Number of customers, number of employees/facilities, number of units sold or produced per fiscal year, etc.
It's a stretch, yeah, but I was just pointing out that it's not a factual error unless he said "EA is bigger BECAUSE of it's greater revenues". He just said "EA is bigger and here's their revenue numbers."
It's no sillier reasoning than spending 10 billion dollars to "solve" a "problem" that has been successfully avoided for the last 60 years via Mutually Assured Destruction instead of funding real solutions for the real threat of domestic nuclear terrorism.
Perhaps a company can have lower revenue and market cap and still be "bigger"? It's a pretty broad term. Perhaps it's used in the wrong context, but I don't think it's necessarily a factual error.
I don't know about complete games, but gaming mod communities never seem to have much of a problem finding excellent artists or content producers.
Check out some of the things the Morrowind mod community has done in terms of new models (Better Bodies, Rhedd's Heads), new textures (Visual Pack), new sounds (the Atmospheric Sounds project) and of course content (too many great mods to list).
Those people all did excellent work for free. A quality completely free game is certainly not out of the question, IMO.
Asheron's Call requires a monthly fee, but you also get monthly updates with gobs of new content (dungeons, monsters, storyline, items, etc.).
No, you can't opt out of an update (if you play AC, you must pay the monthly fee and get the update), but its better than most online game companies who charge an arm and a leg for content through "expansion packs".
Turbine has released one expansion for Asheron's Call, but it had the content equivalent of three monthly patches and added player houses to the game.
Good vs. evil is not a theme of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics. Here's hoping the movie adaptation doesn't change that.
Mr. Hyde is an enraged prostitute killing monster.
The invisible man rapes schoolgirls and brutally murders police officers by bashing their heads open with bricks just because he can.
Alan Quatermain is an aged opium addict.
Captain Nemo has no problems slaughtering scores of people, as long as they're English.
The theme's are rife with 19th century racism/nationalism, sorta like Gangs of New York. Very anti-chinese.
I suspect that every one of those facets is going to be left out of the movie, in addition to the very graphic violence, the subtle in-jokes of Moore's writings, the anglo-centric premise of the story. In their place I expect there to be a lot of mindless action (Quatermain knows Kung-Foo!) and stupid characters (League, meet Tom Sawyer!). I'll go see it, but I don't have high hopes for it.
Yes... damn them for making a number of good Wing Commander games after buying out Origin... the bastards! I'll also point out that, while I don't like them, what was Origin is still making Ultima Online games.
The original poster is talking about how EA buys once great companies and runs their franchises into the ground until profit ends.
You can't honestly believe that the fact that the flagellation of the dead horse that is Ultima Online can possibly come near the former glory of Origin games. Ultima 9 was gutted after years of development and anticipation, the end result being a buggy game that was downright offensive to fans of the series.
Wing Commander the single player game has been dead since last millenium, the hope of a multi-player Wing Commander died last year (when EA decided a completely unknown franchise Earth and Beyond would somehow sell more than a classic franchise).
Ultima Online 2 looked like it would be the next best MMORPG, with innovative features and technology. What did EA do? Cancelled the project a month or two from Beta, fired the developers, and recycled some of the content in UO1.
Origin is nothing now, besides releasing half-hearted expansions and patches to Ultima Online, which people only keep their accounts because of the in-game houses they bought. This didn't happen after EA bought out Origin, it happened after they stopped caring about publishing quality games and treating their talent with disdain.
Westwood and their C&C and Dune series
I'm really not even sure how you can say that with a straight face in response to an article about a new C&C game...
The article also mentions how EA dismantled Westwood, which is what he's saying- EA buys successful franchises, squeezes them dry, and then throws away the leftovers.
Students at my University rely heavily on public computer labs (all Dell computers), and floppies are crucial.
You don't need a CD-RW to store a term paper. You can't carry a CD-RW in your jacket pocket. Scratching a CD-RW is a lot more likely and devestating than losing a 25 cent floppy disk.
Students can't afford extraneous USB devices just to use a School's computers.
It is my understanding that the issued guns can only fire the issued bullets, which are only to be fired in official states of emergency, and there are annual inspections to make sure that there are no unauthorized firings of the issued guns/bullets.
Like many others have said, Exult is by far much more impressive than some front-end app.
Here are some other open-source Ultima remakes that you may want to contribute to if you have the time, skill, or inclination:
[a href=http://xu4.sourceforge.net]XUltima4 [/a] is an opensource rebuild of the classic Ultima 4 in an effort to make it easily portable to many modern systems. I imagine after this is complete, much of the code could be used to build similar versions of the other older Ultimas like 3 and 5.
[a href=http://low.sourceforge.net]Here,[/a] : [a href=http://uw2rev.sourceforge.net]here,[/a] and [a href=http://uwadv.sourceforge.net] here[/a] you can find various open-source projects to faithfully rebuild the Ultima Underworld games. As a bonus, Ulitma Underworld shares an engine with the original System Shock, so that classic game would benefit from an engine rebuild as well.
People that want to contribute to a rebuild of the much-maligned Ultima 8 should talk to the developers of [a href=http://exult.sourceforge.net]Exult[/a].
Now we just need someone to start a project to rebuild Ultima 6 (and Martian Dreams & Savage Empire).
Go to fansforultima.com and download the fan created patches for Ultima 9. If you're an Ultima fan, you owe it to yourself to see a proper ending to the great series.
The dialogue patch completely fills in the gaping plot holes of U9, and doesn't treat the player like a complete Ultima newbie. The monster and economy patches help out with game balance.
Best of all, an anonymous fan created a patch that addresses just about every technical problem in the game.
Take a few minutes and download those patches, and you'll see how good Ultima 9 should have been.
A couple winters ago I had a mouse living in my home computer. He never really caused any problems and he was really cute so I let him stay. After all, it was probably the warmest place in the house.
A few weeks later, my landlord put out poison and I got to enjoy two months of rotting carcass stench in my apartment. He must've died in between the walls.
Glenn Danzig- Spent the last 10 years making Satanic music, mastering the art of Jeet Kune Do, denying rumors that he was going to play Wolverine in the X-Men movie, and beating the crap out of concert security guards with baseball bats. When he left the Misfits, they stopped being seriously evil and were instead a lame novelty group.
Rollins- Spent the last 10 years writing poetry, doing color commentary for VH1's various lame-ass top 50 shows, and doing really awful weather jokes on Comedy Central. When he joined Black Flag, they stopped being a good punk rock band and started worrying about their feelings and shit.
Guess who wins?
(oh just so this isn't -5 offtopic, I vote for batman too.)
Like in Airplane cockpits , the batmobile, or in space-sim video games, the MFD seems like it would be really useful, especially if there were buttons to control it on the steering wheel.
One display could show odo, tach and speedo by default, press a steering wheel button to switch to stereo info, or on-board navigation, or a HUD (like an earlier poster suggested), or vehichle diagnostic info (oil pressure, turbocharger controls, fluid levels, engine temp, etc.).
If you really want to make a "future car", make it run on Hydrogen or BioDiesel or something cool like that.
What if "the Market" is really a fabrication of corporate executives who plan on using invested capital for their own gains while they watch their company crash and burn, knowing that they can get off scott-free because the government doesn't have effective tools to audit and regulate corporations to see if "the Market" is truly what it seems?
Yes, the ability for the mob to always choose the just and right judgement and punishment works so much better than bureaucracy and legislation.
Just ask any black person that lived in the south in the first half of the 20th century.
One person telling someone else he's an asshole for one reason or another is human. A mob humiliating and exacting vengeance on one person is scary. Those things tend to get out of hand real quick.
"Here's one to prime your pump: charge an extra $5 for a "cellphone ticket." If you want to enter the theatre with a cellphone, you have to pay the cellphone ticket price."
Yeah, that's all we need. Jackasses in movie theaters that think that their five bucks gives them every right to disrupt a movie for the rest of the moviegoers.
Ignoring the significance of Lord of the Rings is ridiculous. The movie proved that the general public has no problem sitting through a 4 hour fantasy movie, as long as it was of highest quality. An important feat, especially considering the dearth of fantasy preceding the movie's release.
Secondly, I see where you're coming from about milking the fans. But the studio wouldn't be making the extra versions if the fans hadn't asked for them.
The studios could have just made the plain old Blockbuster version and that would be that. But instead they opted to listen to the fans and give them an even better version of the movie they love.
Fans buying both versions of the movies may seem odd and addict like, but they're fans. They want to watch FoTR on their couch ASAP, special features or not. That a special version is even being made for them shows the power a niche market can have over an industry.
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Number of customers, number of employees/facilities, number of units sold or produced per fiscal year, etc.
It's a stretch, yeah, but I was just pointing out that it's not a factual error unless he said "EA is bigger BECAUSE of it's greater revenues". He just said "EA is bigger and here's their revenue numbers."
It's no sillier reasoning than spending 10 billion dollars to "solve" a "problem" that has been successfully avoided for the last 60 years via Mutually Assured Destruction instead of funding real solutions for the real threat of domestic nuclear terrorism.
Perhaps a company can have lower revenue and market cap and still be "bigger"? It's a pretty broad term. Perhaps it's used in the wrong context, but I don't think it's necessarily a factual error.
I don't know about complete games, but gaming mod communities never seem to have much of a problem finding excellent artists or content producers.
Check out some of the things the Morrowind mod community has done in terms of new models (Better Bodies, Rhedd's Heads), new textures (Visual Pack), new sounds (the Atmospheric Sounds project) and of course content (too many great mods to list).
Those people all did excellent work for free. A quality completely free game is certainly not out of the question, IMO.
Yeah, it works wonders when you're trying to seduce an AIDS patient .
Asheron's Call requires a monthly fee, but you also get monthly updates with gobs of new content (dungeons, monsters, storyline, items, etc.).
No, you can't opt out of an update (if you play AC, you must pay the monthly fee and get the update), but its better than most online game companies who charge an arm and a leg for content through "expansion packs".
Turbine has released one expansion for Asheron's Call, but it had the content equivalent of three monthly patches and added player houses to the game.
Good vs. evil is not a theme of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics. Here's hoping the movie adaptation doesn't change that.
Mr. Hyde is an enraged prostitute killing monster.
The invisible man rapes schoolgirls and brutally murders police officers by bashing their heads open with bricks just because he can.
Alan Quatermain is an aged opium addict.
Captain Nemo has no problems slaughtering scores of people, as long as they're English.
The theme's are rife with 19th century racism/nationalism, sorta like Gangs of New York. Very anti-chinese.
I suspect that every one of those facets is going to be left out of the movie, in addition to the very graphic violence, the subtle in-jokes of Moore's writings, the anglo-centric premise of the story. In their place I expect there to be a lot of mindless action (Quatermain knows Kung-Foo!) and stupid characters (League, meet Tom Sawyer!). I'll go see it, but I don't have high hopes for it.
The original poster is talking about how EA buys once great companies and runs their franchises into the ground until profit ends.
You can't honestly believe that the fact that the flagellation of the dead horse that is Ultima Online can possibly come near the former glory of Origin games. Ultima 9 was gutted after years of development and anticipation, the end result being a buggy game that was downright offensive to fans of the series.
Wing Commander the single player game has been dead since last millenium, the hope of a multi-player Wing Commander died last year (when EA decided a completely unknown franchise Earth and Beyond would somehow sell more than a classic franchise).
Ultima Online 2 looked like it would be the next best MMORPG, with innovative features and technology. What did EA do? Cancelled the project a month or two from Beta, fired the developers, and recycled some of the content in UO1.
Origin is nothing now, besides releasing half-hearted expansions and patches to Ultima Online, which people only keep their accounts because of the in-game houses they bought. This didn't happen after EA bought out Origin, it happened after they stopped caring about publishing quality games and treating their talent with disdain.
The article also mentions how EA dismantled Westwood, which is what he's saying- EA buys successful franchises, squeezes them dry, and then throws away the leftovers.
Students at my University rely heavily on public computer labs (all Dell computers), and floppies are crucial.
You don't need a CD-RW to store a term paper. You can't carry a CD-RW in your jacket pocket. Scratching a CD-RW is a lot more likely and devestating than losing a 25 cent floppy disk.
Students can't afford extraneous USB devices just to use a School's computers.
It is my understanding that the issued guns can only fire the issued bullets, which are only to be fired in official states of emergency, and there are annual inspections to make sure that there are no unauthorized firings of the issued guns/bullets.
Is that not so?
Like many others have said, Exult is by far much more impressive than some front-end app.
Here are some other open-source Ultima remakes that you may want to contribute to if you have the time, skill, or inclination:
[a href=http://xu4.sourceforge.net]XUltima4 [/a] is an opensource rebuild of the classic Ultima 4 in an effort to make it easily portable to many modern systems. I imagine after this is complete, much of the code could be used to build similar versions of the other older Ultimas like 3 and 5.
[a href=http://low.sourceforge.net]Here,[/a] : [a href=http://uw2rev.sourceforge.net]here,[/a] and [a href=http://uwadv.sourceforge.net]
here[/a] you can find various open-source projects to faithfully rebuild the Ultima Underworld games. As a bonus, Ulitma Underworld shares an engine with the original System Shock, so that classic game would benefit from an engine rebuild as well.
People that want to contribute to a rebuild of the much-maligned Ultima 8 should talk to the developers of [a href=http://exult.sourceforge.net]Exult[/a].
Now we just need someone to start a project to rebuild Ultima 6 (and Martian Dreams & Savage Empire).
Go to fansforultima.com and download the fan created patches for Ultima 9. If you're an Ultima fan, you owe it to yourself to see a proper ending to the great series.
The dialogue patch completely fills in the gaping plot holes of U9, and doesn't treat the player like a complete Ultima newbie. The monster and economy patches help out with game balance.
Best of all, an anonymous fan created a patch that addresses just about every technical problem in the game.
Take a few minutes and download those patches, and you'll see how good Ultima 9 should have been.
Of course, that's actually a good thing for Linux users.
God forbid I pay for something and not have to deal with it ramming advertisements down my throat.
If they wanted to offer the game for free or even dirt cheap, ads would be acceptable.
A couple winters ago I had a mouse living in my home computer. He never really caused any problems and he was really cute so I let him stay. After all, it was probably the warmest place in the house.
A few weeks later, my landlord put out poison and I got to enjoy two months of rotting carcass stench in my apartment. He must've died in between the walls.
Glenn Danzig- Spent the last 10 years making Satanic music, mastering the art of Jeet Kune Do, denying rumors that he was going to play Wolverine in the X-Men movie, and beating the crap out of concert security guards with baseball bats. When he left the Misfits, they stopped being seriously evil and were instead a lame novelty group.
Rollins- Spent the last 10 years writing poetry, doing color commentary for VH1's various lame-ass top 50 shows, and doing really awful weather jokes on Comedy Central. When he joined Black Flag, they stopped being a good punk rock band and started worrying about their feelings and shit.
Guess who wins?
(oh just so this isn't -5 offtopic, I vote for batman too.)
Like in Airplane cockpits , the batmobile, or in space-sim video games, the MFD seems like it would be really useful, especially if there were buttons to control it on the steering wheel.
One display could show odo, tach and speedo by default, press a steering wheel button to switch to stereo info, or on-board navigation, or a HUD (like an earlier poster suggested), or vehichle diagnostic info (oil pressure, turbocharger controls, fluid levels, engine temp, etc.).
If you really want to make a "future car", make it run on Hydrogen or BioDiesel or something cool like that.
Fucking Mongorians, try to knock down my shity wall!
Doh!
Boy is there egg on my face.
What if "the Market" is really a fabrication of corporate executives who plan on using invested capital for their own gains while they watch their company crash and burn, knowing that they can get off scott-free because the government doesn't have effective tools to audit and regulate corporations to see if "the Market" is truly what it seems?
Yes, the ability for the mob to always choose the just and right judgement and punishment works so much better than bureaucracy and legislation.
Just ask any black person that lived in the south in the first half of the 20th century.
One person telling someone else he's an asshole for one reason or another is human. A mob humiliating and exacting vengeance on one person is scary. Those things tend to get out of hand real quick.
"Here's one to prime your pump: charge an extra $5 for a "cellphone ticket." If you want to enter the theatre with a cellphone, you have to pay the cellphone ticket price."
Yeah, that's all we need. Jackasses in movie theaters that think that their five bucks gives them every right to disrupt a movie for the rest of the moviegoers.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but every dentist I've seen in the last five years here in America has used a kind of "tooth sandblaster".
Doesn't hurt at all, no need for sedation or even much anaesthetics (I don't even think I used any anaesthetics...)
The only down side is the gritty taste in your mouth afterwards.
"...and remember that if we are to show fear by changing our American way of life, the Giant Space Rock has already won."
I can only hope that we act fast to make sure that the Giant Space Rock becomes part of the Axis of Evil.
Ignoring the significance of Lord of the Rings is ridiculous. The movie proved that the general public has no problem sitting through a 4 hour fantasy movie, as long as it was of highest quality. An important feat, especially considering the dearth of fantasy preceding the movie's release.
Secondly, I see where you're coming from about milking the fans. But the studio wouldn't be making the extra versions if the fans hadn't asked for them.
The studios could have just made the plain old Blockbuster version and that would be that. But instead they opted to listen to the fans and give them an even better version of the movie they love.
Fans buying both versions of the movies may seem odd and addict like, but they're fans. They want to watch FoTR on their couch ASAP, special features or not. That a special version is even being made for them shows the power a niche market can have over an industry.