Well he was a kid before he was a teenager. I thought the premise of Wind Waker was that it was set earlier in his life.
You have obviously never played the game. While there may be issues with the "grander storyline", Wind Waker makes it quite clear it is set about a hundred years after Ocarina of Time.
Re:I have been loving not watching as much TV...
on
National TV Turn Off Week
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
As I have mentioned before, my favorite part of TV is that the government has mandated (with our tax dollars) HDTV to be used. Forcing it to be placed into sets in the future so that we can all double pay for it. Now they realize that we are all fat because we sit on our dead, dying, asses and watch TV. So get out and do something but make sure you pay more taxes to support better TV signals!
The government has not mandated HDTV, just digital. The switch to digital will free up spectrum, which the government can then sell for significant amounts of money. The government will probably make a profit on it, not use your tax dollars. TVs may become more expensive, but that price will only be paid by those who benefit from the change.
This is a feature of DVDs that should have been available from the beginning! Why is it that I can't select the "clean" or "edited for tv" version of a movie from the main dvd menu?
It is a feature of DVDs, it's just not on the menu. You can set the parental lock feature on your player, and the discs check that to either show an edited version or simply refuse to play.
Unlike in the other two cases, though, coming up with a way to get people to spend hundreds of dollars on the same game just to be able to compete isn't that admirable of an innovation.
He came up with a solution to that problem as well - ante, where the winner of each game gets a random card from the loser's deck. If people actually used it in Magic, it would be okay to lose 90% of the time to someone who spent 20 times as much on their deck, because you'd come out ahead on average.
Perhaps he should have been able to predict that people wouldn't use it, but he did try.
I think Richard Garfield was the best person they could have got to represent non-electronic (board and card) games. Describing him as representing "pen and paper" games is just bizzare.
I think the big problem is that new games don't seem to sell. It doesn't matter how great it is, making a sequel to a hit is like free money. Let's look at some innovative games:
* Pikmin - Don' think it sold well. Probably wouldn't have even been released if it wasn't a Miyamoto game. At least we'll get a sequel (a good thing). Maybe it will sell better, it deserves it.
This did sell well. According to N-Sider.com it sold 603,000 copies in the US and 504,000 in Japan. Not Zelda or Mario numbers, but very respectable. Better than Star Fox Adventures
* Ico - Talked about this the other day. Looked great. Played great. Didn't sell very well.
With reason. Although the game was brilliant, it took about 10 hours to beat and has very little replay. Best rental ever, but not a good buy for $50.
* Sly Cooper - FANTASTIC game, I don't think it sold very well. There will be a sequel, maybe it will sell better.
Don't know anything about this one.
* Animal Crossing - I was ADDICTED to this game for months. When I stopped playing, I felt like I abandonded all my friends. It was great. I hope the sequel makes it here.
N-Sider says it sold 633,310 copies in the US, and 268,620 in Japan. The Japanese numbers look suspect though - there were two versions in Japan, one with less features than the US version, then another with all the US features and a bit more. It lists both versions with the same release date, and says the original sold 588 copies. Regardles, it looks like pretty good sales to me.
(which already includes the likes of Acclaim and Eidos)
No, it does not include Acclaim. It was reported that they were dropping support for the GameCube, but the *same day* they clarified that this was wrong, they were merely no longer going to release every game on every platform. A check of their website shows upcoming GameCube games, including one that's not coming out for the PS2.
What about bootleg anime on eBay or half.com? They're often easy to spot, but I don't know what to do about them. Is there an effective way to report them?
If you see this game at your store, pick it up, along with the two expansions.
In addition to the two expansions, there's Frag PvP, an expansion based on the comic, and Frag Deadlands, a stand-alone game that can be combined with the original.
The homepage at www.sjgames.com/Frag, and has the rules in PDF form, and some fan-created variants.
Steve Jackson Games changed direction in 1991 (I think) when they were raided by the US Secret Service. Before that they'd basically made small wargames and strategy games. I think their cash cow was "Car Wars", but they also had success with Ogre, Raid on Iran, and Illuminati.
They got raided due to a GURPS supplement, so I have trouble believing that.
After the SS raid, they seemed to derive their primary income from GURPS. And starting in about 2000, they began supplementing that with gag card games like "chez geek", "munchkin", and "ninja burger".
And Frag, and Spooks, and Knightmare Chess, and a new edition of Car Wars, and others. Not to mention prior things like Ogre Miniatures and Illuminati: New World Order. Last year Munchkin accounted for over 30% of their sales, so it's hardly just "supplementing" GURPS.
"CD/DVD production costs are an order of magnitude less than tooling a line to print ROM boards, ad printing them."
Yet the price of the game is still the same if not higher.
The price for new games has pretty much held steady at $50 for about twenty years or so. May not look like a drop, but it's totally ignoring inflation.
Also, the price of old CD/DVD games is consistetly lower than cart games - $20 is pretty much standard for an old game on CD/DVD ("Greatest Hits", etc.) while cart games rarely dropped below $40. This is pretty much directly attributable to the lower production costs.
BMX:XXX tanked, to my knowledge, as did DOA:Extreme Beach Volleyball.
No, DOA Volleyball sold fairly well. A brief googling shows it sold 73,000 copies in it's first day in Japan, which I think is somewhere around a fifth of the number of Xboxes sold there. Last April it was "approaching 500,000" units sold worldwide.
Why is it there's going to be a Firefly film, but still no Babylon 5 movie?
Before the release of The Phantom Menace JMS said he wouldn't do a Babylon 5 movie until after the third Star Wars movie - for some reason he didn't want to compete.
And JMS is currently sitting on some good news about a B5 project. It "isn't a novel, or a short story, a comic, an animated series, a radio drama or a stage play." My guess is it's a movie.
... that they like to cancel great TV shows, just to make a few extra bucks on a movie they know people have been dying to see.
That is clearly not the case. Fox cancelled the TV show. Universal will be making the bucks on the movie. Possibly Fox got some money from Universal for the rights, but that's all Fox will ever get.
IBM already makes the chip for the GameCube, and reportedly will do so for the next Nintendo console. If that hasn't affected their image, I don't see why the Xbox 2 would.
However, it's odd array of buttons can often lead much to be desired from games that are cross platform. Soul Calibur is an excellent example of this. Designed for a Dreamcast / PS controller type with four buttons in diamond, it relies on hitting 2 buttons simultaneously to do many moves. For moves that don't use "A" the Gamecube is tricky and/or relies on mapping a trigger to the combination. This leaves you short.
You're short even on a Dreamcast or Playstation controller, unless you can hit opposite corners of the diamond at the same time. My GameCube controller setup for Soul Calibur II is no more complicated than my Dreamcast controller setup for Soul Calibur.
I agree, creativity is dead. Some people may think "oh well X game got Y features in its latest game." IMO thats not creativity, thats evolution. In another 5-10 years, unless we see some serious change, every game on the market not made by independent developers will be a rehash or a remake of another game.
That's silly. In the last several years we've got numerous creative games from major companies, and no reason to believe this will change. Animal Crossing, Dance Dance Revolution, Shenmue, Space Channel 5, Pikmin, and the Sims, off the top of my head.
The parent to this poster (the AC) posts that violence DOES work, and he's right - but only to an extent. His point about the Romans & Carthaginians is very apt, and proves the point exactly - that violence solved the dispute, but that's because it was COMPLETE AND UTTER destruction of not just a subset of people, but an entire culture. They didn't just take out the military - they took out civilians, too. With a passion, they took out men, women, children, the elderly - no mercy for anyone. That's how that was solved.
But there are many situations that were solved with violence, but without complete destruction. The conflicts of World War II are over. We won't be fighting the Germans and Japanese again any time soon. Of course it took more than just violence - the post-war diplomacy was very important, but violence was a needed component.
The only way a game company is likely to take a risk on a totally new type of gameplay with multi-million dollar budgets is if they have a "name" developer like Sid Meier or Will Wright.
Which seems reasonable, because generally most people aren't likely to risk $50 on a totally new type of gameplay unless it's from a "name" developer like Sid Meier or Will Wright.
Lunch Money : You play a catholic schoolgirl on a playground. You beat the crap out of your opponent(s). Suggested to use consumable items such as M&Ms as life counters. You buy the deck and you get the whole game- none of this Endless Diarrhea of Expansions that other CCGs suffer. Also an excellent card based hand-to-hand combat system.:)
It's not a CCG, it's a card game. There's no "collectable". There will be expansions - Lunch Money: Sticks and Stones is coming out soon, and Beer Money (a seperate game that can be combined with Lunch Money) was just announced.
Slashdot Mirror
Well he was a kid before he was a teenager. I thought the premise of Wind Waker was that it was set earlier in his life.
You have obviously never played the game. While there may be issues with the "grander storyline", Wind Waker makes it quite clear it is set about a hundred years after Ocarina of Time.
As I have mentioned before, my favorite part of TV is that the government has mandated (with our tax dollars) HDTV to be used. Forcing it to be placed into sets in the future so that we can all double pay for it. Now they realize that we are all fat because we sit on our dead, dying, asses and watch TV. So get out and do something but make sure you pay more taxes to support better TV signals!
The government has not mandated HDTV, just digital. The switch to digital will free up spectrum, which the government can then sell for significant amounts of money. The government will probably make a profit on it, not use your tax dollars. TVs may become more expensive, but that price will only be paid by those who benefit from the change.
From the article:
"The genre traces its roots to the publication of G. Gary Gygax's seminal pen-and-paper RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, almost 25 years ago."
D&D came out 30 years ago, in 1974. Wizards of the Coast is doing various stuff this year to celebrate the 30th anniversary.
This is a feature of DVDs that should have been available from the beginning! Why is it that I can't select the "clean" or "edited for tv" version of a movie from the main dvd menu?
It is a feature of DVDs, it's just not on the menu. You can set the parental lock feature on your player, and the discs check that to either show an edited version or simply refuse to play.
Unlike in the other two cases, though, coming up with a way to get people to spend hundreds of dollars on the same game just to be able to compete isn't that admirable of an innovation.
He came up with a solution to that problem as well - ante, where the winner of each game gets a random card from the loser's deck. If people actually used it in Magic, it would be okay to lose 90% of the time to someone who spent 20 times as much on their deck, because you'd come out ahead on average.
Perhaps he should have been able to predict that people wouldn't use it, but he did try.
But that's a whole other argument.
Indeed.
I think Richard Garfield was the best person they could have got to represent non-electronic (board and card) games. Describing him as representing "pen and paper" games is just bizzare.
I think the big problem is that new games don't seem to sell. It doesn't matter how great it is, making a sequel to a hit is like free money. Let's look at some innovative games:
* Pikmin - Don' think it sold well. Probably wouldn't have even been released if it wasn't a Miyamoto game. At least we'll get a sequel (a good thing). Maybe it will sell better, it deserves it.
This did sell well. According to N-Sider.com it sold 603,000 copies in the US and 504,000 in Japan. Not Zelda or Mario numbers, but very respectable. Better than Star Fox Adventures
* Ico - Talked about this the other day.
Looked great. Played great. Didn't sell very well.
With reason. Although the game was brilliant, it took about 10 hours to beat and has very little replay. Best rental ever, but not a good buy for $50.
* Sly Cooper - FANTASTIC game, I don't think it sold very well. There will be a sequel, maybe it will sell better.
Don't know anything about this one.
* Animal Crossing - I was ADDICTED to this game for months. When I stopped playing, I felt like I abandonded all my friends. It was great. I hope the sequel makes it here.
N-Sider says it sold 633,310 copies in the US, and 268,620 in Japan. The Japanese numbers look suspect though - there were two versions in Japan, one with less features than the US version, then another with all the US features and a bit more. It lists both versions with the same release date, and says the original sold 588 copies. Regardles, it looks like pretty good sales to me.
(which already includes the likes of Acclaim and Eidos)
No, it does not include Acclaim. It was reported that they were dropping support for the GameCube, but the *same day* they clarified that this was wrong, they were merely no longer going to release every game on every platform. A check of their website shows upcoming GameCube games, including one that's not coming out for the PS2.
Better than Windows (well, at least in my opinion). And by that I mean you don't need to purchase any tools to make DVDs.
You can burn DVDs, make menus, etc., all with open source tools.
That's not an advantage of Linux - you can do the same thing on Windows, with the same tools.
What about bootleg anime on eBay or half.com? They're often easy to spot, but I don't know what to do about them. Is there an effective way to report them?
If you see this game at your store, pick it up, along with the two expansions.
In addition to the two expansions, there's Frag PvP, an expansion based on the comic, and Frag Deadlands, a stand-alone game that can be combined with the original.
The homepage at www.sjgames.com/Frag, and has the rules in PDF form, and some fan-created variants.
Steve Jackson Games changed direction in 1991 (I think) when they were raided by the US Secret Service. Before that they'd basically made small wargames and strategy games. I think their cash cow was "Car Wars", but they also had success with Ogre, Raid on Iran, and Illuminati.
They got raided due to a GURPS supplement, so I have trouble believing that.
After the SS raid, they seemed to derive their primary income from GURPS. And starting in about 2000, they began supplementing that with gag card games like "chez geek", "munchkin", and "ninja burger".
And Frag, and Spooks, and Knightmare Chess, and a new edition of Car Wars, and others. Not to mention prior things like Ogre Miniatures and Illuminati: New World Order. Last year Munchkin accounted for over 30% of their sales, so it's hardly just "supplementing" GURPS.
"CD/DVD production costs are an order of magnitude less than tooling a line to print ROM boards, ad printing them."
Yet the price of the game is still the same if not higher.
The price for new games has pretty much held steady at $50 for about twenty years or so. May not look like a drop, but it's totally ignoring inflation.
Also, the price of old CD/DVD games is consistetly lower than cart games - $20 is pretty much standard for an old game on CD/DVD ("Greatest Hits", etc.) while cart games rarely dropped below $40. This is pretty much directly attributable to the lower production costs.
BMX:XXX tanked, to my knowledge, as did DOA:Extreme Beach Volleyball.
No, DOA Volleyball sold fairly well. A brief googling shows it sold 73,000 copies in it's first day in Japan, which I think is somewhere around a fifth of the number of Xboxes sold there. Last April it was "approaching 500,000" units sold worldwide.
Why is it there's going to be a Firefly film, but still no Babylon 5 movie?
Before the release of The Phantom Menace JMS said he wouldn't do a Babylon 5 movie until after the third Star Wars movie - for some reason he didn't want to compete.
And JMS is currently sitting on some good news about a B5 project. It "isn't a novel, or a short story, a comic, an animated series, a radio drama or a stage play." My guess is it's a movie.
That is clearly not the case. Fox cancelled the TV show. Universal will be making the bucks on the movie. Possibly Fox got some money from Universal for the rights, but that's all Fox will ever get.
IBM already makes the chip for the GameCube, and reportedly will do so for the next Nintendo console. If that hasn't affected their image, I don't see why the Xbox 2 would.
However, it's odd array of buttons can often lead much to be desired from games that are cross platform. Soul Calibur is an excellent example of this. Designed for a Dreamcast / PS controller type with four buttons in diamond, it relies on hitting 2 buttons simultaneously to do many moves. For moves that don't use "A" the Gamecube is tricky and/or relies on mapping a trigger to the combination. This leaves you short.
You're short even on a Dreamcast or Playstation controller, unless you can hit opposite corners of the diamond at the same time. My GameCube controller setup for Soul Calibur II is no more complicated than my Dreamcast controller setup for Soul Calibur.
Shouldn't that be running out about now? IIRC, patents only last 17 years, and the NES came out in 1985...
It ran out before the launch of the Dreamcast, which is why it had the Nintendo-style D-pad.
I agree, creativity is dead. Some people may think "oh well X game got Y features in its latest game." IMO thats not creativity, thats evolution. In another 5-10 years, unless we see some serious change, every game on the market not made by independent developers will be a rehash or a remake of another game.
That's silly. In the last several years we've got numerous creative games from major companies, and no reason to believe this will change. Animal Crossing, Dance Dance Revolution, Shenmue, Space Channel 5, Pikmin, and the Sims, off the top of my head.
The parent to this poster (the AC) posts that violence DOES work, and he's right - but only to an extent. His point about the Romans & Carthaginians is very apt, and proves the point exactly - that violence solved the dispute, but that's because it was COMPLETE AND UTTER destruction of not just a subset of people, but an entire culture. They didn't just take out the military - they took out civilians, too. With a passion, they took out men, women, children, the elderly - no mercy for anyone. That's how that was solved.
But there are many situations that were solved with violence, but without complete destruction. The conflicts of World War II are over. We won't be fighting the Germans and Japanese again any time soon. Of course it took more than just violence - the post-war diplomacy was very important, but violence was a needed component.
The only way a game company is likely to take a risk on a totally new type of gameplay with multi-million dollar budgets is if they have a "name" developer like Sid Meier or Will Wright.
Which seems reasonable, because generally most people aren't likely to risk $50 on a totally new type of gameplay unless it's from a "name" developer like Sid Meier or Will Wright.
Is there a PART 2 of the voting? I did not even see Starcraft or Madden!
Yes. RTFA.
And considering it was mentioned on the front article page, where the hell is Starcraft?
It's in already, of course. The qualifying is only for about half the spots.
Lunch Money : You play a catholic schoolgirl on a playground. You beat the crap out of your opponent(s). Suggested to use consumable items such as M&Ms as life counters. You buy the deck and you get the whole game- none of this Endless Diarrhea of Expansions that other CCGs suffer. Also an excellent card based hand-to-hand combat system. :)
It's not a CCG, it's a card game. There's no "collectable". There will be expansions - Lunch Money: Sticks and Stones is coming out soon, and Beer Money (a seperate game that can be combined with Lunch Money) was just announced.