It was Windows 3.1 or '95, so I could still talk him through jumping to a DOS window and hand-editing the ini file with the EDIT program. Now imagine trying to do that when you're about as honky as they come, and your main exposure to black culture was radio-friendly hip-hop and a late-night showing of New Jack City on HBO.
In the late 90's, Packard Bell disappeared. Most people assumed they were finally taken down by their own incompetence, but what really happened was this:
Packard Bell was able to manufacture their systems so cheaply because they had rent-free facilities on a disused airbase in Sacramento, CA. NEC, wishing to enter the end-user/retail sector and covetous of this manufacturing facility, bought 49% of Packard Bell, re-named them to NEC Consumer Systems Division, and put a clause in the contract that allowed them to gain ownership of the other 2% if certain milestones were not reached. Then, NEC seeded the CSD division with internal executives, who made sure those milestones would never be reached. Mission accomplished, NEC now had their manufacturing facilities rent-free, and they shut down the consumer systems division, no longer willing to compete with Dell & Gateway.
I was one of the end-user technical support nerds for NEC-CSD, and wow did we get some crazies. Among my favorites were the black supremacist who refused to speak to me because I sounded white, so I put him on hold and then picked up a few minutes later with a badly faked "black" accent ("Yo what up? This is NEC, I'm Johnson. How can I help you?"). His issue? He'd set all of his Windows desktop color settings to black - backgrounds, borders, buttons, and text - and was calling to complain that his monitor was broken, because all he could see what his mouse cursor (which he was angry at for being white).
Also good was the hung-over stoner who'd woken up to find that he'd thrown up IN his monitor. No, sorry, that's not covered under warranty, but could you tell me how you did it?
But the best call didn't even happen to me, it happened to Chuck. One slow afternoon Chuck came around and motioned for everyone not currently on a call to follow him. We gathered around his cube and he muted the input on his phone, put on his headset, and then piped it to the speaker.
Chuck: "Hello sir, I have my supervisor here with us, could you please repeat for us what you told me?" Cust: "Well, this laptop is junk, and I want a new one." Chuck: "Okay, can you talk me through what's wrong?" Cust: "My modem wouldn't connect, and I got really angry, so I pulled the card out and snapped it in half. Then I threw it across the room." Chuck: "So your modem is no longer functional?" Cust: "My computer's busted and I want a new one." Chuck: "Okay, so how did we go from broken modem card to broken laptop?" Cust: "So I calm down and I figure I can fix this modem. I got the pieces, and I figured out how they were supposed to go. Then I superglued them together and put them in a vice clamp overnight." Chuck: "Okay. What happened next?" Cust: "Well, I put it in my computer and tried to dial out to the internet again, but it still didn't work. Then I tried to pull out the card, but it got stuck. I had to use needle-nose pliers to pull the damn thing out, and I only got half of it. The other half's stuck in there, and now my computer's ruined! Your computer is junk, and I want a new laptop!"
At this point, the twenty or so people gathered around Chuck's cube were in hysterics. Chuck reached over, released the mute so that the man on the other end of the phone could hear us, left it open for a few seconds, and hung up on him.
man, I remember the last console to ship with support for 7 controllers, advanced video playback capability, strong multimedia features, and a > $500 pricetag.
I wonder what all those people who used to work at 3DO are doing now.
(All snark aside, mad props to RJ Mical, Dave Needle, and David Morse. These guys together have come up with some of the best-designed and least well-received pieces of videogame hardware conceived in the last 20 years. They deserve better than the market gave them.)
What's with all the gnashing of teeth, and wringing of hands? This happens all the time in the console world. The Playstation purchased on launch day in 1995 was not the same beast as the Playstation bought in 1999. Chip consolidation and improved manufacturing techniques let Sony lower the price on the Playstation as they put the hardware through different revisions. But you wouldn't know if if you didn't read the model numbers.
Similarly, Nintendo has done this with the GameCube, dropping the component/progressive output video port from later models. Sony's continued the process well into the Playstation 2's lifecycle, even before the radical re-design of the PS Two (and for that matter, the 2000 re-design of the PS One). In fact, Nintendo's been doing this since at least the SNES, and Sega's been doing it since the Master System. This kind of thing is old hat.
Microsoft was never able to do this with the original XBox because they didn't own all the silicon inside. Improvements in manufacturing techniques meant Intel and nVidia could sell XBox CPU's and GPU's to Microsoft at a higher margin, but Microsoft didn't directly reap the benefits of improving technology as the component pieces of its system got cheaper.
Not so this time. Microsoft made sure they owned the entire XBox 360 end-to-end, and they're going to leverage it to make the product more profitable as market forces drive the retail price of the machine down. This is all about manufacturing cheaper XBox 360's. It's not about stepping up the CPU speed, it's about cheaper consoles and higher margins, and it's nothing that every other player in the market hasn't done before.
So chill out, y'all. There's no conspiracy, and nobody's getting screwed.
It's not about the quality of the films available. The films are about as good as they've always been, to be honest. That is to say, they're shit, but they're entertaining, so I'll keep going.
It's the theater-going experience itself that has become intolerable. I'd go back to the movies in a heartbeat if I knew of a theater that had the following policies:
1) Theater owners need to hire large, hardass, bouncer-type stone cold ushers. If you talk, you're out. Cell phone? Out. Laser pointer? Out. Kick the seat in front of you? Out. Smartass who yells comments, thinking he's the next Joel Robinson or Mike Nelson? Out. If you're bothering the people around you in any way, instead of watching the film quietly or respectfully (or making out quietly, that's always cool by me), then you're out on your ass, no refund, and cry me a fucking river.
2) Theater owners must enforce the MPAA ratings. Don't let kids buy tickets for The Shaggy Dog and then sneak into Saw II. They ruin it. Check IDs at the box office, and check tickets at the door of the auditorium, and bingo, no more problem. I tried to see the Exorcist re-release 5 years ago, and it was ruined by a theater full of teenagers who were all holding tickets to see the latest g-rated insult to IQs over 50. I haven't seen a horror film in the theater since.
3) Theater owners must stop showing advertisements before a film starts for products that are not other films. People resent paying $12 to be a captive audience for 30 minutes of television commercials.
Bonus un-necessary but IT WOULD BE AWESOME policies:
4) Theater audiences must SHUT THE FUCK UP. In the last ten years or so, I've noticed a disturbing trend. Audiences seem no longer content to just laugh at the funny parts or cry at the sad parts. They now must treat a film as if someone is filming a sitcom, and they are part of the live studio audience. Here's a news flash, people: IT'S A FUCKING MOVIE. IT CAN'T HEAR YOU. Stop clapping and cheering when the Warner Brothers logo shows up at the beginning of the next Batman film. Stop applauding when Neo beats down Agent Smith. Definitely STOP GIVING THE CREDITS A STANDING OVATION. What, are you fucking retarded or something? What the hell is wrong with you people?
3) A liquor license, even just wine-beer, for R-rated evening showings after 8pm. I'd love to be able to drink a cold one while I'm watching a movie in a room full of grownups. I already have a local theater that does this with second-run films, but I'd love it if I could get this kind of service in a first-run show with a kick-ass sound system.
We must be careful, though, lest skynet become self-aware. If processors of high performance and wide bandwidth like the Cell were linked together without sufficient security, a worldwide system crash could occur with one attack!
Seriously though, the day I got home and found out my PS2 games looked worse than my Dreamcast games (after waiting all night in the rain to get one, no less) was bitter indeed. Don't believe a single thing Sony says about their hardware. It's all lies.
Fluffy article or no, they're right. The achievements system is pure genius, because it adds public bragging rights to the concept of 100%'ing a game, and suddenly I'm interested. They've tacked a level grind onto every game out there, and it worked.
I'm totally addicted to 100%'ing the achievements in my games. I've spent hours scouring maps for hidden items so I could claim the elusive "game complete" achievement in Kameo. I routinely start every game on the hardest difficulty level so I can show off to others that I've done it. I spent 3 days with a checklist from GameFAQs finding hidden gaps in Tony Hawk. I played Gun 3 extra times so I could have credit for beating it on every difficulty level.
The system isn't perfect. Some games, like King Kong or give away achievement points like they're candy. I'm more proud of my 25-point "Big Cheese of the South Seas" achievement in Hexic HD than I am of the entire 1000 points credit I have for King Kong. Other games like Quake 4 have achievements that almost nobody will win (be #1 on the worldwide leaderboards). Some games give you a full set of achievements just for beating them. We'll see how things settle out.
I love gaming. I've got a launch-day Dreamcast, PS2, XBox, Gamecube, and 360. I play the hell out of them. I spend over $5000 a year on videogames, but if this advertising trend continues, that number will drop to $0.
I hate advertising, especially captive audience advertising. I refuse to pay for the privilege of receiving someone's brand message. I don't go to the movies anymore, because I can't stand the advertising in front of films. I bought a TiVO when I subscribed to pay television, so I could skip ads. I stopped watching series on HBO when I found out that they received paid product placement for shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. I use adblock and other proxy tools to block banner advertising, and if a site finds a way to put a banner on my screen anyway, I never return to the site.
To get to the topic at hand, I should say that I have no problem paying $60 for a game, or even $50. Only the written word gives me better entertainment value. At even 10 hours (a short game), I'm paying $6 / hour for entertainment (well, plus the amortized cost of the console, but over 5 years of hard play time this is basically negligible). That's a fine bargain.
I should amend this statement: I have no problem paying $10 extra for a new game if the costs of development are recouped through consumer purchases. Paying $10 more for Tony Hawk American Wasteland on the 360, a game that is so buggy that some of the in-game missions cannot completed, is an insult. Finding the game stuffed full of advertising for cell phones and energy drinks is such an affront that I am left feeling violated.
This trend continues across other games. Need For Speed: Most Wanted is an EA game, and everyone knows EA would whore their own mothers if they thought it increased the bottom line, so it's not totally unexpected that the game features branding for cell phones and other various non-automotive sponsorship at every turn. I got this one from a friend for $20, and even then I feel a little used after I finish a play session.
Even Microsoft gets in on the act. Travelodge advertises in Project Gotham Racing 3. The Samsung logo is emblazoned on the menu system for Perfect Dark Zero. What do shitty motels have to do with road racing? What do cheap Korean electronics have to do with cyberpunk mercenary spies? Not a goddamn thing, that's what, and I resent their presence in the game.
I wouldn't mind the advertising barrage in gaming so much if it helped keep the cost of the product down. I know that development costs are skyrocketing and I'm not unsympathetic, but charging $10 more for a game while stuffing it full of advertising is a naked cash grab, and I resent it. It's tempting to say that publishers can't have it both ways, but that's not true. They can have it both ways, because I'm a fairly typical high-income gamer, and I'm nowhere near pissed enough to stop buying their products. Yet. I'm still playing every game I've listed in this post, and odds are good I'll be playing their sequels in a year or two.
So let's say this: I don't want publishers to have it both ways, but I still bend over, hold my ass open, and take it. I resent them for it, and it builds ill will in me toward them, and over time it disenfranchises me with the hobby as a whole. I'm a lifetime gamer with lots of disposable income, and this commodification and packaging of my eyeballs is slowly turning me off on the entire experience. I can't be the only one.
I try. I'm more than willing to meet site operators halfway. I understand that they're selling content to generate clicks, and as long as they're fair, I'm willing to click a few banners here & there.
But I'm only willing to go halfway. If I see a blinking or highly animated image that distracts my attention away from the content I've actually come to see, I have no qualms about ad-blocking. I adblock only if the ads are so annoying that I can't ignore them anymore. I tried really hard at the Onion's AVCLUB site, for instance, because it's one of my favorites. But then they had to go and start serving interstitials, and animating the hell out of everything.
Gone.
Anandtech's obnoxious flash ads?
Gone.
Slashdot? Stays.
This does not apply to ads served by the major conglomerates. Doubleclick etc. are in my Adblock file and will stay there, no matter what.
Just when I thought we'd finally standardized on a naming convention that nobody could easily mis-spell, now I'm going to have to put up with a hojillion references to "lightening."
Many of your early games for Microprose were built around the concept of taking several robust mini-game concepts and weaving them together into a coherent whole (I'm thinking in particular of Pirates! and Covert Action, although there are others that fit this description). Was this a conscious design decision? Were you looking for interesting play mechanics to build games around, or did you start with the concept (Pirates! Spies!) and then work from a list of pirate-like and spy-like activities?
Conversely, when one of these mini-games doesn't work out like you'd hoped, do you cut them? A lot of people reacted negatively to the dancing game in the new Pirates! re-make, for instance, and I hear a general consensus among gamers that the mini-game build around sacking a city lacks depth. How hard is it to cut one of these games? What do you do when the mechanic just doesn't feel right?
Is it just me, or is Dvorak sub-par when compared to most of the other bloggers out there cracking wise about tech issues?
He was so much more interesting before there was Livejournal.
Listless crowd?
on
PAX05 Writeup
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· Score: 5, Informative
There's a great forum thread going on at the Penny-Arcade site about what lameasses the concert crowd was. Apparently every time anyone tried to rock out, they were given a big ol' social beatdown by the crowd, who just wanted to play their game boys and nod in time.
What blows my mind is that the guy who calls them on it is getting chewed out, by and large, by the other members of the forum. I mean, far be it from me to tell you how to enjoy a concert, but wow. It's like these people have never been to a concert or something.
I was contemplating a PAX trip next year, but if this is the kind of crowd PAX is attracting, I can't say I'm particularly enthused about attending. I mean, I know it's nerdcore, but it just strikes me as impolite to sit there and play Nintendogs while someone's performing on stage for you.
I just saw a great flash-based Captcha designed to combat just this sort of attack. The test was composed of white text on a white background. Colored shapes of various sizes swirled in the background behind the text in a pseudo-random pattern, and the text was visible or obfuscated depending on whether there was a shape behind it at the moment. After watching it for a few minutes to see if there were any obvious flaws, I noticed that the entire phrase was never visible all at once.
A little patience was required, but I was able to verify in less than 10 seconds. Animation seems to be very useful for this kind of application.
1) XBox launch date: November 8th, 2001. 2) KOTOR release date: July 16th, 2003.
Almost 2 years after the XBox launch. Knights may have been buggy, but it was most definitely not a launch title.
Further, Knights didn't crash in the way you described. I've played hundreds of hours of it (beaten it on both the light and dark side), and while it wasn't perfect, the engine didn't just crash randomly.
The only serious showstopper bug that everyone can agree upon involved wearing the invisibility belt, and then entering a scripted conversation. The character with which you were speaking would often fail his saving throw vs. your invisibility, and would not continue the conversation, forcing players to restart.
The XBox launch had its faults (lack of must-play titles, uncomfortable controllers, no third-party peripherals, shitty thompson DVD drives), as did KOTOR, but the one has little to do with the other.
Right after I heard about the product announcement a couple of months ago, I went to the local game chain retailer and asked if they were taking pre-orders, but they said no. They said there'd be some advertising when they were.
I went back last week, and their pre-orders are *gone*. All of them. It's impossible to pre-order a launch day XBox through EB or Gamestop, from what I've been told. I'll either have to hold my nose and support Wal-Mart, or hold my nose and wait in line outside a Best Buy all night like I did for a PS2.
And the problem with waiting in line outside a Best Buy all night for a videogame machine, is the kind of people who wait in line outside a Best Buy all night for a videogame machine. I can't stand my own kind.
A little more co-ordination on the pre-order availability would have been awesome, guys.
Anyone know of a brick & mortar retailer where launch day pre-orders are still available?
(No, I'm not interested in replies saying "Just wait," "LOL PS3," "Sean Burke lawsuit o gnos!" or other such purchase discouragement. The launch day purchase decision has been made, I'm just looking now for the least painful way to get my grubby little hands on one on launch day.)
There are several titles I was looking forward to purchasing this year that I won't be buying now that I know they have Massive's ad technology in them. I was about to buy SWAT 4 when the first patch was released, and among the features in the patch changelist was this little gem:
Added Massive Streaming Ad Support
My knee-jerk reaction was that once I've paid the $50 for a game, that's it. I've already made my contribution to the publisher's revenue stream. I am not a recurring revenue resource, and I resent being treated as one. I decided based solely on the inclusion of Massive streaming ad support not to purchase SWAT 4, even though SWAT 3 is one of my all-time favorite games.
On the other hand, Massive's front page has screenshots from the latest Splinter Cell, which I've played without really noticing the ads at all. In fact, things like the faces of soda machines make great places to put advertising in such a way that the game feels more immersive, not less. If Massive puts their ads in places that make sense contextually, like on television sets in-game, then I guess I won't have any real problem with it as long as I can destroy the TV.
The idea that they can track impressions is certainly something else entirely. I wonder if anyone has started a Massive Blacklist yet for the hosts file? It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to do. Just fire up a network sniffer, start up your Massive-infected game in singleplayer, and walk by a couple of in-game billboards. Exit the game, and see what outbound connections you made during the play session.
Why are we even paying attention to this?
on
Hot Coffee Cooling Off
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Fact: The developers at Rockstar thought that it might be fun to include a sex mini-game. Fact: This mini-game was built, but ultimately scrapped. Maybe this was because it pushed the game over the line with the ESRB, or maybe it's because the mini-game is not really funny and not very fun. Fact: There is no sex mini-game included in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as shipped.
I repeat: There is no sex mini-game included in Grant Theft Auto: San Andreas as shipped. I've played the entire game, end to end, and while it does let me beat people down with a giant black dildo if I feel so inclined, the sex mini-game is just not in there.
That is not to say that the code for the sex mini-game is not on the DVD, but it is not in the game. This is an important distinction. If the mini-game is present on the DVD, but there is no way to access it while playing the game as shipped, then that sequence isn't really part of the game, any more than a deleted scene on a DVD is part of the movie.
It is common practice in software projects to strip out features as the release date approaches. Maybe the feature just doesn't work right, or it does work right but isn't really as good as everyone thought it would be, or maybe it introduces bugs, or maybe it pisses off media decency watchdogs. For whatever reason, features are disabled. This is usually done not by deleting the feature from the project entirely, but rather by deleting the calls that activate it. Deleting large chunks of code carries a huge risk in the later stages of software development, because it's easy to make a mistake that will break the build. If someone makes a mistake and deletes the wrong class file when they're taking out un-used code for something like, say, a sex mini-game that management has decided not to include in the final product, they could all too easily cause just such a problem.
Breaking the build is a Very Bad Thing, especially in gigantic projects like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which cost $50 million to develop and employed hundreds of people. At the end of the software development cycle, new builds of the program are made every night. These are copied and sent out to teams of testers, sometimes hundreds of them, who run through the program and look for bugs. These bugs get fixed, a new build is made that night incorporating those bugfixes, and the cycle continues.
If the build is broken, nobody works. If the testers don't get a new build, then they can't find new bugs, because they're still running into the old ones. If the developers don't get a new build, they can't fix other bugs, because they don't know how their changes will interact with changes they've already made. Everyone winds up sitting idle, getting some sleep, talking to their significant others, and maybe realizing that working 20 hours a day for 7 days a week at substandard wages sucks. Maybe they begin to question their sexless and empty lives, and maybe they start chatting with each other about how a union would fix all this mess before their jobs are shipped off to China, and it's too late to do anything about it.
Morale suffers, the whole project slips, deadlines are missed, analysts revise your publisher's stock downwards, and you suddenly need a new job.
So instead of making a major change like deleting the entire mini-game, it's much safer to make a small change, like deleting the parts of code that start the mini-game. If there is no way to invoke certain parts of a program, then those parts may as well not exist. This is so common in software projects, both for business and entertainment programs, that the current controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas seems from the perspective of the software world like a tempest in a teapot. Grand Theft Auto III had code for a half-completed fourth island on the DVD. Knights of the Old Republic II, which is notorious for its terrible and seemingly unfinished ending, had the voice acting and artwork for
Hope you like giving away your hard-earned works for free to Fox:
By posting Content on any public area of MySpace.com, you automatically grant as well as represent and warrant that you have the right to grant to MySpace.com, an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute such information and content to MySpace.com and that MySpace.com has the right to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
That's a very nice little starting point, but the article has no depth. A little meat, even a mention of connecting Windows 2k/XP desktops to an OpenLDAP system via SAMBA for authentication, rather than relying on an Active Directory, for example, would be welcome.
And for the record: Active Directory design isn't, IMHO, harder than the design of any other well-administered LDAP-based authentication system. Further, I'll say that Microsoft has done a fantastic job of making the administration tools transparent and easy-to-use, and the integration of Exchange mail servers & NIS authentication via Services For Unix into the same tool is icing on the cake. Sure, the per-server licensing fees aren't cheap, but you do get what you pay for in this instance.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Windows 3.1 or '95, so I could still talk him through jumping to a DOS window and hand-editing the ini file with the EDIT program. Now imagine trying to do that when you're about as honky as they come, and your main exposure to black culture was radio-friendly hip-hop and a late-night showing of New Jack City on HBO.
It was one of the odder moments in my life.
In the late 90's, Packard Bell disappeared. Most people assumed they were finally taken down by their own incompetence, but what really happened was this:
Packard Bell was able to manufacture their systems so cheaply because they had rent-free facilities on a disused airbase in Sacramento, CA. NEC, wishing to enter the end-user/retail sector and covetous of this manufacturing facility, bought 49% of Packard Bell, re-named them to NEC Consumer Systems Division, and put a clause in the contract that allowed them to gain ownership of the other 2% if certain milestones were not reached. Then, NEC seeded the CSD division with internal executives, who made sure those milestones would never be reached. Mission accomplished, NEC now had their manufacturing facilities rent-free, and they shut down the consumer systems division, no longer willing to compete with Dell & Gateway.
I was one of the end-user technical support nerds for NEC-CSD, and wow did we get some crazies. Among my favorites were the black supremacist who refused to speak to me because I sounded white, so I put him on hold and then picked up a few minutes later with a badly faked "black" accent ("Yo what up? This is NEC, I'm Johnson. How can I help you?"). His issue? He'd set all of his Windows desktop color settings to black - backgrounds, borders, buttons, and text - and was calling to complain that his monitor was broken, because all he could see what his mouse cursor (which he was angry at for being white).
Also good was the hung-over stoner who'd woken up to find that he'd thrown up IN his monitor. No, sorry, that's not covered under warranty, but could you tell me how you did it?
But the best call didn't even happen to me, it happened to Chuck. One slow afternoon Chuck came around and motioned for everyone not currently on a call to follow him. We gathered around his cube and he muted the input on his phone, put on his headset, and then piped it to the speaker.
Chuck: "Hello sir, I have my supervisor here with us, could you please repeat for us what you told me?"
Cust: "Well, this laptop is junk, and I want a new one."
Chuck: "Okay, can you talk me through what's wrong?"
Cust: "My modem wouldn't connect, and I got really angry, so I pulled the card out and snapped it in half. Then I threw it across the room."
Chuck: "So your modem is no longer functional?"
Cust: "My computer's busted and I want a new one."
Chuck: "Okay, so how did we go from broken modem card to broken laptop?"
Cust: "So I calm down and I figure I can fix this modem. I got the pieces, and I figured out how they were supposed to go. Then I superglued them together and put them in a vice clamp overnight."
Chuck: "Okay. What happened next?"
Cust: "Well, I put it in my computer and tried to dial out to the internet again, but it still didn't work. Then I tried to pull out the card, but it got stuck. I had to use needle-nose pliers to pull the damn thing out, and I only got half of it. The other half's stuck in there, and now my computer's ruined! Your computer is junk, and I want a new laptop!"
At this point, the twenty or so people gathered around Chuck's cube were in hysterics. Chuck reached over, released the mute so that the man on the other end of the phone could hear us, left it open for a few seconds, and hung up on him.
man, I remember the last console to ship with support for 7 controllers, advanced video playback capability, strong multimedia features, and a > $500 pricetag.
I wonder what all those people who used to work at 3DO are doing now.
Oh, they're working for Sony.
(All snark aside, mad props to RJ Mical, Dave Needle, and David Morse. These guys together have come up with some of the best-designed and least well-received pieces of videogame hardware conceived in the last 20 years. They deserve better than the market gave them.)
What's with all the gnashing of teeth, and wringing of hands? This happens all the time in the console world. The Playstation purchased on launch day in 1995 was not the same beast as the Playstation bought in 1999. Chip consolidation and improved manufacturing techniques let Sony lower the price on the Playstation as they put the hardware through different revisions. But you wouldn't know if if you didn't read the model numbers.
Similarly, Nintendo has done this with the GameCube, dropping the component/progressive output video port from later models. Sony's continued the process well into the Playstation 2's lifecycle, even before the radical re-design of the PS Two (and for that matter, the 2000 re-design of the PS One). In fact, Nintendo's been doing this since at least the SNES, and Sega's been doing it since the Master System. This kind of thing is old hat.
Microsoft was never able to do this with the original XBox because they didn't own all the silicon inside. Improvements in manufacturing techniques meant Intel and nVidia could sell XBox CPU's and GPU's to Microsoft at a higher margin, but Microsoft didn't directly reap the benefits of improving technology as the component pieces of its system got cheaper.
Not so this time. Microsoft made sure they owned the entire XBox 360 end-to-end, and they're going to leverage it to make the product more profitable as market forces drive the retail price of the machine down. This is all about manufacturing cheaper XBox 360's. It's not about stepping up the CPU speed, it's about cheaper consoles and higher margins, and it's nothing that every other player in the market hasn't done before.
So chill out, y'all. There's no conspiracy, and nobody's getting screwed.
Still missing, the two best titles on the console:
Psychonauts
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath
Damn.
It's not about the quality of the films available. The films are about as good as they've always been, to be honest. That is to say, they're shit, but they're entertaining, so I'll keep going.
It's the theater-going experience itself that has become intolerable. I'd go back to the movies in a heartbeat if I knew of a theater that had the following policies:
1) Theater owners need to hire large, hardass, bouncer-type stone cold ushers. If you talk, you're out. Cell phone? Out. Laser pointer? Out. Kick the seat in front of you? Out. Smartass who yells comments, thinking he's the next Joel Robinson or Mike Nelson? Out. If you're bothering the people around you in any way, instead of watching the film quietly or respectfully (or making out quietly, that's always cool by me), then you're out on your ass, no refund, and cry me a fucking river.
2) Theater owners must enforce the MPAA ratings. Don't let kids buy tickets for The Shaggy Dog and then sneak into Saw II. They ruin it. Check IDs at the box office, and check tickets at the door of the auditorium, and bingo, no more problem. I tried to see the Exorcist re-release 5 years ago, and it was ruined by a theater full of teenagers who were all holding tickets to see the latest g-rated insult to IQs over 50. I haven't seen a horror film in the theater since.
3) Theater owners must stop showing advertisements before a film starts for products that are not other films. People resent paying $12 to be a captive audience for 30 minutes of television commercials.
Bonus un-necessary but IT WOULD BE AWESOME policies:
4) Theater audiences must SHUT THE FUCK UP. In the last ten years or so, I've noticed a disturbing trend. Audiences seem no longer content to just laugh at the funny parts or cry at the sad parts. They now must treat a film as if someone is filming a sitcom, and they are part of the live studio audience. Here's a news flash, people: IT'S A FUCKING MOVIE. IT CAN'T HEAR YOU. Stop clapping and cheering when the Warner Brothers logo shows up at the beginning of the next Batman film. Stop applauding when Neo beats down Agent Smith. Definitely STOP GIVING THE CREDITS A STANDING OVATION. What, are you fucking retarded or something? What the hell is wrong with you people?
3) A liquor license, even just wine-beer, for R-rated evening showings after 8pm. I'd love to be able to drink a cold one while I'm watching a movie in a room full of grownups. I already have a local theater that does this with second-run films, but I'd love it if I could get this kind of service in a first-run show with a kick-ass sound system.
Nonsense! It will launch on-time, have supercomputer calculation capabilites for home entertainment, and will instill discipline in our children and adults alike. Everyone will know discipline! To get a PS3, we will work more hours to buy one.
We must be careful, though, lest skynet become self-aware. If processors of high performance and wide bandwidth like the Cell were linked together without sufficient security, a worldwide system crash could occur with one attack!
Seriously though, the day I got home and found out my PS2 games looked worse than my Dreamcast games (after waiting all night in the rain to get one, no less) was bitter indeed. Don't believe a single thing Sony says about their hardware. It's all lies.
Fluffy article or no, they're right. The achievements system is pure genius, because it adds public bragging rights to the concept of 100%'ing a game, and suddenly I'm interested. They've tacked a level grind onto every game out there, and it worked.
I'm totally addicted to 100%'ing the achievements in my games. I've spent hours scouring maps for hidden items so I could claim the elusive "game complete" achievement in Kameo. I routinely start every game on the hardest difficulty level so I can show off to others that I've done it. I spent 3 days with a checklist from GameFAQs finding hidden gaps in Tony Hawk. I played Gun 3 extra times so I could have credit for beating it on every difficulty level.
The system isn't perfect. Some games, like King Kong or give away achievement points like they're candy. I'm more proud of my 25-point "Big Cheese of the South Seas" achievement in Hexic HD than I am of the entire 1000 points credit I have for King Kong. Other games like Quake 4 have achievements that almost nobody will win (be #1 on the worldwide leaderboards). Some games give you a full set of achievements just for beating them. We'll see how things settle out.
A correction: $5000 should have been $1500. I'm high on crack. Please excuse me.
I love gaming. I've got a launch-day Dreamcast, PS2, XBox, Gamecube, and 360. I play the hell out of them. I spend over $5000 a year on videogames, but if this advertising trend continues, that number will drop to $0.
I hate advertising, especially captive audience advertising. I refuse to pay for the privilege of receiving someone's brand message. I don't go to the movies anymore, because I can't stand the advertising in front of films. I bought a TiVO when I subscribed to pay television, so I could skip ads. I stopped watching series on HBO when I found out that they received paid product placement for shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. I use adblock and other proxy tools to block banner advertising, and if a site finds a way to put a banner on my screen anyway, I never return to the site.
To get to the topic at hand, I should say that I have no problem paying $60 for a game, or even $50. Only the written word gives me better entertainment value. At even 10 hours (a short game), I'm paying $6 / hour for entertainment (well, plus the amortized cost of the console, but over 5 years of hard play time this is basically negligible). That's a fine bargain.
I should amend this statement: I have no problem paying $10 extra for a new game if the costs of development are recouped through consumer purchases. Paying $10 more for Tony Hawk American Wasteland on the 360, a game that is so buggy that some of the in-game missions cannot completed, is an insult. Finding the game stuffed full of advertising for cell phones and energy drinks is such an affront that I am left feeling violated.
This trend continues across other games. Need For Speed: Most Wanted is an EA game, and everyone knows EA would whore their own mothers if they thought it increased the bottom line, so it's not totally unexpected that the game features branding for cell phones and other various non-automotive sponsorship at every turn. I got this one from a friend for $20, and even then I feel a little used after I finish a play session. Even Microsoft gets in on the act. Travelodge advertises in Project Gotham Racing 3. The Samsung logo is emblazoned on the menu system for Perfect Dark Zero. What do shitty motels have to do with road racing? What do cheap Korean electronics have to do with cyberpunk mercenary spies? Not a goddamn thing, that's what, and I resent their presence in the game.
I wouldn't mind the advertising barrage in gaming so much if it helped keep the cost of the product down. I know that development costs are skyrocketing and I'm not unsympathetic, but charging $10 more for a game while stuffing it full of advertising is a naked cash grab, and I resent it. It's tempting to say that publishers can't have it both ways, but that's not true. They can have it both ways, because I'm a fairly typical high-income gamer, and I'm nowhere near pissed enough to stop buying their products. Yet. I'm still playing every game I've listed in this post, and odds are good I'll be playing their sequels in a year or two.
So let's say this: I don't want publishers to have it both ways, but I still bend over, hold my ass open, and take it. I resent them for it, and it builds ill will in me toward them, and over time it disenfranchises me with the hobby as a whole. I'm a lifetime gamer with lots of disposable income, and this commodification and packaging of my eyeballs is slowly turning me off on the entire experience. I can't be the only one.
I try. I'm more than willing to meet site operators halfway. I understand that they're selling content to generate clicks, and as long as they're fair, I'm willing to click a few banners here & there.
But I'm only willing to go halfway. If I see a blinking or highly animated image that distracts my attention away from the content I've actually come to see, I have no qualms about ad-blocking. I adblock only if the ads are so annoying that I can't ignore them anymore. I tried really hard at the Onion's AVCLUB site, for instance, because it's one of my favorites. But then they had to go and start serving interstitials, and animating the hell out of everything.
Gone.
Anandtech's obnoxious flash ads?
Gone.
Slashdot? Stays.
This does not apply to ads served by the major conglomerates. Doubleclick etc. are in my Adblock file and will stay there, no matter what.
Just when I thought we'd finally standardized on a naming convention that nobody could easily mis-spell, now I'm going to have to put up with a hojillion references to "lightening."
Sid,
Many of your early games for Microprose were built around the concept of taking several robust mini-game concepts and weaving them together into a coherent whole (I'm thinking in particular of Pirates! and Covert Action, although there are others that fit this description). Was this a conscious design decision? Were you looking for interesting play mechanics to build games around, or did you start with the concept (Pirates! Spies!) and then work from a list of pirate-like and spy-like activities?
Conversely, when one of these mini-games doesn't work out like you'd hoped, do you cut them? A lot of people reacted negatively to the dancing game in the new Pirates! re-make, for instance, and I hear a general consensus among gamers that the mini-game build around sacking a city lacks depth. How hard is it to cut one of these games? What do you do when the mechanic just doesn't feel right?
Is it just me, or is Dvorak sub-par when compared to most of the other bloggers out there cracking wise about tech issues?
He was so much more interesting before there was Livejournal.
There's a great forum thread going on at the Penny-Arcade site about what lameasses the concert crowd was. Apparently every time anyone tried to rock out, they were given a big ol' social beatdown by the crowd, who just wanted to play their game boys and nod in time.
What blows my mind is that the guy who calls them on it is getting chewed out, by and large, by the other members of the forum. I mean, far be it from me to tell you how to enjoy a concert, but wow. It's like these people have never been to a concert or something.
I was contemplating a PAX trip next year, but if this is the kind of crowd PAX is attracting, I can't say I'm particularly enthused about attending. I mean, I know it's nerdcore, but it just strikes me as impolite to sit there and play Nintendogs while someone's performing on stage for you.
I just saw a great flash-based Captcha designed to combat just this sort of attack. The test was composed of white text on a white background. Colored shapes of various sizes swirled in the background behind the text in a pseudo-random pattern, and the text was visible or obfuscated depending on whether there was a shape behind it at the moment. After watching it for a few minutes to see if there were any obvious flaws, I noticed that the entire phrase was never visible all at once.
A little patience was required, but I was able to verify in less than 10 seconds. Animation seems to be very useful for this kind of application.
Thank you for the clarification.
Nice try spreading the FUD:
1) XBox launch date: November 8th, 2001.
2) KOTOR release date: July 16th, 2003.
Almost 2 years after the XBox launch. Knights may have been buggy, but it was most definitely not a launch title.
Further, Knights didn't crash in the way you described. I've played hundreds of hours of it (beaten it on both the light and dark side), and while it wasn't perfect, the engine didn't just crash randomly.
The only serious showstopper bug that everyone can agree upon involved wearing the invisibility belt, and then entering a scripted conversation. The character with which you were speaking would often fail his saving throw vs. your invisibility, and would not continue the conversation, forcing players to restart.
The XBox launch had its faults (lack of must-play titles, uncomfortable controllers, no third-party peripherals, shitty thompson DVD drives), as did KOTOR, but the one has little to do with the other.
Right after I heard about the product announcement a couple of months ago, I went to the local game chain retailer and asked if they were taking pre-orders, but they said no. They said there'd be some advertising when they were.
I went back last week, and their pre-orders are *gone*. All of them. It's impossible to pre-order a launch day XBox through EB or Gamestop, from what I've been told. I'll either have to hold my nose and support Wal-Mart, or hold my nose and wait in line outside a Best Buy all night like I did for a PS2.
And the problem with waiting in line outside a Best Buy all night for a videogame machine, is the kind of people who wait in line outside a Best Buy all night for a videogame machine. I can't stand my own kind.
A little more co-ordination on the pre-order availability would have been awesome, guys.
Anyone know of a brick & mortar retailer where launch day pre-orders are still available?
(No, I'm not interested in replies saying "Just wait," "LOL PS3," "Sean Burke lawsuit o gnos!" or other such purchase discouragement. The launch day purchase decision has been made, I'm just looking now for the least painful way to get my grubby little hands on one on launch day.)
Is... is that Gravity Kills I heard in the background at the end of the trailer?
Holy 1997, Batman.
There are several titles I was looking forward to purchasing this year that I won't be buying now that I know they have Massive's ad technology in them. I was about to buy SWAT 4 when the first patch was released, and among the features in the patch changelist was this little gem:
My knee-jerk reaction was that once I've paid the $50 for a game, that's it. I've already made my contribution to the publisher's revenue stream. I am not a recurring revenue resource, and I resent being treated as one. I decided based solely on the inclusion of Massive streaming ad support not to purchase SWAT 4, even though SWAT 3 is one of my all-time favorite games.
On the other hand, Massive's front page has screenshots from the latest Splinter Cell, which I've played without really noticing the ads at all. In fact, things like the faces of soda machines make great places to put advertising in such a way that the game feels more immersive, not less. If Massive puts their ads in places that make sense contextually, like on television sets in-game, then I guess I won't have any real problem with it as long as I can destroy the TV.
The idea that they can track impressions is certainly something else entirely. I wonder if anyone has started a Massive Blacklist yet for the hosts file? It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to do. Just fire up a network sniffer, start up your Massive-infected game in singleplayer, and walk by a couple of in-game billboards. Exit the game, and see what outbound connections you made during the play session.
Fact: The developers at Rockstar thought that it might be fun to include a sex mini-game. Fact: This mini-game was built, but ultimately scrapped. Maybe this was because it pushed the game over the line with the ESRB, or maybe it's because the mini-game is not really funny and not very fun. Fact: There is no sex mini-game included in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as shipped.
I repeat: There is no sex mini-game included in Grant Theft Auto: San Andreas as shipped. I've played the entire game, end to end, and while it does let me beat people down with a giant black dildo if I feel so inclined, the sex mini-game is just not in there.
That is not to say that the code for the sex mini-game is not on the DVD, but it is not in the game. This is an important distinction. If the mini-game is present on the DVD, but there is no way to access it while playing the game as shipped, then that sequence isn't really part of the game, any more than a deleted scene on a DVD is part of the movie.
It is common practice in software projects to strip out features as the release date approaches. Maybe the feature just doesn't work right, or it does work right but isn't really as good as everyone thought it would be, or maybe it introduces bugs, or maybe it pisses off media decency watchdogs. For whatever reason, features are disabled. This is usually done not by deleting the feature from the project entirely, but rather by deleting the calls that activate it. Deleting large chunks of code carries a huge risk in the later stages of software development, because it's easy to make a mistake that will break the build. If someone makes a mistake and deletes the wrong class file when they're taking out un-used code for something like, say, a sex mini-game that management has decided not to include in the final product, they could all too easily cause just such a problem.
Breaking the build is a Very Bad Thing, especially in gigantic projects like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which cost $50 million to develop and employed hundreds of people. At the end of the software development cycle, new builds of the program are made every night. These are copied and sent out to teams of testers, sometimes hundreds of them, who run through the program and look for bugs. These bugs get fixed, a new build is made that night incorporating those bugfixes, and the cycle continues.
If the build is broken, nobody works. If the testers don't get a new build, then they can't find new bugs, because they're still running into the old ones. If the developers don't get a new build, they can't fix other bugs, because they don't know how their changes will interact with changes they've already made. Everyone winds up sitting idle, getting some sleep, talking to their significant others, and maybe realizing that working 20 hours a day for 7 days a week at substandard wages sucks. Maybe they begin to question their sexless and empty lives, and maybe they start chatting with each other about how a union would fix all this mess before their jobs are shipped off to China, and it's too late to do anything about it.
Morale suffers, the whole project slips, deadlines are missed, analysts revise your publisher's stock downwards, and you suddenly need a new job.
So instead of making a major change like deleting the entire mini-game, it's much safer to make a small change, like deleting the parts of code that start the mini-game. If there is no way to invoke certain parts of a program, then those parts may as well not exist. This is so common in software projects, both for business and entertainment programs, that the current controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas seems from the perspective of the software world like a tempest in a teapot. Grand Theft Auto III had code for a half-completed fourth island on the DVD. Knights of the Old Republic II, which is notorious for its terrible and seemingly unfinished ending, had the voice acting and artwork for
Hope you like giving away your hard-earned works for free to Fox: By posting Content on any public area of MySpace.com, you automatically grant as well as represent and warrant that you have the right to grant to MySpace.com, an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute such information and content to MySpace.com and that MySpace.com has the right to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
If Zazzle can't even get Your/you're right on a front-facing, high-profile license site, I don't think I really want to trust them with my money.
That's a very nice little starting point, but the article has no depth. A little meat, even a mention of connecting Windows 2k/XP desktops to an OpenLDAP system via SAMBA for authentication, rather than relying on an Active Directory, for example, would be welcome.
And for the record: Active Directory design isn't, IMHO, harder than the design of any other well-administered LDAP-based authentication system. Further, I'll say that Microsoft has done a fantastic job of making the administration tools transparent and easy-to-use, and the integration of Exchange mail servers & NIS authentication via Services For Unix into the same tool is icing on the cake. Sure, the per-server licensing fees aren't cheap, but you do get what you pay for in this instance.