The running puzzles in WW were truely excelent, but the rest of the game ruined it. The other puzzles were often buggy, and you could get the game to break (falling through areas, getting the camera stuck, etc..) if you tried to look around too much or go anywhere you weren't obviously supposed to go. It was like the game penalized you for exploring. If not by breaking, but by distracting you with yet another repetative buttonmashing combat session. Meh.
Everybody always thinks too hard about why Warrior Within wasn't good. Perhaps it is because people don't want to admit to themselves that the combat doesn't make the game?
Here's the deal. The Sands of Time was an excelent environmental puzzle game with some crappy fighting. The Warrior Within was a crappy 3D fighter with some mediocre environmental puzzles. Neither the music, the mood, nor the combat engine had anything to do with what made the games good or bad.
It's OK to admit you like an adventure/puzzle game. It doesn't make you less 'hardcore'.
You're exactly correct. I don't know when it happened, but people seem to be under the delusion that freedom of the press is no longer part of the first amendment, but an independant freedom that includes the freedom to break the laws of the land.
Yes, we have the freedom of speech. It's guaranteed in law to us by the same sentence that give us freedom of the press. It does not, however, free us from responsibility for our actions.
Those are some mighty big assumptions you're making there. The biggest is that because there is no fee, they can't ban anybody. Want to take bets on their ability to ban an entire machine?
The Xbox team isn't stupid - they knew when they made the decision that any additional requirement for certification that meant additional work for game developers made it that much more likely that some would decide not to develop for the system.
How are you managing to completely miss the point over and over?
Of course the developers went along instead of deciding not to develop for the system. Who cares that the developers had to do extra work. The point is that design details of what could have been an independant artistic creation were dictated to the creators by Microsoft.
It's like saying that requiring games to not crash during normal gameplay is "bad" since it reduces the freedom of game devs to make games that crash.
The problem with the analogy is not anything you have said, but that you took it a step too far.
Think about the supply and demand side of the argument, which is still perfectly valid, and don't lose the point by going off on a mental tangent. Analogies don't kill analogies. Pedantry kills analogies.
Why else would you post an adversarially worded argument about why achievements aren't bad in response to a comment that suggests not that achievements are bad, but that requiring game developers to include achievements is bad. Any editorial influence that a game platform manufacturer tries to assert over third party developers is bad. You shouldn't have to make the argument that developers have 'quite a lot of freedom'. That should be a given, right along with the rest of their artistic freedom.
Personally, I consider it a feature. The integrated gamerscore system is one of the big turnoffs to me about Xbox Live. It attracts exactly the kind of gamers that I have no desire to play with. The culture on XBox live was borrowed from the AOL chat-rooms of the mid to late '90s, and it is one of the biggest turn-offs to online gaming for me, and why I didn't even care if PlayStation had an online service. It's probably why only 12% of the Xbox owners signed up for Live, and if the basic Live service wasn't free on the 360 I suspect those numbers would be about the same this generation.
If XBL attracts the immature 12-22 year old set away from the PS3, then maybe I'll actually shell out the $800 or whatever crazy price Sony is asking for it...
The flipside to that is that you know you'll probably never get to play against the best players unless you yourself become one of the best. I don't play Halo because I can't do the whole FPS with a control pad thing, but I know I got good at Quake and UT by playing with people who were signifigantly better than me. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that over time the rankings on XBL don't typically change signifigantly...
Some games just plain aren't suited to the achievements. Developers then go out of their way to use up their allotment. This results either in inane achievements, or in-game tasks that don't fit the game genre. It also encourages and rewards unhealthy gaming habits. For example, one of the achievements in Dead Rising requires you to play for at least 14 hours in a single session. That's if you do it perfectly the first time...
Console manufacturers should impose as few requirements as practical on game makers, and that should include allowing them to choose if they will have in game achievements or not. I would still hope, though, that many game studios would choose not to use them for the reasons above, and since they are essentially a tool to get gamers to provide free advertising for their game.
None of these enterprises were considered great commercial successes.
If you don't call DEC's Alpha chip a 'great commercial success', than what is? Does it still have to be on the market? What chip from the Alpha era is still on the market? They've all been redesigned since.
The only reason the Alpha 'failed' is because DEC's support business was so much more profitable than it's CPU business.
The big guys can come up with new versions each year or so and catch up to the "boutique" designs.
Intel only managed to catch up with the Alpha for two reasons: They stopped coming out with new versions of the Alpha, and Intel implemented patented Alpha designs without a license. It's not really a fair argument to you though, since Alpha wasn't 'boutique', and DEC *was* one of the 'big guys'.
Similarly, SPARC was *the* CPU of the.com boom. How many do they have to sell to be a 'great commercial success'?
All the magic is out of CPU design. Lots of people know how to do it, and do it well. The hard part these days is in the manufacturing process, and you can buy that. There is no good reason not to design your own CPU if you can reasonably expect to sell enough of them,
This may come as a shock to you, but for the PS3 to succeed, *you* neither have to want one or buy one. The fact of the matter is that Sony came up with a business plan for sales of their machine, and they sold every single one they offered for the terms you considered unreasonable.
There are a lot of things out there that people think are overpriced... Things that people wish they could afford, but are just out of their reach for the time being. You just have to come to terms with the fact that those things are outside of your viable lifestyle, and you have to learn to live without until, if you're lucky, the price comes down to the point where you can afford them.
Think about new cars. Not even luxury cars, just ordinary everyday mass-market vehicles. When a brand new, highly-desireable model rolls off the line, there is a good chance that you'll have to pay more than you think the car is worth if you want to be one of the first to own one... Then as time goes by availability increases and the price becomes such that more people can afford it. During that early phase, though, people with more money than you, people you don't understand, will buy that car even though there are others on the market that provide better value for the money.
Game system manyfacturers have long been unusually altruistic with their initial system pricing, keeping the price artificially low even during the periods where supply far outstripped demand. Sony is the first manufacturer to come to their senses in this department, and I think you will find that next generation Microsoft will jump on the bandwagon. In the meantime, you're not rich enough to afford one of the first batch of PS3s (neither am I...). Tough.
Stock options have a value that is readily available in the market place or through options pricing models.
You imply that virtual goods do not. If they don't, obviously they can't be taxed, but the implication is that you can easily determine these items market value.
I could build a 3500 sq/ft house with 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms out of $85,000 worth of materials, live in it for 10 years, and disassemble it into its requisite components which are now worthless and shipped to the landfill... The government would still tax me on the value of that building to the tune of $10k per year or so while I owned it even though no transaction occured at all. How is taxing a virtual item that you could sell for real cash, even if you never intend to, any different?
...is a lack of results/deliverables in the expected time frame. Either your employees are producing at an acceptable level or they aren't. I don't understand why many managers feel they need to waste time with the cat and mouse games. Perhaps the real question this guy should be asking is "Why do the middle managers at my company have time available to look into this; Perhaps we should have fewer middle managers."
You can buy the Sony branded BluRay re-writer that is in this machine all by itself for $499. I'm guessing they're charging $2000 extra because they have some idea they can get people to pay that.
That's plain not true. It captures at the full 320x240 NTSC resolution. It scales the bitrate up to the available bandwdith. Quality video encoding DSPs are not very expensive at all right now. The difference between your PC capture card and the slingbox are that the slingbox has a slow, cheap general purpose CPU (which doesn't need to be fast), a cheap-o case, and no disks, etc...
On a LAN, the slingbox video is quite passable. Better than, for example, a TiVo on maximum compression.
I don't have an example to give you because we haven't actually made that link. I know plenty of people who don't know they are depressed or psychotic because of how they were treated as a child though.
Your argument is that these findings aren't commonly accepted because they aren't commonly accepted yet. Most things are obvious with hindsight.
Educational programming is MEANT to help children learn.
Strict dicipline is MEANT to get children to behave and adapt to the real world...
My main argument, however, is that emotional stimuli effect the development of the brain. So when somebody suggests that they found another similar link, albiet with stimuli that is intended to be helpful rather than harmful, we shouldn't write them off as a crackpot without some additional research.
Yes. I bought one of these at the end of September because it said it was Mac compatable, and it wasn't. There are a lot of angry people with a Slingbox they can't use waiting for them to get off their asses and release the client. The problem is almost certainly that they had a hard time getting the DRM working. Bastards.
VLC is nice, but SlingBoxes can be had for $100. You'll be hard pressed to build a VLC encoding rig for that little money. Of course, you'll have no crappy DRM with the VLC or or MythTV setup...
Read my comment again. I didn't say he said the conclusion was incorrect. I said his conclusion was incorrect. His conclusion was that the paper should be used to line trash cans and talk shit to his students about rather than to raise the call for some proper research into the subject.
Toyota is about to pass GM as the world's biggest, and they sell SMALL CARS....and full size sedans, and SUVs, and pickups. My sister's 4Runner is *enormous*. Their most popular car is a full sized sedan, not a compact. Their small cars have been passed long ago in the value, quality, and fuel economy departments by Korean cars. The Corolla and Prius are so overpriced that it more than offsets any fuel savings you may get.
They have a sellers market. I know because I was at the dealer two days ago. The salesman was polite, but uninterested in talking. All his Camry's were gone.
Toyota has very good inventory management and manufacturing. Their sales could be in the tank and they would still only have two weeks inventory.
So the point is valid; jack the price of electricity and we have new incentives to save power.
Power fuels our lifestyle. We can accomplish a lot through efficiency and conservation, but not enough to justify what effects the high price would have in areas where we cannot conserve while maintaining our lifestyle. We would be better off building our non-carbon-emitting generation capabilities and regulating blatant misuse of electricity.
That is a rare example. Most large office/lab/warehouse/manufacturing buildings are lit by flourescent or high-pressure sodium lighting (which is actually more efficient in lumens per watt than flourescent) already, and have been since the 1950s. You will be hard pressed to find any other example as extreme as the one you mention.
Slashdot Mirror
The running puzzles in WW were truely excelent, but the rest of the game ruined it. The other puzzles were often buggy, and you could get the game to break (falling through areas, getting the camera stuck, etc..) if you tried to look around too much or go anywhere you weren't obviously supposed to go. It was like the game penalized you for exploring. If not by breaking, but by distracting you with yet another repetative buttonmashing combat session. Meh.
Everybody always thinks too hard about why Warrior Within wasn't good. Perhaps it is because people don't want to admit to themselves that the combat doesn't make the game?
Here's the deal. The Sands of Time was an excelent environmental puzzle game with some crappy fighting. The Warrior Within was a crappy 3D fighter with some mediocre environmental puzzles. Neither the music, the mood, nor the combat engine had anything to do with what made the games good or bad.
It's OK to admit you like an adventure/puzzle game. It doesn't make you less 'hardcore'.
You're exactly correct. I don't know when it happened, but people seem to be under the delusion that freedom of the press is no longer part of the first amendment, but an independant freedom that includes the freedom to break the laws of the land.
Yes, we have the freedom of speech. It's guaranteed in law to us by the same sentence that give us freedom of the press. It does not, however, free us from responsibility for our actions.
Those are some mighty big assumptions you're making there. The biggest is that because there is no fee, they can't ban anybody. Want to take bets on their ability to ban an entire machine?
The Xbox team isn't stupid - they knew when they made the decision that any additional requirement for certification that meant additional work for game developers made it that much more likely that some would decide not to develop for the system.
How are you managing to completely miss the point over and over?
Of course the developers went along instead of deciding not to develop for the system. Who cares that the developers had to do extra work. The point is that design details of what could have been an independant artistic creation were dictated to the creators by Microsoft.
It's like saying that requiring games to not crash during normal gameplay is "bad" since it reduces the freedom of game devs to make games that crash.
What a load. That isn't the same thing at all.
The problem with the analogy is not anything you have said, but that you took it a step too far.
Think about the supply and demand side of the argument, which is still perfectly valid, and don't lose the point by going off on a mental tangent. Analogies don't kill analogies. Pedantry kills analogies.
Are you just trying to be an ass for some reason?
Why else would you post an adversarially worded argument about why achievements aren't bad in response to a comment that suggests not that achievements are bad, but that requiring game developers to include achievements is bad. Any editorial influence that a game platform manufacturer tries to assert over third party developers is bad. You shouldn't have to make the argument that developers have 'quite a lot of freedom'. That should be a given, right along with the rest of their artistic freedom.
Personally, I consider it a feature. The integrated gamerscore system is one of the big turnoffs to me about Xbox Live. It attracts exactly the kind of gamers that I have no desire to play with. The culture on XBox live was borrowed from the AOL chat-rooms of the mid to late '90s, and it is one of the biggest turn-offs to online gaming for me, and why I didn't even care if PlayStation had an online service. It's probably why only 12% of the Xbox owners signed up for Live, and if the basic Live service wasn't free on the 360 I suspect those numbers would be about the same this generation.
If XBL attracts the immature 12-22 year old set away from the PS3, then maybe I'll actually shell out the $800 or whatever crazy price Sony is asking for it...
The flipside to that is that you know you'll probably never get to play against the best players unless you yourself become one of the best. I don't play Halo because I can't do the whole FPS with a control pad thing, but I know I got good at Quake and UT by playing with people who were signifigantly better than me. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that over time the rankings on XBL don't typically change signifigantly...
Some games just plain aren't suited to the achievements. Developers then go out of their way to use up their allotment. This results either in inane achievements, or in-game tasks that don't fit the game genre. It also encourages and rewards unhealthy gaming habits. For example, one of the achievements in Dead Rising requires you to play for at least 14 hours in a single session. That's if you do it perfectly the first time...
Console manufacturers should impose as few requirements as practical on game makers, and that should include allowing them to choose if they will have in game achievements or not. I would still hope, though, that many game studios would choose not to use them for the reasons above, and since they are essentially a tool to get gamers to provide free advertising for their game.
None of these enterprises were considered great commercial successes.
.com boom. How many do they have to sell to be a 'great commercial success'?
If you don't call DEC's Alpha chip a 'great commercial success', than what is? Does it still have to be on the market? What chip from the Alpha era is still on the market? They've all been redesigned since.
The only reason the Alpha 'failed' is because DEC's support business was so much more profitable than it's CPU business.
The big guys can come up with new versions each year or so and catch up to the "boutique" designs.
Intel only managed to catch up with the Alpha for two reasons: They stopped coming out with new versions of the Alpha, and Intel implemented patented Alpha designs without a license. It's not really a fair argument to you though, since Alpha wasn't 'boutique', and DEC *was* one of the 'big guys'.
Similarly, SPARC was *the* CPU of the
All the magic is out of CPU design. Lots of people know how to do it, and do it well. The hard part these days is in the manufacturing process, and you can buy that. There is no good reason not to design your own CPU if you can reasonably expect to sell enough of them,
This may come as a shock to you, but for the PS3 to succeed, *you* neither have to want one or buy one. The fact of the matter is that Sony came up with a business plan for sales of their machine, and they sold every single one they offered for the terms you considered unreasonable.
There are a lot of things out there that people think are overpriced... Things that people wish they could afford, but are just out of their reach for the time being. You just have to come to terms with the fact that those things are outside of your viable lifestyle, and you have to learn to live without until, if you're lucky, the price comes down to the point where you can afford them.
Think about new cars. Not even luxury cars, just ordinary everyday mass-market vehicles. When a brand new, highly-desireable model rolls off the line, there is a good chance that you'll have to pay more than you think the car is worth if you want to be one of the first to own one... Then as time goes by availability increases and the price becomes such that more people can afford it. During that early phase, though, people with more money than you, people you don't understand, will buy that car even though there are others on the market that provide better value for the money.
Game system manyfacturers have long been unusually altruistic with their initial system pricing, keeping the price artificially low even during the periods where supply far outstripped demand. Sony is the first manufacturer to come to their senses in this department, and I think you will find that next generation Microsoft will jump on the bandwagon. In the meantime, you're not rich enough to afford one of the first batch of PS3s (neither am I...). Tough.
Stock options have a value that is readily available in the market place or through options pricing models.
You imply that virtual goods do not. If they don't, obviously they can't be taxed, but the implication is that you can easily determine these items market value.
You're right. I was just playing devil's advocate...
They do tax stock options as a capital gain though, even though no hard currency or goods have changed hands.
I could build a 3500 sq/ft house with 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms out of $85,000 worth of materials, live in it for 10 years, and disassemble it into its requisite components which are now worthless and shipped to the landfill... The government would still tax me on the value of that building to the tune of $10k per year or so while I owned it even though no transaction occured at all. How is taxing a virtual item that you could sell for real cash, even if you never intend to, any different?
...is a lack of results/deliverables in the expected time frame. Either your employees are producing at an acceptable level or they aren't. I don't understand why many managers feel they need to waste time with the cat and mouse games. Perhaps the real question this guy should be asking is "Why do the middle managers at my company have time available to look into this; Perhaps we should have fewer middle managers."
You can buy the Sony branded BluRay re-writer that is in this machine all by itself for $499. I'm guessing they're charging $2000 extra because they have some idea they can get people to pay that.
That's plain not true. It captures at the full 320x240 NTSC resolution. It scales the bitrate up to the available bandwdith. Quality video encoding DSPs are not very expensive at all right now. The difference between your PC capture card and the slingbox are that the slingbox has a slow, cheap general purpose CPU (which doesn't need to be fast), a cheap-o case, and no disks, etc...
On a LAN, the slingbox video is quite passable. Better than, for example, a TiVo on maximum compression.
I don't have an example to give you because we haven't actually made that link. I know plenty of people who don't know they are depressed or psychotic because of how they were treated as a child though.
Your argument is that these findings aren't commonly accepted because they aren't commonly accepted yet. Most things are obvious with hindsight.
Educational programming is MEANT to help children learn.
Strict dicipline is MEANT to get children to behave and adapt to the real world...
My main argument, however, is that emotional stimuli effect the development of the brain. So when somebody suggests that they found another similar link, albiet with stimuli that is intended to be helpful rather than harmful, we shouldn't write them off as a crackpot without some additional research.
Yes. I bought one of these at the end of September because it said it was Mac compatable, and it wasn't. There are a lot of angry people with a Slingbox they can't use waiting for them to get off their asses and release the client. The problem is almost certainly that they had a hard time getting the DRM working. Bastards.
VLC is nice, but SlingBoxes can be had for $100. You'll be hard pressed to build a VLC encoding rig for that little money. Of course, you'll have no crappy DRM with the VLC or or MythTV setup...
Read my comment again. I didn't say he said the conclusion was incorrect. I said his conclusion was incorrect. His conclusion was that the paper should be used to line trash cans and talk shit to his students about rather than to raise the call for some proper research into the subject.
Toyota is about to pass GM as the world's biggest, and they sell SMALL CARS. ...and full size sedans, and SUVs, and pickups. My sister's 4Runner is *enormous*. Their most popular car is a full sized sedan, not a compact. Their small cars have been passed long ago in the value, quality, and fuel economy departments by Korean cars. The Corolla and Prius are so overpriced that it more than offsets any fuel savings you may get.
They have a sellers market. I know because I was at the dealer two days ago. The salesman was polite, but uninterested in talking. All his Camry's were gone.
Toyota has very good inventory management and manufacturing. Their sales could be in the tank and they would still only have two weeks inventory.
So the point is valid; jack the price of electricity and we have new incentives to save power.
Power fuels our lifestyle. We can accomplish a lot through efficiency and conservation, but not enough to justify what effects the high price would have in areas where we cannot conserve while maintaining our lifestyle. We would be better off building our non-carbon-emitting generation capabilities and regulating blatant misuse of electricity.
Aah the irony. You realize you used an non-capitalistic example and then described it as capitalism, right?
That is a rare example. Most large office/lab/warehouse/manufacturing buildings are lit by flourescent or high-pressure sodium lighting (which is actually more efficient in lumens per watt than flourescent) already, and have been since the 1950s. You will be hard pressed to find any other example as extreme as the one you mention.