First of all, a truly revolutionary control system would track your entire body. Secondly, it would likely require some kind of visual interface that makes you feel like you're there. Either that, or playing a game will be like a dream. You're convinced you're actually in the game world even though you're stationary. This Wii controller is one of many, many steps in that direction and it isn't like this sort of thing hasn't been done before in gaming.
It's revolutionary, however, because it's actually being done. It is that necessary, middle step that everyone new was coming someday yet everyone thought was twenty years down the line.
Consider: using the technology in the Wii controllers, we could almost have virtual reality now. Put whatever motion sensing magic in the controllers into a pair of VR goggles. They can detect distance, speed and orientation, so the game can use that information to adjust the camera. Use the controllers as well (which have a primitive, rumble-based force feedback, but it's still force feedback) and you can manipulate objects in the world.
Honestly, I'm not sure if we should laud Nintendo for being insightful in their change of focus, or be angry with Sony and Microsoft for their R&D passivity.
Ah, I found that Wikibook some time ago. Although it contains many omissions (and contains much that is apocryphal, etc), it made Blender seem almost comprehensible to me.
I still need to get more practice in before I can become proficient in it. A lot more, probably.
Plenty of people can think outside boxes. You can probably do it yourself. Thinking different comes not from intrinsic ability, but because a person has learned insufficently to be the same.
And "The last great innovator in the industry" is that way only because he's allowed to be. Wright is, unquestionably, a genius, but there are other geniuses, whose names you've never heard of, and probably never will.
This is going to provide all kinds of fodder for the Overrated Gremlins that follow me around Slashdot, but....
This article is right on, on just about every point. It's what I always considered to be wrong with VII. From the annoyingness of Cloud Strife, to how VII is everywhere now, to how it wrecked length expectations in the console RPG market, to how it's horribly padded, to the load times. ESPECIALLY the load times. Those are the reasons I got to the 10 hour mark in the PS1 game and lost interest at that point.
These days I'm not really too fond of the earlier games, either, but that didn't stop me from picking up IV on GBA mostly out of a feeling of nostalgia. VII, though, leaves me cold.
Man, first they get faced in a Slashdot poll, then completely snubbed in the Robot Hall of Fame. You'd think it was the Cable Ace Awards or something. Little Tom Servo's sarcasm sequencer must be overheating right about now....
(It makes no sense to me...)...why video games have never made great movies.
I know why.
It's because what qualifies for a good video game story is, in general, an order of magnitude worse than what qualifies for a good movie story. Final Fantasy games, widely lauded for having among the best stories in the industry, tend to have the kind of narrative crap that would be lucky to be a trash paperback fantasy. Stuff that someone who's emotionally invested in the work might enjoy, but cannot survive the light of day.
There are good game stories out there. Sometimes you find them where you don't expect. (Grandia and Grandia II, for example, for all their cliches, have genuinely good dialogue and character development in them.) But generally, most game stories suck, for these reasons:
They don't need a good story for people to buy them. An excellent tale takes time, and thus money, to write, but "scenarios" are often looked down upon as being relatively unimportant compared to the rest of the game assets.
They are difficult to write well, and intrinsically different from most prior forms of narrative. Take a popular novel, and try to turn it into a game, and you'll probably meet inevitable failure. The best novel-to-game work I can think of, Infocom's classic adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was basically rewritten with loads of new material. (In some ways it's like a lost Hitchhiker's book, but no matter.) Most authors are not Douglas Adams, and even if they have his talent, they are unlikely to share the most-unwriterly enthusiasm for computers that inspired him to take on the project.
The game development industry has a poisonous atmosphere at the moment. Anyone with enough writing skill to produce an amazing game script will probably not be able to see it through the twists of a major studio's digestive tract -- and feel free to extend my metaphor if you want to imagine what it'll look like by the time it makes it through. Wonderfully irregular writing has a way of getting the corners broken off on the way through development meetings. There's too much money at stake to risk something truly different here.
What makes for a good novel or movie does not necessarily make for a good game. Players have to strongly identify with a protagonist, which mostly precludes giving him vague motives, or story structures other than The Great Quest. Not all writers want to spend their careers writing The Lord of the Rings over and over again.
Finally, the fact is, you don't need a good story to support a good game, but you definitely need a good game even if you have a good story.
For instance, Tetris is more friendly than anything else - imagine it with darker music, shades of grey and red, and similar gameplay but a harsher look at feel. It would attract a slightly difference balance of audience).....DEATH METAL TETRIS! (Imagine a hard driving version of the classic Gameboy music here)
Mature gamers automatically are drawn to mature subjects, but it seems that immature games have usually had the longest run.
Be careful with the word "immature" here, it carries a negative connotation that I don't believe you intend (and you're wrong if you did intend it). And "mature" games, very often, are presented in a juvenile, sensationalistic way, while games that don't seek to play up their blood-and-sex content are free to have a more mature subject matter. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, to give recent examples, are games have have almost a storybook presentation but are far from immature.
Anyway I think the phenomenon you bring up isn't all that surprising. Games that seek to shock or titilate tend to age rather ungracefully, since newer games that seek to do the same are, overall, better for having better graphics, while the older games are quickly superceded in the areas that were their primary selling point.
Your examples are interesting because they each come from widely acknowledged masters of their forms. That, mixed with the overall differentness of Japanese culture from western, have given some of them a kind of superstar status. However, do not look down upon western creators in the process. I maintain that the U.S. is just as capable of producing, and has produced and is still producing, brilliant works, but in a way, you're too close to them to see.
I'd give examples, but I gotta run at for now. Maybe I can bring them up later.
You don't seem to know what "censorship" means. Censorship refers to when the government prevents publication of materials, not a private website.
False! The relevent definition given by answers.com (found from the helpful Google link) is: The act, process, or practice of censoring.
Television and radio networks have censors. What they do is censor. Any media company can censor.
But I can understand your confusion since whenever the First Amendment is brought into play it's usually a case of government censorship, and the First Amendment is the context most talked about. But the problem here isn't the government censoring anyone, it's the hypocritical stance taken by the Wikipedia editors, since Wikipedia prides itself on the open flow of information, allowing, basically, anyone to contribute on any subject.
As for whether media censorship is a good thing, I take the position that it is not. The reasons government-sponsored censorship are bad are the same reasons media-sponsored censorship is bad. Actually making that case logically, in the face of concerns over property rights, is I think possible, but something I would have to think about for a while.
Japan anyway has always been a creative leading force in the world,
No, I dispute this. It's just that Japanese culture is currently trendy, and so whatever there that seems different from the rest of the world seems great to us.
The Japanese are no more creative than any other culture. Indeed, it might be possible to make an arguement that their tremendously conforming social structures make them less individualistic -- though I will not claim that myself at this time.
There are plenty of ingenious things to be found in your very own country, wherever that is. Unfortunately, often ingenuity does not sell (especially in the United States), but trendiness does. There are countless shows, movies, stories and games that you would love, but will never be made, because no one with the resources to have them made and propel them into a visible realm is willing to take a chance on them.
Is it possible that the Japanese are more willing to purchase creative work than other people? Perhaps, I'm not sure one way or the other. But that's entirely different from being a leading, creative force.
Street Fighter, Megaman (Rockman there), Pokemon, Tekken, Mario, Sonic, and numerous RPG franchises (if you're willing to count them) are examples of major Japanese franchises that will never die.
It won't happen for these reasons: 1. The James Bond license, in a complete switch from the usual state of things, actually makes the game much cooler. 2. Emulating an N64 is still not trivial, would rely on using information that would have to be gained in a clean-room reverse engineering, and even then may be subject to a lawsuit from Nintendo. Of course they could always look at public emulators, but I'm unsure that wouldn't carry its own liability. 3. The ROM has Nintendo's logo all over it, all that would have to be scrubbed. Further, I'm reasonably sure Nintendo actually owns the copyright on the game. They were the original publisher in any case.
However, the game's size is likely NOT a determining factor. The Wikipedia page for Goldeneye 007 states that the game's ROM is 16 megabytes. The size limit for Xbox Live Arcade games is 50 megabytes. Even counting in twice the game's ROM size to hold an emulator, it would still probably fit.
However, consider this: Rare still probably has the source code and art assets for the game. They could probably recompile the game to make use of the X-Box 360's hyperflash sparklemagic technical pixie thingies. In fact, they would have to do this, otherwise people would laugh at how the 360 now has a FIRST-GEN N64 GAME WITHOUT ANY GRAPHIC ENHANCEMENT, gasp! So that means, at the very least, better textures.
The N64 game's ROM was only that small because it used heavy texture compression and because people weren't accustomed to 360-level texture sharpness. Look at it now: the game is still cool, but it's blurry as hell. Unfortunatly, to improve the textures would probably greatly increase the game's size, and that 50 megabyte Live Arcade limit looks like a hard (if arbitrary) one.
That's speculation of course, but it sounds about right to me. Anyone care to subject it to the iron knifeblade of reason?
I know I've been guilty of replying to the first highly-modded comment, even though my reply had nothing to do with that comment, simply because that increased my visibility to moderators.
I guess I've been "guilty" of it too, if one is to look out for that sort of thing. Actually, however, I just don't worry too much about it. I post on Slashdot not to accumulate some score, but in order to participate in a conversation and ask a question once in a while, and trust that the moderation system will do its work. (Which it doesn't, always, for that see the guy who marks all my stuff 'Overrated.')
I know I've been lazy as a moderator on occasion, and blown my mod points on the first half-decent posts I found when browsing "Oldest first".
I think it could be a lot easier to moderate. One has to jump through a lot of hoops to give everyone an equal and fair shot at mod-ups. I really think there should be an option one could check that would temporarily disable comment filtering when one as mod points, and also perhaps present threads in a random order instead of first by date. Of course, with word that Moderation 2.0 will probably be focused more on tags than a straight score, it's possible that these suggestions will be obselete soon.
I have sinned myself, and so I know there is truth in what nacturation says.
If it's a sin, then it's one of those tricky cases where God has set us up for a fall beforehand. You know, like Lust.
The story is not a dupe that I can see, contrary to the tag that has been assigned to it: it was published by the AP on April 6th, today, and I don't see any other stories referring to it. If it's a dupe (just being "yet another" story on Bush science censorship isn't enough), could someone point out the story that it duplicates?
The story is not flamebait. It consists almost entirely of a quotation from the article, and the quote does not misrepresent the opinions of the researchers. The editorial perspective of Slashdot is pro-science, so they would certainly be on the researchers' side in this.
That the story is obvious (another tag): Considering that these things keep happening, it's certainly not obvious enough.
I guess I can't believe people are finding these faults with the story. Am I missing something?
Hmm... I figure I know who Bob Ross is because of the web of popular culture references that have been made about him that have served to elevate his low-budget PBS show into one of those second-tier cultural artifacts that's just famous enough to be known to most people today, but in eighty years will make all kinds of historians wonder what the hell we mean when "Bob Ross" comes up in an ancient document they're investigating.
Well, virtual paint could very well sell -- Mario Paint is regarded as a classic now, after all. And there is a certain attractiveness to non-messy paint.....
These things are broadly true, except I'm unsure about an N64-style analog stick. That would have required an entirelly different design for the DS, no matter how useful it'd be for Mario 64.
I wasn't trying to turn it into yet another DS-vs-PSP thing, I only brought it up because the PSP also has a web browser that a good number of people seem to think is lacking. I don't know if Opera on the DS will be better, but the touch screen could make web browsing much easier. Some of the other obstacles to making a DS web browser are also being remedied by the project (word is that the browser will ship with a RAM expansion that goes into the GBA slot!) so it has the potential to be a really cool little application.
Nintendo is chasing after non-gamers for the DS and Revolution, so this has the potential to be a real coop for them to have this on their systems. Bob Ross has greater name recognition, outside of gaming circles, than Grand Theft Auto.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, a truly revolutionary control system would track your entire body. Secondly, it would likely require some kind of visual interface that makes you feel like you're there. Either that, or playing a game will be like a dream. You're convinced you're actually in the game world even though you're stationary. This Wii controller is one of many, many steps in that direction and it isn't like this sort of thing hasn't been done before in gaming.
It's revolutionary, however, because it's actually being done. It is that necessary, middle step that everyone new was coming someday yet everyone thought was twenty years down the line.
Consider: using the technology in the Wii controllers, we could almost have virtual reality now. Put whatever motion sensing magic in the controllers into a pair of VR goggles. They can detect distance, speed and orientation, so the game can use that information to adjust the camera. Use the controllers as well (which have a primitive, rumble-based force feedback, but it's still force feedback) and you can manipulate objects in the world.
Honestly, I'm not sure if we should laud Nintendo for being insightful in their change of focus, or be angry with Sony and Microsoft for their R&D passivity.
Ah, I found that Wikibook some time ago. Although it contains many omissions (and contains much that is apocryphal, etc), it made Blender seem almost comprehensible to me.
I still need to get more practice in before I can become proficient in it. A lot more, probably.
Will Wright's reputation is well-deserved.
BUT....
Plenty of people can think outside boxes. You can probably do it yourself. Thinking different comes not from intrinsic ability, but because a person has learned insufficently to be the same.
And "The last great innovator in the industry" is that way only because he's allowed to be. Wright is, unquestionably, a genius, but there are other geniuses, whose names you've never heard of, and probably never will.
This is going to provide all kinds of fodder for the Overrated Gremlins that follow me around Slashdot, but....
This article is right on, on just about every point. It's what I always considered to be wrong with VII. From the annoyingness of Cloud Strife, to how VII is everywhere now, to how it wrecked length expectations in the console RPG market, to how it's horribly padded, to the load times. ESPECIALLY the load times. Those are the reasons I got to the 10 hour mark in the PS1 game and lost interest at that point.
These days I'm not really too fond of the earlier games, either, but that didn't stop me from picking up IV on GBA mostly out of a feeling of nostalgia. VII, though, leaves me cold.
Man, first they get faced in a Slashdot poll, then completely snubbed in the Robot Hall of Fame. You'd think it was the Cable Ace Awards or something. Little Tom Servo's sarcasm sequencer must be overheating right about now....
I know why.
It's because what qualifies for a good video game story is, in general, an order of magnitude worse than what qualifies for a good movie story. Final Fantasy games, widely lauded for having among the best stories in the industry, tend to have the kind of narrative crap that would be lucky to be a trash paperback fantasy. Stuff that someone who's emotionally invested in the work might enjoy, but cannot survive the light of day.
There are good game stories out there. Sometimes you find them where you don't expect. (Grandia and Grandia II, for example, for all their cliches, have genuinely good dialogue and character development in them.) But generally, most game stories suck, for these reasons:
For instance, Tetris is more friendly than anything else - imagine it with darker music, shades of grey and red, and similar gameplay but a harsher look at feel. It would attract a slightly difference balance of audience). ....DEATH METAL TETRIS! (Imagine a hard driving version of the classic Gameboy music here)
Mature gamers automatically are drawn to mature subjects, but it seems that immature games have usually had the longest run.
Be careful with the word "immature" here, it carries a negative connotation that I don't believe you intend (and you're wrong if you did intend it). And "mature" games, very often, are presented in a juvenile, sensationalistic way, while games that don't seek to play up their blood-and-sex content are free to have a more mature subject matter. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, to give recent examples, are games have have almost a storybook presentation but are far from immature.
Anyway I think the phenomenon you bring up isn't all that surprising. Games that seek to shock or titilate tend to age rather ungracefully, since newer games that seek to do the same are, overall, better for having better graphics, while the older games are quickly superceded in the areas that were their primary selling point.
Your examples are interesting because they each come from widely acknowledged masters of their forms. That, mixed with the overall differentness of Japanese culture from western, have given some of them a kind of superstar status. However, do not look down upon western creators in the process. I maintain that the U.S. is just as capable of producing, and has produced and is still producing, brilliant works, but in a way, you're too close to them to see.
I'd give examples, but I gotta run at for now. Maybe I can bring them up later.
You're not very bright, are you?
If you're trying to convince someone, it's best not to flame them right off the bat....
You don't seem to know what "censorship" means. Censorship refers to when the government prevents publication of materials, not a private website.
False! The relevent definition given by answers.com (found from the helpful Google link) is: The act, process, or practice of censoring.
Television and radio networks have censors. What they do is censor. Any media company can censor.
But I can understand your confusion since whenever the First Amendment is brought into play it's usually a case of government censorship, and the First Amendment is the context most talked about. But the problem here isn't the government censoring anyone, it's the hypocritical stance taken by the Wikipedia editors, since Wikipedia prides itself on the open flow of information, allowing, basically, anyone to contribute on any subject.
As for whether media censorship is a good thing, I take the position that it is not. The reasons government-sponsored censorship are bad are the same reasons media-sponsored censorship is bad. Actually making that case logically, in the face of concerns over property rights, is I think possible, but something I would have to think about for a while.
Japan anyway has always been a creative leading force in the world,
No, I dispute this. It's just that Japanese culture is currently trendy, and so whatever there that seems different from the rest of the world seems great to us.
The Japanese are no more creative than any other culture. Indeed, it might be possible to make an arguement that their tremendously conforming social structures make them less individualistic -- though I will not claim that myself at this time.
There are plenty of ingenious things to be found in your very own country, wherever that is. Unfortunately, often ingenuity does not sell (especially in the United States), but trendiness does. There are countless shows, movies, stories and games that you would love, but will never be made, because no one with the resources to have them made and propel them into a visible realm is willing to take a chance on them.
Is it possible that the Japanese are more willing to purchase creative work than other people? Perhaps, I'm not sure one way or the other. But that's entirely different from being a leading, creative force.
Street Fighter, Megaman (Rockman there), Pokemon, Tekken, Mario, Sonic, and numerous RPG franchises (if you're willing to count them) are examples of major Japanese franchises that will never die.
Ooooooh yes they will.
It won't happen for these reasons:
1. The James Bond license, in a complete switch from the usual state of things, actually makes the game much cooler.
2. Emulating an N64 is still not trivial, would rely on using information that would have to be gained in a clean-room reverse engineering, and even then may be subject to a lawsuit from Nintendo. Of course they could always look at public emulators, but I'm unsure that wouldn't carry its own liability.
3. The ROM has Nintendo's logo all over it, all that would have to be scrubbed. Further, I'm reasonably sure Nintendo actually owns the copyright on the game. They were the original publisher in any case.
However, the game's size is likely NOT a determining factor. The Wikipedia page for Goldeneye 007 states that the game's ROM is 16 megabytes. The size limit for Xbox Live Arcade games is 50 megabytes. Even counting in twice the game's ROM size to hold an emulator, it would still probably fit.
However, consider this: Rare still probably has the source code and art assets for the game. They could probably recompile the game to make use of the X-Box 360's hyperflash sparklemagic technical pixie thingies. In fact, they would have to do this, otherwise people would laugh at how the 360 now has a FIRST-GEN N64 GAME WITHOUT ANY GRAPHIC ENHANCEMENT, gasp! So that means, at the very least, better textures.
The N64 game's ROM was only that small because it used heavy texture compression and because people weren't accustomed to 360-level texture sharpness. Look at it now: the game is still cool, but it's blurry as hell. Unfortunatly, to improve the textures would probably greatly increase the game's size, and that 50 megabyte Live Arcade limit looks like a hard (if arbitrary) one.
That's speculation of course, but it sounds about right to me. Anyone care to subject it to the iron knifeblade of reason?
I know I've been guilty of replying to the first highly-modded comment, even though my reply had nothing to do with that comment, simply because that increased my visibility to moderators.
I guess I've been "guilty" of it too, if one is to look out for that sort of thing. Actually, however, I just don't worry too much about it. I post on Slashdot not to accumulate some score, but in order to participate in a conversation and ask a question once in a while, and trust that the moderation system will do its work. (Which it doesn't, always, for that see the guy who marks all my stuff 'Overrated.')
I know I've been lazy as a moderator on occasion, and blown my mod points on the first half-decent posts I found when browsing "Oldest first".
I think it could be a lot easier to moderate. One has to jump through a lot of hoops to give everyone an equal and fair shot at mod-ups. I really think there should be an option one could check that would temporarily disable comment filtering when one as mod points, and also perhaps present threads in a random order instead of first by date. Of course, with word that Moderation 2.0 will probably be focused more on tags than a straight score, it's possible that these suggestions will be obselete soon.
I have sinned myself, and so I know there is truth in what nacturation says.
If it's a sin, then it's one of those tricky cases where God has set us up for a fall beforehand. You know, like Lust.
Wow, my LEGITIMATE QUESTION got downvoted from neutral for being "Overrated." Someone out there has an axe to grind.
Does someone here know how Voyager missed this?
The story is not a dupe that I can see, contrary to the tag that has been assigned to it: it was published by the AP on April 6th, today, and I don't see any other stories referring to it. If it's a dupe (just being "yet another" story on Bush science censorship isn't enough), could someone point out the story that it duplicates?
The story is not flamebait. It consists almost entirely of a quotation from the article, and the quote does not misrepresent the opinions of the researchers. The editorial perspective of Slashdot is pro-science, so they would certainly be on the researchers' side in this.
That the story is obvious (another tag): Considering that these things keep happening, it's certainly not obvious enough.
I guess I can't believe people are finding these faults with the story. Am I missing something?
What's strange about this is that, on the average, I'm a lot more interested in the IGF finalists than most things I see on store shelves these days.
Yeah, I realized that after I posted it. My bad.
The control pad on the Dual Shock 2 is pressure-sensitive? Wow, I never suspected, I thought it was just the shoulder buttons.
I learned something new today! Which games support this feature, would you happen to know?
Hmm... I figure I know who Bob Ross is because of the web of popular culture references that have been made about him that have served to elevate his low-budget PBS show into one of those second-tier cultural artifacts that's just famous enough to be known to most people today, but in eighty years will make all kinds of historians wonder what the hell we mean when "Bob Ross" comes up in an ancient document they're investigating.
Well, virtual paint could very well sell -- Mario Paint is regarded as a classic now, after all. And there is a certain attractiveness to non-messy paint.....
These things are broadly true, except I'm unsure about an N64-style analog stick. That would have required an entirelly different design for the DS, no matter how useful it'd be for Mario 64.
I wasn't trying to turn it into yet another DS-vs-PSP thing, I only brought it up because the PSP also has a web browser that a good number of people seem to think is lacking. I don't know if Opera on the DS will be better, but the touch screen could make web browsing much easier. Some of the other obstacles to making a DS web browser are also being remedied by the project (word is that the browser will ship with a RAM expansion that goes into the GBA slot!) so it has the potential to be a really cool little application.
Nintendo is chasing after non-gamers for the DS and Revolution, so this has the potential to be a real coop for them to have this on their systems. Bob Ross has greater name recognition, outside of gaming circles, than Grand Theft Auto.