So the question would be, who is it that decides what is enough for a new release? Certainly not consumers. Some changes may also not be blatantly apparent to the user. When working with 500k to 1 million lines of code, seemingly simple changes can take a while to perfect.
My point here is that consumers won't be fooled by this forever. (Though some of the people I know who buy sports games, well, let's just say they are not the most discriminating customers.)
Agreed that the CEO determines the direction of the company, but at a very high level. I would be very surprised if a CEO of a mid-large corporation has much knowledge of the inner workings.
That's irrelevant, indeed it can make the problem worse. For it's those guys who make the ultimate decisions as to which trends to follow, or more likely, beat into the ground.
True, games probably will go up to $60. New things are apparently a great way to justify raising prices for just about any product.
Now that's just laughable in this case. Paying $50 for the same game with updated rosters and minor new features each year isn't enough now, now the typical yearly upgrade will cost $60.
imo, the core (meaning mission critical) of a game company would be its heart (dev and artists). Without them, the head would have nothing. No point in being a CEO if you don't have employees who make your products.
And yet, the CEO is what directs all the others, the CEO has control of the direction of the company (along witht the board of directors). And EA's developers are well-known for being over-worked and underpaid.
Not that this justifies the process, but most products go through small or miniscule upgrades before being re-released.
But they are not then advertised as entirely new products, the minor updates and bug-fixes are usually not selling points, and game software doesn't wear out like material products. Most people would not pay full price all over again for that kind of excessively minor update, not if they weren't under some sort of duress.
Lawsuits or some kind of lash back will just make this worse.
But lawsuits are the specific remedy our society provides for the redress of grievances. It's not like, if you have a personal beef, you can lobby Congress to pass a law just for you. (Unless you're the Schivao family, that is.)
Here's a thought...everyone is probably more tired of reading the same EA flame postings than you think players are of buying sports games each year. At least the players game 1 new feature.
But you pay 50 bucks, soon probably 60, for that one new feature, while anti-EA postings are gratis, with our compliments.
At the core of the company are the workers, true, but at the core of a human being are intestines. The core matters less than the thing that directs it, the head, and EA's head is what's rotten, and what gives us interminable updates of sports games year after year.
Also, I'm unsure why you bring up "at will employment." All I've ever seen the term used is by is employers holding it over the heads of employees like a guillotine -- do what we say, whatever that may be, or it's curtains for you, mate, and instantly.
The highly ironic thing is in EA, the epitomy of everything that is wrong in gaming, owning Maxis, who are creating something that appears to be the epitomy of everything that is right in gaming (see the story and especially the video on Spore).
But they're also the guys who made Maxis produce *eight* expansions for The Sims, instead of spending that time working on making things like Spore.
This might come as a shock to you, but EA is a pretty fucking huge game production machine, and does dominate gaming in much the same way Microsoft dominates the home PC operating system market.
Actually, it comes as a pretty big surprise to me.
I haven't bought an EA game since SimCity 3000, and before that it was the Genesis days. EA is big, but it's not *that* big, it's certainly not a Microsoft level behemoth, for the plain fact that there are substantial other studios that still substantial other products -- and many of them.
Further, in a way it's apples and oranges, comparing Microsoft to EA. Microsoft is the top OS manufacturer, but that wouldn't matter so much if they weren't the top office suite manufacturer. EA *just* makes games, so they don't have that same kind of synergy, and they are unable to lock-out other game developers from making whatever they want.
These kinds of anti-competitive measures are what make Microsoft's foothold so difficult to topple, things like purposeful incompatibility with other software, playing games with file formats, embrace and extend, etc. EA may be really big, but they don't have anything like that to secure their own position.
Big-O's giant robot battles had a sense of weight and realism to them. Imagine an on-screen Roger Smith pulling back that lever, and watching that giant pneumatic hammer arm rearing back....
The incongruous giant robot sections of the N64 Goemon games are the closest thing to the idea that's in my own personal gaming experience: a robot's cockpit view of the action, laggy, weighty controls, and a wide variety of attacks for different situations. I really think it'd work absurdly well, though I'd imagine that the chances of a Big-O licensed game are next to none by now.
So, instead of pretending to be a pirate or a jungle explorer, we get to pretend to be a theme park guest pretending to be a pirate or a jungle explorer?
Is the community around X-Plane ruthlessly competitive with each other? I think what the parent poster was saying was that top players were afraid of anything that worked against their own personal playing style, since there are hundreds of other players to compete against and even slight changes could upset their own precarious hold on the leader board.
Come to think of it... I've never heard of X-Plane. Is it any good?
1. Someone said that Nintendo makes a profit on their consoles. I don't think this is always the case, I'm not sure the N64 or Gamecube were like that when released. They probably cost Nintendo less than the PS2 or X-box hardware upon release, however. By now, with the advancement of technology and economies of scale fully in force, and with game systems not dropping in price as rapidly as they usually do by this time in a hardware generation, it's possible that all three manufacturers are making profits from console sales (though Microsoft might be making less than the others, since the X-box already benefitted from tremendous economies of scale by using stock personal computer parts).
2. Even if Nintendo is making profit from the sale of consoles, it would still pale before the royalties from licensing for games. That requires a lockout system in order to force people to buy licenses. If homebrew code were possible, then whatever hole allows users to run that code could also, very likely, be utilized by game developers. Of course, piracy is also a problem, but this is the real issue console manufacturers have to worry about -- piracy will never become a mainstream alternative to buying the games in stores, but if the general lockout fails to the extent that anyone can make games for the system, then the manufacturer's business model breaks down completely.
This is the price we pay for ultra-cheap game consoles, most of which are sold for way below the cost of manufacturing. There's no way in hell a PSP costs less than $250 to make, so Sony has to sell many games to make up for the cost to produce. It's a bit of a gamble, as Sony themselves discovered with the early days of the PS2 in Japan, when many people bought them to use as DVD players and not for playing games. Sony only gets money from DVD sales if those DVDs are made by Sony.
In the long run, these kinds of economic systems tend to break down. It's unlikely that console manufacturers will be able to get away with selling their hardware this cheap indefinitely. Eventually, a combination of manufacturer insight and economic circumstance will intersect, a system with true, official homebrew capability will be made, and if it takes off really well, just once, it'll be almost impossible to put the genie back into its bottle. The effects of this: software licensing will practically vanish, cross-compatibility between competing systems might begin to appear, and the resulting consoles will probably look a lot more like home computers than before....
Wow. Go, Nintendogs! It must be something really special -- I nearly died when I saw Famitsu gave it a perfect score.
A perfect score! They've only awarded that like four times before in their history, and two of those were Zeldas. I can't even imagine how a virtual dog game could be that good, but evidently this one is. Some bright young designer at Nintendo is eating his kibble from a jeweled bowl tonight, surely.
Then they take something completely off the wall, like Pikmin, and somehow manage to get people addicted to it.
This isn't really for or against your arguments, but it's something that I just felt like saying....
In my experience, the things that are completely off the wall are most likely to foster addiction. That's why I've played so damn much Tetris in my life. That's why I've completely beaten each level in Katamari Damacy with good scores and yet still play it even at the slightest excuse. And that's why I kept playing Pikmin until I was able to beat it in just nine game days.
On the other hand, while I like Metroid Prime 2, it just hasn't fostered that same kind of obsession. It's just too similar to the FPS games that have annoyed me completely out of that genre -- and to the original Metroid Prime, by the way.
Nobody will initially buy based on such a flimsy feature though.
I would, thus, you are disproven. Of course, I also bought the NES Classics version of Castlevania -- and consider it worth it, so maybe I'm atypical.
However, those antique games mostly have gameplay ten times better than any released today. Super Mario Bros. 3 had around 90 levels, and yet they each, somehow, manage to provide sufficently different gameplay that playing through them all was a joy, instead of a chore. There's no way in hell I'd play through 90 levels of anything else, except perhaps Katamari Damacy.
The biggest problem with Nintendo's idea, however, is that many of these games have already seen recent rereleases for the GBA.
The independent developers thing is the most interesting thing I've heard about any of the consoles in this generation. (I wonder if it weren't a direct response to Greg Costikiyan's comments about Iwata's speech at GDC....)
Shame it'll probably not be homebrew-level development, but more along the lines of the requirements to join the development programs already in place (and viewable at warioworld.com.
Yeah, this is the price that Microsoft pays for releasing their system a year before the other players.
Personally, however, these numbers are almost meaningless for me - and despite being a liberal arts major, I *do* know what they mean. Most gamers will simply not know *or* care about these numbers. This was true this generation, but it'll be especially true this generation, with game systems starting to tip the balance in the direction of being overpowered.
We won't be able to tell at all what this generation is going to be link until we see actual games. No scratch that -- until we see a good number of actual games. No number of applications of modifiers like "stunning" or "awesome" or "mindblowing" will change this: how many "awesomes" is each 50 GFlops worth? At least in the 16-bit days, words like "background scaling" meant something, and even then we had Sega trying to define the Genesis' higher clock speed as "blast processing."
I got all hyped up over the sequel game, and yet despite the inclusion of Link in the GC version, I didn't think it measured up to the Dreamcast Soulcalibur. It just didn't have enough extra there except for the extra weapons. We played the DC game for months and months (and we don't even *like* fighting games), but SCII got lots less attention from us.
I think you might be on to something there. While Nintendo may be trying to branch out more into the adult market, they're trying to do it without jeopardizing the kid market, which for online play pretty much demands restricting players in some way.
I got a survey from Nintendo a couple of days ago (what can I say, I register my games) asking for opinions on online play in a wide variety of Nintendo's franchises (among them: Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, Animal Crossing), and one of the options for each one was if I wanted to play just with friends met in RL, just with online friends, or with anyone.
(For the record: I answered "with anyone" for everything except Mario Party....)
What are you talking about? "Constantly" here means, basically, "The N64." Revolution hasn't even been pushed back, this is our first hint as to its release date.
You may be smelling delay, but wait until the delay actually comes before complaining. Then I'll probably chime in, heh.
Empty promises? Game companies acting like rampaging lucre-beasts? Selling access to fairly gimmicky and short-lived bit-content, like "tricked out vehicles" to make friends drool while they watch you play some racing game? (That's paraphrasing, fairly maliciously, a quote from some X-Box exec I read, excited about his new, precious revenue source.)
I don't think it'll last, and I'd accelerate the process if I could. If I had the money, I'd love to produce this commercial and see if I could get it inserted into network news broadcasts. I kind of doubt I could, for the same reason Adbusters has problems getting their own spots aired.
Gen Y Slacker Type #1: "Dude! Take a look at this new game! If I press this button, the guy does a backflip and slices through that monster like a buzzsaw!"
Gen Y Slacker Type #2: "That's nice, but-"
#1: "Oh, and when I win the game, it opens up an entirely new character who can play the game in, uh, a slightly different way!"
#2: "Interesting, except-"
#1: "Oh, and look at that other character, check out the polygons on her, huh? On that... fake girl, heh heh... heh..."
#2: "But why not-"
#1: "And I've collected everything I can collect, and I've found the secret double-plus-good ending, and I've max'd out everyone's stats, and I can play as the bad guy, and everything's unlocked... and I've... but... uh."
#2: "And you're now feeling kind of empty from the whole experience, right?"
#1: "Hm, now that you mention it, yeah."
#2: "Yeah. Here, take a look at this pamphlet. It should help to put the situation into better perspective." (Hands over a pamphlet entitled: "Why You're Feeling Empty: A short essay on the meaninglessness of arbitrary accomplishment.")
- LATER -
#1: "Wow, that handout you gave me was right on the money! I've thrown away my game systems and got started doing something useful!"
#2: "Just like I did a month ago. What are you doing?"
#1: "Writing Sonic the Hedgehog super hot triple-X hentai fanfiction!"
#2: "Just like I started doing a month ago. Hmm...."
This is why I think that the success of video games is short-lived. As companies are producing strings of games that are successively less unique and fun, playing through them feels more and more like work, work with a very insubstantial reward at the end.
Once a majority of players have made that connection, everything falls apart. Again.
Umm... Who was it that was upset about the whole "Earth is not the center of the Universe" thing? Tortured some guy till he recanted, and all that. Headed by some "pope" guy?
I'm not aware of Copernicus being tortured.
Yes, it's true that for a long time the Catholic church was the enemy of science (although it's not all so simple as that -- Gregor Mendel was a monk after all).
What I'm saying is that it's not necessarily true that religion is against science. It has been for some religions in the past, but Christianity is not a catch-all term for religious belief, and the Catholic church is a lot more friendly towards science, and a lot bigger, than these guys who call themselves "Bible literalists."
Some of those ideas may, in a sense, have been discovered before. (Though I agree with the later comments that Jesus' spin on them was wholly different, and in fact the point.)
But you also have to realize that it is highly unlikely that people in the intersection of Jesus's time and locality had even heard of Confucius or Buddha. Give him some credit for independent discovery, dude.
Slashdot Mirror
So the question would be, who is it that decides what is enough for a new release? Certainly not consumers. Some changes may also not be blatantly apparent to the user. When working with 500k to 1 million lines of code, seemingly simple changes can take a while to perfect.
My point here is that consumers won't be fooled by this forever. (Though some of the people I know who buy sports games, well, let's just say they are not the most discriminating customers.)
Agreed that the CEO determines the direction of the company, but at a very high level. I would be very surprised if a CEO of a mid-large corporation has much knowledge of the inner workings.
That's irrelevant, indeed it can make the problem worse. For it's those guys who make the ultimate decisions as to which trends to follow, or more likely, beat into the ground.
True, games probably will go up to $60. New things are apparently a great way to justify raising prices for just about any product.
Now that's just laughable in this case. Paying $50 for the same game with updated rosters and minor new features each year isn't enough now, now the typical yearly upgrade will cost $60.
imo, the core (meaning mission critical) of a game company would be its heart (dev and artists). Without them, the head would have nothing. No point in being a CEO if you don't have employees who make your products.
And yet, the CEO is what directs all the others, the CEO has control of the direction of the company (along witht the board of directors). And EA's developers are well-known for being over-worked and underpaid.
Not that this justifies the process, but most products go through small or miniscule upgrades before being re-released.
But they are not then advertised as entirely new products, the minor updates and bug-fixes are usually not selling points, and game software doesn't wear out like material products. Most people would not pay full price all over again for that kind of excessively minor update, not if they weren't under some sort of duress.
Lawsuits or some kind of lash back will just make this worse.
But lawsuits are the specific remedy our society provides for the redress of grievances. It's not like, if you have a personal beef, you can lobby Congress to pass a law just for you. (Unless you're the Schivao family, that is.)
Here's a thought...everyone is probably more tired of reading the same EA flame postings than you think players are of buying sports games each year. At least the players game 1 new feature.
But you pay 50 bucks, soon probably 60, for that one new feature, while anti-EA postings are gratis, with our compliments.
At the core of the company are the workers, true, but at the core of a human being are intestines. The core matters less than the thing that directs it, the head, and EA's head is what's rotten, and what gives us interminable updates of sports games year after year.
Also, I'm unsure why you bring up "at will employment." All I've ever seen the term used is by is employers holding it over the heads of employees like a guillotine -- do what we say, whatever that may be, or it's curtains for you, mate, and instantly.
The highly ironic thing is in EA, the epitomy of everything that is wrong in gaming, owning Maxis, who are creating something that appears to be the epitomy of everything that is right in gaming (see the story and especially the video on Spore).
But they're also the guys who made Maxis produce *eight* expansions for The Sims, instead of spending that time working on making things like Spore.
This might come as a shock to you, but EA is a pretty fucking huge game production machine, and does dominate gaming in much the same way Microsoft dominates the home PC operating system market.
Actually, it comes as a pretty big surprise to me.
I haven't bought an EA game since SimCity 3000, and before that it was the Genesis days. EA is big, but it's not *that* big, it's certainly not a Microsoft level behemoth, for the plain fact that there are substantial other studios that still substantial other products -- and many of them.
Further, in a way it's apples and oranges, comparing Microsoft to EA. Microsoft is the top OS manufacturer, but that wouldn't matter so much if they weren't the top office suite manufacturer. EA *just* makes games, so they don't have that same kind of synergy, and they are unable to lock-out other game developers from making whatever they want.
These kinds of anti-competitive measures are what make Microsoft's foothold so difficult to topple, things like purposeful incompatibility with other software, playing games with file formats, embrace and extend, etc. EA may be really big, but they don't have anything like that to secure their own position.
Hee hee...
Though I do think they explained some things with the last episodes -- Cartoon Network had an option for a third season after all.
Big-O's giant robot battles had a sense of weight and realism to them. Imagine an on-screen Roger Smith pulling back that lever, and watching that giant pneumatic hammer arm rearing back....
The incongruous giant robot sections of the N64 Goemon games are the closest thing to the idea that's in my own personal gaming experience: a robot's cockpit view of the action, laggy, weighty controls, and a wide variety of attacks for different situations. I really think it'd work absurdly well, though I'd imagine that the chances of a Big-O licensed game are next to none by now.
Amen. There's only so many Ultimate Star Wars games you can make.
Personally, I lost interest back when the first GC game was released -- I got it, but never picked up the second.
So, instead of pretending to be a pirate or a jungle explorer, we get to pretend to be a theme park guest pretending to be a pirate or a jungle explorer?
At least it's not a Universal Studios MMORPG....
Is the community around X-Plane ruthlessly competitive with each other? I think what the parent poster was saying was that top players were afraid of anything that worked against their own personal playing style, since there are hundreds of other players to compete against and even slight changes could upset their own precarious hold on the leader board.
Come to think of it... I've never heard of X-Plane. Is it any good?
1. Someone said that Nintendo makes a profit on their consoles. I don't think this is always the case, I'm not sure the N64 or Gamecube were like that when released. They probably cost Nintendo less than the PS2 or X-box hardware upon release, however. By now, with the advancement of technology and economies of scale fully in force, and with game systems not dropping in price as rapidly as they usually do by this time in a hardware generation, it's possible that all three manufacturers are making profits from console sales (though Microsoft might be making less than the others, since the X-box already benefitted from tremendous economies of scale by using stock personal computer parts).
2. Even if Nintendo is making profit from the sale of consoles, it would still pale before the royalties from licensing for games. That requires a lockout system in order to force people to buy licenses. If homebrew code were possible, then whatever hole allows users to run that code could also, very likely, be utilized by game developers. Of course, piracy is also a problem, but this is the real issue console manufacturers have to worry about -- piracy will never become a mainstream alternative to buying the games in stores, but if the general lockout fails to the extent that anyone can make games for the system, then the manufacturer's business model breaks down completely.
This is the price we pay for ultra-cheap game consoles, most of which are sold for way below the cost of manufacturing. There's no way in hell a PSP costs less than $250 to make, so Sony has to sell many games to make up for the cost to produce. It's a bit of a gamble, as Sony themselves discovered with the early days of the PS2 in Japan, when many people bought them to use as DVD players and not for playing games. Sony only gets money from DVD sales if those DVDs are made by Sony.
In the long run, these kinds of economic systems tend to break down. It's unlikely that console manufacturers will be able to get away with selling their hardware this cheap indefinitely. Eventually, a combination of manufacturer insight and economic circumstance will intersect, a system with true, official homebrew capability will be made, and if it takes off really well, just once, it'll be almost impossible to put the genie back into its bottle. The effects of this: software licensing will practically vanish, cross-compatibility between competing systems might begin to appear, and the resulting consoles will probably look a lot more like home computers than before....
Alas! I'm still one short. I didn't even get a different message from the King when I got 194!
If only that damn camera didn't keep moving back, argh.
Wow. Go, Nintendogs! It must be something really special -- I nearly died when I saw Famitsu gave it a perfect score.
A perfect score! They've only awarded that like four times before in their history, and two of those were Zeldas. I can't even imagine how a virtual dog game could be that good, but evidently this one is. Some bright young designer at Nintendo is eating his kibble from a jeweled bowl tonight, surely.
Then they take something completely off the wall, like Pikmin, and somehow manage to get people addicted to it.
This isn't really for or against your arguments, but it's something that I just felt like saying....
In my experience, the things that are completely off the wall are most likely to foster addiction. That's why I've played so damn much Tetris in my life. That's why I've completely beaten each level in Katamari Damacy with good scores and yet still play it even at the slightest excuse. And that's why I kept playing Pikmin until I was able to beat it in just nine game days.
On the other hand, while I like Metroid Prime 2, it just hasn't fostered that same kind of obsession. It's just too similar to the FPS games that have annoyed me completely out of that genre -- and to the original Metroid Prime, by the way.
That is very, very interesting news. Where did you get these sales figures? I just might have to look into this....
Thanks for posting it -- once this news breaks into popular consciousness, I think a lot of people will see the PSP differently....
Nobody will initially buy based on such a flimsy feature though.
I would, thus, you are disproven. Of course, I also bought the NES Classics version of Castlevania -- and consider it worth it, so maybe I'm atypical.
However, those antique games mostly have gameplay ten times better than any released today. Super Mario Bros. 3 had around 90 levels, and yet they each, somehow, manage to provide sufficently different gameplay that playing through them all was a joy, instead of a chore. There's no way in hell I'd play through 90 levels of anything else, except perhaps Katamari Damacy.
The biggest problem with Nintendo's idea, however, is that many of these games have already seen recent rereleases for the GBA.
The independent developers thing is the most interesting thing I've heard about any of the consoles in this generation. (I wonder if it weren't a direct response to Greg Costikiyan's comments about Iwata's speech at GDC....)
Shame it'll probably not be homebrew-level development, but more along the lines of the requirements to join the development programs already in place (and viewable at warioworld.com.
Yeah, this is the price that Microsoft pays for releasing their system a year before the other players.
Personally, however, these numbers are almost meaningless for me - and despite being a liberal arts major, I *do* know what they mean. Most gamers will simply not know *or* care about these numbers. This was true this generation, but it'll be especially true this generation, with game systems starting to tip the balance in the direction of being overpowered.
We won't be able to tell at all what this generation is going to be link until we see actual games. No scratch that -- until we see a good number of actual games. No number of applications of modifiers like "stunning" or "awesome" or "mindblowing" will change this: how many "awesomes" is each 50 GFlops worth? At least in the 16-bit days, words like "background scaling" meant something, and even then we had Sega trying to define the Genesis' higher clock speed as "blast processing."
I got all hyped up over the sequel game, and yet despite the inclusion of Link in the GC version, I didn't think it measured up to the Dreamcast Soulcalibur. It just didn't have enough extra there except for the extra weapons. We played the DC game for months and months (and we don't even *like* fighting games), but SCII got lots less attention from us.
I think you might be on to something there. While Nintendo may be trying to branch out more into the adult market, they're trying to do it without jeopardizing the kid market, which for online play pretty much demands restricting players in some way.
I got a survey from Nintendo a couple of days ago (what can I say, I register my games) asking for opinions on online play in a wide variety of Nintendo's franchises (among them: Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, Animal Crossing), and one of the options for each one was if I wanted to play just with friends met in RL, just with online friends, or with anyone.
(For the record: I answered "with anyone" for everything except Mario Party....)
What are you talking about? "Constantly" here means, basically, "The N64." Revolution hasn't even been pushed back, this is our first hint as to its release date.
You may be smelling delay, but wait until the delay actually comes before complaining. Then I'll probably chime in, heh.
Empty promises? Game companies acting like rampaging lucre-beasts? Selling access to fairly gimmicky and short-lived bit-content, like "tricked out vehicles" to make friends drool while they watch you play some racing game? (That's paraphrasing, fairly maliciously, a quote from some X-Box exec I read, excited about his new, precious revenue source.)
I don't think it'll last, and I'd accelerate the process if I could. If I had the money, I'd love to produce this commercial and see if I could get it inserted into network news broadcasts. I kind of doubt I could, for the same reason Adbusters has problems getting their own spots aired.
Gen Y Slacker Type #1: "Dude! Take a look at this new game! If I press this button, the guy does a backflip and slices through that monster like a buzzsaw!"
Gen Y Slacker Type #2: "That's nice, but-"
#1: "Oh, and when I win the game, it opens up an entirely new character who can play the game in, uh, a slightly different way!"
#2: "Interesting, except-"
#1: "Oh, and look at that other character, check out the polygons on her, huh? On that... fake girl, heh heh... heh..."
#2: "But why not-"
#1: "And I've collected everything I can collect, and I've found the secret double-plus-good ending, and I've max'd out everyone's stats, and I can play as the bad guy, and everything's unlocked... and I've... but... uh."
#2: "And you're now feeling kind of empty from the whole experience, right?"
#1: "Hm, now that you mention it, yeah."
#2: "Yeah. Here, take a look at this pamphlet. It should help to put the situation into better perspective."
(Hands over a pamphlet entitled: "Why You're Feeling Empty: A short essay on the meaninglessness of arbitrary accomplishment.")
- LATER -
#1: "Wow, that handout you gave me was right on the money! I've thrown away my game systems and got started doing something useful!"
#2: "Just like I did a month ago. What are you doing?"
#1: "Writing Sonic the Hedgehog super hot triple-X hentai fanfiction!"
#2: "Just like I started doing a month ago. Hmm...."
This is why I think that the success of video games is short-lived. As companies are producing strings of games that are successively less unique and fun, playing through them feels more and more like work, work with a very insubstantial reward at the end.
Once a majority of players have made that connection, everything falls apart. Again.
("And it's about time," sez Cranky Kong.)
But the Catholic Church today is against these things, which disproves the premise that religion == against them.
Umm... Who was it that was upset about the whole "Earth is not the center of the Universe" thing? Tortured some guy till he recanted, and all that. Headed by some "pope" guy?
I'm not aware of Copernicus being tortured.
Yes, it's true that for a long time the Catholic church was the enemy of science (although it's not all so simple as that -- Gregor Mendel was a monk after all).
What I'm saying is that it's not necessarily true that religion is against science. It has been for some religions in the past, but Christianity is not a catch-all term for religious belief, and the Catholic church is a lot more friendly towards science, and a lot bigger, than these guys who call themselves "Bible literalists."
Some of those ideas may, in a sense, have been discovered before. (Though I agree with the later comments that Jesus' spin on them was wholly different, and in fact the point.)
But you also have to realize that it is highly unlikely that people in the intersection of Jesus's time and locality had even heard of Confucius or Buddha. Give him some credit for independent discovery, dude.