Long-time reader, first-time poster! Or something like that.
I'm not directly involved in the IGF, although I do also work at CMP, which organizes the Festival, and I can assure everyone that the IGF tries its hardest to accommodate everybody on what is a major task for all concerned.
I went and found someone at the IGF, and he showed me a copy of an email sent to the Velox creators at limebird.com on November 16th 2004, because their website was apparently down. They never replied to this email, and so it was presumed that they were not entering the competition any more.
I appreciate that things like this are very upsetting, but I also find it upsetting that it has to be escalated to such a public forum before it's found out that there has been at least somewhat of a mix-up. There _has_ been some changing personnel on the IGF, which may have exarcebated matters, but nonetheless, this is a bit of a shame.
IMHO, though this may eventually be linked to some kind of product, the most complex of these Alternate Reality Games are fun and interesting enough in their own right that I don't really consider them seditious advertising. Is it seditious/free advertising when we link to a preview of Grand Theft Auto? But, yep, your mileage may vary.:)
I went and Babelfish-ed the article and have changed that sentence - as another commenter suggested, it was just suggesting that next-gen consoles like the PS2 can do real-time rendering, so there should be no (or less) need for pre-rendered intro sequences and suchlike.
It may be that's an early sketch from Ashley Wood - it's rather 'alternative', but his actual comic pages remind me reassuringly of the PlayStation 1 game, especially the color scheme - rather cool, actually.
To be fair, America's Army wasn't actually built by the, uhh, Army - but by a team headed out of the Naval Postgrad School in Monterey, as referenced in the article. Plus, the Army has been using external contractors such as There Inc. and Pandemic for much of their training-related development, so in some ways, it _is_ interesting that they'd set up a dev studio of their own.
Sarcasm is also always welcome on Slashdot, of course.
Actually, ArenaNet and Destination Games are both owned wholly by NCSoft, I believe, so they're not quite as autonomous as you imply - Cryptic and NetDevil are officially independent though, I believe.
The 'controller invention' N64 comment was added, presumably, by the person who wrote the article for 1UP (not by lovely Slashdot editors, although it is in the same bracketing format we use), but I removed it, because you're right, it doesn't seem to make total sense. Doh.
Interesting, and well-spotted - seems that the writer (Steve L. Kent) sold his raw interview to GameSpy, and an edited one to the Seattle P-I - getting paid twice for doing the same thing is neat!
I wanted to link this image in the story, as shown on the Gaming Age forums, but didn't manage to get permission from the author before the story ran. Classic.
That Codename Gordon story (which was announced on Steampowered.com yesterday, btw) is, I agree, somewhat less important than the new Half-Life 2 news, so I re-arranged and added that info rather than post a whole new Half-Life related story - thanks for the heads-up.
The phrase has been removed by me and an update posted - apologies, I edited this submission extensively last night, and even Googled for 'solly cholly' to see if it was a swearword, because I had't heard of it, but saw lots of other people (who obviously also didn't know its original etymology) using it in normal speech, so I let it pass.
I think crunch is a particularly big problem for the games industry because there's always _something_ you can do to make the game better, whether it be more moves for the main character, re-tweaking levels, changing up the AI, and so on and so forth. So it's really tempting to keep tweaking for ever, with associated minor and major code/graphical changes and even system rewrites
I'm not saying that isn't the case in other industries as well, but sometimes non-game software is a little more rigid in terms of a fixed, easily definable feature set. But YMMV.
Not so much a dupe, since the release hadn't actually happened at the time of that previous story. I'll update this story to reference the old one and then everyone will be happy bunnies, hm?
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, that'll teach me to submit too early in the morning, without recourse to caffeine.
Long-time reader, first-time poster! Or something like that.
I'm not directly involved in the IGF, although I do also work at CMP, which organizes the Festival, and I can assure everyone that the IGF tries its hardest to accommodate everybody on what is a major task for all concerned.
I went and found someone at the IGF, and he showed me a copy of an email sent to the Velox creators at limebird.com on November 16th 2004, because their website was apparently down. They never replied to this email, and so it was presumed that they were not entering the competition any more.
I appreciate that things like this are very upsetting, but I also find it upsetting that it has to be escalated to such a public forum before it's found out that there has been at least somewhat of a mix-up. There _has_ been some changing personnel on the IGF, which may have exarcebated matters, but nonetheless, this is a bit of a shame.
IMHO, though this may eventually be linked to some kind of product, the most complex of these Alternate Reality Games are fun and interesting enough in their own right that I don't really consider them seditious advertising. Is it seditious/free advertising when we link to a preview of Grand Theft Auto? But, yep, your mileage may vary. :)
The alleged developer of the site even has a weblog - pretty interesting stuff.
Thanks, article amended to clarify that.
I went and Babelfish-ed the article and have changed that sentence - as another commenter suggested, it was just suggesting that next-gen consoles like the PS2 can do real-time rendering, so there should be no (or less) need for pre-rendered intro sequences and suchlike.
I guess the official Nintendo page for Vol.3 has popped up now (maybe since Magic Box posted the info?), so all is good with the world.
Seems like there's a list of Master System games on the site, but it's not clear which of those is included, unfortunately.
Good point - I've removed that sentence from the summary, to avoid confusion.
It may be that's an early sketch from Ashley Wood - it's rather 'alternative', but his actual comic pages remind me reassuringly of the PlayStation 1 game, especially the color scheme - rather cool, actually.
Fixed, sorry about that.
To be fair, America's Army wasn't actually built by the, uhh, Army - but by a team headed out of the Naval Postgrad School in Monterey, as referenced in the article. Plus, the Army has been using external contractors such as There Inc. and Pandemic for much of their training-related development, so in some ways, it _is_ interesting that they'd set up a dev studio of their own.
Sarcasm is also always welcome on Slashdot, of course.
Thanks, fixed.
Actually, ArenaNet and Destination Games are both owned wholly by NCSoft, I believe, so they're not quite as autonomous as you imply - Cryptic and NetDevil are officially independent though, I believe.
Managed to find the specific TeamXbox page the movie is hosted on, so things should behave now.
Fair comment - 'origami' changed to 'paper' to better reflect the, uhm, non-complexity of the creation.
The 'controller invention' N64 comment was added, presumably, by the person who wrote the article for 1UP (not by lovely Slashdot editors, although it is in the same bracketing format we use), but I removed it, because you're right, it doesn't seem to make total sense. Doh.
Interesting, and well-spotted - seems that the writer (Steve L. Kent) sold his raw interview to GameSpy, and an edited one to the Seattle P-I - getting paid twice for doing the same thing is neat!
I think someone should tell Dr. Gupta's secretary that they've been transcribing from a GameSpot interview with Michael Pachter, instead of the great doctor's notes. Whoops.
I wanted to link this image in the story, as shown on the Gaming Age forums, but didn't manage to get permission from the author before the story ran. Classic.
That Codename Gordon story (which was announced on Steampowered.com yesterday, btw) is, I agree, somewhat less important than the new Half-Life 2 news, so I re-arranged and added that info rather than post a whole new Half-Life related story - thanks for the heads-up.
Actually, I think GameSpot are having network problems, which may be the issue - doh.
The phrase has been removed by me and an update posted - apologies, I edited this submission extensively last night, and even Googled for 'solly cholly' to see if it was a swearword, because I had't heard of it, but saw lots of other people (who obviously also didn't know its original etymology) using it in normal speech, so I let it pass.
I think crunch is a particularly big problem for the games industry because there's always _something_ you can do to make the game better, whether it be more moves for the main character, re-tweaking levels, changing up the AI, and so on and so forth. So it's really tempting to keep tweaking for ever, with associated minor and major code/graphical changes and even system rewrites
I'm not saying that isn't the case in other industries as well, but sometimes non-game software is a little more rigid in terms of a fixed, easily definable feature set. But YMMV.
Not so much a dupe, since the release hadn't actually happened at the time of that previous story. I'll update this story to reference the old one and then everyone will be happy bunnies, hm?