Agreed. This guy doesn't even have the name of [sic] hte product right! It's an iPod touch, NOT an iTouch.
Sadly, many people still call the damn things "iTouch". Sure, it's not really correct, but it's pseudo-accepted lingo by a lot of iPhone/iPod Touch users.
I swear all you did was mash the attack buttons to kill waves of minions, and when the story said "oh snap, shit's happening over here!" you damn well went that way if you didn't want to autofail the level.
I'm not gonna lie, me and (some of) my buddies love to pick up that game and kill some idiot dudes... but I don't think I'd call that "tactics", even for a beat-em-up.
The other factors like "do demos hurt or help" are trivial at best, you still haven't learned the most important lesson that quality products = sales.
The thing is, quality of the product and sales are related, but quality products == good sales. It's worth looking into different ways of seeing what affects the profitability of games, since there are people like me who make a living out of it, and we like keeping our jobs.
I don't agree with the articles premise of good demos being a negative detractor in even most cases, but there are other features of a game that would certainly affect sales.
Because it is completely impossible to have the dev-team crank out the demo AFTER the game has gone gold and the entire world is waiting for presses to finish and the CD's to be shipped?
A demo can easily steal one to four development weeks from a team.
You have no idea how expensive this is, do you?
Not to mention that asking a team to do a demo after a game has gone gold is basically saying to the team "well, you're done crunching to get the game done, now start crunching to get a demo done really quickly before it reaches retail!"
That's asking for a nightmare in morale loss and mistakes.
I can't believe that the removal from DRM from the iTunes music store isn't bigger news. I think it's huge news. This is the single biggest remaining reason why people are nervous about moving to downloaded music, and it's gone.
My mother downloads copious amounts of music and videos from iTunes, and she doesn't know what DRM is.
Don't forget that most people that complain about DRM in music aren't the majority of the buying public. There are plenty of non-Tech people that just don't care.
That and the ability to just burn the tracks to a CD and rip them with something else makes most people not even notice it (like me).
The generally accepted commercial practice for remote authentication is two use two methods to authenticate: something you have, and something you know.
Nothing is going to be impossible to crack. The extra step of "something you have" just means it's one more thing to forge for anyone who wishes to compromise your [whatever].
Obviously a password can be brute forced and so forth, but the generally accepted "8+ characters, upper- and lowercase and numbers" works for most people and most situations.
Of course I'm still lost as to alternatives to passwords, so perhaps people will just have to suck it up and put a bit of effort into it.
Yeah, I'd go with that one, personally. It's not difficult to make sets of passwords that you can easily remember that wouldn't be straight from a dictionary or something equally inane and stupid.
Yeah, I'm seeing something about "Top Wii Download Sites", which I find kind of shocking, since Nintendo has a monopoly on their Wii legit downloads (their site or nothing).
I find it very unfortunate that such obvious scams can actually make it on to slashdot, but perhaps it's some form of Darwinism?..
I haven't actually played the game, but I can infer that there's at least two major sources of replay value, gameplay-wise:
1) Collect all the light seeds (you can go completionist and try to get them all) 2) Complete achievements (one of which is go through the game with little/no "death" triggers, which is the "mistake-free run" you referred too).
Especially in the case of the latter, hardcore gamers probably won't be disappointed if they like the game the first run through and want to really master it.
Also, on PC with no DRM (aside from Steam).
Re:Torture IS a game
on
Torture in Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
80 hours of nonstop anything can be torture for most people, regardless of what you're doing.
Especially since if it's 80 straight hours, you're already causing multiple days of sleep deprivation.
Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest...
on
Torture in Games
·
· Score: 1
I prefer 4th editions method of alignment: Good, Really Good (ie Lawful Good), Evil, Really Evil (ie Chaotic Evil), and Don't Give a Damn about Good or Evil (ie Unaligned).
Effectively, if you're not trying to do good for others, or your actions don't commonly end up hurting others due to your own maliciousness, you're Unaligned; literally, you don't work for the ends of good or evil. To be good or evil, you have to try.
That said, there's still value with the old scheme of 9 alignments as opposed to the newly condensed 5, and I pretty much agree with your segregation of the three evils.
Actually, I'm not. I'm Canadian, but I do have a fair bit of British background in me, and I've also watched and enjoyed a fair bit of British humour.
It's an amazing sight to see somebody being verbally cut down to size, but sadly it appears to be a dying art what with the politically correct brigade and all;
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the whole PC thing. I suppose anyone who can utilize sarcasm and dodge the PC bullet most of the time would be talented indeed.
Risk and Civilization both probably wouldn't be as useful due to the fact that they're both turn based, allowing a large scale of time for some people to react. What would take one person five seconds to analyze and react to could take another twenty, and there would be no way of measuring a person's ability to react to new situations in a timely manner by looking at end of game results.
In an RTS, you're forced to react to problems quickly, making your mind more apt at reacting with haste and, hopefully, with accuracy.
I have no difficulty at all imagining doing that with a trackball.
For all cases I can think of, the differences between using a mouse or a trackball is not a matter of function, but matter of convenience and preference.
But I would think that if you really can't expect to sell an iPhone app for more than $5 a pop you would try and find other ways to get people to spend money via the app and get some kind of kick back that way.
Except you can't. Apple doesn't let you do micro transactions, nor paid updates. The only money you can get from people is those who buy your app, and those who buy your next app. Nothing more.
What sort of support do users expect from a $0.99 app.
You'd be surprised. Check out the comments for any 99 cent app; I've seen games where people have "demanded" features for what similar games have in the $5 price point, despite being a fifth of the cost.
But wouldn't that include games made specifically for the DSi, using its cameras, allegedly faster CPU, and allegedly bigger RAM?
It shouldn't. Nintendo has publicly clarified that the games (DS or DSi) will not be region-locked. It'll be hard to confirm until the DSi is launched elsewhere in the world, however.
You call $15 high priced, compared to the $20-$60 of every other handheld or console game?
In addition, I don't think I've heard about any game on the App store that has sold decently and hasn't either launched at $10 or has had a price reduction to lower than $10.
My original reaction to the headline was "Why? Doesn't everyone who cares own this?"
But if the owners of the cabinet can download new songs... then Activision can get free advertising for new songs if people see/hear them in arcades at movie theaters and so forth.
But for Activision, it's even better then free advertising: people will pay them to play it. Combined with the fact that the price to play a song will likely be far less then buying the song through DLC for the console versions, it is in that way it's almost like players can demoing the song at an arcade, then download it at home if they liked it.
I have nothing against doing interesting, "unlicensed" stuff with the DS. My only point is that the GP said:
If you own a DS, you NEED to own a R4.
and the majority of people with DSs don't need one, because they a) don't (or shouldn't) pirate, or b) don't do any of the other cool stuff you could do with an R4.
30% is not an unreasonable rate. But saying that it is my only choice and I am not allowed to bypass it is unreasonable.
Maybe... but do you realize how damn awesome the deal is to game developers? We're used to getting less than 2% on most games, even if they are profitable, on most other platforms. Having a 70% take on everything you sell is retardedly awesome.
It's unfortunate that when you've lived in a hollow log, how awesome a tent looks as shelter. It's no house, but it's still an improvement.
1) This is about normal books on the DS, not interactive novels. One is passive, the other is not.
2) You call four Phoenix Wright games and half a dozen other interesting titles "a lot"? It definitely seems impressive compared to what any other current-gen gaming console or handheld has, but compared to the level of books that are published throughout the world (heck, even compared to the number of book hits each year), that's nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. This guy doesn't even have the name of [sic] hte product right! It's an iPod touch, NOT an iTouch.
Sadly, many people still call the damn things "iTouch". Sure, it's not really correct, but it's pseudo-accepted lingo by a lot of iPhone/iPod Touch users.
Wait, there's tactics in that game?
I swear all you did was mash the attack buttons to kill waves of minions, and when the story said "oh snap, shit's happening over here!" you damn well went that way if you didn't want to autofail the level.
I'm not gonna lie, me and (some of) my buddies love to pick up that game and kill some idiot dudes... but I don't think I'd call that "tactics", even for a beat-em-up.
The other factors like "do demos hurt or help" are trivial at best, you still haven't learned the most important lesson that quality products = sales.
The thing is, quality of the product and sales are related, but quality products == good sales. It's worth looking into different ways of seeing what affects the profitability of games, since there are people like me who make a living out of it, and we like keeping our jobs.
I don't agree with the articles premise of good demos being a negative detractor in even most cases, but there are other features of a game that would certainly affect sales.
Because it is completely impossible to have the dev-team crank out the demo AFTER the game has gone gold and the entire world is waiting for presses to finish and the CD's to be shipped?
A demo can easily steal one to four development weeks from a team.
You have no idea how expensive this is, do you?
Not to mention that asking a team to do a demo after a game has gone gold is basically saying to the team "well, you're done crunching to get the game done, now start crunching to get a demo done really quickly before it reaches retail!"
That's asking for a nightmare in morale loss and mistakes.
It's called "Year 1: Improve last years game", then "Year 2: Use last years game for this year, but change the names of the players".
This way, they effectively spend 2 years to make some sort of improvement to the yearly franchise.
I can't believe that the removal from DRM from the iTunes music store isn't bigger news. I think it's huge news. This is the single biggest remaining reason why people are nervous about moving to downloaded music, and it's gone.
My mother downloads copious amounts of music and videos from iTunes, and she doesn't know what DRM is.
Don't forget that most people that complain about DRM in music aren't the majority of the buying public. There are plenty of non-Tech people that just don't care.
That and the ability to just burn the tracks to a CD and rip them with something else makes most people not even notice it (like me).
The generally accepted commercial practice for remote authentication is two use two methods to authenticate: something you have, and something you know.
Nothing is going to be impossible to crack. The extra step of "something you have" just means it's one more thing to forge for anyone who wishes to compromise your [whatever].
Obviously a password can be brute forced and so forth, but the generally accepted "8+ characters, upper- and lowercase and numbers" works for most people and most situations.
Of course I'm still lost as to alternatives to passwords, so perhaps people will just have to suck it up and put a bit of effort into it.
Yeah, I'd go with that one, personally. It's not difficult to make sets of passwords that you can easily remember that wouldn't be straight from a dictionary or something equally inane and stupid.
Yeah, I'm seeing something about "Top Wii Download Sites", which I find kind of shocking, since Nintendo has a monopoly on their Wii legit downloads (their site or nothing).
I find it very unfortunate that such obvious scams can actually make it on to slashdot, but perhaps it's some form of Darwinism?..
I haven't actually played the game, but I can infer that there's at least two major sources of replay value, gameplay-wise:
1) Collect all the light seeds (you can go completionist and try to get them all)
2) Complete achievements (one of which is go through the game with little/no "death" triggers, which is the "mistake-free run" you referred too).
Especially in the case of the latter, hardcore gamers probably won't be disappointed if they like the game the first run through and want to really master it.
Also, on PC with no DRM (aside from Steam).
80 hours of nonstop anything can be torture for most people, regardless of what you're doing.
Especially since if it's 80 straight hours, you're already causing multiple days of sleep deprivation.
I prefer 4th editions method of alignment: Good, Really Good (ie Lawful Good), Evil, Really Evil (ie Chaotic Evil), and Don't Give a Damn about Good or Evil (ie Unaligned).
Effectively, if you're not trying to do good for others, or your actions don't commonly end up hurting others due to your own maliciousness, you're Unaligned; literally, you don't work for the ends of good or evil. To be good or evil, you have to try.
That said, there's still value with the old scheme of 9 alignments as opposed to the newly condensed 5, and I pretty much agree with your segregation of the three evils.
Are you British by any chance?
Actually, I'm not. I'm Canadian, but I do have a fair bit of British background in me, and I've also watched and enjoyed a fair bit of British humour.
It's an amazing sight to see somebody being verbally cut down to size, but sadly it appears to be a dying art what with the politically correct brigade and all;
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the whole PC thing. I suppose anyone who can utilize sarcasm and dodge the PC bullet most of the time would be talented indeed.
Risk and Civilization both probably wouldn't be as useful due to the fact that they're both turn based, allowing a large scale of time for some people to react. What would take one person five seconds to analyze and react to could take another twenty, and there would be no way of measuring a person's ability to react to new situations in a timely manner by looking at end of game results.
In an RTS, you're forced to react to problems quickly, making your mind more apt at reacting with haste and, hopefully, with accuracy.
I have no difficulty at all imagining doing that with a trackball.
For all cases I can think of, the differences between using a mouse or a trackball is not a matter of function, but matter of convenience and preference.
Unfortunately, I already do that. Without trying.
At all.
This is not sarcastic.
The sad part is people will probably still say this, conditioned that they are to the wrong meaning of "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
But I would think that if you really can't expect to sell an iPhone app for more than $5 a pop you would try and find other ways to get people to spend money via the app and get some kind of kick back that way.
Except you can't. Apple doesn't let you do micro transactions, nor paid updates. The only money you can get from people is those who buy your app, and those who buy your next app. Nothing more.
What sort of support do users expect from a $0.99 app.
You'd be surprised. Check out the comments for any 99 cent app; I've seen games where people have "demanded" features for what similar games have in the $5 price point, despite being a fifth of the cost.
People in the app store are god damn greedy.
But wouldn't that include games made specifically for the DSi, using its cameras, allegedly faster CPU, and allegedly bigger RAM?
It shouldn't. Nintendo has publicly clarified that the games (DS or DSi) will not be region-locked. It'll be hard to confirm until the DSi is launched elsewhere in the world, however.
You call $15 high priced, compared to the $20-$60 of every other handheld or console game?
In addition, I don't think I've heard about any game on the App store that has sold decently and hasn't either launched at $10 or has had a price reduction to lower than $10.
My original reaction to the headline was "Why? Doesn't everyone who cares own this?"
But if the owners of the cabinet can download new songs... then Activision can get free advertising for new songs if people see/hear them in arcades at movie theaters and so forth.
But for Activision, it's even better then free advertising: people will pay them to play it. Combined with the fact that the price to play a song will likely be far less then buying the song through DLC for the console versions, it is in that way it's almost like players can demoing the song at an arcade, then download it at home if they liked it.
You didn't read my last paragraph.
I have nothing against doing interesting, "unlicensed" stuff with the DS. My only point is that the GP said:
If you own a DS, you NEED to own a R4.
and the majority of people with DSs don't need one, because they a) don't (or shouldn't) pirate, or b) don't do any of the other cool stuff you could do with an R4.
30% is not an unreasonable rate. But saying that it is my only choice and I am not allowed to bypass it is unreasonable.
Maybe... but do you realize how damn awesome the deal is to game developers? We're used to getting less than 2% on most games, even if they are profitable, on most other platforms. Having a 70% take on everything you sell is retardedly awesome.
It's unfortunate that when you've lived in a hollow log, how awesome a tent looks as shelter. It's no house, but it's still an improvement.
Two things:
1) This is about normal books on the DS, not interactive novels. One is passive, the other is not.
2) You call four Phoenix Wright games and half a dozen other interesting titles "a lot"? It definitely seems impressive compared to what any other current-gen gaming console or handheld has, but compared to the level of books that are published throughout the world (heck, even compared to the number of book hits each year), that's nothing.