I know all about the advertising vs. subscription revenue thing. But the fact remains that if you get an unasked-for magazine for free that doesn't make you a reader. It makes you a receiver. If people don't see the ads, they don't matter.
While I admit I thumbed through the magazine a little, I wasn't exactly reading it as throughly as I would a magazine I actually *wanted*.
* On the Gamecube RPG front, you forgot Baiten Kaitos.
* On the DS, I'm probably in the minority here, but I think the Yoshi game is something special, though rather more challenging than most people will be expecting.
* PSP doesn't have "several" great games, Lumines is the only unqualified success. Though a lot of people really like that one.
* Most of the PSP hacks boil down to using their image viewer or the built-in Wipeout Pure web browser to do things you could do with any image viewer or web browser. None of them are "real" hacks... yet.
* DS hacks *are* progressing, I read just today about another method for getting homebrew code to run on it. But they're not up to the point where you can use it for just anything, either.
Doesn't it seem strange that one of our selling factors for these portable systems is how badly the companies that made them implemented their content protection! Talk about a negative feature. "Boss! I got bad news and I got good news. The bad news is, they figured out our wireless encryption. Users can now write their own games for our system with minimal effort. But on the plus side, system sales have jumped a bit for some reason...."
Anyway, there are about as many PS2 fans here. And Xbox... well, let's just say that probably there have been more Xbox cover stories here on Slashdot than either of the other consoles. Halo and Halo 2 alone probably account at least half of them. (There's been a lot of PSP stories lately too, though I have to admit I submitted one of 'em.)
I think Nintendo is running out of ideas as the other companies are getting developers who make platform games as well as Nintendo. Sony has it's Square and Rockstar. Microsoft has Rare and Bungie. Nintendo has well...Nintendo.
Sony: Rockstar, granted. Square, no way. Microsoft: Rare, not yet for MS they haven't. Bungie, not what I'd call a source of new ideas.
Nintendo: Hal Laboratories (Smash Bros. and Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Paper Mario and Wario Ware) and Retro Studios (Metroid Prime and nuttin' else yet).
What Nintendo hasn't had this generation is a megahit like Halo 2 or GTA. Resident Evil 4 is really sharp, however.
But I agree that Nintendo has been uncommonly quiet this generation. I don't think it's because they're out of ideas though -- DK Jungle Beat is one of the most ingenious things we've seen this generation.
Shame they're not showing at E3 though. People are going to talk.
I subscribed to it 'cause it came free with one of those Gamestop cards. Even after it "ran out," they kept arriving. I wasn't very fond of the game thing even when I was receiving it, and I'd never pay money for the damn thing itself.
I don't think it's fair to compare a magazine that you get free and tends to keep arriving after you let your subscription lapse with a "real" magazine like Oprah's (no matter how unreal it may seem).
In typical fashion, people freaked not realizing it was a joke.
I don't blame them, what with "the great taste of Sprite" invading Anarchy Online (great title Zonk!). Or with in-game advertising considered to be such a fast-growing opportunity right now.
There are things that are irrational to get freaked about, and then there's this. What with everyone and his brother in the game industry falling all over themselves to brand game elements (even Nintendo put branding in Pikmin 2!), I'm not surprised it's a touchy issue for some people.
If buying the double disc version is really more than buying both separately (which I doubt will remain the case) then I hope there are more extras thrown in to make it worthwhile.
Well, hell. I hope when the price for milk goes up at the supermarket that they throw in a small container of cream for my coffee to go with it. I hope when the price of gas goes up they give away a quart of oil with a fill up.
By your logic, if the price goes up it's a good thing, because it's more likely the companies will graciously grant us extras for paying more. Not a good thing to expect from profit-seeking entities.
If they *were* doing something like that, then they should be marketing the hell out of it, else there would be no benefit to adding the extra content beyond hoping word of mouth picked up on it and advertised the new features.
Actually, the problem with using FreeCiv to illustrate the strengths of open source regarding game design has nothing to do with that. It's a *great* game that has just as good a graphics as it needs and has a strong AI. Commercial Civilization games do not look a great deal better than it.
The problem with using FreeCiv for this is that it's basically a clone of a pre-existing, commercial game, granted with adjustable rules and lots of cool features, but it's still more like Civilization-plus-things (and sometimes minus) rather than striking new ground. If one relied on FreeCiv to make an argument about the suitability of open source for game creation, questions would immediately arise about originality; do open source software project naturally require a commercial product to break new ground before they can get behind a concept?
My response to that would be Rogue and (here's the mandatory Slashdot mention of) Nethack, which are games that don't have a direct analogue to the commercial gaming world. The best such game that could be remotely considered roguelike in nature in Diablo II, which, while it has real-time play, mutiplayer, and much better graphics, is so much inferior to Nethack in gameplay it isn't funny.
There have been several game soundtrack concerts, especially in Japan but slowly more in the U.S. too. In the States however, these tend to be playings to people who have fond, childhood memories of these games, of which these concerts serve as a kind of recognition. In return, some games now have full orchestral arrangements (Smash Bros Melee's soundtrack is almost a concert in itself.)
This concert will likely not be as popular because the only game on the list with sizable nostalgia factor is Sonic the Hedgehog, and even then it remains to be seen if they'll use the "classic" version of the tunes (Sonic 1 and 2) or the worse update (Sonic 3 on). For all these games' triple-A-ness (which is debatable for some of them), no one thinks of them when it comes to game music.
With the PSP looking stronger than the DS currently, it is questionable whether or not this will continue, or whether the significantly cheaper and more durable GBA will continue to rule the market.
I'm not sure about this. The DS is also significantly cheaper and durable than the PSP. And the PSP's strength in the mass-market boils down to (in my opinion) MP3 playback and better graphics, but comes at the expense of much greater price.
The future is cloudy in this area. Neither system has what I consider to be all that great a lineup so far. The one out of the gate with a real system seller (Lumines doesn't count from what I've seen) may go on to win.
dude, the nations of the world is a fricken classic.
Yes, agreed. That's why I said that most of the things that tried to teach were cruddy. I specifically had that (and Wakko's states-of-the-union song) in my mind as exceptions when I said most.
However, I don't think you'd find anyone who wouldn't be interested in the propect of new Animaniacs cartoons on TV.
I'm unsure.
That era of Warner Bros. animation did produce some good material. Animaniacs, Freakazoid, Pinky and the Brain, each of these at their best were much better than anything on Saturday Morning had any right being. (Of course, Batman: The Animated Series was brilliant all the way through, but it seems difficult to meaningfully juxtapose that with Pinky and the Brain....)
But don't forget that for every classic bit in Animaniacs, there were two clunkers. The Warner Bros., Slappy Squirrel and PatB, those were the reasons to watch Animaniacs. Mindy and Buttons, Rita and Runt, and most of the things that tried to teach the viewer usually turned out pretty cruddy.
Actually, while there's a good chunk of new Adams-written material in it, I don't recall reading anywhere saying that it's Adams work and nothing else, that it's being used exactly as he wrote it. The fact that scenes are being edited out and back in even now proves that. Very likely the screenplay was edited by others after it left his hands, and *that's* the primary infection vector for evil in this project.
Of the 6 million or so people who bought Halo 2 in the opening months...a super-deluxe version in HD with new maps, and an ending would entice at least a million people to buy right away.
Including me.
I'm not so sure, would one-sixth the people who bought Halo 2 buy the same thing, again, and an entirely new system to play it on, in order to play it with better graphics? I think for most people to take the plunge again, it'll take more than just this, especially since Halo 2 was the big console game *this* past holiday season.
It was *great*! Fully the equal of Freakazoid and sometimes even up to (dare I say it??) Tick quality. In a perfect world these would have been on shelves in DVD format two years ago.
It depends almost entirely on what lineup the system has at launch. An enhanced version of Halo 2 may help, but it won't be enough. If the system lacks backwards compatibility it'll be tougher going.
So, could someone tell me how ILoveBees, despite having a Halo 2-themed story, actually had all that much to do with Halo 2? It could have been used just as well to hype Kirby's Air Ride.
I always pictured this name option as Microsoft hedging their bets, just in case Nintendo's Revolution turns out to be something soul-shattering that they can try to hurriedly co-opt. I mean, why else would you name your system after the number of degrees in a circle unless you wanted to associated it with revolution.
Seriously, celebs know dick about politics, economics, or video games. I don't think someone with an artsy-fartsy theater background or "duh captain of duh team" is qualified to review a game system or games.
Ahem. As an English grad student with a rather extreme amount of game playing experience under his belt (I've beaten Athena for crying out loud), I do have to take offense at this statement....
I do take offensense that the current video game industry sees me as an ADD High school cheer leader who can't get enough music industry dribble contained in shiney package presented by Paris Hilton. Everytime I watch MTV my head hurts from the constant camera shifting and bright lights they use in every shot.
Contrast with:
Please, for the love of God, won't somebody bring back the Sega Genesis/Dreamcast and let people who actually enjoy playing innovative games do just that.
I kind of hate to bring this up because Sega had the quality behind them to back it up, but remember that it was Sega themselves who pioneered this way of selling games, granted in a form that seems almost understated today, in their legendary battles against Nintendo. (Who still hasn't gotten the hang of marketing this way, bless whatever their corporate excuse for a heart might be.) "SEGA!!!"
I think the useful question to ask here is: what will changing the patent system do to IBM's current patent portfolio?
If it's left unmolested then it'll help IBM in the short run, since they have more than anyone else and people will have that much less of a chance of catching up.
Slashdot Mirror
I know all about the advertising vs. subscription revenue thing. But the fact remains that if you get an unasked-for magazine for free that doesn't make you a reader. It makes you a receiver. If people don't see the ads, they don't matter.
While I admit I thumbed through the magazine a little, I wasn't exactly reading it as throughly as I would a magazine I actually *wanted*.
* On the Gamecube RPG front, you forgot Baiten Kaitos.
* On the DS, I'm probably in the minority here, but I think the Yoshi game is something special, though rather more challenging than most people will be expecting.
* PSP doesn't have "several" great games, Lumines is the only unqualified success. Though a lot of people really like that one.
* Most of the PSP hacks boil down to using their image viewer or the built-in Wipeout Pure web browser to do things you could do with any image viewer or web browser. None of them are "real" hacks... yet.
* DS hacks *are* progressing, I read just today about another method for getting homebrew code to run on it. But they're not up to the point where you can use it for just anything, either.
Doesn't it seem strange that one of our selling factors for these portable systems is how badly the companies that made them implemented their content protection! Talk about a negative feature. "Boss! I got bad news and I got good news. The bad news is, they figured out our wireless encryption. Users can now write their own games for our system with minimal effort. But on the plus side, system sales have jumped a bit for some reason...."
There sure are a lot of Nintendo fans here on /.
(blinks) Hey, yeah. There sure are.
Why do you suppose that is, hm?
Anyway, there are about as many PS2 fans here. And Xbox... well, let's just say that probably there have been more Xbox cover stories here on Slashdot than either of the other consoles. Halo and Halo 2 alone probably account at least half of them. (There's been a lot of PSP stories lately too, though I have to admit I submitted one of 'em.)
Where are the Xbox and Sony games that bend my mind?
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you mostly, but...
Katamari Damacy. It's a game I really, really wish was made for a Nintendo system. It's almost like a non-Nintendo Nintendo game.
I'm not sure gamers want something revolutionary.
Damn what "gamers" want. I want something revolutionary!
It won't be at E3, though. I'm really disappointed about that, 'cause I'm actually going this year. Maybe I should just save the plane fare, hmm.
I think Nintendo is running out of ideas as the other companies are getting developers who make platform games as well as Nintendo. Sony has it's Square and Rockstar. Microsoft has Rare and Bungie. Nintendo has well...Nintendo.
Sony: Rockstar, granted. Square, no way.
Microsoft: Rare, not yet for MS they haven't. Bungie, not what I'd call a source of new ideas.
Nintendo: Hal Laboratories (Smash Bros. and Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Paper Mario and Wario Ware) and Retro Studios (Metroid Prime and nuttin' else yet).
What Nintendo hasn't had this generation is a megahit like Halo 2 or GTA. Resident Evil 4 is really sharp, however.
But I agree that Nintendo has been uncommonly quiet this generation. I don't think it's because they're out of ideas though -- DK Jungle Beat is one of the most ingenious things we've seen this generation.
Shame they're not showing at E3 though. People are going to talk.
I subscribed to it 'cause it came free with one of those Gamestop cards. Even after it "ran out," they kept arriving. I wasn't very fond of the game thing even when I was receiving it, and I'd never pay money for the damn thing itself.
I don't think it's fair to compare a magazine that you get free and tends to keep arriving after you let your subscription lapse with a "real" magazine like Oprah's (no matter how unreal it may seem).
In typical fashion, people freaked not realizing it was a joke.
I don't blame them, what with "the great taste of Sprite" invading Anarchy Online (great title Zonk!). Or with in-game advertising considered to be such a fast-growing opportunity right now.
There are things that are irrational to get freaked about, and then there's this. What with everyone and his brother in the game industry falling all over themselves to brand game elements (even Nintendo put branding in Pikmin 2!), I'm not surprised it's a touchy issue for some people.
If buying the double disc version is really more than buying both separately (which I doubt will remain the case) then I hope there are more extras thrown in to make it worthwhile.
Well, hell. I hope when the price for milk goes up at the supermarket that they throw in a small container of cream for my coffee to go with it. I hope when the price of gas goes up they give away a quart of oil with a fill up.
By your logic, if the price goes up it's a good thing, because it's more likely the companies will graciously grant us extras for paying more. Not a good thing to expect from profit-seeking entities.
If they *were* doing something like that, then they should be marketing the hell out of it, else there would be no benefit to adding the extra content beyond hoping word of mouth picked up on it and advertised the new features.
Actually, the problem with using FreeCiv to illustrate the strengths of open source regarding game design has nothing to do with that. It's a *great* game that has just as good a graphics as it needs and has a strong AI. Commercial Civilization games do not look a great deal better than it.
The problem with using FreeCiv for this is that it's basically a clone of a pre-existing, commercial game, granted with adjustable rules and lots of cool features, but it's still more like Civilization-plus-things (and sometimes minus) rather than striking new ground. If one relied on FreeCiv to make an argument about the suitability of open source for game creation, questions would immediately arise about originality; do open source software project naturally require a commercial product to break new ground before they can get behind a concept?
My response to that would be Rogue and (here's the mandatory Slashdot mention of) Nethack, which are games that don't have a direct analogue to the commercial gaming world. The best such game that could be remotely considered roguelike in nature in Diablo II, which, while it has real-time play, mutiplayer, and much better graphics, is so much inferior to Nethack in gameplay it isn't funny.
There have been several game soundtrack concerts, especially in Japan but slowly more in the U.S. too. In the States however, these tend to be playings to people who have fond, childhood memories of these games, of which these concerts serve as a kind of recognition. In return, some games now have full orchestral arrangements (Smash Bros Melee's soundtrack is almost a concert in itself.)
This concert will likely not be as popular because the only game on the list with sizable nostalgia factor is Sonic the Hedgehog, and even then it remains to be seen if they'll use the "classic" version of the tunes (Sonic 1 and 2) or the worse update (Sonic 3 on). For all these games' triple-A-ness (which is debatable for some of them), no one thinks of them when it comes to game music.
With the PSP looking stronger than the DS currently, it is questionable whether or not this will continue, or whether the significantly cheaper and more durable GBA will continue to rule the market.
I'm not sure about this. The DS is also significantly cheaper and durable than the PSP. And the PSP's strength in the mass-market boils down to (in my opinion) MP3 playback and better graphics, but comes at the expense of much greater price.
The future is cloudy in this area. Neither system has what I consider to be all that great a lineup so far. The one out of the gate with a real system seller (Lumines doesn't count from what I've seen) may go on to win.
dude, the nations of the world is a fricken classic.
Yes, agreed. That's why I said that most of the things that tried to teach were cruddy. I specifically had that (and Wakko's states-of-the-union song) in my mind as exceptions when I said most.
However, I don't think you'd find anyone who wouldn't be interested in the propect of new Animaniacs cartoons on TV.
I'm unsure.
That era of Warner Bros. animation did produce some good material. Animaniacs, Freakazoid, Pinky and the Brain, each of these at their best were much better than anything on Saturday Morning had any right being. (Of course, Batman: The Animated Series was brilliant all the way through, but it seems difficult to meaningfully juxtapose that with Pinky and the Brain....)
But don't forget that for every classic bit in Animaniacs, there were two clunkers. The Warner Bros., Slappy Squirrel and PatB, those were the reasons to watch Animaniacs. Mindy and Buttons, Rita and Runt, and most of the things that tried to teach the viewer usually turned out pretty cruddy.
Not an NES, or at least not easily... but you CAN get Super Mario Bros., in a version very close to the original, for the Gameboy Advance.
Actually, while there's a good chunk of new Adams-written material in it, I don't recall reading anywhere saying that it's Adams work and nothing else, that it's being used exactly as he wrote it. The fact that scenes are being edited out and back in even now proves that. Very likely the screenplay was edited by others after it left his hands, and *that's* the primary infection vector for evil in this project.
Of the 6 million or so people who bought Halo 2 in the opening months...a super-deluxe version in HD with new maps, and an ending would entice at least a million people to buy right away.
Including me.
I'm not so sure, would one-sixth the people who bought Halo 2 buy the same thing, again, and an entirely new system to play it on, in order to play it with better graphics? I think for most people to take the plunge again, it'll take more than just this, especially since Halo 2 was the big console game *this* past holiday season.
It was *great*! Fully the equal of Freakazoid and sometimes even up to (dare I say it??) Tick quality. In a perfect world these would have been on shelves in DVD format two years ago.
Game over. Far above par for a show about videogames.
That's like being, to blatantly steal a line from John Flansburgh, being the tallest midget.
The best show about video games so far, unfortunately, is Starcade, the old arcade game show they used to air, long ago, on TBS.
It depends almost entirely on what lineup the system has at launch. An enhanced version of Halo 2 may help, but it won't be enough. If the system lacks backwards compatibility it'll be tougher going.
So, could someone tell me how ILoveBees, despite having a Halo 2-themed story, actually had all that much to do with Halo 2? It could have been used just as well to hype Kirby's Air Ride.
Xbox 360
I always pictured this name option as Microsoft hedging their bets, just in case Nintendo's Revolution turns out to be something soul-shattering that they can try to hurriedly co-opt. I mean, why else would you name your system after the number of degrees in a circle unless you wanted to associated it with revolution.
Seriously, celebs know dick about politics, economics, or video games. I don't think someone with an artsy-fartsy theater background or "duh captain of duh team" is qualified to review a game system or games.
Ahem. As an English grad student with a rather extreme amount of game playing experience under his belt (I've beaten Athena for crying out loud), I do have to take offense at this statement....
But only barely.
I do take offensense that the current video game industry sees me as an ADD High school cheer leader who can't get enough music industry dribble contained in shiney package presented by Paris Hilton. Everytime I watch MTV my head hurts from the constant camera shifting and bright lights they use in every shot.
Contrast with:
Please, for the love of God, won't somebody bring back the Sega Genesis/Dreamcast and let people who actually enjoy playing innovative games do just that.
I kind of hate to bring this up because Sega had the quality behind them to back it up, but remember that it was Sega themselves who pioneered this way of selling games, granted in a form that seems almost understated today, in their legendary battles against Nintendo. (Who still hasn't gotten the hang of marketing this way, bless whatever their corporate excuse for a heart might be.) "SEGA!!!"
I think the useful question to ask here is: what will changing the patent system do to IBM's current patent portfolio?
If it's left unmolested then it'll help IBM in the short run, since they have more than anyone else and people will have that much less of a chance of catching up.