Classic, it seems they drop these respective treasures three or four times per screen. Makes it a little too easy, I think, but nobody to my knowledge has reverse-engineered the game to the point where we understand what the probabilities really are.
But the one feature I love the most about Zelda Classic: you can switch B-button weapons without taking five seconds to scroll up to the selection screen. I love that. I wish the N64 ports had that.
Last night I checked eBay; the highest price for a copy was $22.50. Like many supply crunches, this one will blow over in, like, a week.
To be honest, most American gamers know what's coming out of Japan, and they're just as formulaic as American games. We've got our first-person shooters and mission-based driving games, while they've got fighters, insanely long RPG's, and quite a few too many card-based battle games.
So, while we're celebrating how Japanese the game is, it's really secondary to how non-formulaic the game is, compared to what we've usually been seeing.
This is especially true of Playstation 2 owners. Gamecube owners are already accustomed to formula-breaking games; they have Pikmin, after all.
The article seems to focus on SF Bay area retailers. SF is a tech-savvy, geek-rich town with a healthy Asian population to boot, so it stands to reason more people there would have heard about it. At least eight per vicinity-of-a-store.
Here in Phoenix/Tempe, I just sauntered into Fry's Electronics and bought one of three copies on display, Friday night. I wonder if they've sold out yet. So it's worth giving your local retailer a call to see if they have it in. And remember, "Katamari" is easier to spell over the phone than "Damacy", "Damashii", "DeMacci", or "Dummycheese".
I'm pretty much hooked on the game. I've played all the levels, and I can still see myself putting the game in about once a day for the foreseeable future. It makes me just want to share it with everybody.
I'd like to bring up Animal Crossing. A lot of my friends told me how cool it was, and I agree that it can be a lot of fun to watch your town evolve like that. But it seems to ask a lot from you.
In play time, for example, you can't save for like the first hour, not until you've finished all of Tom Nook's chores. And every time I want to take the train to another town, I have to talk to that stupid cat. In fact, a great deal of the game consists of reading dialogue you've heard before.
But the real tragedy comes when you realize the commitment level they expect. Suppose you just want to play every Saturday afternoon or so, when you have an afternoon to kill. Well, the game will punish you for having the audacity to have a real life, by filling your town with weeds, and your house with vermin, and everyone you talk to will complain about how long you've been gone.
Of course, the game comes from Japan, where the norm for a role-playing game is, well, definitely not for the wage slave.
Well, some of us will burn out and come back. I'm not a big marathon gamer, and every so often I set a goal to finish all the single-player Starcraft campaigns, and I always get bored and quit somewhere in the Protoss missions. Most of my non-gaming hobbies are the same way.
But, there are people who, if left to their own devices, will not only drown themselves in a MMORPG for years at a time, but they may even have an affair within the game, and leave their current mate. We've all heard the stories, and we all know someone who's either ended or started a relationship in this way. So, it's definitely not true that people always burn out before it becomes problematic.
I'm waiting for someone to hack together a Q-Link server, so that QuantumLink will rise again. I was too broke to use it when it first came out.
I've been waiting for Commodore BBSes to return to the net for a long time.
The thing I liked the most about Commodore BBSes was the color and graphics. Every BBS had little custom color schemes and graphical flourishes here and there. And, of course, the phreakers' boards had the most flamboyant designs. With the popularity of ASCII art today, you can just imagine what Commodore users could accomplish with PETSCII, and what Atari users could accomplish with ATASCII now that you mention it.
Color64 and C-net boards had a charm that was hard to match.
I think I remember calling a GBBS Pro when I was in junior high, around 1992. It wasn't Year-1990 compliant, so it reported the year as 198:.
Actually, there were plenty of 2K games in the beginning, including Combat.
I reverse-engineered Combat out of curiosity, and learned that even in the simplest games, you often had to make changes not just every scanline, but in mid-scanline as well.
2K. A hex dump of a 2k program could probably fit on one or two pieces of A4 paper.
And I'm proud to say that Senator McCain is from my home state, Arizona.
I wish he had become President. Then I'd be proud to be an American as well.
I've seen two Prop Cycle machines in the Phoenix area: one at Metrocenter, that apparently wasn't very popular and was eventually marked down to 25 cents per play. The other is still at the bottom of a staircase at GameWorks Tempe, for $1.00 a play.
I think it's the perfect game for a home exercise bike console, though looking at my home entertainment center I don't think my television is high enough off the ground. Still, I'd find a way to make it work; I live in a second-floor apartment and the downstairs neighbors wouldn't appreciate it if I bought a DDR controller.
The Playstation 2 can probably outperform the original Prop Cycle machine graphics-wise, and create levels that are higher in number, larger in size, and finer in detail. A land-based bicycle game set in Amsterdam would be excellent.