I'd say their first step might have been to actually make some sort of presence online in the first place! I remember having discussions at the GDC [www.gdconf.com] with a guy from Nintendo who said they had a modem for the 'Cube ready to go, but weren't likely to release it unless "they needed to".
Bottom line is why patent something you don't even seem intent to use (yet, I guess.) I know, I know... forward thinking and all that, but this is not a company known for their strides in online goodies, from what I recall.
...unless that's new. Opera didn't come with my 3650 phone.
You have to buy Opera for a Symbian OS phone like mine (Series 60) but it is very nice. It's one of the best browsers available that I have seen.
I would have been MUCH happier if there was something loaded in the thing when I got it... which may be the thoughts Nokia is having. If they included a sweet little browser based on Firefox, it would really round out the apps in the phones of this class... actually, I think it was a mistake not to include a decent browser in the thing in the first place.
That's kind of misleading... yes, a total that's equivelant to 15% of your income goes to SS, but only 7.5% percent comes from you -- the other 7.5% is paid by your employer.
Unless you're like many of us who are self-employed, in which case you get to foot the whole 15%! I personally would really appreciate the option of doing my own investing of that extra 7.5%... of course that doesn't make sense as a trade off, but I'll tell you it's sure tough to see those tax numbers when you start working 1099's or start up a Sole Prorietorship, et. al.
Well... it's one thing to say one is better and give concrete reasons, but to say one "will always be better" is pretty much Flaimbait. That's a pretty ludicrous claim, don't you think?
I have many of my own "issues" concerning the obviously industry-driven push towards forcing men to buy their loved ones jewelry to prove said love... I made a very strong case to my wife when we were engaged about how diamonds and wedding rings were only as important as you make them, and that any other "thing" could easily hold as much value if you so chose. Of course, as another poster mentioned elsewhere, there are many more forces external to the primary parties, who create intense social pressures that most women are not likely to ignore.... Thus, we ultimately bought rings, one with diamonds. Further thoughts on this issue withheld to provide the following info:
After seeing the documentary from the Guerilla News Network called The Diamond Life on issue 2.4 of Substance TV, I am now wishing I had looked more carefully at where these diamonds we bought came from. The situation surrounding "conflict diamonds" is astounding to say the least, and this video slams that point home in a very disturbing and enlightening way. I highly recommend anyone who thinks they need diamonds for some reason to watch this thing.
As far as alternatives to a "real" diamond, my wife has briefly told me about an artificial, lab-created diamond called Moissanite, which is apparently created from carbon crystal, thereby making it quite similar to real diamonds. One place to find out more about this is at www.moissanite.com, but I don't know if that's the official source of this material. Entering the term into Google reveals many links, but I'm not the one interested in this stuff, so go there for yourself if you'd like.
I, for one, really like the idea of things like this being created artificially. It seems to me that a perfect diamond is certainly as beautiful as a perfectly similar replica... and nobody has to die so my wife can have one.
A company called Essential Reality has a product in the works that is actually based on their earlier work on the Nintendo Power Glove (if I'm not mistaken). It's called the P5. I saw a prototype at GDC this year and talked with one of the engineers on the project. It looks very interesting to me.
If you happen to be going to E3 this year, you can check out their latest version there. The unit is slated to sell for $149, which might really make it a possibility for widespread use/adoption. ----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
Okay, so again I have my opinion diverted by yet another post/article that contradicts the last thing I read. I am having a damn hard time figuring out what my goals are!
I run a couple cheesy little sites (yeah, yeah, I'm gonna plug them.. ya blame me??), MassMOG.com and PointlessGames.com. I started out with these two ideas bringing visions of dollar signs dancing in my head, but... that was over a year ago. The dollar signs don't dance quite so much anymore, which sure does wonders for morale.
I originally wanted to pull of the whole "doing what I want to do while getting paid a modest amount for doing it" scene, but now I don't know what to think. I create the sites myself and develop all the content on my own, so the only overhead is me. Sure, I could use some help with the gaming news site, but I won't do that until I absolutely have to. The game site is just fun and a medium to learn Director and Flash design/programming, so it doesn't matter too much whether it's a smash hit or not. At any rate, I would still love to be able to make enough money to cover hosting charges and maybe help pay the rent with income from the sites at the least... with the most being to simply replace my monthly income so I can do my own projects full-time...
Is this possible with a couple small sites using basic ad revenue??
Some days I think the answer is "oh, sure.. all you need is maybe $1500-2000 a month to be happy. You can make that with moderate traffic still... right?" Other days, it seems the latest news is that I may only be able to pull in about $100/month with 250,000 impressions! Oh yeah.. now there are many folks saying that ad agencies wouldn't be caught dead signing on new game-oriented sites these days... sheesh! First they tell you that you have to have X amount of traffic before they sign you up, then they proceed to tell you it's the wrong kind of traffic. Grrr.
Anyway, I'm mostly venting here, but it would be nice to hear some stories about the Little Guys who are making this whole thing work. I'm trying to ignore most of the crap about the foolishly bloated Big Guys, since it doesn't seem to be worthwhile to compare myself to them at all. After all, I work out of my home in a pretty inexpensive city in Colorado, so I don't have many huge expenses... it seems like it has to be possible to bring in a "decent" amount of money from a small operation...
A little help, please?? *sigh*
----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
I'm envisioning someone searching/. down the road for something, getting frustrated and just slam-typing their keyboard... accidently entering something like 8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>>4^, only to get back a few hundred results! =)
Yeah, okay... so that's some accident, but "it could happen!"
----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
I really don't see what the point of this post is about. It doesn't figure into what's really happening to the massive "mog" of sites out there. It seems that nearly everything that's being pimped is more of a bit of soothing rain in a world of miserable over-commercialization! ----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
I really don't see what the point of this post is about. It doesn't figure into what's really happening to the massive "mog" of sites out there. It seems that nearly everything that's being pimped is more of a bit of soothing rain in a world of miserable over-commercialization!
*sigh*.. (at least all mine are little sites that aren't just doing this to make a/.'ed buck... well, not really anyway...) ----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
...not to mention, he apparently didn't even go to the site. Pure HTML until you get to the games, which are the reason for the site, but not the entire makeup of it!
LOL! You will notice that there is nothing on my site that even begins to claim that the games on it are worth a poop! They're pointless!
I never intended to improve on anything.. just learn from a classic game as a "getting my programming skill feet wet" project. I understand your bitterness, but I'd think it's more aptly directed at someone who actually deserves it... like people who claim to have "made the next best thing"
True, one can simply tell Outlook to send plain text or HTML, but many people are just too darn lazy.
It's not the people who know about this type of setting, but who are too lazy to switch it, that bother me. It's the fact that many more people just have no idea that settings like that exist. There are many people with whom I must deal on a daily basis that don't know their computers/software well enough to even use it for their needs, much less understand that settings should be changed from the default. (many are scared of changing things from defaults.)
Of course at this point we're talking about the mass public, the people who just want to have everything "work"... always. They don't care how or why, it should just work. If it doesn't work, it's a "network error", "the server must be down", or "Windows sucks" (well..)
...it's the same phenomenon with people who hear a violent grinding noise every time they hit the brakes on their car, but don't think that it's a "real" problem. (hrm.. now you've gotten me wondering if it is all just laziness...)
Well, I have a cheesy little site with some clones on it. They are easy to make, they teach me a lot about programming and game development, and they are a lot of fun. People like to play them so they come back, which helps me stay motivated to do more.
What my dilemma has been for a while is that I would love to make one of the games in question - exactly like the original - and put it on my site. It would be a good challenge to make my version as close to the original as possible... teaching me all sorts of valuable skills I need in order to make my own games later. I would also like to give complete credit to the history of where this game came from and why I love it. Basically, if considered in terms of journalism, I want to take a quote from Atari and credit the source. I'm talking about simply quoting the work of others and giving them credit for it, while integrating it into a part of a greater work. I have no problem putting in my footnotes and bibliography, as I should.
The problem I see is this: you clone, then you make public the fact that you cloned, then you are wide open to one of these wonderful lawsuits because you were honest enough to say that you did it.
What I do instead (along with others, I imagine) is what I see to be much sneakier and more deceiptful: we make a clone and then start changing the things we think might tie us most directly to the original - the name, art, sounds, a slight tweak to gameplay. Then, we claim that the game is ours, "not connected to the game you're thinking of," we try to prove.
In the end, what started as a quote... has become plagiarism.
I develop/run a Web site with various clone games on it for now. (This will not always be the case, but there is a lot of sample code about how to make these old games... they are good education for a new developer.)
From my perspective, here's how it all goes: these old arcade games are so deeply ingrained(?) in many minds that they are very obvious choices to develop. For me, it's a beginner stepping stone to learning programming, as well as a lot of fun. For my site's visitors, it is an immediately familiar way to get into playing a bunch of games right away. I can churn out a handful of clones for people to play while I work on my original stuff. I'm not cloning the work of my current competition, but I am cloning what seems to be (yeah, I know.. it's not smart to do something based on a "seems to be", but that's the way it goes...) old games that are a part of a public domain mindset. In other words, they've been around for so long, they're part of the psyche of almost any game player who has been around long enough to know what they are.
This may not be coming across right, but making a "Space Rock Shooting Thing" seems (there's that word again) like making a poker game or a billiards game. Now, since my site is free and I'm not selling copies of anything, I'm not sure at this point where I stand in this issue. I do intend (God willing) to get enough traffic someday to finally get paying ads and ad revenue from the site, but I'm not selling the games directly. Of course, this may mean that I'm the same as someone who clones a game, changes a few things, and sells it outright.
I agree completely that these ripoffs are mostly people who are just having fun. I also feel like I'm helping to preserve the memory of the old classics, to some extent. (Now I'm stretching a bit, prolly...:) Either way, I won't feel bad about making a version of an "old school" game as long as Hasbro is abandoning the classics in their classic form. The only reason I'm making a "version" of the game is in fear of copyright violations. As far as I'm concerned, I wish Hasbro was still making/selling upright arcade machines of the old Astroids game. I'm having a hard time finding one for my garage.
I was at a "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!!" hyped-type computer mega sale thing a while back where I was amazed to see all the seemingly illegal stuff being sold there. My naive mind wasn't really aware that people sell stuff like this so openly.
I call it "seemingly illegal" because I really didn't know much about it at the time, but then I saw some really blatant examples of overclocking and such. It's interesting that a merchant would sell CPUs advertised as having clock speeds that I had never heard of (at the time, before I learned more about overclocking.) People were buying them up like crazy. I assume they were mostly people who didn't know they were marked wrong, but I guess the lure of a motherboard/CPU combo for so cheap is too strong for a lot of folks... little do they know the only reason it's a combo is that's how they get the funky clock speed.
Anyway, it's gotten me wondering if anyone buys these things knowing full well that they are overclocked?? If you knew someone was marking stuff wrong, would you still buy it cheap?
What has been happening with more frequency over the years (well, over the 10-12 years I've been involved) is that successful games that were creative/innovative new "genres" have become the building blocks for "hybrid" games. It's mostly stemming from the developers' desire to play the game that they make, to some extent (setting aside the B.S. about the publishers, 'cause that's another issue.) When a developer really enjoys playing RTS games, RPG's, and action games, they may be inclined to develop a "new" genre of Action RPG Strategy games or whatever.
For example, the MUDs going graphical are a culmination of the desire to play an FPS with the depth of a MUD. Fallout is an example of wanting elements of RPG alongside RTS/turn-based (it's switchable in this game series) combat. Games like the upcoming Warcraft III are created almost solely from melting together successful/desireable design elements into a single interface, IMO.
Of course, this type of development exists all over the place, and over time, where new projects build off of the shoulders of older projects. I'm not saying that hybrid games constitute new genres necessarily, however, they are breathing life into the sections of existing genres that may have been going a bit limp on their own.
That being said, my retail game development experience lies squarely in the "yes, Publisher, I'd be glad to take my 2D scrolling platform shooter and convert it into a 3D RTS hunting game. I understand that it would sell much better, sir, in light of the popularity of Deer Hunter." sheesh.
I remember a time when members of Metallica were commenting on the issue of bootleg recordings of their live shows and such. They maintained that the people who tracked down and bought these recordings were most often the loyal fans who already owned every other recording the band had released. These fans were only searching for any new shred of material from their favorite band, and Metallica didn't see that this affected sales, but rather was a supplement to the existing market. However, this behavior was clearly against copyright.
I really wonder how their position might have differed if the argument were raised today. Bootleg recordings are of course quite different from ripped CDs, but the issues are still quite similar. At the time of this earlier discussion (when I remember it, anyway,) there were mostly tapes and some CDs being distributed in pretty small quantities.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say their first step might have been to actually make some sort of presence online in the first place! I remember having discussions at the GDC [www.gdconf.com] with a guy from Nintendo who said they had a modem for the 'Cube ready to go, but weren't likely to release it unless "they needed to".
Bottom line is why patent something you don't even seem intent to use (yet, I guess.) I know, I know... forward thinking and all that, but this is not a company known for their strides in online goodies, from what I recall.
Blizzard is currently using a BT client to distribute patches and content updates for their upcoming (currently beta) World of Warcraft.
...unless that's new. Opera didn't come with my 3650 phone.
You have to buy Opera for a Symbian OS phone like mine (Series 60) but it is very nice. It's one of the best browsers available that I have seen.
I would have been MUCH happier if there was something loaded in the thing when I got it... which may be the thoughts Nokia is having. If they included a sweet little browser based on Firefox, it would really round out the apps in the phones of this class... actually, I think it was a mistake not to include a decent browser in the thing in the first place.
That's kind of misleading... yes, a total that's equivelant to 15% of your income goes to SS, but only 7.5% percent comes from you -- the other 7.5% is paid by your employer.
Unless you're like many of us who are self-employed, in which case you get to foot the whole 15%! I personally would really appreciate the option of doing my own investing of that extra 7.5%... of course that doesn't make sense as a trade off, but I'll tell you it's sure tough to see those tax numbers when you start working 1099's or start up a Sole Prorietorship, et. al.
Well... it's one thing to say one is better and give concrete reasons, but to say one "will always be better" is pretty much Flaimbait. That's a pretty ludicrous claim, don't you think?
My wife can flip through the closeout clothing racks in a store at near light speed.
You wanna talk browsing speed? Opera ain't got nothin' on her.
At the time I thought,
Haiku rules all different.
Therefore error prone:
Idiot Button
A pointless game to ponder...
How much time to waste?
I have many of my own "issues" concerning the obviously industry-driven push towards forcing men to buy their loved ones jewelry to prove said love... I made a very strong case to my wife when we were engaged about how diamonds and wedding rings were only as important as you make them, and that any other "thing" could easily hold as much value if you so chose. Of course, as another poster mentioned elsewhere, there are many more forces external to the primary parties, who create intense social pressures that most women are not likely to ignore.... Thus, we ultimately bought rings, one with diamonds. Further thoughts on this issue withheld to provide the following info:
After seeing the documentary from the Guerilla News Network called The Diamond Life on issue 2.4 of Substance TV, I am now wishing I had looked more carefully at where these diamonds we bought came from. The situation surrounding "conflict diamonds" is astounding to say the least, and this video slams that point home in a very disturbing and enlightening way. I highly recommend anyone who thinks they need diamonds for some reason to watch this thing.
As far as alternatives to a "real" diamond, my wife has briefly told me about an artificial, lab-created diamond called Moissanite, which is apparently created from carbon crystal, thereby making it quite similar to real diamonds. One place to find out more about this is at www.moissanite.com, but I don't know if that's the official source of this material. Entering the term into Google reveals many links, but I'm not the one interested in this stuff, so go there for yourself if you'd like.
I, for one, really like the idea of things like this being created artificially. It seems to me that a perfect diamond is certainly as beautiful as a perfectly similar replica... and nobody has to die so my wife can have one.
If you happen to be going to E3 this year, you can check out their latest version there. The unit is slated to sell for $149, which might really make it a possibility for widespread use/adoption.
----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
I run a couple cheesy little sites (yeah, yeah, I'm gonna plug them.. ya blame me??), MassMOG.com and PointlessGames.com. I started out with these two ideas bringing visions of dollar signs dancing in my head, but... that was over a year ago. The dollar signs don't dance quite so much anymore, which sure does wonders for morale.
I originally wanted to pull of the whole "doing what I want to do while getting paid a modest amount for doing it" scene, but now I don't know what to think. I create the sites myself and develop all the content on my own, so the only overhead is me. Sure, I could use some help with the gaming news site, but I won't do that until I absolutely have to. The game site is just fun and a medium to learn Director and Flash design/programming, so it doesn't matter too much whether it's a smash hit or not. At any rate, I would still love to be able to make enough money to cover hosting charges and maybe help pay the rent with income from the sites at the least... with the most being to simply replace my monthly income so I can do my own projects full-time...
Is this possible with a couple small sites using basic ad revenue??
Some days I think the answer is "oh, sure.. all you need is maybe $1500-2000 a month to be happy. You can make that with moderate traffic still... right?" Other days, it seems the latest news is that I may only be able to pull in about $100/month with 250,000 impressions! Oh yeah.. now there are many folks saying that ad agencies wouldn't be caught dead signing on new game-oriented sites these days... sheesh! First they tell you that you have to have X amount of traffic before they sign you up, then they proceed to tell you it's the wrong kind of traffic. Grrr.
Anyway, I'm mostly venting here, but it would be nice to hear some stories about the Little Guys who are making this whole thing work. I'm trying to ignore most of the crap about the foolishly bloated Big Guys, since it doesn't seem to be worthwhile to compare myself to them at all. After all, I work out of my home in a pretty inexpensive city in Colorado, so I don't have many huge expenses... it seems like it has to be possible to bring in a "decent" amount of money from a small operation...
A little help, please?? *sigh*
----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
Yeah, okay... so that's some accident, but "it could happen!"
----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
I really don't see what the point of this post is about. It doesn't figure into what's really happening to the massive "mog" of sites out there. It seems that nearly everything that's being pimped is more of a bit of soothing rain in a world of miserable over-commercialization!
----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
I really don't see what the point of this post is about. It doesn't figure into what's really happening to the massive "mog" of sites out there. It seems that nearly everything that's being pimped is more of a bit of soothing rain in a world of miserable over-commercialization!
*sigh*.. (at least all mine are little sites that aren't just doing this to make a /.'ed buck... well, not really anyway...)
----
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
...not to mention, he apparently didn't even go to the site. Pure HTML until you get to the games, which are the reason for the site, but not the entire makeup of it!
I never intended to improve on anything.. just learn from a classic game as a "getting my programming skill feet wet" project. I understand your bitterness, but I'd think it's more aptly directed at someone who actually deserves it... like people who claim to have "made the next best thing"
I only claim to have "made a thing." =)
"There were areas you wouldn't want to stick your hand in."
*blecht!*
It's not the people who know about this type of setting, but who are too lazy to switch it, that bother me. It's the fact that many more people just have no idea that settings like that exist. There are many people with whom I must deal on a daily basis that don't know their computers/software well enough to even use it for their needs, much less understand that settings should be changed from the default. (many are scared of changing things from defaults.)
Of course at this point we're talking about the mass public, the people who just want to have everything "work"... always. They don't care how or why, it should just work. If it doesn't work, it's a "network error", "the server must be down", or "Windows sucks" (well..)
Those are the largest "next" and "prev" buttons I've ever seen! =)
Kinda like the giant number buttons on my nearly blind Grandfather's telephone.
(..aww, come on... please don't troll me. It is funny, isn't it??)
What my dilemma has been for a while is that I would love to make one of the games in question - exactly like the original - and put it on my site. It would be a good challenge to make my version as close to the original as possible... teaching me all sorts of valuable skills I need in order to make my own games later. I would also like to give complete credit to the history of where this game came from and why I love it. Basically, if considered in terms of journalism, I want to take a quote from Atari and credit the source. I'm talking about simply quoting the work of others and giving them credit for it, while integrating it into a part of a greater work. I have no problem putting in my footnotes and bibliography, as I should.
The problem I see is this: you clone, then you make public the fact that you cloned, then you are wide open to one of these wonderful lawsuits because you were honest enough to say that you did it.
What I do instead (along with others, I imagine) is what I see to be much sneakier and more deceiptful: we make a clone and then start changing the things we think might tie us most directly to the original - the name, art, sounds, a slight tweak to gameplay. Then, we claim that the game is ours, "not connected to the game you're thinking of," we try to prove.
In the end, what started as a quote... has become plagiarism.
From my perspective, here's how it all goes: these old arcade games are so deeply ingrained(?) in many minds that they are very obvious choices to develop. For me, it's a beginner stepping stone to learning programming, as well as a lot of fun. For my site's visitors, it is an immediately familiar way to get into playing a bunch of games right away. I can churn out a handful of clones for people to play while I work on my original stuff. I'm not cloning the work of my current competition, but I am cloning what seems to be (yeah, I know.. it's not smart to do something based on a "seems to be", but that's the way it goes...) old games that are a part of a public domain mindset. In other words, they've been around for so long, they're part of the psyche of almost any game player who has been around long enough to know what they are.
This may not be coming across right, but making a "Space Rock Shooting Thing" seems (there's that word again) like making a poker game or a billiards game. Now, since my site is free and I'm not selling copies of anything, I'm not sure at this point where I stand in this issue. I do intend (God willing) to get enough traffic someday to finally get paying ads and ad revenue from the site, but I'm not selling the games directly. Of course, this may mean that I'm the same as someone who clones a game, changes a few things, and sells it outright.
I agree completely that these ripoffs are mostly people who are just having fun. I also feel like I'm helping to preserve the memory of the old classics, to some extent. (Now I'm stretching a bit, prolly... :) Either way, I won't feel bad about making a version of an "old school" game as long as Hasbro is abandoning the classics in their classic form. The only reason I'm making a "version" of the game is in fear of copyright violations. As far as I'm concerned, I wish Hasbro was still making/selling upright arcade machines of the old Astroids game. I'm having a hard time finding one for my garage.
I call it "seemingly illegal" because I really didn't know much about it at the time, but then I saw some really blatant examples of overclocking and such. It's interesting that a merchant would sell CPUs advertised as having clock speeds that I had never heard of (at the time, before I learned more about overclocking.) People were buying them up like crazy. I assume they were mostly people who didn't know they were marked wrong, but I guess the lure of a motherboard/CPU combo for so cheap is too strong for a lot of folks... little do they know the only reason it's a combo is that's how they get the funky clock speed.
Anyway, it's gotten me wondering if anyone buys these things knowing full well that they are overclocked?? If you knew someone was marking stuff wrong, would you still buy it cheap?
For example, the MUDs going graphical are a culmination of the desire to play an FPS with the depth of a MUD. Fallout is an example of wanting elements of RPG alongside RTS/turn-based (it's switchable in this game series) combat. Games like the upcoming Warcraft III are created almost solely from melting together successful/desireable design elements into a single interface, IMO.
Of course, this type of development exists all over the place, and over time, where new projects build off of the shoulders of older projects. I'm not saying that hybrid games constitute new genres necessarily, however, they are breathing life into the sections of existing genres that may have been going a bit limp on their own.
That being said, my retail game development experience lies squarely in the "yes, Publisher, I'd be glad to take my 2D scrolling platform shooter and convert it into a 3D RTS hunting game. I understand that it would sell much better, sir, in light of the popularity of Deer Hunter." sheesh.
The time for the GameBoy Parking Meter has come! Let's put those fancy new displays to good use.
I really wonder how their position might have differed if the argument were raised today. Bootleg recordings are of course quite different from ripped CDs, but the issues are still quite similar. At the time of this earlier discussion (when I remember it, anyway,) there were mostly tapes and some CDs being distributed in pretty small quantities.