I'm not sure how to reconcile the varying reviews
on
Hotel Dusk Review
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· Score: 1
The Onion's AV Club, which is normally a pretty astute review site for video games, is pretty hard on Dusk. All the reviews can agree on the fact that the game is about the story, not the gameplay aspects of it, but the AV Club seems to really pound the story as being trite. Somehow I'm more inclined to believe the reviewers there when it comes to evaluating the quality of a narrative than just about anyone out there who regularly reviews videogames, for whom the model of storytelling is Final Fantasy or Half Life.
I'm sure the story (for someone who regularly reads real fiction) is nowhere near as good as the game's boosters would have us believe, but I also think folks at The Onion may be a little too hard on it. I'm curious to know what the rest of you out there thought of this, evaluated from the perspective of a graphic novel. Is it really compelling, or is it one of those titles you like more for what it's trying to do (bringing fiction to a new medium), rather than what it is.
It's because of people like you that I started sniping. I got tired of placing an early bid and have someone timidly bump up the bid because they didn't really know what they wanted to pay, or whose idea of what something was worth was based on what everyone else thought it was worth.
I was going to ask you if you realized, that you can bid $1,000,000, but it doesn't mean you're going to pay that much, but clearly you understand this, since you're responding to the parent (who bid a hypothetical $200 and paid $160). So I'm flabbergasted trying to understand your statement:
I've actually used the same technique you describe (small incremental bids) not because I was shilling, but because my "best price" was "smallest allowable amount over the current winning bid, up to and including my max price"
Whenever you bid any amount, you automatically will pay the "smallest allowable amount over the current winning bid, up to and including my max price." Why do you need to incrementally bid, unless you don't really know what you want, and "$1 more than my max" always seems okay. When you look at eBay auctions after the fact, you rarely see someone who micro-bid up to some level & then gave up before they were ever the winner - micro bidders are always trying to just go over. This makes absolutely no sense, because all you're accomplishing by doing that is guaranteeing that the very next person to bid will out-bid you.
Why not just wait until the end of the auction & enter the amount you think is fair? If you're lucky, you'll get it for much less, if nobody else thought it was worth so much; otherwise you get nothing, or you take it for what you think was fair. In all scenarios, you "win", unless the item in question is one that comes up for sale very rarely and you need it soon.
Of course you were. First off, how do you know they outbid you by 50 cents? All ebay bids automatically go 50 cents over the next highest bid. The only way you would know that they "just barely beat you" would be to go back & rebid incrementally until you "won".
I thought your maximum was $100 and not a penny more. If you were willing to pay more, why didn't you bid that much in the first place? Why bid more than once? Bid once for the absolute max you're willing to pay (in fact, bid 5% over what you think is reasonable, just so you don't feel bad about having someone beat you by 50 cents) and then walk away. You'll only pay just over what the next highest bidder paid.
Afraid of getting nickle & dimed by people bumping up the price with micro-bids, just to "test the waters"? That's why you snipe.
DLPs aren't really "flatscreens" (if you mean flat panel). My 55" Sony SXRD takes up more space than that 27" tube TV it replaced (a little less deep, but much wider). It's not really the kind of TV you can set up in your kitchen or corner of the bedroom, where a lot of those daily hours of TV get spent. Our kitchen TV is LCD; the old tube is in the corner of the bedroom; the SXRD goes in the "TV Room", and is only used to watch DVDs and "scheduled" series (as opposed to drive-by viewing).
If this was about LCDs or plasmas, the story might be a little different, but its the form factor (not the picture quality or expense) of rear-projection TVs that allow them to be segregated to "special" viewing events in the living room/home theatre.
Jack Thompson is a dangerous dope, but he law in question isn't as bad as you make it out. Read the original article - there's an "AND" between those three points. If the article is correct, lacking serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value is not alone grounds to restrict the game - it must also depict violence in a bad way and be patently contrary to prevailing standards (whatever that means).
And from what you're saying it can take up to 10 seconds on digital? Holy crap... how can you channel surf with that? Maybe I'll just not go digital.
10 seconds is the worst case, but 2 seconds is not uncommon. However, if you're using a digital tuner, you quickly learn to just use the digital channel guide as well - just press the guide button and half your screen is devoted to a TV programming grid that you can quickly surf through - you're just doing your surfing based on reading instead of looking at the screen. Bad if you're illiterate, but much faster than surfing channels the old way, especially when you have lots of channels to surf. Plus, you can see what's coming up. And far better than those old "TV Guide Channel" listings that forced you to stare at the slowly scrolling list for 2 minutes before the channel you wanted finally rolled around to the display.
You're not looking hard enough. CNet lets you search for TVs based on a wide variety of criteria. Here's the page that shows you all HDTVs broken down by screen size. There are over 250 models that are between 25" and 40".
Satellite solves the problem of no local HD programming. And are you really sure that your rural area receives no HDTV over the air? Unless you're in the mountains, chances are that you can receive over-the-air signals. HDTV signals travel farther & with much less opportunity for signal degradation. Where I live the standard channels come in poorly or not at all, yet the HD version of each one is crystal clear. Check out AntennaWeb to see if you are within range, and what sort of antenna you'd need to receive them.
All except the part about their stock tumbling 78%. First off, I doubt that news of a battery recall would sink a tool manufacturer. Secondly, there is no such thing as Milwaukee stock - they're a subsidiary of the Hong Kong corporation, Techtronic Industries, and make up about 10% of that company's revenue (their revenue was less than $700 million at the time of their acquisition in 2005, compared to Techtronic's 2.8 billion).
Still not very newsworthy. At Disney's EPCOT, you have "Turtle Talk With Crush, which is far more impressive as an example of real-time electronic puppetry. In Crush's case, we're not talking about a mechanical robot, but a big super-high-def video screen with a real-time rendered Crush interacting with kids. A Robot with a moving jaw, colored LEDs and antennas that move up & down doesn't really bring anything new to the table that hasn't already been done 20 years ago at Chuck-E-Cheese.
I guess "Next Gen" in Sony HQ means "Start Over From Scratch". Those FMV games sure were fun back then; I'm sure sitting through a 4 minute cutscene and pressing up/down/left/right every minute or so is going to be even more fun in HD.
First off, the article is about the myth of the "40 hour gamer" not the 40 hour game". The author is not complaining that the games take longer than 40 hours, but that it takes him months to find 40 hours in which to play solitary games - a problem for those games who suddenly find themselves with the trappings of what is commonly called "a life".
Most of the posts here are completely missing the point ("You suck D00D!"). As someone who's put down more than one game that I was enjoying partway through, I can tell you the main reason why: because something new comes along. Humans enjoy novelty, and many long-play games are long play because of a continual repetition of the basic game mechanic. After your fourth session sitting down doing essentially the same thing you've been doing for the last month, you get intrigued by the latest & greatest. Add to this the fact that you may have multiple irons in the fire (I'm currrently in the middle of 3 different books and 4 different single-player games)
Why is this a problem? Because there are a lot more "soft" gamers out there than hardcore ones, and they make a lot more money. As a developer, what would you prefer you market to be: 3% of the population or 30%? If you're spending tons of effort to produce a narrative game that can only be reached by 3% of the population, why are you bothering with a narrative? Hard games are fine, but perhaps they should be restricted to genres that are inherently more repetitive (e.g. classic arcade games), allowing people that bail on the title to go away feeling they had fun, as opposed to abandoning the narrative.
Ultimately, there are many more people out there that only want to commit 6 hours to some interactive entertainment as opposed to 40.
1. What kind of fairy dust are you filling up your tank with in order to get 26 mpg out of an Element? The highway EPA is only 25, and practical use from almost all real owners shows it more like 19-21 mpg (although it sounds like you are mostly highway miles).
2. How can a daily commute that takes you over the Sagamore Bridge be considered "no traffic"? This is probably one of the worst traffic corridors in MA, at least during summer. I'm sure during the winter it's fine, but in the summer - does that Element come with pontoons as an option?
Thanks for the info - especially regarding CCR. I always liked that game on the DC; didn't know they'd pumped it up for the GBA. I had played Tactics Ogre for about 6 hours, but the JRPG nature of it really turned me off; plus, I didn't get the "strategy" feel of the combat from it the way you do from AW - it seemed way more like a game of "level up your dudes so you can walk all over the bad guys" as opposed to the "try to solve this tactical situation that we GUARANTEE there is a way to do" that is AW. I'll check out the other titles as well.
AFAIK most fighting games coming out of Japan give you a practice mode where they tell you all the moves and many of the combos up front.
They do now. Wasn't always the case. And even with this knowledge (which still takes a long time to completely learn, at which point you can begin to actually begin practicing in an attempt to become good), the knowledge of what moves work well against others, or what blocks will succeed, can only be determined by trial and error (or reading enthusiast websites). Contrast this with games like chess or soccer, where all the rules are extant at the beginning; you don't win at chess because you knew how to capture with the pawn en passant and your opponent didn't, or at soccer because you know about a shortcut across the field that only comes with familiarity. Sure, both those games reward experience and practice, but it is because of developing tactics or skills built on top of basic manuevers known to everyone, not by hidden rules knowledge.
And I don't know what hidden rules any of the Japanese RPGs have. There's always some NPC who wants to interrupt you and tell you all about them, before asking you "Did you get that? (y/n)".
Consider games like Pokemon, whose rules structure is dizzying in its complexity (it's a testament to differences between a kids mind and an adult's when you see how a ten-year-old can accumulate the reams of minutia regarding the powers & progression rates of all the creatures in the game). Or FFVII, with its system of materia for building up characters - this information is not documented anywhere (other than fan sites or strategy guides); it's left up to the player to discover it (either from characters, as you describe), but ultimately from trial and error as you experiment with components. How about Sonic Adventure, with its Chau herding? All are examples of rules as discoverable content. It's a valid form of entertainment - it's essentially a universe simulation where the player plays the part of a scientist developing & testing hypotheses, but it's not really a "game". But it's also treating rules as chrome - extra complexity introduced for novelty value as opposed to strategic or tactical complexity.
These are all methods of stretching out the length of time you devote to a game, while ensuring that you will eventually tire of it once you've "discovered" everything. Contrast it with sports, card or board games, which require relatively little time to learn, but can be played for a lifetime, without the need to introduce new contexts (e.g. "maps") in which to play the game. There is plenty of strategy to be explored in a soccer field or chessboard without having to artificially tart it up with chrome that is the mainstay of almost all computer games produced today. But a game based on chrome will ultimately be put aside.
You don't actually own a GBA or other proper portable console, do you?
Actually, I do. (See my post above). I have plenty of games to play on the other platforms in my house (GC, XBox & PC) - too many, in fact - there are at least 4 untouched demos & discs for each system lying around waiting for me to find the time to play them. I see the GBA as a chance to play games when I've got a little spare time in between life's other activities - riding a plane, waiting at a doctor's office, etc. Of course, playing games in public can generate unwanted attention, but I would contend (and my original post was dancing around this) that this is because the games that are getting produced for these systems are catering to the geeky fanboys (who do, to be fair, spend a ton of money on games, and support an industry). If developers would devote energy to producing games with a broader appeal, the idea of playing a game in public wouldn't carry such a social stigma.
There are plenty of games that "normal" adults like to play, usually party games & such, but also sports. Why can't developers try to produce games that cater to this audience? I see a few reasons. Game development today (like software development in general) is about tackling problems that are known quantities; it's safer for publishers to get behind projects where they can more easily predict what the cost and duration of a project will be, and this can be done when you are putting out games that fit tightly into a genre, with relatively known metrics surrounding content creation. Innovation is painful because you don't know how long something may take, and you don't know if people will like it.
For this reason, you want to restrict innovation to low-cost, low-risk projects that won't destroy you when they fail (and they will). It's why I was surprised why the portable games showed so little imagination when it came to innovation - I can only assume (maybe I'm wrong) that the cost to develop a title for the GBA was much, much less than a typical console or PC title. Why not use that opportunity to push the envelope? Most of the titles were content to be down-ports from more powerful systems, or bringing classic Nintendo console titles from the past onto the portable platform. It doesn't surprise me that you spent most of your time playing the GBA at home - the games on it were mostly titles designed originally to be played in front of a TV.
If you want to extend your audience beyond the geeky hardcore (which I'm certainly a card-carrying member), you've got to develop games that push other cognitive buttons besides twitch-rush, obsessive pack-ratting, OCD and the desire to see stat bars grow larger. You need to incorporate social aspects, where the interaction between players is facilitated by the medium (as it is in traditional card games like Bridge or Poker) instead of being replaced by it.
I guess we have different ideas of what constitutes a "ton". According to GameRankings.com, here's the rundown on titles for the GBA, broken down by genre:
So out of 170 titles, we have 26 that are misc or strategy; the remainder are dominated by action & rpgs. Granted, this doesn't include very many import titles, but for what the average gamer can buy in a store, this represents pretty much all of them. I've owned a GBA since the SP came out, and I look pretty hard to find fun pick up & play type games, but I really only have a handful games in my collection that I look at with any frequency: Advance Wars, Monkey Ball and Konami Arcade. I tried Warioware (finished it, in fact), but I really couldn't see what people liked about it; it didn't seem like a game to me, more like some kind of hand-eye coordination test, like "Reader Rabbit" for twitch development. Puyo Pop is all right, but it didn't grab hold of me, and Chu Chu Rocket I played on the Dreamcast, and didn't see the point of getting a single-player version that played on the GBA (maybe I was wrong).
Of all those games, the only one I can really come back to is AW. Why? Because one of the few games that allows you to save & power off in the middle of the game without losing your state. The more complex games (actioners like Metroid or the rpgs) let you do this, but you can only put the game aside for so long before you've forgotten what you were doing when you come back to it (sometimes it might be months before I play a particular title again). The simple & somewhat "quick" games don't seem to believe in a save feature, which, for a game like Puyo Pop, is kind of a pain, as you need to set aside at least half an hour to play the game, something that doesn't make sense for a system I carry around in my pocket to play when waiting for a bus.
I guess I was always kind of shocked that nobody ever came out with more titles like AW - turn based, little or no persistent state, boardgame-like mechanics that could be played in 10 minute increments, with multiplayer capabilities. It seems like such an obvious route for something like the GBA, but most of the effort was put into platformers & rpgs.
As I read the article, the author seems to assume that "game" means an avatar-centric, single-player experience (ACSPE), along with MMORPGs thrown in. Certainly all his screenshots are of this type of game. So-called "puzzle games" (Tetris, Popcap's catalog, etc.), sports games, strategy games, and multiplayer games of all kinds, seem to fall outside his analysis.
For one thing, the concept of "beating" a game only really applies to the ACSPE, where there is "content" to burn through that usually doesn't merit a second look, like most movies. I think this is one of the main problems of gaming today that leads to lack of variety, a narrow audience, and excessive time commitments in order for a game to be fun.
Consider the pre-computer era definition of game: A game was something that was played against someone else, could have been physical (sports) or purely cognitive (board/card games) and almost always lasted less than a few hours (obviously, cricket strains this definition). Early computer games followed this pretty closely, replacing the human opponent with an AI (chess simulators, combat simulators, etc.).
The advent of paper-and-pen RPGs, and their subsequent translation into CRPGs changed all this. Persistent state that spanned play sessions, extemely large time commitments, and the elmination of what was traditionally thought of as competion created something that arguably should never have been called a "game" (how many of you were ever asked "How do you determine who's the winner" when you first explained RPGs to a layman?). These ideas soon bled over into most of the other genres, as they proved to be very effective in building franchise loyalty. Today, it's difficult to find a "serious" game that doesn't incorporate the features of "leveling", "extrinsic reward" (e.g. cutscenes, loot, etc.), "guaranteed success" (the main idea of the article) or "hidden rules" (my personal pet peeve), common in many Japanese games - the techique of withholding the rules of the game from the player, forcing them to "discover" them as a part of the process of playing, essentially turning rules into "content". I realize "hiddne rules" is a mainstay of some genres (fighters and Japanese RPGs comes immediately to mind), but I find them unforgiveable gimmicks for milking extra play-time out of a system, and forcing the player into an OCD-like monomania in order to actually get their money's worth (thereby wasting their time).
As popular as the ACSPE is, thousands of years of human history shows that the other sort of "game" (directly competitive systems, or abstract puzzle) can be quite successful as well, but it's been overlooked by almost everyone other than the online Flash/Java minigame market. Is this really the only venue for this type of fun? Even systems that would seem to be ideally suited for this type of game (e.g. the GBA or mobile phones) have precious few "strategy" or "puzzle" games, compared the mountains of action and rpg ACSPEs that have always struck me as inappropriate for systems that seem designed for short games with other people, as you're usually out in public with a few free minutes when you have the opporunity to use these.
Anyway, my overall point is, if developers would expand the types of games they'd develop beyond the ACSPEs focused on in this article, many, if not most, of these points would become moot. I also think that the emphasis of the effort would move from content generation to game design as you reduced the number of art resources required to produce a title. I see this as a good thing, as the content creation is probably the largest cost component of most modern games, the most time-consuming, and the least able to change dramatically if large changes need to be made during the middle of development to accomodate new ideas.
It's only signficant if it becomes routine for studios to start making movies that are over 4 hours long. Is it really necessary to fit more than this onto a single disk? You have to get up to go to the bathroom at some point.
Like the article says, a $5000 scooter. There are electric scooters out there that could also be carried onto a subway car with you, but they're 1/20th the price. Sure, they don't have the same range, or cool factor, but who the heck did Kamen think his market was? We're talking about a device to make it easier for people to get from public transportation hubs to their destination endpoints. These aren't the kind of people that have $5000 to waste on a personal transporter. You're talking about 10 years of bus transfers before it pays for itself.
I live about a mile from nearby subway stations, and have been known to be an early adopter - a perfect candidate for a Segway (other than the fact that I'm not sure about it's viability in Boston winter conditions). I told myself that I'd buy one once they got down to about $1500. Well, it's five years later and the price hasn't budged. If they really wanted to change the world, they would have figured out a way to sell them for $1000.
Who has a Windows computer that inexplicably freezes now and then? Yes, who?
My wife's Powerbook running OSX freezes about twice a month; my PC freezes maybe twice a year.
Who has a Windows computer that suffers degraded performance and the discovery of spyware/viruses/etc?
Her Powerbook frequently bogs down for no explicable reason. Maybe running out of disk space, or fragmentation, but who knows? My PC has yet to be infected with spyware or viruses (knock wood).
Who has a Windows computer that doesn't offer the equivalent of iLife out of the box?
When we upgraded her computer to OSX, there was no iLife - unless we wanted to pay an extra $100.
Anyone I know who has used Windows for more than a few years nods their head (or rolls their eyes) in a camaraderie of sufferers whenever typical Windows problems (which you seem to deny) are mentioned.
And any Mac owner who is honest with themselves will admit that all these problems plague the Mac as well, as well as acknowledging that during the OS9 era, Macs froze & crashed far more often than Win2K or even Win98 (I should know, I owned both). Yet smug Mac boosters during that period continued to cling to the myth that Macs were more "stable" than Windows boxen.
Apple saying that Windows was not designed to withstand the onslaught of viruses & security threats is disingenuous, as the Mac OS could not stand up to them either. The overwhelming majority of trojans & viruses that afflict home users come from software that was voluntarily & consciously installed on the machine - the Mac's system of requiring someone to enter the root password would not make it immune to this attacks.
It's not like OSX is a bundle of joy to work with; although I've only spent about 30 minutes, I still haven't figured out how to uninstall software, and there are those Gimp printer drivers I installed on the machine that I can't get rid of; I only recently stumbled onto how to remove a printer I no longer own from my choice of printers - a far easier proposition on the PC. OSX is great for a lot of things, but IMO, the UI is not as mature as the Windows UI for understanding how things go together - there's a lot of magic going on under the hood, and if it weren't for my unix experience, I wouldn't know how to solve a lot of problems - problems I was able to figure out under Windows just by messing around. Give OSX another 5 years and they'll put a clean, navigable way around these things, I'm sure.
I've owned Macs since '87, but these ads are pure BS. There are a lot of reasons to own a Mac, but, other than the spyware issue for naive users (a very valid reason, IMO), the rest of these reasons are bunk.
In the U.S., most places have taken to just displaying the last 4 digits of your credit card number on the receipts they give back to you. However, on a recent trip to Europe (Finland & Russia, actually), I noticed that the receipts there seem to favor a scheme where a random set of digits appear each time (e.g. XXXX-XXX1-234X-XXXX). If you're like me, you often accumulate a bunch of these receipts in your pockets as you travel; some people may just dump the days wad of receipts in a trash can. A fortunate dumpster diver may stumble onto a wad of receipts that allow him to reconstruct the credit card number. I'm not sure why the people that implemented that latter scheme thought it was preferable.
Slashdot Mirror
The Onion's AV Club, which is normally a pretty astute review site for video games, is pretty hard on Dusk. All the reviews can agree on the fact that the game is about the story, not the gameplay aspects of it, but the AV Club seems to really pound the story as being trite. Somehow I'm more inclined to believe the reviewers there when it comes to evaluating the quality of a narrative than just about anyone out there who regularly reviews videogames, for whom the model of storytelling is Final Fantasy or Half Life.
I'm sure the story (for someone who regularly reads real fiction) is nowhere near as good as the game's boosters would have us believe, but I also think folks at The Onion may be a little too hard on it. I'm curious to know what the rest of you out there thought of this, evaluated from the perspective of a graphic novel. Is it really compelling, or is it one of those titles you like more for what it's trying to do (bringing fiction to a new medium), rather than what it is.
-BbT
It's because of people like you that I started sniping. I got tired of placing an early bid and have someone timidly bump up the bid because they didn't really know what they wanted to pay, or whose idea of what something was worth was based on what everyone else thought it was worth.
I was going to ask you if you realized, that you can bid $1,000,000, but it doesn't mean you're going to pay that much, but clearly you understand this, since you're responding to the parent (who bid a hypothetical $200 and paid $160). So I'm flabbergasted trying to understand your statement:
I've actually used the same technique you describe (small incremental bids) not because I was shilling, but because my "best price" was "smallest allowable amount over the current winning bid, up to and including my max price"
Whenever you bid any amount, you automatically will pay the "smallest allowable amount over the current winning bid, up to and including my max price." Why do you need to incrementally bid, unless you don't really know what you want, and "$1 more than my max" always seems okay. When you look at eBay auctions after the fact, you rarely see someone who micro-bid up to some level & then gave up before they were ever the winner - micro bidders are always trying to just go over. This makes absolutely no sense, because all you're accomplishing by doing that is guaranteeing that the very next person to bid will out-bid you.
Why not just wait until the end of the auction & enter the amount you think is fair? If you're lucky, you'll get it for much less, if nobody else thought it was worth so much; otherwise you get nothing, or you take it for what you think was fair. In all scenarios, you "win", unless the item in question is one that comes up for sale very rarely and you need it soon.
-BbT
Was I caught in the frenzy? No.
Of course you were. First off, how do you know they outbid you by 50 cents? All ebay bids automatically go 50 cents over the next highest bid. The only way you would know that they "just barely beat you" would be to go back & rebid incrementally until you "won".
I thought your maximum was $100 and not a penny more. If you were willing to pay more, why didn't you bid that much in the first place? Why bid more than once? Bid once for the absolute max you're willing to pay (in fact, bid 5% over what you think is reasonable, just so you don't feel bad about having someone beat you by 50 cents) and then walk away. You'll only pay just over what the next highest bidder paid.
Afraid of getting nickle & dimed by people bumping up the price with micro-bids, just to "test the waters"? That's why you snipe.
-BbT
DLPs aren't really "flatscreens" (if you mean flat panel). My 55" Sony SXRD takes up more space than that 27" tube TV it replaced (a little less deep, but much wider). It's not really the kind of TV you can set up in your kitchen or corner of the bedroom, where a lot of those daily hours of TV get spent. Our kitchen TV is LCD; the old tube is in the corner of the bedroom; the SXRD goes in the "TV Room", and is only used to watch DVDs and "scheduled" series (as opposed to drive-by viewing).
If this was about LCDs or plasmas, the story might be a little different, but its the form factor (not the picture quality or expense) of rear-projection TVs that allow them to be segregated to "special" viewing events in the living room/home theatre.
-BbT
Jack Thompson is a dangerous dope, but he law in question isn't as bad as you make it out. Read the original article - there's an "AND" between those three points. If the article is correct, lacking serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value is not alone grounds to restrict the game - it must also depict violence in a bad way and be patently contrary to prevailing standards (whatever that means).
-BbT
And from what you're saying it can take up to 10 seconds on digital? Holy crap... how can you channel surf with that? Maybe I'll just not go digital.
10 seconds is the worst case, but 2 seconds is not uncommon. However, if you're using a digital tuner, you quickly learn to just use the digital channel guide as well - just press the guide button and half your screen is devoted to a TV programming grid that you can quickly surf through - you're just doing your surfing based on reading instead of looking at the screen. Bad if you're illiterate, but much faster than surfing channels the old way, especially when you have lots of channels to surf. Plus, you can see what's coming up. And far better than those old "TV Guide Channel" listings that forced you to stare at the slowly scrolling list for 2 minutes before the channel you wanted finally rolled around to the display.
-BbT
If you eat the pizza you destroy your shield!
I have two words for you:
Poop Shield.
-BbT
I was more impressed with what 4 quid buys you in the UK.
-BbT
You're not looking hard enough. CNet lets you search for TVs based on a wide variety of criteria. Here's the page that shows you all HDTVs broken down by screen size. There are over 250 models that are between 25" and 40".
Satellite solves the problem of no local HD programming. And are you really sure that your rural area receives no HDTV over the air? Unless you're in the mountains, chances are that you can receive over-the-air signals. HDTV signals travel farther & with much less opportunity for signal degradation. Where I live the standard channels come in poorly or not at all, yet the HD version of each one is crystal clear. Check out AntennaWeb to see if you are within range, and what sort of antenna you'd need to receive them.
-BbT
... math errors.
How embarrassing, especially when I'm being pedantic.
-BbT
this has not actually happened, but it could
All except the part about their stock tumbling 78%. First off, I doubt that news of a battery recall would sink a tool manufacturer. Secondly, there is no such thing as Milwaukee stock - they're a subsidiary of the Hong Kong corporation, Techtronic Industries, and make up about 10% of that company's revenue (their revenue was less than $700 million at the time of their acquisition in 2005, compared to Techtronic's 2.8 billion).
-BbT
Still not very newsworthy. At Disney's EPCOT, you have "Turtle Talk With Crush, which is far more impressive as an example of real-time electronic puppetry. In Crush's case, we're not talking about a mechanical robot, but a big super-high-def video screen with a real-time rendered Crush interacting with kids. A Robot with a moving jaw, colored LEDs and antennas that move up & down doesn't really bring anything new to the table that hasn't already been done 20 years ago at Chuck-E-Cheese.
BbT
I guess "Next Gen" in Sony HQ means "Start Over From Scratch". Those FMV games sure were fun back then; I'm sure sitting through a 4 minute cutscene and pressing up/down/left/right every minute or so is going to be even more fun in HD.
-BbT
First off, the article is about the myth of the "40 hour gamer" not the 40 hour game". The author is not complaining that the games take longer than 40 hours, but that it takes him months to find 40 hours in which to play solitary games - a problem for those games who suddenly find themselves with the trappings of what is commonly called "a life".
Most of the posts here are completely missing the point ("You suck D00D!"). As someone who's put down more than one game that I was enjoying partway through, I can tell you the main reason why: because something new comes along. Humans enjoy novelty, and many long-play games are long play because of a continual repetition of the basic game mechanic. After your fourth session sitting down doing essentially the same thing you've been doing for the last month, you get intrigued by the latest & greatest. Add to this the fact that you may have multiple irons in the fire (I'm currrently in the middle of 3 different books and 4 different single-player games)
Why is this a problem? Because there are a lot more "soft" gamers out there than hardcore ones, and they make a lot more money. As a developer, what would you prefer you market to be: 3% of the population or 30%? If you're spending tons of effort to produce a narrative game that can only be reached by 3% of the population, why are you bothering with a narrative? Hard games are fine, but perhaps they should be restricted to genres that are inherently more repetitive (e.g. classic arcade games), allowing people that bail on the title to go away feeling they had fun, as opposed to abandoning the narrative.
Ultimately, there are many more people out there that only want to commit 6 hours to some interactive entertainment as opposed to 40.
-BbT
1. What kind of fairy dust are you filling up your tank with in order to get 26 mpg out of an Element? The highway EPA is only 25, and practical use from almost all real owners shows it more like 19-21 mpg (although it sounds like you are mostly highway miles).
2. How can a daily commute that takes you over the Sagamore Bridge be considered "no traffic"? This is probably one of the worst traffic corridors in MA, at least during summer. I'm sure during the winter it's fine, but in the summer - does that Element come with pontoons as an option?
-BbT
Thanks for the info - especially regarding CCR. I always liked that game on the DC; didn't know they'd pumped it up for the GBA. I had played Tactics Ogre for about 6 hours, but the JRPG nature of it really turned me off; plus, I didn't get the "strategy" feel of the combat from it the way you do from AW - it seemed way more like a game of "level up your dudes so you can walk all over the bad guys" as opposed to the "try to solve this tactical situation that we GUARANTEE there is a way to do" that is AW. I'll check out the other titles as well.
-BbT
AFAIK most fighting games coming out of Japan give you a practice mode where they tell you all the moves and many of the combos up front.
They do now. Wasn't always the case. And even with this knowledge (which still takes a long time to completely learn, at which point you can begin to actually begin practicing in an attempt to become good), the knowledge of what moves work well against others, or what blocks will succeed, can only be determined by trial and error (or reading enthusiast websites). Contrast this with games like chess or soccer, where all the rules are extant at the beginning; you don't win at chess because you knew how to capture with the pawn en passant and your opponent didn't, or at soccer because you know about a shortcut across the field that only comes with familiarity. Sure, both those games reward experience and practice, but it is because of developing tactics or skills built on top of basic manuevers known to everyone, not by hidden rules knowledge.
And I don't know what hidden rules any of the Japanese RPGs have. There's always some NPC who wants to interrupt you and tell you all about them, before asking you "Did you get that? (y/n)".
Consider games like Pokemon, whose rules structure is dizzying in its complexity (it's a testament to differences between a kids mind and an adult's when you see how a ten-year-old can accumulate the reams of minutia regarding the powers & progression rates of all the creatures in the game). Or FFVII, with its system of materia for building up characters - this information is not documented anywhere (other than fan sites or strategy guides); it's left up to the player to discover it (either from characters, as you describe), but ultimately from trial and error as you experiment with components. How about Sonic Adventure, with its Chau herding? All are examples of rules as discoverable content. It's a valid form of entertainment - it's essentially a universe simulation where the player plays the part of a scientist developing & testing hypotheses, but it's not really a "game". But it's also treating rules as chrome - extra complexity introduced for novelty value as opposed to strategic or tactical complexity.
These are all methods of stretching out the length of time you devote to a game, while ensuring that you will eventually tire of it once you've "discovered" everything. Contrast it with sports, card or board games, which require relatively little time to learn, but can be played for a lifetime, without the need to introduce new contexts (e.g. "maps") in which to play the game. There is plenty of strategy to be explored in a soccer field or chessboard without having to artificially tart it up with chrome that is the mainstay of almost all computer games produced today. But a game based on chrome will ultimately be put aside.
-BbT
You don't actually own a GBA or other proper portable console, do you?
Actually, I do. (See my post above). I have plenty of games to play on the other platforms in my house (GC, XBox & PC) - too many, in fact - there are at least 4 untouched demos & discs for each system lying around waiting for me to find the time to play them. I see the GBA as a chance to play games when I've got a little spare time in between life's other activities - riding a plane, waiting at a doctor's office, etc. Of course, playing games in public can generate unwanted attention, but I would contend (and my original post was dancing around this) that this is because the games that are getting produced for these systems are catering to the geeky fanboys (who do, to be fair, spend a ton of money on games, and support an industry). If developers would devote energy to producing games with a broader appeal, the idea of playing a game in public wouldn't carry such a social stigma.
There are plenty of games that "normal" adults like to play, usually party games & such, but also sports. Why can't developers try to produce games that cater to this audience? I see a few reasons. Game development today (like software development in general) is about tackling problems that are known quantities; it's safer for publishers to get behind projects where they can more easily predict what the cost and duration of a project will be, and this can be done when you are putting out games that fit tightly into a genre, with relatively known metrics surrounding content creation. Innovation is painful because you don't know how long something may take, and you don't know if people will like it.
For this reason, you want to restrict innovation to low-cost, low-risk projects that won't destroy you when they fail (and they will). It's why I was surprised why the portable games showed so little imagination when it came to innovation - I can only assume (maybe I'm wrong) that the cost to develop a title for the GBA was much, much less than a typical console or PC title. Why not use that opportunity to push the envelope? Most of the titles were content to be down-ports from more powerful systems, or bringing classic Nintendo console titles from the past onto the portable platform. It doesn't surprise me that you spent most of your time playing the GBA at home - the games on it were mostly titles designed originally to be played in front of a TV.
If you want to extend your audience beyond the geeky hardcore (which I'm certainly a card-carrying member), you've got to develop games that push other cognitive buttons besides twitch-rush, obsessive pack-ratting, OCD and the desire to see stat bars grow larger. You need to incorporate social aspects, where the interaction between players is facilitated by the medium (as it is in traditional card games like Bridge or Poker) instead of being replaced by it.
-BbT
I guess we have different ideas of what constitutes a "ton". According to GameRankings.com, here's the rundown on titles for the GBA, broken down by genre:
action: 80
action/adventure: 15
adventure: 2
driving: 9
rpg: 31
sports: 7
misc: 16
strategy: 10
So out of 170 titles, we have 26 that are misc or strategy; the remainder are dominated by action & rpgs. Granted, this doesn't include very many import titles, but for what the average gamer can buy in a store, this represents pretty much all of them. I've owned a GBA since the SP came out, and I look pretty hard to find fun pick up & play type games, but I really only have a handful games in my collection that I look at with any frequency: Advance Wars, Monkey Ball and Konami Arcade. I tried Warioware (finished it, in fact), but I really couldn't see what people liked about it; it didn't seem like a game to me, more like some kind of hand-eye coordination test, like "Reader Rabbit" for twitch development. Puyo Pop is all right, but it didn't grab hold of me, and Chu Chu Rocket I played on the Dreamcast, and didn't see the point of getting a single-player version that played on the GBA (maybe I was wrong).
Of all those games, the only one I can really come back to is AW. Why? Because one of the few games that allows you to save & power off in the middle of the game without losing your state. The more complex games (actioners like Metroid or the rpgs) let you do this, but you can only put the game aside for so long before you've forgotten what you were doing when you come back to it (sometimes it might be months before I play a particular title again). The simple & somewhat "quick" games don't seem to believe in a save feature, which, for a game like Puyo Pop, is kind of a pain, as you need to set aside at least half an hour to play the game, something that doesn't make sense for a system I carry around in my pocket to play when waiting for a bus.
I guess I was always kind of shocked that nobody ever came out with more titles like AW - turn based, little or no persistent state, boardgame-like mechanics that could be played in 10 minute increments, with multiplayer capabilities. It seems like such an obvious route for something like the GBA, but most of the effort was put into platformers & rpgs.
-BbT
As I read the article, the author seems to assume that "game" means an avatar-centric, single-player experience (ACSPE), along with MMORPGs thrown in. Certainly all his screenshots are of this type of game. So-called "puzzle games" (Tetris, Popcap's catalog, etc.), sports games, strategy games, and multiplayer games of all kinds, seem to fall outside his analysis.
For one thing, the concept of "beating" a game only really applies to the ACSPE, where there is "content" to burn through that usually doesn't merit a second look, like most movies. I think this is one of the main problems of gaming today that leads to lack of variety, a narrow audience, and excessive time commitments in order for a game to be fun.
Consider the pre-computer era definition of game: A game was something that was played against someone else, could have been physical (sports) or purely cognitive (board/card games) and almost always lasted less than a few hours (obviously, cricket strains this definition). Early computer games followed this pretty closely, replacing the human opponent with an AI (chess simulators, combat simulators, etc.).
The advent of paper-and-pen RPGs, and their subsequent translation into CRPGs changed all this. Persistent state that spanned play sessions, extemely large time commitments, and the elmination of what was traditionally thought of as competion created something that arguably should never have been called a "game" (how many of you were ever asked "How do you determine who's the winner" when you first explained RPGs to a layman?). These ideas soon bled over into most of the other genres, as they proved to be very effective in building franchise loyalty. Today, it's difficult to find a "serious" game that doesn't incorporate the features of "leveling", "extrinsic reward" (e.g. cutscenes, loot, etc.), "guaranteed success" (the main idea of the article) or "hidden rules" (my personal pet peeve), common in many Japanese games - the techique of withholding the rules of the game from the player, forcing them to "discover" them as a part of the process of playing, essentially turning rules into "content". I realize "hiddne rules" is a mainstay of some genres (fighters and Japanese RPGs comes immediately to mind), but I find them unforgiveable gimmicks for milking extra play-time out of a system, and forcing the player into an OCD-like monomania in order to actually get their money's worth (thereby wasting their time).
As popular as the ACSPE is, thousands of years of human history shows that the other sort of "game" (directly competitive systems, or abstract puzzle) can be quite successful as well, but it's been overlooked by almost everyone other than the online Flash/Java minigame market. Is this really the only venue for this type of fun? Even systems that would seem to be ideally suited for this type of game (e.g. the GBA or mobile phones) have precious few "strategy" or "puzzle" games, compared the mountains of action and rpg ACSPEs that have always struck me as inappropriate for systems that seem designed for short games with other people, as you're usually out in public with a few free minutes when you have the opporunity to use these.
Anyway, my overall point is, if developers would expand the types of games they'd develop beyond the ACSPEs focused on in this article, many, if not most, of these points would become moot. I also think that the emphasis of the effort would move from content generation to game design as you reduced the number of art resources required to produce a title. I see this as a good thing, as the content creation is probably the largest cost component of most modern games, the most time-consuming, and the least able to change dramatically if large changes need to be made during the middle of development to accomodate new ideas.
-BbT
Blu-ray is 50G, while HD-DVD is 30G
I'd call that pretty significant.
It's only signficant if it becomes routine for studios to start making movies that are over 4 hours long. Is it really necessary to fit more than this onto a single disk? You have to get up to go to the bathroom at some point.
-BbT
Like the article says, a $5000 scooter. There are electric scooters out there that could also be carried onto a subway car with you, but they're 1/20th the price. Sure, they don't have the same range, or cool factor, but who the heck did Kamen think his market was? We're talking about a device to make it easier for people to get from public transportation hubs to their destination endpoints. These aren't the kind of people that have $5000 to waste on a personal transporter. You're talking about 10 years of bus transfers before it pays for itself.
I live about a mile from nearby subway stations, and have been known to be an early adopter - a perfect candidate for a Segway (other than the fact that I'm not sure about it's viability in Boston winter conditions). I told myself that I'd buy one once they got down to about $1500. Well, it's five years later and the price hasn't budged. If they really wanted to change the world, they would have figured out a way to sell them for $1000.
-BbT
Or you could really go nuts & try http://oldmanmurray.com/
-BbT
Who has a Windows computer that inexplicably freezes now and then? Yes, who?
My wife's Powerbook running OSX freezes about twice a month; my PC freezes maybe twice a year.
Who has a Windows computer that suffers degraded performance and the discovery of spyware/viruses/etc?
Her Powerbook frequently bogs down for no explicable reason. Maybe running out of disk space, or fragmentation, but who knows? My PC has yet to be infected with spyware or viruses (knock wood).
Who has a Windows computer that doesn't offer the equivalent of iLife out of the box?
When we upgraded her computer to OSX, there was no iLife - unless we wanted to pay an extra $100.
Anyone I know who has used Windows for more than a few years nods their head (or rolls their eyes) in a camaraderie of sufferers whenever typical Windows problems (which you seem to deny) are mentioned.
And any Mac owner who is honest with themselves will admit that all these problems plague the Mac as well, as well as acknowledging that during the OS9 era, Macs froze & crashed far more often than Win2K or even Win98 (I should know, I owned both). Yet smug Mac boosters during that period continued to cling to the myth that Macs were more "stable" than Windows boxen.
Apple saying that Windows was not designed to withstand the onslaught of viruses & security threats is disingenuous, as the Mac OS could not stand up to them either. The overwhelming majority of trojans & viruses that afflict home users come from software that was voluntarily & consciously installed on the machine - the Mac's system of requiring someone to enter the root password would not make it immune to this attacks.
It's not like OSX is a bundle of joy to work with; although I've only spent about 30 minutes, I still haven't figured out how to uninstall software, and there are those Gimp printer drivers I installed on the machine that I can't get rid of; I only recently stumbled onto how to remove a printer I no longer own from my choice of printers - a far easier proposition on the PC. OSX is great for a lot of things, but IMO, the UI is not as mature as the Windows UI for understanding how things go together - there's a lot of magic going on under the hood, and if it weren't for my unix experience, I wouldn't know how to solve a lot of problems - problems I was able to figure out under Windows just by messing around. Give OSX another 5 years and they'll put a clean, navigable way around these things, I'm sure.
I've owned Macs since '87, but these ads are pure BS. There are a lot of reasons to own a Mac, but, other than the spyware issue for naive users (a very valid reason, IMO), the rest of these reasons are bunk.
-BbT
In the U.S., most places have taken to just displaying the last 4 digits of your credit card number on the receipts they give back to you. However, on a recent trip to Europe (Finland & Russia, actually), I noticed that the receipts there seem to favor a scheme where a random set of digits appear each time (e.g. XXXX-XXX1-234X-XXXX). If you're like me, you often accumulate a bunch of these receipts in your pockets as you travel; some people may just dump the days wad of receipts in a trash can. A fortunate dumpster diver may stumble onto a wad of receipts that allow him to reconstruct the credit card number. I'm not sure why the people that implemented that latter scheme thought it was preferable.
-BbT