Someone needs to go back in time to 1986 QUICK and kill George Lucas. OR, for the faint of heart, convince him that it would be really cool if he made the prequels using ONLY 1978 technology. I guarantee that would have made a much more interesting movie.
If anyone else were to direct them and write the screenplay I'd agree it could turn into something magnificent. However, strong direction and dialogue, both of which would be vitally important to such a venture IMO are Lucas's absolute weakest points. I'm afraid that were he to attempt something like that they'd probably be even worse than the current prequels.
I agree with everything you said about imagination being more powerful than CGI.. but IMO the amazing CGI is all the prequels have going for them.
But we always hear about the holiday season being the big cash flow for the gaming industry. Consoles are always released around the holidays.. so I always figured that they were marketing to parents who buy consoles as gifts for their children for xmas.
And I'm not that poor. In fact, my income is above average for my area. I also know a few parents who make close to or above triple digit salaries.. and they don't own a high def TV nor would they buy their kids a $500 console. I just have a hard time believing that the amount of people who would spend that much on new hardware is enough to provide a return on MS and Sony's investment in the product... which was really my point.
I guess I just don't understand the economics behind these new consoles.
I might be wrong now, but I always believed that the largest demographic for video games and consoles were teenagers and college students who either rely on their parents to buy them or who don't have the money to buy them thanks to tuition costs etc.
If a console costs $500, doesn't include any games, and the games are $60 - $80.. what parent in their right mind is going to shell out this kind of money for their kids?!
I realize that there are lot of hard core gamers who shell out $800 for the latest graphics cards and spend a lot on cooling and PC mods etc.. but I'd like to believe they are a minority.. I guess I'm wrong as it seems that's who MS and Sony are targetting now.
All I know is.. as much as I may want a NextGen console.. and even if I could afford one.. I would never spend over $200 - $300 on a console.
That's one of the reasons I don't go to movie theaters anymore.
Not only is it insanely expensive ($15 / ticket now at the movie palace in my city! I can buy a DVD and own it for unlimited viewings for that) and you have to sit through 1/2 hour of commercials for coke, msn and countless cars plus the movies themselves are commericals now with all the blatant product placement.. but you still have all the idiots and teenagers who talk, kick your chair and leave their cell phones on for the duration of the movie.
Why on earth anyone actually pays for that kind of experience these days is just beyond me.
I love movies but I'd rather rent or buy a DVD and kick back at home in my underwear where I can watch the whole movie through and not have to worry about other people killing it for me.
Even if it is worth is I wonder if Sony is shooting themselves in the foot.
Half the market for video games are children and teenagers who depend on their parents to buy them this. I'd spend up to about $200 on a console for the family and that's about it... I don't care how powerful it is or how much my kids want it, $200 is my limit.
A big part of that limit is the cost of games. If they want to make the console more expensive fine, but the only way to win me back would be to lower the price of the games.... they could at least ship a decent game and a second controller with the console too.
Re:Every game in the Xbox 360 is Live aware...
on
The Xbox 360 Unveiled
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· Score: 1
Not to mention those of us who do have high speed internet connections but prefer to just casually play offline single player games at our leisure.
The last online game I played was Q3A. I haven't had the time, motivation or desire to ever allow myself to get that hooked with online competition again.
Lucas isn't that bad of a writer. At least not as bad as he is a director. He does write some pretty flaky dialogue, but good direction and acting can overcome that (ie: allowing the characters to improvise or reword so it sounds more natural and believable).
The problem is that a script is supposed to be a just a guideline. A script by itself is nothing.. it takes a lot to bring it to life.. and a good chunk of that is the direction. Lucas' "vision" has always been stunning visual effects.. and not much else... and he writes for that.
Don't forget that he also wrote Empire, Jedi and the Indiana Jones trilogy. As long as someone else directs his movies are usually a success.
In fact, the only movie that he directed that was a huge success on it's own merit* was A New Hope.. and even Lucas himself admitted it was a near disaster.. and that he had brought in some brilliant editors (Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew) that saved the movie.
* You can consider the prequels a financial success... but IMO that's mostly due to them being part of the franchise. Had they been standalone movies I think they would have flopped (or at least I HOPE they would have flopped.. lol).
FarCry has a pretty cool plot and keeps you interested in the game.
I never played the original Half Life but Half Life 2 has a pretty cool plot too and is a combination of a puzzle game and a FPS.
And even if FPS games really are the same old rehashes over and over.. sometimes a really good concept can stick. I know there's people who hate FPS games in general and find them boring.. but there's obviously a lot of people who love them too.
George Lucas is the single most financially successful film maker of all time. He doesn't need any more of my money and I'm not prepared to hand any more to him just for the sake of being a stereotypical geek.
The first 3 movies were great, but had Lucas directed Empire and Jedi I fear they'd have been as bad as the prequels. And the prequels really showed Lucas's true colours. He's a visionary in the sense that he loves special effects and visuals.. but he has no fucking clue how to deliver a story or how to direct.
The reviews are making me curious.. but I'll wait to rent it before I hand over any more money to Lucas.
I completely agree that Lucas is a horrible director.
Lucas himself admitted that the only reason A New Hope turned out ok rather than a complete disaster was because of the brilliant editing done by Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew.
Empire and Jedi, IMO, were good because Lucas didn't direct them. I think the new ones could have been great had Lucas handled the story and FX and handed off the directing to someone else.. like Spielberg (who was supposed to direct Jedi but couldn't because Lucas dropped out of the Director's Guild after Empire).
anyways, a completely insecure computer is very safe if you create your networks and use proceedures that protect the equipment and networks.
I'm sure your company has strict procedures in place to protect against this sort of thing. However, I do feel the need to point out that, statstically, most security-related incidents are caused by insiders.
A couple of years back when I was still working as an admin I was hired by a company and on my first week there was a security incident. Upon investigation it turned out it was an ex-admin who had installed trojans on many of the servers that he had root access to while he was working there.
Yup, I'm currently boycotting movie theaters because of this.
I remember in the late 80's or early 90's it was either the first or second 'new' Batman movie with Michael Keaton. They had an advertisement for Coke at the beginning. It was even themed for the movie and people were OUTRAGED. For the next 10 years or so there were no more attempts that I remember to do non-movie commercials before movies.
Man how times have changed.. and fast.
But, unfortunately, I don't think our wallets are very loud in these cases. Movie theaters, television, music etc. is all teenager domain.. and I don't see teenagers boycotting any form of entertainment any time soon. Even advertisements are 'cool' for teenagers these days. As long as teenagers are buying up movie tickets and chugging down ad after ad without complaining then it's here to stay:(
My wife wants to get a second computer for the living area (as I use our current computer mostly all the time for business etc.) and I'm trying to convince her to either get a Mac, Linux or if she *must* have Windows to keep it off the Internet.
She won't budge mainly because of games. Our kids have a bunch of little kid games that only run on Windows.. and they also have a bunch of flash games that run on the Internet. Going either route (Mac/Linux or No Internet) means sacrificing one of the two.
So it's not just as cut and dry as switching to Mac and forget your problems. There's always going to be some kind of sacrifice.
Also, in the case of ST TNG, each episode is on it's own DVD packed with behind the scenes shit and extras.
It's almost worth the $150 (canadian) just for that.
Not that I can afford it.. I wish they'd come out with a stripped down version for $50 with just the episodes on 1 or 2 disks. But the whole package that they're offering is defintely worth it.
The 'drug lords' in my city are 20 year-old college kids growing in their basements and selling to their friends to earn a few extra bucks. Every so often (living on a border town) we hear of a smuggling bust going from Canada to the US or vice versa.. in those cases they *claim* it's like $20,000 worth but do the math.. then you know it's overly exagerated and probably just kid and his girlfriend with a nickel bag.
I already posted something similar above and hate to repost, but it's relevant here so I'll summarize.
Enough chargebacks against the merchant will also get your credit card blacklisted at that merchant.
Don't chargeback unless you have a damned good reason to (credit card stolen). If you chargeback often it doesn't matter what your credit record is like.. your card will be useless.
Merchants incurr a penalty fee for each chargeback (with Visa it's 1%). So they can't afford to risk that you may chargeback a second time.
The problem with disputing charges is that will also hurt you.
Most stores don't do credit card processing themselves, they rely on 3rd party merchant accounts. These merchant accounts want to illiminate fraudulent purchases just as much as credit card companies.. only more. Because when someone does a "chargeback" (the word used to refer to disputing a charge) the merchant has to pay a fee. So they lose money.
The credit card companies do this so that merchants will be forced to do more to prevent fraudulent purchases. Makes sense, only it has a side effect. Since merchants incurr penalty charges they actually blacklist people who dispute charges.
Now of course, if someone actually does steal your credit card and makes purchases that you shouldn't have to pay then by all means chargeback. However, just know that you must not take such decisions lightly.. because you will find your credit card being declined more and more as you dispute charges.
It's ultimately up to you how you chose to see how fairly the models are compensated. However, you need to understand that the system doesn't work any differently whether you're doing porn sites or shooting for magazines.
The models don't have anything to do with the site's day to day operations. They performed a one-time service for the site and thus were paid for their services. They are not employees. They are not under contract. Many models do shoots through agencies and are featured on many different sites.
I get bothered when a model is treated poorly. If she's descriminated against etc. But as long as both parties signed a model release contract and delivered what was agreed upon, I don't see why the model would be entitled to any of the site's ongoing profits.
The only case where a model generally gets paid on an ongoing basis is on single girls sites where the site features one model only. Many times the model will be under a contract to perform exclusively for that site. She will either get a fixed rate for each month that she delivers the required content and services (chats, e-mails etc.) or occasionally she'll get a percentage of the site's net.
It's not just advertising.. it is literally handing them cash.
For-profit sites, particularly paysites, operate by converting traffic into money. Traffic is a liquid asset on the Internet. It is bought, sold and traded in bulk. The quality, or value, of the traffic is based on how productive the traffic is (ie: how much the surfers click around once they arrive on the site.. a surfer who doesn't click isn't interested in buying anything).
Each site has it's own conversion ratio with it's general traffic. For example, 1 out of every 700 surfers that hit the site might buy a membership. When a surfer buys a membership it's calleda 'conversion'. The traffic has just been converted into money.
So if suicidegirls gets slashdotted by over a million surfers and their conversion ratio is 1:700 (just pulling both those numbers out of my ass obviously) then they just got 1 million / 700 sign-ups. They are probably sending Slashdot and Nintendo gift baskets and thank-you letters as we post. Their profits most undoubtedly went through the roof this month.
The things I would do to have one of my sites slashdotted. The profits would far outweigh the bandwidth overages.
you can't really fight against such threats any other way than making it national news that someone is extorting you that way...
Scary thing about such threats is that even that doesn't work. I wonder how many people out there will never go see another "The Who" show as long as they live because of the Pete Townshend incident.
First it was "innocent until proven guilty", then it was "guilty until proven innocent".. and now I'm inclined to believe that it's "just guilty because the public wants it to be that way".
If someone accuses you of being a pedofile it doesn't matter if you're guilty or not.. your life is over. And it doesn't matter what you say to defend yourself because you're a monster and a liar in the public's eye.
I didn't own a PS2 when GTAIII came out and I never played it for the PC. I played VC for the first time well after the PC version was out, but on the PS2 when I was watching my little brother for the summer.
I fell in love with VC and when my brother took his PS2 away I went out and got the PC version. I beat it like 10 times and then decided to go get GTAIII.
I played GTAIII through once, but really didn't like it anywhere near VC. I could understand the appeal.. VC had everything that made GTAIII cool.. but VC added a lot more than just vehicles IMO.
The story line was way better, you could relate to Tommy Vercetti a lot more than the character from GTAIII (what was his name anyway?). The radio stations in VC created a far more immersive atmosphere and having recognizable songs from the era it was based in helped tremendously to add to the game's appeal. It also had a lot of comic relief that made the story line more interesting and there were other features like being able to buy property that I really missed going to GTAIII.
I just purchased a PS2 almost specifically for San Andreas (there were other less-selfish reaons - my wife and kids wanted one for xmas) and it looks like going from SA to VC is going to be just as hard as going from VC to GTAIII.. even though VC is probably my all time favourite game (until now).
Doom 3 - remake of a classic. Typical ID pushing of graphics but not much in terms of game play.
Halo 2 - next version of Halo.. will probably push the envelope but they can afford to because of Halo's success.
GTA VC/SA - both new versions of GTA III
Half Life 2 - new version of HL
You misinterpreted my original post. I did use the words 'threatens the gaming industry'.. which, by itself, is slightly ambiguous. Had you read my elaboration carefully you would have understood that I was refererring to new games that push the envelope.
Console sales are a constant.. which is why so much emphasis is put on them. It's why contracts are written to guarantee a game will be developed exclusively for one console for a set period of time after its release.
But when kids get bored because each new game is exactly the same as the last.. those console sales will diminish.
It's unrealistic to take a risk involing a couple mil and do something completely new when it's harder and harder to see returns on your investment.
It's not like you can make a $50 prototype of a video game and get a group of kids together to do study group before investing full throttle like you can with a physical toy.
Re:It's like a free ride when you've already paid.
on
GTA: San Andreas Leaked
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I want to extend on that...
The fact that all these kids copy games makes me really pissed. I don't mind much when it's music.. because there's hidden benefits to the artist of sharing music (I'm a musician so I can make that statement confidently). But the gaming industry is fragile. It's like a mini hollywood, only it's value hasn't quite been realized yet.
Kids love video games. I'm an adult and I still love video games. I'm looking forward to San Andreas.. but I'll probably wait for the PC version since I don't own nor care much for the PS2.
The thing is.. and most slashdotters know this I think.. it does take millions of dollars to produce a game like San Andreas. GTA III was the first commercially successful game to throw you into a complete 3D world.. why were they first ? We've had the technology for a few years.. why did it take Rockstar until the late 90's to produce one ? Because it's too fucking expensive and the returns aren't guaranteed.
Game theft threatens the gaming industry more than any kind other kind of 'piracy' (god I hate that word). If kids want to be able to play new games in the future that really push the envelope, and aren't just cheesy knock-offs of the games that were successful 5 years ago.. then they better stop biting the hand that feeds them.... because pretty soon the investors won't be there to throw their money into future development.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone needs to go back in time to 1986 QUICK and kill George Lucas. OR, for the faint of heart, convince him that it would be really cool if he made the prequels using ONLY 1978 technology. I guarantee that would have made a much more interesting movie.
.. but IMO the amazing CGI is all the prequels have going for them.
If anyone else were to direct them and write the screenplay I'd agree it could turn into something magnificent. However, strong direction and dialogue, both of which would be vitally important to such a venture IMO are Lucas's absolute weakest points. I'm afraid that were he to attempt something like that they'd probably be even worse than the current prequels.
I agree with everything you said about imagination being more powerful than CGI
Well, obviously :)
.. so I always figured that they were marketing to parents who buy consoles as gifts for their children for xmas.
.. and they don't own a high def TV nor would they buy their kids a $500 console. I just have a hard time believing that the amount of people who would spend that much on new hardware is enough to provide a return on MS and Sony's investment in the product... which was really my point.
But we always hear about the holiday season being the big cash flow for the gaming industry. Consoles are always released around the holidays
And I'm not that poor. In fact, my income is above average for my area. I also know a few parents who make close to or above triple digit salaries
I guess I just don't understand the economics behind these new consoles.
I might be wrong now, but I always believed that the largest demographic for video games and consoles were teenagers and college students who either rely on their parents to buy them or who don't have the money to buy them thanks to tuition costs etc.
.. what parent in their right mind is going to shell out this kind of money for their kids?!
.. as much as I may want a NextGen console .. and even if I could afford one .. I would never spend over $200 - $300 on a console.
If a console costs $500, doesn't include any games, and the games are $60 - $80
I realize that there are lot of hard core gamers who shell out $800 for the latest graphics cards and spend a lot on cooling and PC mods etc.. but I'd like to believe they are a minority.. I guess I'm wrong as it seems that's who MS and Sony are targetting now.
All I know is
That's one of the reasons I don't go to movie theaters anymore.
.. but you still have all the idiots and teenagers who talk, kick your chair and leave their cell phones on for the duration of the movie.
Not only is it insanely expensive ($15 / ticket now at the movie palace in my city! I can buy a DVD and own it for unlimited viewings for that) and you have to sit through 1/2 hour of commercials for coke, msn and countless cars plus the movies themselves are commericals now with all the blatant product placement
Why on earth anyone actually pays for that kind of experience these days is just beyond me.
I love movies but I'd rather rent or buy a DVD and kick back at home in my underwear where I can watch the whole movie through and not have to worry about other people killing it for me.
Even if it is worth is I wonder if Sony is shooting themselves in the foot.
Half the market for video games are children and teenagers who depend on their parents to buy them this. I'd spend up to about $200 on a console for the family and that's about it... I don't care how powerful it is or how much my kids want it, $200 is my limit.
A big part of that limit is the cost of games. If they want to make the console more expensive fine, but the only way to win me back would be to lower the price of the games.... they could at least ship a decent game and a second controller with the console too.
Not to mention those of us who do have high speed internet connections but prefer to just casually play offline single player games at our leisure.
The last online game I played was Q3A. I haven't had the time, motivation or desire to ever allow myself to get that hooked with online competition again.
Lucas isn't that bad of a writer. At least not as bad as he is a director. He does write some pretty flaky dialogue, but good direction and acting can overcome that (ie: allowing the characters to improvise or reword so it sounds more natural and believable).
.. and a good chunk of that is the direction. Lucas' "vision" has always been stunning visual effects .. and not much else... and he writes for that.
... but IMO that's mostly due to them being part of the franchise. Had they been standalone movies I think they would have flopped (or at least I HOPE they would have flopped .. lol).
The problem is that a script is supposed to be a just a guideline. A script by itself is nothing.. it takes a lot to bring it to life
Don't forget that he also wrote Empire, Jedi and the Indiana Jones trilogy. As long as someone else directs his movies are usually a success.
In fact, the only movie that he directed that was a huge success on it's own merit* was A New Hope.. and even Lucas himself admitted it was a near disaster.. and that he had brought in some brilliant editors (Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew) that saved the movie.
* You can consider the prequels a financial success
There are exceptions.
.. sometimes a really good concept can stick. I know there's people who hate FPS games in general and find them boring .. but there's obviously a lot of people who love them too.
FarCry has a pretty cool plot and keeps you interested in the game.
I never played the original Half Life but Half Life 2 has a pretty cool plot too and is a combination of a puzzle game and a FPS.
And even if FPS games really are the same old rehashes over and over
Your puppet strings are showing.
George Lucas is the single most financially successful film maker of all time. He doesn't need any more of my money and I'm not prepared to hand any more to him just for the sake of being a stereotypical geek.
The first 3 movies were great, but had Lucas directed Empire and Jedi I fear they'd have been as bad as the prequels. And the prequels really showed Lucas's true colours. He's a visionary in the sense that he loves special effects and visuals.. but he has no fucking clue how to deliver a story or how to direct.
The reviews are making me curious.. but I'll wait to rent it before I hand over any more money to Lucas.
I completely agree that Lucas is a horrible director.
.. like Spielberg (who was supposed to direct Jedi but couldn't because Lucas dropped out of the Director's Guild after Empire).
Lucas himself admitted that the only reason A New Hope turned out ok rather than a complete disaster was because of the brilliant editing done by Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew.
Empire and Jedi, IMO, were good because Lucas didn't direct them. I think the new ones could have been great had Lucas handled the story and FX and handed off the directing to someone else
anyways, a completely insecure computer is very safe if you create your networks and use proceedures that protect the equipment and networks.
I'm sure your company has strict procedures in place to protect against this sort of thing. However, I do feel the need to point out that, statstically, most security-related incidents are caused by insiders.
A couple of years back when I was still working as an admin I was hired by a company and on my first week there was a security incident. Upon investigation it turned out it was an ex-admin who had installed trojans on many of the servers that he had root access to while he was working there.
That thing looks very cool and I was almost ready to order one ... till I found they were going for $595 CAD !
There's no way I would ever pay over $100 - $150 for a keyboard. No matter how ergonmic and sanitary it is. My current keyboard was like $20.
Anyone know of a cheaper solution ?
There are a few incorporated pornography companies that I'm sure would come up for many productive uses of .sux :)
Yup, I'm currently boycotting movie theaters because of this.
:(
I remember in the late 80's or early 90's it was either the first or second 'new' Batman movie with Michael Keaton. They had an advertisement for Coke at the beginning. It was even themed for the movie and people were OUTRAGED. For the next 10 years or so there were no more attempts that I remember to do non-movie commercials before movies.
Man how times have changed.. and fast.
But, unfortunately, I don't think our wallets are very loud in these cases. Movie theaters, television, music etc. is all teenager domain.. and I don't see teenagers boycotting any form of entertainment any time soon. Even advertisements are 'cool' for teenagers these days. As long as teenagers are buying up movie tickets and chugging down ad after ad without complaining then it's here to stay
Games.
.. and they also have a bunch of flash games that run on the Internet. Going either route (Mac/Linux or No Internet) means sacrificing one of the two.
My wife wants to get a second computer for the living area (as I use our current computer mostly all the time for business etc.) and I'm trying to convince her to either get a Mac, Linux or if she *must* have Windows to keep it off the Internet.
She won't budge mainly because of games. Our kids have a bunch of little kid games that only run on Windows
So it's not just as cut and dry as switching to Mac and forget your problems. There's always going to be some kind of sacrifice.
Also, in the case of ST TNG, each episode is on it's own DVD packed with behind the scenes shit and extras.
.. I wish they'd come out with a stripped down version for $50 with just the episodes on 1 or 2 disks. But the whole package that they're offering is defintely worth it.
It's almost worth the $150 (canadian) just for that.
Not that I can afford it
Drug lords ?
.. in those cases they *claim* it's like $20,000 worth but do the math .. then you know it's overly exagerated and probably just kid and his girlfriend with a nickel bag.
Are we talking about marijuana or heroin ? lol
The 'drug lords' in my city are 20 year-old college kids growing in their basements and selling to their friends to earn a few extra bucks. Every so often (living on a border town) we hear of a smuggling bust going from Canada to the US or vice versa
I already posted something similar above and hate to repost, but it's relevant here so I'll summarize.
.. your card will be useless.
Enough chargebacks against the merchant will also get your credit card blacklisted at that merchant.
Don't chargeback unless you have a damned good reason to (credit card stolen). If you chargeback often it doesn't matter what your credit record is like
Merchants incurr a penalty fee for each chargeback (with Visa it's 1%). So they can't afford to risk that you may chargeback a second time.
The problem with disputing charges is that will also hurt you.
.. only more. Because when someone does a "chargeback" (the word used to refer to disputing a charge) the merchant has to pay a fee. So they lose money.
.. because you will find your credit card being declined more and more as you dispute charges.
Most stores don't do credit card processing themselves, they rely on 3rd party merchant accounts. These merchant accounts want to illiminate fraudulent purchases just as much as credit card companies
The credit card companies do this so that merchants will be forced to do more to prevent fraudulent purchases. Makes sense, only it has a side effect. Since merchants incurr penalty charges they actually blacklist people who dispute charges.
Now of course, if someone actually does steal your credit card and makes purchases that you shouldn't have to pay then by all means chargeback. However, just know that you must not take such decisions lightly
It's ultimately up to you how you chose to see how fairly the models are compensated. However, you need to understand that the system doesn't work any differently whether you're doing porn sites or shooting for magazines.
The models don't have anything to do with the site's day to day operations. They performed a one-time service for the site and thus were paid for their services. They are not employees. They are not under contract. Many models do shoots through agencies and are featured on many different sites.
I get bothered when a model is treated poorly. If she's descriminated against etc. But as long as both parties signed a model release contract and delivered what was agreed upon, I don't see why the model would be entitled to any of the site's ongoing profits.
The only case where a model generally gets paid on an ongoing basis is on single girls sites where the site features one model only. Many times the model will be under a contract to perform exclusively for that site. She will either get a fixed rate for each month that she delivers the required content and services (chats, e-mails etc.) or occasionally she'll get a percentage of the site's net.
It's not just advertising .. it is literally handing them cash.
.. a surfer who doesn't click isn't interested in buying anything).
For-profit sites, particularly paysites, operate by converting traffic into money. Traffic is a liquid asset on the Internet. It is bought, sold and traded in bulk. The quality, or value, of the traffic is based on how productive the traffic is (ie: how much the surfers click around once they arrive on the site
Each site has it's own conversion ratio with it's general traffic. For example, 1 out of every 700 surfers that hit the site might buy a membership. When a surfer buys a membership it's calleda 'conversion'. The traffic has just been converted into money.
So if suicidegirls gets slashdotted by over a million surfers and their conversion ratio is 1:700 (just pulling both those numbers out of my ass obviously) then they just got 1 million / 700 sign-ups. They are probably sending Slashdot and Nintendo gift baskets and thank-you letters as we post. Their profits most undoubtedly went through the roof this month.
The things I would do to have one of my sites slashdotted. The profits would far outweigh the bandwidth overages.
you can't really fight against such threats any other way than making it national news that someone is extorting you that way...
.. and now I'm inclined to believe that it's "just guilty because the public wants it to be that way".
.. your life is over. And it doesn't matter what you say to defend yourself because you're a monster and a liar in the public's eye.
Scary thing about such threats is that even that doesn't work. I wonder how many people out there will never go see another "The Who" show as long as they live because of the Pete Townshend incident.
First it was "innocent until proven guilty", then it was "guilty until proven innocent"
If someone accuses you of being a pedofile it doesn't matter if you're guilty or not
I didn't own a PS2 when GTAIII came out and I never played it for the PC. I played VC for the first time well after the PC version was out, but on the PS2 when I was watching my little brother for the summer.
.. VC had everything that made GTAIII cool .. but VC added a lot more than just vehicles IMO.
.. even though VC is probably my all time favourite game (until now).
I fell in love with VC and when my brother took his PS2 away I went out and got the PC version. I beat it like 10 times and then decided to go get GTAIII.
I played GTAIII through once, but really didn't like it anywhere near VC. I could understand the appeal
The story line was way better, you could relate to Tommy Vercetti a lot more than the character from GTAIII (what was his name anyway?). The radio stations in VC created a far more immersive atmosphere and having recognizable songs from the era it was based in helped tremendously to add to the game's appeal. It also had a lot of comic relief that made the story line more interesting and there were other features like being able to buy property that I really missed going to GTAIII.
I just purchased a PS2 almost specifically for San Andreas (there were other less-selfish reaons - my wife and kids wanted one for xmas) and it looks like going from SA to VC is going to be just as hard as going from VC to GTAIII
Doom 3 - remake of a classic. Typical ID pushing of graphics but not much in terms of game play.
.. will probably push the envelope but they can afford to because of Halo's success.
.. which, by itself, is slightly ambiguous. Had you read my elaboration carefully you would have understood that I was refererring to new games that push the envelope.
.. which is why so much emphasis is put on them. It's why contracts are written to guarantee a game will be developed exclusively for one console for a set period of time after its release.
.. those console sales will diminish.
Halo 2 - next version of Halo
GTA VC/SA - both new versions of GTA III
Half Life 2 - new version of HL
You misinterpreted my original post. I did use the words 'threatens the gaming industry'
Console sales are a constant
But when kids get bored because each new game is exactly the same as the last
It's unrealistic to take a risk involing a couple mil and do something completely new when it's harder and harder to see returns on your investment.
It's not like you can make a $50 prototype of a video game and get a group of kids together to do study group before investing full throttle like you can with a physical toy.
I want to extend on that...
.. because there's hidden benefits to the artist of sharing music (I'm a musician so I can make that statement confidently). But the gaming industry is fragile. It's like a mini hollywood, only it's value hasn't quite been realized yet.
.. but I'll probably wait for the PC version since I don't own nor care much for the PS2.
.. and most slashdotters know this I think .. it does take millions of dollars to produce a game like San Andreas. GTA III was the first commercially successful game to throw you into a complete 3D world .. why were they first ? We've had the technology for a few years .. why did it take Rockstar until the late 90's to produce one ? Because it's too fucking expensive and the returns aren't guaranteed.
.. then they better stop biting the hand that feeds them. ... because pretty soon the investors won't be there to throw their money into future development.
The fact that all these kids copy games makes me really pissed. I don't mind much when it's music
Kids love video games. I'm an adult and I still love video games. I'm looking forward to San Andreas
The thing is
Game theft threatens the gaming industry more than any kind other kind of 'piracy' (god I hate that word). If kids want to be able to play new games in the future that really push the envelope, and aren't just cheesy knock-offs of the games that were successful 5 years ago