Someone sent a link to Zuma a little while back. My first thought upon playing it was "this is a PC version of Puzzloop."
Now, if you want to trace it back further, Puzzloop was based somewhat more loosely on a linear version of Bust a Move, which in turn was a hexagonal interpretation of Columns. Columns was Sega's attempt to get in on the success of Tetris.
Of course, the difference between stealing is how much interpretation goes on between the steps, and how honest the developers are about the originality. Puzzle Pirates has a swordfighting system with is clearly based upon Puzzle Fighter. Puzzle Fighter in turn was based upon Waku Waku Animal, which was an attempt to rip off Puyo Pop, which was a somewhat more successful attempt to rip off columns, who was going for tetris. However, if you look at the Swordfighting in Puzzle Pirates and Tetris, there is a huge delta between the two. Likewise, you can trace fighting games from Soul Calibur III -> Soul Calibur -> Tekken -> Mortal Kombat -> Street Fighter II -> Street Fighter I -> Karate Champ, and back up from Karate Champ -> Kung Fu -> Double Dragon -> Ninja Gaiden -> Strider -> Sonic the Hedgehog -> Sonic Adventures.
My point is that fundamental game mechanics flow between games, in the same way that camera movements flow between movies and bad acting flows between TV shows. The mechanics are building blocks from which games emerge, but they are not the games themselves. It isn't the individual mechanics per-say, but the execution that matters.
As a person who earns his living making video games, video game reviewing has always been a sore spot.
We read all of the reviews. All of them. IGN, Gamespot, Famitsu, Edge, Joystick101, The Atlanta Herald... you name it we've read it. This is where we get our impresson of people's impression of the game. This is where we get fodder to make alterations to future games. And you know what, it's disheartening when nearly every review gets at least one thing factually wrong. It's disheartening when the reviewer clearly hasn't played more than 15 minutes into the game that you just spend 16 months creating. And it's disheartening when the reviewer keeps talking about boobies and poop and fart jokes like he was a 12 year old on the playground.
One of the most insightful pieces I've read talked about how Half-Life 2 used darkness to symbolize safety and bright, light areas as a sign of danger. But this was Game Developer magazine talking about art direction, not a reviewer talking about the game itself. Maybe it is too much to ask for a reviewer to take as in-depth a look at a game as a developer would, but there is direction to be had here. Compare and contrast with other titles, plot developments, gameplay structures, etc. Give insight into what the developers were trying to achieve and what they created. Put the game into context. Even Ebert will delve a little bit into the movie school theory behind the movies.
Even as simple sources of opinions, reviewers frequently fall down. Afraid of "offending" any publishers, they don't say anything negative about certain titles. Afraid of stepping out of line, they keep their scores in line with everyone else's. I saw a review the other day that said "X may very well be the best game available on the PS2." He then gave it a 70%, same as everyone else.
There is a lot of room for innovation and insight in video game reviews. Hopefully somebody will pick up that opportunity and run with it.
House of the dead had a 7 million dollar budget and grossed 11 million in domestic box office. Add in overseas numbers and DVD sales, and you have what the industry considers a real winner.
What happens next is, of course, the problem. A: people watch the movie, are terrified by how bad it is and don't come back. B: With a success under his belt, Uwe Bowl is given 20 million dollars to make his next movie, with is also drek but doesn't have the charm of a low-budget film. C: Anybody who didn't see the first movie goes in to see the second movie, realizes how bad it is, and doesn't come back.
In essence, you have hollywood investing in people who can sucker the largest audience into bad films.
BTW, I just posted this to the IMDB forums, but might as well share here. This is the poster for the movie. This is a quick photoshop edit of the poster to make it look like the character from the game. The actress was more than capable of pulling off the role, but without competenet direction, cinematography, and costuming she didn't have a chance.
There are different iso's floating around with different levels of completion. Supposedly the last one was from near the end of their beta cycle, and was about to go gold. I've found a few ISO's over the years, and the best one has crashed maybe once, lending credence to the theory that it was basically done.
Not to disparage Paradox or anything, but this thing was ready to ship.
And honestly, it was. You're right in pointing out that it's a lot better than many of the games released at the time. Certainly it is a lot better than most of the 4-player games on the PS1.
I recently tried downloading a game to my phone to see what it was like. Note that this wasn't the internet proper, but was over their minimalist phone network. The game preview images took nearly 30 seconds to load, and the whole process took about 20 minutes. After I bought the game for 5 dollars, I went online to check my bill and found out that the process of finding and downloading the game took an additional 6 dollars worth of bandwidth. It's like buying 100 dollars worth of groceries and getting a 150 dollar "lingering fee" when you walk out of the building. Bandwidth just isn't that expensive.
I hear Verizon is a lot better with their data. Bandwidth is still tiny, but prices are closer to what you would expect to pay for a service like this.
Of course, I live in an area with three free open WAP points at any given location, so the whole thing is somewhat moot. But I won't buy a network-centric phone until the cellphone companies get off of their high horses and become network providers rather than end-to-end monopolists. After all, none of them have figured out yet that I want to SSH into a machine at work, so why should I expect them to be able to take responsibility for the entire experience chain?
It is my phone, I'll install what I want and run what I want. You can choose to provide the network connection or not. That's the way it works in the rest of the world, and man does it work better.
Google has Googled the entire Googley Google. Google Google world park in Googleville has a Googleplex of Googish Googles Googling to Google your Googles. "We Google Your Google so you don't have to," said one Googliscious Googler.
A spokesperson for MSN was Googled as saying: "Crap"
Back in the day the Thrill Kill ISO was pretty widely available... one of the testers leaked the ISO onto FTP sites and the nanocent P2P networks. You can still find it if you are interested, though it has become a bit more rare. It isn't bootleg, it's a leak.
Thrill Kill had a few interesting things about it. For one, you didn't have a health meter that went down. You had a carnage meter that went up. When you were fully carnaged, you could do a move that would kill off one of the other players. This lead to interesting situations where everyone is huddled in a corner trying to avoid the inevitable. It's the only fighting game I've ever played that had a special move of "put the other guy in front of you." There were also some unique moves... not having contortionists or midgets on stilts as staples in games, the developers could afford to get a little creative with character attacks. And being pre-GTAIII, it bled of a style that was lacking at the time. After the Night Trap debackle, nobody else seemed willing to reach out and make a game that pushed the boundaries of taste.
Unfortunately, it also pushed the playstation farther than it was capable of going. The fighting felt very, very loose, and the entire thing ran at about 20 FPS at best. Also, fighting with 4 people got quite "dirty," as you might be attacking someone while someone attacks you who is getting attacked by someone else. As the game was combo-centric, and this ended combos, making the experience quite frustrating. Further wearing down the gameplay was the repetition of enemies in the single player mode. With three other characters in every battle, you ran through the full roster of the game in about two and a half fights. The developers didn't throw in any variants like 1v1 or 2v2 or 3v1, etc, so the fighting was all vanilla. The arenas didn't help reduce the sense of repetition, as while they had some degree of variability in set pieces, they were all perfectly square of exactly the same dimensions and they all played identically.
I have to say: I was into the whole "let's make the least tasteful game possible" thing. The playstation wasn't the right platform for it, and there needed to be a second generation of gameplay, but it had potential and opened the door for later multiplayer fighters who could avoid all of Thrill Kill's mistakes.
BTW, Thrill Kill is probably the only properly dead game on the list. Earthbound 0 and Mega Man B&C both saw overseas releases, and both have retro-pack releases coming up in the US. It's too bad they didn't list out more interesting titles that were actively canned before production was up, such as Secret of Mana for the SNES CD and Sonic the Hedgehog 32X (and about a million other games... 3/4ths of all games never get released).
The abomination of videogaming known as DDR served as an outlet for wannabe Travoltas to flail around wildly and quickly made the house of tank simulators and street fighting a haven for lamos.
On the weekends, do the people at GamePro pretend that they work for a good magazine, like Edge?
Hmm... non-violent fun... like Mario Kart DS? Animal Crossing? Guitar Hero, Katamari Damacy, SSX, Amplitude, Marble Madness, Puzzle Pirates, Devil Dice, Super Puzzle Fighter, The Sims, Uplink... Yup. No fun games out there that don't involve 'shootin and boobies.
BTW, I don't care if they do look like Danny Bonaduce, don't make fun of the expert DDR players. Trust me on this: they can kick your ass several dozen times per second. They may look like someone from Riverdance while doing it, but you will just have gotten your ass kicked by someone from Riverdance, which is even worse.
This is a really important distinction. HDTV's aren't the hot item because everyone is buying one, they're the hot item because the TV makers make a heck of a lot more profit off of one of those than they do off a standard 30" screen.
On the other hand, with the switch to digital in 2007, we're going to see a lot more forced upgrades of TV's... HD sets are exactly what they want people to buy. And with an new HD set, why not pick up an HD-DVD player? Heck, 10% of Xbox 360's sold at the same time as a new HDTV.
Honestly, I've always loved the up-resing of televisions and have wanted HDTV years ago. But the circus around them is really turning me off. Studies have shown that the majority of HD buyers don't have an HD video stream and don't realize it. There is still a lot of life left in the old standard.
Remember, if you don't have a high-density set that supports the HDMI copy protection standard, this isn't going to do anything. Computer monitors do not count.
It is also first generation, and very likely to have major electrical problems. Not to mention the player is about the size of an average HDTV set.
As an American citizen too, I think we can do better.
A: we give more foreign aid than any other country, but not per-capita or as a percentage of GDP. B: a lot of those "gifts" include military aid. This aid does far more harm than good. C: a lot of American foreign aid is required to be spent on American companies and contractors... basically all of our military aid, most of the aid we're sending to Iraq, the Saudi aid, etc. D: most Americans couldn't point to Iran on a map. Very few of us travel the world, keep up with international news, or could describe any structure of government besides our own. Many can't even describe our own with any accuracy. E: We elected a leader who claims that "I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."
1. Create games with a single-registration online component, such as your account key in World of Warcraft.
That could happen but wouldn't be a good idea as it would generate a huge amount of ill will towards a publisher. Especially if it wasn't made clear up front.
I thought so too, but Microsoft Windows got away with it and World of Warcraft is raking in the money.
2. Pressurs console manufacturers to lock games to the first system that plays them, DRM style.
Suicide. Remember the backlash that was brewing on just the rumor that the PS3 would do this? Even Sony couldn't pull that off.
Again, I would think this. But I said the same thing 15 years ago about requiring a disk to be in a computer when playing a game, and look where we are now.
3. Move to an Xbox Live Arcade style download-only service.
This is the most viable choice. Some people actually like things like Steam, for reasons that utterly escape me.
I do too. This is probably the least evil of all of the options. I'm still waiting for iGames.
4. Make re-selling games illegal.
That would require a fundamental change in the law, possibly even a Constitutional Amendment. First Sale has a long and well established legal precendent up to the Supreme Court.
Re-selling software applications violates EULA, and MS has successfully stopped second hand sales of Windows on this ground. And, again, long-held principles of ownership were shattered with the passage of the DMCA. I don't think it would be that difficult to buy a legally binding bill through congress on this.
Operating system in common usage includes the usability layers, including plug-in extensibility architectures and how applications call the system to playback arbitrary video sequences, or how the system interacts with the rest of the networking cloud. And you can't fix a crappy, highly-dependent file system without getting down to the "real" os layer.
I'm not saying there aren't ways of revising past the problems building from the current generation of systems. However, I don't think that in practical terms such a transition will happen without throwing everything out and starting over. Sure, you could replace the interface, the file handling capabilities, the local / remote computer paradigm, update the kernel, and redo the API calls to support the above, but at some point you're just trying to replace every bit of a system while making sure that everything continues to function throughout the entire process.
From a technical standpoint there is no reason why Linux couldn't evolve into the next super slick, highly usable, highly accesable, flexible to the user's will operating system, which has a modern interpretation of local and remote storage and local and remote applications. However, when a project gets big enough and gets enough momentum behind it, you can't make such radical changes to it: you have to scrap it and start over. There is just too much baggage to fight against. Besides, I want Linux and *bsd to remain rock solid highly configurable and efficient server tools for skilled professionals, at which they currently excel. They shouldn't undergo a radical shift because they're good at what they do. They're just being leveraged into something they're not. Now windows... that you can gut.
Don't be resigned to the status quo. Operating systems could be a hell of a lot better.
There was a great racist theory going around for a long time, that sounded remarkably like what you've described above. We didn't understand the language of the African persons, or Indian persons, and as such there was no evidence they were having deep reflective thoughts. And without deep reflective thoughts, they aren't human. (Of course, many African tribes thought the same about the white people. Many still do, basically correctly).
Because we didn't understand their language, we wrote them off completely as being outside the sphere of "us" and undeserving of protection.
Now we're in a similar position with many animals. We know chimpanzees exhibit behaviors consistent with emotions like love, respect, disappointment, devotion, etc. We've seen elephants exhibit behaviors that look like religious ceremonies, and who hold grave sites in high reverence. Heck, I've seen an eel that was so emotionally distraught over it's partner being thrown out of the water to her death during an earthquake that a week later he threw himself to his death too. We've all known household pets that show jealousy and passive-agressive tendencies in no uncertain terms.
How does the argument, then, that these animals have no emotions, and therefore no "soul" still hold water? Because we don't understand their language. We know they have one. Dolphins and Whales are the most obvious examples of mammals with the capability for complex language, but chimps, cats, dogs, birds... basically every animal that we've really spent time studying has shown such capacity, many of which clearly exhibit that capacity in the wild. And if you include gestural languages, the amount of communication going on in the animal kingdom goes up tremendously.
We also know they have higher cognition. They can extrapolate from past experience, they can make predictions about the future based upon incomplete knowledge, they can solve basically all of the puzzles we put in front of them. There is the famous example of the bird that reasoned out the concept of zero on it's own. A bird, mind you, not a chimp or a dolphin. If you've ever seen a raccoon try to reason its way through all of the pitfalls between it and the garbage you're trying to keep from it, you'll see intelligence in action. And again, mathematics, logic, and other abstract functions are not at all beyond most animals.
So yes, the moral of the story is that we don't speak Swahili, we don't know exactly what the black people are saying, but we know they're saying something and what they're doing seems consistent with what we would do so it is reasonable to inferr that we're not fundamentally different.
If Linux and WIndows are "old clunkers" then presumably the *BSDs are not just dead, but rotting in hell with all those demons!
Have you tried to get a newbie up to speed on an OS recently? Windows and Linux are old clunkers. Specifically about video, I've sent people video and had to iterate through several different codec downloads and lots of software installs before they hit something that worked. And that's on Windows. How is downloading streaming video from arbitrary sites like CNN going on Linux? With the forced commercials and separation of stream types, etc, it can be a nightmare and it isn't going to get any better. Even skilled people give up.
And beyond that, the interface in both is terrible. Is the data I'm looking for in/usr/bin/run? C:/documents and settings/Default User/Application Data/? Or one of a million other places? Is my dependency tree resolved properly? Hell, deleting an application in the two major operating systems is 1000x more hassle and failure-prone than throwing out a binder at work. And once a system is up and running don't move anything or everything breaks. Don't rename anything or everything breaks. Ever have the fun of trying to walk a new person through a registry fix over the phone? Or, well, any sort of Linux support over the phone to somebody who wasn't a hardcore linux person?
Browser applications are also a miserable failure, because they're tacked onto a system designed to do something completely different. The browser window itself can't update, so you need to run in Flash, ActiveX, or Java, none of which are particularly good at full scale applications. Flash is too animation-centric for persistent data like that, Java never hit its stride (see the WordPerfect in Browser in Java debacle), and ActiveX is ActiveX. Comparing the elegance of remote Xwindows or straight SSH to browser applications shows just how far behind we are.
Sure, 20 years of debugging goes a long way, and the *nix's are more than competent in serving content, but for the average user OS's are still foriegn, behave strangely, require a high learning curve, and don't adapt well to the way the user wants to work.
There are actually two people "getting screwed" here, the publishers and the developers. But unless the title is a break-away hit, the developers usually don't see a dime. And if the title is a hit, the developers get a sweet deal on their next title. So really the one getting screwed is the publisher, as the developer is already screwed.
Unfortunately lower initial price does not always equal higher sales, let alone higher profits. People equate cost with quality (usually incorrectly), and as such cheaper games will often sell less overall. Having worked on the 2k sports lineup earlier, I was elated to see Sega try to sell their sports titles at the steepy EA-undercutting price of 20 bucks. These weren't crappy games: they were frequently better than the competition and at less than half the price. But everyone saw the price, assumed it was being binned for being bad, and flocked to EA in even greater numbers. People are bad at math sometimes.
No developer will admit to this, but sometimes junk gets shipped because the project needs to be started over. Sometimes a game just doesn't click, be it for gameplay reasons, artistic reasons, etc, and there really isn't any way practical or otherwise to salvage it. I would guess that a lot more games are shipped as junk because the project was never going to get particularly great, rather than because the publisher didn't want to pony up for another 3 months of development.
However, there are some options that you didn't mention. The pessimist in me suspects these will be the options that publishers explore.
1. Create games with a single-registration online component, such as your account key in World of Warcraft.
2. Pressurs console manufacturers to lock games to the first system that plays them, DRM style.
3. Move to an Xbox Live Arcade style download-only service.
If they did stuff like this, they wouldn't have to shut down the game.
I would have liked to see evil triumph and destroy the world, shutting down the AC2+ universe "forever," but that's just me. Also, give everyone on AC2 a free 4 month trial of AC1.
Sony released a hdd/Linux combination for the PS1 and the PS2. They were called Yaroze and PS2 Linux. PS3 Linux is a natural extension of these.
They were basically a very expensive ways for hobbyists to get their hands dirty with the console before moving on to full-on game development (the graphics subsystems were locked out), while Sony had an expensive source to mine for ideas.
The one possibility which hasn't been discussed is a google-branded version of Windows. Have google toolbar and the other google goodies built in, with google as the home page and I.E. launching on startup, and Google can subsidise the cost of the OS to get the 50 or so dollars per year per user of google's accessories.
It would run Dora the Explorer and Blues Clues, but it would also direct people through Google's services. Why would Google need to take down Windows, when they can make even more money from it?
I don't know. Those Americans are the best in the world at caring less. They have just about reached the theoretical minimum of caring. Of course, they might not be trying that hard right now because, well, they couldn't care less.
It is only a rumor at this point. Here is a quote from the article
"Here are some predictions for the media industry for 2006, based on interviews with industry analysts, executives and investors, along with a little intuition."
Oh come on. If you want dependable information on the future of IT you always go to industry analysts, executives, and investors. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to refill the iSmell attached to my Internet Appliance.
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Someone sent a link to Zuma a little while back. My first thought upon playing it was "this is a PC version of Puzzloop."
Now, if you want to trace it back further, Puzzloop was based somewhat more loosely on a linear version of Bust a Move, which in turn was a hexagonal interpretation of Columns. Columns was Sega's attempt to get in on the success of Tetris.
Of course, the difference between stealing is how much interpretation goes on between the steps, and how honest the developers are about the originality. Puzzle Pirates has a swordfighting system with is clearly based upon Puzzle Fighter. Puzzle Fighter in turn was based upon Waku Waku Animal, which was an attempt to rip off Puyo Pop, which was a somewhat more successful attempt to rip off columns, who was going for tetris. However, if you look at the Swordfighting in Puzzle Pirates and Tetris, there is a huge delta between the two. Likewise, you can trace fighting games from Soul Calibur III -> Soul Calibur -> Tekken -> Mortal Kombat -> Street Fighter II -> Street Fighter I -> Karate Champ, and back up from Karate Champ -> Kung Fu -> Double Dragon -> Ninja Gaiden -> Strider -> Sonic the Hedgehog -> Sonic Adventures.
My point is that fundamental game mechanics flow between games, in the same way that camera movements flow between movies and bad acting flows between TV shows. The mechanics are building blocks from which games emerge, but they are not the games themselves. It isn't the individual mechanics per-say, but the execution that matters.
As a person who earns his living making video games, video game reviewing has always been a sore spot.
We read all of the reviews. All of them. IGN, Gamespot, Famitsu, Edge, Joystick101, The Atlanta Herald... you name it we've read it. This is where we get our impresson of people's impression of the game. This is where we get fodder to make alterations to future games. And you know what, it's disheartening when nearly every review gets at least one thing factually wrong. It's disheartening when the reviewer clearly hasn't played more than 15 minutes into the game that you just spend 16 months creating. And it's disheartening when the reviewer keeps talking about boobies and poop and fart jokes like he was a 12 year old on the playground.
One of the most insightful pieces I've read talked about how Half-Life 2 used darkness to symbolize safety and bright, light areas as a sign of danger. But this was Game Developer magazine talking about art direction, not a reviewer talking about the game itself. Maybe it is too much to ask for a reviewer to take as in-depth a look at a game as a developer would, but there is direction to be had here. Compare and contrast with other titles, plot developments, gameplay structures, etc. Give insight into what the developers were trying to achieve and what they created. Put the game into context. Even Ebert will delve a little bit into the movie school theory behind the movies.
Even as simple sources of opinions, reviewers frequently fall down. Afraid of "offending" any publishers, they don't say anything negative about certain titles. Afraid of stepping out of line, they keep their scores in line with everyone else's. I saw a review the other day that said "X may very well be the best game available on the PS2." He then gave it a 70%, same as everyone else.
There is a lot of room for innovation and insight in video game reviews. Hopefully somebody will pick up that opportunity and run with it.
House of the dead had a 7 million dollar budget and grossed 11 million in domestic box office. Add in overseas numbers and DVD sales, and you have what the industry considers a real winner.
What happens next is, of course, the problem. A: people watch the movie, are terrified by how bad it is and don't come back. B: With a success under his belt, Uwe Bowl is given 20 million dollars to make his next movie, with is also drek but doesn't have the charm of a low-budget film. C: Anybody who didn't see the first movie goes in to see the second movie, realizes how bad it is, and doesn't come back.
In essence, you have hollywood investing in people who can sucker the largest audience into bad films.
BTW, I just posted this to the IMDB forums, but might as well share here. This is the poster for the movie. This is a quick photoshop edit of the poster to make it look like the character from the game. The actress was more than capable of pulling off the role, but without competenet direction, cinematography, and costuming she didn't have a chance.
There are different iso's floating around with different levels of completion. Supposedly the last one was from near the end of their beta cycle, and was about to go gold. I've found a few ISO's over the years, and the best one has crashed maybe once, lending credence to the theory that it was basically done.
Not to disparage Paradox or anything, but this thing was ready to ship.
And honestly, it was. You're right in pointing out that it's a lot better than many of the games released at the time. Certainly it is a lot better than most of the 4-player games on the PS1.
Cingular is really bad about their data services.
I recently tried downloading a game to my phone to see what it was like. Note that this wasn't the internet proper, but was over their minimalist phone network. The game preview images took nearly 30 seconds to load, and the whole process took about 20 minutes. After I bought the game for 5 dollars, I went online to check my bill and found out that the process of finding and downloading the game took an additional 6 dollars worth of bandwidth. It's like buying 100 dollars worth of groceries and getting a 150 dollar "lingering fee" when you walk out of the building. Bandwidth just isn't that expensive.
I hear Verizon is a lot better with their data. Bandwidth is still tiny, but prices are closer to what you would expect to pay for a service like this.
Of course, I live in an area with three free open WAP points at any given location, so the whole thing is somewhat moot. But I won't buy a network-centric phone until the cellphone companies get off of their high horses and become network providers rather than end-to-end monopolists. After all, none of them have figured out yet that I want to SSH into a machine at work, so why should I expect them to be able to take responsibility for the entire experience chain?
It is my phone, I'll install what I want and run what I want. You can choose to provide the network connection or not. That's the way it works in the rest of the world, and man does it work better.
Google has Googled the entire Googley Google. Google Google world park in Googleville has a Googleplex of Googish Googles Googling to Google your Googles. "We Google Your Google so you don't have to," said one Googliscious Googler.
A spokesperson for MSN was Googled as saying: "Crap"
Don't forget how much they donated and to whom, which is a nationwide database.
Back in the day the Thrill Kill ISO was pretty widely available... one of the testers leaked the ISO onto FTP sites and the nanocent P2P networks. You can still find it if you are interested, though it has become a bit more rare. It isn't bootleg, it's a leak.
Thrill Kill had a few interesting things about it. For one, you didn't have a health meter that went down. You had a carnage meter that went up. When you were fully carnaged, you could do a move that would kill off one of the other players. This lead to interesting situations where everyone is huddled in a corner trying to avoid the inevitable. It's the only fighting game I've ever played that had a special move of "put the other guy in front of you." There were also some unique moves... not having contortionists or midgets on stilts as staples in games, the developers could afford to get a little creative with character attacks. And being pre-GTAIII, it bled of a style that was lacking at the time. After the Night Trap debackle, nobody else seemed willing to reach out and make a game that pushed the boundaries of taste.
Unfortunately, it also pushed the playstation farther than it was capable of going. The fighting felt very, very loose, and the entire thing ran at about 20 FPS at best. Also, fighting with 4 people got quite "dirty," as you might be attacking someone while someone attacks you who is getting attacked by someone else. As the game was combo-centric, and this ended combos, making the experience quite frustrating. Further wearing down the gameplay was the repetition of enemies in the single player mode. With three other characters in every battle, you ran through the full roster of the game in about two and a half fights. The developers didn't throw in any variants like 1v1 or 2v2 or 3v1, etc, so the fighting was all vanilla. The arenas didn't help reduce the sense of repetition, as while they had some degree of variability in set pieces, they were all perfectly square of exactly the same dimensions and they all played identically.
I have to say: I was into the whole "let's make the least tasteful game possible" thing. The playstation wasn't the right platform for it, and there needed to be a second generation of gameplay, but it had potential and opened the door for later multiplayer fighters who could avoid all of Thrill Kill's mistakes.
BTW, Thrill Kill is probably the only properly dead game on the list. Earthbound 0 and Mega Man B&C both saw overseas releases, and both have retro-pack releases coming up in the US. It's too bad they didn't list out more interesting titles that were actively canned before production was up, such as Secret of Mana for the SNES CD and Sonic the Hedgehog 32X (and about a million other games... 3/4ths of all games never get released).
The abomination of videogaming known as DDR served as an outlet for wannabe Travoltas to flail around wildly and quickly made the house of tank simulators and street fighting a haven for lamos.
On the weekends, do the people at GamePro pretend that they work for a good magazine, like Edge?
Hmm... non-violent fun... like Mario Kart DS? Animal Crossing? Guitar Hero, Katamari Damacy, SSX, Amplitude, Marble Madness, Puzzle Pirates, Devil Dice, Super Puzzle Fighter, The Sims, Uplink... Yup. No fun games out there that don't involve 'shootin and boobies.
BTW, I don't care if they do look like Danny Bonaduce, don't make fun of the expert DDR players. Trust me on this: they can kick your ass several dozen times per second. They may look like someone from Riverdance while doing it, but you will just have gotten your ass kicked by someone from Riverdance, which is even worse.
This is a really important distinction. HDTV's aren't the hot item because everyone is buying one, they're the hot item because the TV makers make a heck of a lot more profit off of one of those than they do off a standard 30" screen.
On the other hand, with the switch to digital in 2007, we're going to see a lot more forced upgrades of TV's... HD sets are exactly what they want people to buy. And with an new HD set, why not pick up an HD-DVD player? Heck, 10% of Xbox 360's sold at the same time as a new HDTV.
Honestly, I've always loved the up-resing of televisions and have wanted HDTV years ago. But the circus around them is really turning me off. Studies have shown that the majority of HD buyers don't have an HD video stream and don't realize it. There is still a lot of life left in the old standard.
GNU Windows XP Vista is Not Unix
Remember, if you don't have a high-density set that supports the HDMI copy protection standard, this isn't going to do anything. Computer monitors do not count.
It is also first generation, and very likely to have major electrical problems. Not to mention the player is about the size of an average HDTV set.
As an American citizen too, I think we can do better.
A: we give more foreign aid than any other country, but not per-capita or as a percentage of GDP.
B: a lot of those "gifts" include military aid. This aid does far more harm than good.
C: a lot of American foreign aid is required to be spent on American companies and contractors... basically all of our military aid, most of the aid we're sending to Iraq, the Saudi aid, etc.
D: most Americans couldn't point to Iran on a map. Very few of us travel the world, keep up with international news, or could describe any structure of government besides our own. Many can't even describe our own with any accuracy.
E: We elected a leader who claims that "I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."
1. Create games with a single-registration online component, such as your account key in World of Warcraft.
That could happen but wouldn't be a good idea as it would generate a huge amount of ill will towards a publisher. Especially if it wasn't made clear up front.
I thought so too, but Microsoft Windows got away with it and World of Warcraft is raking in the money.
2. Pressurs console manufacturers to lock games to the first system that plays them, DRM style.
Suicide. Remember the backlash that was brewing on just the rumor that the PS3 would do this? Even Sony couldn't pull that off.
Again, I would think this. But I said the same thing 15 years ago about requiring a disk to be in a computer when playing a game, and look where we are now.
3. Move to an Xbox Live Arcade style download-only service.
This is the most viable choice. Some people actually like things like Steam, for reasons that utterly escape me.
I do too. This is probably the least evil of all of the options. I'm still waiting for iGames.
4. Make re-selling games illegal.
That would require a fundamental change in the law, possibly even a Constitutional Amendment. First Sale has a long and well established legal precendent up to the Supreme Court.
Re-selling software applications violates EULA, and MS has successfully stopped second hand sales of Windows on this ground. And, again, long-held principles of ownership were shattered with the passage of the DMCA. I don't think it would be that difficult to buy a legally binding bill through congress on this.
Operating system in common usage includes the usability layers, including plug-in extensibility architectures and how applications call the system to playback arbitrary video sequences, or how the system interacts with the rest of the networking cloud. And you can't fix a crappy, highly-dependent file system without getting down to the "real" os layer.
I'm not saying there aren't ways of revising past the problems building from the current generation of systems. However, I don't think that in practical terms such a transition will happen without throwing everything out and starting over. Sure, you could replace the interface, the file handling capabilities, the local / remote computer paradigm, update the kernel, and redo the API calls to support the above, but at some point you're just trying to replace every bit of a system while making sure that everything continues to function throughout the entire process.
From a technical standpoint there is no reason why Linux couldn't evolve into the next super slick, highly usable, highly accesable, flexible to the user's will operating system, which has a modern interpretation of local and remote storage and local and remote applications. However, when a project gets big enough and gets enough momentum behind it, you can't make such radical changes to it: you have to scrap it and start over. There is just too much baggage to fight against. Besides, I want Linux and *bsd to remain rock solid highly configurable and efficient server tools for skilled professionals, at which they currently excel. They shouldn't undergo a radical shift because they're good at what they do. They're just being leveraged into something they're not. Now windows... that you can gut.
Don't be resigned to the status quo. Operating systems could be a hell of a lot better.
There was a great racist theory going around for a long time, that sounded remarkably like what you've described above. We didn't understand the language of the African persons, or Indian persons, and as such there was no evidence they were having deep reflective thoughts. And without deep reflective thoughts, they aren't human. (Of course, many African tribes thought the same about the white people. Many still do, basically correctly).
Because we didn't understand their language, we wrote them off completely as being outside the sphere of "us" and undeserving of protection.
Now we're in a similar position with many animals. We know chimpanzees exhibit behaviors consistent with emotions like love, respect, disappointment, devotion, etc. We've seen elephants exhibit behaviors that look like religious ceremonies, and who hold grave sites in high reverence. Heck, I've seen an eel that was so emotionally distraught over it's partner being thrown out of the water to her death during an earthquake that a week later he threw himself to his death too. We've all known household pets that show jealousy and passive-agressive tendencies in no uncertain terms.
How does the argument, then, that these animals have no emotions, and therefore no "soul" still hold water? Because we don't understand their language. We know they have one. Dolphins and Whales are the most obvious examples of mammals with the capability for complex language, but chimps, cats, dogs, birds... basically every animal that we've really spent time studying has shown such capacity, many of which clearly exhibit that capacity in the wild. And if you include gestural languages, the amount of communication going on in the animal kingdom goes up tremendously.
We also know they have higher cognition. They can extrapolate from past experience, they can make predictions about the future based upon incomplete knowledge, they can solve basically all of the puzzles we put in front of them. There is the famous example of the bird that reasoned out the concept of zero on it's own. A bird, mind you, not a chimp or a dolphin. If you've ever seen a raccoon try to reason its way through all of the pitfalls between it and the garbage you're trying to keep from it, you'll see intelligence in action. And again, mathematics, logic, and other abstract functions are not at all beyond most animals.
So yes, the moral of the story is that we don't speak Swahili, we don't know exactly what the black people are saying, but we know they're saying something and what they're doing seems consistent with what we would do so it is reasonable to inferr that we're not fundamentally different.
If Linux and WIndows are "old clunkers" then presumably the *BSDs are not just dead, but rotting in hell with all those demons!
/usr/bin/run? C:/documents and settings/Default User/Application Data/? Or one of a million other places? Is my dependency tree resolved properly? Hell, deleting an application in the two major operating systems is 1000x more hassle and failure-prone than throwing out a binder at work. And once a system is up and running don't move anything or everything breaks. Don't rename anything or everything breaks. Ever have the fun of trying to walk a new person through a registry fix over the phone? Or, well, any sort of Linux support over the phone to somebody who wasn't a hardcore linux person?
Have you tried to get a newbie up to speed on an OS recently? Windows and Linux are old clunkers. Specifically about video, I've sent people video and had to iterate through several different codec downloads and lots of software installs before they hit something that worked. And that's on Windows. How is downloading streaming video from arbitrary sites like CNN going on Linux? With the forced commercials and separation of stream types, etc, it can be a nightmare and it isn't going to get any better. Even skilled people give up.
And beyond that, the interface in both is terrible. Is the data I'm looking for in
Browser applications are also a miserable failure, because they're tacked onto a system designed to do something completely different. The browser window itself can't update, so you need to run in Flash, ActiveX, or Java, none of which are particularly good at full scale applications. Flash is too animation-centric for persistent data like that, Java never hit its stride (see the WordPerfect in Browser in Java debacle), and ActiveX is ActiveX. Comparing the elegance of remote Xwindows or straight SSH to browser applications shows just how far behind we are.
Sure, 20 years of debugging goes a long way, and the *nix's are more than competent in serving content, but for the average user OS's are still foriegn, behave strangely, require a high learning curve, and don't adapt well to the way the user wants to work.
There are actually two people "getting screwed" here, the publishers and the developers. But unless the title is a break-away hit, the developers usually don't see a dime. And if the title is a hit, the developers get a sweet deal on their next title. So really the one getting screwed is the publisher, as the developer is already screwed.
Unfortunately lower initial price does not always equal higher sales, let alone higher profits. People equate cost with quality (usually incorrectly), and as such cheaper games will often sell less overall. Having worked on the 2k sports lineup earlier, I was elated to see Sega try to sell their sports titles at the steepy EA-undercutting price of 20 bucks. These weren't crappy games: they were frequently better than the competition and at less than half the price. But everyone saw the price, assumed it was being binned for being bad, and flocked to EA in even greater numbers. People are bad at math sometimes.
No developer will admit to this, but sometimes junk gets shipped because the project needs to be started over. Sometimes a game just doesn't click, be it for gameplay reasons, artistic reasons, etc, and there really isn't any way practical or otherwise to salvage it. I would guess that a lot more games are shipped as junk because the project was never going to get particularly great, rather than because the publisher didn't want to pony up for another 3 months of development.
However, there are some options that you didn't mention. The pessimist in me suspects these will be the options that publishers explore.
1. Create games with a single-registration online component, such as your account key in World of Warcraft.
2. Pressurs console manufacturers to lock games to the first system that plays them, DRM style.
3. Move to an Xbox Live Arcade style download-only service.
4. Make re-selling games illegal.
If they did stuff like this, they wouldn't have to shut down the game.
I would have liked to see evil triumph and destroy the world, shutting down the AC2+ universe "forever," but that's just me. Also, give everyone on AC2 a free 4 month trial of AC1.
Sony released a hdd/Linux combination for the PS1 and the PS2. They were called Yaroze and PS2 Linux. PS3 Linux is a natural extension of these.
They were basically a very expensive ways for hobbyists to get their hands dirty with the console before moving on to full-on game development (the graphics subsystems were locked out), while Sony had an expensive source to mine for ideas.
The one possibility which hasn't been discussed is a google-branded version of Windows. Have google toolbar and the other google goodies built in, with google as the home page and I.E. launching on startup, and Google can subsidise the cost of the OS to get the 50 or so dollars per year per user of google's accessories.
It would run Dora the Explorer and Blues Clues, but it would also direct people through Google's services. Why would Google need to take down Windows, when they can make even more money from it?
The maker of a product that nobody currently uses boasts that it will be the next iPod in half a decade.
Quick! Someone get this guy a job at Napster.
I think you just described half of Slashdot.
The 1% in the USA, strangely, could care less.
I don't know. Those Americans are the best in the world at caring less. They have just about reached the theoretical minimum of caring. Of course, they might not be trying that hard right now because, well, they couldn't care less.
It is only a rumor at this point. Here is a quote from the article
"Here are some predictions for the media industry for 2006, based on interviews with industry analysts, executives and investors, along with a little intuition."
Oh come on. If you want dependable information on the future of IT you always go to industry analysts, executives, and investors. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to refill the iSmell attached to my Internet Appliance.