And just for the record, the use of the word "who" there instead of "how" is neither regional dialect nor incorrect slang. That is what is known as a typo. (I suppose now you're going to tell me that you think using the word "typo" for "typographical error" is also incorrect, and by using it I am contibuting to mass illiteracy in our society.)
Oh, "coke" is an abbreviation because its made with extracts of the coca[sic] plant.
Again, if "microphone" can only be shortened to "mic," and "mike" is incorrect (when both are actually jargon slang anyway, so your nitpicking is beyond silly... OED my ass), then shouldn't the shortening of Coca-cola, which comes from the cocoa plant, be "coc" instead of "coke"?
Mispronouncing "ask" is a regional dialect thing. Kind of like who both Presidents Bush and Carter are in the habit of saying "Noo-Kyoo-Lar", even though they know it's supposed to be pronounced just like it's spelled ("nuclear"). It has nothing to do with the fact that one slang word for microphone is seen by you (and you alone, it appears) as somehow less valid than another slang word for microphone. I use both all the time, and you are the first one to ever put up a stink about it either way.
Add a TV tuner via USB or whatever, and it would be pretty nice for ice fishing. Especially if it had the capacity to "mini-Tivo" a few favorite shows which you could watch whenever you wanted. Ice fishing is fun, but two days of staring at nothing but your radar and your trap flags would be a nice thing to break up with an episode of Alias or something.
Actually, "Knights of the Old Republic", a (gasp!) adventure game for both PC and console from Bioware outsold all the LucasArts Star Wars console games combined last year. Their slapped-together games are getting pwn3d by their own licensees.
I disagree that the PC gaming scene is as dead as you imply.
To this day, there is no MMORPG for the console market. We're talking about a big chunk of the industry here, where one customer will bring in a gross of about $300 for one game, as long as you keep the expansion packs a-comin'.
Sony made an aborted attempt at bring Everquest to the PS2, and the ancient Phantasy Star Online was ported to the X-Box to the fanfare of no-one. As long as you need a PC to play the likes of DAOC and EQ, nVidia will keep selling ever-escalating GeForce[x] cards.
Nobody thought there even was a major market for PC games in the face of Nintendo, until a little company called "id" came along and became very, very rich by turning a dated low-power 3D shooter into a multiplayer LAN game that swept the nation.
If your game is not good enough to buck negative trends (and start new positive ones), it probably was not all that ground-breaking to begin with.
Planning game design based on faceless kids on geek sites is probably a hell of a lot more reliable than relying on the marketing losers who are probably responsible for green-lighting all those shitty movie-licensed games like "The Italian Job" and "The Hulk."
There's more risk in doing something original, but more upside, too.
No marketing executive would ever suggest releasing a Beach Volleyball game incorporated into the a Japanese dating sim as the sequel to a pvp fighting game, but "Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball", love it or hate it, was a massive hit with X-Box owners, and fairly cheap to put together (since the DOA3 engine could be adapted to handle the gameplay & animation, and they could steal the code-base from any of a hundred "H" games to handle the relationship management part.) Thankfully, the lead geeks at Team Ninja have earned a fair ammount of creative freedom from the success of their various other works, so a game like DOAX was possible.
After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we've decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC.
This is a good example of everything that's wrong with letting corporate market-trend watchers make the decisions for an entertainment company.
It's always a good time to release a good game (by "good," I mean fun to play and judged by many to be worth their hard-earned money), no matter what the style or genre, or how many similar games might have failed recently. It's also never a good time to release a crappy game that nobody will want to play, no matter how hot the market for games if its ilk might be.
Also, people tend to go to the same gas station all the time, lazy creatures of habit that we are. If a gas station becomes your "favorite" because you like the convenience of paying at the pump, guess which gas station you will probably be buying your next set of overpriced wiper blades from?
No PHB who passes up a $400 PC for a $1200 Mac in order to get an "easier to use" computer is going to accept spending a single dime on training. Lack of high administration and training costs will be the main ways he plans on having the Mac pay for itself. If the receptionist is too afraid of the Dock to do her job, she's fired.
Pfft. Allow me to help you feel young: I remember buying a 5k RAM expansion cartrige which plugged into the RS-232 port of my Commodore Vic20, bringing my system up to a whopping 8k!
Later, I bought a special RS-232 bridge which allowed me to connect my accoustic coupler and my memory cartrige at the same time, so I could connect to BBS's using a program I keyed in using BASIC and saved on a cassette tape.
If "the old days" for you included the existance of hard drives, you're just a kid yet.
Gasoline is a loss leader in most places these days. A "Super America" can make a penny a gallon, or even take a small loss, and make it up by selling you a $0.50 snickers bar for a $1.00, and a "Big Gulp" cup of inexpensive sugar-water for $1.49. Their "Supermom" bakery products are also a huge cash-cow for them.
Other gas stations make their money from maintenence and parts, or cigarettes, or deluxe car washes... you get the idea. Ever notice how few gas stations that only sell gas are left? That's because there's no money in retailing the gas itself anymore.
The prices are almost always within a penny or two of each other in a given neighborhood because the fuel itself costs them all about the same ammount. Also, they look up and down the road each morning to make sure nobody is undercutting them too drastically.
So perhaps there is no actual weight to this 'outcry' over violent media. Perhaps it is motivated by something other than legitimate concern for society?
I'm one of those "never ascribe to malice..." types who rejects conspiracy theories unless presented with solid evidence to convict Those Who Have Conspired. It's more likely that those who object to violent media are concerned for society, but their concern is a misinformed one, and their outcry is based on the emotional impact of the issue, rather than the facts.
On the other hand, puritanism crops up in many strange forms in the US. I have a friend who keeps talking about how cell phones cause cancer, traffic accidents, and every other ill to befall mankind. When her husband was given a cell phone from work, she had a big problem with it... not because work would call him a lot, because they dont... not because he would drive carelessly while using it, because he doesn't bring it along in the car... No, she had a problem with it because they were now Cell Phone Owners, and therefore unclean.
What percentage of the population had access to that entertainment? The same as today? I doubt the distribution was nearly as widespread as today. Sure, wherever you were if you looked you could probably find it.
How many teens today have a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the most popular game out there to contain "mature" violence. I'm sure it's a lot, but is it more than even one in five? I was under the impression that most copies were sold to Gen-Xers like me.
As for statistics regarding historical rates of violence, I'm too lazy to google for it at the moment, but reliable numbers from good sources exist out there, and while I don't recall the exact numbers, I do recall that gun violence is down, not up.
Anecdotally, I recall my father talking about the constant gunfighting that went on in the Iron Range in northern Minnesota when he was growing up. I also vividly recall some of the violence (and suicide) among my own generation in the 1980s.
It is true that "gang violence" has slightly moved out of the urban jungles and into the suburbs over the last 20 years or so, but that might ultimately prove to be a Good Thing in the long run, because "white America" was perhaps a little to willing to let such problems fester when they were contained within minority communities. Suburban middle-school teachers are now taught all kinds of facts about gang life that they never would have suspected they would need to know: (Out-of-state sports team clothing is sometimes used as a subtle way of wearing gang colors; baby pacifiers are not just a kinky fashion statement, but a narcotics delivery method; etc.) This represents a cultural shift which has many people alarmed, but we're not talking about the Visigoths coming to burn the city. I live right next door to a High School, and as far as violence goes there's not a safer neighborhood in the city.
Is out society better/safer than it was 30 years ago? 60 years ago? 90 years ago?
Yes, yes, and yes.
No matter what Jon Katz and Michael Moore would like you to believe, your chance of getting brutally killed in or around an American school is far lower today than any of those three periods you just mentioned.
If nothing else, it's a radically safer time to be a minority in America now compared to back when lynchings were commonplace.
Seeing violence every day in the games they play can't possibly be good, can it? Seeing women objectified without realizing the consquences and effects it has on the women can't be good, can it?
Good point. Those dime novels of the 1910s, B movies of the 1940s, and exploitation movies of the 1970s were... oh, you were talking about entertainment of today? Yes, shocking. Very shocking. Almost, but not quite, as violent and sexest as entertainment from previous generations.
Today, a 14 year old would shoot your or if you're lucky, only get a knife to the gut.
Shoot my or?
Seriously, times have not changed that much. Back in the 80s, I knew a kid who took a sheath knife to school every day (he hid it in his sock.)
Working as a teacher in recent years, I've found kids to be more or less the same as they were then. A few troublemakers from terrible home situations, but mostly good kids who go through the motions of being students in order to keep the adults from hassling them so they can socialize over lunch. Drug use is close to the same rate as back then, and smoking is way, way down.
Don't let the hype of a handful of shooting sprees from the last few years mislead you. If you look at the cold, hard, unbiased numbers, even gun violence is down.
Take it easy, I was half-kidding. Smash TV cost me a lot of quarters back in the day. As far as I'm concerned, dual joystick control is one of the best ways to do a top-down shooter.
So, in some ways, I guess, to a purist -- to a gamer -- it's a little disillusioning in that it turned into just another corporation trying to sell another box of crap to the hapless consumer.
Excuse me, sir... Not to be disrespectful to a pioneer of the industry, but was "Smash TV" not Robotron without the humanoids?
I get the feeling that anyone who grew up playing early video games gets a real sense of disgust at seeing the level of depravity present in today's titles.
Everyone? Painting with a rather broad brush there, aren't you?
I grew up in the Pac-Man era. (I was a Tempest and Robotron junkie myself.) I love Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City! GTA:3 is like watching a really good 1970s mobster movie, except you get to play the part of the low-level thug, working your way up the ladder by doing ugly jobs for ugly people. GTA:VC is more like the 1980s drug-dealing mafia movie, and is equally entertaining. Performances from actors like Joey "Pants" Pantaliano and Ray Liota, along with the differences of handling characteristics of different cars, make both games extremely fun and entertaining for me.
I'm an X-Box owner, so I will have to wait a couple years for GTA:SA to get ported over, but the first two are plenty enough to keep me amused until then while my PS2-owning friends are playing the new one.
Another matress trick for sound-dampening: If you have opposite walls facing each other which are causeing reverb problems, put the matresses in the center of the room, balancing on end by leaning them into each other like a little tent. The angle helps, as does the soft material.
Both are correct these days. It's short for "microphone," but "mike" is a common alternate spelling for it. I've even seen it on the packaging from some microphones I've bought. Dictionary.com lists both spellings as legit, too.
Sort of like how "Coke" is short for "Coca-cola" but is not spelled "Coc," is it?
Railing against it is as useless as complaining about "catsup" being spelled "ketchup." Language evolves with usage, and "mike" is becoming the more common spelling than "mike", mainly because it works better when you verb it (as in "Miking" or "Miked".)
I could not agree more. I have yet to see an FPS improve on the original Quake engine. New weapons, better graphics, but pretty much the same thing in HALO, Jedi Knight, UT, and a dozen others. The GTA3 engine has been around a couple years, but I don't see their competition coming up with anything better. GTA3 and GTA:VC are plenty good enough to keep me cheerfully blowing stuff up until the X-Box port of SA comes along, which I will also want to buy, if the content is anywhere near as good as the first two.
Slashdot Mirror
And just for the record, the use of the word "who" there instead of "how" is neither regional dialect nor incorrect slang. That is what is known as a typo. (I suppose now you're going to tell me that you think using the word "typo" for "typographical error" is also incorrect, and by using it I am contibuting to mass illiteracy in our society.)
Again, if "microphone" can only be shortened to "mic," and "mike" is incorrect (when both are actually jargon slang anyway, so your nitpicking is beyond silly... OED my ass), then shouldn't the shortening of Coca-cola, which comes from the cocoa plant, be "coc" instead of "coke"?
Mispronouncing "ask" is a regional dialect thing. Kind of like who both Presidents Bush and Carter are in the habit of saying "Noo-Kyoo-Lar", even though they know it's supposed to be pronounced just like it's spelled ("nuclear"). It has nothing to do with the fact that one slang word for microphone is seen by you (and you alone, it appears) as somehow less valid than another slang word for microphone. I use both all the time, and you are the first one to ever put up a stink about it either way.
Add a TV tuner via USB or whatever, and it would be pretty nice for ice fishing. Especially if it had the capacity to "mini-Tivo" a few favorite shows which you could watch whenever you wanted. Ice fishing is fun, but two days of staring at nothing but your radar and your trap flags would be a nice thing to break up with an episode of Alias or something.
Actually, "Knights of the Old Republic", a (gasp!) adventure game for both PC and console from Bioware outsold all the LucasArts Star Wars console games combined last year. Their slapped-together games are getting pwn3d by their own licensees.
If you can't make money selling it, guess what? It wasn't that good.
To this day, there is no MMORPG for the console market. We're talking about a big chunk of the industry here, where one customer will bring in a gross of about $300 for one game, as long as you keep the expansion packs a-comin'.
Sony made an aborted attempt at bring Everquest to the PS2, and the ancient Phantasy Star Online was ported to the X-Box to the fanfare of no-one. As long as you need a PC to play the likes of DAOC and EQ, nVidia will keep selling ever-escalating GeForce[x] cards.
Nobody thought there even was a major market for PC games in the face of Nintendo, until a little company called "id" came along and became very, very rich by turning a dated low-power 3D shooter into a multiplayer LAN game that swept the nation.
If your game is not good enough to buck negative trends (and start new positive ones), it probably was not all that ground-breaking to begin with.
There's more risk in doing something original, but more upside, too.
No marketing executive would ever suggest releasing a Beach Volleyball game incorporated into the a Japanese dating sim as the sequel to a pvp fighting game, but "Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball", love it or hate it, was a massive hit with X-Box owners, and fairly cheap to put together (since the DOA3 engine could be adapted to handle the gameplay & animation, and they could steal the code-base from any of a hundred "H" games to handle the relationship management part.) Thankfully, the lead geeks at Team Ninja have earned a fair ammount of creative freedom from the success of their various other works, so a game like DOAX was possible.
This is a good example of everything that's wrong with letting corporate market-trend watchers make the decisions for an entertainment company.
It's always a good time to release a good game (by "good," I mean fun to play and judged by many to be worth their hard-earned money), no matter what the style or genre, or how many similar games might have failed recently. It's also never a good time to release a crappy game that nobody will want to play, no matter how hot the market for games if its ilk might be.
Also, people tend to go to the same gas station all the time, lazy creatures of habit that we are. If a gas station becomes your "favorite" because you like the convenience of paying at the pump, guess which gas station you will probably be buying your next set of overpriced wiper blades from?
You are correct, of course. My recall of those days is fuzzy at best. (A sign of age, I suppose.)
No PHB who passes up a $400 PC for a $1200 Mac in order to get an "easier to use" computer is going to accept spending a single dime on training. Lack of high administration and training costs will be the main ways he plans on having the Mac pay for itself. If the receptionist is too afraid of the Dock to do her job, she's fired.
Pfft. Allow me to help you feel young: I remember buying a 5k RAM expansion cartrige which plugged into the RS-232 port of my Commodore Vic20, bringing my system up to a whopping 8k!
Later, I bought a special RS-232 bridge which allowed me to connect my accoustic coupler and my memory cartrige at the same time, so I could connect to BBS's using a program I keyed in using BASIC and saved on a cassette tape.
If "the old days" for you included the existance of hard drives, you're just a kid yet.
Other gas stations make their money from maintenence and parts, or cigarettes, or deluxe car washes... you get the idea. Ever notice how few gas stations that only sell gas are left? That's because there's no money in retailing the gas itself anymore.
The prices are almost always within a penny or two of each other in a given neighborhood because the fuel itself costs them all about the same ammount. Also, they look up and down the road each morning to make sure nobody is undercutting them too drastically.
I'm one of those "never ascribe to malice..." types who rejects conspiracy theories unless presented with solid evidence to convict Those Who Have Conspired. It's more likely that those who object to violent media are concerned for society, but their concern is a misinformed one, and their outcry is based on the emotional impact of the issue, rather than the facts.
On the other hand, puritanism crops up in many strange forms in the US. I have a friend who keeps talking about how cell phones cause cancer, traffic accidents, and every other ill to befall mankind. When her husband was given a cell phone from work, she had a big problem with it... not because work would call him a lot, because they dont... not because he would drive carelessly while using it, because he doesn't bring it along in the car... No, she had a problem with it because they were now Cell Phone Owners, and therefore unclean.
How many teens today have a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the most popular game out there to contain "mature" violence. I'm sure it's a lot, but is it more than even one in five? I was under the impression that most copies were sold to Gen-Xers like me.
As for statistics regarding historical rates of violence, I'm too lazy to google for it at the moment, but reliable numbers from good sources exist out there, and while I don't recall the exact numbers, I do recall that gun violence is down, not up.
Anecdotally, I recall my father talking about the constant gunfighting that went on in the Iron Range in northern Minnesota when he was growing up. I also vividly recall some of the violence (and suicide) among my own generation in the 1980s.
It is true that "gang violence" has slightly moved out of the urban jungles and into the suburbs over the last 20 years or so, but that might ultimately prove to be a Good Thing in the long run, because "white America" was perhaps a little to willing to let such problems fester when they were contained within minority communities. Suburban middle-school teachers are now taught all kinds of facts about gang life that they never would have suspected they would need to know: (Out-of-state sports team clothing is sometimes used as a subtle way of wearing gang colors; baby pacifiers are not just a kinky fashion statement, but a narcotics delivery method; etc.) This represents a cultural shift which has many people alarmed, but we're not talking about the Visigoths coming to burn the city. I live right next door to a High School, and as far as violence goes there's not a safer neighborhood in the city.
Yes, yes, and yes.
No matter what Jon Katz and Michael Moore would like you to believe, your chance of getting brutally killed in or around an American school is far lower today than any of those three periods you just mentioned.
If nothing else, it's a radically safer time to be a minority in America now compared to back when lynchings were commonplace.
Seeing violence every day in the games they play can't possibly be good, can it? Seeing women objectified without realizing the consquences and effects it has on the women can't be good, can it?
Good point. Those dime novels of the 1910s, B movies of the 1940s, and exploitation movies of the 1970s were... oh, you were talking about entertainment of today? Yes, shocking. Very shocking. Almost, but not quite, as violent and sexest as entertainment from previous generations.
Shoot my or?
Seriously, times have not changed that much. Back in the 80s, I knew a kid who took a sheath knife to school every day (he hid it in his sock.)
Working as a teacher in recent years, I've found kids to be more or less the same as they were then. A few troublemakers from terrible home situations, but mostly good kids who go through the motions of being students in order to keep the adults from hassling them so they can socialize over lunch. Drug use is close to the same rate as back then, and smoking is way, way down.
Don't let the hype of a handful of shooting sprees from the last few years mislead you. If you look at the cold, hard, unbiased numbers, even gun violence is down.
Take it easy, I was half-kidding. Smash TV cost me a lot of quarters back in the day. As far as I'm concerned, dual joystick control is one of the best ways to do a top-down shooter.
Excuse me, sir... Not to be disrespectful to a pioneer of the industry, but was "Smash TV" not Robotron without the humanoids?
Everyone? Painting with a rather broad brush there, aren't you?
I grew up in the Pac-Man era. (I was a Tempest and Robotron junkie myself.) I love Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City! GTA:3 is like watching a really good 1970s mobster movie, except you get to play the part of the low-level thug, working your way up the ladder by doing ugly jobs for ugly people. GTA:VC is more like the 1980s drug-dealing mafia movie, and is equally entertaining. Performances from actors like Joey "Pants" Pantaliano and Ray Liota, along with the differences of handling characteristics of different cars, make both games extremely fun and entertaining for me.
I'm an X-Box owner, so I will have to wait a couple years for GTA:SA to get ported over, but the first two are plenty enough to keep me amused until then while my PS2-owning friends are playing the new one.
Another matress trick for sound-dampening: If you have opposite walls facing each other which are causeing reverb problems, put the matresses in the center of the room, balancing on end by leaning them into each other like a little tent. The angle helps, as does the soft material.
All 9 running at full speed... still quieter than my G4, which sounds like low-flying air traffic.
Err... more common than "mic" is what I mean to say there.
Both are correct these days. It's short for "microphone," but "mike" is a common alternate spelling for it. I've even seen it on the packaging from some microphones I've bought. Dictionary.com lists both spellings as legit, too.
Sort of like how "Coke" is short for "Coca-cola" but is not spelled "Coc," is it?
Railing against it is as useless as complaining about "catsup" being spelled "ketchup." Language evolves with usage, and "mike" is becoming the more common spelling than "mike", mainly because it works better when you verb it (as in "Miking" or "Miked".)
I could not agree more. I have yet to see an FPS improve on the original Quake engine. New weapons, better graphics, but pretty much the same thing in HALO, Jedi Knight, UT, and a dozen others. The GTA3 engine has been around a couple years, but I don't see their competition coming up with anything better. GTA3 and GTA:VC are plenty good enough to keep me cheerfully blowing stuff up until the X-Box port of SA comes along, which I will also want to buy, if the content is anywhere near as good as the first two.