I'm appalled that it apparently took a public release to get them to patch the servers. It would have been trivial for Valve to slide this into a patch and release it to everyone.
When a way was found to delete other people's characters in Sega's Phantasy Star Online, the company tried to patch it, while keeping it a secret (and so not explaining how to avoid this abuse). This strategy worked very well with their inability to patch the bug or save the game state on the server side, and their decision to disallow making backups of the data files (the only file manager for the Dreamcast is in ROM, and it respects the do-not-copy bit of course). That's 50-100 hours down the drain for thousands of people.
I'll never pay for an online Sega game, and it will take a long time before I'm even willing to trust another company enough to spend my time on their online game.
I hope it makes sense but there's a fight on the cubicle next to me and I'm a bit distracted.
Yes, but most people don't keep 10 year old PCs - because they're supposed to be backwards compatible. Then you try to run a game (or essential applications, believe it or not) and they can't find the "right" kind of memory or can't interface with some peripheral or don't see the "right" version of DOS/windows or any number of problems.
Just remember: people buy consoles - and console games - because they know they'll work. In a few years, even, if they take good care of the hardware and not abuse the media. How many of your 10 year old games refuse to run on your current hardware? Your future hardware?
This EXACT conversation happened the last time Nintendo was in a thread.
Goddamn geeks!
Yes, I know.. but last time it was moderated funny, so I figured easy karma. Me, I had a Sinclair Spectrum back then, and for most cheats, you had to insert a POKE command between loading and executing, or use one of those handy edit-memory-in-real-time devices.
Namco might have considered calling the game just plain "Beyond Good & Evil" in English, but then there is the small matter of that also being the title of the next platform game from the Rayman team. Using German is probably their only way round a long boring trademark argument.
I wonder what that platform game's going to be named in Germany.
Ironically I've _never_ done Napster or Kazaa or Freenet or any of those types of P2P networks. Yet the RIAA probably wonders why people like me have simply STOPPED buying CD's. Not 1 for 3 years now.
No, they don't. The reason for declining music sales is file sharing, and file sharing only. Go ahead, ask the RIAA if you don't believe me.
That's what I get for thinking about the word "consumers" and changing it to "customers" while I type.
Anyway, I'd ask you to nominate your own dumbest-name-ever for a game, but I have no idea if your responses would be modded down as offtopic, so I won't bother.
of publishing the game in North America with a German title?
I have no idea why the Japanese do that ("Panzer Dragoon / Panzer Dragoon Zwei"? WT*?) - perhaps they're are completely language-agnostic - but American costomers are much less likely to buy a game if they can't understand the title ("Chu Chu Rocket", "Puyo Pop", etc). It at least has to sound like something. Now, who other than a violent audiophile would buy a game about guts and Bose?
"The habit of using pictorial aids, like any habit, is very difficult to get rid of. If, however, we take any responsibility for the effectiveness of our thinking habits, we should try to get rid of the habit as quickly as possibile, for it is a bad habit, confusing and misleading up to the point of being paralysing."
"Some quotes apply to some situations, but not others; trying to apply their ideas indiscriminantly leads to dismissal of truths and acceptance of untruths. Caution and care must always be used, and once one takes the time to do that, one may well find the quotes themselves meaningless".
One important question isn't answered in the/. article or in the press release: Does this law, like state 'Do Not Call' lists, apply to all email sent to addresses in Michigan, or does it only apply to email sent from Michigan addresses?
There are typically FOUR physical addresses related to any single spam - the address of the sender, the recepient, of the sender's customer (the web site advertised, etc) and of the computer used to send the spam (which belongs to the spammer for legal operations, but could be some home user's PC or a school in china running old and non-secure software).
Can somebody please make a four-dimensional matrix summing up the laws regarding every possible combination?
These laws need to be GLOBAL. If they can't for now, at least make them federal. State-by-state legislation is a phenomental waste of time and money, and may actually make things worse.
well, you could always use that little protocol called "file transfer protocol". Go figure. A protocol used to copy files.
But then, whenever you needed to copy a file, you'd have to make sure an FTP server is running here, an FTP client is running there, the directories are right...
I want seamless integration. I want to be able to refer to remote files or directories as easily as files or directories in a local directory. Is it too much to ask?
The game got a 5 star rating from Maxim AND got its own publicity stunt in the form of TakeLaraToWorkDay.com!!!
Well, that will teach me never to trust Maxim - or publicity stunts.
Seriously though, isn't the whole tomb raider think sharkjumpular by now? Sure, it was novel to have a female protagonist and explore ruins, but we've had enough of each over the last few years, and the TR games didn't get any better.
isn't the most remarkable news that Jalabad, in the most fundamentalist part of the country, already has over 300 video game shops to close down?
From the article: "People would gamble and drink alcohol in those video game shops" "Besides playing video games, customers watch DVD movies for a fee."
These places aren't an equivalent of your gamestop or electronics bootyq. They sound like small time combination bars/movie rental/arcades/game rental businesses. They may not even offer anything for actual sale - I find it hard to believe that the corrupted kids even have PSOnes in their homes.
And it's not even clear if children were allowed in those places like the first paragraph suggests, or if it's only "young people" who were corrupted. Or what percentage of the corruption was caused by the games, how much by DVD movies, and how much by alcohol. It's even likely that many of these places were completely movie oriented - imagine the market demand after the population is exposed to movies for what may well be the first time.
In Soviet America, government just tries to make it illegal to sell the hardcore stuff to kids instead of shutting down the whole industry.
Unconstitutional? Sure, the courts will stike down the law, but in the meantime we turn parents into voters because we let them know how much we care. It's like using taxpayers money to fight religious battles. Sure, it seems pointless, but if most of your potential voters are christians who will appreciate your devotion to the almighty while anybody who opposes you is obviously in league with lucifer, and it doesn't cost you anything, why not?
I'm sorry. This is half off-topic (hence no karma bonus) but I just needed to vent. Shouldn't there be any consequences to passing laws that are struck down as unconstitutional?
Slashdot Mirror
Story the first
Story the second
So what, now whenever another source runs an article along the same lines it's a new slashdot story?
I'm appalled that it apparently took a public release to get them to patch the servers. It would have been trivial for Valve to slide this into a patch and release it to everyone.
When a way was found to delete other people's characters in Sega's Phantasy Star Online, the company tried to patch it, while keeping it a secret (and so not explaining how to avoid this abuse). This strategy worked very well with their inability to patch the bug or save the game state on the server side, and their decision to disallow making backups of the data files (the only file manager for the Dreamcast is in ROM, and it respects the do-not-copy bit of course). That's 50-100 hours down the drain for thousands of people.
I'll never pay for an online Sega game, and it will take a long time before I'm even willing to trust another company enough to spend my time on their online game.
I hope it makes sense but there's a fight on the cubicle next to me and I'm a bit distracted.
Normally, I'd be biddy-biddy-bidding all over this, but I guess I'll just wait until somebody lists a Twiki in better condition.
However, the RIAA's strongarm, bullying tactics are pissing me off. I would not vote for any politician who supported that organization
I think that in the U.S. this would make you a libertarian.
This is almost the same as this /. story.
Yes, but most people don't keep 10 year old PCs - because they're supposed to be backwards compatible. Then you try to run a game (or essential applications, believe it or not) and they can't find the "right" kind of memory or can't interface with some peripheral or don't see the "right" version of DOS/windows or any number of problems.
It might be because my NES cartridges won't fit inside the PS2 slot tray. I'm not sure...
Yes, they do.
Just remember: people buy consoles - and console games - because they know they'll work. In a few years, even, if they take good care of the hardware and not abuse the media. How many of your 10 year old games refuse to run on your current hardware? Your future hardware?
"...Featuring starving artists in the movie industry."
I was wondering why all those girls on MTV are so thin.
I'll let you know for $0.25.
This EXACT conversation happened the last time Nintendo was in a thread.
Goddamn geeks!
Yes, I know.. but last time it was moderated funny, so I figured easy karma. Me, I had a Sinclair Spectrum back then, and for most cheats, you had to insert a POKE command between loading and executing, or use one of those handy edit-memory-in-real-time devices.
I had a Nintendo.. why would I need any other friends? :P
Contra?
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START! ... SELECT, START! That takes care of player 2 too - unless you've always played alone.
Namco might have considered calling the game just plain "Beyond Good & Evil" in English, but then there is the small matter of that also being the title of the next platform game from the Rayman team. Using German is probably their only way round a long boring trademark argument.
I wonder what that platform game's going to be named in Germany.
Ironically I've _never_ done Napster or Kazaa or Freenet or any of those types of P2P networks. Yet the RIAA probably wonders why people like me have simply STOPPED buying CD's. Not 1 for 3 years now.
No, they don't. The reason for declining music sales is file sharing, and file sharing only. Go ahead, ask the RIAA if you don't believe me.
That's what I get for thinking about the word "consumers" and changing it to "customers" while I type.
Anyway, I'd ask you to nominate your own dumbest-name-ever for a game, but I have no idea if your responses would be modded down as offtopic, so I won't bother.
of publishing the game in North America with a German title?
I have no idea why the Japanese do that ("Panzer Dragoon / Panzer Dragoon Zwei"? WT*?) - perhaps they're are completely language-agnostic - but American costomers are much less likely to buy a game if they can't understand the title ("Chu Chu Rocket", "Puyo Pop", etc). It at least has to sound like something. Now, who other than a violent audiophile would buy a game about guts and Bose?
"The habit of using pictorial aids, like any habit, is very difficult to get rid of. If, however, we take any responsibility for the effectiveness of our thinking habits, we should try to get rid of the habit as quickly as possibile, for it is a bad habit, confusing and misleading up to the point of being paralysing."
"Some quotes apply to some situations, but not others; trying to apply their ideas indiscriminantly leads to dismissal of truths and acceptance of untruths. Caution and care must always be used, and once one takes the time to do that, one may well find the quotes themselves meaningless".
One important question isn't answered in the /. article or in the press release: Does this law, like state 'Do Not Call' lists, apply to all email sent to addresses in Michigan, or does it only apply to email sent from Michigan addresses?
There are typically FOUR physical addresses related to any single spam - the address of the sender, the recepient, of the sender's customer (the web site advertised, etc) and of the computer used to send the spam (which belongs to the spammer for legal operations, but could be some home user's PC or a school in china running old and non-secure software).
Can somebody please make a four-dimensional matrix summing up the laws regarding every possible combination?
These laws need to be GLOBAL. If they can't for now, at least make them federal. State-by-state legislation is a phenomental waste of time and money, and may actually make things worse.
well, you could always use that little protocol called "file transfer protocol". Go figure. A protocol used to copy files.
But then, whenever you needed to copy a file, you'd have to make sure an FTP server is running here, an FTP client is running there, the directories are right...
I want seamless integration. I want to be able to refer to remote files or directories as easily as files or directories in a local directory. Is it too much to ask?
The game got a 5 star rating from Maxim AND got its own publicity stunt in the form of TakeLaraToWorkDay.com!!!
Well, that will teach me never to trust Maxim - or publicity stunts.
Seriously though, isn't the whole tomb raider think sharkjumpular by now? Sure, it was novel to have a female protagonist and explore ruins, but we've had enough of each over the last few years, and the TR games didn't get any better.
I first read this as "is latex still worth wearing?"
isn't the most remarkable news that Jalabad, in the most fundamentalist part of the country, already has over 300 video game shops to close down?
From the article:
"People would gamble and drink alcohol in those video game shops"
"Besides playing video games, customers watch DVD movies for a fee."
These places aren't an equivalent of your gamestop or electronics bootyq. They sound like small time combination bars/movie rental/arcades/game rental businesses. They may not even offer anything for actual sale - I find it hard to believe that the corrupted kids even have PSOnes in their homes.
And it's not even clear if children were allowed in those places like the first paragraph suggests, or if it's only "young people" who were corrupted. Or what percentage of the corruption was caused by the games, how much by DVD movies, and how much by alcohol. It's even likely that many of these places were completely movie oriented - imagine the market demand after the population is exposed to movies for what may well be the first time.
In Soviet America, government just tries to make it illegal to sell the hardcore stuff to kids instead of shutting down the whole industry.
Unconstitutional? Sure, the courts will stike down the law, but in the meantime we turn parents into voters because we let them know how much we care. It's like using taxpayers money to fight religious battles. Sure, it seems pointless, but if most of your potential voters are christians who will appreciate your devotion to the almighty while anybody who opposes you is obviously in league with lucifer, and it doesn't cost you anything, why not?
I'm sorry. This is half off-topic (hence no karma bonus) but I just needed to vent. Shouldn't there be any consequences to passing laws that are struck down as unconstitutional?
Imagine hearing your coworkers laughing every few minutes with no apparent reason...
Especially the ones who need to open a dozen remote sessions when they start working.