But those are bit-for-bit copies, which includes any copy protection (ironically). So really you're not effecting bit-for-bit bootlegs on the street, just theoretically reducing online distribution. To DVD-quality only. Which is then downsampled to hell anyway.
I'd guess that scripting your team is a lot more strategic than simply responding to stimulous during a battle, and probably a lot more interesting. Sure it may break down to a question of who casts cure on the guy who is at 30% health, but that kind of planning is the strategic element of RPGs. Now it has been distilled in a unique package.
I'm utterly excited about this. I haven't bought the last 4 Final Fantasies, but I'll buy this one. I can only hope it lives up to the promise of being the Final Fantasy for mind rover players. Even if it is as simple as Y's walk-through-em-to-instantly-fight model, at least that cuts out the weakest part of an RPG.
BTW, if you want more action oriented FF, try Secret of Mana for the SNES. This was a sequal to a Game Boy zelda clone, which happens to be the only 3 player action RPG out there (you get the second and third characters several hours into the game). Likewise, Crystalis was one of the last SNK titles for the NES, and it too is absolutely amazing.
Most of those PS1's are pirate systems that are cheaper than the real thing... and will continue to be available. Just look in the gaming section of MBK. You won't find any officially licensed Sony hardware, but you will find a lot of cheaply printed cardboard boxes holding slightly-too-bubbly PS1 systems.
Gay people aren't funny. But if it weren't for gay comics and comics about gays in the 1970's and 1980's, they wouldn't be anywhere near as accepted in this culture.
Pedophile priests aren't funny. Bit if we didn't have running jokes about the problem, few people would have realized that the problem existed.
Black people aren't funny. But shows like The Jeffersons and Fat Albert did a heck of a lot to realize the dream of the races accepting eachother as part of life.
Humor is when we're allowed to say anything, specifically things that are uncomfortable and which we would otherwise sweep under the rug. But, oddly enough, jokes cannot be used when the problem is known, widespread, and painful. Jokes about normal sexual assaults, for example, are verboten because of the sad fact that everyone knows people who have been sexually assaulted, and the humor properties fade.
But for people who don't have direct connection to the physical abuses in prisons, it can be humorous.
What I'm saying is that humor is a vehicle to inform, and in this case serves your purpose.
But Shadow of the Colossus was a highly experimental game in a lot of ways. It developed a gameplay style that was highly original. Artistically and aesthetically it is probably the closest we've come to "art" this year. While it failed in some key areas, there aren't any areas where it wasn't at least trying something majorly new. And everything in the game was keyed around aesthetics and kinesthetics that haven't really been explored before. How often have you felt sympathy for the bosses you're fighting? How often have you questioned your own motivations in a game?
For the voting game developers, originality and pushing the art forward are key, and Shadow lacks in neither area.
If we had to lose, I'm glad we lost to them. And we did walk home with three freakin' awards, and tons of people were throwing up the horns. That's pretty gratifying right there.
Actually, that was about the PS3, as an "explanation" for why they're sticking with the PS2 for now. 'might want to edit the article text. And it wasn't the keynote speaker, but Jaffe who was brought out on stage to hock the life left in the PS2.
And we wonder why only 10% of game developers are female.
Overclock all you want and you are still playing the same game as everyone else.
Rendering power is overrated when talking about game graphics. If you look at World of Warcraft, the game looks incredible. But it looks incredible on lower-end systems too... the art direction is just spot on across the board. Half-Life 2 uses some neat graphical tricks, but in general the game looks amazing because the artists had a clear vision of what they were creating and ensured that every pixel that went on the screen supports that. Look at the detail in the tree leaves... they're not super high-poly, they're just beautiful.
If your graphics card is good enough to run all of today's games, your graphics card is good enough. There really is no reason to spend 300 dollars every two years when spending 80 every two would be sufficient. If you want better looking games, look to lead artists, not to GPU engineers.
You know, I have a whole list of stuff that I think is "harmful to minors". I think it is harmful to minors to not give them access to real, serious sex education, resulting in the teenage pregnancy and STD rates the U.S. is justly infamous for. I think it is harmful to minors to tell them to turn off their brain and just believe God does everything instead. I think it is harmful to minors to pretend that drug abuse is a problem of supply, not of demand, that can be solved by bombing coca plantations in Columbia. It's a pretty long list, actually.
I've been bouncing around MMORPG's recently to build up experience with them, and I still haven't found one (Besides Puzzle Pirates) that seems worth sticking with.
Is Shadowbane worth playing? Is the start-up investment of time in the character low enough that it is worth trying, or is it one that you need to invest a million hours in the game before the actual game starts?
What about Legend of Mir II? Any free or pay MMORPG's that people would recommend as must-trys?
The nice thing about sports games is that they all support co-op play. The bad thing about sports games is that she has to like some team sport, and so do you. This could be soccer, hockey, college basketball, or the rarer polo / lacrosse, etc.
Rhythm music games are also a good choice, as A: most of them support independent difficulty levels and B: they're very easy to pick up. Dance Dance Revolution is a good starting point. Karaoke Revolution is a good one too. When Beatmania comes out in the west later this year, if she has any inclination I'd recommend it as well.
Guitar Hero unfortunately doesn't have independent difficulty settings (Sorry!) but it's still worth picking up if I do say so myself.
Another one that can be fun are RTS games. Yes, RTS games. If you're better / geekier than she is, just start her out on a map with a thousand strong horde of hideously beweaponed Orcish disembowlers, and take for yourself one small pikeman on a donkey. Most RTS games allow for this large degree of balancing, so find a theme that both of you can appreciate (or, let's be honest, she can appreciate), and run with it.
You do get some nice dynamics in Shoot-em-ups where you can wind up protecting the lesser player, or they can valliantly die trying to save you. If both of you actually like the masochistic shooter formula then you could do much worse than Ikaruga. Any game that lets player 2 take lives from player 1 is good.
And as other posters pointed out, Guild Wars is a winner, fighting games have a large degree of balancing, MMORPG's are great but keep your characters at a similar level, etc.
A hack must have been expected, even desired, by Apple. Being able to run both OSX and Win XP (and Linux) on a single notebook would be massive. If you need Wintel, you can buy anything, but if you want OSXP, you have to buy from Apple.
I, for one, am desperately trying to restrain myself from running out and picking up a Mac Book.
A military expert will say that it's stupid to spill all your secrets to ANYONE because mere knowledge of a capability is enough to allow an adversary (or potential adversary) to begin defeating that capability.
Or an ally (or potential ally) to defend the shortcomings of your existing weapons technology. Like, for example, american-made rifles that can't hold up in sand.
I don't buy the whole secrecy-gives-you-a-bettery-military theory. I tend to think that secrecy allows contractors to be lazy, thus ensuring that when we really need it the military just isn't what we expect it to be.
Maybe it's better to do the basic research ourselves but not go that final step to building the hardware until we actually need to use it.
The problem is that ramp-up times are tough. If you need to send planes into North Korea next week, or Alabama by tomorrow, you need experienced pilots and ground crew. Not only that, but you need the planes to have already been built, rather being furiously glued together as fast as Northrup can go.
Usually the "panic response" of building up capabilities after a conflict begins is simply remorse over not having started earlier.
If you don't have the code, you have a really expensive flying Xbox that could quit working without warning and can't possibly be repaired.
Militaries tend to look at planes as an investment, and try to keep them running for years by upgrading their capabilities, finding alternative suppliers, etc. If you have the plane, you have, for example, the physical capability to modify it to work with any arbitrary weapons system you may want it to within reason. However, without source code the process of modifying the software to work with said additional capabilities is somewhere between dangerous and impossible.
It seems like this new service would be best for offsite backup of prescious data.
However, it isn't all that cost-effective. A local disk is very cheap comparatively, but (as a friend of mine found out) if someone steals your computer, they steal your backup too.
Are there any services out there which connects people with reasonable connections over long distances to back-up eachothers data? I'd be willing to get a new 80GB drive and make it available via a private FTP server if someone else would do the same for me.
Or are there cheaper offsite solutions than Amazon's?
Don't forget that the aesthetic qualities of design are automatically copyrighted as well. Not only should you theoretically clear the architect for the building, you need to clear all of the companies whose products appear in your film, assuming they aren't strictly functional. Not only are there copyrights to the music the guitarist is playing (about a dozen rights holders, actually), but the guitar itself has an aesthetic copyright from Fender.
Thankfully, nobody really pursues the aesthetic copyrights on daily objects... or NOTHING would ever get filmed... but we're getting there. Caterpillar may not have much of a case for one, but if a Mini Cooper appeared in your film and they didn't want it to, they'd have a pretty strong case for a copyright.
They haven't shown a single playable game, ever. They haven't shown working hardware. They haven't even shown the non-terrible controller.
And now they say that copyprotection is the reason for the delay? I'm not quite sure which emperical evidence to believe, but they were nowhere near hitting their ship for Spring. Without hardware, software, or even finalized images, what were they going to sell? The letters "3" "S" and "P" printed on little cards?
They weren't ready, plain and simple. They probably held out announcing it for a little while in order to choke off X360 sales, but it has been clear for some time now. They just weren't ready.
Also, keep in mind that the movie industry is losing $$ to the videogame industry.
This oft quoted statistic actually only refers to domestic box office, not including DVD sales, TV sales, rental releases, etc, all of which add up to significantly more than the box office. Generally speaking, movies are still much bigger than games.
But other than that, I agree with what you're saying. One can waste a lot of time with a bad novel. One generally wastes a heck of a lot of time with Bad TV. But there are good examples of both, just as there are good examples of games.
If one were so inclined, one could make a list of games that could be considered culture-worthy. Mine would include:
Silent Hill Zelda Tetris Pac-Man Final Fantasy 3/6 Dada: Stagnation in Blue Katamari Damacy Maniac Mansion Little Nemo the Dream Master Eyetoy: Antigrav (*Cough*Cough*) Street Fighter 2 My Food Sim City 4 Xenogears Metal Gear Solid The Sims Super Mario Brothers 3 Puzzle Pirates Lode Runner
One of the big things hamstringing the X360 right now is the insistance upon high-res imagery. It's not a ludicriously more powerful system than the Xbox, and asking it to have both 10x better effects and graphics and do it at 10x the resolution just won't work... once you have higher resolutions running well, you've used up the system's power.
We'll have to see if this is a major problem over the lifespan of the Xbox, or just launch-day hiccups. If lots of people pick up high-def sets, this could be a big win for them. But if high-def pickup is more moderate, other systems will just plain look better for the majority of people's TV's.
And who knows, maybe Microsoft will change that policy once other systems launch.
People percieve paid software to be superior to free alternatives because A: nothing could go wrong with paid software and B: if something did go wrong, obviously the company would indemnify / rectify / fix the problem.
Likewise, the perception is that the more expensive the software (and the bigger the box it comes in) the more protection you are afforded. And that the company won't suddenly decide to change direction / stop supporting the software / etc.
Yet time and time again this is shown not to be true. McAfee uninstalls arbitrary files on your computer (how'd that get through testing?) and just tells users to re-install from backup... exactly the kind of calamity the software is supposed to prevent. Part of WinNT5 was found to violate someone's patent, and anyone using that particular (admittedly rare) function had to pony up to the original patent holder or write a workaround.
As far as I can tell, the "little guys" software tends to be better in general than the big boys. Why? Because they're still trying. Before Norton was Symantec, they struggled to create an amazing toolkit of software tweaks that really did some great things. Now that their position is secure, they've hardly updated the suite to even work with XP, let alone taken advantage of the fixes and hacks that smaller houses have found. McAfee, once a nimble little company making a great little product, has been bloating for years. The more developers you add to a project, the less anyone knows about what the system is doing.
A free alternative that has been around for a long time: AVG Antivirus There are others. Please post 'em below.
When doing a thesis on retirement homes, one of the staff workers I interviewed said something that has stuck with me all of these years.
"We used to call it 'getting old.' Now we label it the Alzheimers disease and throw money at it and push sick people away. Somehow, people were more accepting of it when it was just 'getting old.'"
This sort of thing happens all the time in game development. Bugs 1 - 142 might be "Go to location 1. Jump. Wrong animation plays." "Go to location 2. Jump. Wrong animation plays." etc. Bug 143 might be that if you attempt to pause while saving the game it erases your memory card, eats all the food in your refridgerator, and puts gum in your DVD player.
At the beginning of a bug-squashing beta period, your team may be killing a hundred bugs per day. By the end, you may spend the last weeks desperately trying to eradicate two or three.
Bugs are generally rated A, B, and C in terms of severity. A bugs are nasty crashers, C bugs are little art tweaks. Unofficially, they also recieve a PITA rating. PITA bugs take a lot of re-engineering to fix, EZ bugs might be as simple as flipping a forgotton flag. Unfortunately, EZ bugs tend to get fixed first, meaning that the bugs caused by re-engineering at the last minute for PITA bugs can frequently slip into retail.
Slashdot Mirror
But those are bit-for-bit copies, which includes any copy protection (ironically). So really you're not effecting bit-for-bit bootlegs on the street, just theoretically reducing online distribution. To DVD-quality only. Which is then downsampled to hell anyway.
I'd guess that scripting your team is a lot more strategic than simply responding to stimulous during a battle, and probably a lot more interesting. Sure it may break down to a question of who casts cure on the guy who is at 30% health, but that kind of planning is the strategic element of RPGs. Now it has been distilled in a unique package.
I'm utterly excited about this. I haven't bought the last 4 Final Fantasies, but I'll buy this one. I can only hope it lives up to the promise of being the Final Fantasy for mind rover players. Even if it is as simple as Y's walk-through-em-to-instantly-fight model, at least that cuts out the weakest part of an RPG.
BTW, if you want more action oriented FF, try Secret of Mana for the SNES. This was a sequal to a Game Boy zelda clone, which happens to be the only 3 player action RPG out there (you get the second and third characters several hours into the game). Likewise, Crystalis was one of the last SNK titles for the NES, and it too is absolutely amazing.
"We didn't take money from publishers because we didn't want publishers to fuck up our game."
- One of the creators of Darwinia, accepting the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
Oddly, I too was in Thailand in December.
Most of those PS1's are pirate systems that are cheaper than the real thing... and will continue to be available. Just look in the gaming section of MBK. You won't find any officially licensed Sony hardware, but you will find a lot of cheaply printed cardboard boxes holding slightly-too-bubbly PS1 systems.
Gay people aren't funny. But if it weren't for gay comics and comics about gays in the 1970's and 1980's, they wouldn't be anywhere near as accepted in this culture.
Pedophile priests aren't funny. Bit if we didn't have running jokes about the problem, few people would have realized that the problem existed.
Black people aren't funny. But shows like The Jeffersons and Fat Albert did a heck of a lot to realize the dream of the races accepting eachother as part of life.
Humor is when we're allowed to say anything, specifically things that are uncomfortable and which we would otherwise sweep under the rug. But, oddly enough, jokes cannot be used when the problem is known, widespread, and painful. Jokes about normal sexual assaults, for example, are verboten because of the sad fact that everyone knows people who have been sexually assaulted, and the humor properties fade.
But for people who don't have direct connection to the physical abuses in prisons, it can be humorous.
What I'm saying is that humor is a vehicle to inform, and in this case serves your purpose.
Thanks.
But Shadow of the Colossus was a highly experimental game in a lot of ways. It developed a gameplay style that was highly original. Artistically and aesthetically it is probably the closest we've come to "art" this year. While it failed in some key areas, there aren't any areas where it wasn't at least trying something majorly new. And everything in the game was keyed around aesthetics and kinesthetics that haven't really been explored before. How often have you felt sympathy for the bosses you're fighting? How often have you questioned your own motivations in a game?
For the voting game developers, originality and pushing the art forward are key, and Shadow lacks in neither area.
If we had to lose, I'm glad we lost to them. And we did walk home with three freakin' awards, and tons of people were throwing up the horns. That's pretty gratifying right there.
Actually, that was about the PS3, as an "explanation" for why they're sticking with the PS2 for now. 'might want to edit the article text. And it wasn't the keynote speaker, but Jaffe who was brought out on stage to hock the life left in the PS2.
And we wonder why only 10% of game developers are female.
Overclock all you want and you are still playing the same game as everyone else.
Rendering power is overrated when talking about game graphics. If you look at World of Warcraft, the game looks incredible. But it looks incredible on lower-end systems too... the art direction is just spot on across the board. Half-Life 2 uses some neat graphical tricks, but in general the game looks amazing because the artists had a clear vision of what they were creating and ensured that every pixel that went on the screen supports that. Look at the detail in the tree leaves... they're not super high-poly, they're just beautiful.
If your graphics card is good enough to run all of today's games, your graphics card is good enough. There really is no reason to spend 300 dollars every two years when spending 80 every two would be sufficient. If you want better looking games, look to lead artists, not to GPU engineers.
By non-AGP do you mean PCI or PCI-E?
You know, I have a whole list of stuff that I think is "harmful to minors". I think it is harmful to minors to not give them access to real, serious sex education, resulting in the teenage pregnancy and STD rates the U.S. is justly infamous for. I think it is harmful to minors to tell them to turn off their brain and just believe God does everything instead. I think it is harmful to minors to pretend that drug abuse is a problem of supply, not of demand, that can be solved by bombing coca plantations in Columbia. It's a pretty long list, actually.
Fox.xxx?
I've been bouncing around MMORPG's recently to build up experience with them, and I still haven't found one (Besides Puzzle Pirates) that seems worth sticking with.
Is Shadowbane worth playing? Is the start-up investment of time in the character low enough that it is worth trying, or is it one that you need to invest a million hours in the game before the actual game starts?
What about Legend of Mir II? Any free or pay MMORPG's that people would recommend as must-trys?
The nice thing about sports games is that they all support co-op play. The bad thing about sports games is that she has to like some team sport, and so do you. This could be soccer, hockey, college basketball, or the rarer polo / lacrosse, etc.
Rhythm music games are also a good choice, as A: most of them support independent difficulty levels and B: they're very easy to pick up. Dance Dance Revolution is a good starting point. Karaoke Revolution is a good one too. When Beatmania comes out in the west later this year, if she has any inclination I'd recommend it as well.
Guitar Hero unfortunately doesn't have independent difficulty settings (Sorry!) but it's still worth picking up if I do say so myself.
Another one that can be fun are RTS games. Yes, RTS games. If you're better / geekier than she is, just start her out on a map with a thousand strong horde of hideously beweaponed Orcish disembowlers, and take for yourself one small pikeman on a donkey. Most RTS games allow for this large degree of balancing, so find a theme that both of you can appreciate (or, let's be honest, she can appreciate), and run with it.
You do get some nice dynamics in Shoot-em-ups where you can wind up protecting the lesser player, or they can valliantly die trying to save you. If both of you actually like the masochistic shooter formula then you could do much worse than Ikaruga. Any game that lets player 2 take lives from player 1 is good.
And as other posters pointed out, Guild Wars is a winner, fighting games have a large degree of balancing, MMORPG's are great but keep your characters at a similar level, etc.
A hack must have been expected, even desired, by Apple. Being able to run both OSX and Win XP (and Linux) on a single notebook would be massive. If you need Wintel, you can buy anything, but if you want OSXP, you have to buy from Apple.
I, for one, am desperately trying to restrain myself from running out and picking up a Mac Book.
To stop doing something, first you must have started doing it.
A military expert will say that it's stupid to spill all your secrets to ANYONE because mere knowledge of a capability is enough to allow an adversary (or potential adversary) to begin defeating that capability.
Or an ally (or potential ally) to defend the shortcomings of your existing weapons technology. Like, for example, american-made rifles that can't hold up in sand.
I don't buy the whole secrecy-gives-you-a-bettery-military theory. I tend to think that secrecy allows contractors to be lazy, thus ensuring that when we really need it the military just isn't what we expect it to be.
Maybe it's better to do the basic research ourselves but not go that final step to building the hardware until we actually need to use it.
The problem is that ramp-up times are tough. If you need to send planes into North Korea next week, or Alabama by tomorrow, you need experienced pilots and ground crew. Not only that, but you need the planes to have already been built, rather being furiously glued together as fast as Northrup can go.
Usually the "panic response" of building up capabilities after a conflict begins is simply remorse over not having started earlier.
If you don't have the code, you have a really expensive flying Xbox that could quit working without warning and can't possibly be repaired.
Militaries tend to look at planes as an investment, and try to keep them running for years by upgrading their capabilities, finding alternative suppliers, etc. If you have the plane, you have, for example, the physical capability to modify it to work with any arbitrary weapons system you may want it to within reason. However, without source code the process of modifying the software to work with said additional capabilities is somewhere between dangerous and impossible.
It seems like this new service would be best for offsite backup of prescious data.
However, it isn't all that cost-effective. A local disk is very cheap comparatively, but (as a friend of mine found out) if someone steals your computer, they steal your backup too.
Are there any services out there which connects people with reasonable connections over long distances to back-up eachothers data? I'd be willing to get a new 80GB drive and make it available via a private FTP server if someone else would do the same for me.
Or are there cheaper offsite solutions than Amazon's?
Don't forget that the aesthetic qualities of design are automatically copyrighted as well. Not only should you theoretically clear the architect for the building, you need to clear all of the companies whose products appear in your film, assuming they aren't strictly functional. Not only are there copyrights to the music the guitarist is playing (about a dozen rights holders, actually), but the guitar itself has an aesthetic copyright from Fender.
Thankfully, nobody really pursues the aesthetic copyrights on daily objects... or NOTHING would ever get filmed... but we're getting there. Caterpillar may not have much of a case for one, but if a Mini Cooper appeared in your film and they didn't want it to, they'd have a pretty strong case for a copyright.
They must be revamping the copyprotection.
The palm-based Fossil Abacus was vaporware for a long time. Then it came out, and nobody noticed.
You can pick one up for 50 clams, if you don't mind strapping a cube to your wrist. And pecking at a screen not much larger than a postage stamp.
They haven't shown a single playable game, ever.
They haven't shown working hardware.
They haven't even shown the non-terrible controller.
And now they say that copyprotection is the reason for the delay?
I'm not quite sure which emperical evidence to believe, but they were nowhere near hitting their ship for Spring. Without hardware, software, or even finalized images, what were they going to sell? The letters "3" "S" and "P" printed on little cards?
They weren't ready, plain and simple. They probably held out announcing it for a little while in order to choke off X360 sales, but it has been clear for some time now. They just weren't ready.
Also, keep in mind that the movie industry is losing $$ to the videogame industry.
This oft quoted statistic actually only refers to domestic box office, not including DVD sales, TV sales, rental releases, etc, all of which add up to significantly more than the box office. Generally speaking, movies are still much bigger than games.
But other than that, I agree with what you're saying. One can waste a lot of time with a bad novel. One generally wastes a heck of a lot of time with Bad TV. But there are good examples of both, just as there are good examples of games.
If one were so inclined, one could make a list of games that could be considered culture-worthy. Mine would include:
Silent Hill
Zelda
Tetris
Pac-Man
Final Fantasy 3/6
Dada: Stagnation in Blue
Katamari Damacy
Maniac Mansion
Little Nemo the Dream Master
Eyetoy: Antigrav (*Cough*Cough*)
Street Fighter 2
My Food
Sim City 4
Xenogears
Metal Gear Solid
The Sims
Super Mario Brothers 3
Puzzle Pirates
Lode Runner
Anyone want to add to this list?
One of the big things hamstringing the X360 right now is the insistance upon high-res imagery. It's not a ludicriously more powerful system than the Xbox, and asking it to have both 10x better effects and graphics and do it at 10x the resolution just won't work... once you have higher resolutions running well, you've used up the system's power.
We'll have to see if this is a major problem over the lifespan of the Xbox, or just launch-day hiccups. If lots of people pick up high-def sets, this could be a big win for them. But if high-def pickup is more moderate, other systems will just plain look better for the majority of people's TV's.
And who knows, maybe Microsoft will change that policy once other systems launch.
People percieve paid software to be superior to free alternatives because A: nothing could go wrong with paid software and B: if something did go wrong, obviously the company would indemnify / rectify / fix the problem.
Likewise, the perception is that the more expensive the software (and the bigger the box it comes in) the more protection you are afforded. And that the company won't suddenly decide to change direction / stop supporting the software / etc.
Yet time and time again this is shown not to be true. McAfee uninstalls arbitrary files on your computer (how'd that get through testing?) and just tells users to re-install from backup... exactly the kind of calamity the software is supposed to prevent. Part of WinNT5 was found to violate someone's patent, and anyone using that particular (admittedly rare) function had to pony up to the original patent holder or write a workaround.
As far as I can tell, the "little guys" software tends to be better in general than the big boys. Why? Because they're still trying. Before Norton was Symantec, they struggled to create an amazing toolkit of software tweaks that really did some great things. Now that their position is secure, they've hardly updated the suite to even work with XP, let alone taken advantage of the fixes and hacks that smaller houses have found. McAfee, once a nimble little company making a great little product, has been bloating for years. The more developers you add to a project, the less anyone knows about what the system is doing.
A free alternative that has been around for a long time:
AVG Antivirus
There are others. Please post 'em below.
When doing a thesis on retirement homes, one of the staff workers I interviewed said something that has stuck with me all of these years.
"We used to call it 'getting old.' Now we label it the Alzheimers disease and throw money at it and push sick people away. Somehow, people were more accepting of it when it was just 'getting old.'"
This sort of thing happens all the time in game development. Bugs 1 - 142 might be "Go to location 1. Jump. Wrong animation plays." "Go to location 2. Jump. Wrong animation plays." etc. Bug 143 might be that if you attempt to pause while saving the game it erases your memory card, eats all the food in your refridgerator, and puts gum in your DVD player.
At the beginning of a bug-squashing beta period, your team may be killing a hundred bugs per day. By the end, you may spend the last weeks desperately trying to eradicate two or three.
Bugs are generally rated A, B, and C in terms of severity. A bugs are nasty crashers, C bugs are little art tweaks. Unofficially, they also recieve a PITA rating. PITA bugs take a lot of re-engineering to fix, EZ bugs might be as simple as flipping a forgotton flag. Unfortunately, EZ bugs tend to get fixed first, meaning that the bugs caused by re-engineering at the last minute for PITA bugs can frequently slip into retail.