Sure, not having to swap discs is kinda nice, but not if its going to add $200-$300 bucks to the price of the console to cover the price of an HD-DVD drive. I'm just not that lazy.
Besides, this isn't exactly breaking new ground here. There were plenty of Playstation 1 games that came out on multiple CDs.
What they complain about being an 'invasion of privacy' other people would consider a feature. Look at XFire, that tells you what games you are playing. What about people who share their iPod playlists? Or people who share their bookmarks online?
Their one real point about the privacy setting not being set to 'nobody' by default might actually have been a good point of the article, had they bothered to do their own homework or RTFM in the first place. It's not like privacy settings aren't completely common in IM applications.
Instead we get a article full of rhetoric and completely off-base comparisons with sloppy research. It gives the assumption that they were more interested in being the first out there with a "hard-hitting" story, regardless of whether or not thats actually true.
This reminds me a lot of the failed DivX format that would 'phone home'.
The original Reuters article is pretty light on details though. What happens if you don't have an internet connction? And where will these players be supposedly 'reporting' to? Not to mention who is going to be paying for this whole infrastructure of 'player monitoring'? This is one step away from becoming a 'service' rather than just a piece of hardware.
The Blu-Ray folks should remember why DivX failed in the first place.
I love these congresspeople who say "We'll have more daylight, so we'll save energy".
Uh, no we won't. Rays from the sun will strike the earth each day for the same exact amount of time, whether we observe DST or not.
Here's an idea, why don't they pass a law to make daylight-savings time year round. Then pass another law that requires every single scheduled thing in the United States to be moved back an hour. Then everyone will have all the "extra daylight" they need.
Well put. As much as people seem to bash the idea of renting music, there is a huge market out there for rented items.
I've never heard someone bash Blockbuster for daring to go into the business of renting movies when you could buy a DVD and keep it forever. Or renting console games when you could own your own.
Even better, what about Netflix? I never hear of anyone bashing them for the grave injustice of mailing you 2 or 3 DVDs for a monthly fee, then expecting you to return them when you want more.
So lets see, Netflix charges $17.99 a month, for up to 3 DVDs at one time. And when you cancel, they do expect you to return whatever DVDs you have in your current possession.
This versus Napster, charging $15 a month, for up to however much music you can store on your computer. While also expecting you to "return your music" if you cancel.
So why is Netflix a fine and upstanding service, while Napster (at least reading the venomous comments left here) is the devil?
The point is, you don't subscribe to Netflix to increase your movie collection anymore than you would subscribe to Napster to increase your music collection. You subscribe to these things to experience what it is you want to experience for a lower price than ownership. Then if you like what you experienced enough, you go out and you buy it.
Obviously renting music isn't going to be for everyone, but bashing even the concept of it is pretty ludicrous.
The only real advantage with a store-bought game guide is that they are typically available as soon as the game is released. Usually you have a company that puts out the "official" game guide for a game, and the author of this guide has had plenty of time and access to the beta version of the game. So its great if you are one of those release-day buyers that lack patience.
One might argue that they look prettier and more professional than a FAQ but often the content itself is very lacking. A good example of this was the last game guide I bought which was for Master of Orion 3. On the surface it looked like it was going to be an extremely informative and helpful book for strategy. But when I actually took it home and started really digging into it, I found that it offered very little. I found it akin to having an 18' X 36' swimming pool that only ended up being 3 inches deep.
Plus, you have to take into account the fact that games get patched (well PC games anyway). A lot of times the patches can really change the dynamic of the game. You are not going to see version 2 of a game guide. On the other hand you will see version 12.55 of a FAQ.
I don't really get the whole portability argument either. If you are on a console you arent even tying up your computer anyway. If its a computer game, theres a decent chance you can either run it in a window or otherwise alt-tab out of the thing. Plus its not like you have to print out all 200 pages of the FAQ. A lot of times FAQs have a lot of info that is cool as a reference but not really required to "win the game" or otherwise get you unstuck.
As far as grammar and spelling, again I don't necessarily see the game guide winning out in every case. With a FAQ, if you make a grammatical mistake, its easy enough to correct. FAQ writers have all the time in the world to update and make corrections. Game guides on the other hand are going to be under some strict deadlines because publishers want that book out there the minute the game is available.
One thing that annoys me the most about game guides is the software stores nagging you to buy them. I think they know the deal and so they will offer incentives to make you buy it with the game, like say give you 20% off if you buy it when you buy the game.
I'm though buying game guides myself although I don't see them disappearing entirely either. I think the impulse buyers will be enough to keep them going although I think either you are going to see the prices go up or profits down.
Makes you wonder though if somebody would ever try selling a CD-only version of the game guide since it would save them a lot of manufacturing costs. Or for that matter bundling it with the game as a separate package. Its not like you don't see enough "super-secret special collectors edition complete with collectable toilet seat" versions of games out there.
I've been wanting to see something like this for a long time, honestly I'm suprised it has taken as long as it has. Stunts had some amazing gameplay, back in a day when successful games depended a lot more on gameplay than graphics. One major disappointment with a lot of the modern day racers is the lack of expandability. Take Need for Speed as an example. It's always had good graphics and gameplay. But they never provide any expansion packs, or ways to add more card or tracks. They are much more interested in just pumping out another sequel. I've seen where people have come up with their own tracks for it, but basically you have to hack up the game to do it, its certainly not a built-in feature of the game. So what this means is that typically you get about a dozen tracks or so, then you get a couple of variants for each track, usually by driving it in reverse, and thats it. By the time you end up beating the career mode, or whatever the main objective is, you are sick of driving the same tracks and promptly quit. This always struck me as such a stark contrast to a lot of the first person shooters out there that strive to make themselves as moddable as possible. You can even find driving games coming out of FPS engines. But unfortunately for racing games, you really don't see the same kind of innovation. Instead there seems to be more of a focus on putting out yearly updates like other sports titles where you rarely see any great gameplay improvements, but usually just a few graphical ones. Sadly, I guess that is the point. Software companies would much rather sell yearly sequels as opposed to making a moddable game that could provide years of playability like Half-Life.
I think CmdrTaco's side note actually brings up an interesting issue worth discussion. Is Sony's naming policy fair, or does it unjustly restrict one's freedom of expression? Take a look at the naming policy as posted in the FAQ on Sony's site. First off, I don't think most would really argue that having a profanity laced name would be considered inappropriate. However, their naming policy goes well beyond that. Verant's goal is to keep names within the genre of the game. To quote their opening sentence:
Character names in EverQuest should reflect the genre of the game. Original, high-fantasy names are desired. These guidelines apply both to first names and to surnames, and also to the combination of first name and surname. (For example, Luke and Skywalker are acceptable names, but Luke Skywalker is not.)
Should Verant be mercilessly bashed for wanting to keep the game in as much of a roleplaying spirit as they can by establishing their ability to change people's names (to, as was so succintly put, crappy D&D names)? And another issue is how well these rules are enforced. Clearly a number of GMs look the other way when it comes to names. Perhaps some of them do not agree with the naming policy and choose not to enforce it. But to the ones that do, does that automatically qualify them as "obnoxious"? After all, aren't they just doing their jobs, as stated by the rules? And finally, where do you draw the line when it comes to deciding which names are appropriate, and which ones are not? Obviously there is a lot of room for interpretation here.
Unfortunately, it IS Sony's problem, because people selling accounts choose to deceive those who buy them. It has become an all-too common occurrence for the "seller" to wait for a period of time after the sale, then call up Sony and give his original information, saying he forgot his password or whatever, and get the account password changed. Naturally, the buyer calls up Sony pissed when he can't login to his account anymore. The bottom line is, Sony shouldn't have to waste a bunch of their resources due to people trying to pull off scams.
Yeah, I definitely noticed the obvious slant of the article towards piracy. I guess C-Net doesn't think the article will be interesting enough on it's own merits, so why not throw in something a little more sensational. It isn't that C-Net is incorrect. No doubt those are things that people out there are going to use Wrapster for. But, they don't bother to acknowledge that there are legitimate uses for it as well. How many times has some new software release come out that you can't grab because the server is clogged? Wrapster would make a great and easy way to mirror files. If you think about it, there are a lot of sites that would hate to see this happen. Think about all the major download sites with all their advertising banners. (And isn't it interesting that C-Net owns download.com?) If something like Wrapster became really popular, it could redirect traffic away from these sites, and this would result in a loss of advertising revenue. Which I think begs another question. Where would you rather download files from? A handful of sites with a lot of bandwidth, bloat, and advertising, which may be clogged, or from a potentially much larger set of users with less bandwidth, but no advertising or bloat, and more likely to not be clogged at any particular time.
There's a good website that details this very method for several different operating systems. The nice part is that it already has a nice long list of various advertisement domains that you can cut and paste and not have to deal with again.
"I guesstimate that Columbia will save $7 Billion in postage by simply not snail mailing me any more crap. We'll see if I need procmail to pick up the slack."
You're right, Columbia House may not be wasting as much postage with snail mail anymore. But unfortunately for me, they have more than made up that annoyance by having their telemarketing staff bombard me with calls. Being a former Columbia House member, I guess that entitles me to a free annoying phone call every month from these people. It's funny to read their sniveling snail mail about how sorry they are for sending you selections of the month, and how they want you back and promise not to do that anymore. I don't know about the rest of you, but I find unsolicited phone calls much more annoying than snail mail.
I think it's funny the way the RIAA keeps sounding off about the evils of MP3, and how it's been the source of piracy, and so many other problems. But it isn't as if we haven't had WAV files for years now. The only difference is nobody wanted to waste 50 or 60 megs of space for one song. Eventually though, that really won't seem like such a big deal once higher speed internet connects become the rule rather than the exception, and 100G hard drives become commonplace. The point being, MP3 is just a file format, and the RIAA should see the bigger picture.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't leave this game off the wish-list of games to port.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E
Sure, not having to swap discs is kinda nice, but not if its going to add $200-$300 bucks to the price of the console to cover the price of an HD-DVD drive. I'm just not that lazy.
Besides, this isn't exactly breaking new ground here. There were plenty of Playstation 1 games that came out on multiple CDs.
What they complain about being an 'invasion of privacy' other people would consider a feature. Look at XFire, that tells you what games you are playing. What about people who share their iPod playlists? Or people who share their bookmarks online?
Their one real point about the privacy setting not being set to 'nobody' by default might actually have been a good point of the article, had they bothered to do their own homework or RTFM in the first place. It's not like privacy settings aren't completely common in IM applications.
Instead we get a article full of rhetoric and completely off-base comparisons with sloppy research. It gives the assumption that they were more interested in being the first out there with a "hard-hitting" story, regardless of whether or not thats actually true.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/04/13/193124 8
This reminds me a lot of the failed DivX format that would 'phone home'.
The original Reuters article is pretty light on details though. What happens if you don't have an internet connction? And where will these players be supposedly 'reporting' to? Not to mention who is going to be paying for this whole infrastructure of 'player monitoring'? This is one step away from becoming a 'service' rather than just a piece of hardware.
The Blu-Ray folks should remember why DivX failed in the first place.
I love these congresspeople who say "We'll have more daylight, so we'll save energy".
Uh, no we won't. Rays from the sun will strike the earth each day for the same exact amount of time, whether we observe DST or not.
Here's an idea, why don't they pass a law to make daylight-savings time year round. Then pass another law that requires every single scheduled thing in the United States to be moved back an hour. Then everyone will have all the "extra daylight" they need.
Well put. As much as people seem to bash the idea of renting music, there is a huge market out there for rented items.
I've never heard someone bash Blockbuster for daring to go into the business of renting movies when you could buy a DVD and keep it forever. Or renting console games when you could own your own.
Even better, what about Netflix? I never hear of anyone bashing them for the grave injustice of mailing you 2 or 3 DVDs for a monthly fee, then expecting you to return them when you want more.
So lets see, Netflix charges $17.99 a month, for up to 3 DVDs at one time. And when you cancel, they do expect you to return whatever DVDs you have in your current possession.
This versus Napster, charging $15 a month, for up to however much music you can store on your computer. While also expecting you to "return your music" if you cancel.
So why is Netflix a fine and upstanding service, while Napster (at least reading the venomous comments left here) is the devil?
The point is, you don't subscribe to Netflix to increase your movie collection anymore than you would subscribe to Napster to increase your music collection. You subscribe to these things to experience what it is you want to experience for a lower price than ownership. Then if you like what you experienced enough, you go out and you buy it.
Obviously renting music isn't going to be for everyone, but bashing even the concept of it is pretty ludicrous.
The only real advantage with a store-bought game guide is that they are typically available as soon as the game is released. Usually you have a company that puts out the "official" game guide for a game, and the author of this guide has had plenty of time and access to the beta version of the game. So its great if you are one of those release-day buyers that lack patience.
One might argue that they look prettier and more professional than a FAQ but often the content itself is very lacking. A good example of this was the last game guide I bought which was for Master of Orion 3. On the surface it looked like it was going to be an extremely informative and helpful book for strategy. But when I actually took it home and started really digging into it, I found that it offered very little. I found it akin to having an 18' X 36' swimming pool that only ended up being 3 inches deep.
Plus, you have to take into account the fact that games get patched (well PC games anyway). A lot of times the patches can really change the dynamic of the game. You are not going to see version 2 of a game guide. On the other hand you will see version 12.55 of a FAQ.
I don't really get the whole portability argument either. If you are on a console you arent even tying up your computer anyway. If its a computer game, theres a decent chance you can either run it in a window or otherwise alt-tab out of the thing. Plus its not like you have to print out all 200 pages of the FAQ. A lot of times FAQs have a lot of info that is cool as a reference but not really required to "win the game" or otherwise get you unstuck.
As far as grammar and spelling, again I don't necessarily see the game guide winning out in every case. With a FAQ, if you make a grammatical mistake, its easy enough to correct. FAQ writers have all the time in the world to update and make corrections. Game guides on the other hand are going to be under some strict deadlines because publishers want that book out there the minute the game is available.
One thing that annoys me the most about game guides is the software stores nagging you to buy them. I think they know the deal and so they will offer incentives to make you buy it with the game, like say give you 20% off if you buy it when you buy the game.
I'm though buying game guides myself although I don't see them disappearing entirely either. I think the impulse buyers will be enough to keep them going although I think either you are going to see the prices go up or profits down.
Makes you wonder though if somebody would ever try selling a CD-only version of the game guide since it would save them a lot of manufacturing costs. Or for that matter bundling it with the game as a separate package. Its not like you don't see enough "super-secret special collectors edition complete with collectable toilet seat" versions of games out there.
I've been wanting to see something like this for a long time, honestly I'm suprised it has taken as long as it has. Stunts had some amazing gameplay, back in a day when successful games depended a lot more on gameplay than graphics.
One major disappointment with a lot of the modern day racers is the lack of expandability. Take Need for Speed as an example. It's always had good graphics and gameplay. But they never provide any expansion packs, or ways to add more card or tracks. They are much more interested in just pumping out another sequel. I've seen where people have come up with their own tracks for it, but basically you have to hack up the game to do it, its certainly not a built-in feature of the game.
So what this means is that typically you get about a dozen tracks or so, then you get a couple of variants for each track, usually by driving it in reverse, and thats it. By the time you end up beating the career mode, or whatever the main objective is, you are sick of driving the same tracks and promptly quit.
This always struck me as such a stark contrast to a lot of the first person shooters out there that strive to make themselves as moddable as possible. You can even find driving games coming out of FPS engines.
But unfortunately for racing games, you really don't see the same kind of innovation. Instead there seems to be more of a focus on putting out yearly updates like other sports titles where you rarely see any great gameplay improvements, but usually just a few graphical ones.
Sadly, I guess that is the point. Software companies would much rather sell yearly sequels as opposed to making a moddable game that could provide years of playability like Half-Life.
I think CmdrTaco's side note actually brings up an interesting issue worth discussion. Is Sony's naming policy fair, or does it unjustly restrict one's freedom of expression?
Take a look at the naming policy as posted in the FAQ on Sony's site.
First off, I don't think most would really argue that having a profanity laced name would be considered inappropriate. However, their naming policy goes well beyond that.
Verant's goal is to keep names within the genre of the game. To quote their opening sentence:
Character names in EverQuest should reflect the genre of the game. Original, high-fantasy names are desired. These guidelines apply both to first names and to surnames, and also to the combination of first name and surname. (For example, Luke and Skywalker are acceptable names, but Luke Skywalker is not.)
Should Verant be mercilessly bashed for wanting to keep the game in as much of a roleplaying spirit as they can by establishing their ability to change people's names (to, as was so succintly put, crappy D&D names)?
And another issue is how well these rules are enforced. Clearly a number of GMs look the other way when it comes to names. Perhaps some of them do not agree with the naming policy and choose not to enforce it. But to the ones that do, does that automatically qualify them as "obnoxious"? After all, aren't they just doing their jobs, as stated by the rules?
And finally, where do you draw the line when it comes to deciding which names are appropriate, and which ones are not? Obviously there is a lot of room for interpretation here.
Unfortunately, it IS Sony's problem, because people selling accounts choose to deceive those who buy them. It has become an all-too common occurrence for the "seller" to wait for a period of time after the sale, then call up Sony and give his original information, saying he forgot his password or whatever, and get the account password changed. Naturally, the buyer calls up Sony pissed when he can't login to his account anymore. The bottom line is, Sony shouldn't have to waste a bunch of their resources due to people trying to pull off scams.
Yeah, I definitely noticed the obvious slant of the article towards piracy. I guess C-Net doesn't think the article will be interesting enough on it's own merits, so why not throw in something a little more sensational.
It isn't that C-Net is incorrect. No doubt those are things that people out there are going to use Wrapster for. But, they don't bother to acknowledge that there are legitimate uses for it as well. How many times has some new software release come out that you can't grab because the server is clogged? Wrapster would make a great and easy way to mirror files.
If you think about it, there are a lot of sites that would hate to see this happen. Think about all the major download sites with all their advertising banners. (And isn't it interesting that C-Net owns download.com?) If something like Wrapster became really popular, it could redirect traffic away from these sites, and this would result in a loss of advertising revenue.
Which I think begs another question. Where would you rather download files from? A handful of sites with a lot of bandwidth, bloat, and advertising, which may be clogged, or from a potentially much larger set of users with less bandwidth, but no advertising or bloat, and more likely to not be clogged at any particular time.
There's a good website that details this very method for several different operating systems. The nice part is that it already has a nice long list of various advertisement domains that you can cut and paste and not have to deal with again.
Web Ad Blocking Under Linux/Unix, BeOS, MacOS, and Windows
"I guesstimate that Columbia will save $7 Billion in postage by simply not snail mailing me any more crap. We'll see if I need procmail to pick up the slack."
You're right, Columbia House may not be wasting as much postage with snail mail anymore. But unfortunately for me, they have more than made up that annoyance by having their telemarketing staff bombard me with calls. Being a former Columbia House member, I guess that entitles me to a free annoying phone call every month from these people.
It's funny to read their sniveling snail mail about how sorry they are for sending you selections of the month, and how they want you back and promise not to do that anymore.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I find unsolicited phone calls much more annoying than snail mail.
I think it's funny the way the RIAA keeps sounding off about the evils of MP3, and how it's been the source of piracy, and so many other problems. But it isn't as if we haven't had WAV files for years now. The only difference is nobody wanted to waste 50 or 60 megs of space for one song. Eventually though, that really won't seem like such a big deal once higher speed internet connects become the rule rather than the exception, and 100G hard drives become commonplace. The point being, MP3 is just a file format, and the RIAA should see the bigger picture.