I never really understood how something that had legitimate uses that were not illegal could be classified as breaking any laws. Something that requires users to actually voluntarily start using it to, for example, warez nintendo games rather than play PD shoot em ups seems to put the crime squarly on the shoulders of the user than the makers of the tool.
Hell, I could beat up old people with VHS copies of TV's Blossom, but I would never advocate banning Blossom... well, I *would*, but for taste reasons more than anything. Damn that annoying Six!
Ahhh, Amiga Power. Now there was a fantastic magazine. None of the DEVIOUSNESS and DEVILRY that are to be found in most PUBLICATIONS. Just plenty of words emphasised in CAPITALS and a general lack of knowledge, interest or concern for the computer market around them.
And lets not forget that this fine body of men brought us Gravity Power - OFFICIALLY, The Finest Game Ever.
To be honest, I just take this kind of thing as read. Here in the UK it seems to be par for the course that certain unscrupulous magazines will review unfinished code (favourably in most cases) and in some instances, you get the impression that the reviewer hasn't even seen the game. The cynic within suspects that deals for advertising may have been done...
One incident that sticks in my mind is the CUAmiga review of Elite: Frontier, which scored very highly, yet there was no mention whatsoever of the showstopping bugs that ruined the game. Having said that, CUAmiga was usually one of the more trustworthy magazines.
Oh, then I guess you wouldn't want this free one then, oh well, I guess I'll just throw it out...
Ridiculous little monkey. If the holiday is given to me then the analogy is utterly flawed. A better one would be that I am not prepared to pay to go to Aruba with my friends, but I will stow them away in the plane, smuggle them through customs and secretly accomodate them in the broom cupboard of the hotel.
There are lots of things that I want but that I don't need enough to bother buying (certainly at the price they try to charge.)
They can charge what the hell they like. Regardless of what a lot of the automatons around here think, business is not duty bound to provide you with what you want at the price you want it.
such as I might find the behaviour of the publisher or artist unethical, so I would not give them money whether I could have the music free or not
So you steal to punish the wrong-doers of the world. How very noble of you.
Star War Galaxies will be an interesting test of the viability of MMPORGs in the mass market I believe. At the moment, we're seeing a potential deluge of games being sold to a limited audience - and the majority of the games are suffering. Games that require such a wholehearted commitment are petulant bitches who will suffer no rival for their time, so having two or three of the things on the go at once is simply not an option.
What seems to be happening is that the next big thing will come out (DAOC) and people will tentatively set foot outside the last big thing (EQ) before realising that abandoning their year's investment is simply not an option and returning to their (perhaps inferior) previous game. DAOC is going through this at the moment - when I was playing a few months ago, there would be a regular 1000+ players at anyone time... last night when I looked, it was more like 300-400.
Publishers are having to try new ways of distributing to get the attention of gamers. Recently, several MMPORGs have gone to the free download or magazine giveaway model (WWIIOnline, Darkspace, Jumpgate, EQ) in an effort to snare punters commitment free. Only time will tell if this works.
Star Wars Galaxies on the other hand represents something of a new beast - a can't-succeed business model, with a can't-lose license. I'm interested to see how it will fair.
I sat down the other day and thought about the internet and its part in my life and I realised, maybe for the first time, how utterly indispensible its become. I mean, its the first invention or "fad" in my lifetime that has generated interest and worked its way into my life in such a way that I would genuinely have difficulty if it was taken away. Nothing else has done this: not sega game consoles, or compact disks, or satellite tv or whatever.
Its in everypart of my life: I communicate with it, I play on it, I shop on it, I learn from it, I work with it.
It is uniquely useful - you can learn entire programming languages, and probably spoken languages, from deja. The other day I found a page which listed streaming russian tv stations for my homesick wife. Almost any piece of information you can think of is a google search away. And you can even publish your own brand of idiocy for (potentially) every person on the planet to read!! Good god. The idea of life without the internet frightens me...
I based my complete lack of effort at school on a firm believe that by the year 2000, when I was of a working age, it was a sure-fire certainty that all the menial tasks would be performed by a slave race of sentient robots. This would leave us free to persue a hedonistic lifestyle of art, poetry and free love!
I had been a little disappointed to find that 2000 arrived and this utopia was nowhere in sight... but now, I'm re-energised with hope! Where's my toga?? I'm off to hand in my resignation!
What gets me is the way broadband is sold (in the UK at least). Advertisements tend to focus on how broadband can be used for streaming music/video, about how you can download 10 times faster than a 56k modem. But now this scheme seems to be saying "okay, you can do all of this, but we'd really rather you didn't".
Its similar to the Freeserve fiasco here in the UK a few years ago. They launched a free call, subscription service which they called "Freeserve Unlimited". They marketed it as being permenant, free connection anytime of the day or night. Then six months later, when they discovered they couldn't meet their promises, started to cancel the accounts of those that used the service for more than xx% of the day. Without appeal.
Fair enough, if the lack of capacity is going to spoil it for the majority, but my problem is with how they market these services. Unlimited it certainly wasn't.
I always kind of assumed that broadband internet access would start off desirably out of the reach of most people, but gradually slide down the scale of availibility, dropping in cost until it was a mass market technology. But more and more I see providers of the service taking steps backward and either raising prices or limiting availibility, putting restrictions on what you can or can't do with it.
This is especially true here in the UK where free dial up internet access appeared, then promptly disappeared. Now a similar thing seems to be happening to broadband. Rather than becoming more accessible to the average man in the street, companies seem to be raising prices and limiting signups right, left and centre.
Not a lot to do with the article here though, just an observation. What exactly has caused this? Have companies overestimated network capacity? Or are they just incompetent? Will widescale, high bandwidth access ever become the norm, rather than the exception?
Ahhh... the Amiga. I have great fondness for this little beige pal, with whom I spent so many joyous times. Started off with a humble A1200 and gradually borged it into a tower case with 64Mb RAM, a Cybervision gfx card (which never worked properly) and a mighty 060 processor. See, my PC owning cretin, as I dazzle you with my "games machine's" ability to run Mame (bombjack only) at full speed, or decode MP3s in glorious mono!
I don't really see this as a great loss for gaming - like many people have commented already, Capcom have produced very little in the way of originality or creativity since SF2... the whole franchise is looking a little dated, lets be honest?
Personally, I would like to see a shake up in the arcades. Time to get rid of the "pound per play" concept and introduce a "pay per half hour" scheme. Similarly, introduce LAN based gaming.. repackage PCs with nice, arcadey controllers (trackballs) in a cabinet with a big monitor, network them together and have four or eight, or whatever, machines playing UT or Q3 or Halo or any number of other multiplayer games. I know LAN arenas like this exist already, but I would like to see them more mainstream, with less of a PC feel about them.
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I never really understood how something that had legitimate uses that were not illegal could be classified as breaking any laws. Something that requires users to actually voluntarily start using it to, for example, warez nintendo games rather than play PD shoot em ups seems to put the crime squarly on the shoulders of the user than the makers of the tool.
Hell, I could beat up old people with VHS copies of TV's Blossom, but I would never advocate banning Blossom... well, I *would*, but for taste reasons more than anything. Damn that annoying Six!
Ahhh, Amiga Power. Now there was a fantastic magazine. None of the DEVIOUSNESS and DEVILRY that are to be found in most PUBLICATIONS. Just plenty of words emphasised in CAPITALS and a general lack of knowledge, interest or concern for the computer market around them.
And lets not forget that this fine body of men brought us Gravity Power - OFFICIALLY, The Finest Game Ever.
Such memories..
To be honest, I just take this kind of thing as read. Here in the UK it seems to be par for the course that certain unscrupulous magazines will review unfinished code (favourably in most cases) and in some instances, you get the impression that the reviewer hasn't even seen the game. The cynic within suspects that deals for advertising may have been done...
One incident that sticks in my mind is the CUAmiga review of Elite: Frontier, which scored very highly, yet there was no mention whatsoever of the showstopping bugs that ruined the game. Having said that, CUAmiga was usually one of the more trustworthy magazines.
Oh, then I guess you wouldn't want this free one then, oh well, I guess I'll just throw it out...
Ridiculous little monkey. If the holiday is given to me then the analogy is utterly flawed. A better one would be that I am not prepared to pay to go to Aruba with my friends, but I will stow them away in the plane, smuggle them through customs and secretly accomodate them in the broom cupboard of the hotel.
Which I wouldn't.
There are lots of things that I want but that I don't need enough to bother buying (certainly at the price they try to charge.)
They can charge what the hell they like. Regardless of what a lot of the automatons around here think, business is not duty bound to provide you with what you want at the price you want it.
such as I might find the behaviour of the publisher or artist unethical, so I would not give them money whether I could have the music free or not
So you steal to punish the wrong-doers of the world. How very noble of you.
If I wasn't going to buy the music anyway, then no one loses anything by me having a copy.
If you weren't going to buy a copy, why would you *want* a copy?
Seems to me you can justify your theft by simply saying that you weren't going to buy it anyway, so its fine and noone loses out.
Star War Galaxies will be an interesting test of the viability of MMPORGs in the mass market I believe. At the moment, we're seeing a potential deluge of games being sold to a limited audience - and the majority of the games are suffering. Games that require such a wholehearted commitment are petulant bitches who will suffer no rival for their time, so having two or three of the things on the go at once is simply not an option.
What seems to be happening is that the next big thing will come out (DAOC) and people will tentatively set foot outside the last big thing (EQ) before realising that abandoning their year's investment is simply not an option and returning to their (perhaps inferior) previous game. DAOC is going through this at the moment - when I was playing a few months ago, there would be a regular 1000+ players at anyone time... last night when I looked, it was more like 300-400.
Publishers are having to try new ways of distributing to get the attention of gamers. Recently, several MMPORGs have gone to the free download or magazine giveaway model (WWIIOnline, Darkspace, Jumpgate, EQ) in an effort to snare punters commitment free. Only time will tell if this works.
Star Wars Galaxies on the other hand represents something of a new beast - a can't-succeed business model, with a can't-lose license. I'm interested to see how it will fair.
I sat down the other day and thought about the internet and its part in my life and I realised, maybe for the first time, how utterly indispensible its become. I mean, its the first invention or "fad" in my lifetime that has generated interest and worked its way into my life in such a way that I would genuinely have difficulty if it was taken away. Nothing else has done this: not sega game consoles, or compact disks, or satellite tv or whatever.
Its in everypart of my life: I communicate with it, I play on it, I shop on it, I learn from it, I work with it.
It is uniquely useful - you can learn entire programming languages, and probably spoken languages, from deja. The other day I found a page which listed streaming russian tv stations for my homesick wife. Almost any piece of information you can think of is a google search away. And you can even publish your own brand of idiocy for (potentially) every person on the planet to read!! Good god. The idea of life without the internet frightens me...
Is there any wonder its becoming so popular.
I based my complete lack of effort at school on a firm believe that by the year 2000, when I was of a working age, it was a sure-fire certainty that all the menial tasks would be performed by a slave race of sentient robots. This would leave us free to persue a hedonistic lifestyle of art, poetry and free love!
I had been a little disappointed to find that 2000 arrived and this utopia was nowhere in sight... but now, I'm re-energised with hope! Where's my toga?? I'm off to hand in my resignation!
What gets me is the way broadband is sold (in the UK at least). Advertisements tend to focus on how broadband can be used for streaming music/video, about how you can download 10 times faster than a 56k modem. But now this scheme seems to be saying "okay, you can do all of this, but we'd really rather you didn't".
Its similar to the Freeserve fiasco here in the UK a few years ago. They launched a free call, subscription service which they called "Freeserve Unlimited". They marketed it as being permenant, free connection anytime of the day or night. Then six months later, when they discovered they couldn't meet their promises, started to cancel the accounts of those that used the service for more than xx% of the day. Without appeal.
Fair enough, if the lack of capacity is going to spoil it for the majority, but my problem is with how they market these services. Unlimited it certainly wasn't.
I always kind of assumed that broadband internet access would start off desirably out of the reach of most people, but gradually slide down the scale of availibility, dropping in cost until it was a mass market technology. But more and more I see providers of the service taking steps backward and either raising prices or limiting availibility, putting restrictions on what you can or can't do with it.
This is especially true here in the UK where free dial up internet access appeared, then promptly disappeared. Now a similar thing seems to be happening to broadband. Rather than becoming more accessible to the average man in the street, companies seem to be raising prices and limiting signups right, left and centre.
Not a lot to do with the article here though, just an observation. What exactly has caused this? Have companies overestimated network capacity? Or are they just incompetent? Will widescale, high bandwidth access ever become the norm, rather than the exception?
Ahhh... the Amiga. I have great fondness for this little beige pal, with whom I spent so many joyous times. Started off with a humble A1200 and gradually borged it into a tower case with 64Mb RAM, a Cybervision gfx card (which never worked properly) and a mighty 060 processor. See, my PC owning cretin, as I dazzle you with my "games machine's" ability to run Mame (bombjack only) at full speed, or decode MP3s in glorious mono!
Looking back, I was kind of odd as a young adult.
I don't really see this as a great loss for gaming - like many people have commented already, Capcom have produced very little in the way of originality or creativity since SF2... the whole franchise is looking a little dated, lets be honest?
Personally, I would like to see a shake up in the arcades. Time to get rid of the "pound per play" concept and introduce a "pay per half hour" scheme. Similarly, introduce LAN based gaming.. repackage PCs with nice, arcadey controllers (trackballs) in a cabinet with a big monitor, network them together and have four or eight, or whatever, machines playing UT or Q3 or Halo or any number of other multiplayer games. I know LAN arenas like this exist already, but I would like to see them more mainstream, with less of a PC feel about them.
Just a thought.