"To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmers' magazines left standing."
This is another nostalgia-stuffed feel-good statement I see burrowed into our news stories from time to time as we shed the old and embrace the new. Me? I just don't give a damn. Let them die. I haven't purchased a magazine outside of an airport in this millennium and I don't know anyone else who has, either. There isn't one thing a magazine could tell me that I haven't read (and probably re-re-read) many times over.
Today we have our laptops, Kindles, RSS feeds, incredible PDAs, hell, my cell phone does more than first computer ever could, ten times over.
We don't need dead trees to get our information any longer. Call it the green economy shedding the skin of old media, call it putting the ole girl out to pasture, call it shooting an unneeded service in the face, whatever.
Just please don't give me this nostalgic wasn't-it-great-back-then crap about how you used to be so excited for the new issue to come in the mail. Rather, be excited about seeing your RSS feed updated. Shift your focus, enjoy your nostalgia, but put it into perspective.
1. Gen Con failed to uphold its legal obligations in terms of financial reporting, accounting and payments to Lucasfilm ($500,000 in damages) 2. Gen Con did not give auction proceeds to Make-A-Wish as they had agreed to do ($150,000 in damages) 3. Gen Con did not give Lucasfilm their share of the auction proceeds ($150,000 in damages) 4. Gen Con did this all unjustly ($150,000 in damages)"
Firstly, with that huge amount of rack equipment, you'll need to either separate yourself from it with a wall, or you'll freeze from the constant A/C that is required and go nuts from the noise as previously stated.
For the more mundane details:
- Cable Management. Try to build the room with cable management in mind. Where do the cables go? I wouldn't mention this if you hadn't mentioned the racks. It sounds like you're building a server room that you're going to put your primary machine in. That's great and all, but that's also still "The Server Room" and not "An Office" with carpet and quiet.
- Power sources. Off the ground, preferably over your head.
- Different colored cabling. The more precise you can get this, the easier it is to find/test/figure out problems. "The web servers are on the green cabling and the file server on red" is one of the most appreciated phrases ever when things go wrong.
- Room to grow. You've grown this much so far. In five years you're going to have more machines in there. Can you handle it and still have "your side"?
- Has your management taken into account the noise factor?
- Monitor arm. Now you can install one of these! I heard these were sweet and I think it'd be really cool (dream, right?)
- Fire protection system. Being in the vicinity of those servers will probably put you very close to their fire protection. Have you thought about what systems you want to keep them safe?
- What about Water protection, if that's a consideration?
- RJ11 and RJ45 jacks. Put jacks everywhere, even if they're not being used. You can never have too many jacks or wires run.
- Filing cabinets, shelving, etc. Just wanted to mention that.
- Build a floor plan in a flowcharting program. Map out EVERYTHING. Where you want everything to go and everything to face. (Face the door as someone said earlier). There are plenty of neato Web 2.0 flowcharting programs, or just download a demo copy of Visio or something (if you have a mac, use OmniGraffle -- and for that matter, use it every day for all sorts of things, that program rules!)
- Media storage cabinet. You may want to look into something like this if you're keeping track of server backups, etc.
This is not necessarily true. I have a video series for Magic the Gathering (youtube.com/mrorangeguy) and I am not a "big player" in the least. I began like everyone else, in the 10min limit. Then I begged and pleaded and bugged the hell out of them until I became a Director. This was about a year ago now.
They've since changed the policy and the methods by which you become a Director, so this may be moot. However, I know I'm just a guy making videos with the tools he has and no corporate backing. I also read where they let those who they had already allowed 10+ minutes to keep this access when they changed said policy (To which I'm grateful, of course).
Either way, they let people pass the limit when they show effort and ask. That's my experience, anyway.
Naturally, you'd have to have read the actual LoTR to get that and not just seen the movies.... Oh man, you actually have to read the books to get that joke?
It's too bad you're posting this on Slashdot. Nobody has ever read those books here.
This is a series of riddles, with no payoff but the joy in moving on to the next level. Me and my friends (and some of my geek cousins) have found ourselves at times obsessed with this game. I've reached Level 33 and have been waiting for my friends to catch up ever since.
You'd be surprised how good these riddles can be. Ever need to edit pictures and look closer for clues? How about identifying musical notes? Having to decode Hex and ASCII values, image manipulation, even hidden JPG data? It's all inside.
Give it a try, I think the/. crowd will love it. It has a ton of levels, but it is not in the finishing of notpron which is the payoff, but the journey. After playing it for awhile you'll grow addicted to the rush of seeing the new level pop up and being absolutely stumped as to how to finish it.
Note: There are copycats to the original, including the recent frvade. I've played this one but definitely prefer notpron. YMMV. Good luck, riddlers.
"The second, and probably more important, reason is from a user point of view. You don't want to have your documents only accessible to a program on some other organization's computer. It's bad enough when the documents you store on your own computer are in a proprietary format you're not allowed to know how to process; not even having access to the documents without intermission of a 3rd party is much, much worse. Not just because of the huge potential for lock-in, but also because of the reliability and security aspects."
You realize this makes no sense, right?
Only accessible to a program on some other org's computer? Huh? As if this sort of project would include proprietary formats? Don't be silly. If anything of this scale and design would include something as verbose it would never work, and besides these companies know better, particularly giants like Google or Yahoo.
Needing a 3rd party? How about Microsoft or Adobe? If you create files with a virtual office suite, then you would want to download and save them in a variety of formats (which the program would be all-too-happy to provide). MS and Adobe will be the primary 3rd party outfits you know and love, and would be relied on as primary exporting formats.
"Not even having access to the documents without intermission of a 3rd party is much, much worse."
What's your definition of a 3rd party? How about your computer at work? You said yourself it's a pain to access it--wouldn't it be great to have it anywhere there is a web browser? Readable to boot? Able to edit your old documents because the app can read old formats?
"Not just because of the huge potential for lock-in, but also because of the reliability and security aspects."
News flash: The lock-in occured in 1997 with Office 97, the defacto standard. Every office program reads those standard file formats, amongst a host of others.
Reliability and security aspects are the job of Yahoo or Google to shore up. I'm a huge Google fan and with over 200MB of email in my Gmail account, and it's always been up and available when needed. I trust them to do this sort of thing as well. It's a trust issue, and I certainly don't trust my credit card info to a Microsoft Passport. But I would entrust my documents to Google. Sure it sounds odd, but that's the leap of faith you have to take with these sorts of endeavors. Either you adhere to it or you don't.
There seems to be a lot of trepidation for a subject/possibility that is very exciting to me.
FYI, here was the soundtrack list for Burnout 3. I've highlighted what I consider the best of the bunch:
Apologies for the terrible formatting,/.'s "average characters per line" spam filter had to be worked around
1208 - "Fall Apart", Amber Pacific - "Always You" Ash - "Orpheus", Atretyu - "Right Side of the Bed" Autopilot Off - "Make a Sound" Bouncing Souls - "Sing Along Forever" Burning Brides - "Heart Full of Black" Chronic Future - "Time and Time Again" Donots - "Saccharine Smile" Eighteen Visions - "I Let Go" Fall Out Boy - "Reinventing the Wheel" Finger Eleven - "Stay in Shadow" Franz Ferdinand - "This Fire" From First to Last - "Populace in Two" Funeral For A Friend - "Rookie of the Year" Futureheads - "Decent Days and Nights" Go Betty Go - "C'mon", Jimmy Eat World - "Just Tonight" Letter Kills - "Radio Up" Local H - "Everyone Alive" Maxeen - "Please", Midtown - "Give It Up" Moments In Grace - "Broken Promises" Motion City Soundtrack - "My Favorite" Mudmen - "Animal" My Chemical Romance - "I'm Not Okay" New Found Glory - "At Least I'm Known" No Motiv - "Independence Day" Silent Drive - "4-16" Sugarcult - "Memory" The D4 - "Come On!", The Explosion - "Here I Am" The Fups - "Lazy Generation", The Lot Six - "Autobrats" The Matches - "Audio Blood", The Mooney Suzuki - "Shake That Bush" The Ordinary Boys - "Over the Counter" The Von Bondies - "C'Mon C'Mon" Yellowcard - "Breathing"
Here is the Burnout 3: Revenge soundtrack list:
Andy Hunter - Come On, Animal Alpha - Bundy Apocalyptica - Life Burns!, Asian Dub Foundation - Flyover Avenged - Sevenfold Beast..., Billy Talent - Red Flag Bloc Party - Helicopter, Bullet For My Valentine - Hand Of Blood The Chemical Brothers - The Big Jump CKY - As The Tables Turn, Comeback Kid - Wake The Dead The Dead 60s - Riot Radio, Dogs - Tuned to a Different Station The Doors - Break On Through (To The Other Side) BT vs. The Doors Remix Emanuel - The Hey Man!, Fall Out Boy - Dance, Dance Finch - Ink, Funeral For A Friend - All The Rage Goldfinger - I Want, Infusion - Better World (Adam Freeland Mix) Junkie XL - Today LCD Soundsystem - Daft Punk is Playing at My House (Soulwax Shibuya Mix) Maximo Park - Apply Some Pressure Mindless Self Indulgence - Straight To Video (KMFDM Remix) Morningwood - Nu Rock, MxPx - Heard That Sound Nine Black Alps - Shot Down OK Go - Do What You Want Pennywise - Stand Up The Academy Is... - Almost Here The All-American Rejects - Top Of The World The Black Velvets - Fear And Loathing The Bravery - An Honest Mistake (Superdiscount Remix) The Outline - Shotgun The Starting Line - The World Thrice - Lullaby Timo Maas - First Day (General Midi Remix) Tsar - Band-Girls-Money Unwritten Law - F.I.G.H.T. We Are Scientists - The Great Escape Yellowcard - Lights And Sounds
The Bravery and Tsar are fantastic, not sure of many others.
For showing your true colors. I guess there's just a little too much refreshing, interesting commentary happening between companies, and you need to add that PR yin to the Community-Based yang.
This interview isn't one. It's a press release, and what's worse is that I was thinking about resubscribing to WoW. No longer.
If you can't give me straight, truthful answers not wrapped in Blameless Marketing Drivel, you simply don't deserve my money.
Am I the only guy who read the blurb and couldn't help but blurt out: "What the fuck is Hertz doing working on a rent-a-ping-pong-ball...for roaches?!"
It was like living in a Ziggy strip, I swear to God.
What? Steam is the only direct-to-consumer internet-based game delivery service. Insomuch as a direct client-to-server experience with direct payment capacity in the client. You trash it because it is the only one available and the only one that has performed.
Like it or not, Steam has been a huge success and through the sale of HL2 (and subsequent server almost-meltdown) they have learned a lot of lessons. I never have problems playing any Valve games, from HL2 to Counter Strike. Any and all patches are applied quickly and easily with no input needed from me.
Call me what you like, but I -love- Steam and being ingrained in the independent game industry, I really like how it has been accepted, sometimes begrudgingly, by the game-buying public and geeks at large. I see its flaws, but I'm more of a silver lining guy myself.
This is the kind of service/platform that independent developers need, not shelf space. Games are becoming risk-adverse, and that means creativity suffers. Don't slam a great leap in technology and delivery. Instead, use it, provide some constructive criticism, but don't dismiss it.
Here are the key paragraph's from Greg's rant. Absolutely classic stuff!
-Start-
As recently as 1992: games cost 200K. Next generation games will cost 20m. Publishers are becoming increasingly risk averse. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. Who was at the Microsoft keynote? I don't know about you but it made my flesh crawl. [laughter] The HD era? Bigger, louder? Big bucks to be made! Well not by you and me of course. Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation. Was your allegiance bought at the price of a television? Then there was the Nintendo keynote. This was the company who established the business model that has crucified the industry today.. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard's chest did he carve it from? [audience falls about]
How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can't afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it's ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation's time there are still games to love. You can start today.
-End-
Hahahaha, who's heart did he pull out? Just brilliant!
Days of Wonder, Blogs, and BoardGameGeek
on
Fun Tabletop Games?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I've written on these guys before, but let me do so again in a more straightforward manner:
Days of Wonder is a great company who takes brilliant designs the world over and shares them with a geek-like audience. Me and my wife love Mystery of the Abbey. Think of it like a really interesting, deep version of Clue. No candlesticks, no ridiculous characters, and it actually has -strategy- incorporated, and everyone who has played it loves it immediately.
And no, I'm not even getting paid to say that (though of course, it would be nice).
Lastly, I'd like to say that me and my wife's favorite non-boardgame is Bang!, an easy-to-learn great mechanic-filled game that anyone over the age of 7 will adore.
Oh, and of course, get all the recommendations you can handle over at the always fantastic BoardGameGeek.com.
Have fun!
Evan CCGBlog.com - CCG Design, Theory, and Commentary
You can read more about root causes at http://www.taproot.com
(official disclaimer: I work for the company, and yes please forgive the site ugliness, I'm working with a web dev as we speak)
A Series of Unfortunate Mistakes
on
Troika Games Closes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This studio has a long history of buckling under publisher demands and therefore releasing half-assed games that need FAN-CREATED PATCHES to fix glaring holes (caps because it's so ridiculous you have to have your players create patches for you).
You want to fail as a game studio? Release your latest game with a showstopper that drops them to the desktop (Vampire: Masquarade).
You want to fail as a game studio? Release an unfinished RPG, with unfinished rooms, quests, and broken bits that were so broken it took MULTIPLE (ugh!) fan-created patches to fix them.
Troika is an example of how to fuck up. It has nothing to do with EA or whatever, they simply released unfinished games with bad, ugly bugs. This will sink any game company at any time. EA or no, if a game doesn't play or is broken, people won't buy it.
"They lost because the world is going corporate."
No, they lost the fight because the world doesn't put up with that kind of performance, horrid out of the box experience, and regulating the fans to make the patches.
I'm sorry for the team involved, and I'm sure they tried their damndest. But whether it was bad management or some other reason, there were clear and easy-to-read signs on why they went kaput.
Slashdot Mirror
"To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmers' magazines left standing."
This is another nostalgia-stuffed feel-good statement I see burrowed into our news stories from time to time as we shed the old and embrace the new. Me? I just don't give a damn. Let them die. I haven't purchased a magazine outside of an airport in this millennium and I don't know anyone else who has, either. There isn't one thing a magazine could tell me that I haven't read (and probably re-re-read) many times over.
Today we have our laptops, Kindles, RSS feeds, incredible PDAs, hell, my cell phone does more than first computer ever could, ten times over.
We don't need dead trees to get our information any longer. Call it the green economy shedding the skin of old media, call it putting the ole girl out to pasture, call it shooting an unneeded service in the face, whatever.
Just please don't give me this nostalgic wasn't-it-great-back-then crap about how you used to be so excited for the new issue to come in the mail. Rather, be excited about seeing your RSS feed updated. Shift your focus, enjoy your nostalgia, but put it into perspective.
Just FYI, this filing is a direct result of Lucasfilm suing Gen Con for a lot of deception regarding "Celebration IV" that occurred last year.
As taken from this story on TheForce.net, here is a summation of the charges:
1. Gen Con failed to uphold its legal obligations in terms of financial reporting, accounting and payments to Lucasfilm ($500,000 in damages)
2. Gen Con did not give auction proceeds to Make-A-Wish as they had agreed to do ($150,000 in damages)
3. Gen Con did not give Lucasfilm their share of the auction proceeds ($150,000 in damages)
4. Gen Con did this all unjustly ($150,000 in damages)"
...is another man's IT Kingdom.
Firstly, with that huge amount of rack equipment, you'll need to either separate yourself from it with a wall, or you'll freeze from the constant A/C that is required and go nuts from the noise as previously stated.
For the more mundane details:
- Cable Management. Try to build the room with cable management in mind. Where do the cables go? I wouldn't mention this if you hadn't mentioned the racks. It sounds like you're building a server room that you're going to put your primary machine in. That's great and all, but that's also still "The Server Room" and not "An Office" with carpet and quiet.
- Power sources. Off the ground, preferably over your head.
- Different colored cabling. The more precise you can get this, the easier it is to find/test/figure out problems. "The web servers are on the green cabling and the file server on red" is one of the most appreciated phrases ever when things go wrong.
- Room to grow. You've grown this much so far. In five years you're going to have more machines in there. Can you handle it and still have "your side"?
- Has your management taken into account the noise factor?
- Monitor arm. Now you can install one of these! I heard these were sweet and I think it'd be really cool (dream, right?)
- Fire protection system. Being in the vicinity of those servers will probably put you very close to their fire protection. Have you thought about what systems you want to keep them safe?
- What about Water protection, if that's a consideration?
- RJ11 and RJ45 jacks. Put jacks everywhere, even if they're not being used. You can never have too many jacks or wires run.
- Filing cabinets, shelving, etc. Just wanted to mention that.
- Build a floor plan in a flowcharting program. Map out EVERYTHING. Where you want everything to go and everything to face. (Face the door as someone said earlier). There are plenty of neato Web 2.0 flowcharting programs, or just download a demo copy of Visio or something (if you have a mac, use OmniGraffle -- and for that matter, use it every day for all sorts of things, that program rules!)
- Media storage cabinet. You may want to look into something like this if you're keeping track of server backups, etc.
That's all I can think of at the moment.
This is not necessarily true. I have a video series for Magic the Gathering (youtube.com/mrorangeguy) and I am not a "big player" in the least. I began like everyone else, in the 10min limit. Then I begged and pleaded and bugged the hell out of them until I became a Director. This was about a year ago now.
They've since changed the policy and the methods by which you become a Director, so this may be moot. However, I know I'm just a guy making videos with the tools he has and no corporate backing. I also read where they let those who they had already allowed 10+ minutes to keep this access when they changed said policy (To which I'm grateful, of course).
Either way, they let people pass the limit when they show effort and ask. That's my experience, anyway.
It's too bad you're posting this on Slashdot. Nobody has ever read those books here.
"Begun, the format war has."
Okay, seriously, +1 That's Nasty needs to be added to the moderator drop-down already.
Found at: notpron.com
/. crowd will love it. It has a ton of levels, but it is not in the finishing of notpron which is the payoff, but the journey. After playing it for awhile you'll grow addicted to the rush of seeing the new level pop up and being absolutely stumped as to how to finish it.
This is a series of riddles, with no payoff but the joy in moving on to the next level. Me and my friends (and some of my geek cousins) have found ourselves at times obsessed with this game. I've reached Level 33 and have been waiting for my friends to catch up ever since.
You'd be surprised how good these riddles can be. Ever need to edit pictures and look closer for clues? How about identifying musical notes? Having to decode Hex and ASCII values, image manipulation, even hidden JPG data? It's all inside.
Give it a try, I think the
Note: There are copycats to the original, including the recent frvade. I've played this one but definitely prefer notpron. YMMV. Good luck, riddlers.
"The second, and probably more important, reason is from a user point of view. You don't want to have your documents only accessible to a program on some other organization's computer. It's bad enough when the documents you store on your own computer are in a proprietary format you're not allowed to know how to process; not even having access to the documents without intermission of a 3rd party is much, much worse. Not just because of the huge potential for lock-in, but also because of the reliability and security aspects."
You realize this makes no sense, right?
Only accessible to a program on some other org's computer? Huh? As if this sort of project would include proprietary formats? Don't be silly. If anything of this scale and design would include something as verbose it would never work, and besides these companies know better, particularly giants like Google or Yahoo.
Needing a 3rd party? How about Microsoft or Adobe? If you create files with a virtual office suite, then you would want to download and save them in a variety of formats (which the program would be all-too-happy to provide). MS and Adobe will be the primary 3rd party outfits you know and love, and would be relied on as primary exporting formats.
"Not even having access to the documents without intermission of a 3rd party is much, much worse."
What's your definition of a 3rd party? How about your computer at work? You said yourself it's a pain to access it--wouldn't it be great to have it anywhere there is a web browser? Readable to boot? Able to edit your old documents because the app can read old formats?
"Not just because of the huge potential for lock-in, but also because of the reliability and security aspects."
News flash: The lock-in occured in 1997 with Office 97, the defacto standard. Every office program reads those standard file formats, amongst a host of others.
Reliability and security aspects are the job of Yahoo or Google to shore up. I'm a huge Google fan and with over 200MB of email in my Gmail account, and it's always been up and available when needed. I trust them to do this sort of thing as well. It's a trust issue, and I certainly don't trust my credit card info to a Microsoft Passport. But I would entrust my documents to Google. Sure it sounds odd, but that's the leap of faith you have to take with these sorts of endeavors. Either you adhere to it or you don't.
There seems to be a lot of trepidation for a subject/possibility that is very exciting to me.
FYI, here was the soundtrack list for Burnout 3. I've highlighted what I consider the best of the bunch:
/.'s "average characters per line" spam filter had to be worked around
Apologies for the terrible formatting,
1208 - "Fall Apart", Amber Pacific - "Always You"
Ash - "Orpheus", Atretyu - "Right Side of the Bed"
Autopilot Off - "Make a Sound"
Bouncing Souls - "Sing Along Forever"
Burning Brides - "Heart Full of Black"
Chronic Future - "Time and Time Again"
Donots - "Saccharine Smile"
Eighteen Visions - "I Let Go"
Fall Out Boy - "Reinventing the Wheel"
Finger Eleven - "Stay in Shadow"
Franz Ferdinand - "This Fire"
From First to Last - "Populace in Two"
Funeral For A Friend - "Rookie of the Year"
Futureheads - "Decent Days and Nights"
Go Betty Go - "C'mon", Jimmy Eat World - "Just Tonight"
Letter Kills - "Radio Up"
Local H - "Everyone Alive"
Maxeen - "Please", Midtown - "Give It Up"
Moments In Grace - "Broken Promises"
Motion City Soundtrack - "My Favorite"
Mudmen - "Animal"
My Chemical Romance - "I'm Not Okay"
New Found Glory - "At Least I'm Known"
No Motiv - "Independence Day"
Silent Drive - "4-16"
Sugarcult - "Memory"
The D4 - "Come On!", The Explosion - "Here I Am"
The Fups - "Lazy Generation", The Lot Six - "Autobrats"
The Matches - "Audio Blood", The Mooney Suzuki - "Shake That Bush"
The Ordinary Boys - "Over the Counter"
The Von Bondies - "C'Mon C'Mon"
Yellowcard - "Breathing"
Here is the Burnout 3: Revenge soundtrack list:
Andy Hunter - Come On, Animal Alpha - Bundy
Apocalyptica - Life Burns!, Asian Dub Foundation - Flyover
Avenged - Sevenfold Beast..., Billy Talent - Red Flag
Bloc Party - Helicopter, Bullet For My Valentine - Hand Of Blood
The Chemical Brothers - The Big Jump
CKY - As The Tables Turn, Comeback Kid - Wake The Dead
The Dead 60s - Riot Radio, Dogs - Tuned to a Different Station
The Doors - Break On Through (To The Other Side) BT vs. The Doors Remix
Emanuel - The Hey Man!, Fall Out Boy - Dance, Dance
Finch - Ink, Funeral For A Friend - All The Rage
Goldfinger - I Want, Infusion - Better World (Adam Freeland Mix)
Junkie XL - Today
LCD Soundsystem - Daft Punk is Playing at My House (Soulwax Shibuya Mix)
Maximo Park - Apply Some Pressure
Mindless Self Indulgence - Straight To Video (KMFDM Remix)
Morningwood - Nu Rock, MxPx - Heard That Sound
Nine Black Alps - Shot Down
OK Go - Do What You Want
Pennywise - Stand Up
The Academy Is... - Almost Here
The All-American Rejects - Top Of The World
The Black Velvets - Fear And Loathing
The Bravery - An Honest Mistake (Superdiscount Remix)
The Outline - Shotgun
The Starting Line - The World
Thrice - Lullaby
Timo Maas - First Day (General Midi Remix)
Tsar - Band-Girls-Money
Unwritten Law - F.I.G.H.T.
We Are Scientists - The Great Escape
Yellowcard - Lights And Sounds
The Bravery and Tsar are fantastic, not sure of many others.
For showing your true colors. I guess there's just a little too much refreshing, interesting commentary happening between companies, and you need to add that PR yin to the Community-Based yang.
This interview isn't one. It's a press release, and what's worse is that I was thinking about resubscribing to WoW. No longer.
If you can't give me straight, truthful answers not wrapped in Blameless Marketing Drivel, you simply don't deserve my money.
Pity.
This is exactly the same way that hardware businesses work. Are you really that surprised?
"I'll be sure to kick the ethernet cable out of the wall and "forget" my password just for them."
Anytime good buddy! I'll just keep messing with your quotas and reading your email on a semi-daily basis.
Oh, by the way: The tests came back positive and your mom says hi.
Am I the only guy who read the blurb and couldn't help but blurt out: "What the fuck is Hertz doing working on a rent-a-ping-pong-ball...for roaches?!"
It was like living in a Ziggy strip, I swear to God.
"Screenshots really can't capture how amazing it is to freely move around a 3D world."
Yeah, I tell you what though, I do this every day and it's the shit.
Actually Lilo was the little girl, and Stitch was the alien.
Yeah, I'm a dad.
Yeah because, really, I'd rather just lie down and take it like we do now.
eerwin AT gmail dizzot com
:)
Thanks!
What? Steam is the only direct-to-consumer internet-based game delivery service. Insomuch as a direct client-to-server experience with direct payment capacity in the client. You trash it because it is the only one available and the only one that has performed.
Like it or not, Steam has been a huge success and through the sale of HL2 (and subsequent server almost-meltdown) they have learned a lot of lessons. I never have problems playing any Valve games, from HL2 to Counter Strike. Any and all patches are applied quickly and easily with no input needed from me.
Call me what you like, but I -love- Steam and being ingrained in the independent game industry, I really like how it has been accepted, sometimes begrudgingly, by the game-buying public and geeks at large. I see its flaws, but I'm more of a silver lining guy myself.
This is the kind of service/platform that independent developers need, not shelf space. Games are becoming risk-adverse, and that means creativity suffers. Don't slam a great leap in technology and delivery. Instead, use it, provide some constructive criticism, but don't dismiss it.
Hahahaha, awesome Taco. I agree with what someone else noted: You should've gotten the links wrong too ;)
"this shit never gets old" haha, nice!
Here are the key paragraph's from Greg's rant. Absolutely classic stuff!
-Start-
As recently as 1992: games cost 200K. Next generation games will cost 20m. Publishers are becoming increasingly risk averse. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. Who was at the Microsoft keynote? I don't know about you but it made my flesh crawl. [laughter] The HD era? Bigger, louder? Big bucks to be made! Well not by you and me of course. Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation. Was your allegiance bought at the price of a television? Then there was the Nintendo keynote. This was the company who established the business model that has crucified the industry today.. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard's chest did he carve it from? [audience falls about]
How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can't afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it's ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation's time there are still games to love. You can start today.
-End-
Hahahaha, who's heart did he pull out? Just brilliant!
I've written on these guys before, but let me do so again in a more straightforward manner:
Buy everything you see here. I assure that you will NOT be disappointed.
Days of Wonder is a great company who takes brilliant designs the world over and shares them with a geek-like audience. Me and my wife love Mystery of the Abbey. Think of it like a really interesting, deep version of Clue. No candlesticks, no ridiculous characters, and it actually has -strategy- incorporated, and everyone who has played it loves it immediately.
And no, I'm not even getting paid to say that (though of course, it would be nice).
You can also read some (tabletop) gaming blogs:
- BoardGamePlayer.com
- BoardGames-To-Go
- Chris Farrell's Gaming Blog
- Jeffro @ Mindsay
Lastly, I'd like to say that me and my wife's favorite non-boardgame is Bang!, an easy-to-learn great mechanic-filled game that anyone over the age of 7 will adore.
Oh, and of course, get all the recommendations you can handle over at the always fantastic BoardGameGeek.com.
Have fun!
Evan
CCGBlog.com - CCG Design, Theory, and Commentary
You can read more about root causes at http://www.taproot.com
(official disclaimer: I work for the company, and yes please forgive the site ugliness, I'm working with a web dev as we speak)
This studio has a long history of buckling under publisher demands and therefore releasing half-assed games that need FAN-CREATED PATCHES to fix glaring holes (caps because it's so ridiculous you have to have your players create patches for you).
You want to fail as a game studio? Release your latest game with a showstopper that drops them to the desktop (Vampire: Masquarade).
You want to fail as a game studio? Release an unfinished RPG, with unfinished rooms, quests, and broken bits that were so broken it took MULTIPLE (ugh!) fan-created patches to fix them.
Troika is an example of how to fuck up. It has nothing to do with EA or whatever, they simply released unfinished games with bad, ugly bugs. This will sink any game company at any time. EA or no, if a game doesn't play or is broken, people won't buy it.
"They lost because the world is going corporate."
No, they lost the fight because the world doesn't put up with that kind of performance, horrid out of the box experience, and regulating the fans to make the patches.
I'm sorry for the team involved, and I'm sure they tried their damndest. But whether it was bad management or some other reason, there were clear and easy-to-read signs on why they went kaput.
Dude! They totally did this like 200 years ago, except with all of that tracking stuff (as it didn't really exist back then).
You would never believe how it ended up...