Just to clarify, the guild in question was not recruiting only LGBT players, it was recruiting people friendly to LGBT people. I said it before on the last thread about this topic, Blizzard has a policy against descrimination based on sexuality, and this guild was essentially recruiting people who followed this rule. Blizzard then penalized the guild for emphasizing one of Blizzard's own rules. It's ridiculous on its face.
Just to clarify, Blizzard was not and has never challenged the EXISTENCE of such a guild, nor has it ever penalized members for belonging to such a guild. The only thing that has happened is that Blizzard has issued a warning against public recruitment of "gay friendly" (or any other real-world-persecuted-minority-friendly) in the chat channels. They have explicitly encouraged recruitment through other means, such as the forums and private websites.
Toy Story 2 was meant to be straight-to-video. It turned out so good that they released it at the theatres. That was why it didn't count - according to Disney it was a "straight to video" release that just happened to end up at the movies.
Close, but not quite like that. Yes, Toy Story 2 was originally planned as a DTV (direct-to-video) sequel done by a small team at Pixar. But during production, they basically scrapped the whole movie because they didn't like it. Toy Story 2 became the focus of the whole company; a new script was written, and everything that had been done for the DTV version was thrown away.
The redesigned Toy Story 2 was always meant to be theatrical-quality. It's not as if Pixar finished it and then were pleasantly surprised by the results.
As a low-level character on a different server, I'm very disappointed. I had been donating what I could (copper bars, linen bandages, lower-level stuff). I figured it was a community thing and, even though the dungeons will be old news by the time I finally got there, I would at least be helping the world event. But now I find out that, despite helping, I'm not allowed to witness the event? Even if I managed to survive walking the way there? My last linen bandage has been donated.
Feel free to witness the event... on the server you normally play on. This is an issue on the Medivh server because thousands and thousands of people have created level 1 alts so to watch the event happen for the first time.
It would have been nice for Blizzard to have forseen this, but it will only be a problem on the first few servers to unlock the event. Once someone records a video clip and sends it around, everybody will lose interest and there won't be the need to remove low-level players from that one zone.
Also, I should point out that the event is global, and will probably cause interesting things to happen in other zones as well.
False. The exploitable Windows behavior is different than Wine. SetAbortProc is a terrible idea by design, yes. But the way in which this particular exploit works is (from what I'm hearing, not verified first-hand) based on special-case behavior in Windows that only executes when a very specific condition is met which could never be met by a WMF file which matched the specs.
Because of the particular behavior (spawning a new thread with the execution point set to the next byte of data data) it would be very hard for Microsoft to argue that this was not an intentional back door.
As a PC gaming fan, you buy new games. You'd be surprised that many people do NOT buy new games. They only buy the games that they have heard other people say good things about over a long period of time.
John Q Public is too dumb or apathetic to find out about what new games to buy for his 10-year-old son. But he might recognize an established name that's gotten positive word-of-mouth, see a new edition of it, and buy that.
This is why Madden is successful. This is why Tiger Woods is successful. This is why the Burnout games sel so well. It's why publishers talk in terms of "franchises".
Any company that's looking for long-term profit has no incentive to create new games just for the sake of being new. Properly managed franchises will always outsell new concepts.
(Whether or not franchises like Madden or Burnout are well-handled is a totally separate issue, but you certainly can't argue with them based on sales charts...)
Within the studios, this is common knowledge. It's the reason why Hollywood movies never turn a profit, as a rule. Every now and then you hear a story about how someone got screwed by agreeing to take less up front for a share of the profits. (Most recently, Peter Jackson is suing New Line for cooking the books on the LotR movies.)
Hollywood accounting is like Enron strung out on crystal meth. All the sliminess with twice the crazy.
This is an old game. Do you really think that companies spend $100+ million on a movie budget? There are many countries, like Germany, where movie investments become tax write-offs.
Only German national productions can quality for the tax rebate. Hollywood *loves* this trick: sell the production rights to a German company, and lease them back immediately, with the option to buy out the lease when the movie hits theaters.
I've heard it said that Tomb Raider was made for under $9 million, excluding salaries. The "official" budget on paper was ten times that amount. Where did the rest of the money go? Back into the investors' pockets, of course, but now completely tax-deductable.
Do you know why Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was such a big deal? It was made for practically nothing. The stated $30-mil figure was totally bogus. Thanks to some budget manipulation, it turned a profit for the production company long before the first reel was shipped. Any profits from theaters or DVD were just icing on the cake.
Asian games tend to support pay-by-usage and/or micropayments to unlock content. There is no technical reason why this isn't done in the states; it is just a cultural difference. North American publishers have done small-scale tests and they do not believe that there is a large market for pay-by-usage or micropayments in the US.
Case in point: World of Warcraft is pay-by-the-minute in China, and the client is a free download as opposed to a $50 boxed CD set.
Yeah, I guess I'd agree with that. Pretty good entertainment at the time, but not much for long-term replay value. Then again, that charge could be leveled at about 98% of all the games out there. (Doom 3, anyone?)
Your last statement is right on the money, though: EA will never come up an instant classic. I don't think that they're set up in a way that's capable of producing one. I guess the right analogy is that they have a solid batting average but never swing for the fences.
The rule should be: Avoid movie/tv games made by EA.
I dunno, their Lord of the Rings games are really good (except for that Third Age RPG), and some of their Bond games aren't bad either (Everything or Nothing was excellent, although not strictly a movie tie-in).
I think you mean: Avoid movie/tv games made by THQ or Activision.;)
Holy crap, a Microsoft-owned developer released a key Microsoft XBox 360 launch title to manufacturing... before Microsoft had a chance to give it the OK! I mean, this could have been a disaster.
This kind of extreme guts is why I love Microsoft! They're so hardcore! In fact this makes me want to buy another XBox 360.
Don't forget that the Vikings found America first, and Leibniz beat Newton independently to some principles of calculus (note, I said some, not all). It isn't about who invents something, it's about who markets it.
Off topic, but given that we talk about "derivatives" and "integration" and use those funny d and s symbols, I think Liebniz did a pretty good marketing job;)
This program is an efficient way to generate two source blocks with the same resulting MD5. This program does NOT allow you to match an arbitrary MD5 hash. That may come some day, but unless I've missed a very important paper somewhere, it has not happened yet.
This does not totally invalidate MD5 for verification. This attack still does not let you poison a torrent feed, etc, unless you are the author of the original source data and you engineered the data specifically to be vulnerable to this attack.
The Revolution will come with a "shell" that essentially converts the wand into a classic two-handed multi-button controller. I'd bet that most developers with cross-platform plans are targetting that.
Ni-Fi refers to Nintendo's protocol on top of 802.11b. In the same context, Wi-Fi is commonly used to refer to TCP/IP over 802.11b. (We could get pedantic about definitions, but try teaching the layer model to an average consumer...)
In that sense, the DS does not use Wi-Fi, but it does use 802.11b.
Valve is currently published by EA. Blizzard is published by Vivendi Universal. Raven and id are published by Activision (I think).
If you want to switch the topic to developers, then I agree, those guys are the best of the bunch. Then again, EA has some solid internal teams too -- Criterion (Burnout games), Maxis (SimCity, Sims, Spore), and Bond Team (Everything or Nothing, From Russia With Love).
All released this year. And for that matter, take another look at the sports games -- Madden is going stale, but "NBA Street v3" and "Fight Night: Round 2" are chart-toppers on Metacritic, with plenty of 100% reviews.
The myth is that EA gets away with crap because they are #1. The fact is that they are #1 because they are better than any other publisher in the industry. Period.
The "sweatshop" news is bullshit. Their new Los Angeles studio was a disaster, with bad management and worse practices, but they've cleaned it up now. I'd wager that people at EA are treated/better/ than at many other game companies.
EA takes number one when you consider game quality? Given the sheer number of crap they put out every year, their ranking should've gone way down simply due to poor reviews. The rest of the top 5 I can understand (Doom 3 boosted Activision's sales and the rest are first-party publishers.)
I call bullshit.
Maybe Activision has the odd quality title like "Doom 3", but also release total crap like "Fantastic Four", "Madagascar", and "Monster Garage". Each one of those titles is worse than anything EA put out last year.
Or maybe you're thinking of THQ? Probably not. They can publish all the Warhammer 40k games they want, they'll never live down "Big Mutha Truckers 2". And their Nickelodeon-licensed games are flat-out terrible (check the Metacritic scores -- I didn't know they could go that low).
Everybody loves to rag on EA, but when it comes down to facts, the fact is that they are the best publisher out there. EA consistently puts out solid 75+ games. Other companies dump crap on the marketplace whenever they can, and make up for it with one or two high-profile releases.
SThis is just like the "Pixel Shader 3.0" fakery that happened with Far Cry.
The only difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions is that they have disabled a lot of features on the 32-bit version. There is no reason why they could not look the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clarify, the guild in question was not recruiting only LGBT players, it was recruiting people friendly to LGBT people. I said it before on the last thread about this topic, Blizzard has a policy against descrimination based on sexuality, and this guild was essentially recruiting people who followed this rule. Blizzard then penalized the guild for emphasizing one of Blizzard's own rules. It's ridiculous on its face.
Just to clarify, Blizzard was not and has never challenged the EXISTENCE of such a guild, nor has it ever penalized members for belonging to such a guild. The only thing that has happened is that Blizzard has issued a warning against public recruitment of "gay friendly" (or any other real-world-persecuted-minority-friendly) in the chat channels. They have explicitly encouraged recruitment through other means, such as the forums and private websites.
Toy Story 2 was meant to be straight-to-video. It turned out so good that they released it at the theatres. That was why it didn't count - according to Disney it was a "straight to video" release that just happened to end up at the movies.
Close, but not quite like that. Yes, Toy Story 2 was originally planned as a DTV (direct-to-video) sequel done by a small team at Pixar. But during production, they basically scrapped the whole movie because they didn't like it. Toy Story 2 became the focus of the whole company; a new script was written, and everything that had been done for the DTV version was thrown away.
The redesigned Toy Story 2 was always meant to be theatrical-quality. It's not as if Pixar finished it and then were pleasantly surprised by the results.
As a low-level character on a different server, I'm very disappointed. I had been donating what I could (copper bars, linen bandages, lower-level stuff). I figured it was a community thing and, even though the dungeons will be old news by the time I finally got there, I would at least be helping the world event. But now I find out that, despite helping, I'm not allowed to witness the event? Even if I managed to survive walking the way there? My last linen bandage has been donated.
... on the server you normally play on. This is an issue on the Medivh server because thousands and thousands of people have created level 1 alts so to watch the event happen for the first time.
Feel free to witness the event
It would have been nice for Blizzard to have forseen this, but it will only be a problem on the first few servers to unlock the event. Once someone records a video clip and sends it around, everybody will lose interest and there won't be the need to remove low-level players from that one zone.
Also, I should point out that the event is global, and will probably cause interesting things to happen in other zones as well.
False. The exploitable Windows behavior is different than Wine. SetAbortProc is a terrible idea by design, yes. But the way in which this particular exploit works is (from what I'm hearing, not verified first-hand) based on special-case behavior in Windows that only executes when a very specific condition is met which could never be met by a WMF file which matched the specs.
Because of the particular behavior (spawning a new thread with the execution point set to the next byte of data data) it would be very hard for Microsoft to argue that this was not an intentional back door.
As a PC gaming fan, you buy new games. You'd be surprised that many people do NOT buy new games. They only buy the games that they have heard other people say good things about over a long period of time.
John Q Public is too dumb or apathetic to find out about what new games to buy for his 10-year-old son. But he might recognize an established name that's gotten positive word-of-mouth, see a new edition of it, and buy that.
This is why Madden is successful. This is why Tiger Woods is successful. This is why the Burnout games sel so well. It's why publishers talk in terms of "franchises".
Any company that's looking for long-term profit has no incentive to create new games just for the sake of being new. Properly managed franchises will always outsell new concepts.
(Whether or not franchises like Madden or Burnout are well-handled is a totally separate issue, but you certainly can't argue with them based on sales charts...)
Movie theaters don't have to, either. It's a purely voluntary, industry-regulated system. There are no laws involved.
This article explains it in better detail than I ever could:
http://www.slate.com/id/2117309/
Within the studios, this is common knowledge. It's the reason why Hollywood movies never turn a profit, as a rule. Every now and then you hear a story about how someone got screwed by agreeing to take less up front for a share of the profits. (Most recently, Peter Jackson is suing New Line for cooking the books on the LotR movies.)
Hollywood accounting is like Enron strung out on crystal meth. All the sliminess with twice the crazy.
This is an old game. Do you really think that companies spend $100+ million on a movie budget? There are many countries, like Germany, where movie investments become tax write-offs.
Only German national productions can quality for the tax rebate. Hollywood *loves* this trick: sell the production rights to a German company, and lease them back immediately, with the option to buy out the lease when the movie hits theaters.
I've heard it said that Tomb Raider was made for under $9 million, excluding salaries. The "official" budget on paper was ten times that amount. Where did the rest of the money go? Back into the investors' pockets, of course, but now completely tax-deductable.
Do you know why Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was such a big deal? It was made for practically nothing. The stated $30-mil figure was totally bogus. Thanks to some budget manipulation, it turned a profit for the production company long before the first reel was shipped. Any profits from theaters or DVD were just icing on the cake.
They don't even see these articles. The first symptom of whinerism is tunnel vision, the inability to notice things which don't match your opinion.
Asian games tend to support pay-by-usage and/or micropayments to unlock content. There is no technical reason why this isn't done in the states; it is just a cultural difference. North American publishers have done small-scale tests and they do not believe that there is a large market for pay-by-usage or micropayments in the US.
Case in point: World of Warcraft is pay-by-the-minute in China, and the client is a free download as opposed to a $50 boxed CD set.
Yeah, I guess I'd agree with that. Pretty good entertainment at the time, but not much for long-term replay value. Then again, that charge could be leveled at about 98% of all the games out there. (Doom 3, anyone?)
Your last statement is right on the money, though: EA will never come up an instant classic. I don't think that they're set up in a way that's capable of producing one. I guess the right analogy is that they have a solid batting average but never swing for the fences.
The rule should be: Avoid movie/tv games made by EA.
;)
I dunno, their Lord of the Rings games are really good (except for that Third Age RPG), and some of their Bond games aren't bad either (Everything or Nothing was excellent, although not strictly a movie tie-in).
I think you mean: Avoid movie/tv games made by THQ or Activision.
Holy crap, a Microsoft-owned developer released a key Microsoft XBox 360 launch title to manufacturing ... before Microsoft had a chance to give it the OK! I mean, this could have been a disaster.
This kind of extreme guts is why I love Microsoft! They're so hardcore! In fact this makes me want to buy another XBox 360.
Don't forget that the Vikings found America first, and Leibniz beat Newton independently to some principles of calculus (note, I said some, not all). It isn't about who invents something, it's about who markets it.
;)
Off topic, but given that we talk about "derivatives" and "integration" and use those funny d and s symbols, I think Liebniz did a pretty good marketing job
This program is an efficient way to generate two source blocks with the same resulting MD5. This program does NOT allow you to match an arbitrary MD5 hash. That may come some day, but unless I've missed a very important paper somewhere, it has not happened yet.
This does not totally invalidate MD5 for verification. This attack still does not let you poison a torrent feed, etc, unless you are the author of the original source data and you engineered the data specifically to be vulnerable to this attack.
The Revolution will come with a "shell" that essentially converts the wand into a classic two-handed multi-button controller. I'd bet that most developers with cross-platform plans are targetting that.
Ni-Fi refers to Nintendo's protocol on top of 802.11b. In the same context, Wi-Fi is commonly used to refer to TCP/IP over 802.11b. (We could get pedantic about definitions, but try teaching the layer model to an average consumer...)
In that sense, the DS does not use Wi-Fi, but it does use 802.11b.
What led you to that conclusion?
:)
Living in the Bay Area and having friends at different game companies, mostly
Valve is currently published by EA. Blizzard is published by Vivendi Universal. Raven and id are published by Activision (I think).
If you want to switch the topic to developers, then I agree, those guys are the best of the bunch. Then again, EA has some solid internal teams too -- Criterion (Burnout games), Maxis (SimCity, Sims, Spore), and Bond Team (Everything or Nothing, From Russia With Love).
EA has just as many "Doom 3"'s as any other company:
Battlefield 2 (PC)
Burnout Revenge
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath
All released this year. And for that matter, take another look at the sports games -- Madden is going stale, but "NBA Street v3" and "Fight Night: Round 2" are chart-toppers on Metacritic, with plenty of 100% reviews.
The myth is that EA gets away with crap because they are #1. The fact is that they are #1 because they are better than any other publisher in the industry. Period.
The "sweatshop" news is bullshit. Their new Los Angeles studio was a disaster, with bad management and worse practices, but they've cleaned it up now. I'd wager that people at EA are treated /better/ than at many other game companies.
I call bullshit.
Maybe Activision has the odd quality title like "Doom 3", but also release total crap like "Fantastic Four", "Madagascar", and "Monster Garage". Each one of those titles is worse than anything EA put out last year.
Or maybe you're thinking of THQ? Probably not. They can publish all the Warhammer 40k games they want, they'll never live down "Big Mutha Truckers 2". And their Nickelodeon-licensed games are flat-out terrible (check the Metacritic scores -- I didn't know they could go that low).
Everybody loves to rag on EA, but when it comes down to facts, the fact is that they are the best publisher out there. EA consistently puts out solid 75+ games. Other companies dump crap on the marketplace whenever they can, and make up for it with one or two high-profile releases.
There's always hope, as long as you can get your product mentioned on Slashdot...
I disagree with some points, agree with others, but in general, I *like* the game. Sorry that the author doesn't, but hey, to each his own.
Maybe it's not what he was hoping for, but that's not the same thing as being a failure.
SThis is just like the "Pixel Shader 3.0" fakery that happened with Far Cry.
The only difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions is that they have disabled a lot of features on the 32-bit version. There is no reason why they could not look the same.
Pure marketing BS.