Ok I will give you that one..riding on the back of an overgrown chicken is soooo much more grown up than riding a dinosaur. And besides carrying a sword 3 times bigger than yourself is much cooler than a squirt gun on a backpack.
Seriously though, they are both fantasy games but the comparison ends there. I could make the same comparision with say Metroid vs Spro the Dragon or Resident Evil vs Kingdom Hearts.
Most of the Mario "kiddie" games you speak of are far more difficult than the majority of the "grown-up" games out there. GTA for instance is a cake walk next to Super Mario Brothers 2 or Mario Sunshine. The myth of Nintendo being a kiddie console is one perpetuated mainly by teens and preteens that think they are too old to play a game with a cartoony main character. Once you grow up you will find that its ok, mario is no threat to your manhood. Oddly enough you will also generally find that immaturity in gaming is usually on the violence for violence's sake crowd. In the end its all about fun and a challenge, Nintendo does a good job of delivering both.
I really cant fathom that EB and Gamestop control 25% of the gaming public. If 1 in 4 people really are stupid enough to take 1/10 the resale value on their games to buy one at 15% more than they can get them elsewhere, then I can start to understand Bill O'Reiley's comments regarding gamers.
Wake up folks, EB and Gamestop are the video game equivalent of a pawn shop. Its there for the sole purpose of taking advantage of kids that dont know better, the poor or people with way more money than sense.
From what I have seen the only debate that is settled is the debate over whether the earth is getting warmer, how and why are still up in the air. I watched a program a few weeks back where this group of scientists were looking at layers of earth and talked about how they thought global warming was a natural phenomenon and was basically cyclic. Others claim there is no proof. In the end its all a guess. What happens if we guess wrong? If it is cyclic and nature is performing a partial do-over, wont doing everything in their power to change it make gore and company the ulimate anti-environmentalists? Quite the conundrum, I surely wouldnt want to be the one guessing which answer was right.
Sadly thats true, either the candidate will not be hired or will be abused to the point of burnout as they look at that persons skill set as providing the opportunity to elimiate others so he/she can unhappily wear multiple hats.
I cant really see things changing though, americans like cheap stuff, corporations like unrealistic profits. No one is satisfied with making a living and being comfortable. As long as corporations and consumers continue this dance its not going to change until there is an inevitable shift in encomomies.
What Robert Cresanti refuses to face is that much of the shortage isnt from the dot com bust, most of us rode that out, it is more from people who were forced out during the "offshoring" boom and the waves of layoffs due to "restructuring". Many have abandonded the field in droves and have encouraged their friends and loved ones to do the same. Outsourcing which was once done as a cost saving measure is now being necessary due to lack of available domestic skills.
I worked with a team of 12 engineers that were slowly whittled away due to layoffs from offshoring out of the 8 or so I still keep in touch with not a single one has gone back into the corporate world all have either gone to small companies, independent contracting or left the field completely. You can only kick a dog so many times before it turns on you. As foreign enconomies improve and outsourcing becomes less cost effective (its already happening) companies that screwed over their domestic employees are going to find it harder and harder to do business. IMHO they are getting what they deserve.
Dr Iain Collings CSIRO's Science lead in Communications and Signal Processing (the ones who came up with the patent) not only participates he is a member of the IEEE Communications Society Communications Theory Committee.
ODFM and DSSS came about in the 80's (the technologies that 802.11 is based on.
The CSIRO was sued after it filed suit against Buffalo Wireless not before. Buffalo was sued in Feb of 05 and in May of 05 Dell, Microsoft, Intel, HP and Netgear all filed suit on the same day.
Sorry I was at work and for some reason thats what came to mind.
BTW for those that arent familiar with it, since its not one of his more popular novels. The Difference Engine is a rather odd book less cyberpunk, more like steampunk. Its an alternate past where Lord Byron takes power in England and Charles Babbage fully realized the potential of the mechanical computer. Basically what happens is the Internet revolution takes place in the 19th century. Its a good book, check it out if you can find it and like Gibsons style.
I have the rest of the Tarbell's (except v12) but those are the two I happen to have on the shelf at the moment, the rest are in the bookcase.
The Door into Summer is great, love pretty much all the Heinlein books but Citizen is special to me, first it was my dads and is a first edition, second it was my first exposure to Science Fiction.
The C Programing Language by Kernighan and Ritchie The Linux Bible from Wiley and Sons Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson Cryptonomicron by Neil Stephenson (autographed) The Differencial Engine by William Gibson Tricks With Your Head by Mac King The Tarbell Course in Magic vol 1&2 Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
In the long run isnt this going to prove bad for CSIRO? In the future as other "standards" are adopted will anyone want the CSIRO involved and will any of their achievements be looked at as something to include rather than something to avoid? While I understand their reasoning I really think this was very shortsighted and could easily push the CSIRO into the relm of being virtually ignored by much of that standards community. I sat in on IEEE meetings for the 802.11g standard and saw shocked to learn the truth about how "standards" work and how many companies try quietly to slip in their own usually proprietary idea's to they and gain leverage after the standard is adopted. I guess it's no different than politicians tacking unrelated affinity pork to bills and resolutions, maybe I just dont understand all the facts but it seems sad that organizations who's own bylaws state their purpose is the national and/or common good appear to pander to the same tactics as the corporate world.
I do have one question though, where was CSIRO when the standards for 802.11a/b/g were being created? And why didnt they speak up?
So Sony is ok because they do stupid things once in a while? Last I checked MS didnt ship out rootkits embedded in their media, nor did their computer peripherals explode. Evil is all in perspective and frankly neither one is real insterested in your personal well being. I would rather buy from a smart company that one that has an equal chance of screwing me on purpose and by accident.
The idea that the bottom of the line Sony is only $100 more than the top of the line MS product is supposed to be a selling point? More storage in games 99.9% of the time translates into more crappy cinematics to skip...
For the $100, you get an unproven media platform, online play completely lacking in infrastucture and second rate motion sensing. What a bargain, in the end the only real "benefit" is the ability to run linux and most of us do that on our pc's so its not really a selling point.
Personally, im opting for neither, I'm putting my money into a Wii and upgrading my pc with the savings.
If its only targeted audio ads for radio, its no big deal to me. I listen to talk radio mostly and already hear plenty of worthless "in one ear and out the other" ads for everything from hottubs to frozen custard. I cant say I have ever purchased anything because of an ad but I can give you a long list of products I went out of my way to avoid after their commercials annoyed me.
Where I concider it crossing the line is when it goes from radio ads to those annoying audio web ads. Those annoy me so much I turn the speakers on my computer off when im surfing. In fact I would say that audio web ads would be #3 in my top 3 of most annoying things online, #1 being spam and #2 being sites that want their headlines on google news but require registration to view them.
dreamcast i'd give an A even after its demise I would still give its first party game library an A.
Skies of Arcadia, Grandia, Marvel Vs Capcom 2, Dead or Alive 2, Soul Calibur, Phantasy Star Online, Super Magnetic Neo, Power Stone, Shenmue, ikaruga, virtua Tennis, Quake 3 Arena, Mr Driller, Chu Chu Rocket, HoD2, Gunbird 2, Jet Grind Radio, Samba de Amigo, the list goes on....
I blame the fanboys that bought into Sony hype for cutting short what easily could have been the greatest console of all time, of course I also blame Sega for being a bunch of idiots that couldnt market anything to save their lives.
Now all they need to do is come up with a way to recognize spam words in image text without the overhead of OCR and they can make a fortune on that alone.
It may have nothing to say, but its still every picked on geeks dream come true. I can imagine many a young geek will be taking out his frustration with this. If I had this option when I was kid it would have avoided many poundings as I tried and often failed to stick up for myself.
This scares the crap out of me. Granted its one of the few video game franchises that could translate into a cool movie, and the first Mortal Kombat was actually not too awful, but this could also be so easy to totally screw up. I will squeel like a fanboy though if just once Simon uses his whip to knock down a lantern. I expect it to be really bad, but I so want this to be good.
Your very lucky, I have a dell laptop that didnt explode in the nearly two years I've owned it to, but I still sent the battery back. I've gone through 2 ps2's the one have now is flakey (reads disks most of the time, sometimes the lights on the front just flash, have no idea what thats all about). I never said all sony products will die on you it just seems their quality control has gone to crap, like most everyone else's.
wow that would be a meaningful reply if I owned an xbox or an xbox360 but currently all I have is a PS2 (my second one...the first one died) and a Gamecube...try again.
This is just good strategy on Nintendo's part. With the touch line of games they are already doing a decent job reaching non-gamers for the DS. Applying that same strategy to the Wii only makes sense. My mother recently purchased a DS Lite after reading about Brain Age in a mainstream magazine.
This strategy might end up being the wisest instance of subterfuge in video game history. Most people who dont play games dont avoid them because they dont like them, they avoid them because they are scared of technology and the percieved complexity of game consoles. Opening them up to games that they dont have to "learn" just opens the path to other games as well. My mother had already picked up Nintendogs, Namco Museum, Brain Age, Brain Academy, Tetris DS and a Soduku game. My nephew has plotted to get her to play Magical Starsign with him, though I dont know how successful that will be.
In the long run this opens up a huge market that all the other console manufacturers tend to ignore, couple that with the unique interactivity of the Wii (which my many non-gamers will be percieved as more natural and less scary) and the Wii could be poised to dominate. Think about it, Nintendo already appeals to the grandkids, if you can hook the grandparents gaming might just make that next leap towards mainstream.
Investigations into the Blue Laser shortage. Seriously though, what the heck is going on at Sony, first its the Batteries, then the "laser shortage" and overpriced console, now its price fixing? When I was a kid sony stood for unequaled quality and innovation, now it seems to stands for "might last until the warranty expires, if your lucky". What has changed?
The only Game movies I have seen that werent compltele disasters were Mortal Kombat (the first one), Silent Hill and Resident Evil. Of those none were particularly good, just not as bad as they could have been. The best video game movies are the ones that were based on video games that didnt exist or ended up spawning video games based on them, Tron, Cloak & Daggar and The Last Starfighter come to mind.
Why are the majority so bad? Why must every director put their "creative stamp" on things. Of course the same thing happens to comic book movies. This will get me modded down faster than saying something negative about firefly but IMHO Brian Singer ruined Superman Returns that way much like Ang Lee and the Hulk. Neither were really terrible but for fans they were just not right. For that reason alone I really hope that the Halo film never gets made, Street Fighter has already been ruined and who under the age of 20 really knows what Street Fighter is anyway, so who cares if they want to piss away money for a Golden Turkey award let them.
I am still convinced that Street Fighters is what killed Raul Julia...he died of shame.
Rumor has it that the Street Fighter game is going to be based around Chun-Li which tells me the focus is less on fighting and more on T&A. That being the case wouldnt they have been better off going for Dead of Alive its more well known with the younger gamers and if far more of a T&A fest than Street Fighter. Heck they could scrap the fighting and go for Dead of Alive Volleyball. Of course they could also just doodle a hentai flick and achieve the same goals for 1/4th the budget.
Sorry but the fans are wrong in this one. Viral advertising doesnt mean stealing intellectual property and copyrighted material to show your "love" for whatever is being promoted. I liked firefly alot (have the box set and serenity on dvd) but browncoaters are just about the nuttiest tv fan club out there, even Joss thinks they are a bit off.
The efforts to save firefly were valiant and managed to get a movie done but fans are out of excuses. No one (outside the fans) watched the first run, numbers didnt grow for the second well advertised and announced run on Sci-Fi and Serenity made only $25 million in the US (It cost $40 million to make). To put in into perspective..for every single person who went to see Serenity, four people went to see that steaming pile of poo called The Pacifier.
This "franchise" is dead, many are stating that universals actions are a good sign and that they are trying to protect what they see as a valuable property. Perhaps they are just trying to recoup their losses by going after the ones who convinced them they would make buckets of cash in the first place. The cast has moved on so should the fans, you fought a good fight but its over.
HTML has been and continues to be "Good Enough". If there were some truly compelling reason to upgrade to something else most already would have. When image tags were introduced, people abandoned lynx rather quickly, the same goes for transparent gif support, CSS, etc. Its nice to try to bring order or whatever the goal of xhtml is but frankly if its got the ability to slap some text on page, embed and image and throw in a pretty background its good enough for most people, they know it, they are comfortable with it and they arent going to change without a really compelling reason.
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Ok I will give you that one..riding on the back of an overgrown chicken is soooo much more grown up than riding a dinosaur. And besides carrying a sword 3 times bigger than yourself is much cooler than a squirt gun on a backpack.
Seriously though, they are both fantasy games but the comparison ends there. I could make the same comparision with say Metroid vs Spro the Dragon or Resident Evil vs Kingdom Hearts.
Most of the Mario "kiddie" games you speak of are far more difficult than the majority of the "grown-up" games out there. GTA for instance is a cake walk next to Super Mario Brothers 2 or Mario Sunshine. The myth of Nintendo being a kiddie console is one perpetuated mainly by teens and preteens that think they are too old to play a game with a cartoony main character. Once you grow up you will find that its ok, mario is no threat to your manhood. Oddly enough you will also generally find that immaturity in gaming is usually on the violence for violence's sake crowd. In the end its all about fun and a challenge, Nintendo does a good job of delivering both.
I really cant fathom that EB and Gamestop control 25% of the gaming public. If 1 in 4 people really are stupid enough to take 1/10 the resale value on their games to buy one at 15% more than they can get them elsewhere, then I can start to understand Bill O'Reiley's comments regarding gamers.
Wake up folks, EB and Gamestop are the video game equivalent of a pawn shop. Its there for the sole purpose of taking advantage of kids that dont know better, the poor or people with way more money than sense.
From what I have seen the only debate that is settled is the debate over whether the earth is getting warmer, how and why are still up in the air. I watched a program a few weeks back where this group of scientists were looking at layers of earth and talked about how they thought global warming was a natural phenomenon and was basically cyclic. Others claim there is no proof. In the end its all a guess. What happens if we guess wrong? If it is cyclic and nature is performing a partial do-over, wont doing everything in their power to change it make gore and company the ulimate anti-environmentalists? Quite the conundrum, I surely wouldnt want to be the one guessing which answer was right.
Sadly thats true, either the candidate will not be hired or will be abused to the point of burnout as they look at that persons skill set as providing the opportunity to elimiate others so he/she can unhappily wear multiple hats.
I cant really see things changing though, americans like cheap stuff, corporations like unrealistic profits. No one is satisfied with making a living and being comfortable. As long as corporations and consumers continue this dance its not going to change until there is an inevitable shift in encomomies.
What Robert Cresanti refuses to face is that much of the shortage isnt from the dot com bust, most of us rode that out, it is more from people who were forced out during the "offshoring" boom and the waves of layoffs due to "restructuring". Many have abandonded the field in droves and have encouraged their friends and loved ones to do the same. Outsourcing which was once done as a cost saving measure is now being necessary due to lack of available domestic skills.
I worked with a team of 12 engineers that were slowly whittled away due to layoffs from offshoring out of the 8 or so I still keep in touch with not a single one has gone back into the corporate world all have either gone to small companies, independent contracting or left the field completely. You can only kick a dog so many times before it turns on you. As foreign enconomies improve and outsourcing becomes less cost effective (its already happening) companies that screwed over their domestic employees are going to find it harder and harder to do business. IMHO they are getting what they deserve.
Well a few corrections..
Dr Iain Collings CSIRO's Science lead in Communications and Signal Processing (the ones who came up with the patent) not only participates he is a member of the IEEE Communications Society Communications Theory Committee.
ODFM and DSSS came about in the 80's (the technologies that 802.11 is based on.
The CSIRO was sued after it filed suit against Buffalo Wireless not before. Buffalo was sued in Feb of 05 and in May of 05 Dell, Microsoft, Intel, HP and Netgear all filed suit on the same day.
Actually that volume 7 that im missing...I have another 4 volume set next to it but its not Tarbell its Mark Wilson.
Sorry I was at work and for some reason thats what came to mind.
BTW for those that arent familiar with it, since its not one of his more popular novels. The Difference Engine is a rather odd book less cyberpunk, more like steampunk. Its an alternate past where Lord Byron takes power in England and Charles Babbage fully realized the potential of the mechanical computer. Basically what happens is the Internet revolution takes place in the 19th century. Its a good book, check it out if you can find it and like Gibsons style.
I have the rest of the Tarbell's (except v12) but those are the two I happen to have on the shelf at the moment, the rest are in the bookcase.
The Door into Summer is great, love pretty much all the Heinlein books but Citizen is special to me, first it was my dads and is a first edition, second it was my first exposure to Science Fiction.
The shelf next to my computer has:
The C Programing Language by Kernighan and Ritchie
The Linux Bible from Wiley and Sons
Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson
Cryptonomicron by Neil Stephenson (autographed)
The Differencial Engine by William Gibson
Tricks With Your Head by Mac King
The Tarbell Course in Magic vol 1&2
Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
In the long run isnt this going to prove bad for CSIRO? In the future as other "standards" are adopted will anyone want the CSIRO involved and will any of their achievements be looked at as something to include rather than something to avoid? While I understand their reasoning I really think this was very shortsighted and could easily push the CSIRO into the relm of being virtually ignored by much of that standards community. I sat in on IEEE meetings for the 802.11g standard and saw shocked to learn the truth about how "standards" work and how many companies try quietly to slip in their own usually proprietary idea's to they and gain leverage after the standard is adopted. I guess it's no different than politicians tacking unrelated affinity pork to bills and resolutions, maybe I just dont understand all the facts but it seems sad that organizations who's own bylaws state their purpose is the national and/or common good appear to pander to the same tactics as the corporate world.
I do have one question though, where was CSIRO when the standards for 802.11a/b/g were being created? And why didnt they speak up?
BetaMax was superior in both video quality and audio fidelity...but that didnt help it much
So Sony is ok because they do stupid things once in a while? Last I checked MS didnt ship out rootkits embedded in their media, nor did their computer peripherals explode. Evil is all in perspective and frankly neither one is real insterested in your personal well being. I would rather buy from a smart company that one that has an equal chance of screwing me on purpose and by accident.
The idea that the bottom of the line Sony is only $100 more than the top of the line MS product is supposed to be a selling point? More storage in games 99.9% of the time translates into more crappy cinematics to skip...
For the $100, you get an unproven media platform, online play completely lacking in infrastucture and second rate motion sensing. What a bargain, in the end the only real "benefit" is the ability to run linux and most of us do that on our pc's so its not really a selling point.
Personally, im opting for neither, I'm putting my money into a Wii and upgrading my pc with the savings.
If its only targeted audio ads for radio, its no big deal to me. I listen to talk radio mostly and already hear plenty of worthless "in one ear and out the other" ads for everything from hottubs to frozen custard. I cant say I have ever purchased anything because of an ad but I can give you a long list of products I went out of my way to avoid after their commercials annoyed me.
Where I concider it crossing the line is when it goes from radio ads to those annoying audio web ads. Those annoy me so much I turn the speakers on my computer off when im surfing. In fact I would say that audio web ads would be #3 in my top 3 of most annoying things online, #1 being spam and #2 being sites that want their headlines on google news but require registration to view them.
dreamcast i'd give an A even after its demise I would still give its first party game library an A.
Skies of Arcadia, Grandia, Marvel Vs Capcom 2, Dead or Alive 2, Soul Calibur, Phantasy Star Online, Super Magnetic Neo, Power Stone, Shenmue, ikaruga, virtua Tennis, Quake 3 Arena, Mr Driller, Chu Chu Rocket, HoD2, Gunbird 2, Jet Grind Radio, Samba de Amigo, the list goes on....
I blame the fanboys that bought into Sony hype for cutting short what easily could have been the greatest console of all time, of course I also blame Sega for being a bunch of idiots that couldnt market anything to save their lives.
Now all they need to do is come up with a way to recognize spam words in image text without the overhead of OCR and they can make a fortune on that alone.
It may have nothing to say, but its still every picked on geeks dream come true. I can imagine many a young geek will be taking out his frustration with this. If I had this option when I was kid it would have avoided many poundings as I tried and often failed to stick up for myself.
This scares the crap out of me. Granted its one of the few video game franchises that could translate into a cool movie, and the first Mortal Kombat was actually not too awful, but this could also be so easy to totally screw up. I will squeel like a fanboy though if just once Simon uses his whip to knock down a lantern. I expect it to be really bad, but I so want this to be good.
Your very lucky, I have a dell laptop that didnt explode in the nearly two years I've owned it to, but I still sent the battery back. I've gone through 2 ps2's the one have now is flakey (reads disks most of the time, sometimes the lights on the front just flash, have no idea what thats all about). I never said all sony products will die on you it just seems their quality control has gone to crap, like most everyone else's.
wow that would be a meaningful reply if I owned an xbox or an xbox360 but currently all I have is a PS2 (my second one...the first one died) and a Gamecube...try again.
This is just good strategy on Nintendo's part. With the touch line of games they are already doing a decent job reaching non-gamers for the DS. Applying that same strategy to the Wii only makes sense. My mother recently purchased a DS Lite after reading about Brain Age in a mainstream magazine.
This strategy might end up being the wisest instance of subterfuge in video game history. Most people who dont play games dont avoid them because they dont like them, they avoid them because they are scared of technology and the percieved complexity of game consoles. Opening them up to games that they dont have to "learn" just opens the path to other games as well. My mother had already picked up Nintendogs, Namco Museum, Brain Age, Brain Academy, Tetris DS and a Soduku game. My nephew has plotted to get her to play Magical Starsign with him, though I dont know how successful that will be.
In the long run this opens up a huge market that all the other console manufacturers tend to ignore, couple that with the unique interactivity of the Wii (which my many non-gamers will be percieved as more natural and less scary) and the Wii could be poised to dominate. Think about it, Nintendo already appeals to the grandkids, if you can hook the grandparents gaming might just make that next leap towards mainstream.
Investigations into the Blue Laser shortage. Seriously though, what the heck is going on at Sony, first its the Batteries, then the "laser shortage" and overpriced console, now its price fixing? When I was a kid sony stood for unequaled quality and innovation, now it seems to stands for "might last until the warranty expires, if your lucky". What has changed?
The only Game movies I have seen that werent compltele disasters were Mortal Kombat (the first one), Silent Hill and Resident Evil. Of those none were particularly good, just not as bad as they could have been. The best video game movies are the ones that were based on video games that didnt exist or ended up spawning video games based on them, Tron, Cloak & Daggar and The Last Starfighter come to mind.
Why are the majority so bad? Why must every director put their "creative stamp" on things. Of course the same thing happens to comic book movies. This will get me modded down faster than saying something negative about firefly but IMHO Brian Singer ruined Superman Returns that way much like Ang Lee and the Hulk. Neither were really terrible but for fans they were just not right. For that reason alone I really hope that the Halo film never gets made, Street Fighter has already been ruined and who under the age of 20 really knows what Street Fighter is anyway, so who cares if they want to piss away money for a Golden Turkey award let them.
I am still convinced that Street Fighters is what killed Raul Julia...he died of shame.
Rumor has it that the Street Fighter game is going to be based around Chun-Li which tells me the focus is less on fighting and more on T&A. That being the case wouldnt they have been better off going for Dead of Alive its more well known with the younger gamers and if far more of a T&A fest than Street Fighter. Heck they could scrap the fighting and go for Dead of Alive Volleyball. Of course they could also just doodle a hentai flick and achieve the same goals for 1/4th the budget.
Sorry but the fans are wrong in this one. Viral advertising doesnt mean stealing intellectual property and copyrighted material to show your "love" for whatever is being promoted. I liked firefly alot (have the box set and serenity on dvd) but browncoaters are just about the nuttiest tv fan club out there, even Joss thinks they are a bit off.
The efforts to save firefly were valiant and managed to get a movie done but fans are out of excuses. No one (outside the fans) watched the first run, numbers didnt grow for the second well advertised and announced run on Sci-Fi and Serenity made only $25 million in the US (It cost $40 million to make). To put in into perspective..for every single person who went to see Serenity, four people went to see that steaming pile of poo called The Pacifier.
This "franchise" is dead, many are stating that universals actions are a good sign and that they are trying to protect what they see as a valuable property. Perhaps they are just trying to recoup their losses by going after the ones who convinced them they would make buckets of cash in the first place. The cast has moved on so should the fans, you fought a good fight but its over.
HTML has been and continues to be "Good Enough". If there were some truly compelling reason to upgrade to something else most already would have. When image tags were introduced, people abandoned lynx rather quickly, the same goes for transparent gif support, CSS, etc. Its nice to try to bring order or whatever the goal of xhtml is but frankly if its got the ability to slap some text on page, embed and image and throw in a pretty background its good enough for most people, they know it, they are comfortable with it and they arent going to change without a really compelling reason.