Man, I totally feel your pain. I'm glad it's not just me hates that goddamn EA logo intro. Whispering child is obviously the new gravel-voiced man. And i do not like it! And aside from that, the whole EA ethos rags me. They want to make everything into some sort of extreme sport, all the better to extract money from the plebs.
Western society seems to have got itself into some sort of inescapable mindset, wherein appreciation can only be expressed in dollars, where it is not worth doing anything if there isn't "4. Profit!!" at the end of the line.
Surely artists create because they are driven to do so? Surely the fact that people enjoy it should be some sort of payment in itself? I'm not disputing that such people need some sort of financial incentive to free up their time to allow them to spend it creatively, but it really rags me when people like Eminem or Metallica, who are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, whine about people "stealing" their music. Maybe if you get to that stage it's time to examing your motivations behind your art - are you doing it for the cold hard cash, to massage your ego, or to bring your fans pleasure?
I download stuff. I also buy stuff. If I downloaded less, would I buy more? No. The only thing that would have me do that is if CDs and DVDs were cheaper.
Yeah, BT are really altruistic giving all this stuff away for free. Or not.
First I heard of this was when I was prompted to 'upgrade' my version of Yahoo Messenger to the U.K. version (sponsored by BT, there name was all over it). It nagged me everytime at start-up, so off I go and click Yes. Turns out the new version is just like the old version, except with all chatrooms and voice chatrooms *removed*. (Apparently Lycos UK have carved these up into a separate enterprise, some sort of godawful web-based "U Come here to flirt! A/S/L! Kisses! Love online" 'service')
But there is one extra button to make up for this. It is "BT Communicator". Make voice calls over the internet to a normal phone! If you are on BT interent. I am not. But it is free!
FOR THE FIRST MONTH ONLY.
All it is, is some trial offer trying to hook you in so you can be charged at a later date. So beware!
Aha! So that's what that damn DNAS thing is doing. I was wondering why the music always stopped or skipped when a game was doing this.. it is scanning your game CD to make sure it is genuine!
Yeah, GTA3 was definitely influenced by Driver, but it was what Driver *could* have been, had the dev team had some balls. I could just see their focus group "you can't have a game where you commit crimes and run over civilians! Let's have the paper thin excuse of him being an undercover cop, and commit the crimes anyway! And oh yeah, make the civvies leap dramatically out of the way unharmed no matter how fast you come at them!" That cop thing was ludicrous. Like when you're 'protecting' the president in the final mission but all the FBI guys are trying to kill you 'cos no-one has clued them in to the fact you're really a cop. Er, guys? That car you just kamikazied into a wall? You do know the president was in there? (If it had've been Bush I suppose...)
And then GTA3 comes along, and says "Fuck it" and it's a million times the game Driver was, and is so damn successful it destroys the Driver series forever and makes them look like the fence-sitting milque-toasts they are. I think GTA3 itself best summed it up, in the mission where you had to kill the rat in your organisation, an undercover cop who was a good 'driver' but 'hopeless out of the car'.
Driver, you were utterly, utterly owned by GTA3. Time to give up and think of what could have been.
Because console programmers seem to be so locked into the idea of "one common hardware platform" that they hard code everything to 400 vertical lines, 60 times a second. By the time it comes to do the PAL conversion they look at it and think, "well, we could go back redo the code.. or just slap a big black border top and bottom". Guess which one often wins out. Of course, the problem is, you've taken care of the extra screen real estate, but now you're only getting 50 fps. They look at it and think "well, we could go back and redo the logic... or just have it run 16.67% slower." And that, my friend, is the ingredients of a truly shitty PAL conversion, made all the more annoying by the fact it could have been avoided with a bit of forward planning in the design stages.
Launching first isn't necessarily an advantage you know. Look at the Dreamcast - it wasn't able to make a significant dent in the PS1 user-base, and when the PS2 came out it was seen as second-generation, giving the Dreamcast a dated feel of a "one and a half" generation console (yeah, yeah, I know this is wrong and the Dreamcast was as good as the PS2 in some areas, but this was not the perception). So, rather than getting the drop on the competition, they just allowed them time to study the move and counter more effectively. It seems to me that the PS2 has a similarly entrenched market grip at this time, which could make history repeat itself.
Whenever your mouth has just gone into unexpected spice overload, water is the WORST thing you can drink, be it from a vase or not. I speak from experience! I had a balti turn from merely over-hot to something that almost made me cry when I drank a big glass of water to try to cool off. I'm sure there is some scientific reason for that! Milk is good to cool down.
Well, I guess it's whatever sort of comedy you're into. The first few seasons I loved, they were keenly observed satires on American family life that just happened to be animated. The next few seasons were good too, but they were leaning more and more towards the "watch Homer go kerrrrazzyyy!" storylines. So, if you like wacky, these are great. Now, as you say, it's just a parade of celebrity cameos.
Yep, that about sums up the writers attitude. Do it right for a few seasons then get lazy-ass about it. Next to go was "We tried making it funny for the first few seasons, then found it was easier to just make it wacky"
This reminds me of that character Harry Enfield used to do of the guy who got incredibly worked up over things that hadn't even happened.
"That Neil Armstrong guy, he walked on the moon, well done, total hero, lovely fellow, great ambassador for humankind, but if he was to come round to my house and he was to kill my dog, I'd be like OI!!! ARMSTRONG!! NO!!!"
You know, I bet they don't even expect anyone to buy it. This is just their flagship model, in the same way car companies do double-figure production runs of crazy supercars. It's not for profit - it's for kudos and profile raising.
E.g., since we're talking about its creator, when I played the first Populous, once let it on auto-play, just to see how the computer plays. The "evil" guys were just minding their business, building their evil towns and planting their evil crops. The "good" guys suddenly built an army and slaughtered them all. Who was good and who was evil there?
I can explain. The "good" guys had water-tight intelligence that the evil-doers had the capacity to launch an attack in less than fifteen minutes, and had to pre-emptively go to war.
Slashdot Mirror
One step at a time, my friend. Target the worst abusers first.
Man, I totally feel your pain. I'm glad it's not just me hates that goddamn EA logo intro. Whispering child is obviously the new gravel-voiced man. And i do not like it!
And aside from that, the whole EA ethos rags me. They want to make everything into some sort of extreme sport, all the better to extract money from the plebs.
Western society seems to have got itself into some sort of inescapable mindset, wherein appreciation can only be expressed in dollars, where it is not worth doing anything if there isn't "4. Profit!!" at the end of the line.
Surely artists create because they are driven to do so? Surely the fact that people enjoy it should be some sort of payment in itself? I'm not disputing that such people need some sort of financial incentive to free up their time to allow them to spend it creatively, but it really rags me when people like Eminem or Metallica, who are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, whine about people "stealing" their music. Maybe if you get to that stage it's time to examing your motivations behind your art - are you doing it for the cold hard cash, to massage your ego, or to bring your fans pleasure?
I download stuff. I also buy stuff. If I downloaded less, would I buy more? No. The only thing that would have me do that is if CDs and DVDs were cheaper.
Yeah, BT are really altruistic giving all this stuff away for free. Or not.
First I heard of this was when I was prompted to 'upgrade' my version of Yahoo Messenger to the U.K. version (sponsored by BT, there name was all over it). It nagged me everytime at start-up, so off I go and click Yes.
Turns out the new version is just like the old version, except with all chatrooms and voice chatrooms *removed*. (Apparently Lycos UK have carved these up into a separate enterprise, some sort of godawful web-based "U Come here to flirt! A/S/L! Kisses! Love online" 'service')
But there is one extra button to make up for this. It is "BT Communicator". Make voice calls over the internet to a normal phone! If you are on BT interent. I am not.
But it is free!
FOR THE FIRST MONTH ONLY.
All it is, is some trial offer trying to hook you in so you can be charged at a later date. So beware!
Aha! So that's what that damn DNAS thing is doing. I was wondering why the music always stopped or skipped when a game was doing this.. it is scanning your game CD to make sure it is genuine!
LOL! If there ever was a archetypal case of 'money for old rope' then this surely would be it. Pathetic.
"lucky enough to own a penis"?
I didn't know Jeffrey Dahmer was into video games.
Am I the only one who loved X-2? Sure, it was money for old rope, but there was so much damn rope you could hardly complain.
I guess this must be some sort of ESRB "Royal Flush"?
Yeah, GTA3 was definitely influenced by Driver, but it was what Driver *could* have been, had the dev team had some balls.
I could just see their focus group "you can't have a game where you commit crimes and run over civilians! Let's have the paper thin excuse of him being an undercover cop, and commit the crimes anyway! And oh yeah, make the civvies leap dramatically out of the way unharmed no matter how fast you come at them!" That cop thing was ludicrous. Like when you're 'protecting' the president in the final mission but all the FBI guys are trying to kill you 'cos no-one has clued them in to the fact you're really a cop. Er, guys? That car you just kamikazied into a wall? You do know the president was in there? (If it had've been Bush I suppose...)
And then GTA3 comes along, and says "Fuck it" and it's a million times the game Driver was, and is so damn successful it destroys the Driver series forever and makes them look like the fence-sitting milque-toasts they are.
I think GTA3 itself best summed it up, in the mission where you had to kill the rat in your organisation, an undercover cop who was a good 'driver' but 'hopeless out of the car'.
Driver, you were utterly, utterly owned by GTA3. Time to give up and think of what could have been.
Well, blow me down! And here I thought they were running games at 50Hz in Europe just for the hell of it!
Because console programmers seem to be so locked into the idea of "one common hardware platform" that they hard code everything to 400 vertical lines, 60 times a second. By the time it comes to do the PAL conversion they look at it and think, "well, we could go back redo the code.. or just slap a big black border top and bottom".
Guess which one often wins out.
Of course, the problem is, you've taken care of the extra screen real estate, but now you're only getting 50 fps. They look at it and think "well, we could go back and redo the logic... or just have it run 16.67% slower."
And that, my friend, is the ingredients of a truly shitty PAL conversion, made all the more annoying by the fact it could have been avoided with a bit of forward planning in the design stages.
In communist China, playing this game is mandatory.
Launching first isn't necessarily an advantage you know. Look at the Dreamcast - it wasn't able to make a significant dent in the PS1 user-base, and when the PS2 came out it was seen as second-generation, giving the Dreamcast a dated feel of a "one and a half" generation console (yeah, yeah, I know this is wrong and the Dreamcast was as good as the PS2 in some areas, but this was not the perception).
So, rather than getting the drop on the competition, they just allowed them time to study the move and counter more effectively. It seems to me that the PS2 has a similarly entrenched market grip at this time, which could make history repeat itself.
The name's Dumass. Alexander Dumass.
(sorry)
Whenever your mouth has just gone into unexpected spice overload, water is the WORST thing you can drink, be it from a vase or not. I speak from experience! I had a balti turn from merely over-hot to something that almost made me cry when I drank a big glass of water to try to cool off.
I'm sure there is some scientific reason for that! Milk is good to cool down.
Well, I guess it's whatever sort of comedy you're into. The first few seasons I loved, they were keenly observed satires on American family life that just happened to be animated. The next few seasons were good too, but they were leaning more and more towards the "watch Homer go kerrrrazzyyy!" storylines. So, if you like wacky, these are great.
Now, as you say, it's just a parade of celebrity cameos.
Yep, that about sums up the writers attitude. Do it right for a few seasons then get lazy-ass about it. Next to go was "We tried making it funny for the first few seasons, then found it was easier to just make it wacky"
This reminds me of that character Harry Enfield used to do of the guy who got incredibly worked up over things that hadn't even happened.
"That Neil Armstrong guy, he walked on the moon, well done, total hero, lovely fellow, great ambassador for humankind, but if he was to come round to my house and he was to kill my dog, I'd be like OI!!! ARMSTRONG!! NO!!!"
Haha, awesome man, absolutely awesome post.
You know, I bet they don't even expect anyone to buy it. This is just their flagship model, in the same way car companies do double-figure production runs of crazy supercars. It's not for profit - it's for kudos and profile raising.
Yeah, all the common people should invest all their money in stocks and shares so they too can ride this exciting wave of money-making possibility!
Right. See you in line at the soup kitchens, bub.
Hmm, so your strategy boils down to
"Put a big mpeg file on a writable DVD and call it the new standard"?
By which time, your character should have reached level 12.
E.g., since we're talking about its creator, when I played the first Populous, once let it on auto-play, just to see how the computer plays. The "evil" guys were just minding their business, building their evil towns and planting their evil crops. The "good" guys suddenly built an army and slaughtered them all. Who was good and who was evil there?
I can explain. The "good" guys had water-tight intelligence that the evil-doers had the capacity to launch an attack in less than fifteen minutes, and had to pre-emptively go to war.