If I had to guess, I'd say you don't own the game. And based on your spelling, I'd say you've never owned a Tamagotchi, either.
Either way, if you think Nintendogs is nothing but an overhyped Tamagotchi, surely you can see that Gun is nothing more than a cheap westernized copy of GTA, right?
And I'm sorry, the fact that Gun didn't even make it into the top 30, when Nintendogs did, is a pretty pathetic summary.
Aw, come on. Gun is a neat game, but it's not groundbreaking in any way. It wouldn't be wrong to put it into a Top-X-List, but it isn't wrong to leave it out, either.
Nintendogs, on the other hand, single-handedly proved that the DS is more than just a gimmick, sold hundreds of thousands of consoles, showed that games can be successfull outside the hardcore gaming market and pretty much brought Nintendo back from its Gamecube failure image to the front of gaming innovation.
You may not like Nintendogs, but that doesn't change the fact that it's clearly one of the most importang games of this years. Way more important than Gun.
I am a bit of a Sony Whore though, I have a P910i, a Sony Camera, PS2 and now the PSP. The memory cards I've got work amongst all of them so that's a bonus.
I'm moving away from Sony's hardware precisely because of the memory cards. I bought a P800 three years ago. It has a Memory Stick DUO, so I couldn't use the Memory Sticks I already had in it. Would I buy the new P990 now, I couldn't use the DUO sticks in it, because it has Pro DUO sticks. And I can't use those sticks in any of the other devices I own. On the other hand, the CF card I bought about five years ago still works in my most recent camera. Sony can't even lock you into their memory sticks properly, since they change the format more often than all the others combined:-)
So when in doubt, I always chose the non-Sony solution.
I've had my DS for about 5 months. I own about 20 games. Part of the difference may be that I use it a lot more than you do. I commute to work by train, so there's an hour of gaming I have every weekday, no matter what. I simply can't play the same game for months. Or even weeks. Because sooner or later, you finish it, or it gets boring. Or you simply need something new. Sure, Meteos is awesome, but if I had to play Meteos an hour every day, I'd have a nervous breakdown.
Or maybe you aren't playing more because there aren't more interesting games on the PSP? I constantly feel that I don't have enough time to play all the good games that came out for the DS recently.
Or maybe my attention span is way too short.
But I'd be terribly angry (well, annoyed, anyway) if I had bought a PSP for hundreds of bucks and then only found two games which I actually wanted to play on it.
Oh well. Back to Mario & Luigi. Or should I play a quick race of Mario Kart before going to bed? Hm...
I have a DS and a GBA SP, too. Most of the time, I use these for my portable gaming needs. But I don't cary them with me all the time. I do carry my cell phone with me all the times, though. I even read books on my phone, simply because it's always there. Sure, reading a book in paper form is a lot more convenient, and it doesn't destroy your eyes, but then you have to carry a book with you.
I think I do have quite a large chunk of my life on my cell:-)
And yeah, battery life is a problem, but I put my phone in its cradle every evening and let it sync with my Mac, and it holds enough charge for one day even if I'm playing games for a few hours, so that's allright.
It's the only game I've bought so far and both myself and my girlfriend are terribly addicted.
I must be the only person on Slashdot who bought a PSP and is happy with it as is.
Maybe I misread, so let me get this straight: You shelled out the full price of the PSP, bought only 1 (in words: one) game for it and are happy with your purchase?
Either you bought your PSP only a few days ago, or you're so stinking rich that you don't mind paying hundreds of dollars for being able to play one single game.
Seriously, how many people are lame enough to play games on their cell phones?
Why, me, thank you! Although I've hardly ever actually bought a game specifically for my phone. I play the old Lucas Arts games on my P800 using a port of ScummVM. My cell phone is always with me, so if I'm sitting in a train or waiting for a bus with a few minutes to waste, I fire up Monkey Island.
I bought three games for my cell. A strategy war game called Strategic Assault which is quite funny, a shooter called Interstellar Flames which is utterly unplayable and Sim City. I also got Lemmings.
Cell phones aren't that bad for wasting a few minutes now and then if you've got the right games. And as cell phones continue to mature, getting better graphics and better controls, eventually more people will start using them for playing games. Even now, I see tons of kids playing games on their cell phones in Europe, and MTV is constantly running ads for these games. This market may soon be huge.
It's possible that Sony paid for some of them (but even that is disputed), but definitely not for all of them. Some of the pictures are clearly in public places which do not belong to any private entity.
These games are hardly suited for judging people's acceptance of in-game ads. If I'm playing Tony Hawk's, I obviously expect them to wear clothes from real brands, and have brand-name skateboards. Likewise, I expect real cars and real tuning brands in games like Need for Speed, and I'm not bothered by billboards in sports games because there are billboards in real sport events, too.
That does not mean that I want to see a coke sign or a Nike ad in a game which is based on a fictional universe.
I know. I used to spray murals, too, a few years ago. I was talking about the tags (the smaller paintings which are usually done in one color and contain not a lot more than the name of the person doing it), not about murals. Even though I'll be the first to freely admit that painting murals - especially on private property - is really stupid (whether the one doing it is smart or not), and had I been caught, I sure as hell wouldn't have complained about it.
Sony's stupid little crappy pictures are clearly not comparable to murals, which are all unique and require quite a bit of planning and time, sometimes even taking more than one night's work. I still like checking out murals, and there are some truly amazing artists in my home town.
Even so, I want to repeat that I think creating murals in illegal places is stupid, no matter what your motivation is. Many people don't like them, and you're basically forcing people to pay money to remove them.
So, I'm torn on the issue of murals, but not on the issue of tags and of Sony's ads.
So it's now Sony's fault that users, who have their DRM software installed, just cicked-through a legally binding document that allows Sony to install such software?
Um, yeah. It's very much Sony's fault for creating and distributing this software. Most people don't read these EULAs, and no normal person expects a rootkit to be installed when they're simply trying to listen to music. Sony knew exactly what would happen to its users (to the very people who gave Sony money, nota bene!), and they went ahead anyway.
Or do you mean that vandalising is OK as long as it's not done for profit?
No, it's not OK, but normally, illegal tags are created by bored (and possibly stupid) kids who mark their territories like dogs pissing on corners. What exactly is Sony's excuse for behaving like that?
Studies show that only 5% of male characters are played by women. Yet 60% of female characters are played by men... The ELSPA white paper "Chicks and Joysticks" has more on that.
Those numbers are utterly meaningless. Let's assume that there are 90% males playing a game and 10% females. Let's further assume that a given person is equally likely to play with a character of the other gender as with a character of his or her own gender. That gives us 5% females playing females, 5% females playing males, 45% males playing males and 45% males playing females.
In this case, 10% of all male characters are played by females, while 90% of all female characters are played by males - even though males and females are equally likely to play with a character of the opposite gender!
Clearly, your numbers don't show that males are more likely to play female characters than the other way around. In fact, they don't really show anything at all since we don't know how many males and females were in the sample.
BTW, I never considered buying mp3s, as on iTunes, I can't imagine to pay for a DRMmed file that's not very high quality, to boot. I'm a typical headphones listener, and even through crappy A/Ds you hear a serious difference...
I doubt you even ever listened to a song from the iTunes store. If you had, you'd know that they aren't MP3, but AAC. The quality of the songs on iTunes is very good. I'm also a headphone listener, and I can't hear the difference between an iTunes song and CD. Of course, I'm not a pro, either.
Now that Apple have introduced multi-button support in their OS, we can use them. But on the laptop itself we still have only one button (and as far as I have experienced in shops, the pointer surface doesn't even have hotspots for scrolling - but I could (hopefully) be wrong).
You are. You can scroll via "gestures" on the Mac, and there are third-party applications which duplicate the "scroll zones" which some PCs have.
But to quickly comment on the multi button issue: I hate multi button trackpads. The problem is that your hand is constanly moving while using a trackpad. So the position of the buttons moves vis-à-vis your hand. This means that I quite often hit the wrong button when using PC laptops. And most laptop manufaturers aren't happy with two buttons, they need to have at least four or five buttons, sometimes the same button several times (on top and on bottom of the pad). Please, God, no!
Do you mean "bright", or do you mean "glossy"? I don't think Mac screens are less bright (I hardly ever turn my all the way up), but they're definitely less glossy than some PC laptops' screens. Gruber at fireball.net wrote about this recently:
And speaking of Wintel laptop displays, what is deal with the growing trend of laptop displays being treated with some sort of super-high-gloss finish? This isn't something where some laptop displays are a bit shinier than others; it's a dramatic, instantly discernible difference. During a recent trip to Fry's, the majority of the laptops they had on display had screens which were treated with this hyper-glossy finish.
What is behind this trend? Are these screens significantly cheaper? If not, what is the appeal? Why would anyone want a screen so glossy that it's reflective? These screens quite obviously are more prone to glare from light sources, and the glossy finish would seemingly bring even more attention to smudges left behind by the ignorant mouth-breathing sort of people who touch computer displays with their fingers.
Needless to say, the new PowerBook displays use no such coating.
However unlike the aforementioned Video Games have been noted in studies for reducing the subject's likelihood of displaying violent behavior, because the game serves as a release mechanism.
Could you provide some links to these studies? I've never seen any study indicating anything like this. In fact, all studies I've read indicated the exact opposite. The human mind isn't a boiling pot that needs to release steam in order to keep from boiling over. It's a learning machine which learns from experience, even if that experience happens in games.
The DS seems to be shaping up to a great console for adventure gamers. Phoenix Wright is utterly hilarious, with an awesome storyline and fascinating puzzles. I hope Capcom is going to localize a few more of the Phoenix Wright games, appearently there are several GBA sequels to Phoenix Wright available in Japan.
The only bad thing I can say about Another Code is that it's too freaking short. It should have been three times as long at least.
The dual screen/touchs creen combination really works great with adventure games.
Second of all, his comment about the 10% of Game Cube owners seems to be missed by everybody here.
Or maybe you missed it. The point against this point is that the 10% quote holds true for all consoles, since most households own more than one console by now. If he had asked his audience who owned an Xbox, and then discounted those who also owned either a PS2 or a Cube, he'd have gotten the same 10% result.
And yeah, you can play FPS with current gamepads. It's just that you can play them better with a keyboard and a mouse.
Lastly, as others have pointed out, Epic gets money from Microsoft. So maye you're right about his being a businessman.
My only real complaint with the title is that it doesn't do as much with the touch-screen and when it does the usage is sort of clumsy.
So, you want more touch screen usage or less? Frankly, I think it's not helping game quality if we criticise DS games for not using all DS features. The two screens help a lot with Castlevania, so the DS already makes a difference. I can't see any reason why the game would need to have more touch screen support, it's quite perfect as it is.
Some games use more DS features than others. We should judge games on their quality and on how much fun they are, not on how much DS features they support - although obviously, interesting usages of uniqute DS features are always worth mentioning:-)
Exactly. And remember who their target audience is: People who bought UMDs.
Engineer: "I figured out a way to show PSP movies on the TV!"
Exec: "Uhm, that's gonna cost a lot, and it looks like crap. Who's gonna buy this?"
Engineer: "The same idiots who bought all the UMD movies."
Exec: "When can we ship it?"
Slashdot Mirror
If I had to guess, I'd say you don't own the game. And based on your spelling, I'd say you've never owned a Tamagotchi, either.
Either way, if you think Nintendogs is nothing but an overhyped Tamagotchi, surely you can see that Gun is nothing more than a cheap westernized copy of GTA, right?
Aw, come on. Gun is a neat game, but it's not groundbreaking in any way. It wouldn't be wrong to put it into a Top-X-List, but it isn't wrong to leave it out, either.
Nintendogs, on the other hand, single-handedly proved that the DS is more than just a gimmick, sold hundreds of thousands of consoles, showed that games can be successfull outside the hardcore gaming market and pretty much brought Nintendo back from its Gamecube failure image to the front of gaming innovation.
You may not like Nintendogs, but that doesn't change the fact that it's clearly one of the most importang games of this years. Way more important than Gun.
I'm moving away from Sony's hardware precisely because of the memory cards. I bought a P800 three years ago. It has a Memory Stick DUO, so I couldn't use the Memory Sticks I already had in it. Would I buy the new P990 now, I couldn't use the DUO sticks in it, because it has Pro DUO sticks. And I can't use those sticks in any of the other devices I own. On the other hand, the CF card I bought about five years ago still works in my most recent camera. Sony can't even lock you into their memory sticks properly, since they change the format more often than all the others combined :-)
So when in doubt, I always chose the non-Sony solution.
Well, yeah. Enough of my rant.
I've had my DS for about 5 months. I own about 20 games. Part of the difference may be that I use it a lot more than you do. I commute to work by train, so there's an hour of gaming I have every weekday, no matter what. I simply can't play the same game for months. Or even weeks. Because sooner or later, you finish it, or it gets boring. Or you simply need something new. Sure, Meteos is awesome, but if I had to play Meteos an hour every day, I'd have a nervous breakdown.
Or maybe you aren't playing more because there aren't more interesting games on the PSP? I constantly feel that I don't have enough time to play all the good games that came out for the DS recently.
Or maybe my attention span is way too short.
But I'd be terribly angry (well, annoyed, anyway) if I had bought a PSP for hundreds of bucks and then only found two games which I actually wanted to play on it.
Oh well. Back to Mario & Luigi. Or should I play a quick race of Mario Kart before going to bed? Hm...
I have a DS and a GBA SP, too. Most of the time, I use these for my portable gaming needs. But I don't cary them with me all the time. I do carry my cell phone with me all the times, though. I even read books on my phone, simply because it's always there. Sure, reading a book in paper form is a lot more convenient, and it doesn't destroy your eyes, but then you have to carry a book with you.
I think I do have quite a large chunk of my life on my cell :-)
And yeah, battery life is a problem, but I put my phone in its cradle every evening and let it sync with my Mac, and it holds enough charge for one day even if I'm playing games for a few hours, so that's allright.
Maybe I misread, so let me get this straight: You shelled out the full price of the PSP, bought only 1 (in words: one) game for it and are happy with your purchase?
Either you bought your PSP only a few days ago, or you're so stinking rich that you don't mind paying hundreds of dollars for being able to play one single game.
Why, me, thank you! Although I've hardly ever actually bought a game specifically for my phone. I play the old Lucas Arts games on my P800 using a port of ScummVM. My cell phone is always with me, so if I'm sitting in a train or waiting for a bus with a few minutes to waste, I fire up Monkey Island.
I bought three games for my cell. A strategy war game called Strategic Assault which is quite funny, a shooter called Interstellar Flames which is utterly unplayable and Sim City. I also got Lemmings.
Cell phones aren't that bad for wasting a few minutes now and then if you've got the right games. And as cell phones continue to mature, getting better graphics and better controls, eventually more people will start using them for playing games. Even now, I see tons of kids playing games on their cell phones in Europe, and MTV is constantly running ads for these games. This market may soon be huge.
It's possible that Sony paid for some of them (but even that is disputed), but definitely not for all of them. Some of the pictures are clearly in public places which do not belong to any private entity.
These games are hardly suited for judging people's acceptance of in-game ads. If I'm playing Tony Hawk's, I obviously expect them to wear clothes from real brands, and have brand-name skateboards. Likewise, I expect real cars and real tuning brands in games like Need for Speed, and I'm not bothered by billboards in sports games because there are billboards in real sport events, too.
That does not mean that I want to see a coke sign or a Nike ad in a game which is based on a fictional universe.
I know. I used to spray murals, too, a few years ago. I was talking about the tags (the smaller paintings which are usually done in one color and contain not a lot more than the name of the person doing it), not about murals. Even though I'll be the first to freely admit that painting murals - especially on private property - is really stupid (whether the one doing it is smart or not), and had I been caught, I sure as hell wouldn't have complained about it.
Sony's stupid little crappy pictures are clearly not comparable to murals, which are all unique and require quite a bit of planning and time, sometimes even taking more than one night's work. I still like checking out murals, and there are some truly amazing artists in my home town.
Even so, I want to repeat that I think creating murals in illegal places is stupid, no matter what your motivation is. Many people don't like them, and you're basically forcing people to pay money to remove them.
So, I'm torn on the issue of murals, but not on the issue of tags and of Sony's ads.
I would like that very much. When are you free?
Um, yeah. It's very much Sony's fault for creating and distributing this software. Most people don't read these EULAs, and no normal person expects a rootkit to be installed when they're simply trying to listen to music. Sony knew exactly what would happen to its users (to the very people who gave Sony money, nota bene!), and they went ahead anyway.
But even if you think that this is just OK and the user's fault, how Sony reacted to the whole thing and "fixed" it by making it even worse destroys any last shred of credibility they still had.
No, it's not OK, but normally, illegal tags are created by bored (and possibly stupid) kids who mark their territories like dogs pissing on corners. What exactly is Sony's excuse for behaving like that?
Those numbers are utterly meaningless. Let's assume that there are 90% males playing a game and 10% females. Let's further assume that a given person is equally likely to play with a character of the other gender as with a character of his or her own gender. That gives us 5% females playing females, 5% females playing males, 45% males playing males and 45% males playing females.
In this case, 10% of all male characters are played by females, while 90% of all female characters are played by males - even though males and females are equally likely to play with a character of the opposite gender!
Clearly, your numbers don't show that males are more likely to play female characters than the other way around. In fact, they don't really show anything at all since we don't know how many males and females were in the sample.
I doubt you even ever listened to a song from the iTunes store. If you had, you'd know that they aren't MP3, but AAC. The quality of the songs on iTunes is very good. I'm also a headphone listener, and I can't hear the difference between an iTunes song and CD. Of course, I'm not a pro, either.
You are. You can scroll via "gestures" on the Mac, and there are third-party applications which duplicate the "scroll zones" which some PCs have.
But to quickly comment on the multi button issue: I hate multi button trackpads. The problem is that your hand is constanly moving while using a trackpad. So the position of the buttons moves vis-à-vis your hand. This means that I quite often hit the wrong button when using PC laptops. And most laptop manufaturers aren't happy with two buttons, they need to have at least four or five buttons, sometimes the same button several times (on top and on bottom of the pad). Please, God, no!
Do you mean "bright", or do you mean "glossy"? I don't think Mac screens are less bright (I hardly ever turn my all the way up), but they're definitely less glossy than some PC laptops' screens. Gruber at fireball.net wrote about this recently:
Could you provide some links to these studies? I've never seen any study indicating anything like this. In fact, all studies I've read indicated the exact opposite. The human mind isn't a boiling pot that needs to release steam in order to keep from boiling over. It's a learning machine which learns from experience, even if that experience happens in games.
No. That honor probably goes to Goldeneye on the N64. Which was made by Rare, ironically. Another games company bought by Microsoft.
The DS seems to be shaping up to a great console for adventure gamers. Phoenix Wright is utterly hilarious, with an awesome storyline and fascinating puzzles. I hope Capcom is going to localize a few more of the Phoenix Wright games, appearently there are several GBA sequels to Phoenix Wright available in Japan.
The only bad thing I can say about Another Code is that it's too freaking short. It should have been three times as long at least.
The dual screen/touchs creen combination really works great with adventure games.
Because we're talking about Microsoft here? Remember Windows 1.0?
The Xbox isn't yet supposed to make money. It's supposed to extend Microsoft's market. Then, it's supposed to make money.
Or maybe you missed it. The point against this point is that the 10% quote holds true for all consoles, since most households own more than one console by now. If he had asked his audience who owned an Xbox, and then discounted those who also owned either a PS2 or a Cube, he'd have gotten the same 10% result.
And yeah, you can play FPS with current gamepads. It's just that you can play them better with a keyboard and a mouse.
Lastly, as others have pointed out, Epic gets money from Microsoft. So maye you're right about his being a businessman.
So, you want more touch screen usage or less? Frankly, I think it's not helping game quality if we criticise DS games for not using all DS features. The two screens help a lot with Castlevania, so the DS already makes a difference. I can't see any reason why the game would need to have more touch screen support, it's quite perfect as it is.
Some games use more DS features than others. We should judge games on their quality and on how much fun they are, not on how much DS features they support - although obviously, interesting usages of uniqute DS features are always worth mentioning :-)
Both of these games are excellent, by the way.
Exactly. And remember who their target audience is: People who bought UMDs.
Engineer: "I figured out a way to show PSP movies on the TV!"
Exec: "Uhm, that's gonna cost a lot, and it looks like crap. Who's gonna buy this?"
Engineer: "The same idiots who bought all the UMD movies."
Exec: "When can we ship it?"
So you're telling me my playing of Pac Man on my VCS 2600 was all an illusion? Oh my god! I never suspected!