So, you are - by your own admission - missing out on games you want to play on the small chance you might, at some point in the next few years, possibly have to send it in for repair under its extensive warranty? Is that supposed to make sense?
For what it's worth, launch day 360 here, never had the slightest glitch. Sees a fuck-ton of use, too, and does it while sitting in a cramped little stand. And, in the interest of fairness, it's sitting next to an equally functional launch ps3.
It's not the downloading that's a crime; it's the uploading to other people that's being punished. Had you downloaded it off, say, rapidshare or just a random web link, you'd be liable for the $20 cd.
That's the oft-ignored flip side of all the apologists who claim they're downloading torrents because they lost their original discs, or own it on another format, or any of a number of seemingly innocuous reasons: you forget that you're enabling other people who aren't necessarily so chivalrous.
So yes, legally it's better to physically rob a store than to seed a torrent. As well it should be.
So they'll be directing the ads for lovers of painfully loud music to 50-year-olds, while the gaming ads will go to children despite the average gamer being 35. May I suggest a few more surveys before they roll out their new tech?
To be entirely fair, it's possible this - and, indeed, a lot of the shit like DRM and the games' lack of content - is coming from EA and not Wright. Now, he could be faulted for being overly forgiving of their antics, but it's hard to get too angry at a man who manages to get ridiculous amounts of funding and advertising backing for unique (if sometimes flawed) games. My guess is he's off planning his next big thing, leaving Spore to EA and its programmers.
A game like GTA IV takes itself and its fiction very seriously. It spends a lot of time, effort, and gameplay resources convincing you that the world you are traveling through is the same world that the story and cutscenes take place in. It may not be a game that allows you to own or control property to the degree seen in Burnout Paradise or Saints Row II, but it wants its world to be cohesive, not divided.
Burnout Paradise? Is that a typo? Of his five or so examples of open world games, I'd say that's the ONLY one with less control over the game world - particularly in the sense of controlling "property" - than GTAIV.
Public radio waves are broadcast directly into your home. You might not have a radio set to listen in, but they're there. With that mode of distribution comes a requirement to pander to the lowest common denominator of offense, as it should.
Edge places a high value on innovation, and openly admits to doing so. Even those who rate Killzone highly admit that, while amusing, it brings absolutely nothing to the table not seen before. It takes zero chances, preferring to polish the pre-existing experience. Even Gears 2 made SOME changes to the formula, both technically and in terms of storytelling and gameplay flow.
For many gamers, that's just fine. But as someone who plays most everything that comes out, I'd much rather a score tell me if the game will truly surprise me, as opposed to just being a well-trodden path through the FPS woods. Not everyone looks for the same thing in a review, but then, that's why there are multiple review sources. You can't whine about the over-dependence on metacritic and the generally poor state of numerical reviews, as many do of late, then penalize one source for actually trying something different and using the full 10 scale.
Wow, thanks guys. I was rooting for you there for a while, just out of a sense of "hurray for the little guy." Way to make me remember that however theoretically just your cause, you're a bunch of random assholes profiting off the work of others!
The ongoing struggle to procure intelligent, reasonable intellectual property and fair use rights worldwide needs these guys as spokespeople like animal rights needs PETA and parents' groups need Jack Thompson. Like so many before them drunk on the heady mix of righteousness and attention, they've gone full tilt into being walking, talking straw men.
- Released for PC, PSN, and Live
- Supposed to cost about $15
- Only three classes (like Heroes), all of them designed to fight (no support classes)
- Auto-healing over time
- Unlimited ammo
- Only three maps
- 24 players (down from 64 in its PC predecessors)
In other words, in every single way - save possibly being able to knock down trees - inferior to previous entries in the series. Fuck you, EA. Fuck you.
Involuntarily?...ok, if someone has a gun to your head making you use google, and you need help, type "first post." We'll get you help as soon as we can.
Uh, no, they don't. Apparently, you didn't read through enough. They PROMISED that the game would have this, like Fallout 1 and 2 did, so maybe that's where you're getting confused. But when the game actually came out, nope!
There really is a person on this planet named "Jane Q. Public"???
Isn't that kind of, like, overdoing things a bit? It sounds like some sort of pseudonym, but apparently it's your real name, because it says so right over your post.
Remember, however, that Netflix doesn't show you the rating of a movie; it shows you its best estimate of how well you will like the movie. And does a pretty good job of it, too, once you've rated a few hundred films. So there are a few problems with your reasoning, in addition to the painfully obvious "it's already been released elsewhere" point covered in previous comments:
- Is it even possible to make a shell account? Last I checked, you have to be logged in to rate anything on Netflix. And being logged in means you're a paying customer. I can't imagine paying $5 or whatever per single vote being cost effective, even at the cheapest service tier. Maybe there's a way if you abuse the free trial system, but that still strikes me as an awful lot of work.
- Say, for the sake of argument, that these ARE shill accounts. They signed up somehow, rated that one movie, and never did anything again. If they haven't rated any other movies on your list, Netflix's algorithm will have nothing to link it to your preferences. I.e. it won't affect the rating you see in the slightest.
- Let's even examine what happens if it's a multi-movie shill, perhaps kept up to vote highly for every movie released by a particular company. Again, the ranking system will almost certainly end up filtering out the result: unless you also happen to have given high scores to everything else that company has released, it's not likely to matter much in the final star value.
- Assuming that you're looking at the unweighted score - an inadvisable decision, given that the remarkably astute ranking system is the best part of Netflix - you have to account for the long-term balancing effects of opinionated Internet voters. See, for example, IMDB, where new movies often peak onto the top 250 only to be struck down by Godfather/Shawshank/etc. fans. If someone only sort of likes a movie that's unrated, they might give it a 3, whereas showing up to see it rated 5 is going to result in a 1 and possible an irate comment. The flock will detect the wolf in their midst soon enough and crush it.
- Who the fuck uses Netflix to get ratings for unreleased movies?
On a tangentially related note, I first read that title and thought we were going to see a Netflix-like weighted rating system for games. I'd kill for a way to heavily weight lovers of Dwarf Fortress while throwing out comments from Halo junkies when deciding what to play next.
Slashdot headline: Obama Picks RIAA's Favorite Lawyer For Top DoJ Post
Original headline: Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post
Quibbling over a single letter might seem pedantic - and/.'s headline is misleading rather than incorrect - but in this case, that's one very important letter. *sigh* The news lately is like a game of blogger's telephone.
So you'd prefer to continue paying $2-$3 for a game that takes millions of dollars and thousands of manhours to produce? Well, no DUH. I'd like to shit gold bullion and spend my evenings with supermodels. The problem is that you ultimately get what you pay for, and the used game market means people are paying virtually nothing. What's more, in selling a new game so someone else can buy it used for a few dollars less, you've stood a good chance of robbing the devs of another entire purchase (or more, as the chain goes on). You'd be better off pirating the damn thing.
I know we're supposed to be all anti-DRM and such and usually I'm on board with that. I will continue to fight tooth and nail any attempt to force me to authenticate a game every time I play or limit my installs or any of a number of other moronic attempts to control the market at the consumer end. But let's not end up, as consumers, on the opposite end of the spectrum! You get what you pay for, and with pirating becoming more widespread and the used game market booming, it should be little surprise when we see beta versions on shelves and generally slipshod coding. Pick a random game from five years ago and there's a depressingly high chance that the dev house behind it has gone belly up; it's a big industry when taken as a whole, but not when you take into account the sheer number of people splitting that pie.
Something has to change. And when it does, someone who's paying $2-$3 per game has no damn right to complain.
Not to mention the next installment in the Homestar Runner game coming out, er, today. And Little Big Planet. And Far Cry 2. And King's Bounty (which is remarkably awesome - it's like the Russians are the only ones who remember how to do good PC RPGs these days). And World of Goo. And the stuff at gog.com, crying "download me" directly into my subconscious. It'll be 2009 by the time I finish the stuff coming in the next week, and that doesn't take into account November's wave of gaming goodness.
If you guys have large oil reserves, HIDE THEM QUICKLY. Say they all dried up. Being white will only keep US Republicans from attacking for so long, and "worse than Iran" is not something you want associated with your country right now.
The second link is getting passed around as the Japanese woman "killing" her husband, which (rightly so) sounds ludicrous to most gamers. In reality, she logged into his account and deleted all of his characters and information, an act that is certainly worthy of some sort of punishment. Whether or not it needs to be brought to the attention of real world police is arguable, but quit making it sound like she's guilty of PvP.
Slashdot Mirror
...kid/brother/wife/dog...
Holy shit, how does that even happen? I've heard of southern families, but wow!
So, you are - by your own admission - missing out on games you want to play on the small chance you might, at some point in the next few years, possibly have to send it in for repair under its extensive warranty? Is that supposed to make sense?
For what it's worth, launch day 360 here, never had the slightest glitch. Sees a fuck-ton of use, too, and does it while sitting in a cramped little stand. And, in the interest of fairness, it's sitting next to an equally functional launch ps3.
It's not the downloading that's a crime; it's the uploading to other people that's being punished. Had you downloaded it off, say, rapidshare or just a random web link, you'd be liable for the $20 cd.
That's the oft-ignored flip side of all the apologists who claim they're downloading torrents because they lost their original discs, or own it on another format, or any of a number of seemingly innocuous reasons: you forget that you're enabling other people who aren't necessarily so chivalrous.
So yes, legally it's better to physically rob a store than to seed a torrent. As well it should be.
The DCMA? Is that the spawn of Santa?
So they'll be directing the ads for lovers of painfully loud music to 50-year-olds, while the gaming ads will go to children despite the average gamer being 35. May I suggest a few more surveys before they roll out their new tech?
You should really not comment on a game you've obviously not played for more than 15 minutes.
To be entirely fair, it's possible this - and, indeed, a lot of the shit like DRM and the games' lack of content - is coming from EA and not Wright. Now, he could be faulted for being overly forgiving of their antics, but it's hard to get too angry at a man who manages to get ridiculous amounts of funding and advertising backing for unique (if sometimes flawed) games. My guess is he's off planning his next big thing, leaving Spore to EA and its programmers.
A game like GTA IV takes itself and its fiction very seriously. It spends a lot of time, effort, and gameplay resources convincing you that the world you are traveling through is the same world that the story and cutscenes take place in. It may not be a game that allows you to own or control property to the degree seen in Burnout Paradise or Saints Row II, but it wants its world to be cohesive, not divided.
Burnout Paradise? Is that a typo? Of his five or so examples of open world games, I'd say that's the ONLY one with less control over the game world - particularly in the sense of controlling "property" - than GTAIV.
Public radio waves are broadcast directly into your home. You might not have a radio set to listen in, but they're there. With that mode of distribution comes a requirement to pander to the lowest common denominator of offense, as it should.
Edge places a high value on innovation, and openly admits to doing so. Even those who rate Killzone highly admit that, while amusing, it brings absolutely nothing to the table not seen before. It takes zero chances, preferring to polish the pre-existing experience. Even Gears 2 made SOME changes to the formula, both technically and in terms of storytelling and gameplay flow.
For many gamers, that's just fine. But as someone who plays most everything that comes out, I'd much rather a score tell me if the game will truly surprise me, as opposed to just being a well-trodden path through the FPS woods. Not everyone looks for the same thing in a review, but then, that's why there are multiple review sources. You can't whine about the over-dependence on metacritic and the generally poor state of numerical reviews, as many do of late, then penalize one source for actually trying something different and using the full 10 scale.
...idiots would realize that pretending to be a real person other than themselves on the Internet is going to get them sued.
Wow, thanks guys. I was rooting for you there for a while, just out of a sense of "hurray for the little guy." Way to make me remember that however theoretically just your cause, you're a bunch of random assholes profiting off the work of others!
The ongoing struggle to procure intelligent, reasonable intellectual property and fair use rights worldwide needs these guys as spokespeople like animal rights needs PETA and parents' groups need Jack Thompson. Like so many before them drunk on the heady mix of righteousness and attention, they've gone full tilt into being walking, talking straw men.
What we know about BF1943:
- Released for PC, PSN, and Live
- Supposed to cost about $15
- Only three classes (like Heroes), all of them designed to fight (no support classes)
- Auto-healing over time
- Unlimited ammo
- Only three maps
- 24 players (down from 64 in its PC predecessors)
In other words, in every single way - save possibly being able to knock down trees - inferior to previous entries in the series. Fuck you, EA. Fuck you.
Along the right-hand side, presumably crippled by NoScript: "Please enable javascript to view the most popular posts list."
The irony makes my head hurt.
Involuntarily? ...ok, if someone has a gun to your head making you use google, and you need help, type "first post." We'll get you help as soon as we can.
Uh, no, they don't. Apparently, you didn't read through enough. They PROMISED that the game would have this, like Fallout 1 and 2 did, so maybe that's where you're getting confused. But when the game actually came out, nope!
There really is a person on this planet named "Jane Q. Public"???
Isn't that kind of, like, overdoing things a bit? It sounds like some sort of pseudonym, but apparently it's your real name, because it says so right over your post.
Remember, however, that Netflix doesn't show you the rating of a movie; it shows you its best estimate of how well you will like the movie. And does a pretty good job of it, too, once you've rated a few hundred films. So there are a few problems with your reasoning, in addition to the painfully obvious "it's already been released elsewhere" point covered in previous comments:
- Is it even possible to make a shell account? Last I checked, you have to be logged in to rate anything on Netflix. And being logged in means you're a paying customer. I can't imagine paying $5 or whatever per single vote being cost effective, even at the cheapest service tier. Maybe there's a way if you abuse the free trial system, but that still strikes me as an awful lot of work.
- Say, for the sake of argument, that these ARE shill accounts. They signed up somehow, rated that one movie, and never did anything again. If they haven't rated any other movies on your list, Netflix's algorithm will have nothing to link it to your preferences. I.e. it won't affect the rating you see in the slightest.
- Let's even examine what happens if it's a multi-movie shill, perhaps kept up to vote highly for every movie released by a particular company. Again, the ranking system will almost certainly end up filtering out the result: unless you also happen to have given high scores to everything else that company has released, it's not likely to matter much in the final star value.
- Assuming that you're looking at the unweighted score - an inadvisable decision, given that the remarkably astute ranking system is the best part of Netflix - you have to account for the long-term balancing effects of opinionated Internet voters. See, for example, IMDB, where new movies often peak onto the top 250 only to be struck down by Godfather/Shawshank/etc. fans. If someone only sort of likes a movie that's unrated, they might give it a 3, whereas showing up to see it rated 5 is going to result in a 1 and possible an irate comment. The flock will detect the wolf in their midst soon enough and crush it.
- Who the fuck uses Netflix to get ratings for unreleased movies?
On a tangentially related note, I first read that title and thought we were going to see a Netflix-like weighted rating system for games. I'd kill for a way to heavily weight lovers of Dwarf Fortress while throwing out comments from Halo junkies when deciding what to play next.
"He had captured the princess."
Did I pass?
Slashdot headline:
Obama Picks RIAA's Favorite Lawyer For Top DoJ Post
Original headline:
Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post
Quibbling over a single letter might seem pedantic - and /.'s headline is misleading rather than incorrect - but in this case, that's one very important letter. *sigh* The news lately is like a game of blogger's telephone.
You mean like the American car market, which is in danger of disappearing entirely? Yep, pretty much, good analogy.
So you'd prefer to continue paying $2-$3 for a game that takes millions of dollars and thousands of manhours to produce? Well, no DUH. I'd like to shit gold bullion and spend my evenings with supermodels. The problem is that you ultimately get what you pay for, and the used game market means people are paying virtually nothing. What's more, in selling a new game so someone else can buy it used for a few dollars less, you've stood a good chance of robbing the devs of another entire purchase (or more, as the chain goes on). You'd be better off pirating the damn thing.
I know we're supposed to be all anti-DRM and such and usually I'm on board with that. I will continue to fight tooth and nail any attempt to force me to authenticate a game every time I play or limit my installs or any of a number of other moronic attempts to control the market at the consumer end. But let's not end up, as consumers, on the opposite end of the spectrum! You get what you pay for, and with pirating becoming more widespread and the used game market booming, it should be little surprise when we see beta versions on shelves and generally slipshod coding. Pick a random game from five years ago and there's a depressingly high chance that the dev house behind it has gone belly up; it's a big industry when taken as a whole, but not when you take into account the sheer number of people splitting that pie.
Something has to change. And when it does, someone who's paying $2-$3 per game has no damn right to complain.
Not to mention the next installment in the Homestar Runner game coming out, er, today. And Little Big Planet. And Far Cry 2. And King's Bounty (which is remarkably awesome - it's like the Russians are the only ones who remember how to do good PC RPGs these days). And World of Goo. And the stuff at gog.com, crying "download me" directly into my subconscious. It'll be 2009 by the time I finish the stuff coming in the next week, and that doesn't take into account November's wave of gaming goodness.
If you guys have large oil reserves, HIDE THEM QUICKLY. Say they all dried up. Being white will only keep US Republicans from attacking for so long, and "worse than Iran" is not something you want associated with your country right now.
The second link is getting passed around as the Japanese woman "killing" her husband, which (rightly so) sounds ludicrous to most gamers. In reality, she logged into his account and deleted all of his characters and information, an act that is certainly worthy of some sort of punishment. Whether or not it needs to be brought to the attention of real world police is arguable, but quit making it sound like she's guilty of PvP.